So, Like, Where Do You Find Your Truth?

This being the Sabbath and all I thought it a good time to consider the idea of truth and what it means to us, to me and to you.

As far as I can tell there are two main types of truth, one that is becoming vastly more popular than the other. There is truth founded on belief. That's the sort of truth you'll find preached in pews wherever Christians gather today. It's a lot like the truth our Jewish brethren exchanged yesterday and the children of Islam delved into on Friday. When it is embellished with religious overtones we call it "faith."

'Truth' founded on belief is a lot more prevalent than you might imagine. It has a vast secular dimension.  As John Ralston Saul observes in his book on globalism, all ideologies, economic or political, are belief-based. He devotes several pages documenting how economic models, at least historically, have lasted on average about 30 years before they're replaced by the next great thing which we believe to be more sound or convenient, a correction to our former flawed notions. Political ideology is likewise a belief-based construct. Communism, socialism, social democracy, capitalist democracy, oligarchy, plutocracy - they're belief based and, perhaps with a bit of occasional blood-letting here and there, interchangeable.

The other side, fact-based truth, that's in trouble. It impedes things like unfettered commerce. Ask Monsanto or Exxon. The last thing they want to do is confront facts, particularly scientific fact. Not for nothing do they attack science as a modern "religion." It may not cut much ice with the scientific community or those who prefer fact-based truth but that doesn't matter. It works just fine with their target audience - those who need to believe and will reject what Al Gore called the "inconvenient (fact-based) truth."

This leads to the now predictable faith-based response to fact-based truth, usually in the form of attacks on Gore for the size of his house, Suzuki for the number of his children or scientists generally for their massive (five figure) salaries. It becomes like a mantra, more compelling with each additional chanter. It's a bit like a quasi-hypnotic reaction, a mass psychosis.

Our political leadership has become disturbingly belief-based. Our current prime minister solemnly pledged that his government would follow the science. He left out the part about 'how far' because the honest answer would be 'not very.' His mandate letters to his ministers made each and every one a vassal to the nation's economy and his neoliberal vision of what that should be.

Mr. Trudeau is a disciple to the cult of perpetual exponential growth. It's entirely belief-based given the premise that our economy can continue to grow, steadily ever faster, endlessly on a planet that is decidedly finite, not growing, not a bit. If anything, our rapidly metastasizing human civilization is shrinking, as in degrading, the planet's ecosystem. Earth's carrying capacity is no longer what it historically was. Doesn't sound like someone is 'following the science.'

Like all cults, neoliberalism's quest for perpetual exponential growth is entirely belief-based and, like all belief-based truth of its dimension, it won't end well. It may end abruptly but it won't end well.

Like all cults, the neoliberal order and its High Priests ignore whatever doesn't suit their belief-construct. They still chase a toxic growth paradigm even though the Earth's envrionment, its biosphere is already reeling.

Neoliberalism's cult needs a collaborator to spread the news. Enter the mainstream media. This bit posted to Facebook gives you the idea:

Like it or not, we're at a moment when we need a lot more fact-based truth and not so much faith-based 'truth' whether that's religious, political or economic belief. One and only one of them leads us to a future. The other only leads us to Armageddon, extinction.

We're coming to a point where we need solid, fact-based leadership. We're in a jam. It's man-made. A lot of this mess traces straight back into belief-based thinking, really messed up ideas that flew in the face of knowledge, fact and truth. It worked, or so it seemed, for a few decades but it's not working any more. The economic model we continue to cling to has outlived its utility. It's not working for us any longer. It's working against us, driving critical resource exhaustion, climate change and the looming collapse of biodiversity. Now, more than ever, we need leaders clear-headed enough to try to steer us in another direction.

On Friday, Luis Alfonso de Alba, the top UN envoy entrusted with preparing September's [climate change] summit, called for a "drastic" rethink of the global economic model. 

Required was a "transformation of the way we consume, the way we produce," de Alba said. "This is not a process in which we can aim at a gradual increase of ambitions."

It Sounds Radical But It's Not, Not Really.

There's been no end of weirdness over the past couple of decades but, being the most adaptable species of complex life on Earth, the only creature able to inhabit every part of our land and ice mass, we've done what man has always done - we've tolerated change until we came to see it as our new normal. Maybe if we were less adaptable, more vulnerable... oh well.

The funny thing is that danger or risk is something we countenance especially in the face of significant cost or inconvenience for doing anything effective to deal with it. We want something done about it provided that something is free or really cheap. We want something done that won't put us out. We're all for change provided we don't have to change. We don't want to see the consequences and thus there's no need to put a price on future events.

One measure of selfishness is the frequency of responses from people of my age who say, "I'll be dead by then. Yes, it's a pity, but that's none of my concern and, besides, Oprah's on in a few minutes."

Climate change. Despite all the ongoing denialism and campaign of distraction, it's probably the best researched scientific theory of all time. The central theory has been tested against one scientific discipline, or specialty, after another. For example, a geologist might say, "If the central theory is right, there ought to be this sort or that form of geological evidence, corroboration. Let's have a look. Let's see." And so a mountain of research has been amassed - covering a gamut of scientific disciplines including geology, geography, hydrology, oceanography, atmospherics, glaciology, physics, biology, botany, marine biology, epidemiology, paleontology, and many more.

One discipline after another, the research poured in corroborating the central theory of anthropogenic global warming, AGW. There isn't a single scientific discipline that refutes the theory. Not one disproves AGW or calls it into question. Likewise in the developed world there's not one national academy of sciences that does not endorse the theory of AGW.

None of this puts off the denialists or their corporate backers. They're still free to attack climate change as an ideology, a belief. They don't engage the scientific fact of climate change. They don't refute the mountain of research and analysis. It's too conclusive, too sound to be challenged on any factual basis. And so they seize the narrative and transform it into a belief because nothing is easier to challenge and undermine than a belief. That's been the stock in trade of organized religion since it was invented. All you have to do is present an opposing belief especially if it's a belief that a lot of people find preferable to scientific fact.

(BTW - National Geographic has posted DiCaprio's climate change documentary, "Before the Flood," online.)

We've seen plenty of proof of the reality of climate change over the past twenty years. Severe storm events of increasing frequency, duration and intensity; floods and droughts on a scale we haven't known before; disease and pest migration (destructive beetle infestations, the spread of viruses - West Nile, Zika and Lyme disease, etc.); species migration, especially marine species moving poleward as their traditional waters turn too warm; the retreat of glaciers and melting of ice caps; accelerating sea level rise; a steady progression of record hot years.

The next ten years will see the onset of something completely unknown to human civilization. It's called "climate departure." It marks a transition from the climate we've known for the past 12,000 years to a new climate in which, past the point of "departure" even the coolest year will be hotter than the hottest year experienced in the pre-departure era.

When it comes to climate departure, the closer you are to the equator the sooner it will set in. It's predicted to manifest within 10-years in parts of the Caribbean and Asia Pacific, spreading poleward until it engulfs most of the populated regions by mid-century. The Middle East will be hit in about 20 years. The populace in these areas impacted will find it very challenging to remain. Heat kills and it also wreaks havoc on agriculture and freshwater resources. Most of the cities of the world will have reached departure by 2047.

That sounds sufficiently dire that rational people would be spurred to action, immediately. Perhaps the problem is an even more dire paucity of rational people. They're practically an endangered species.

You see, you can't deal with climate change without also tackling its companion crises - overpopulation and over-consumption. You won't have a hope of fixing any of them unless you fix them all. So, what exactly have we got in mind for Existential Crisis B and Existential Crisis C? Nothing good.

Science has now figured that we, mankind, reached our Earth's carrying capacity when our numbers reached the low 3-billions sometime in the early 70s. That's an important date, do keep it in mind.

For several years the World Wildlife Fund, in conjunction with the Zoological Society of London and in collaboration with other groups including the Global Footprint Network have been producing annual Living Planet reports. One subject of focus has been our rapidly dwindling wildlife. Not the number of species but the overall tally of plants and animals - the totality of the other life forms with which we share Earth.

What they have found is that we, mankind, are squeezing out other species, plant and animal. Since 1970 their numbers have declined by more than half. The Living Planet 2016 report estimates that the decline could hit 67% by 2020, just a few years from now. We are constantly pushing back their habitat to make room for our burgeoning global population and we're consuming ever more of the resources without which their numbers collapse. This is real "uncharted waters" stuff.

In just one lifetime, my own, mankind's population has tripled. It took us 11,000 years of civilization to grow to just one billion. We doubled that in a century. In under 70-years we tripled that again to over 7-billion. What grows like that? Not much - bacteria in a petri dish, cancer cells - oh yeah, and us. Now Africa and Asia have developed huge population bombs - with hundreds of millions about to enter reproductive age. Hang onto your hat. We're going to hit 9+ billion before you know it.

Then there's the business of over-consumption. The Earth, as you might have heard, is finite. It's about the same size it was when multi-cellular life first appeared way back when. Yet, starting in the early 70s, we began to exceed our biosphere's carrying capacity. By "we" I mean humankind. When it comes to natural resources, everything from fresh water to biomass, there's only so much the Earth can replenish in a given time, say a year. Right now we've exceeded that replenishment rate by a factor of 1.7. It's the equivalent of taking home a thousand dollars a month but spending 17 hundred. Not good.

Part of our quandary arises out of sheer numbers. The other part comes from how much each of us consumes. Here's the thing. Take per capita energy consumption, for example. In 1820 that stood at a steady 20 gigajoules of energy per person per year. By 1970 (there it is again) that had grown to 50 gigajoules per person per year. Half a century later, today, it's 80 gigajoules.

So we've gone from one billion people, each using 20 gigajoules of energy per year, to more than seven billion people, each using 80 gigajoules of energy per year in a little under two centuries, a blip in mankind's 12,000 year history. Do the math and you go from 20 billion gigajoules in 1820 to 560 billion gigajoules today.  Can you get a sense of the enormity of what we're doing?

If you can get a sense of the enormity of what we're doing, if you grasp how our population is burgeoning even as our consumption levels skyrocket, if you appreciate how we're gutting pretty much every other life form on the planet - if you get all this, then I'm proud to include you in the "rational" group I spoke of earlier on. You're in a decided minority.

Can you guess who is not in that minority with you? That would be those holding the reins of power, our political leadership. Not just Canada but globally. Here's the giveaway. They are absolutely obsessed with the pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth in GDP. They are devout adherents to a world of ever growing extraction, production and consumption. The International Energy Agency believes them. It predicts overall energy demand will grow by upwards of an additional 40% by 2050.

So, you see, despite the fact that the Earth is essentially finite, despite the fact that we're now utterly dependent on continuing to deplete its resources ever faster than they can be replenished, despite the fact that we have wantonly exceeded our biosphere's environmental carrying capacity, despite the fact that our specie's numbers are more than twice what our planet can support, despite all this and more:

Our political leadership, in conjunction with our economic leadership (you don't understand that?), are so utterly irrational that they ignore everything that's been happening since the early 70s, all the signs, all the science to continue their pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth, the very foundation of what's predicted to be the 6th major extinction event.

Stopping this, breaking this bleak and self-destructive pursuit, sounds radical but it's not, not really. When you've got a three pack a day habit, there's nothing radical about quitting.