Let me ask you some questions about the condition of the Earth

Al Urquhart [email protected]

1. What do you think about a world with 10 or 12 billion people by the end of the century? That is 5 or 6 times more than when some of us living today were born. (To have fewer people by 2100, millions of people would have to die at a rate faster even than during the Covid pandemic.)

2. Do you think that energy consumption will decline in the near future? Do you think that renewable energy sources will replace the fossil fuel sources in the near future? ( Look at the increase in renewable sources that would have to take place to substitute for current sources.)

3. Do you think that Americans will reduce the amount of new minerals they use each year? (What is the availability of these resources?)

4. Do you think that the atmospheric warming gasses of carbon dioxide and methane will be reduced soon enough to limit climate warming? (Global warming increased again last year.)

(Source: http://serc.carleton.edu/details/images/41716.html)

1. Do you think that the ecological deficit will decrease soon? (The United States’ ecological footprint is much larger than that of the world’s.)

Global Footprint Network

1. Do you think that the stability of the Earth’s ecology– climate, mass extinctions, ocean acidification, soil fertility and loss, glacier melting, and water availability–will be reversed in the next decade?

Source: Adapted from New Scientist, 16-10-09

Source: Michael Dowd video

My Conclusions

I believe that the answers to the questions that I asked are “NO.” Because these questions are all interrelated, it becomes obvious that the many, piece meal, technological solutions that have been proposed for specific problems are not integrated enough to stem the flow of ecological disasters that exist today.

Like all organisms, humans reproduce and improve their well being until they confront environmental limits. Humans have reproduced prodigiously (as is shown in the first diagram) and have, in the last two hundred years, grown their material lives exponentially, through the use of fossil fuel energy, (as is shown in the second diagram). And now we humans are reaching ecological limits, (as is indicated in diagrams 3, 4, and 5).

We humans will not be able to avert a general collapse of modern civilization as the demands to satisfy goods and services have reached several ecological limits, possibly to their tipping point, beyond which radical, world-wide ecological changes will occur.

However, it has been difficult to alert our leaders to these problems, even as pollution, extinctions, and climate change continue at accelerated rates. At best, a few goals have been set; but they have not been implemented. For example: this year will probably see the second greatest increase in CO₂ emission on record in spite of greater awareness of the implications of global warming. And GDP is predicted to rise, indicating that consumption of energy and materials will increase.

Day by day, month by month, year by year, and decade by decade demands for consumption have increased and been satisfied since new sources of energy have been employed. Today the release of many of the restrictions placed on the world by the Covid pandemic result in the demand for a return to normalcy–the normalcy of growth and consumption that resulted in the ecological disasters that we are experiencing today. Congress is in gridlock. Societies are rent with inequalities, Poorer people want to enjoy the seeming security of wealth attained by the wealthier. The wealthier funnel their disproportionate wealth into further capitalist adventures. The dreamers want to go into space. Many dispossessed want to fight. Others feel that their individual freedoms are more important than the needs of the human community, let alone those of maintaining a resilient and stable Earth. For me, these conditions and attitudes can only result in the collapse of civilization as we know it.

What can a person do when he/she realizes the predicament the world is in today?

1. The most important action we can take is to understand the physical world in which we live. We must learn about the world that exists even if humans were not a part of it. The physical world of energy, entropy, ecology and evolution must be understood to realize the magnitude of the predicament that human alteration of the Earth has created.
2. We must also realize that the modern worldview–the world of progress and growth–is dominated by

power, production, property, profit, and publicity. (Lewis Mumford’s Pentagon of Power.) To understand the implications of the dominant worldview we must also understand the concept of exponential growth. Most importantly that continued economic growth based on the Earth’s resources, which are finite, is a physical impossibility.

1. So how can we humans live in a world in which our actions and our belief systems are failing? How can we live with the knowledge that this brief moment of human exuberance is expiring? More particularly, how can we act and think in a world in which the goods and services we have enjoyed in the last several decades become steadily less available? And how can we contemplate life in which millions of people will die or live shorter lives because of the collapse of modern society?

I have been asking myself these questions for years and have come to realize that I need not be pessimistic and delve into gloom and depression nor be unrealistically hopeful and deny the truth of the facts. I have to support what I think it is to be human. At one level, I need to address how I should act knowing that I am embedded in the Earth’s ecology.

1. Deep Adaptation. The best ways of doing so have been described by Jem Bendell in his essays on practicing Deep Adaptation. He writes: (https://jembendell.com/category/deep-adaptation/)

Deep Adaptation “is a framework for exploring ideas for how to attempt …. what we call the four Rs of Deep Adaptation.

“What do we most value that we want to keep and how,” is a question of resilience.

“What could we let go of so as not to make matters worse,” is a question of relinquishment.

“What could we bring back to help us in these difficult times,” is a question of restoration.

“With what and with whom shall we make peace as we awaken to our common mortality,” is a question of reconciliation.

These are all questions because we are in a very new situation where the expectation of simple answers given to us by somebody else is not going to help as much as us exploring together how to be and what to do.“

1. The ‘Ls’ of Life. At another level Michael Dowd lists things we can all do at all times: Love; Learn something new; Laugh; Leave a Legacy; Live Courageously. ( Michael Dowd has many excellent videos on YouTube that elaborate on his views of the predicament that we and the Earth are currently experiencing. )
2. Advice to Young People in the 21^st Century. I believe that Richard Heinberg’s advice to young people is probably the most important recommendation for preparing for a future for those who will have to live their lives in a disintegrating society. He writes:

• Learn to grow food. Study permaculture.
• Learn to read people. You’re going to need to know whether people in your vicinity are trustworthy.
• Be trustworthy. Otherwise smart and trustworthy people won’t associate with you.
• Learn to express yourself clearly and persuasively.
• Consider making a commitment not to reproduce. There are already plenty of people in the world.
• Learn to make decisions by consensus and to work collaboratively. Be a person with whom others enjoy working.
• Learn to repair and use relatively simple technologies. Studying to be a computer programmer or hacker could pay off in the short run, but over the longer term you’ll benefit more from learning to fix farming and construction tools and small engines. Learn to make spare parts from junk.
• Learn how energy works. Be able to identify the sources of energy in your environment and find ways to harness that energy to do useful work.
• Learn to defend yourself. Sadly, for the remainder of this century the world is likely to be a more violent place. Even if that turns out not to be the case, martial arts can still be useful paths of self-discipline.
• Learn to heal the human body via nutrition, herbs, and basic emergency care.
• Learn to recognize the subjective effects of sex hormones, dopamine, and other brain chemicals, and find ways to override those effects when they threaten to push you off course. Instead, channel their effects to help achieve goals.
• Learn about nature. Memorize the names of local plants, birds, and insects, and observe their habits. Learn to be comfortable in the wild.
• Learn how to produce beauty via art, music, or movement, and how to engage others in creative, celebratory activities.
• Learn to emotionally process trauma and grief, and to help others do so. Learn when and how to use humor to release tension.

1. Environmentalists Anonymous. I recommend a 10 Step modeling of Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step way of living in which, on a personal level, most of us are addicts in an addictive society but continue to deny our addiction. At the national scale, the best examples of our addiction may be

A. our demand for more energy at the same time as we realize that the use of more energy results in undermining the environmental and ecological well-being of life on earth through air pollution, global warming, ocean acidification; plant and animal extinctions, etc.;

1. our attraction to consumption of material goods—the products that fill our shopping malls, our auto and RV showrooms, even the increasing amounts of paper that fill our offices because of the miracles of modern electronic technology—while, at the same time, we find it impossible to rid ourselves of the wastes created in the processes of consuming without polluting the air, water, land and thus even our own health ; and

C. our inability to see the unsustainable basis for our growth economy.

Modelling the premise of AA, I believe that an environmentalist can, once he/she has “hit bottom,” he or she can only admit that he or she is an addict and that his or her life is out of control. In other words, our actions cannot be made to correspond with our thoughts; we realize that we are caught in the double bind of a modern worldview versus the natural world ecology in which we are embedded; these are conflicting messages that cannot be reconciled and which will deprive us of sanity and health unless we admit them.

If we cannot control our addiction to devastating the Earth’s ecology with our current ways of thinking we must come up with a new way of thinking—a new epistemology. Step 2 of AA does exactly that through the recognition that we are part, but only part, of a Power greater than ourselves, a Power that is sane and healthy, a system in which mind and matter, humans and environment, are not opposed. The realization that we are merely part of a naturally evolving and ecological world is truly a humbling experience for those of us raised in the traditions of The Enlightenment and Modern beliefs which stress the power, rationality, and individuality of humans and humanity.

The 3rd step toward sanity may be as difficult as the acknowledgement of our addiction that only comes after “hitting bottom.” To surrender to this new way of thinking—in the words of AA, making “a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understand him”—is for most modern Americans, seen as a great threat to our current ways of life. But viewed in the context in which every technological triumph disrupts some ecological or evolutionary relationship, often in startling and precipitous ways, one catches glimpses of disasters far more threatening than alterations of our current life styles. Continued human survival in ecologic and evolutionary terms surely rests outside our own control; our technological addictions only precipitate the disturbance of the many interrelated natural systems of which we are but a small part. A new epistemology emphasizes the conviction that we are merely “part of” something much greater than ourselves.

I like to call the ‘Power greater than myself’: Gaia.

If we accept this new fundamental perspective, we can actively and honestly become part of it by physically acknowledging, and wherever possible rectifying, the wrongs we have done in the past, not perpetuating them today, and avoiding them in the future.

THE TEN STEPS OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS ANONYMOUS

We:

1. Admit that we are powerless over our exploitation of the environment–that our lives have become unmanageable.

2. Have come to believe that we are but a small part of the evolutionary and ecological systems (Gaia).

3. Have made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Gaia.

4. Have made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admit to Gaia, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Have made a list of the environmental and ecological systems we had harmed, and have become willing to make amends to them all.

7. Have made direct amends to such systems wherever possible, except when to do so would further injure them or innocent persons.

8. Have continued to take personal inventory and when we are wrong, promptly admitted it.

9. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Gaia.

10. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we try to carry this message to others addicted to exploiting the environment, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Hello. My name is Al and I am addicted to exploiting the environment.