We could solve the climate crisis tomorrow—climate
change or global warming as it is called—and it wouldn't matter.
Oh, it would prevent the rising oceans, and mitigate against the
coming droughts, but confronting global warming isn't the end of the
crisis—it isn't even the beginning of the end.
You see, every day a city the size of Grand Rapids
Michigan erupts on the skin of the earth. The resulting demands for
energy, mineral resources, food and water, clean air and the like
will continue to inexorably increase the demands made upon mother
earth bringing it to a crisis point sometime in this century. And
you haven't even begun to address the problems related to human waste
and pollution on this scale.
You see, it isn't simply the burning of carbon-based
fuel that is driving the crisis. It is also driven by population
increase and industrialization. Population increases demand for
land, food, air and water; industrialization and the demand for
higher living standards combined with population increases
exponentially increases the demand for natural
resources—water, minerals, energy. Those born in the
industrialized world use 20 times the resources of the rest of the
world and, with the world clamoring to be similarly comfortable one
can easily see how mother nature will be brought to the breaking
point.
And, as the old 1970's commercial selling butter used to
intone “it is not wise to upset mother nature”. Indeed, mother
nature is the last revolutionary, and she is ruthless. If you doubt,
consult the Black Plague.
We've known about this coming crisis for nearly half a
century. In 1970 a group called The Club of Rome, a group of
scientists using the world's first large-scale computer models
studying projected population growth, resource use, pollution levels
and other variables. They published their results in a book called
World Dynamics, a dire warning of what awaits by the end of
this century if we do nothing. We have wasted roughly half the time
we have left, some say more. If anything, the window of opportunity
is closing as various “negative feedback loops” appear—greenhouse
gases being one of the nasty surprises that became apparent a decade
after the publication of the original work.
During one of my visits to the “farm” my grandmother
asked me, when I was young, if I had read Toynbee. Arnold Toynbee
was a philosopher and historian, prominent in the mid-twentieth
century. He has fallen out of grace in recent years first because
his writing style makes difficult reading and secondly because he
tended to be disparaging about tribal civilizations. Nevertheless,
his study of the two dozen or so recorded civilizations and the
reasons for their fall were, I discovered much later in life, well
worth the read. Toynbee makes the compelling case that if a
civilization can meet an emerging threat soon enough, before it
becomes overwhelmed, it can survive and indeed become stronger. But
if it is overwhelmed it will collapse upon itself bringing invasion
or a dark age.
I have suspected, all these years, that we are on the
cusp of such a crisis. Originally, I had thought that perhaps we had
a century, or a century and a half, but the intervening years have
seen the horizon close in upon us.
And so, as political forces rise in places like Russia,
Brazil, and the US, calling upon us to extract and burn ever more
fossil fuel; as we continue to roll back environmental protections
rather than increase them, as we bury our head in the sand, the
storms and the sea threaten to overwhelm us; as political divisions
threaten to undermine us; as the international cartels threaten to
consume us we tremble at the prospect.
An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh
Impeach and imprison.
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