I must admit at the outset a debt of gratitude for Kossack diarist tsackton and his piece
Human Extinction: Reputable Scientists Now See It On Horizon
based on the technical paper “An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress”
published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. I am sure that many of us fit somewhere on the spectrum between pessimist and extreme pessimist in regard to the ability of our species to pull ourselves out of this environmental mess. I recommend his diary for a sober but chilling viewpoint on our prospects. The fact that human extinction is coming up more often in the ongoing dialogue should give us pause. Rather than review the academic article, I am going to review two recent books that answer some of the meta questions that I have. The first is Carolyn Baker’s Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times (Berkeley, 2013),
the second an anthology of writings entitled Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (Golden Sufi Center, Point Reyes, 2013),
an anthology of writings dealing again with a spiritual response to our crisis, by which I am not referring to eco-buddhism, creation christianity, or gaia worship, but questions rather about what it means to be human and out of harmony with our surroundings. What does it mean to be faced with inevitable collapse? Before I get pounced upon for the use of the word inevitable, think of this, if you will, as a thought experiment, like the proverbial question of which music would you take to a desert island. Below the fold, then, for a review of two such responses.
The earliest human civilizations are thought to have evolved in the fertile crescent area of the middle east about 5,000 years ago. The key words for our all too brief history refresher are Mesopotamia and Bronze Age. If the doomsayers are correct our human species may find itself without a planet in just a hundred years or so, and the human ascendency on earth will have lasted for a mere five and a half millennia, a mere finger snap in geologic time, but also pretty shabby on the biological species level as well.
So I will start with another quick thought experiment. I am on a starship fleeing a desolate and poisoned planet, never to return, asleep in suspended animation for the voyage surely light years in duration. When I awaken, what will I remember of my home planet in my all too brief moments of introspective time while trying to adapt to and survive in a new environment? Old growth forests, orange lichens on gneiss outcroppings in Georgian Bay, Ontario, or perhaps butterflies? Yosemite?
An aside: While I am writing this, I see behind the page my current wallpaper, a head and shoulders portrait of my granddaughter. I always work a mention of her into my diaries, because I think about her and her future constantly. At what point to we gasp out, Kurtz style, “the horror... the horror”, at what we’ve done. Are we an infection, a virus species that needs to be eliminated to save the earth? As Elizabeth Kolbert suggests in The Sixth Extinction,
do we have an insanity gene? For that matter, is our possible end, as Walpole put it, a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel? I digress.
Carolyn Baker suggests a striking analogy for dealing with our possible demise. She postulates that we are in need of planetary hospice workers to help us through the stages of acceptance of planetary collapse. She comes journalistically from a peak oil perspective, that it is our industrial carbon fueled civilization that is ending, but she does not rule out total extinction. Among some of Ms. Baker’s presuppositions are the following points: 1) that there are no technological presuppositions, 2) that we need to deal with societal collapse on an emotional and spiritual level (she comes from a Jungian perspective), 3) she draws comparison with her own battle with breast cancer, and 4) she insists that in dealing with the collapse that we inculcate an attitude of joy and gratitude.
I must admit that this smacks of good old fashioned boosterism on at least one level, but is a view that I actually hold myself. As Brother David Steindl-Rast holds, gratitude is the heart of prayer, and prayer may be about all we have left. Ms. Baker suggests we need to develop grief rituals and new community bonds, a position I can hardly find fault with, but she is overly fond of the terms transformation and paradigm shift, an overly positive connotation that I don’t think applies to the poverty stricken third world dark age that may well be our surrounding in a few decades. This is in fact what I found most infuriating about this book: her constant slipping into what I call workshop-speak, and yet collapse is what it is- a forced wake up and confrontation of some of our darkest fears. Death will be in our midst as a species wide imperative. Either all life on earth will be extinguished, or all human life, or merely most human life. In any case, death will be our companion, and Collapsing Consciously attempts to offer a genuine strengthening of our spiritual reserves.
The second book, Spiritual Ecology, offers an anthology of writings by notable friends of the planet that we are all familiar with: Joanna Macy, Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva and others. These are all solid writers, with much food for thought in their essays. It is what you would expect from writers such as these. I think Ms. Macy’s offering appealed to me the most, and it complemented the themes in Ms. Baker’s book nicely. Given that I am still trying to wrap my head around the concept of “last generations”, and probably will be for the rest of my days, Collapsing Consciously, for whatever writing faults it has, is a far more practical resource.
Many a science fiction film has made use of the device of puny human brains being unable to contain the “god’s eye view” of our planet and species. I’ll close on the point I made at the outset, that five thousand years of human ascendency is a blip on the planetary timescale. Bach, the Sistine Chapel, Shakespeare? Soon to be forgotten. Meh.
9:32 PM PT: Update: In view of strong sentiment in the comments to this diary that it would be irresponsible to succumb to hopelessness over the human predicament, I would like to suggest the following. I know that Bill McKibben and other climate activists have occasionally posted comments and even diaries on dKos, so I would humbly like to invite as many of the following list of scientists or more, to either send a joint letter to the President of the United States, or to convene nothing less than a summit conference of scientists similar to the one held in Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian in 2012. The names I would start with are
James Hansen
Bill McKibben
Lester Brown
E.O. Wilson
Richard Alley
Dennis Meadows
Jorgen Randers
Doug Erwin
I am thinking of the letter Einstein sent to President Roosevelt concerning the atomic bomb. It is too late to be thinking small, so I am throwing this bottle into the sea in hopes that someone will retrieve it and think, that's so crazy it just might work. I have heard all of these scientists give presentations. It's time for another summit.
Sat Jun 14, 2014 at 5:39 AM PT: Since Bill McKibben has already started the process going forward to a September 21st climate demonstration to coincide with a United Nations Climate Conference that weekend, perhaps an open letter from many of the most notable climate scientists could be presented to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Anyone who could help draw attention to this possibility I urge you to get in touch with Bill. I will do what I can to email some of these scientists. The sqeaky wheel, etc. I'm not going to give up on this.