After digesting yesterday's essay by UBC prof William Rees about how humanity is suffocating other forms of life on our planet, I was left wondering what they're afraid of, why aren't they talking to us about what is happening, right now, beneath our own feet?
As Rees pointed out, "We are clever enough to document — in exquisite detail — various trends that portend the collapse of modern civilization, yet not nearly smart enough to extricate ourselves from our self-induced predicament."
For a decade, perhaps a bit more, I've been covering one major report after another on research documenting the alarming collapse of non-human life - insect, mammals, birds, sea mammals, fish, the lot. Some species have fallen extinct but the worrisome problem is that virtually all species are in severe decline, often upwards of 66% of their numbers over the past 40 years which, of course, coincides with the advent of neoliberalism.
Even in Canada, everything from casual windshield “surveys” to formal scientific assessments show a drop in insect numbers. Meanwhile, domestic populations of many insect-eating birds are in freefall. Ontario has lost half its whip-poor-wills in the past 20 years; across the nation, such species as nighthawks, swallows, martins and fly-catchers are down by up to 75 per cent; Greater Vancouver’s barn and bank swallows have plummeted by 98 per cent since 1970. Heard much about these things in the mainstream news?
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As the Bonn climate summit wraps up it reveals how ineffectual our nations have become and why they'll never succeed in bringing climate change under control. They're still treating climate change as a standalone crisis. They imagine they're dealing with a disease but it's really just one of several symptoms of the greater threat that confronts us - ourselves.
You cannot take climate change in isolation of its companion threats that are also existential. Climate change cannot be separated from over-population and over-consumption of our planet's finite resources. Rees pointed it out beautifully. It took our species 200,000 years to reach one billion and just another 200 years to increase that more than seven fold and, in the course of those same 200 years, GDP has swelled about a hundred fold. That's hundreds of times more production, more consumption, more waste, more pollution and contamination of every form imaginable. And what are our politicians doing? With their corporate partners they're obsessively pursuing perpetual, exponential growth. Every foot is on the gas pedal but nobody's hands are on the wheel.
That's not democratic leadership. That's nihilism.
They can't even respond to climate change beyond purely gestural proposals - carbon taxes. What exactly is that going to do? Nothing, it's a sop.
Rees didn't write an op-ed. He penned an essay. He wasn't expressing an opinion. He was writing from fact, scientific knowledge documented in "exquisite detail." His was not some dodgy belief-based construct. That's the crap peddled to us by our political caste, the nihilists.
Surely we have reached a point where you have to ask yourself why you're supporting and empowering nihilists. Why? The science has been pouring in for more than a decade. There's a mountain of research and analysis and it's compelling.
What's your problem? Is it simply too much to take in? Can you not get your mind around the enormity of the change that has set in over just the past forty years? Do you, like our leaders, need to pretend this isn't happening or that it's not immediate or a mortal threat to our civilization?
8 comments:
Nothing will change. The direction we have set is now irreversible, in my view, thanks to the feckless political class and the even more feckless population. End of story, Mound.
I too feel pessimistic, Lorne, but we really can't foresee how this will play out. I just posted an item about replacing GDP as a metric of progress. The idea is that GDP has no utility once the economy has grown larger than the environment because that excess growth rests on conjuring tricks that will fail. That's already happening. Eventually the economy will shrink until it's once again a subset of the environment. We can either enact that change on our terms or we'll be forced back not on our terms.
If we're very lucky other nations will go through this well before us, perhaps giving us an invaluable object lesson and incentive to do it on our own terms. Maybe when the crunch comes we will finally act out of self-interest. Maybe not.
"If we're very lucky other nations will go through this well before us . . . "
There's no guarantee on that. This is a risk that will hit every part of the world. Chaos is coming. We are going to have to learn to live with ever changing environments. We will go from too much rain to drought and back again. We will have huge crop failures. The food chain will be broken again and again.
The 1% are showing every sign of knowing all this. They are hiding their money. They are buying multiple properties all over the world so as to have refuges. They are protecting themselves.
Toby, when I wrote "if we're very lucky" implied that there's "no guarantee."
Short of world war, which many informed types today would not rule out, we're looking at a wide range of impacts that will not be universally nor contemporaneously experienced. If the outcomes were uniform and contemporaneous, do you imagine we would be at such loggerheads over what to do about this threat?
"Alan Bernstein on why Canadian science needs to lead
"We all know what's going on in the U.S. and the U.K. Those two countries, which have traditionally been the strongest science-based countries in the English-speaking world, are literally shutting their doors and minds. And there's an instability in both of those countries which is both frightening and disheartening, and it's causing the kind of instability that is not conducive to science and to research, or attracting the best and brightest from anywhere in the world." CBC Ideas listen here
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/friesen-prize-winner-dr-alan-bernstein-team-science-will-save-the-world-1.4407377
Thanks for the link, Toby. One of Trudeau's solemn campaign promises was that a Liberal government would "follow the science" and make evidence-informed decisions.
Today governments are doing a lot of things that are neither science nor evidence based. Neoliberalism is the obvious example. As Ralston Saul points out neoliberalism is akin to a religion. Most economic models are ideological, meaning they're belief-based. That's the drawback to "social" sciences such as economics.
The WTO and the IMF have pronounced neoliberalism a failure (as did Milt Friedman a couple of years before his death) but despite the evidence our governments cling to their beliefs and continue to pursue perpetual exponential growth, GDP.
Science and evidence is being rejected because it exposes the fallacies in pet policies at which point belief, often larded with fabrication, prevails.
That is due to the fact, many people are worried about losing their billions.
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