As I graduated from college in the fall of 1972, I
obtained and then read World Dynamics. My biology course in
college was not a rehash of High School biology, a study instead of
ecology. I had seen reference to the work while perusing the
library stacks and went forthwith to the college bookstore and
ordered a copy. Then I set down and began reading, pouring over the
assembled data and graphs, the explanations, the complexities of what
would happen if humanity responded in certain ways to the then known
data and trends.
The next spring found me in Worcester, Massachusetts
awaiting admittance to Clark University on a full scholarship. It
was here, in a rented flat, that the enormity of the task at hand
dawned upon me. While holed up in a second floor flat, in what are
affectionately termed “triple-deckers” in this working-class
industrial town, I was visited by my old friend Larry Hamp.
Hamp and I had spent a couple of years researching the
New York City Draft Riots of 1863 and had reached the point
where we could complete each other's sentences. Over a bottle of
Lancer's wine and a few joints I began one night to lay it out for
him. Protesting, he gave me every argument that he could muster
before, at the end of a long night, admitting that we are indeed
fucked.
The argument went something like this and there has been
little in the ensuing nearly half century to change the broad
conclusions. Government is reactive, if not reactionary. By the
time it becomes universally obvious that the enormity of the looming
crisis threatens even the well-to-do—that is the power structure—it
will be too late. Conversely, even if governments can be made to be
proactive and meet the challenge as it emerges, there will
develop a counter-movement that will contend with a straight face
that the crisis never existed and that the fraud was perpetrated by
their adversaries as a means of gaining and holding power. In this
last argument one sees the coming of the modern ReSCUMlickan response
first emerging in the shallow countenance of Senator Inhof of
Oklahoma and now spread entirely through the ReSCUMlickan ranks.
There are many corollaries to this argument including
the exponential nature to the variables, ranging from
population growth to resource depletion to pollution meaning that
each resembles a half filled glass that when stood on edge will reach
a tipping point bringing a swift and violent crash.
Put simply let's use a pond filling with algae as an
example. If the rate of growth of the algae doubles every day then
the day before the pond is choked it is only half full, two days
before it is only a quarter, three days one-eighth, four day
one-sixteenth. A few days before catastrophe only a minor problem
occurs. This is the nature of many of the variables now facing
humanity, and we cannot say for certain where lies the tipping point.
Then there are the notorious “negative feed-back”
loops where nasty currents combine to accelerate even nastier
outcomes. As an example the warming of the planet melts the polar
ice caps. With the melting ice less solar radiation is reflected
back into space further speeding the warming process. Indeed the
polar regions are warming faster than the planet as a whole. Further
the warming of the arctic regions releases methane, a greenhouse gas
far more potent than CO2 , again speeding the process of global
warming. Lastly the melting fresh water is lighter than sea water
and as the ice caps melt the ocean currents—nature's way of
expelling heat—become disrupted further heating the planet.
There are many other examples, population impact on food
supply which, in turn, affects land use and rising levels of
pollution. It is a skein that humanity seems bound to unravel with
little or no idea how to weave it back together.
The point in these columns is that everything, as the
Greeks tried to teach, is political. Everything is a consequence of
political will, a point lost on all sides of the argument. While the
naysayers will contend with near dead certainty that the present
crisis requires mustering a still nascent political will to force the
confiscation of trillions of dollars of assets in order to, for
instance, keep fossil fuels in the ground, it is also worth noting
that the very existence of the fossil fuel industry is a consequence
of political will. It was governments throughout the world that gave
these corporations the legal protections, sometimes the military
protections, not to mention the tax breaks and outright grants to
build these systems in the first place.
It all boils down to politics and the question has
always been and will always remain: will we develop the political
will soon enough to intervene and use the inherent police power of
the state to put an end to the crisis? The answer: not as long as
there is a ReSCUMlickan Party and it's enablers on the other side of
the isle.
The upcoming crises demand political action. Severe,
consistent and long term political action ranging from draconian cuts
in population growth to the outright elimination of fossil fuels to
an entirely new ethos of land use. It demands a top-down, not a
bottom-up approach because the problems face not just a municipality,
nor a county nor even a state or a nation. It demands that humanity
voluntarily gets into the harness and pull this wagon as one in the
same direction. It demands a level of cooperation and coordination
that will swamp the feeble national institutions now in place.
Instead we have the Paris Accords in which the world
gathered to survey its fate, decided what to do and then voluntarily
committed itself to doing half of it. Then along comes tRUMP
declaring undue hardship as he withdrew the world's greatest
producers of fossil fuels from the accord.
Finally, a last word. From the Greeks we learned that
everything contains within itself the seeds of it's own destruction
Within each of us lies the seed of the disease that will, in the
end, claim our life. In this context it means that what has served
us so well in the past are the very things that will claim our
future, in this case the inordinate preoccupations with economic
growth, the dependence on current forms of energy, the need to
reproduce.
What faces humanity is nothing less than a combination
of looming crises that together threaten the perfect storm. To
confront what is clearly before us requires nothing less than a new
politics, new institutions, but a new economics and new religions.
Humanity has always been adept at adaptation but not this adept.
Certainly it's institutions have been, if Toynbee is to be believed
and the rise of the modern conservative movement are any indication,
not so well adaptable.
It certainly means the end of the American Empire,
perhaps the end of Western Civilization. It may take out a great
swath of the human population—through disease and starvation—in
the bargain. All that will be left will be the looming Dark Age, the
return of the Hobbesian dog-eat-dog state of nature, where the strong
consume the weak, and the thugs rule.
An Br'er Putin he jus' laugh and laugh
Impeach and Imprison
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