Are We Willing to Lose This Without Even Putting Up a Fight?

How do you not show up to fight against an existential threat?  It's existential. It imperils your very existence.

Jason Kenney's Canada, Scott Moe's Canada, Doug Ford's Canada as well as Andrew Scheer and Justin Trudeau's Canada is a nation that has little stomach for fighting a clear threat to our continued existence. They're what you could call the Business As Usual club, or BAU.

Most of them talk a good game but they're just blowing smoke up your arse. The glaciers are disappearing, ice caps are melting, sea ice is vanishing, sea levels are rising, we have heatwaves inside the Arctic Circle in the dark of the polar winter, the tundra is thawed and dried and burning, the permafrost is exposed to release its once safely sequestered bounty of methane and CO2, man and nature now compete to see which can set fire to the most woodland, crops fail from heavy flooding in one region and flash droughts in other areas. To feed our nearly 8 billion strong brood we're farming our stocks of arable land to exhaustion and contaminating our lakes and rivers with blue-green algae caused by the runoff of agricultural chemicals. Our dwindling stocks of wilderness are being consumed and we are denying other creatures the habitat without which their numbers plummet by more than half. Species are going extinct at rates unknown in the history of our civilization.  Where they can find a clear path, plants and animals are migrating poleward. We rarely talk about it but our leaders, civilian and military, are bracing for mass human migration from homelands that are becoming uninhabitable by people seeking nothing more than survival.

Yet we're in a pissing contest over a $30/tonne carbon tax. While we're at it our purported leaders are vying to persuade us that they alone can ramp up Canadian production of the highest-carbon, lowest value, climate wrecking ersatz petroleum there is. Let that sink in for a minute.

Some are questioning whether we've already left it too late, already ordained the collapse of our ecosystem, our biosphere.

Cristiana Paşca Palmer, the executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said the destruction of the world’s biggest rainforest was a grim reminder that a fresh approach was needed to stabilise the climate and prevent ecosystems from declining to a point of no return, with dire consequences for humanity. 

“The Amazon fires make the point that we face a very serious crisis,” she told the Guardian. “But it is not just the Amazon. We’re also concerned with what’s happening in other forests and ecosystems, and with the broader and rapid degradation of nature. The risk is we are moving towards the tipping points that scientists talk about that could produce cascading collapses of natural systems.” 

The world’s environmental crises are an increasing concern in international politics. Deforestation of the Amazon was high on the agenda of this week’s G7 meeting in Biarritz, France. In September, world leaders will gather in New York for a climate action summit. Next year, they are scheduled to get together again for a nature summit before a UN biodiversity conference in Kunming, China, in October.

Conferences, they're good. There was a summit in 2015 at which the community of nations pledged to do whatever it took to limit climate change not to 2 degrees Celsius but to just 1.5 C. A freshly minted prime minister proclaimed that "Canada's back" but, since then has been mainly backsliding. Mr. Trudeau has been falling further and further behind even meeting Stephen Harper's emissions goals. But what about that 2015 stuff and the 'Canada's back' business? Oh, I see, that was just more horse shit.

Some are already throwing in the towel. The Guardian has a video of Alan Cookson who has spent four years leading volunteer beach cleaning efforts on the Welsh coast. He's quitting, finding the plastics onslaught insurmountable. He says it's like "mopping up a flood."

Yesterday I wound up watching a couple of travel videos from Deutsche Welle. They focused on Southeast Asian destinations, including once pristine Thai resorts. It was disheartening to watch huge hordes of European tourists quite happily swimming amidst a sea of plastics, beaches covered in the stuff. People still pay big dollars for the privilege. I had to ask myself what have we become? Is this 'terminal-stage humanity'?

Homo Sapiens have a terrible, potentially lethal flaw. It has various labels. Some have called it 'landscape amnesia' but I prefer 'creeping normalcy.'  We get used to 'what is today.' It becomes our new normal. The past is forgotten, extinguished, no longer relevant. Why not swim in a mess of plastic when that's normal?  Why not, through weight of numbers alone, thoroughly, perhaps permanently, trash once pristine ecosystems when that's normal?

Do you think that pigs stuffed into those industrial barns find that little metal cage anything but normal?  That is the pig's normal until something else comes along, usually something worse and often involving knives.  We may be more intelligent, more sentient than the pig but, damn, if we don't behave a lot like them.  And we may be heading for a similarly abbreviated fate because that's what Business As Usual has in store for us.