Easter Blessings

A copy of Richard Heinberg's new book, Peak Everything has arrived on our coffee table. To summarize: the 20th century was the century of abundance and the 21st will be the century of declines. And not just oil but food, human population, uranium and potable water. And not a moment too soon for this out of control death culture. It's just too bad that we aren't more responsible tenants of this earth.

We'll also hit peak greenhouse gas emissions which thereafter will decline. Hopefully we'll have avoided transforming Earth into Venus as the climate rebalances itself; technology can't do it, only time.

Since my eyes were opened, I've always dreaded climate change and the rising temperatures and crazy weather that will accompany it. Most people stupidly only see warmer temperatures in places like Canada as a positive thing. I guess I thought that somehow humans would remain unchanged by climate change, being able to resist it, and that other living things would slowly disappear being both murdered by humans and displaced by changing climates.

But climate change is like a fever to reject an unwanted illness.

Heinberg helped me to see that climate change is the earth attempting to remove or force change on a disobedient child. Change or die humans. Inshallah, there will always be life on this earth whether next to volcanic vents on the deep ocean floor or shivering in the dark winters of Antarctica. Civilized humans won't be able to resist forever and one day even after hundreds of thousands of years the earth will restore itself.

And wonderfully I managed to tie this entry to Easter. Hope you've had a good one. Remember spring is coming!

Bad News

All around the world (though it hasn't reached Canada yet for the most part), food prices are going up. The UN World Food Program doesn't have enough funding to keep up with the rising prices. As such malnutrition and starvation rates are expected to rise.

From an article in the Guardian: "The impact has been felt around the world. Food riots have broken out in Morocco, Yemen, Mexico, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Pakistan has reintroduced rationing for the first time in two decades. Russia has frozen the price of milk, bread, eggs and cooking oil for six months. Thailand is also planning a freeze on food staples. After protests around Indonesia, Jakarta has increased public food subsidies. India has banned the export of rice except the high-quality basmati variety."

Since we are essentially eating oil due to the fact that all industrial farming needs oil, unfortunately there's nothing we can do about this inevitable rise. We have built such a population that it requires oil to maintain itself. Still there's a lot that could be done (though don't hold your breath):

• Divest from ethanol and move toward public transit. If you keep driving people are going to die though you're unlikely to ever see them starve.
  
• Don't waste food. How much food is thrown out by the grocery stores in your neighbourhood every day? It's a lot and most of it is perfectly good.
  
• Start a Food Not Bombs and save some of this food that would otherwise be going to waste.
• Grow your own food, support community gardens, buy local and organic food.
  

Visionary Species?

My desk is littered with thoughts on tiny scraps of paper. Some of them make it to this space and some end up on the floor or in the recycling and are forgotten. It's quite sad really because in the moment that one records them thoughts seem to be genius, major breakthroughs. But when you get around to doing something about them it's almost too late.

And maybe that's okay.

A recent thought dealt with the constant theme of this blog of late: the place of humans in the natural world. Undoubtedly humans are currently on an unsustainable and destructive collision course with the natural world. We have forgotten ourselves in the flashes of neon and plastic that assail us like IEDs. It's like over stimulation has caused a sort of madness to take hold, one making us blind to the facts.

• We are too many therefore we are squeezing out other species,
• We wholly believe in the doctrine of instant gratification, living in the moment,
  
• We consume too much, far too much of the earth's resources pretending these are needs,
• We are violent to other beings, not out of necessity but out of greed,
• We are dooming other species and our descendants to miserable lives, if any at all, on a planet that would sustain all life indefinitely.
  

My thought was about the place we currently occupy. We are caught in the dark void between animal and something else which I'll refer to as visionary species. Animals live in balance with other species as parts of vibrant and ever changing ecosystems. Sometimes they vanish being unsuited but the system continues through cycles. One member of this system doesn't need to give it much thought, just provide for the basics and ensure you pass on your genes to the next generation.

A visionary species on the other hand would be able to think long term and be willing to make tough choices to ensure the survival and thriving of the species. A visionary species, I surmise, would never risk extinction, being possessed of foresight. The visionary species would recognize that it is part of the world's many ecosystems but that its special place requires treading softly and mindfully at all times. In order to achieve maximum happiness and material security, populations of these species would be small but vibrant enough to ensure a stable and healthy gene pool. A visionary species would make lasting goods as much as possible and never, ever take too much ensuring that future generations could live as comfortably and happily as the one that came before.

While I recognize that dichotomies are usually false, I beg, for the purposes of this argument, that you bear with me. By failing to either embrace our animal natures (which might be impossible given our devious/genius brains) or our potential to be a visionary species we are threatening all life on earth. We are an out of control animal that overcomes natural controls to our ultimate detriment. The longer you put off the fire, the hotter it will burn. In our madness we think the party will go on for ever.

To start down the path of being a visionary species (and we need to move fast) humans need to challenge everything they believe. I mean everything from retirement to travel to food to ownership. Currently all our collective cures to our own excesses remain within the frame of our destructiveness; so we consume more to cure our consumption for instance. The strongest barrier to challenging these "truths" is our lives which have become so burdened and mindless that we can't sit quietly and truly find the path to visionary species and we certainly can't do so together.

So we are always alone writing little notes to ourselves.

There you have it. Do humans have the potential to become a truly visionary species? Is this just more human arrogance and denial of our true nature? Or, as I often believe, are we simply not worth it? If only we could go without taking the system down with us, that would be truly visionary.

Upside?

I just finished a really good book about the coming collapse. I recommend that you check it out. And for those of you who question my reading lists of late you'll be happy to hear that the author is the Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. The book is The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon.

Homer-Dixon touches on the numerous ways that our modern industrial civilization is under threat. There's climate change of course, the coming energy scarcity, asymmetric warfare, overpopulation, and the growing gap between the rich and poor in states and between states. All these "tectonic stresses" threaten the highly complex yet fragile global civilization that we have created. There is little resiliency in the structures we have created and maintained.

Collapse is natural. It happens all the time in systems. It leads to innovation and change. For instance a forest fire (which humans stupidly prevent thereby making conditions ripe for a monster fire which nothing can stop) allows for new seeds and species to take over newly cleared niches thereby restarting and slowly increasing the complexity of the forest ecosystem which will then experience another creative collapse; do we need more convincing that linearity is unnatural? We've been putting off collapse for so long and pretending that we can continue to take and take forever (insanity?) that we're due for a monumental rebalancing. The longer we wait the more painful it will be; the forest fire will burn so hot it will kill all the seeds.

He is also very critical of the hollowness of modern industrial civilization with its focus on consumption: "Our economic role in this culture of consumerism is to be little more than walking appetites that serve the function of maintaining our economy's throughput. Our psychological state is comparable to that of drug addicts needing a fix: buying things doesn't really make us happy, except perhaps for a moment after the purchase. But we do it over and over anyway"(197).

Homer-Dixon ultimately believes that collapse is unavoidable. Sooner or later it's coming down. What we need, he suggests, is to be ready to rebuild lest the forces of intolerance and violence take over. While he offers a lot of potential scenarios he explains that we must be guided by new values (that are already becoming visible): "Our values must be compatible with the exigencies of the natural world we live in and depend on. They must implicitly recognize the laws of thermodynamics, energy's role in our survival, the dangers of certain kinds of connectivity, and the nonlinear behaviour of natural systems like the climate. The endless material growth of our economies is fundamentally inconsistent with these physical facts of life. Period. End of story. And a value system that makes endless growth the primary source of our social stability and spiritual well-being will destroy us"(305).

What I liked most about this book was that it wasn't offering crazy solutions to our problems and pretending to be positive about the ingenuity of humans to subdue nature. It recognized that civilization is on a deadly and unsustainable path in its current form (can it ever be sustainable?) and has to collapse for the good of all life, including humans. It was also very accessible to those of us not familiar with panarchy for instance. It was also just plain interesting with examples from Homer-Dixon's Gore-like world traveling (are you part of the problem?).

There are so many books outlining that humanity is headed for disaster (Power Down, Collapse, Endgame, The Long Emergency, The World Without Us) but dear reader, if you want to start to learn the truth, start with The Upside of Down and then move on to Derrick Jensen.

And please if anyone tells you that humans will cope with the breakdown of the natural world at their hands tell them to go fuck themselves. We're fucked but that's a good thing.

The Elephant

The more and more I think about it, there is a single issue that impacts all the topics that I discuss on this blog. If humanity (can you speak of it as a single entity and if we are even capable) is serious about dealing with global warming, saving the earth's wonderful biodiversity, reversing the pollution of the earth's water and air, halting the siege of the ozone layer, stopping the mowing down of the world's forests, slowing the depletion of the earth's oil reserves and more then this issue needs to be pushed to the top of the global agenda. And that issue is:

OVERPOPULATION

All humans need family planning in a bad way. Especially if we all want to be resource pigs like North Americans. Dare I say it but perhaps we need an international one child policy. We need to give out condoms like business cards. We need to embrace and celebrate our sexuality and put procreation and guilt on the back burner. Far from expanding them, we need to shrink our populations and fast. Instead of piling billions of dollars into elitist talking shops let's be supportive and make it simple to have a small family, or better yet no family at all.

A new child of parents with North American lifestyle aspirations is destined to take a big bite out of the world's resources and contribute to all the ills mentioned above. That child will need to eat meat three times a day and have access to out of season fruit all year round. She'll need air conditioning and heating. She'll need a new private vehicle ever few years. She'll need malls, designer clothes produced a world away, cheap Chinese imports with excessive packaging, cell phones and Ipods. Her ecological footprint will be massive. Therefore the fewer of these children the better.

But tell all this to the Pope. Or your parents, who anxiously await the next grandchild. Or the economist warning the government that a population drop will devastate the economy much like taking action on climate change. Or anyone who has had the nuclear family ideal detonated inside their skull.

Didn't you hear? I can already hear some of these people say. God gave us this earth and told us to be fruitful and multiply. We can't go against the word of God (or for the economist, the word of the market). We've always done it this way.

End of story.

But I still say we ignore overpopulation at our peril. For some interesting and rigorous research into the earth's ideal human carrying capacity by state and more relevant information check out the Optimum Population Trust.