The Dull Static

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by John F Duffy in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 172 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dark Mountain Project, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Mass Die Off, Mike Ruppert, Neoliberal Capitalism, Paul Kingsnorth, Peak Oil, Uncivilization

Originally posted at: Prayforcalamity.com

The flowering dogwoods are in bloom. Along the country lanes, the pink petals have already exploded into ephemeral radiance and begun to wither and fall from the branches of the Jane Magnolia trees. For me this means no longer having the agonizing luxury of hours to sit and write. After six months of bi-weekly essays, I feel I have expressed much of what had become balled up and cluttered in my mind, and now it is time to ruminate in the garden once again.

I named this blog, “Pray for Calamity,” because there are several major crises converging which threaten human civilization, and there are no existing structures capable of mitigating them. Democracy, capitalism, neo-liberal globalization; they are all incapable of undertaking the work necessary to avert cataclysm. The paradigms of thought and approach which are almost hardwired into the modern mind at this point, need to be scrubbed. Of the remaining, solvable ecological crises, which may not include climate change, there is no tool available to attend to them that comes from the conventional tool box of legal, lawful pursuit. These ecological crises, which range from topsoil depletion to tree extinctions to massive die off of oceanic life, cannot be remedied without a fundamental shift in the thinking of the people in the civilized world. If people do not begin to perceive the world as a living entity, interconnected, conscious, and with intrinsic value beyond how it can be carved up and sold, then it is only a matter of time until the human race begins to suffer on a massive scale due to their callous disregard for the other beings with whom they share this planet.

And then there are the political and economic and resource depletion crises as well.

Changing our minds, changing how we think, is physically speaking one of the easiest things we can do. However, when our egos and our identities are wholly interwoven with an idea or an ideology, changing our way of thinking and discarding the old ideas, can be the hardest thing we are asked to undertake. If our physical reality changes, this can create a rip in the threads that stitch our view of ourselves with a dogma or a paradigm. So I await calamity because the egos of the civilized have hardened their hearts and deafened their ears, and until those in the first world middle class feel the gnawing pain of persistent hunger and the fear of deafening uncertainty, they will refuse to consider that maybe everything they have been taught to believe about themselves and their collective destiny, is abjectly wrong.

—

“We’re many generations overdue for a revolution, in our thinking. I’m not talking about blood and violence although I’m afraid thats already happened. I’m talking about a revolution that’s probably the hardest kind, the kind that takes place within the human soul and the human mind. To be able to tear everything down, throw everything out, and start with a completely fresh piece of paper and say, ‘OK, how do we solve this problem?’”

Mike Ruppert said that in the documentary “Collapse.” While by no means a perfect man, Mike was a good person, and did his best to tell the truth as he knew it. He shot himself two weeks ago. He left many insights like this one as gifts for us.

People who become aware of the depth of the problems facing humanity at this juncture in time, often seek answers. They want to know what we need to do. Some suggest we need a revolution. Some suggest we need to take to the hills and hide on personal homesteads, to perhaps form communities of these homesteads and just hold on white knuckled through the bottle neck of collapse. Then there is Paul Kingsnorth of the Dark Mountain Project, who speaks of the difference between problems which are to be solved, and predicaments which are to be endured.

“What do you do,” he asked, “when you accept that all of these changes are coming, things that you value are going to be lost, things that make you unhappy are going to happen, things that you wanted to achieve you can’t achieve, but you still have to live with it, and there’s still beauty, and there’s still meaning, and there are still things you can do to make the world less bad? And that’s not a series of questions that have any answers other than people’s personal answers to them. Selfishly it’s just a process I’m going through.” He laughed. “It’s extremely narcissistic of me. Rather than just having a personal crisis, I’ve said: ‘Hey! Come share my crisis with me!’

Kingsnorth was recently interviewed by the New York Times. As a long time environmental activist who years ago lost faith that there is much we can do to “save the planet,” he decries the false hope sold by mainstream environmentalist groups. With friend Dougald Hine, Kingsnorth wrote the “Uncivilization” manifesto, on which The New York Times writes:

“Uncivilization” was firm in its conviction that climate change and other ecological crises are predicaments, and it called for a cadre of like-minded writers to “challenge the stories which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality and the myth of separation from ‘nature.’ ”

On this matter I think Kingsnorth and Hine are right on the mark. We will never weather the predicaments before us, let alone solve what problems remain solvable, if we refuse to take an honest look at who we are, where we are, and just what the hell we are doing. I think this is a meditation that would benefit revolutionaries and those hiding in the hills alike. We must ask if civilization is something we are even interested in continuing. We must ask what it is we value most and whether or not the lifestyles we are cordoned into are even in line with those values. We must ask what it means to be human. And if we are to trust any of our conclusions, we must first find a way to step outside of everything our culture has programmed us to believe.

—

Civilization is a power structure. It is a rejection of natural law in favor of the control of those high on social hierarchies. Civilization is the domestication of nature and people alike. It is the creation of a once regional, now global farm where the multitudes of humans are livestock, restricted by the borders of various owners, and subjugated and exploited for the extraction of the surplus values generated by their labor. Non human life forms and entire ecosystems are subjugated likewise, and as this control apparatus is now world wide and hell bent on growing in scale year over year, life itself is at risk. Simultaneously, this architecture of domestication and control has blunted the souls of the humans it dominates, and like house pets, the great many people have been declawed and broken. This is the existential portion of the crisis we face. The meaninglessness of life on the inside. The dull static of the best case scenario, where those in the first world yearn for the life of tepid, safe predictability offered by the owner class, should only one produce enough without question or complaint. We are a wretched bunch who fetishize our oppressors and spew vitriol at insurrectionaries who would in trying to shake us loose even for a moment, dare make us late for work.

Navigating circumstances beyond our control in which masters are hostile to us, constantly maneuvering to exert more control over our lives as well as to extract more value from us even in our imprisonment or death; most people are surviving, not thriving. Merely jockeying through a preset condition of work and fee schedules has muted the potential of our species. What has been throttled cannot be measured in discoveries or inventions, but in the satisfaction of individuals and communities to thrive on their own terms. To be fully actualized and autonomous creatures. To witness the assembly line life of modern man is to suffer a snuff film.

If we are to rescue our own hearts and our minds, if we are to save the last embers of burning wildness in our souls and to break the tethers that bind our thinking to suicidal paradigms, then we must uncivilize. Like Buck in “The Call of the Wild,” we must seek to undomesticate ourselves, no only to survive the realities of the world into which we are being thrust, but because to be a house mutt lying bored at master’s feet is to barely exist at all.

—

So what does any of this really mean? What are the steps, the actions to undertake which will align the force of our arms with the rhythms of our hearts? Do we fight or do we flee? Or do we stand upon the hill and bear witness until the fire consumes us? Or is there perhaps some combination of all; a time for rebellion, a time to tend our gardens, and a time to merely sit and say goodbye?

Certainly, if people seek a recipe for action that can maintain society in a form even remotely similar to its present incarnation, then I offer nothing. If what people desire is a map of the future from which plans can be derived and survival assured, I have none. I think maybe it is time to give up on maps. Maybe it is time to just be in the territory for a while. Maybe it is time to give up on human words and to leave the electronic buzz of the internet and to set foot on soil and rock. If domestication is the product of being in the domicile, in the house, then perhaps what we need is to step outside. If the stories we have been told for generations have poisoned us; if these myths about the greatness of the lines on maps and the men who ruled those patchwork lines have only served to make us slaves to abstractions, engendering in us a self righteousness and a malice towards all that isn’t of our hands and seeding in us a fear of what lies outside comfortable walls, then perhaps it is time to go and to hear some different voices. To hear some new stories. Maybe, lost in the ballad of crowing frogs and moaning trees we can crumple up what is written before us and find a blank piece of paper, and on it we will write of our sadness and our fear. We will admit our weakness in the face of all that we have made and we will scratch out our apologies and our gratitude.

Then we will collect up everything that we think the future needs to be given, and we will carry it within us to barricades and to garden gates, to jail cells and to barn bays and to graves. We will find the fire that will make tomorrow worth struggling towards, in that dark, when we are bent and cold heaps of hungry, smoke smelling bone and sinew beneath taught and blackened skin. The madness of the world will grow raw, and real. Privation and awfulness will bloom, and we will endure it.

No Better than Primordial Bacteria?

30 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 76 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Carbon Man, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Cyanobacteria, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Evolutionary Dead End, Extinction of Man, Mass Die Off, Peak Oil

The detritus of distant planets hurdled through the darkness of space on a one-way collision course with a young, cloudless planet devoid of life. Unceremoniously crashing into this planet’s surface, these rocks from the heavens carried a gift –amino acids, the seeds of life. Anaerobic microorganisms soon emerged in the greenish-red, anoxic oceans of the planet. For the longest time these primitive life forms thrived in the ocean depths, the only place safe from the deadly ultraviolet radiation of that planet’s sun. But then by some misfortune of the cosmos, their reign abruptly ended as an oxygen-producing bacteria (later to be known as the cyanobacteria) created the planet’s first great extinction event by wiping out the anaerobic life forms. You see, free oxygen happened to be toxic to these anaerobic organisms and, subsequently, photosynthetic organisms took their place, pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and filling it with oxygen which would eventually allow life to expand onto newly formed continents.

The planet fluctuated between pulses of glaciation and warming as the tug-of-war between fire and ice raged for aeons. Volcanos erupted, the atmosphere warmed, and oceans grew to swallow up land, only to slowly recede back again as water became locked up in glaciers. During this volatile time, the chemistry of the oceans changed from an anoxic environment rich in hydrogen sulfide to one in which oxygen penetrated its deepest waters. The stage had finally been set for multicellular animals to evolve from this rich aquatic oasis, and life slowly crept onto land from its watery cradle. Complex organisms of all shape and size sprang up over time to walk, swim, and fly, but the planet’s restive climatic system would, on occasion, still open its jaws to swallow up nearly all plant and beast across the globe. Continents collided with each other, pushing the planet’s crust upward into mountain ridges. Ocean and air currents reconfigured their paths, and ice age cycles came and went.

After nearly 4.5 billion years of planetary evolution there stood upright a creature whose cleverness and adaptability far surpassed any living thing that had ever existed. Its kind lived and hunted in groups using tools to catch and kill from a distance, and wherever it roamed, waves of extinct species were left in its wake. The success of the tribe expanded and so did its numbers, spreading from continent to continent wherever it could get a foothold. Its tools became more sophisticated and it learned to cultivate food in one area rather than nomadically searching for it. Societies with sophisticated social structures and cultures developed within these fixed settlements, and from them grew empires with armies which fought with one another for resources and slaves. These civilizations had their own growth and decay timeline, fading into ruins after becoming overly complex and corrupt while overshooting their ecological threshold. But from the ashes of one would always arise the next to build upon the collective knowledge of the species.

It would be the compressed dead matter of ancient life that would truly propel this species to heady heights of technological and material wealth. The steel-and-concrete of megacities rose up to the sky and millions flocked to them to work, live, and die in their cold geometry. A constant barrage of digital lights, pictures, and slogans kept the masses beguiled by illusionary riches. The city was a labyrinth of dead ends and a house of mirrors, but the minions were told that if only they stayed in the game and ran a bit harder, they could reach that ‘dangling carrot’. After millenia of evolution, the one species at the top of the food chain, a.k.a. carbon man, was now ensnared by its own intricate web of myths and outright lies that it had spun for itself. Unable to see, speak or hear the truth, this oddity of nature was quickly losing ground to reality and on the fast track to joining all those other living things it had pushed over the cliff of extinction. For all carbon man’s cunning and ingenuity, his actions and behavior were much worse than that of the primordial cyanobacteria mentioned earlier in this planet’s history. This time the deadly pollutant from a single organism’s activities that would cause the Final Great Extinction Event was not O2, but rather CO2.

Carbon man’s modern set of living arrangements known as capitalist industrial civilization was not, in all reality, taking its passengers down a road of enlightenment and progress, but down an ever-darkening path of barbarity and death. All its vainglorious achievements and techtopian visions of the future were but hot air from a species drowning in its own propaganda and toxic waste as it raced towards an evolutionary dead-end. For if the species were able to recognize and acknowledge that industrial civilization’s own waste was creating its very demise while at the same time being powerless to do anything about it, then the end result for this hubristic species would be no different from that of the unthinking and rudimentary bacteria of the planet’s first life forms.

Nightmares of the Omnicidal Juggernaut

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Pollution

≈ 136 Comments

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6th Mass Extinction, Annalee Newitz, Capitalism, Charles Bukowski, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumer Culture, Corporate State, Dr. Paul Willis, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, General Electric, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Omar N. Bradley, Overpopulation, Privatization of Science, Security and Surveillance State, Singularity Network, Social Unrest, Techno-Optimists, Technocapitalism, Technotopia, The Elite 1%, Transhumanists, unwashed public, Zdzislaw Beksiński, Zygmunt Bauman

What had been designed to be our servants became our masters, then our owners and gods, and finally our destroyer….

Some days I wake up and despise the monotony and pettiness of this culture and its followers: its celebrity worship, its staged news reporting, its chameleon politicians, its conniving marketers of consumerism, its cookie-cutter neighborhoods, its push-button surveillance state, and its clueless masses all working together to create the illusion of normalcy. Everyone goes along with this mindless program like obedient slaves, afraid of the social stigma attached to questioning any radical deviation from what constitutes normal. God forbid anyone openly discusses the cliff we are fast approaching, its sheer drop-off and craggy rocks below coming more clearly into view. One last scramble for the last bit of habitable land at the poles will be the inevitable end game as atmospheric warming catches up to the glacial melt and sea level rise humans have set into motion. In light of all the scientific evidence accumulated over decades, mankind has known for some time that a radical reconfiguration of our socio-economic system was the only way to avoid collapse, as described beautifully back in 2008 by a longtime blogger who has been writing for nearly a decade:

There can be no “soft-landing” for a species adding another million of itself every 4 and a half days to consume and convert into more and more human flesh what little remains of the planet’s tattered web of life. Worshiping paper symbols of wealth as the only measurement of social and environmental worth, our species has monetized and misunderstood nature, ignoring its true incalculable value. Surely something is amiss when the financial interests of the insecticide industry trump the health of humans and the survival of pollinators. Examining the root cause of such corrosive effects in our economic system, i.e. capitalism, is nearly as taboo as mentioning the collapse of modern civilization. The culturally Pavlovian responses to any such criticism directed at capitalism or the unsustainability of industrial civilization is to argue for the rehabilitation of capitalism into something less destructive and tout humanity’s unfailing ability to adapt to any situation. Reinforced by past successes such as the Green Revolution, robotic exploration of distant planets, and Moore’s Law of technological advancement, the marriage of capitalism and technology has created a mindset which takes for granted the belief that the marketplace will create a hi-tech fix to any and all problems. Little green aliens, paranormal experiences, and techno-utopian futures seem to be more socially acceptable subjects for discussion rather than the collapse of a way-of-life that requires several more Earths if everyone were to live like Americans. Perhaps that is why we get technotopian books like this one:

The myth of progress is central to corporate ideologies of materialism, modernism, and technocapitalism. The mythical quality of technological progress was expressed most succinctly in GE’s slogan from the 1950’s: “Progress is our most important product.”

The newly revealed cover-up of GE’s PCB contamination of the Hudson River is just the latest in a not-so-stellar record of “bringing good things to life.”

There are reportedly hundreds of Transhumanist-affiliated groups(life extensionists, techno-optimists, Singularitarians, biohackers, roboticists, AI proponents, and futurists) in the world with the largest, the Singularity Network, claiming 10,000 members. Few in our society can imagine this planet exhausted of its resources, inhospitable to agriculture, and devoid of all its keystone species, but such a world is fast becoming reality as industrial civilization steamrolls the planet under the direction of technocapitalism. Millions of factories continue to spit out products by the ton to be shipped to every corner of the globe. The ravenous hordes struggling for a higher standard of living never think twice about the energy and eco-social damage tied to these consumer products that magically appear on store shelves.

“A transhuman future is a day-dream and we are rapidly running out of the luxury of being able to do nothing about the very real problems that face us now. A transhuman future is a nightmare of the electric sheep.”
~ Dr. Paul Willis

The boundaries of a finite planet have been temporarily extended by technology, giving mankind a false sense of power over his environment, but technological complexity is not immune to the law of diminishing returns; the problems are overwhelming the solutions:

“…Technology cannot bring back a concentrated resource deposit like soil, phosphates and fossil fuels that have been dispersed and converted so completely that no amount of energy can get them back. The links in the technological evolutionary chain have been successful so far, but all it takes is a single broken link that will drop us into the waste heap of failed evolution. The next link of the chain always exists in the imaginations of men, technological wonders to carry us forward, but malignant growth, the kind sponsored by corporate, banking and Wall St. entities, will guarantee the current technological link is our last one…”

For a culture that lives for today and ignores the consequences of tomorrow, the show must go on even as cracks and weaknesses in this false façade become more evident day by day. Omar N. Bradley may have been thinking about weapons of mass destruction when he made an observation about mankind’s tools of self-destruction, but he could not have been more prescient in the broader sense of technology’s reach into our lives when he said, “If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”

As in previous fallen civilizations, today’s elite are more out of touch with our precarious position than most realize, and they will try to cling to their wealth and social status despite how much blood flows in the streets as the masses bear the brunt of collapse first –poverty, disease, war, starvation, etc., but ultimately no one can run from the death of the Earth’s oceans, the spread of novel diseases, and the die-off of trees. Those now deciding how our technologic scalpels will be wielded are not institutions looking out for the greater good of humanity, but by the ultra wealthy for their own personal financial enrichment and narcissistic interests:

“For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money…

…that personal setting of priorities is precisely what troubles some in the science establishment. Many of the patrons, they say, are ignoring basic research — the kind that investigates the riddles of nature and has produced centuries of breakthroughs, even whole industries — for a jumble of popular, feel-good fields like environmental studies and space exploration…

..the rise of science philanthropy may simply help “rich fields, universities and individuals to get richer.” The new patrons are responsible for one of the most striking trends on these campuses: the rise of privately financed institutes, the new temples of science philanthropy.

This privatization of science is just one more aspect of capitalism’s usurpation and corruption of the body politic.

The art in this blog post is from Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksiński whose intricately detailed paintings of apocalyptic landscapes, mutated and deformed humans, and surreal images were said to be inspired from his nightmares. He never gave titles to his paintings and signed them on the back. It is said he would often wake up in the middle of night to paint his dark visions. In 2005 he was found dead lying on the floor of his Warsaw flat in a pool of blood, stabbed 17 times.

Perhaps the greatest nightmare of modern man is the fact that he is at the mercy of an ever-expanding industrial civilization running on autopilot, as Zygmunt Bauman described, with no realistic way to stop its onslaught of toxic waste, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and numerous other ecocidal features. I can see this horror when I look at much of Beksiński’s work, but I also see nature reclaiming the battlefield after man has defeated himself.

To a great degree, humans are their own worst enemy, prisoners of their flawed cerebral wiring with its neuroses, blind spots, and cognitive biases, but the real enemy is the omnicidal juggernaut our numbers have created; its base urges can’t be contained.

Us and Them

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by Brutus in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation

≈ 87 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Extinction of Man, Mass Die Off, Social Unrest

Cold War antipathies between the “free world” and the Communist Block used to be conceptualized (in short) as “us and them” (sometimes “us vs. them”), which meant the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the last two great superpowers. Additional facets to geopolitics were added by China, North Korea, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, and Brazil (mostly members of the nuclear club), but they didn’t figure as prominently in the rhetoric as what was clearly (even then) a false dualism. Binary thinking of this sort continues today in bogus phrases such as “either you’re with us or against us” or “if you’re not part of the solution then you’re part of the problem.” In American politics, the two-party system (Republicans and Democrats) appears to be intransigent and permanent despite political parties having risen and fallen over time both here and abroad. This ~~herd~~ team mentality keeps most political thinkers and observers from examining third-party alternatives with much seriousness the same way it forestalls bipartisanship. A little known fact is that the government-sounding agency called the Commission on Presidential debates is, in reality, a private corporation financed by Anheuser-Busch and other major companies and created by the Republican and Democratic parties to seize control of the presidential debates from The League of Women Voters in 1987.

Close identification with in-groups is learned early in life as cliques form in middle school (or before?) and is reinforced as each of us progresses through life’s phases. For instance, married/committed couples have a divergent set of understandings of personal relationships from unmarried individuals seeking/searching for a significant other. Childless couples have fundamentally differing social perspectives from those raising children (parents’ outlooks tracking with their children’s development). Working class folks have fewer opportunities and prerogatives than white-collar and professional workers. The rich enjoy considerable obeisance from everyone and benefit from undeserved favors and preferential treatment that the lower and middle classes can only look upon with envy and/or resentment. Examples go on and on.

We cling to these identities with surprising faithfulness, considering how they lump everyone rather imprecisely into categories, not altogether arbitrarily constructed but crude nonetheless. Blends of attitudes and truly creative, outlying thinking don’t figure in discussions dominated by rigid fidelity to narrow rhetoric, sound bites, and talking points. Interestingly, this same us-and-them effect is at work in discussions of collapse and NTE, the players divided unevenly between those who just don’t get it (for a variety of reasons) and those who believe all indications are beyond controversy, meaning, completely obvious: we’re on a hopelessly downward trajectory. Of course, this division omits the bulk of the population for whom the issue isn’t even broached, and even for those who acknowledge the issue, there are a surprising number of positions on the continuum, such as those who get it but haven’t extrapolated far enough, those who get it but lie or deny out of one motivation or another (e.g., self-enrichment or political gain, albeit short-term), and those who don’t get it yet are exceeding well-versed in the evidence (so that it can be argued and spun).

All these dividing lines, rather than being a celebration of diversity, make us a fractured society along multiple faults. Perhaps it’s just my perception, but there seems to be a widening gap between those who openly admit our future must lead ineluctably to doom and techno-utopians for whom future horizons loom bright. I’ve suggested elsewhere that newcomers to the issue of collapse have a lot of catching up to do, but that naïvely assumed a common, shared understanding of our reality upon which to base incontrovertible conclusions. Let me suggest something a bit more radical: the utter failure of the masses to grasp the immensity of the collapse story already unfolding around us while a few intrepid folks call bullshit on the substitute story offered by clever politicians, pundits, and marketeers — rhetoricians all — is equivalent to the divide between a poor, illiterate, itinerant farmer (or hunter or trapper) ca. 1780 and the Founders, a tiny group of landed gentry who were exceptionally well-educated men — Renaissance men, if you will, all having deep understanding of political and Enlightenment philosophy of the day. It must have been nearly impossible for the Founders to communicate effectively with the governed.

Today, the situation is reversed: mouth-breathing populists are now governing and have seized upon the means to manipulate the masses through disinformation and misdirection. Further, popular leaders and opinion-makers refuse to hear and simply cannot understand what a wizened few are telling them, namely, that unsustainable practices of industrial civilization have reached fever pitch and will soon become a hellscape of our own creation. Like a Revolutionary Era agriculturist or outdoorsman, today’s populists (and the large portion of the population they reflect — who elect them, in fact) may possess narrow expertise at their individual endeavors. Yet ironically, they remain over specialized and cut off from broad intellectual traditions and are thus functionally illiterate. Similarly, the masses to whom they proselytize have at best limited command of reading and almost no critical thinking skills whatsoever. (We never even approached universal literacy, which is a gateway to erudition.) A liberal arts education is to them hollow and meaningless, they are fundamentally immune to what science instructs, and their heads are full of entertainments (e.g., superhero geekery and professional sports) and other distractions that block real knowledge and understanding gained through careful, sustained consideration of an array of sources and perspectives. Contrast them with folks who read voluminously, study trends and scientific reports, and draw conclusions from a wealth of evidence: the two groups might as well be speaking Mandarin and English for all the communication passing between them.

My sense of the term populist should not be mistaken for leaders who embody the will of the people. That’s obviously not happening. The most basic function of government is to formulate policy and allocate funds to execute those policies. The graphic below shows top policy priorities over the past five years:

Well down the list is dealing with global warming (and I’m guessing the related complex of problems). Protecting the environment fares about 10–20 points better, as though it were a separate issue. What is most important to the public, however, are those things at which our leaders are failing the worst: the economy and jobs; terrorism; and education. Every administration and Congress initially pays ample lip service to priorities with wide public support but then diverts to a different agenda. This paragraph by Joel Hirschhorn captures the sort of populism now practiced.

With the Bush-corrosion of our Constitution and collapse of the economic system after it had been exploited by the rich and corrupt, what better time for revolution? Instead, we got a president with a glib tongue, a terrific smile and a deep commitment to the two-party plutocracy and corporate state. Obama is no populist, not even close. Nor is he a genuine reformer. At best, he is a master exploiter of populism.

It’s noteworthy that Hirschhorn saw through the B.S. five years ago.

A similar disconnect between public mandate and leadership is described in this Truthout article from 2011:

According to the latest poll conducted by CBS “60 Minutes” and the magazine Vanity Fair, 61 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthy as the primary way to cut the budget. The same poll finds that the second most popular first choice for cutting the nation’s budget deficit, at 20 percent, is cutting the military budget. That is, 81 percent of us — four out of five — would cut the deficit by taxing the rich and/or slashing military spending. Only four percent of those polled favored cutting Medicare … and only three percent favored cutting Social Security … A second poll, this time by CNN, reports that 63 percent of Americans oppose the US War in Afghanistan and want it ended. Only 35 percent say they support the war (now in its ninth year).

With such a disconnect stalling meaningful discussion before it begins, no wonder that controlling rhetoric is defined instead by funding (profit), celebrity (guru glorification, including green-washing types), and ~~false~~ solutionism. They are precisely the wrong kinds of issues, of course. The right kinds might involve the realization that…

in an interconnected world, we all succeed and fail together in this life (there is no us and them anymore),
the time has long passed for solutions and (an attempt at) mitigation is the next step, and
moral choices about how we act in the time remaining us are of paramount importance once deteriorating conditions lead to widespread chaos.

Instead we get slick salesmanship to keep the economy humming (funneling capital to the top) and the masses calmed or blissed-out on gadgetry. We get not-so-behind-the-scenes preparations to cull and quarantine the population when the going gets rough. And we succumb to infighting among those who can’t achieve consensus about what’s to be done. Us and them to the bitter end.

The Technological Sublime

08 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 153 Comments

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"The Relive Box", 6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Dystopic Future, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Luis Suarez-Villa, Passenger Pigeon, Peak Oil, Richard Heinberg, Richard Wolff, T. C. Boyle, Tasmanian Aborigines, Techno-Optimists, Technocapitalism, Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism, Technophelia

“Life is tragic and absurd and none of it has any purpose at all. Science has killed religion, there’s no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all.”
~ TC Boyle

This past Thursday night I went to a reading by author T.C. Boyle at Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library. Outside the entrance of the auditorium were a couple of tables lined with signed copies of his numerous novels and collections of short stories and manned by a few young people, perhaps college students, taking people’s money. I had already bought a copy of T.C. Boyle Stories at the local bookstore before coming and read a few of the short stories before the auditorium doors opened. I seldom go to such events, but what had first caught my eye were the titles of some of his books, one of which is A friend of the Earth whose premise is rather dystopic.

While waiting in line for the event, I opened up my book and read “The Extinction Tales” from the author’s first volume of short stories. The title of this particular short story states exactly what it’s about, taking the reader across continents and centuries from the massacre of the passenger pigeon to the genocide of the aboriginal Tasmanians. A couple of modern-day vignettes serve as the bookends to this vast sweep of history, at the beginning the hunting skills of a lighthouse caretaker’s pet cat snuff out the remaining population of the island’s unique bird species and at the end a man is haunted by the death of his father whose funeral he neglected to attend.

The doors opened and perhaps 100 to 200 people filled the seats. After a few fawning introductions by a couple of NAU faculty members, Tom Coraghessan Boyle took the lectern. Tall and lanky with a goatee, wearing red sneakers, and dressed in black with the glowing cat eyes of a printed t-shirt peaking through his opened sports jacket, he appeared more hipster than a sixty-something tenured English professor, but spoke as eloquently and articulately as one would expect.

He read two stories, but the second one resonated with me the most. “The Relive Box” is an allegorical tale of a middle-aged single father who becomes obsessed with the latest hi-tech escapism device which mentally transports people back to any specified time in their life by reading their memories. He’s stuck reliving various moments of his past while his present life falls apart. The ‘here and now’ simply becomes lifeless space and time to be filled by the ‘relive box’.

The parallels with today’s addiction to computers, video games, iPhones, and social media are obvious; our inseparable relationship with technology has made us virtual cyborgs. Our enslavement to technology extends to a societal level with the wide-held assumption that geoengineering and adaptive technologies will evolve in time to spare us from the worst of a collapsing environment, allowing business-as-usual to continue no matter how dire current scientific reports and future projections may be. Unarmed by a blind faith in technology, industrial civilization barrels headlong into a world growing more violent and unstable by the day. Technocapitalists live by the sword of technology and will die by it as well.

In the hands of corporate capitalists, our socio-economic system brings us terminator seeds from Monsanto, predatory banking instead of public banking, the military industrial complex’s war for profit instead of national defense, viagra instead of antibiotics, a government for the ultra wealthy and not the majority, corporate rule with Citizens United instead of representative democracy, and so on.

In the words of David Simon, “There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show.”

Technology is no different in capitalism’s overriding dependency on the successful accumulation of capital:

The system within which institutions, cultures, and people operate determines its policies, beliefs, and behaviors. Those operating within a capitalist system conform to the dictates of corporations. Capitalism cannot be reformed and its resiliency to stay afloat during environmental collapse is remarkable:

Nonetheless, in the final analysis, our entire way of life based on fossil fuels and infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is untenable…

“A small minority — people who are at the margins of the system and who are thus able to observe it as if from outside, who are not tied into any of the major influence groups, and who have learned to seek out alternative sources of information and think critically — will gradually come to the conclusion that the entire system of industrial civilization is inherently unsustainable.”
~ Richard Heinberg, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World

A “post-carbon world” may very well not include people, but building an alternative system demands that we believe a post-collapse world does include survivors.

Message from the Corporatocracy?

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 97 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-terrorism, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Homeland Security, Iraq Invasion, No-Bid Government Contracts, Runaway Climate Change, Science Applications International Corporation(SAIC), Security and Surveillance State, Techno-Optimists, The Revolving Door Between Government and Corporations, War for Profit, War on Terror, Will Potter: Green is the New Red

This website got an interesting comment in the ‘About’ section from a well-educated fellow who works in the technology sector of the economy. His credentials are impressive. I did some checking to see if he really was who I thought he was and it definitely appears so. His IP address takes me directly to the Science Applications International Corporation(SAIC). SAIC is a major defense contractor with “friends in high places”, having received numerous no-bid contracts from the government. Its top personnel move freely within the government/corporate revolving door. A noteworthy fact in their history is that they were “instrumental” in fabricating the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and they pushed war as the only option. SAIC was the contractor that waisted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on the failed Trailblazer project which was an attempt to create a system that would spy on cell phone, internet, and other electronic communications. Needless to say, they have an extensive and dark history:

Additional information on SAIC is here. Now that I’ve gotten that introduction out of the way, let’s look at the message from Tihamer Toth-Fejel:

Tihamer,

I’m happy you got a chuckle out of this website. We here at CoIC try to deal with the angst of the collapse of industrial civilization by treating the situation with gallows humor. Yes the Roman Empire did take some time to collapse, but I’m very confident that we don’t have the luxury of “hundreds of years” to see modern civilization disappear into the dustbin of history. The reasons for such an accelerated crash have been documented here and elsewhere numerous times. You only have to read The Limits to Growth to know much of what was accurately predicted decades ago. Collapse doesn’t happen overnight, but occurs in pulses and waves. Nothing as large and extensive as modern civilization will simply disappear overnight and no one here pushes such a theory. Ecologic overshoot is not a hard concept to understand and mankind is subject to it just as any other organism, although we have proven very adept at ‘extending and pretending’ our overexpansion. Cognitive biases are “an inevitable feature of adaptive behavior in all organisms, including ourselves.” Perhaps mankind can exhibit a collective free will and turn this ship around, but I highly doubt it. Our political system is beholden to Wall Street money and everything in Washington is predicated on the short-term election cycle. The same goes for our economy which needs constant growth and quarterly profits at the expense of a habitable planet. Dealing with climate change interferes with profits, so the capitalists feel better when they bury their heads in the sand. Unfortunately, humans did not evolve to deal with seemingly invisible, long-term, existential threats such as climate change and ocean acidification, many of their effects being nonlinear and complex.

Concerning your second point, I am indeed using the internet to write about the collapse of industrial civilization. What is your point? I think you are implying that I am anti-technology, encouraging mankind to live in caves. If you read my core beliefs for this site, you’ll find your answer; nonetheless, we do recognize the rule that technology is a byproduct of available energy resources, and at the rate that humanity is exhausting the plant, animal, and mineral wealth of this planet, I’m not sure what pixy dust the techno-optimists think is going to maintain our current set of unsustainable living arrangements. Perhaps you can tell us. And if humans were able to bend the laws of physics and create some new energy source, we would still be in trouble due to overpopulation and our enormous consumption of natural resources. I think Brutus had it right when he called humans “locusts” stripping the land bare.

On your third point, yes planet Earth will eventually die… in about five billion years when our sun becomes a red giant, maybe. Does this inevitability give us the green light to exterminate everything within a mere century? This would be somewhat analogous to a three-year-old committing suicide because they have come to the realization that they only have roughly 80 more years to live. And what about future generations? Is that even a consideration in your thinking? Perhaps you could even expand your thinking to include this planet’s myriad other life-forms whose biological functions support a vast web of life that makes our very own existence possible. Humans are currently overseeing the 6th mass extinction which will likely take us all down as well, but I’m sure you are well aware of this crisis and are working diligently on some sort of techno-fix for it. Your last sentence implies that you are a person of the anti-environmental, right-wing persuasion who sees those concerned about the habitability of the planet as eco-terrorists. This is a predictable viewpoint from someone who is an apparent contractor for the DoD and servant of the corporatocracy, but I assure you that future biospheric events will change the minds of even the most greeny-hating, military-industrial-complex loving demagogues on the planet.

No Escape

15 Saturday Feb 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 161 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, Surplus Value, The Black Angels: Young Men Dead, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

A DJ on the radio mentioned the flooding in England the other day and exclaimed, “The climate is going crazy!”. The shallowness of the conversation and its failure to dig any deeper as to the reasons why the climate is “going crazy” is mirrored in the mainstream media and our society. Real journalism is simply another casualty of our rotting consciousness. Like a leper, those who cannot see or feel are oblivious to their own self-inflicted wounds. The flywheel of industrial civilization continues to spin out of control, taking out chunks of ecological bricks making up a once diverse and vibrant living planet. In some parts of the world, epic drought is desiccating cropland and exposing the cracked surface of lake beds, while on the other side of the globe unceasing rain is causing deluges of biblical proportion. Still other regions are experiencing freak snow and ice storms. The damage is done, but humans will continue to scour the earth for resources to maintain a house whose foundation now rests on the shifting sands of a destabilized biosphere.

If you thought shale gas was a nightmare, you ain’t seen nothing yet. A subterranean world of previously ignored reserves is about to be opened up. These are the vast coal deposits that have proved unreachable by conventional mining, along with gas deposits around them. To the horror of anyone concerned about climate change, modern miners want to set fire to these deep coal seams and capture the gases this creates for industry and power generation.
– Fire in the hole: After fracking comes coal

Weather patterns once held in place by an ice-locked Arctic are unraveling at an unsettling pace, yet industrial man can’t seem to pull himself away from his carbon burning orgy long enough to see that the monkey wrench inside Earth’s intricate and homeostatic climate system is himself. Never in the history of Earth has a single species become a geologic force for mass planet-wide extinction. The worshippers of the “free market” proclaim solutions to climate change will be forthcoming in the form of technology, yet all environmental laws and regulations are simply window dressing around the resource consuming pit of capitalism. Technology cannot replenish depleted resources or restore the relative ecological equilibrium that existed prior to the industrial revolution. Natural law is nonnegotiable and those who transgress it, repeatedly ignoring clear and present warning signs, are doomed to suffer the unforgiving consequences. Modern man will leave behind a toxic and radioactive wasteland for eons.

The corporate state is impotent in the face of the environmental meltdown since its only real purpose appears to be an enabler and enforcer to the plunder of the commons and the concentration of wealth into the most ruthless and greedy hands. There is no escaping this system that is locked into a path of self-destruction except through death, as Kevin Moore describes on this blog:

“…in general terms the purpose of government is:

a) to facilitate the looting-and-polluting of local regions and the planet as a whole in order that a small minority can acquire material wealth and enjoy themselves.
b) to facilitate the transfer of wealth from those lower in the hierarchical system to those near the top.
c) to keep the general populace uninformed and compliant.
d) to provide sufficient ‘trickle down’ for the misinformed and deluded masses to think they are not being exploited.
e) [more recently] to promote the agendas of transnational corporations, which are focused on complete control of populations and resources and maximization of short-term profits.

The purpose of environmental laws is:

1. to facilitate the looting-and-polluting of local regions and the planet as a whole but to limit the impact of severe pollution in specific cases where that pollution would be detrimental to other planet-destroying money-making activities..
2. to provide the pretence that governments care about the welfare of the general populace.
3. to provide looters and polluters with official mandates for looting and polluting, i.e. an environmental impact process having been gone through and ‘no significant impacts identified’, the activity of the looter-and-polluter is given the stamp of approval.

Under such a system it become inevitable that all politicians are, or quickly become, bought-and-paid-for professional liars and that all senior environment officers become lackeys to the system and therefore enemies of the people.

The entire political-economic system of western nations is geared to making everything that matters worse, so everything that matters gets worse.”

These are the unvarnished and stark rules of the game for those who care to know the truth. Becoming fully aware is a hope-destroying and soul-wrenching realization, but the truth is never measured by its popularity and very few ever face and accept it. The welfare and safety of the public and future generations will continue to be sacrificed at the altar of stock markets and mass consumerism. As commenter James says:

“…Murdering extant humans NOW to gain wealth is accepted government policy and in some cases personal policy…”

Nowhere is this more true than in the one country that comprises 5% of the world’s population, but consumes 25% of its resources; others are furiously trying to catch up.

So as the industrial world whistles past the graveyard on its civilization-ending trajectory, we watch the signposts of doom whiz by us each day and wonder what is the point of getting up every morning to participate in this omnicidal culture. With virtually the entire planet having been plotted, demarcated, sold off for exploitation and surveillance by drone, I’m afraid no one is getting out of this trap alive so you might as well learn to respond to current news events with a certain black and morbid humor. We are the pathologists of capitalist industrial civilization, dissecting its potholed road to collapse just as a coroner would conduct the postmortem examination of a morbidly obese person who gorged themself on twinkies and high fructose soft drinks.

Many have used the phrase “the climate is moving to a new normal” or “moving to a new paradigm”. Such phrases give a false sense of security, as if the damage has stopped and the Earth’s systems can now recalibrate to a new settled state, but human forcing of the biosphere by way of GHG emissions continues unabated and in fact has now tripped multiple climate tipping points. There is no “new paradigm”, but an ongoing cascading collapse of all known stability and equilibrium.

When you go into your mindless 9-to-5 job and your micromanaging boss harasses you for petty little things, you’ll think about how meaningless it all is in an age where governments will crumble, billions will starve to death, and the earth will soon become just another lifeless rock floating through space.

“…Run for the hills, pick up your feet and let’s go.
 We did our jobs, pick up speed now lets move.
 The trees can’t grow without the sun in their eyes.
 And we can’t live if we’re too afraid to die….”

Destroy the World

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 130 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment), Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Tipping Points, CO2 Emissions, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Fossil-Fuel Based Economy, Global Famine, Kathleen White (Distinguished Senior Fellow-in-Residence & Director), Mass Die Off, Mass Media Manipulation, Michael Ruppert, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, unwashed public

As mankind spirals towards its own self-manufactured demise, I look with a jaundiced eye at daily events in the news and at the bread-and-circus infotainment that fills the American hologram. The mass media is replete with misinformation on the state of the world, so I wasn’t too surprised by the recent words of wisdom(sarcasm) from Kathleen White (Distinguished Senior Fellow-in-Residence & Director, Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment); nevertheless, I felt compelled to set aside a partially completed essay on capitalism and technology in order to express some of my thoughts about White’s essay on the benefits of fossil fuels to humanity:

“…Fossils fuels also augment food supply. Fertilizer derived from natural gas has increased agricultural productivity by 40-60 percent. According to economist Indur Goklany, without fossil fuels, an area equivalent to U.S., Canada, and India combined would have to be converted into crop land to meet global food demand. Fossil fuel-based fertilizer, pesticides, and mechanized substitutes for animal power have saved vast natural ecosystems from conversion to cropland. And the increased atmospheric concentration of man-made CO2 has enhanced plant growth.”

[You fail to consider that without fossil fuels, mankind would not have been enabled to overpopulate the planet to such a degree as to require so much farmland. You also fail to say that the negatives of climate change swamp (no pun intended) any supposed benefits of a warming planet. As we are already seeing, the effects of epic droughts and floods are wreaking havoc on farmers. Good luck trying to move the agricultural industry northward where the soils are extremely poor. Famine and mass extinction are the inevitable outcome of industrial civilization’s destabilizing activities on the planet.]

“Although combustion of fossil fuels releases pollutants, that environmental damage can, and is, undergoing dramatic reversal far quicker than could the conversion of natural ecosystems to croplands. The prosperity supported by fossil fuel energy allows investment in effective technologies to reduce and eliminate harmful pollution.”

[CO2 and other GHG levels are increasing every year, having gone parabolic in the last 100 years. This reality paints a bleak picture for the future of humanity. Far from being mitigated, environmental damage is accelerating everywhere one looks from the acidification of the oceans to the die-off of forests and jungles. The simple fact is that renewable energy cannot replace fossil fuel based energy at the rate the world is consuming, as European actions have recently indicated. Only a wholesale reconfiguration of the economy and our way of life will enable solutions to the environmental crisis. Rather than taking this courageous and self-reflective approach, society is putting its proverbial head in the sand concerning climate change. The public already finds the subject of climate change difficult enough to understand without having to wade through a constant onslaught of misleading articles such as yours.]

“Renewable energy still provides a sliver of global demand. Despite the billions of dollars in subsidies, retail prices are still 2-3 times higher than fossil fuels. Renewable energy from wind and solar remain diffuse, intermittent and parasitic on fossil fuels for back-up. Nuclear fission provides energy comparable or superior to fossil fuels, but the public remains resistant to broad use.”

[Yes, capitalist industrial civilization cannot be run on renewables so that is why we need to be talking about powering down and living within the carrying capacity of the planet rather than maintaining the status quo. Nuclear has the little problem of making vast swaths of the planet uninhabitable from radiation contamination, as evidenced by such catastrophes as Chernobyl and Fukushima. Nuclear energy also leaves behind tons of radioactive waste that must be stored away for thousands of years. These sort of factors tend to scare the public. With global sea levels rising and storms becoming more destructive, the world’s nuclear plants, which are mostly situated along waterways and oceans for coolant purposes, are in jeopardy. Get it?]

“Energy-dense, abundant, imperishable, versatile, reliable, portable and affordable, fossil fuels provide 85 percent of the world’s energy because they are superior to the current alternatives. And hundreds of millions still await the benefits of affordable energy. Until energy sources comparable or superior to fossil fuels are fully available, policies to reduce emissions of CO2 should proceed with caution lest they prematurely jettison the well-springs of mankind’s greatest advance — the blessings of which literally light up the holiday season.”

[The “well-springs of mankind’s greatest advance” are soon to be jettisoned into the dustbin of history and extinction as we have already tripped multiple tipping points in the earth’s biosphere such as the Polar ice melt and many others. Hundreds of millions will never experience the energy-intensive lifestyles of developed countries since climate chaos will put a halt to human expansion within this century. Fossil fuels have allowed industrial civilization to far overshoot the environment; for the rest of the world to live like Americans, we would need more than 4 Earths.]

The Black Road of Technology

14 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 99 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Anishnabek, Capitalism, Casino Capitalism, Chris Christie's Traffic-Gate, Climate Change, Clive Hamilton, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Commodification of Nature, Consumerism, Death of Languages, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecocide, Extinction of Man, Genocide, Geoengineering, Loss of Biodiversity, Mass Die Off, Monoculture Farming, Murphy's Law, Native Wisdom, Ojibwe, Runaway Climate Change, Rust Cohle of 'True Detective', Techno-Optimists, The Limits to Growth, The Rat Race, The Seventh Fire Prophecy

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that shouldn’t exist under natural law… The honorable thing for our species to do is to stop reproducing and walk hand in hand, brothers and sisters, into extinction — one last midnight.”
~ Rust Cohle, ‘True Detective‘

Sitting comfortably within their climate-controlled homes and buildings, a tiny percentage of eco-conscience humans watches with morbid fascination as large numbers of animals drop like flies in a bug zapper. In the latest die-off, bats rain down from Australian skies; parrots, kangaroos and emus perish from heat exhaustion. Ominous signs of an unraveling web of life are everywhere to see, but the industrial world has become utterly disconnected from nature and pays little heed to such warnings. Rather, what holds their interest is Chris Christie’s Traffic-Gate. That our fate is bound to the well-being of Earth is a belief lost with the genocide of so many indigenous cultures. Capitalist carbon man resides in a totally fabricated world — he eats food mass-produced from fossil fuel inputs, drinks ‘purified’ water bottled in plastic, and at bedtime drowns out the noise of energy-gluttonous cities with the electronic recordings of ocean waves and forest sounds. But most absurdly, he ‘communes with nature’ through staged wildlife TV shows and eco-trip adventures. Rather than allow poachers and farmers free rein, the capitalists thought it wiser to extract profit out of the Earth’s dying ecosystems by tapping into the “green” industry of eco-tourism, another in a lost list of anthropocentric oxymorons.

Relentless marketing on TV, internet, radio, billboards, print, etc has created an unending cycle of desire and consumption, fueling the trivialization of life that feeds its commodification. The individual is reduced to a “buying unit” by the skyscrapers, institutions, and bureaucracy of capitalism, but in a future world of spent resources and civilization-destroying weather, the market won’t have much use for so many “buying units”. Introspection by many rational, sober, and clear-minded people since the publication of ‘The Limits to Growth’ has not altered the course of history to date; why would I think the human species would suddenly alter their behavior after having tripped so many ecological tipping points and feedback loops? Hindsight is 20/20 only if a lesson was learned the first time.

“…The basic truth between the lines of this press event [National Research Council (NRC) briefing on abrupt climate change] was that we are facing a world that is becoming increasingly hostile to humankind.

We are literally making the planet into a wasteland like this is some post-apocalyptic science fiction story. It is just shocking. And the most horrifying aspect of it all is that we’ve waited to reduce emissions so long that we’re exiting the win-win field of possible climate responses. We’re now headed into a world of lose-lose. That’s the news nobody wants to convey – or hear. But there it is.” – link

The cancer of hyper consumption and economic growth for never-ending profit has trashed the planet, but blind faith in the markets and techno-optimism are the siren’s call beguiling industrial civilization over the cliff. Capitalism likes efficiency; in its quest for greater efficiency, diversity – the essence of life – is being exterminated. Monoculture is death. More biodiversity means more resilience. A recent scientific paper purports to prove this long-held maxim:

“…when a lot of species are interacting and competing in an ecosystem, the ‘average’ interactions that any one species experiences are likely to be weaker than in a simpler, less diverse system. When there are a lot of different niches occupied by different species, we also expect different responses to environmental fluctuations among the community, meaning that some species inherently do better than others depending on the specific disturbance. Species-rich systems also tend to have more of what we call ‘functional redundancy‘, meaning that if one species providing an essential ecosystem function (e.g., like predation) goes extinct, there’s another, similar species ready to take its place…”

Biodiversity loss is not the only aspect of life being degraded. The planet is also losing cultural diversity – languages, crafts, religions, histories, ancient knowledge, etc. are disappearing as globalization reduces all of life to the status of a marketable commodity. Thousands of languages were once spoken in North and South America before the invasion of European powers. It’s interesting to note that in the Ojibwe language, and perhaps in most if not all native languages of North America, there exists no word to describe “greed” or the concept of personal property, but there are endless numbers of verbs to describe “every movement and temperature and visual sense of water.” After a few hundred years of progress, the white man has Wall Street and the natives have gambling casinos.

“In the Seventh Fire prophecy of the Anishnabek, each of the seven fires represent an era in human history. We are now in the time of the Seventh Fire. The task of the people of this age, including the Anishnabek and other red people, the yellow people, the black and the white, is to come together through choosing the road of cooperation. Without this, there will be no Eighth Fire, or future for Natives and others…

…Today, in the age of the Seventh Fire, the races are again faced with a choice. The two roads are the black road of technology and overdevelopment leading to environmental catastrophe, the other is the red road of spirituality and respect for the earth. Together, people of the world have to choose the right road, be of one mind, or the earth cannot survive…” ~ The Seventh Fire (Ojibwe) Prophecy

The “black road of technology and overdevelopment” is paved with the fallout of dead bodies and poisoned landscapes —nuclear meltdowns, oil and chemical spills, factory fires and explosions, etc., but to a very tool-centric species just itching to keep this omnicidal train going, geoengineering looks like the perfect ticket. It promises to allow industrial civilization to continue burning carbon while avoiding the nasty side-effect of catastrophic climate change. Unfortunately, human error and miscalculation, the bane of so many other industrial endeavors, will undoubtedly come into play. The ‘hacking’ of the Earth’s entire climate system represents the peak of hubris for modern man. Describing the conceit of our technological domination of the planet, Clive Hamilton states:

“Pursuing abatement is an admission that industrial society has harmed nature, while engineering the Earth’s climate would be confirmation of our mastery over it — final proof that, whatever minor errors made on the way, human ingenuity and faith in our own abilities will always triumph. Geoengineering promises to turn failure into triumph.”

The Earth’s carbon sinks are filling up and the twin problem of ocean acidification will need a techno-fix too. Complexity begets even more complicated problems. Our culture avoids the simple fact that humanity is vulnerable and dependent on the Earth, that life is fragile and interconnected, and that the importance of Murphy’s law is amplified exponentially when playing GOD with technology. Let’s also hope that the psychological effects of climate change don’t make the nuclear powers lose their cool.

…A warm dry wind is all that breaks the silence
The highways quiet scars across the land
People lie, eyes closed, no longer dreaming
The earth dies screaming…

“For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”

02 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 80 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Ice Melt, Canfield Ocean, Capitalism, Climate Change, CO2 Emissions, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Droughts and Fire in Australia, Ecocide, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Gary Bedford: Regional Environment Officer, Great Permian Extinction, Infinite Growth Paradigm, International Energy Agency (IEA), Jellyfish Plague, John Key: New Zealand Prime Minister, Kevin Moore, Mass Die Off, Methane Time Bomb, New Plymouth District Council (NPDC), Nuclear Radiation, Ocean Acidification, Overpopulation, Pathocracy, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Runaway Climate Change, The Elite 1%, Typhoon Haiyan

Despite mounting evidence of our grim reality, the world’s psychopathic leadership remains willfully deaf, dumb, and blind to the unfolding global ecocide and humanicide. A persistent sounding of the alarm by a tiny minority of the population only seems to have irritated and offended those in the elite class who are pressing the fossil-fueled industrial machine onward, full steam ahead. However, it’s not a cliff we are headed towards because surely the psychopaths would have hidden their parachutes underneath their business suits. There will be no Bottleneck for humans because we’re headed toward the black hole of extinction from which nobody gets out alive. Yes, they’ll be a few hangers-on for a brief period until there is only one lone straggler… and then darkness for the human species along with 99% of all other life. We’re doomed by a pathocracy:

…from Greek pathos, “feeling, pain, suffering”; and kratos, “rule”

A totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by a psychopathic elite, and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.

A pathocracy can take many forms and can insinuate itself covertly into any seemingly just system or ideology. As such it can masquerade under the guise of a democracy or theocracy as well as more openly oppressive regimes…

Kevin Moore, a frequent commenter on this site, has provided us with an excellent summation of current factors which clearly spell extinction for the “wise” ape. Certainly if a reasonable person in charge studies his list, they would want to turn this ill-fated ship around before it quite literally takes everyone down into a deep, watery grave. On the contrary, Kevin points out that they are “throwing the compass and fishing gear overboard” and “boring holes in the hull while distributing all the rations for immediate consumption.” I’m afraid those who have managed to work their way into political positions are forbidden from making any decisions jeopardizing business-as-usual; but as the memes go, there is no business on a dead planet nor is there a planet B. The least these politicians and corporate heads could do is be honest with their own children by telling them their future is not as important as the short-term profits to be had right now by ripping up the Earth’s last remaining resources and fouling the biosphere. If they cannot be truthful to their own offspring, how could we expect them to be forthright and unbiased with us?

At any rate and for posterity’s sake (however brief that may be), here is Kevin’s detailed and ‘hopium-free’ list:

Yesterday I sent out an email to a long list of people concerning the meeting I had with the local council’s climate change officer, during which I pointed out we are in the early stages of complete meltdown of planetary systems. And ‘nobody’ is at all bothered.

Here is what I sent as a summary of the meeting: .

I raised the following points with Colin Comber, New Plymouth District Council climate change officer, at our meeting on Friday, 29th November, 2013. On most points he had nothing to say.

1. The forcing factor for methane has been raised from 23 times CO2 to 34 times CO2. Even that multiplier understates the warming potential in the short term, and a figure of at least 100 times should be used for methane bursts.

2. Recent methane bursts in the East Siberian Sea have resulted in 2000ppb, which is equivalent to over 200ppm CO2 in the short-term, making the total global CO2 equivalence 600ppm (at least). The extraordinarily high concentration of greenhouse gases has resulted in rapid temperature increases in the Arctic (up around 1C since 2006, despite the huge amount of energy involved in melting ice.).

3. 2012 saw the lowest ever summer ice area.

4. The current Arctic ice area is hovering around two standard deviations below the historic average, but much of the ice is thin and new, making 2013 the lowest stable ice volume ever.

5. Atmospheric CO2 hit 400ppm earlier this year. It troughed at 393ppm (photosynthesis cycle) and is on its way up; it is anticipated to reach 403ppm April-May 2014.

6. The heat forcing of current atmospheric CO2 is equivalent to around 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs being exploded every day.

7. The present level of atmospheric CO2 is 40% above the pre-industrial level and corresponds to a sea level 23 meters above current; the reason we don’t have an immediate sea level rise is the thermal lag of warming deep oceans and converting ice into water. Such a level of CO2 has not been experienced any time in the evolution of humans over the past 2 million years. Indeed, for much of our recent history the CO2 level was around 180ppm and there were thick ice sheets as far south as central England.

8. The IEA has announced we are on track for a rise in average temperature of 3.5oC by 2035. Such a temperature rise puts temperatures beyond anything experienced in human history and most of the Earth into an uninhabitable zone. Interestingly, NZ governments quote the IEA as the best source of information when it comes to energy but completely ignore the IEA when it comes to unwelcome information about climate. The IEA is talking about a runaway greenhouse gas situation.

9. Acidification of the oceans [due to absorption of anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere] is proceeding at an unprecedented rate, leading to stress of organisms dependent on bicarbonate cycle for shell formation. Industrial activity is altering the chemical and biological composition of the oceans at a rate faster than that of the great Permian Extinction Event which wiped out 95% of life on Earth. Continuation on the current path of burning fossil fuels will render the oceans uninhabitable to most existing marine species, and then wipe out most terrestrial species.

10. I was personally shocked to see millions of jellyfish on a local beach recently. Although my observation has no scientific significance it is indicative of the ‘death of the oceans’ I have been reading about; we are transforming the oceans back to some primeval form, similar to that of 600 million years ago, wiping out the species (turtles, sunfish etc.) that feed on jellyfish and loading the oceans with toxins. I had previously noted the paucity of sea life in rock pools compared to 30 years ago (this is presumably not from over-collection, since the beach has been designated a maritime protection zone).

11. Whereas the previous five mass extinction events (other than the one that wiped out dinosaurs) were due to natural volcanic activity, the present mass extinction event is due to industrial activity and emissions from industrial activity.

12. An unknown amount of radiation is leaking from the crippled Fukushima reactors into the Pacific Ocean. People on the west coast of the US are now extremely concerned, particularly since mass deaths of sea life are now being frequently reported.

13. Australia recently reported the highest ever October temperatures (corresponding with the earliest severe wildfires).

14. Typhoon Haiyan was the biggest storm ever to make landfall and resulted in unprecedented damage. This was due to extraordinarily hot sea water associated with ocean warming. An excellent essay on Nature Bats Last highlighted the fact that prior to the Second World War people in the region lived without the ‘benefits’ of civilization, and when storms smashed things up they just picked up the pieces and rebuilt their huts, got water from lakes and rivers, and went back to fishing from small boats: now they are unable to do any of that because all the natural, sustainable systems have been ruined or covered with concrete and asphalt, and industrial civilization resulted in a population explosion that resulted in far more victims than there would have been if development had not occurred.

15. If we imagine the Earth totally covered with industrial civilization (no land available for food production) it is clearly not sustainable. 90% covered by civilization is not sustainable. Nor is 80%. Not even 50% is sustainable. The current level of civilization utilises about 43% of the primary production of the Earth and has resulted in a 0.85C rise in average temperature. That 0.85C rise is already having catastrophic effects (meltdown of the Arctic, super-storms etc.)

16. The fact that we already have meltdown (lowest Arctic ice, extraordinary storms, death of corals etc.) at 0.85C above the long-term average indicates that we are already in overshoot with respect to population and resource consumption. Despite the fact that we have reached the meltdown stage, governments persist with policies predicated on increased population and increased resource use, which is completely insane. NPDC [New Plymouth District Council] advocates the same kind of insanity on a daily basis.

17. The previously proposed ‘safe’ level of temperature rise of 2C is not safe at all, and was only ever an arbitrary number. But climate specialists now admit that warming cannot be restricted to 2C anyway, and that we are on track for a 4C or 6C rise in average temperature, i.e. a largely uninhabitable planet in a matter of decades, probably by 2060, which would be within the normal lifespan of children living today. If the International Energy Agency is correct, the Earth will be largely uninhabitable by 2040.

18. Nothing whatsoever is being done to curtail emissions. International negotiations are a farce predicated on ‘kicking the can down the road’ for as long as possible. NPDC policy, mirroring that around the world, is geared to increasing CO2 emissions, via increased population, increased use of concrete, increased dependence on internal combustion engines, etc. I quoted the incident I had witnessed of two petrol-powered vehicles being used to deposit and level gravel on a path in Pukekura Park when one person with a wheelbarrow could have done the job (and 50 years ago that was how the job was done); meanwhile, the mulching machine in operation in the park prior to our meeting would have consumed more energy in a few hours than the electric bikes the council promotes would save in a year.

19. Extraction of conventional oil peaked over 2005 to 2008, and the economic system is now being propped up by desperation measures centered around fracking, deep-sea drilling, extraction from tar sands, etc. as well as consuming ever greater amounts of energy, such activities increase the emissions associated with fossil fuel extraction, thereby exacerbating the climate catastrophe.

20. We cannot look to John Key* or Jonathan Young** or Andrew Little*** for leadership on environmental issues: they are simply opportunists acting as agents of global corporations and money-lenders; they implement policies favourable to global corporations and money-lenders which entail trashing the environment, generally as quickly as possible.

21. Currently, NPDC is fully committed to destroying the futures of the young people living in the district and elsewhere via resource depletion and environmental collapse, as indicated by the huge display in the council foyer which announces that NPDC spends 2c of every dollar collected promoting economic growth. (Economic growth equates to increased resource consumption and increased emissions.)

22. The present economy has no future because of energy depletion and because it is increasing the level of pollution, both locally and globally. Continuation on the present path of searching for and burning fossil fuels results in an uninhabitable planet within decades. Drastically reducing fuel consumption leading to total abandonment of fossil fuels is the only sane option. (It may be too late for that, but it is still the only sane option.)

23. This is not a matter of priorities. Surely there can be no priority higher than ensuring the next generation has a habitable planet to live on. The system ignores the most important priority of all, and therefore the system is INSANE.

24. Everyone within the system pretends nothing is wrong and that the system has a future even when a modicum of rational thought indicates it doesn’t (infinite growth on a finite planet is mathematically impossible.)

25. The composition of the new council give us no reason for optimism and many reasons for extreme pessimism.

26. The main reason the general populace of the district continues to ‘behave badly’ -purchase and use oversized vehicles, cover land with concrete and asphalt, consume at unsustainable levels etc.- is because they are encouraged to by NPDC. The only message they get from the council is that everything is rosy (when the reverse is the case and we are mightily close to collapse).

27. The overuse of internal combustion engines is causing severe health problems globally and within the district. Coupled with consumption of junk food, mechanized transport is causing obesity and other diseases. Consumerism is generating a freak society, and each week that passes the ‘freak show’ becomes more bizarre.

28. There is a culture of ‘spend, spend, spend’ amongst council officers, with utterly ridiculous projects being undertaken. Apart from being totally unnecessary, these concrete and steel projects put additional CO2 into the atmosphere and bring forward abrupt climate change and an uninhabitable planet, are financially crippling the district, and pushing those on low fixed incomes ‘off the cliff’.

29. I pointed out that I spoke with Gary Bedford, regional environment officer, prior to returning to NP in 2006, and raised the matters of Peak Oil and Abrupt Climate Change; he ‘did not want to know’ and has done nothing whatsoever to protect the district. Indeed, he is on record as making absurd statements such as: “Climate change will be good for Taranaki.” I wish to have a follow-up session with him.

30. I have been proven right on practically everything I said in 2006 and subsequently to variously composed councils since 2006. Council officers have been proven consistently wrong. But it makes no difference how often council officers are proven wrong, nothing in the system changes and the insanity continues.

31. NPDC has been provided with the most accurate data and analysis available over many years (particularly my submission to the draft plan 2013), and NPDC has ignored it all. Hence, everything that matters has gotten worse and will continue to get worse by the day.

32. As far as I can establish, Colin Comber is the only council officer in a position to challenge the nonsense churned out by the bulk of the administration, in so far as all the policies advocated by senior council officers result in increased emissions and an ever faster meltdown of the global and local environment. I pointed out to him that he has ‘sat on his hands’ since our first meeting (around 6 years ago) and everything has gotten worse as a consequence.

Notes:

*John Key: NZ Prime Minister.

**Jonathan Young: MP for the city

***Andrew Little: List Labour MP for the city (MMP system).

Andre Judd: recently elected (October 2013) mayor of the city.

What is particularly interesting for me is that Jonathan Young, Andrew Little and Andrew Judd all have copies of my most recent book ‘The Easy Way’ (which details most of what is discussed on CoIC and NBL etc.) and that I had several sessions with Andrew Little on the content of TEW, and numerous sessions with Andrew Judd prior to his election.

Old habits die hard, but if you’re a smoker and you’ve got stage 3 cancer staring you in the face, the only two options are to radically change your behavior or die with your bad habits. We’ve already destroyed the Earth’s air conditioner which has altered the Jet Streams, unlocked the methane monster, and set off various other positive feedback loops ushering in a new normal of extreme weather. As a result, humans no longer enjoy a stable climate within which to cultivate food and can no longer depend on feshwater supply from seasonal snow melt. Yes, it’s rather a bit too late, but why keep digging when the hole you are in is already way too deep?