They were called ‘consumers’. Their every behavior became just another stream of data to be tracked, recorded, quantified, and analyzed by corporations for their vast, profit-seeking conveyor belt of production, distribution and marketing to a sea of mouths. The machine was global and its hungry tentacles wrapped the Earth. Wherever it turned its covetous eyes, the Earth shook and its creatures large and small fled for cover. Government and corporate rule were fully enmeshed and the birth of a worldwide surveillance state was born. All mass communication systems were controlled and grassroot uprisings within the Empire’s homeland could be cut off at the knees before they ever gained traction. Protection of the homeland from terrorism was the initial excuse by which the fascist state expanded its power. Knowledge is power; foreign countries and governments could be manipulated from a distance. Privacy was a quaint relic of a bygone era. With the awareness that Big Brother was watching, few voiced their true opinions. The charade of democracy played on as the consumers retreated into their fabricated world of digital screens and commercialization.
“[Citizens became] one-dimensional idiots; consuming pointlessly, obsessing about lifestyle, gawping at celebrities, gazing blankly at moronic TV game shows, forever grasping towards the next, vacuous, artificial ‘want’ created by Global Gobble Corporation.” ~ Philip Mirowski
The captains of industry were happy with their scheme of manipulating markets, printing fiat money, continuously uprooting industry to cheaper labor pools abroad, keeping well oiled the wheels of the military industrial complex by waging war-for-profit wherever possible, and ravaging the Earth for every last bit of ancient carbon and minerals. Vast sums of money were spent on public relations and greenwashing in order to ensure the unwashed masses would stay ignorant and subservient to the looting and destruction of society and the environment. The elite were quickly turning the Earth into a death trap for all living things, and few noticed or cared. As long as cheap, mass produced, nutrient-poor food was on tap to fill the stomachs of the teeming masses, revolt and bloodshed were averted. The elite, however, could see the writing on the wall. Plans were drawn up to use force when the inevitable time arose that fuel, food, and water became scarce. The heavy stick of Empire so often used to smash swarthy radicals abroad would, in due time, be turned inward on the homeland.
“The Will To Extermination is the very core of the Dark Side. It has been ignored at humanity’s own peril.” ~ Patrice Ayme
“Our technological abilities have made us tremendously successful animals, but also tremendously dangerous ones, glorified apes with nuclear capabilities. We tend to overexploit or destroy our resources, drastically modify or pollute our environments, overpopulate the planet, and wage war on our fellow inhabitants, all of which threaten our long-term viability as a species. Is self-induced extinction the ultimate fate of intelligent, tool-using organisms like ourselves? Are we smart, but not smart enough?”
~ Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth
“This is what I recently learned from my friend, Professor Bill Rees:
During individual development, repeated sensory experiences and cultural norms literally shape the human brain’s synaptic circuitry in patterns that reflect and embed those experiences. Patterned thinking acquires a physical presence in the brain.
Subsequently, people seek out compatible experiences and, “when faced with information that does not agree with their [preformed] internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information.” (Brain and Culture, Bruce E. Wexler, The MIT Press, 2006).
Most people are genuinely unable to face the truth. Based on this premise, most if not all human civilizations have been built.
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error…” (Gustave le Bon, 1896).
~ Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek
In spite of their own economic and scientific data overwhelmingly pointing towards a very bleak future, the experts in their various chosen fields appear to be happy-faced optimists about the world our descendants will inherit. So says columnist Charlie Smith:
He concludes his essay with the following remarks:
“…I confess that I’m troubled by all the optimism I encounter from leading thinkers on inequality, climate change, overpopulation, and oil depletion.
Adding up all the variables, I’ve concluded that more global food shortages and increased famine are inevitable. Despite this, our premier plans to build a new bridge to Delta that will result in the loss of some of Canada’s finest farmland.
Having a cheery disposition may make someone sound more pleasant in radio and television interviews.
It might even enhance a person’s likelihood of obtaining book contracts, becoming a media or entertainment executive, or getting elected to high public office.
But it has a way of sugar-coating problems, diminishing the sense of urgency that we should all be feeling about these crises.”
The apocalypse has been commodified as a Hollywood thriller to be viewed in the comfort of a movie theater or living room sofa. Faith in technology, normalcy bias, sunken costs, and the mass propaganda of vested interests are just a few of the human blinders preventing any change from the status quo. To say that there is no future for the human species would be to admit that we are all living in a fictitious construct whose time is quickly running out. Who openly discusses such things in their place of work? I would wager to say that the answer is zero. In his essay ‘The Convergence of Crisis‘, Simon Hasleton writes:
“…There is, also, a sense in which denial should be seen as a psychological defense operating on the personal level. AGW presents an immense challenge to our lives: to our health and safety and the survival of our grandchildren, and their grandchildren. How will we handle it, when the water fails or the crops fail and the food reserves are empty as the population passes the nine million mark? When when Amsterdam or Kolkata are inundated? When (as in Texas) temperature pushes into the high 30s, for weeks on end? This is the future AGW promises. And there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it, so we blank it out, or prefer the trivia of the tabloids, or retreat into a blinkered concentration on the immediacy of everyday concerns….”
There is no escaping the capitalist system which now encompasses the entire world. Who is stopping the Brazilians from clearing the Amazon just as America and Europe slashed and burned their own virgin forests to make way for cities, highways, railroads, farms, etc.? Who is stopping China from burning through the world’s remaining fossil fuel? This is how industrial civilization defines “progress”. Our next step is to try to control the climate through seeding the atmosphere and other geoengineering experiments. Aside from nuclear weapons and their evil counterpart, nuclear energy, I can’t imagine a more dangerous and hubristic scheme. Charlie Smith has an article on that subject as well, entitled ‘Eric Schlosser raises alarm in Vancouver about nuclear weapons and nuclear power‘:
“…Schlosser also told the audience that his research into nuclear weapons has strengthened his opposition to nuclear energy. He cited the research of Charles Perrow, who examined the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear-power plant in 1979.
This helped Schlosser understand how a seemingly minor event—a dropped socket in a missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980—nearly caused an explosion that could have killed millions of people.
“These are complex technological systems,” Schlosser said. “Again and again, we find ourselves inadequate to manage them.“
His biggest concern is that the waste from nuclear reactors remains deadly for tens of thousands of years. He said that it’s “highly irresponsible for us to be creating poisons that future generations might suffer from“.
There has never been a central storage facility created in the United States, which means that the waste remains at the nuclear-reactor sites.
“And these reactor sites were never designed to store nuclear waste in the way it’s being stored,” he said. “They are huge targets, potential targets, for terrorists. But they are also at enormous risk in a natural disaster, in earthquakes, things like that. And a lot of these nuclear reactors are near large urban areas…”
He didn’t mention that all nuclear plants are built on the shores of lakes, rivers, and oceans in order to satisfy their cooling water needs. Not such a great idea in a future that includes the ravages of climate chaos – sea level rise, shrinking and flooding rivers, and violent storms. Sea level rise will also increase the damage from earthquakes as this 2014 study for the city of Berkley, CA mentions:
“…Like regions across the globe, the San Francisco Bay Area is experiencing and will continue to increasingly experience the impacts of the changing climate. By 2100, average temperatures in the San Francisco Bay Area will increase up to 11° F. In 2100, Berkeley will have 6-10 additional heat waves each year, which will disproportionately impact the elderly, children under five, and the low-income community members.
Climate change will also cause additional extreme rainfall events, which will lead to more flooding. San Francisco Bay sea-levels will rise up to 55” by 2100, impacting infrastructure and community members in west Berkeley. Climate change impacts will also exacerbate the natural hazards of concern outlined in this plan. Rising sea levels will increase Berkeley’s exposure to earthquake liquefaction, tsunami inundation, and flooding. Increases in precipitation and severe storms will make flooding more frequent, and will increase the landslide risk in the hills. California’s water security will be reduced, and drought will become a more persistent issue….”
How does San Francisco adapt to an 11°F increase in average temperature? It doesn’t. It will be a ghost city by then; the human population will have crashed and be well on its way to the black void of extinction. The city officials of Berkley have not figured that out yet since climate change is a newly added threat to their plans:
“…Climate change is a newly-introduced hazard of concern for the 2014 plan. The climate change section describes the anticipated impacts to Berkeley from climate change. It also outlines how climate change exacerbates other hazards identified in this plan. The City discusses potential impacts from sea-level rise on Berkeley’s western coast, and maps areas in Berkeley that are vulnerable in 55-inch sea-level rise…”
Modern industrial civilization with its exploding human population is protected from the laws of nature only for as long as resources are plentiful and the climate remains stable. Technology cannot be created and supported without inexpensive and highly concentrated energy. Technology is simply a byproduct of human ingenuity and energy expenditure. For over four billion years everything on Earth has evolved and adapted, most recently under the benevolence of the Holocene climate. The current climate catastrophe is a manmade disruption that is several orders of magnitude greater than the average rate of change over the last 300 millenia.
The primary problem with most ‘news’ today is that its filtered through corporate gatekeepers. Another problem with the ‘news’ is that its fragmented and does not connect all the dots to give a person the full picture. As Neil Postman said, “The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.” So let’s connect some dots, courtesy of Robert Callaghan:
By 2025, humans will impact 50% of earth’s biosphere. This will cause a planetary ecological state shift leading to a mass extinction event that is unstoppable and irreversible once started. http://www.ecoshock.info/2012/06/planet-shift-no-return.html
Only 1% of methane needs to be released to cause total disaster. Peter Wadhams interview.
Natalia Shakhova interview: Do you believe scientists who spent 30 years in the arctic, or do you believe scientists who spent 30 years at their computer?
And the latest on the methane monster:
Extinction is a taboo word – bad for busine$$ and a real downer for everyone involved. Best to keep to the cultural storyline that such horrible things only happen on the silver screen with the aid of expensive CGI effects.
An achieved goal of capitalist industrial civilization was the systematic reduction of nature to a simple component of the economy. Landscapes of rivers, lakes, forests, and meadows were replaced by the concrete, steel, and asphalt of cityscapes. The build-up of toxic wastes and byproducts of industrial civilization were seen merely as external problems to be solved via engineering and technology. In the grand narrative of material progress, industrial man put himself at the center of the universe, the lead actor and hero who would always survive and triumph. He saw no problem with the complete subjugation of the wilderness, taking more from the land than was given back, and reducing biodiversity to a shell of its former self in the name of economic growth. The dominant mindset was summed up thusly…
“…nature is a malignant force with useful aspects that must be harnessed, and useless, harmful ones that must be shorn of their power. They spend their energy adapting nature to their purposes, instead of themselves to her demands. They destroy pests of crops and men, they build dykes and great dams to avert floods, and they level hills in one spot and pile them up in another. Their premise is that nature will destroy them unless they prevent it…” ~ Clyde Kluckhohn
In the collective consciousness of industrial civilization, man was exempt from falling victim to the 6th mass extinction. The future narrative of people in the modern age never included:
…that they would be among the last humans to walk the Earth.
…that their children would not live long enough to grow old.
…that all cultural, artistic, and scientific achievements of the human species would soon be forgotten in time, no longer practiced and appreciated.
Cocooned away from the elements as they were, few city dwellers noticed the creeping deterioration of the planet’s biosphere. Their artificial world, filled with the digital screens of computers, televisions, electronic billboards, and sundry other micro-computer devices, kept the public preoccupied with a constant stream of infotainment, celebrity gossip, sports, and political spectacles. The popular line of thought was that the natural world was too resilient to collapse from man’s activities; periodic efforts of environmental remediation would be all that was needed to keep business-as-usual afloat. Generational amnesia cast a false sense of security over the unwashed masses. Rivers and streams, once teeming with fish and aquatic life, were now laden with toxins, heavy metals, and plastics. Moose and bison no longer roamed the fragmented wilderness; the remaining few were set aside for bioengineering experiments in a last-ditch effort to save them. The whole web of life with all its keystone species from microbes and insects to large terrestrial and aquatic mammals was unravelling. Pests, viruses, and pathogens ran rampant in the new disorder of the planet. Scientists talked of tipping points, but no one really knew when such red lines in biospheric stability would be crossed or if they had already been breached. Like a runaway freight train, industrial civilization had indeed passed many tipping points long ago. Few thought there would be such an abrupt downward spiral, seemingly without warning. The first law of thermodynamics was being realized on a system-wide scale.
Modern man was thought to have been infinitely adaptive and clever, but the linear-thinking that dominated the culture was riddled with too many blind-spots to prevent its inevitable downfall. As long as the same economic system and mode of living persisted, no amount of new technology would solve the root problems. Since the mid 1970’s, the industrialized world had been living beyond the total carrying capacity of the Earth for decades and even created a day to recognize the transgression which would arrive a few days earlier each year. Various reports of imminent catastrophe were published, but to no avail. Everyone had their mental crutch to fool themselves into believing that the day of reckoning would never come. Some, like the fanatical zealots of religion, rejoiced that the end was upon us while others were paralyzed with fear and despair. The all-pervasive mainstream cult of money worship, consumption, and economic growth gave rise to other doomsday cults who heralded the end of time.
Mother nature took no prisoners; there was no escaping her ironclad laws. Mass starvation, war, and pestilence rapidly whittled the human population down to small pockets of survivors, but then even those few post-apocalyptic tribes soon declined and disappeared until the day arrived that only one human walked the Earth. One lone human survivor out of the billions that once were.
He survived the pandemic that wiped out roughly three-quarters of the global population. He survived the nuclear meltdown and craziness of the food wars and nuclear terrorism. And thus far he survived climate chaos by constantly moving. MRE’s were mass-produced for the general public and stored in most cities when the agricultural system started to show signs of imminent collapse. Even after all these years, the last human still found these warehouses of preserved food to be an invaluable source of sustenance, supplementing his diet with the occasional cockroach, rat, or wild pig.
How did the last man on Earth spend his time when not scavenging for food, water, and other essentials? He was on a search to find other humans of course. How could he have known that he was the sole survivor? Without electricity, there no longer existed any sort of global communication system. The one solar-powered/hand crank shortwave radio he had in his backpack had yet to pick up any signals, but he would religiously take it out every night to scan the frequencies for an hour or two. To break the deathly silence of the world, he would occasionally play the assorted music files that were on his wind-up mp3 player. He especially loved their sound inside the expansive corridors of old libraries he visited during his trek across the continent. With his life always in jeopardy, he found that a good book was the best form of escapism; compromising his health and safety with mind/mood-altering drugs was not an option in a world devoid of hospitals and medicine. And sex? Well, you’ll have to use your imagination for that. He certainly did. Such solitude, a prison cell of solitary confinement spanning the entire planet, would have driven most to madness and suicide, but he handled the loneliness day by day and with stoicism.
In his early years, he experienced a taste of working at a 9-5 job, driving a car and flying on jumbo jets, but he didn’t miss any of it really. He had been one of those who had read extensively about the unsustainability of the global economy and about the nature of ecological overshoot and collapse, and he had prepared for it. He held no illusions of a new civilization being reborn out of the ashes of capitalist industrial civilization. Capitalism, he knew, held too tight of a grip on modern man, and the psychological barriers of the masses prevented them from seeing the end of everything concerning the human experience …forever. As the weeks, months, and years passed by and he grew older, he began to reconcile with the idea that he was very likely the last person left alive. No need to leave any more messages on roof tops, in vacant parking lots, or over the empty airwaves. No one was listening. No one was coming. There really was no prospect of growing old gracefully in this new reality. He had yet to find some small pocket of unpolluted land that did not register on his Geiger counter. So he made a pact with himself and the pistol he carried that when his health and strength no longer allowed him to eke out an existence, he would not be alive when the wild dogs came for him.
The scientists and health officials had been saying for years that the world was due for another pandemic, but none were prepared for the one that hit the world in 2029 and lasted for two years. A warming planet had been doing strange things to the life cycle and spread of viruses and pathogens while industrial civilization had slowly been losing ground with the efficacy of its antibiotics and drugs. And it didn’t help that in a capitalist world, Big Pharma was more interested in the large pay-off of a drug like viagra than in the investment and development of the next generation of antibiotics. Rampant overuse and abuse of such medicines in the medical and agricultural fields had allowed pathogens to mutate and overcome man’s pharmaceutical weapons, jumping from the animal population to the human world.
With the unraveling of the industrial world already well underway at the time due to peak oil, massive unemployment, and bankrupt governments, conspiracy theories ran rampant about the source of this deadly pandemic that at its height would kill tens of millions per day. Once the total numbers were tallied, nearly two-thirds of the global human population were found to have been wiped out. Some thought it was a genetically engineered disease released by a rogue government scientist, or perhaps a germ weapon research project gone awry, while others thought it was a State sponsored terrorist act. Few accepted the fact that this plague was simply the disastrous outcome of our blind faith in technology as well as Nature’s inevitable push-back from centuries of human assault and incursion. Ironically, it was not specifically peak oil or climate change or financial ruin that quickly brought down the globalized hi-tech world, but the microbial world unseen by the naked eye. The meek had indeed inherited the Earth. With 5 billion people dead and the economy in disarray, greenhouse gases plummeted, but too little too late to stop all the positive climatic feedback loops that had long since been set into motion. Of course nearly all of the global elite managed to cocoon themselves from the general population, avoiding the lethal airborne virus. Mother Nature had finally pulled an ace out of her sleeve for which there was no available antidote. The initial symptoms of the virus were flu-like, but quickly lead to bleeding from every orifice and a rapid filling of the lungs with fluid, suffocating its victims. Young and old were affected equally. Hospitals, overwhelmed by the number of victims, became more like morgues. Centers were set up to incinerate the mountains of bodies piling up throughout the cities.
The African Flu Pandemic of 2029, which is believed to have originated in the war-torn jungles of the Congo, became better known as “The First Great Culling”. Proper sanitation and medical services never fully returned in any country, and a large migration of survivors away from cities ensued in subsequent years. This was really the watershed moment in modern times where myths of eternal progress, the superiority of mega-cities, and the triumph of man over nature were shattered. The desperate extraction of the most dirty and dangerous sources of fossil fuel came to an abrupt end. Regional differences and conflicts temporarily disappeared while teetering governments, too traumatized to think about anything other than their own internal problems, administered triage to their surviving population. Industrial civilization had suffered a major heart attack. This mass die-off was only the first wave of catastrophes that would befall the world. Weapons of mass destruction would soon be used again as the Earth’s remnant human population fought to gain control of the remaining habitable areas in the polar regions.
Rhetoric about ‘civil society’ and ‘global cooperation’ were quaint ideas of a bygone era, now horribly out-of-date in these post-apocalyptic days of struggling to eke out an existence in inhospitable, resource-depleted places. The global elite simply became more cutthroat in the face of this brutal reality. Technology came to be used more and more as a tool of control and oppression over the lower class who were more than willing to be slaves if it meant a full stomach and a place to sleep in one of the underground sanctuaries built to escape climate chaos. Vast geoengineering projects became mankind’s primary endeavor as he vainly attempted to restore what he had so thoughtlessly and methodically destroyed.
Because we have created our own processed environment of roads, cars, industry, buildings, malls, homes; because we live in a world designed by capitalism, a world of incessant advertising, sales and the desperate, frantic pursuit of material things; we rarely, if ever, experience an intimate connection with the natural world we are hoping to save.
“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don’t know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth reading.” ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin, We.
——————————–
Everything is going to go.
The End.
Let’s look back, where it started.
The Beginning…
The Sumerians, formerly hunters and gatherers, began settling in villages in the fertile valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the period from 8000 to 7500 B.C.
According to the theory of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, this is how writing began:
Archaeological studies of the period show evidence of grain cultivation in fields surrounding villages, the construction of communal silos for storing grain, and a rapid increase in population. In such a setting, individual farmers needed a reliable way to keep track of their goods, especially the amount of grain stored in shared facilities.
It seems they did it by maintaining stocks of baked-clay tokens—one token for each item, different shapes for different types of items. A marble-sized clay sphere stood for a bushel of grain, a cylinder for an animal, an egg-shaped token for a jar of oil. There were as many tokens, or counters, of a certain shape as there were of that item in the farmer’s store.
Thus, tokens could be lined up in front of accountants, who doubtless organized them according to types of goods and transactions. They could even be arranged in visual patterns to make estimation and counting easier.
This simple system of data storage persisted practically unchanged for almost 4,000 years, spreading over a large geographic area. Eventually, the growth of villages into cities and the increasing complexity of human activities, especially in southern Mesopotamia, forced a shift to a more versatile means of record keeping. This shift was marked by the appearance of elaborate tokens alongside the well-established system of simple counters. Though similar in size, material, and color and fabricated in much the same way as their plainer cousins, the new tokens bore surface markings and showed a greater variety of shapes.
The elaborate tokens were apparently used for manufactured products—the output of Sumerian workshops. Incised cones and rhomboids probably represented loaves of bread and vessels of beer. Disks and parabolic tokens marked with lines signified different types of fibers, cloths, and finished garments. Incised cylinders and rectangles stood for ropes and mats. Other tokens seem to have represented luxury goods, including perfumes and various kinds of metalwork.
The advent of complex tokens coincided with the emergence of powerful central governments and the construction of monuments and great temples, beginning around 3350 B.C. Art from that period shows the rise of a governing elite and the pooling of community resources for celebrating large festivals. The token system, extended to cover goods and services, played a key role in managing massive building projects and orchestrating large public events.
Temple excavations reveal that the Sumerians often kept sets of tokens in clay globes, or envelopes. Temple clerks marked the envelopes by pressing tokens into the soft clay before sealing and baking them, making visible the number and shape of tokens enclosed. Excavated specimens show circular imprints left by spheres and wedge-shaped imprints left by cones.
Once sealed in their clay cocoons, the tokens were hidden from view. It didn’t take long for busy bureaucrats to realize that once the clay envelopes were marked, it was no longer necessary to keep the tokens. In fact, the marks by themselves, impressed on a clay tablet, were sufficient.
Complex tokens couldn’t be stored in clay envelopes as conveniently as simple counters because they often left indecipherable impressions. Instead, perforations allowed such tokens to be strung together, with special clay tags apparently identifying the accounts. In this case, the shortcut that the bureaucrats discovered was to inscribe the incised pattern found on the surface of a complex token directly onto a clay tablet. For example, they could replace an incised ovoid token with a neatly drawn oval with a slash across it.
The result was a practical, convenient data storage system. A small set of clay tablets with neatly aligned signs was much easier to handle than an equivalent collection of loose tokens, and using a stylus for marking clay tablets was a lot faster than making an impression of every token.
Around 3100 B.C., someone had the bright idea that instead of representing, say, 33 jars of oil by repeating the symbol for one jar 33 times, it would be simpler to precede the symbol for a jar of oil by numerals—special signs expressing numbers. Moreover, the same signs could be used to represent the same quantity of any item.
The signs chosen for this new role were the symbols for the two basic measures of grain. The impressed wedge (cone) came to stand for 1 and the impressed circle (sphere) for 10.
In this way, the token system evolved into a kind of shorthand in which signs representing standard measures of grain, impressed on a clay tablet, came to represent not grain or any other specific commodity, but the concept of pure quantity. It was a revolution in both accounting and human communication. For the first time, there was a reckoning system applicable to any and every item under the sun.
Thus, “writing resulted not only from new bureaucratic demands but from the invention of abstract counting,” argued Schmandt-Besserat in How Writing Came About. “The most important evidence uncovered is that counting was not, as formerly assumed, subservient to writing; on the contrary, writing emerged from counting.”
Clay tokens became obsolete by 3000 B.C., replaced by pictographic tablets that could represent not only “how many” but also “what, where, when, and how.” With the introduction of a new type of stylus, pictographic writing developed into cuneiform notation. The resulting record-keeping system proved so efficient and convenient that it was used in the Near East for the next 3,000 years.
“The tokens were mundane counters dealing with foods and other basic commodities of everyday life, but they played a major role in the societies that adopted them,” concluded Schmandt-Besserat. “They were used to manage goods, and they affected the economy; they were an instrument of power, and they created new social patterns; they were employed for data manipulation, and they changed a mode of thought.
So once there was writing, there could be written stories, and one of the earliest we have is the glorious Epic of Gilgamesh. My favourite part is where Enkidu – who I see as representing the wild hunter gatherers and pastoralists who remain connected to wildlife and nature – is tempted by a prostitute to go to the bright neon lights of the city – the ‘lure of civilisation’ so to speak – the streets paved with gold, sex and drugs and rock & roll, something which must have happened to uncountable numbers of people over the millennia and which continues to this day as rural folk move into urban life in search of money and the buzz of ‘modern life’…
So then we have all of the world’s literature, one of the wonders of our species, the legacy of millions of minds and imaginations.
What would we be without that?
Fast forward several thousand years, of stories and cities and risings and vanishings of entire civilisations, to circa 1920 when we get a clear glimpse of something that joins the first city states of Sumeria to our own time today, using writing and the newly invented format of the dystopian novel.
‘’In a country constructed of glass, under complete surveillance…’’
Here we can already see the outlines of the NSA and Edward Snowden, as we look back past 9/11, past the Stazi, through 1984 and Brave New World, through the flames of the burning Reichstag the Sonderkommando arranging the corpses into neat piles to make smoke signals warning the coming generations – “Die now or, in four months time, you will know what makes time so precious.”
Nobody paid attention to Zamyatin; nobody paid attention to the smoke signals.
Enkidu always falls for temptation because he does not know any better, until it is too late…
The streets are never paved with gold, only blood, bones, tears and torment.
In a country constructed of glass, under complete surveillance and devoid of individuality, D-503 discovers he has a soul and is now in danger.
First there were a few hundred on the internet who discussed this and what to do.
It has grown to a few thousands, and now it grows faster and faster and soon, I suppose, millions.
And nobody knows what to do.
I was one of the first to face this matter head on without flinching.
This is the most amazing time in all of human history.
We have evolved since about a million or 2 million years or a couple of hundred thousand years depending upon how you define a human being exactly. And then we made the first cities about 6000 years ago and agriculture and civilisation and technology and writing and now we reach our peak, and destroy everything and become extinct and cause a mass extinction event of most of life on Earth.
That’s how I see it.
And just for a brief moment, we have all these things, computers, etc, and access to all this information. And we peer out into the Universe and try to understand why we are here and what’s going on…
And then we all vanish.
Every day I review this picture because every day people are questioning, and I am trying to reply.
Most people are unable to comprehend that this civilisation will collapse, with billions of people condemned to die prematurely, because it is too horrible to face. But it is absolutely inevitable, only a question of when, and exactly how it takes place.
It might be any time in the next 100 years which seems long and vague for humans, but is an instant in geological time, a millisecond, a nanosecond.
And then I think, going by previous mass extinction events, it takes about 10 million years for life to recover. But whatever it is, it will be nothing like us.
So the problem is, how does one live when one has this knowledge?
This terrible, TERRIBLE knowledge. Hahahaha, enough to make a strong man weep. Seriously. It is such a difficult matter each person has to solve for themselves and, if they have children, their predicament is made much worse.
But I think, live in the moment, striving to be as happy as you are able to be, because each moment is very precious and never returns.
And now, I think we come to write our last stories as our era draws to a close.
The Epic of Human Demise…
Everything is going to go.
So, if I did have children, anyone under thirty, say.
What could I possibly advise? This is very hard because I don’t want the responsibility and I don’t know what will happen, but I get a lot of emails from people who feel bad, and I feel obliged to reply and I feel obliged to say SOMETHING, and I can’t be dishonest or evasive…
So….
You don’t need much of anything.
Cut possessions and consumption to essentials.
Stay fit and healthy, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.
Get a network of others who share same views. Be loyal and supportive.
Everyone is monitored, so develop in-group language, opaque to outsiders.
Share what needs to be shared, need to know, otherwise keep stuff to yourself, especially stuff that matters. One good person you can trust is the most valuable asset you can have, the more the better.
Most people can’t keep secrets. The more they want to, the more they feel compelled to tell someone.
Regard all MSM info with suspicion, as propaganda; nowadays it’s often downright lies.
Distribute important and interesting information as widely as possible.
Don’t be naive. Don’t be anybody’s fool; be your own best friend who you can trust.
It’s going to get much, much worse, so expect that you’ll be shocked. Don’t get knocked off-balance; roll with the punches, bounce back.
Learn stuff all the time, something new every day. There’s a technique to this, make it fun. Go over what you learned yesterday. Get a sense of pride and accomplishment.
Build self-esteem. Learn about ecology, nature, wildlife, the land, the past, what happened. Learn critical thinking. Don’t let anything slide by unnoticed…
Permaculture is good to learn, so is Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Aikido, even basic gardening, cooking, food preservation. One of the saddest thing with so many old people, like me, haha, who have skills – I have knowledge of hand tools used in woodwork and chairmaking with a direct line going back to their invention in Egypt 6000 years ago – is that all this is lost as we die off with no young people who are interested to hand it on to. It’s not just one generation’s knowledge. It’s taken centuries to learn this stuff… Nobody wants to know. Sigh.
Know your enemy.
Who are they?
Well, as far as I am concerned, they are these people. Not necessarily the individual names with the faces and addresses attached, but the whole idea that is acceptable and alright to behave in this way. The whole idea that it is acceptable and alright to live and conduct yourself and your affairs in this way:
We look back a couple of hundred years at the way certain people were behaving and we are shocked and disgusted, and yet we have the same kinds of people behaving in the same kinds of ways, in fact even WORSE, if you check out the actual damage they do.
These people are insane. They have always been with us, since the first cities of Sumeria, these accumulators of wealth and power, whose lust for money is never sated.
But what good will it do them when they inhabit a dead planet? Because that is what is happening and they are to blame, their greed, ignorance and stupidity is the direct cause of this oncoming catastrophe. Everything has to be turned into money, and what good will money be, when Earth is like Mars? Because that’s what is happening….
You’re going to have to mix with the enemy, to survive, but you don’t have to become them, or support them, or fraternise with them. Just disguise yourself and shapeshift your way through to get whatever you need. Ostracise anyone who is supporting The Machine.
Some people think that what matters is people and social reform and justice and that sort of thing. I’m not against those things, just that I don’t think they matter anymore, at least not to me personally. I think the only thing that matters is saving the other species for as long as possible and stopping the killing Machine as much as possible. Pretty much the Deep Green Resistance agenda.
But if you disagree, who cares? I don’t have time to debate and argue over crap. I’d rather see some action, someone fighting to save some fucking butterflies or something, than complaining about the bankers. Sooner or later, all those bankers, anyone who even looks like a banker, are going to be ripped limb from limb by hordes of enraged starving folk with machetes. They’ll deserve it. But that’s not my agenda.
It’s time to get apocalyptic, or get out-of-the-way.
I mean, we all know everything is going to shit. We all know that’s extremely depressing. We all know it makes you feel suicidal. Okay. That bits done. Sorted. Leave it behind.
Like an old jacket you used to wear. Familiar but worn out.
If you’re into suicide, do it. There’s too many of us. Otherwise, get a grip. Don’t go the way that they are currently on NBL, of endless ‘counselling’, because IMHO that’s another disaster. It’s for the people who enjoy self-indulgence and self-pity and the people who exploit them by selling their books. The only person who can sort yourself out is you, and you do it! Right here, right now.
The way I see it, the Roman Catholics had Confession, which was a means for their power pyramid to gather intelligence, much like the NSA and GCHQ are doing now.
People could ‘sin’ and then be absolved and go away and ‘sin’ again, and that became an habitual lifestyle. Remember, the Inquisition was the equivalent of the CIA and lasted for 400 years.
Then Freud and Jung came along and Heaven and Hell were replaced by The Unconscious. Instead of Confession, people lay on the couch and talked about their childhood and their dreams. Same deal really. The equivalent of the Inquisition was perhaps Bedlam, the lunatic asylum.
Basically, all the pyramid power structures that are not fighting to SAVE the biosphere – are there any that are ?? – are the enemy. That doesn’t leave many powerful allies.
It does leave billions of ordinary, rather powerless people who know they don’t like what’s happening. If I was Che Guevara, I’d say it was a perfect time for revolution. The only problem is that a social reform doesn’t fix an ecological crisis caused by exceeding the carrying capacity.
These people are plain evil. They have done nothing good for anybody ever, in their entire history. How does humanity rid itself of such a monstrosity that has caused death suffering and misery for millions and millions of innocent people ?
The problem is power. If the greatest power is corrupt and evil, then who or what will hold it to account for its actions? How can it be removed? How do you prevent it being replaced by something even worse? Only the mass of the people can do this, and they have to understand the problem. Usually they don’t, or they are betrayed by leaders. Any leader who cannot be corrupted will be assassinated.
And now we have the New Age, and all kinds of therapies and therapists and counsellors who’ll take your cash for a book and dvd and a private consultation if you can afford it. It’s just a new priesthood for a new religion, and NTE is a whole new business opportunity for a whole new industry to arise, and some people will spend the whole of the rest of their lives ‘coming to terms with’ whatever it is…
Well, I am a warrior, and that’s not my way of dealing with this. If you get damaged and hurt, you heal yourself as well and effectively and efficiently as you can. I know, because I’ve been through a lot of stuff and been battered all to hell. Be as kind and gentle to yourself as you can possibly be. But there’s no need to rely on someone who doesn’t know any better than you do. How can they, if they have not been through what you have been through, and are doing what they do to make money? There’s a danger in that.
People who are addicted to booze or video games or who are obese or who expect to be told what to do, whole sectors of society – well, what will happen to them? Zombie food?
The old, the children and babies, the pregnant mothers, the weak and disabled, people who rely upon medication for survival, the gentle and tender-hearted ones – what happens?
We know what happens, because it has happened before. We can look back at history and see what happened when societies collapsed. It’s not a new thing. Inform yourself.
Next comes next. We’re going to die anyway. So how are we going to live while we are alive? That’s the bit that matters.
I think Enkidu has to get out of the rotting poisonous city, escape, get back to what he was… find himself again… his soul, his power, his way of being.
Forgive the male tense. There must be a female version of Enkidu, but I have failed to find one. Suggestions in the comments, perhaps.
“It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come today.”
~ Yevgeny Zamyatin.
On my downtime right now and trying to recoup from doomer fatigue, but the following story simply reinforces my belief that industrial civilization will die at its own hands while taking the rest of the living planet with it in a manmade greenhouse extinction event. Capitalism gives humans the perverse incentive to value death and artificial wealth over life and nature’s wealth. Note to self – must read everything by Peter Ward.
Those who have read my thoughts, sprinkled hither and thither around the internet, will perhaps be aware that I gave up, about one and a half years ago, when I realised that whatever mighty efforts activists might make, it was going to be impossible to save the biosphere. Daniel Drumright was about three months ahead of me.
Nobody who hasn’t fully encountered and absorbed that experience for themselves, in its true horror, has any idea what it really means, and for those who have yet to face it, you have my deepest compassion and sympathy.
There’s no point in going over the technical reasoning in detail. People either get it or they don’t. They can find all the information quite easily.
There are three big, obvious factors that most people do not understand; those are, first, the irreversible self-reinforcing positive feedbacks that Guy McPherson is listing, and second, the time lag, that what we have now is the result of what we did forty or so years ago, and what we get in the future will be the effects of what we have been doing ever since. The third is the astounding rate at which all the changes are happening, when compared with all previous similar or comparable events in Earth’s history. Whatever it is, it is ULTRA DRAMATIC on the geological time scale.
The doom scenario has been, and is being, comprehensively documented by xraymike on this blog. The trickle of folk who are going through the process of coming to terms with this hellish awakening has already grown into a cascade and will soon be millions, and I really have nothing to say to them, because I do not know what to say to them.
Once you get the insight regarding the Mass Extinction Event, it’s a bit like the Buddha’s Enlightenment Experience under the Bodhi Tree, only in reverse, so to speak.
Gautama pondered whether to keep his insight to himself and spend the rest of his days in bliss, or whether to teach others what he now knew, and he chose, out of compassion, to spend the remainder of his life wandering through India teaching his message.
But how do you teach how to cope with doom ? There’s nothing optimistic or pleasing or life-enhancing or joyful about imminent apocalypse. There’s just the anguish and distress involved with the demanding process of navigating your own psychology and emotional responses toward an impossible future.
Each individual IS an individual, as we see on NBL, with their own version of the mixture of belief and disbelief and their own political and philosophical and religious outlooks, and some have children and grandchildren and some are thinking of survival chances, some of suicide, some of resistance, and so on.
I have had more than a year to dwell upon my own position, and to watch the responses in my own being, and in the people whom I like and respect, and the voices I admire, who also grasp the profound and terrible tragedy facing us all. For a long time, there was commiseration, but then what ? Commiseration fatigue ? How can anyone commiserate with anonymous thousands, let alone millions ?
Again, there’s lots of speculation as to the detail of how the crash will play out and how societies will respond as they collapse. I’m not going to add much to that here, it’s all available elsewhere. We either get a die back, and a bottle neck, with a few survivors, or a complete die off and total extinction event. I think we get the latter, but even if it is the former, none of us are going to know any of those people, as to who they will be, or where or what becomes of them, so why does it matter ? And why would anyone choose to have to live through whatever horrendous circumstances they will have to endure, following the trauma of the ending of civilisation ? Perhaps some people will just happen to find themselves in such a situation. Who knows ?
Meanwhile, here we are. Peak just about everything, where we start the big slide down into the abysmal depths of whatever awaits us all… the biggest crisis that the human species has ever faced, 7 point something billion of us, with millions more arriving here every month. There is no discernible global leadership of any kind that comprehends our dire situation, only madmen and corruption and people locked in to dead cultural paradigms.
What does a dead cultural paradigm look like ?
Well, we’ve got Joseph Tainter to give us some clues from the historical record and maybe Heathcote Williams to bring us up to date with the contemporary scene
From what I understand of history, we can expect a hard swing toward fascist dystopia, as regimes try desperately to exert total control over everything, and hard swings from repressed populations and factions which reciprocate with resistance.
The future will be whatever it will be. Every day I walk up and down the Beach of Doom and kick at pieces of poisonous plastic flotsam and miscellaneous cosmic debris left by the virtual tide, and gaze at the orange purple bruises on the tangerine sky and sometimes I bicker and haggle with someone.
Yesterday it was Lidia at NBL to whom I am grateful for an insight into something or other.
You see, people can be very roughly divided into two groups. Those who primarily hold a religious, or spiritual, or romantic, or mythical world view. And those who primarily hold a scientific, or materialist, or rationalist world view.
Of course, this is a crude over-simplification, and speaking to any individual, you’ll soon find they hold all kinds of contradictory beliefs. But roughly, it’s Mythos and Logos, or Iain McGilchrist’s Right and Left Hemispheres.
So, Lidia was kind enough to describe her worldview, her welt anschauung, her cosmology, her mental conception of how reality is structured, her epistemology, her way of ‘knowing your place in the Universe’.
I hope she will forgive my using her as an example, and the exchange several days ago was only a brief re-run of a much longer version we had on the now defunct NTE ning, some months ago, so I think I do have a fairly full idea as to her thinking, but so as not to risk any personal offence, I’ll take the illustration away from Lidia, and apply it to any generic physicist or scientist or person with a similar belief system, of whom I have met very, very many. This will allow me some poetic license possibly, avoiding danger of maligning the good Lidia, I hope.
You see, according to this paradigm of reality, there is only physics. Everything is physics.
That means that everything is explained by physics. That means no mystery, because even if there is mystery, that’s only due to physics not yet explaining it. And once mystery is killed off, it’s relatives, cousins – things like awe, wonder, sanctity, sacredness, the numinous – easily shrivel and die too.
So, that reality ‘out there’, and this reality ‘in here’, is all meaningless, because it only means something if we impose some wishful magical thinking onto the physics, which, as objective scientists, we are not allowed to do.
And that reality ‘out there’ is just ‘stuff’, and it interacts with this reality ‘in here’, the brain, which again is just ‘stuff’. It’s all physics, it’s all physical stuff, and even though we don’t understand all of it – even don’t understand most of it, or, if pressed, hardly ANY of it, hahaha – in theory, physics can, and will, explain all of it, one day, so no problem.
So, it’s quite interesting to trace back where this story, this Logos story, comes from, and it’s quite easy to do, because it’s well documented and researched, and it goes back to Descartes and his radical scepticism, and the ideas given to him by an angel (Mythos) and his struggle to find anything, something, that he could not undermine by radical doubt, and his arrival at ‘I think, therefore I am’ and then the beginnings of modern science.
Given that the Church of Rome was the dominant power in Europe at the time, an accommodation had to be made between the rising power of science and the prevailing authority, and thus we got an expedient result, the division which gave the material world to the scientists and the spiritual world to the priests. That’s why there’s no God or spirits involved in physics. Which, you may say, is an excellent thing. But let us call it, for the moment, ‘a mixed blessing’.
Because, you see, if you follow the epistemology carefully, and look at it very closely, something absolutely amazing emerges.
Einstein said that our ordinary common senses give us ‘naive realism’. That is, grass is green, rocks are hard, and snow is cold. But physics, if it is true, tells us that this naive realism is all wrong, physics tells us that the reality is quite different, something completely different is actually going on, out there and in here.
Now, it’s all very well for someone like Einstein, or Niels Bohr, or Feynman, to come up with these ideas, as professional physicists, but what happens when this scientific worldview, this basically Cartesian worldview, is taught to us lesser mortals as part of the culture, and internalised as epistemology, and preached to us as ontology, and integrated into general social cosmology ?
This is where it gets really weird, a MOST extraordinary thing – because when I thought over what Lidia had told me, nowhere in the depiction and analysis is there anywhere for A HAPPY HEALTHY COMPLETE HUMAN BEING.
Isn’t that bizarre ? That human beings have come up with a teaching as to what the world is and what the totality of the Universe is, which does not even include the organism that WE ARE, AT ALL ?
I mean, that strikes me as exceptionally odd. Prior to Descartes, the cosmology was a sort of Divine Order, with the Heavens above and layers with angels and God at the pinnacle and so forth. And people were taught this, and their place in the social hierarchy of feudalism was essentially justified because the King was a sort of representative of God on Earth, and so on. So although we can scoff at the nonsense of it, at least at the time, if you were a peasant, you featured in the story.
If you were out in the fields with your ox and your plough and you were gazing at the distant rainbow and thinking about your dead grandfather and you heard the church bells peeling for a wedding in the village next door, all sorts of strange impressions could flicker through your mind, but basically you had a cosmology which placed God somewhere ‘up there’ and you ‘down here’ with a coherent pattern where your birth and living and death belonged with the landscape and the community and the larger reality.
Therefore, the map, the mental model ‘in here’, when projected and overlaid upon reality, had in it the human subject as its focal point, and because that’s what the human subject had been taught, a story was established featuring the ME.
But now, not only have they written God out, with Descartes and the Cartesian Paradigm of reality as the basis of modern science, but you’ve got a model, a cosmology, which has written US, as human beings, biological creatures, right out of the system altogether, as if they were not even involved !
And then people have internalised this model and taken it to be their own personal reality that they use to explain the world to themselves.
I wonder what that does for a person’s health ? I wonder what it does, when millions of people do something like that ?
The Christian Fundamentalists may be completely round the bend when it comes to LOGIC but maybe they just feel intuitively that what they are being offered by the people who argue against them, a worldview, a cosmology, which says NOTHING MEANS ANYTHING, and a worldview, a cosmology, which doesn’t have ANY PLACE where a happy healthy human, a biological human being, can even fit into it, is so sterile and horrible, that they intuitively reject it and are hostile to it ?
Because, if you look at anthropology or what Joseph Campbell said about myth, what a belief system provides for a tribal people is a safe mental refuge. When a person takes a mental excursion into fantasy and ponders the nature of their own life and identity, and the dream they had last night, and their relationships with the world around them and other folks, and the stars above and so forth, the whole purpose of the cosmology is to deliver them safely back unto THEMSELVES.
I mean, think of acid trips and ayauasca and mushrooms and vision quests and all that stuff, where you encounter visions of beings from other dimensions and the most mind-boggling experiences, the idea is to get back to start, square 1, more or less sane and intact.
The same applies to ordinary daydreams and fantasies and all our thinking about our ordinary experiences. How can we be sane and healthy, if our fundamental belief system does not even include a home base option anywhere within it ?
You know, who cares what the physics says. Primarily, we are human beings, biological animals, that cry when we are hurt and sad, and laugh when we are happy, and get sentimental about babies and kittens, and need clean water and food, etc. AND we need a meaningful Universe which has a place for US in it, with a STORY that makes sense as to why we exist…
You know, a story we can UNDERSTAND about who we are and what we are doing here.
At the moment, all these stories we are being told are crap because they are not accurate with the science, strictly speaking, since they can’t be; we can’t get any clear picture from the physicists as to the ultimate nature of all the quantum stuff and the Universe. In addition, these cultural stories are unsatisfactory at the human level when they LEAVE OUT the human being and pretend it’s all some sort of abstract empty machine.
What’s more, from what a large percentage of quantum physicists have plainly stated, you cannot leave the physicist out of the experiment because the observer EFFECTS the observation. Now, I recognize this is contentious, there is no consensus, and it’s not clear what this means. But !
So, what does a ‘good story’ look like ? Well, that’s hard… but I’m glad you asked.
I think this is a complicated and difficult problem, and here I am upon the Beach of Doom, with all of human history and culture, every idea that’s ever been recorded, washed up at my feet at the tide line, strewn and tangled and rotting and steaming…
Look at us, pitiful, confused Bonobos, asking ourselves questions we can’t answer, tearing ourselves and each other apart, trying to satisfy Maslow’s Hierarchy…
Is that what we are doing ? Well, the whistle has blown, the sirens are wailing, time is up, the NTE light is flashing, so there is not going to be some utopian Promised Land for the Bonobos to migrate to…
Xraymike was kind enough to point me to the definition of the word Humanistic:
1. A believer in the principles of humanism. 2. One who is concerned with the interests and welfare of humans.
“Humanism is a group of philosophies and ethical perspectives which emphasize the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers individual thought and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism). The term humanism can be ambiguously diverse, and there has been a persistent confusion between several related uses of the term because different intellectual movements have identified with it over time.[1] In philosophy and social science, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of a “human nature” (contrasted with anti-humanism). etc…”
So let’s take that as a verbal anchorage.
I’d suggest that most human beings have a fundamental requirement, for their psychological, physiological, and social welfare, to understand ‘the world’ in a way that makes sense. So that, whenever they sit down and think things over, and run ideas through their head, they can confirm themselves and they can confirm ‘the world’ and feel okay.
Wouldn’t that be nice ? Look what we’ve got. It’s not THAT, is it.
Is it any surprise that some people want the Rapture or Alien abduction to get the hell out of this confusion ?
The epistemology that science teaches, following on from Descartes, has caused most of the damage to the biosphere over the last century or two, because nothing is sacred, everything is just dead stuff, in a dead machine, inhabited by ghostly meaningless meat robots, zeks, without any dignity or purpose of their own.
You marry that to Capitalism, an elite with power and greed as their motive, and give it to them as a tool, and hand them control of the Military, which was once meant to guard but gets turned into a predatory plundering machine.
Well. We are where we are. The lights will go out, one by one, and then a few million years of silence as the extremophiles have peace.
It could have been, might have been, a very different story, if we had all followed the example of, say, the Bishnois.
Alice Friedemann must be on the same wavelength as me. This subject of the proliferation of jellyfish caught my attention as well. Since she has done the legwork on this story, I will repost her essay below the following CBC Radio podcast with scientist Lisa-ann Gershwin:
“If jellyfish could wish for perfect conditions, these would include warming and turbid water, lack of predators and competitors, and any conditions that make it harder for other species to survive, like low oxygen or slightly more acidic water than usual. These are the very conditions we are creating at an alarming and increasing rate. And jellyfish are enjoying a renaissance like never before in history.” ~ Lisa-ann Gershwin
Alice Friedemann’s review of Stung!…
A book review of Lisa-ann Gershwin’s “Stung! On jellyfish blooms and the future of the ocean”
[ Xraymike79’s Note: The image above is purely for hyperbole. There are no jellyfish this size. The largest recorded jellyfish is the Lion’s mane jellyfish which can reach a diameter of 7 to 8 feet with tentacles 120 feet long. As Don Howe states below in the comments section: “The power of jellyfish is not in their size but in their vast numbers…”]
Move aside Steven King, jellyfish are worse than any of your demons, worse than any Grade-B monster that’s graced the silver screen. Unlike The Blob, which can be stopped by freezing, you can’t kill them. Not with chemical repellents or biocides or nets or electric shocks or introducing species that eat jellyfish like the striped sea slug. If you shoot, stab, slash, or chop off part of a jellyfish, it can regenerate lost body parts within two days. Not even the past 5 major extinction events which killed up to 90% of all life on earth, killed off the jellyfish.
Meanwhile they’re on a rampage, doing millions of dollars in damage clogging intakes of nuclear, coal, and desalination plants, killing millions of farmed fish, and destroying fishing nets with their sticky icky bodies.
The more we overfish, pollute, acidify and warm the ocean, create vast dead zones, and trawl ocean bottoms, the better the jellyfish do.
The oceans make the earth habitable for us. They generate most of the oxygen we breathe, stabilize temperatures, drive climate and weather, and absorb a third of the CO2 we’re emitting. Over 3 billion people depend on the oceans for their livelihoods; 2.6 billion depend on seafood as their main source of protein.
Most alarming of all, 40% of phytoplankton has died off globally since the 1950s – they’re not only at the base of the food chain, but they generate most of the oxygen we breathe, as well as absorb half of the carbon dioxide, and their increasing death rate will make the ocean get warmer even faster.
Why Jellyfish are taking over the world
Prolific, hard to kill, breed fast, and more – no wonder they’re so successful:
They’ve everywhere, spread around the world in ship ballast or sea currents.
Ubiquitous – from top to bottom of the ocean, from pole to pole, year-round.
Grow faster than other species to quickly take advantage of any food, and they’ll eat almost anything — copepods, fish eggs, larvae, flagellates. They eat past when they can keep consuming, spit food out, waste a great deal other creatures could have eaten. Even when they’re full, their tentacles keep capturing prey.
If there’s no food, jellyfish can consume their own body mass and get smaller and smaller until they find food again, and rapidly return to normal. Even when they grow smaller they can still reproduce.
Consume many times their body weight in high-value food but are of low-value themselves because they provide little energy, ounce for ounce, compared to the food they ate. So they have few predators.
When 2 weeks old they can lay 10,000 eggs a day that hatch 12-20 hours later
They reproduce many ways: massive orgies, fission, fusion, cloning, hermaphroditism, external fertilization, self-fertilization, copulation.
If they lose a body part, they can regenerate it within 2 days.
They are the “Last Man Standing” in eutrophication zones because they need less oxygen
Many species can tolerate any salinity level, from fresh water to salt water
They’ve survived ice ages, hothouse climates, all five mass extinctions, predators, competitors, and us.
Jellyfish in the oceans have been known to live over 10 years
Many of them avoid predators by long vertical migrations from the deep sea to the surface at night and back down again by daylight
They can wait a long time for the right conditions to bloom
Just as plants have seeds which can endure many years waiting for optimum conditions to grow, jellyfish have a seed-like state called a polyp that waits for good conditions, and can clone themselves to create armies of ‘seeds’ waiting to burst into jellyfish blooms seemingly overnight. Polyps don’t “grow up” to become jellyfish. They spawn what we think of as jellyfish – the medusa — which then mate sexually to produce polyps, which stick to rocks, shells, man-made structures, plastic, etc. Both the polyps and the medusa could be considered “immortal” – when a polyp dies it’s clones live on, and when the medusa form of jellyfish dies, it’s pieces turn back into polyps (though I wasn’t clear if all species or just some do this).
Jellyfish are at the top of the food chain
That seems so wrong– a primitive brainless blob? But jellyfish eat much larger clams, crabs, starfish, snails, and fast, smarter fish and squid.
They’re also at the top because not much wants to eat them.
Worse yet, they outcompete other sea life by devouring the eggs and larvae of species that would have grown up to eat jellyfish larvae. It’s a double whammy since these larvae never grow up, leaving a lot more food for jellyfish to consume. A jellyfish bloom can clear the water of all eggs, larvae, copepods, and small plankton in less than a day. This makes it almost impossible for some overfished species to make a comeback.
In his hubris, mankind went about subduing, indexing, commodifing, and exploiting all of Earth. He paid very little heed to the consequences of the shrinking richness that once characterized the natural world. Everything had a price since money had become the sole criteria by which all things, animate and inanimate, were valued. From the anthropocentric perspective, if it didn’t serve people in some way or another, what good was it? If need be, man could use his superior intellect to fix or outright replace what he had permanently destroyed. “A better life through technology” became the law of the land. Just as with the accepted tenet of never-ending economic growth, there was the unquestioned belief of technological solutions for all manmade problems brought on by industrial civilization. Hence, bees dying from a chemically saturated environment could be genetically modified to survive in our toxic soup. Extinct flora and fauna could be brought back to life with bioengineering. Where we would put such resurrected organisms in a world overloaded with humans, other than in zoos or other tiny cutouts of artificial habitat, was a question never answered.
Man became so assured of himself and his technological abilities that he began to lose track of the steadily mounting environmental assaults promising to make Earth uninhabitable for all but a few heat-loving bacteria like thermophiles. In fact many denied outright that such dangers even existed. And those whose livelihood depended on maintaining business-as-usual were more than willing to pay public relations experts who could mold popular thought in favor of such a suicidal path. Most of the truly eco-aware humans, whose numbers were so small as to be inconsequential, spent all their time refuting the ignorance and propaganda of the masses, but to no avail. How could any root causes and solutions ever really be identified if the vast majority were kept at each other’s throats? The climate change deniers fought with the scientists; the capitalists fought with the environmentalists and steady state/degrowth alternative economists, the conspiracy theorists fought with the realists, and ad infinitum. Thus consumed with dissension the human species raced over the cliff of eco-apocalypse and human extinction.
She does not measure time in years, decades, or even centuries, but in millennia. She watches unamused by the tragicomedy of humankind. She is unmoved by the self-inflicted suffering and death that is and will be wrought by our own self-serving behavior. Gaia patiently awaits the extinction of man.
…The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.”
The Middle East is on the frontline of the multi-pronged crisis of overpopulation, resource depletion, and climate change. Fault lines in that region are widening as climate change exacerbates crop-destroying droughts, peak oil starves economies, and stressed populations scramble to survive. Advanced industrialized countries are buffered from the same fate only temporarily by their military and economic might. The oil-cursed Middle East also suffers from being in the crosshairs of industrial civilization’s insatiable appetite for the black stuff. Since the peak of conventional oil in 2005, the industrial world has not only turned to harder to extract and environmentally damaging unconventional sources of oil, but has also ramped up military intervention in order to keep the energy flowing. Access to resources has always been an underlying factor in all wars, but as climate change, resource depletion, and social disintegration escalate, the grip on foreign energy deposits by western powers becomes increasingly tenuous. Climate Change multiplies threats. Militarism and climate change feed off and drive each other:
The war machine of the American Empire is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet.
Our priorities are overwhelmingly skewed toward militarism in order to maintain the unsustainable, while the real threat of climate change grows ever stronger:
In the meantime, the false hope of technology maintains the illusion that our current way of life is inalienable. The industrialized monoculture farming that feeds the masses will quickly fade as synthetic fertilizers become too expensive to artificially replenish nutrient-depleted soils. Pesticides and antibiotics are losing their effectiveness as natural selection breeds super weeds and drug-resistant pathogens. Fresh water is also being sacrificed for fracking, tar sands production, and mountaintop mining. We appear to be systematically destroying any basis for future civilizations as we burn through what is left. “Forests precede mankind; deserts follow.”
Severe land degradation is now affecting 168 countries across the world, according to new research released by the UN Desertification Convention (UNCCD).
The figure, based on submissions from countries to the UN, is a marked increase on the last analysis in the mid-1990s, which estimated 110 states were at risk.
In an economic analysis published last week the Convention also warns land degradation is now costing US$490 billion per year and wiping out an area three times the size of Switzerland on an annual basis. – link
No techno-fix chicanery will bring back the melting polar caps or stop the series of runaway feedbacks loops unleashed from industrial civilization’s fatal attraction to fossil fuels. Our eyes simply don’t appreciate the full scale of climatic change now underway, eroding mankind’s food production, infrastructure, and socio-economic stability, in addition to degrading nature’s ecological resilience and biological diversity, both of which underpin all of mankind’s activities. The megatons of greenhouse gases expelled into the atmosphere by industrial activity everyday are as invisible to humans as the mountains of toxic plastic waste filling up the world’s oceans. Out of sight, out of mind until the effects become too obvious to ignore and too late to change. Overpopulation continues unabated and is in fact encouraged by the imperatives of economic growth; the environmental pressures are ignored as resources are methodically stripped and depleted to unrecoverable levels.
Despite the ingenuity and intelligence of the human race, we appear subject to the same rudimentary biological urges of the lowest single-celled organism which, if given favorable conditions, will uncontrollably multiply its numbers deep into overshoot territory until its food source is exhausted, finally extinguishing itself in a mass die-off. Environmental laws and initiatives appear to be no more than slight speed bumps in our one-way road to extinction. All this talk about curbing GHG’s, “going green”, and “saving the planet” are mere window dressings for our motorized hearse. Nice accoutrements, but the destination is still a grave.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 