If you're an American, I can
appreciate that your immediate priority for saving the world is to get
rid of "the worst president in the history of the United States". His
administration has almost certainly caused more damage to the environment
than any regime in any country in history. What is exasperating is that
our struggle with this psychopath is distracting us from a much more
critical struggle against a much greater enemy: the growth that is
killing us and our planet.
The thesis for much of this blog since it began sixteen months ago has been: Our
world is headed for ecological collapse, due to the relentless and
catastrophic rate of increase in both human population and per-capita
resource consumption ('footprint'). We are already consuming
resources at over twice the rate at which our planet can sustain such
consumption, and by the end of this century, at forecast growth rates,
twice as many people will each be consuming twice as much again, so we
will need eight Earths'
worth of land and resources just to meet immediate demand. This
consumption will, at current rates of sprawl, use up every square inch
of livable, arable land on the planet just for residential housing. It
will require five times the energy that we can reasonably expect to
find, extract and push out to the planet's insatiable humans by the end
of the century, even if we abandon all environmental constraints and
burn every ounce of coal and wood, fire up hundreds of new nuclear
plants, and exhume every gallon of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbon that
has taken millions of years to accumulate under the earth, the seabeds
and the permafrost. As by-products of this activity, we will also
generate five times as much pollution and waste as in all previous
centuries combined, befouling the water and air, poisoning our food,
raising the atmospheric temperature enough to bring about massive and
catastrophic climate change, and eliminating all wilderness areas,
every plant and animal species not used for human food, the forests
that provide us with vital oxygen and medicine, and lowering the water
table around the globe enough to desertify much of it and create a
massive fresh water shortage.
On one point, the scientists, informed humanists and head-in-the-sand
eco-holocaust denyers can agree: This cataclysmic future will never
happen. As man shows himself incapable of reining in his own
rapaciousness and greed, nature will intervene with increasingly potent
and dreadful surprises to prevent this human cancer from destroying her
body. If it weren't for civilization, this would have already happened,
quickly, simply and painlessly as it did for three million years before
man invented a system he thought was better. But civilization has now
raised the ante, introducing a whole new series of political, social,
religious, technological, moral and economic systems, illustrated in
the above chart (from last week's post),
designed to counteract and overcome natural forces. Let's follow this
chart through and see what we're likely to face by the end of this
century.
Overpopulation -- more people per square mile than the Earth can reasonably support -- naturally produces mental stress,
which manifests itself in war, physical and psychological violence,
neglect, repression, mental illness, and a lowered immunity to disease.
In a natural system, this disequilibrium, combined with the scarcity of
food and other critical resources in an overcrowded population, is
sufficient to reduce fertility, increase mortality, and bring
increasing numbers of natural predators to the table, and hence restore
the population to natural levels.
But man has too much invested in relentless growth in population and
consumption to give up that easily. He has invented the following
ingenious methods to sustain growth and civilization even as nature is
trying to limit them:
- Monoculture agriculture:
Intensive cultivation of land with larger and larger quantities of
fewer and fewer varieties of food plants and food animals. This is
sustained by: genetically engineering plants for higher yields; soaking
fields in chemicals, herbicides and pesticides to kill everything else
that interferes with these selected plants; soaking fields in
increasing quantities of fertilizers to compensate for the degradation
of the soil caused by the chemicals, herbicides and pesticides (and
exacerbated by overuse, and the runoff from clearing land not designed
for agricultural use); poisoning and shooting wildlife that tries to
eat human agricultural products; stuffing animals full of growth
hormones and antibiotics to increase meat yield and ward off the
natural diseases that come from overcrowding and monoculture; cramming
these animals into tiny quarters to increase yield, and then debeaking,
confining and drugging them so the stress of this horrendous
overcrowding doesn't cause them to kill themselves and each other. This
agriculture is dependent on cheap supplies of foreign oil for the
petrochemicals needed to sustain it, massive government subsidies,
huge, inexpensive tracts of land to grow corn and grain for cheap
animal feed, and concealment of the incredible cost and damage of
monoculture agriculture to the taxpayers and the Earth's ecosystems.
But in the meantime it results in huge quantities of deceptively cheap
food, which in turn keeps human population growing.
- Salvationist religions:
As overcrowding produces stress and epidemic disease, the people could
get disheartened about the benefits of civilization and rebel against
the power elite. So we need religions to say that nature is evil, war
and suffering are honourable and 'natural', and we must conform to a
strict moral code -- and have large
families. And if as a result we're miserable all our lives, we'll get
our reward in the next one. These religions teach us we're not
responsible, we need not act responsibly, that if we destroy the planet
it's not our fault, and someone else will fix it.
- Corporatism and its political and economic propaganda:
The myth machine must ensure that the teeming billions don't realize
just how bad and unsustainable the situation is, and start taking
things into their own hands -- with revolutions, civil wars, terrorism,
and other behaviours that disrupt the population growth and consumption
necessary for civilization to continue. So the corporatist elite must
control the education system, preserving the myth that pre-civilization
man lived a "brutish" life, the myth that wars are caused by
megalomania and 'evil', rather than as a response to desperation and
suffering and deprivation, the myth that with hard work anyone can be
rich and happy, the myth that we all have a fair say in our political,
legal and economic systems, the myth that our 'leaders' are working for
democracy, rather than hoarding their wealth and power. And the
corporatist elite must control the media, to perpetuate these myths, to
'dumb down' the citizens into mere consumers, and to keep the majority
ignorant of political, economic and ecological reality. And of course
the corporatist elite must continue to control the political and
economic centres of power -- governments and corporations -- so they
control the means of production, the law, and the judiciary, to keep
wealth and power for themselves, and to lock up and silence those who
pose a threat to it.
These man-made systems -- the skewed, destructive, elitist, subjugating
economic, political, legal, social, health, educational, agricultural,
corporate and criminal justice systems, and religions and the media --
produce some poisonous by-products as well. The bankrupt and
propagandizing education system crushes human initiative, creativity
and imagination, so that many of the people who could get us out of
this mess give up or drop out. Without imagination or conscience or
knowledge of ecology, we get strip mining, clearcut forestry, massive
flooding for hydro dams, and the deadly threat and toxic radioactive
poisons of nuclear power and nuclear bombs -- technologies that
needlessly accelerate the destruction of the environment and the loss
of biodiversity. With a little better education, we might have solar
and wind and geothermal energy, erasable paper, hydroponics and
advanced ceramics instead.
This same lack of education and imagination has given us a health
system that treats the rich and neglects the poor, instead of a health
system that prevents disease for all.
And the massive inequality created by corporatism aggravates the stress
that destabilizes the third world, ruins third world economies and
makes them into desperate, violent welfare states, whose destitute
majorities produce the only thing they can that has marketable value --
more babies.
And so the circle goes round and round, producing more and more people and more and more mindless, wasteful consumption.
What will it take to break the cycle? If we acknowledge that the cycle
is unsustainable, what is its weak link? I believe there are three weak links: disease, instinct, and technology.
- Disease: If you've read Demon in the Freezer,
you know that every species has its own unique poxviruses. They are
nature's choice of disease for dealing with massive overpopulation, and
mosquitos, for example, have a host of selective poxviruses that keep
their numbers in check without unbalancing the rest of the ecosystem.
Poxviruses need a certain concentrations of numbers within a certain
travelling distance of each other to thrive. With our record numbers
and mobility, we are the perfect target for a new poxvirus, and
nature's ability to evolve new viruses when there is a prolific host is
extraordinary. And we are just starting to learn about prions, another
mechanism for spreading epidemic disease, and one that is probably
unstoppable. And our monoculture agriculture has greatly increased the
vulnerability of our foods to epidemic disease as well (as BSE and
Avian Flu have demonstrated recently).
- Instinct: For
three million years man survived, and thrived, by trusting and
following his instincts. We have forgotten how to listen to them, and
been brainwashed to distrust them, but they're still in our DNA and
they're still telling us what to do. I believe the drop in fertility in
many countries with high population density is due more to instinct
than to education or birth control technology. I believe the worldwide
rejection of globalization, 'free' trade, 'preemptive' war, cultural
homogenization and consumerism is an instinctive revulsion, not a
spiritual or parochial one -- we intuitively know that there is
something very wrong with the way we live and the way we are headed,
and that economic, political and social imperialism -- and the
destruction of cultural diversity -- are part of the problem, not part
of the solution. We know violence, abuse, rampant crime, pollution,
global warming, extreme poverty and hopelessness are symptoms of the
fact that something is very wrong, and we know something must be done.
We don't need someone to show us or teach us this. We just know it.
- Technology:
Technology is the innovative application of knowledge. It can do an
end-run around the most entrenched and change-resistant political,
economic or legal system. The corporatists recognize that the Internet
has produced a knowledge and communication explosion, and have tried to
squelch and corner every possible disruptive technology by patenting
every single conceivable process. They even tried to create an
alternative Internet under their own control. But they can't put the
lid back on Pandora's box. Margaret Mead said it only takes a few
people to change the world, and never has there been greater
motivation, or opportunity, for that to happen.
You'll notice that my three civilization 'weak links' have nothing to
do with politics, economics, or law. These are lousy levers of change,
and tend to entrench power,
wealth, and the status quo. These systems, and the corporatism that
depends on them, will collapse, but they will last longer than most of
the other elements of civilization on the chart above. If we depend on
the politicians, the economists, the lawyers or the business leaders to
get us out of this mess, we're in for a big disappointment. Not that
these systems aren't going to be faced with convulsive change in this
century: Watch for massive immigration embargoes and blockades,
fire-bombing of plague areas, dozens of coups, wars, suspensions of
civil liberties, many new forms of hyphenated-terrorism, and
revolutions. But none of these will change much. Have they ever, really?
On one side, monoculture agriculture, salvationist religions and corporatism. On the
other, epidemic disease, instinct and technology. An epic battle, a
fight to the finish, that will start in this century but could last
hundreds of years -- It's not as if there's a shortage of pawns. Some
have called it "humanity's final exam".
It is that, and more. Since we are a part of nature, this battle is in
fact a civil war. Which side we each take, or support by our ignorance,
our apathy, our indifference, will determine how we are assessed by our
descendents, and how we are judged by history.
We won't be around to see the end, but we are already witnessing the
first skirmishes. We owe it to our children and grand-children to, at
least, not make the situation worse. In tomorrow's post, entitled What You Can Do to Save the World,
I'll suggest some ways I think each of us can help 'not make the
situation worse'. That may not sound like much, but if enough of us
refuse to make the situation worse, it could make a huge difference.
Perhaps all the difference in the world.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
