Extinction
No seriously, but we’ll get to that in a minute. I didn’t get a chance to write yesterday, but I did run. I woke up this morning and ran again. Lots of fatigue this morning and at the end I just sort of let it go and walked a little bit.
So yesterday I got a little shock, insofar as someone who watched the same TV as I did as a child missed one of the big lessons we learned. It came in Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series, where he mentions the 6th great extinction event. Now, he sugar coated it for sure, I mean in general. But I figured my siblings would have remembered like I did. I guess I was wrong. If they could forget anyone can, so I suppose that’s that. But I’ve talked about this before. Which also means said sibling doesn’t read this.
It went like this though, me saying that we don’t have the time to be patient and compromise, and let the system which is causing the problems get corrected, we need a societal and technological revolution in order to fix things now. They replied with, “war won’t fix this (even though I didn’t use the words warner violence, I said revolution) and people don’t like to be forced into changing.” To which I replied that when I say we don’t have time, I mean scientifically we are causing the next great extinction event right now, and it MIGHT already be too late to save humanity from it, but there is a chance. This isn’t a matter of good PR campaigns and advertising, this is no time for compromise. Either we make substantive change now or we will perish, not us directly but maybe grandchildren, great-grandchildren. At which point the sibling thought I meant the only option was to give up. Such extremism right? No, we need to fight to try the best we can to mitigate this.
We can’t stop what is happening at this point, and it may actually be too late, but we can try to mitigate the damage and hope for the best. That’s what I’m always talking about. But I think most people; even if they grasp the concept of everything else running on geological or stellar time, instead of human time, don’t really wrap their minds around the idea that the things we do, are going to work their way through the biosphere at its time, not ours. Every predicted milestone for climate change has been reached ahead of what the models have said. Which means we’re missing factors that weren’t considered in the models. We are starting to learn about how methane is being released from places we didn’t expect, etc. But still, the fact that even if we didn’t use another fossil fuel ever again, starting today, that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 would not drop below 400 parts per million (which doesn’t seem like a lot but it is) until every human being on earth right now is dead is astounding. A baby, born yesterday, could live a full life, and yet even if no oil, coal, nor natural gas were ever burned in that entire life, atmospheric CO2 would remain on average above 400 ppm. Unacceptable.
This is only one of the factors, it’s the most sensational. That is why it gets used so frequently. It’s the easiest concept for people to understand, yet clearly we still struggle with it. How we manage the land is another whole host of issues. Let’s take a proposed “border wall” along the U.S. – Mexico line: it is obvious to even the casual observer that land animals would find migration impossible, imperiling their ages old migration routes can disrupt their reproduction, ability to gather food, etc. Walls, dams, pipelines, these are easy to understand.
What is difficult to grasp however, is the factory-farm industry, clearing arable lands for feed grain production, destroying the grassland biome of thousands of species and dumping poison chemicals all over to destroy these “pests”. Then fencing off the areas for the livestock, as well as clearing that land, and then eliminating any predatory species which may hurt profit margins by damaging sad livestock. All this also then contributing to the previously mentioned greenhouse gas emissions.
But humans are so adaptable, surely we can overcome all this and find safety and survival somewhere. Humans aren’t adaptable actually, we can use technology to overcome many natural obstacles, but we biologically are actually not very adaptable at all. As is, we are developing so many allergies to different food sources, we’re actually becoming less adaptable, more specialized. The entire food chain, top to bottom is dependent on plants converting solar energy into sugars, after that, predator or prey does not matter. Until a cow can process sunlight directly into energy for its cells, we need all the grasses and grains and everything else. We can overcome warm temperatures, cold temperatures, too much rain, too little rain, as far as it directly effects our physical beings. But we can’t grow crops without water and plant and animal species are much more susceptible to changes in environment. We can do little things to help but overall we can only do so much.
Given the situation we’re in and given that it may already be too late, this is why there’s no time for compromise, there’s no time to entertain the idiots and be nice about it. Because I know, not think, I know simply by probability, that people more intelligent and inventive than Einstein or Newtown or Bruno or Fibonacci have been born and died in total obscurity or even worse, complete bondage. Our euro-centric, misogynistic bigoted, small-minded system has made it so people have been born, maybe lived a life, and died, people who had the natural ability to save us from this fate, yet were never heard from. Simply because they weren’t born in the right place, or to the right parents, with the right skin color, gender, they didn’t worship the right god, or didn’t “love” the right way. There’s no time for this bullshit anymore.
I take a moment to mention though that even if we weren’t facing the end of life on Earth (and yes thus may end up worse than the Permian Extinction), there is no justification for how we treat people. Even without this crisis, the only ethical, moral, logical way forward for humanity would be to abolish all these old prejudices and hatred and work together in our common purpose to explore and discover what all this really is, what we really are. Simply put, fuck your primitive hangups and economy. There’s a whole Universe out there waiting for us to come say hi, and you want to waste it all because you think (pick whatever minority group you want) are somehow not as deserving as you are to a made up system which distributes resources based on perceived value in work which is often completely unnecessary, or usually outright destructive, for life.
But right now, looking out to the stars is secondary, we don’t have the technology or energy to reach out that far. We need to get everyone together today, not tomorrow, not a week from next Tuesday, not next year. This can’t want for the next generation to work it out. Today, now, we need to come together, give everyone a chance at an education, clean water, air, and food. People shouldn’t be commodities to be exploited for profit and discarded when the shareholders demand a larger dividend. Our system is more than inherently destructive to our environment and very survival, it is destructive to being human.
We need all hands on deck, we need to mitigate and delay, so we can take all the best ideas and figure out how to survive, and how to try and preserve as much biodiversity as we can. Maybe we do have to take as much as we can off-world in some sort of generational ship, or preservational ship. But if we can’t get out of our own way now, and I mean right now, we cannot possible hope to survive.
So yes, I’m going to be terse sometimes, I’m going to be mean sometimes. I’m not going to be patient. I’m not going to rely on the system which caused this to fix it. The system demonstrably can’t fix this problem. There’s no bandaid to slap on society to make this one all better. This requires a complete change, and it needs to be fairly immediate. Science has been warning us about Climate Change since the late 40s! The realization that we are in the next great extinction event is a little newer, but it is not met with the same sort of urgency one would think such a thing would inspire.
Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!
*Another Editor’s Note: At the time of publishing, all Hell has broken loose in the USA. Once some dust clears, I will comment.
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