Reporting from amidst fields of fracking wells in Colorado, Trinity La Fay writes about the conscious experience of being in relationship to the place she lives, and the disconnect between people and land needed to maintain the destruction.
On the Colorado Rising website, the maps of oil and gas rigs light up the area just above where I live, past my friend’s house halfway up the state, all the way up and out along the plain in a great sweep. Like some demented statistical X, the active wells appear in a sea of blue dots: the abandoned wells. Combined, they swarm completely around the jagged Rocky Mountains, a rising, desperate sea of exploitation.
I remember when the word fracking was used as a supplemental television curse. The way that they said it seemed perfect, as if they understood that it was a primary contributing source of the doom. The story was about a people who, ejected from a poisonous Earth, had colonized in space only to be pursued repeatedly by a predatory cybernetic race. A race they had created. I think stories are important. So does Joseph Campbell, but, as Mary Daly quotes him regarding child victims of sati (the Hindu practice of burning widows alive in the funeral pyres of their late husbands):
“In spite of these signs of suffering and even panic in the actual moment of the pain of suffocation, we should certainly not think the mental state and experience of these individuals after any model of our own more or less imaginable reactions to such a fate, for these sacrifices were not properly individuals at all.”
While I have visions of flickering relatives keening at the river’s edge, smell burning hair, feel the air being sucked from my lungs: he does not imagine their stories are relevant to his experiences.
So, harrumph.
Scrolling out on the Drilling Maps.com site, I see that we, at least, have the resistance of Mountain Range.
Texas; Oklahoma; Louisiana; Mississippi; Kansas; Michigan; the border between North Dakota and Montana. Just about every square inch from Cleveland, Ohio to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Charleston, West Virginia: like fire, the red dots blend. The names of places are all but erased behind them. I cannot see Arkansas written, but I know it is there. From Pennsylvania’s border with New York; all the way down California; all the way up from the Gulf of Mexico to the ice of the Beaufort Sea.
From the Great Lakes down to the Rio Grande; like a ring of fire around the coast of South America, like accidents waiting to happen from the Gulf of Oman to the Barents Sea; like sinking islands from the Arabian Sea to the Yellow Sea to the Tasman Sea. From the North to the South Pacific: companies know no boundaries.
The beneficiaries of these companies, the responsible, I wonder if they learn these names.
I wonder if they are all unreachably psychopathic, or stupid, or if it matters. The dead squirrel on the road; the stoodup friend; the barren landscape full of ghosts: to their experience, it does not matter if it was cruelty or carelessness.
Besides making it possible to set aflame the now undrinkable water that results from such enterprise, whose footage abounds online, Elementa, Science of the Anthropocene, hosts a special collection forum of “Oil and Natural Gas Development: Air Quality, Climate Science and Policy” wherein an article by Chelsea R Thompson, Jacques Hueber and Detlev Helmig, entitled Influence of oil and gas emissions on ambient atmospheric non-methane hydrocarbons in residential areas of Northeastern Colorado discusses ozone levels and calls it abstract.
Like Paul R. EhrlichPaul R. Ehrlich and Carl Sagan in The Cold and The Dark: The World After Nuclear War, everyone agrees that this is not working. Unlike that pivotal conference, however, modern realizations are lost in a desperate sea of distractions. Here is what The Cold and The Dark said abstractly:
“- survivors would face starvation [as] global disruption of the biosphere could ensue. In any event, there would be severe consequences, even in the areas not affected directly, because of the interdependence of the world economy. In either case the extinction of a large fraction of the Earth’s animals, plants, and microorganisms seems possible. The population size of Homo sapiens conceivably could be reduced to prehistoric levels or below, and extinction of the human species itself cannot be excluded.”
Boundaries are underrated.
According to me. Lots of people like to travel; I’m not into it. I have fallen in love with every landscape I’ve seen, but then, I didn’t get to know them. I live in a hard place that I know very well. Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson have a wonderful conversation during which they speak about the necessity of listening to the Others that are places to care for and live with them, and also the joy of being of a place: the intimacy that comes from noticing what cannot be observed in passing. It can be argued that Amber is ancient light that has been stored and that Jet is ancient darkness. Like Saga, they keep our stories. Shale; Oil; Gas; Tar: these exhumed ancestors seem to bellow as they burn that we wake sleeping titans at our peril. Or, as the article put it:
“The findings presented here suggest that oil and gas emissions have a large-scale regional impact on ambient [non methane hydrocarbons] levels, thereby impacting a large population of [-] residents, and representing a large area source of ozone precursors. The short-chain alkanes exhibit strong correlations with propane in Erie/Longmont, Platteville, and within Denver, supporting the conclusion of widespread impact of [oil and natural gas] emissions.”
They recommend further monitoring.
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
Ehrlich, Paul & Harte, John & Harwell, Mark & Raven, P & Sagan, C & Woodwell, George & Berry, Joseph & Ayensu, E & Ehrlich, A & Eisner, T. (1984).Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War. Science (New York, N.Y.). 222. 1293. 10.1126/science.6658451.
“You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you’re not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.”
—Bill Ayers, cofounder of the Weather Underground.
A black tern weighs barely two ounces. On energy reserves less than a small bag of M&M’s and wings that stretch to cover twelve inches, she flies thousands of miles, searching for the wetlands that will harbor her young. Every year the journey gets longer as the wetlands are desiccated for human demands. Every year the tern, desperate and hungry, loses, while civilization, endless and sanguineous, wins.
A polar bear should weigh 650 pounds. Her energy reserves are meant to see her through nine long months of dark, denned gestation, and then lactation, when she will give up her dwindling stores to the needy mouths of her species’ future. But in some areas, the female’s weight before hibernation has already dropped from 650 to 507 pounds. Meanwhile, the ice has evaporated like the wetlands. When she wakes, the waters will stretch impassably open, and there is no Abrahamic god of bears to part them for her.
The Aldabra snail should weigh something, but all that’s left to weigh are skeletons, bits of orange and indigo shells. The snail has been declared not just extinct, but the first casualty of global warming. In dry periods, the snail hibernated. The young of any species are always more vulnerable, as they have no reserves from which to draw. In this case, the adults’ “reproductive success” was a “complete failure.” In plain terms, the babies died and kept dying, and a species millions of years old is now a pile of shell fragments.
What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair?
We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That’s 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.
There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There’s no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman’s excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We’ve all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong?
There are voices raised in concern, even anguish, at the plight of the earth, the rending of its species. “Only zero emissions can prevent a warmer planet,” one pair of climatologists declare. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, states bluntly that global warming has passed the tipping point, carbon offsetting is a joke, and “individual lifestyle adjustments” are “a deluded fantasy.” It’s all true, and self-evident.
“Simple living” should start with simple observation: if burning fossil fuels will kill the planet, then stop burning them.
But that conclusion, in all its stark clarity, is not the popular one to draw. The moment policy makers and environmental groups start offering solutions is the exact moment when they stop telling the truth, inconvenient or otherwise. Google “global warming solutions.” The first paid sponsor, Campaign Earth, urges “No doom and gloom!! When was the last time depression got you really motivated? We’re here to inspire realistic action steps and stories of success.” By “realistic” they don’t mean solutions that actually match the scale of the problem. They mean the usual consumer choices—cloth shopping bags, travel mugs, and misguided dietary advice—which will do exactly nothing to disrupt the troika of industrialization, capitalism, and patriarchy that is skinning the planet alive.
As Derrick has pointed out elsewhere, even if every American took every single action suggested by Al Gore it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent. Aric tells a stark truth: even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average American’s annual one ton of garbage production, “your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That’s thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste.”
Industrialism itself is what has to stop.
There is no kinder, greener version that will do the trick of leaving us a living planet. In blunt terms, industrialization is a process of taking entire communities of living beings and turning them into commodities and dead zones. Could it be done more “efficiently”? Sure, we could use a little less fossil fuels, but it still ends in the same wastelands of land, water, and sky. We could stretch this endgame out another twenty years, but the planet still dies. Trace every industrial artifact back to its source—which isn’t hard, as they all leave trails of blood—and you find the same devastation: mining, clear-cuts, dams, agriculture. And now tar sands, mountaintop removal, wind farms (which might better be called dead bird and bat farms).
No amount of renewables is going to make up for the fossil fuels or change the nature of the extraction, both of which are prerequisites for this way of life. Neither fossil fuels nor extracted substances will ever be sustainable; by definition, they will run out. Bringing a cloth shopping bag to the store, even if you walk there in your Global Warming Flip-Flops, will not stop the tar sands. But since these actions also won’t disrupt anyone’s life, they’re declared both realistic and successful.
The next site’s Take Action page includes the usual: buying light bulbs, inflating tires, filling dishwashers, shortening showers, and rearranging the deck chairs. It also offers the ever-crucial Global Warming Bracelets and, more importantly, Flip-Flops. Polar bears everywhere are weeping with relief.
The first noncommercial site is the Union of Concerned Scientists. As one might expect, there are no exclamation points, but instead a statement that “[t]he burning of fossil fuel (oil, coal, and natural gas) alone counts for about 75 percent of annual CO2 emissions.” This is followed by a list of Five Sensible Steps. Step One? No, not stop burning fossil fuels—“Make Better Cars and SUVs.” Never mind that the automobile itself is the pollution, with its demands—for space, for speed, for fuel—in complete opposition to the needs of both a viable human community and a living planet. Like all the others, the scientists refuse to call industrial civilization into question. We can have a living planet and the consumption that’s killing the planet, can’t we?
The principle here is very simple.
As Derrick has written, “[A]ny social system based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition unsustainable.” Just to be clear, nonrenewable means it will eventually run out. Once you’ve grasped that intellectual complexity, you can move on to the next level. “Any culture based on the nonrenewable use of renewable resources is just as unsustainable.” Trees are renewable. But if we use them faster than they can grow, the forest will turn to desert. Which is precisely what civilization has been doing for its 10,000 year campaign, running through soil, rivers, and forests as well as metal, coal, and oil. Now the oceans are almost dead and their plankton populations are collapsing, populations that both feed the life of the oceans and create oxygen for the planet.
What will we fill our lungs with when they are gone? The plastics with which industrial civilization is replacing them? In parts of the Pacific, plastic outweighs plankton 48 to 1. Imagine if it were your blood, your heart, crammed with toxic materials—not just chemicals, but physical gunk—until there was ten times more of it than you. What metaphor is adequate for the dying plankton? Cancer? Suffocation? Crucifixion?
But the oceans don’t need our metaphors. They need action. They need industrial civilization to stop destroying and devouring. In other words, they need us to make it stop.
Which is why we are writing this book.
THE DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE BOOK
Strategy to Save the Planet:
by Mojtaba Sadegh (Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, Boise State University), Ata Akbari Asanjan (Research Scientist, Ames Research Center, NASA), and Mohammad Reza Alizadeh (Ph.D. Student, McGill University) / The Conversation
Two wildfires erupted on the outskirts of cities near Los Angeles, forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate their homes Monday as powerful Santa Ana winds swept the flames through dry grasses and brush. With strong winds and extremely low humidity, large parts of California were under red flag warnings.
High fire risk days have been common this year as the 2020 wildfire season shatters records across the West.
What caused the 2020 fire season to become so extreme?
Fires thrive on three elements: heat, dryness and wind. The 2020 season was dry, but the Western U.S. has seen worse droughts in the recent decade. It had several record-breaking heat waves, but the fires did not necessarily follow the locations with the highest temperatures.
What 2020 did have was heat and dryness hitting simultaneously. When even a moderate drought and heat wave hit a region at the same time, along with wind to fan the flames, it becomes a powerful force that can fuel megafires.
That’s what we’ve been seeing in California, Colorado and Oregon this year. Research shows it’s happening more often with higher intensity, and affecting ever-increasing areas.
Climate change intensified dry-hot extremes
We are scientistsandengineers who study climate extremes, including wildfires. Our research shows that the probability of a drought and heat wave occurring at the same time in the U.S. has increased significantly over the past century.
The kind of dry and hot conditions that would have been expected to occur only once every 25 years on average have occurred five to 10 times in several regions of the U.S. over the past quarter-century. Even more alarming, we found that extreme dry-hot conditions that would have been expected only once every 75 years have occurred three to six times in many areas over the same period.
We also found that what triggers these simultaneous extremes appears to be changing.
During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the lack of rainfall allowed the air to become hotter, and that process fueled simultaneous dry and hot conditions. Today, excess heat is a larger driver of dry-hot conditions than lack of rain.
This has important implications for the future of dry-hot extremes.
Warmer air can hold more moisture, so as global temperatures rise, evaporation can suck more water from plants and soil, leading to drier conditions. Higher temperatures and drier conditions mean vegetation is more combustible. A study in 2016 calculated that the excess heat from human-caused climate change was responsible for nearly doubling the amount of Western U.S. forest that burned between 1979 and 2015.
Worryingly, we have also found that these dry-hot wildfire-fueling conditions can feed on one another and spread downwind.
When soil moisture is low, more solar radiation will turn into sensible heat – heat you can feel. That heat evaporates more water and further dries the environment. This cycle continues until a large-scale weather pattern breaks it. The heat can also trigger the same feedback loop in a neighboring region, extending the dry-hot conditions and raising the probability of dry-hot extremes across broad stretches of the country.
All of this translates into higher wildfire risk for the Western U.S.
In Southern California, for example, we found that the number of dry-hot-windy days has increased at a greater rate than dry, hot or windy days individually over the past four decades, tripling the number of megafire danger days in the region.
2020 wasn’t normal, but what is normal?
If 2020 has proved anything, it is to expect the unexpected.
Before this year, Colorado had not recorded a fire of over 10,000 acres starting in October. This year, the East Troublesome fire grew from about 20,000 acres to over 100,000 acres in less than 24 hours on Oct. 21, and it was nearly 200,000 acres by the time a snowstorm stopped its advance. Instead of going skiing, hundreds of Coloradans evacuated their homes and nervously watched whether that fire would merge with another giant blaze.
This is not “the new normal” – it’s the new abnormal. In a warming climate, looking at what happened in the past no longer offers a sense of what to expect in the future.
There are other drivers of the rise in fire damage. More people moving into wildland areas means there are more cars and power lines and other potential ignition sources. Historical efforts to control fires have also meant more undergrowth in areas that would have naturally burned periodically in smaller fires.
The question now is how to manage this “new abnormal” in the face of a warming climate.
In the U.S., one in three houses are built in the wildland-urban interface. Development plans, construction techniques and building codes can do more to account for wildfire risks, including avoiding flammable materials and potential sources of sparks. Importantly, citizens and policymakers need to tackle the problem at its root: That includes cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.
This article was written by BYROBERT HUNZIKER and originally published in CounterPunch on OCTOBER 20, 2020. Robert offers the reader multiple sources of evidence regarding the nature of large-scale permafrost thawing including the impact of the release of greenhouse gases and the potential for a feedback loop.
Twenty-five percent (25%) of the Northern Hemisphere is permafrost. By all appearances, it is melting well beyond natural background rates, in fact, substantially!
Making matters much, much worse, new research has identified past warming events of large-scale permafrost thaw in the Arctic that may be analogous to today, thus spotting a parallel problem of large-scale thawing accompanied by massively excessive carbon emissions spewing into the atmosphere, like there’s no tomorrow.
Permafrost thawing is not, at all times, simply “thawing.”
Of course, as a standalone, the word “thawing” implies a rather evenly keeled methodical process without any specific definition of scale. But, there’s thawing, and then, there’s “large-scale thawing,” which is kinda like turning loose a behemoth. The results are never pretty.
As global warming powers up, like it’s doing now, it has a penchant for finding enormous spans of frozen mud and silt filled with iced-species in quasi-permanent frozen states known as permafrost. As it melts, it’s full of surprises, some interesting, as well as some that are horribly dangerous, for example, emitting huge quantities of carbon, thus kicking into high gear some level of runaway global warming that threatens to wipeout agriculture.
As a matter of fact, according to the research, no more than a few degrees of warming, only a few, can trigger abrupt thaws of vast frozen land thereby releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases as a product of collapsing landscapes, and it feeds upon itself. Indeed, the research effort identified “surges in greenhouse gas emissions… on a massive scale,” Ibid.
The study suggests that massive permafrost ecosystem thawing is subject to indeterminate timing sequences, but it’s armed with a “sensitive trigger” abruptly altering the landscape in massive fashion.
In short, an event could arise out of the blue. It’s well known that Arctic permafrost holds considerably more carbon captured in a frozen state than has already been emitted into the atmosphere.
Already, over just the past two years, other field studies have shown instances where thawing permafrost is 70 years ahead of scientists’ models, prompting the thought that thawing may be cranking up even as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fails to anticipate it.
After all, permafrost is not included in the IPCC’s carbon budget, meaning signatories to the Paris accord of 2015 will need to recalculate their quest to save the world from too much carbon emitting too fast for any kind of smooth functionality of the planet’s climate system. In turn, it undoubtedly negatively impacts the support, or lack thereof, for food-growing regions, which could actually collapse, similar to cascading dominos. Poof!
In the Canadian High Arctic: “Observed maximum thaw depths at our sites are already exceeding those projected to occur by 2090.”
According to Susan Natali of Woods Hole Research Center (Massachusetts) the Arctic has already transformed from a carbon sink to a carbon emitter: “Given that the Arctic has been taking up carbon for tens of thousands of years, this shift to a carbon source is important because it highlights a new dynamic in the functioning of the Earth System.”
A 14-year study referenced by Dr. Natali shows annualized 1.66 gigatonnes CO2 emitted from the Arctic versus 1.03 gigatonnes absorbed, a major turning point in paleoclimate history.
A chilling turn for the worse that threatens 10,000 years of our wonderful Holocene era “not too hot, not too cold.” Alas, that spectacular Goldilocks life of perfection is rapidly becoming a remembrance of the past.
Additionally, according to Vladimir Romanovsky – Permafrost Laboratory, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) there are definitive geophysical signs of permafrost that survived thousands of years now starting to thaw. As stated by Romanovsky: “The new research is yet more evidence that the amplified warming in the Arctic can release carbon at a massive scale.”
Nobody knows how soon such an event will break loose in earnest, but global warming has already penetrated the upper permafrost layers, as cliffs of coastal permafrost are collapsing at an accelerating rate.
In short, the current news about thawing/collapsing permafrost is decidedly negative and a threat to life, as we know it.
The Martens’ study conclusively states: “The results from this study on large-scale OC remobilization from permafrost are consistent with a growing set of observational records from the Arctic Ocean and provide support for modeling studies that simulated large injections of CO2 into the atmosphere during deglaciation. This demonstrates that Arctic warming by only a few degrees may suffice to abruptly activate large-scale permafrost thawing, indicating a sensitive trigger for a threshold-like permafrost climate change feedback.”
Thus, as the Holocene era wanes right before humanity’s eyes, the Anthropocene, the age of humans, stands on the world stage all alone with its own shadow and with ever fewer, and fewer, and fewer vertebrates roaming amongst fields of scorched, blackened plant life. What, or who, will it eat?
According to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and world-renowned biologist E.O. Wilson:
If we choose the path of destruction, the planet will continue to descend irreversibly into the Anthropocene Epoch, the biologically final age in which the planet exists almost exclusively by, for, and of ourselves.
You can access the full article in its original form here:
Connie Barlow is a leading advocate for the “assisted migration” of native trees poleward in this time of rapid climate change. Beginning in 2004 in a paper cowritten with Pleistocene ecologist Paul S. Martin titled, “Bring Torreya taxifolia North — Now,” Barlow’s advocacy subsequently expanded to include even common native trees of North America.
The following video introduces a learning and action series for helping trees adapt to climate change — species by species, decade by decade. This is not a replacement for stopping the burning of fossil fuels, logging, and other carbon emissions sources, but it is necessary addition.
In her series, Barlow invites citizen naturalists are invited to research a favorite native tree species and begin to work with others to keep up with the northward movement of forest zones by planting and monitoring small numbers of wild seeds of common species onto private forested lands well north of where those seeds were collected.
This “assisted migration” in a time of unprecedented climate shift will be increasingly necessary in the decades ahead. Foresters can create the maps to show us where species will need to move to. But we citizen naturalists will play a complementary role in ensuring that the full diversity of genotypes keeps pace with a warming and drying continent.
Importantly, human action will mimic what birds, rodents, and other native seed dispersers have been able to accomplish on their own in previous periods of Earth history, when warming occurred at a slower, more natural pace.
Note: Three tree paintings by Illinois artist Mary Southard are included, as are several still shots from the 20th-century classic animated short film, “The Man Who Planted Trees.”
The series host, Connie Barlow, is the founder of the citizen activist group Torreya Guardians. She is the author of “The Ghosts of Evolution.”
This is the fourth part in the series. In the previous essays, we have explored the need for a collapse, the relationship between a Dyson sphere and overcomsumption, and our blind pursuit for ‘progress.’ In this piece, Elisabeth describes how the Dyson sphere is an extension of the drive for so-called “green energy.”
Techno-utopians imagine the human population on Earth can be saved from collapse using energy collected with a Dyson Sphere–a vast solar array surrounding the sun and funneling energy back to Earth–to build and power space ships. In these ships, we’ll leave the polluted and devastated Earth behind to venture into space and populate the solar system. Such a fantasy is outlined in “Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis” and is a story worthy of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It says, in so many words: we’ve trashed this planet, so let’s go find another one.
In their report, Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino present a model that shows, with continued population growth and deforestation at current rates, we have a less than 10% chance of avoiding catastrophic collapse of civilization within the next few decades. Some argue that a deliberate and well-managed collapse would be better than the alternatives. Bologna and Aquino present two potential solutions to this situation. One is to develop the Dyson Sphere technology we can use to escape the bonds of our home planet and populate the solar system. The other is to change the way we (that is, those of us living in industrial and consumer society) live on this planet into a ‘cultural society’, one not driven primarily by economy and consumption, in order to sustain the population here on Earth.
The authors acknowledge that the idea of using a Dyson Sphere to provide all the energy we need to populate the solar system is unrealistic, especially in the timeframe to avoid collapse that’s demonstrated by their own work. They suggest that any attempt to develop such technology, whether to “live in extraterrestrial space or develop any other way to sustain population of the planet” will take too long given current rates of deforestation. As Salonika describes in an earlier article in this series, “A Dyson Sphere will not stop collapse“, any attempt to create such a fantastical technology would only increase the exploitation of the environment.
Technology makes things worse
The authors rightly acknowledge this point, noting that “higher technological level leads to growing population and higher forest consumption.” Attempts to develop the more advanced technology humanity believes is required to prevent collapse will simply speed up the timeframe to collapse. However, the authors then contradict themselves and veer back into fantasy land when they suggest that higher technological levels can enable “more effective use of resources” and can therefore lead, in principle, to “technological solutions to prevent the ecological collapse of the planet.”
Techno-utopians often fail to notice that we have the population we do on Earth precisely because we have used technology to increase the effectiveness (and efficiency) of fossil fuels and other resources* (forests, metals, minerals, water, land, fish, etc.). Each time we increase ‘effective use’ of these resources by developing new technology, the result is an increase in resource use that drives an increase in population and development, along with the pollution and ecocide that accompanies that development. The agricultural ‘green revolution’ is a perfect example of this: advances in technology enabled new high-yield cereals as well as new fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, and mechanization, all of which prevented widespread famine, but also contributed to an ongoing explosion in population, development, chemical use, deforestation, land degradation and salinization, water pollution, top soil loss, and biodiversity loss around the world.
As economist William Stanley Jevons predicted in 1865, increasing energy efficiency with advances in technology leads to more energy use. Extrapolating from his well-proved prediction, it should be obvious that new technology will not prevent ecological collapse; in fact, such technology is much more likely to exacerbate it.
This mistaken belief that new technology can save us from collapse pervades the policies and projects of governments around the world.
Projects like the Green New Deal, the Democrat Party’s recently published climate plan, and the UN’s sustainable development goals and IPCC recommendations. All these projects advocate for global development and adoption of ‘clean technology’ and ‘clean industry’ (I’m not sure what those terms mean, myself); ’emissions-free’ energy technologies like solar, wind, nuclear and hydropower; and climate change mitigation technologies like carbon capture and storage, smart grids, artificial intelligence, and geo-engineering. They tout massive growth in renewable energy production from wind and solar, and boast about how efficient and inexpensive these technologies have become, implying that all will be well if we just keep innovating new technologies on our well worn path of progress.
Miles and miles of solar panels, twinkling like artificial lakes in the middle of deserts and fields; row upon row of wind turbines, huge white metal beasts turning wind into electricity, and mountain tops and prairies into wasteland; massive concrete dams choking rivers to death to store what we used to call water, now mere embodied energy stored to create electrons when we need them–the techno-utopians claim these so-called clean’ technologies can replace the black gold of our present fantasies–fossil fuels–and save us from ourselves with futuristic electric fantasies instead.
All these visions are equally implausible in their capacity to save us from collapse.
And while solar panels, wind turbines, and dams are real, in the sense that they exist–unlike the Dyson Sphere–all equally embody the utter failure of imagination we humans seem unable to transcend. Some will scoff at my dismissal of these electric visions, and say that imagining and inventing new technologies is the pinnacle of human achievement. With such framing, the techno-utopians have convinced themselves that creating new technologies to solve the problems of old technologies is progress. This time it will be different, they promise.
And yet if you look at the graph of global primary energy consumption:
it should be obvious to any sensible person that new, so-called ‘clean’ energy-producing technologies are only adding to that upward curve of the graph, and are not replacing fossil fuels in any meaningful way. Previous research has shown that “total national [US] energy use from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use and, focussing specifically on electricity, each unit of electricity generated by non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity.”
In part, this is due to the fossil fuel energy required to mine, refine, manufacture, install, maintain, and properly dispose of materials used to make renewable and climate mitigation technologies. Mining is the most destructive human activity on the planet, and a recent University of Queensland study found that mining the minerals and metals required for renewable energy technology could threaten biodiversity more than climate change. However, those who use the word “clean” to describe these technologies conveniently forget to mention these problems.
Wind turbines and solar arrays are getting so cheap; they are being built to reduce the cost of the energy required to frack gas: thus, the black snake eats its own tail. “Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash”, a recent headline blares, above an article that makes no suggestion that perhaps it’s time to cut back a little on energy use. Because they cannot be recycled, most wind turbine blades end up in landfill, where they will contaminate the soil and ground water long after humanity is a distant memory. Forests in the southeast and northwest of the United States are being decimated for high-tech biomass production because of a loophole in EU carbon budget policy that counts biomass as renewable and emissions free. Dams have killed the rivers in the US Pacific Northwest, and salmon populations are collapsing as a result. I could go on.
The lies we tell ourselves
Just like the Dyson Sphere, these and other technologies we fantasize will save our way of life from collapse are delusions on a grand scale. The governor of my own US state of Washington boasts about how this state’s abundant “clean” hydropower energy will help us create a “clean” economy, while at the same time he fusses about the imminent extinction of the salmon-dependent Southern Resident Orca whales. I wonder: does he not see the contradiction, or is he willfully blind to his own hypocrisy?
The face of the Earth is a record of human sins (1), a ledger written in concrete and steel; the Earth twisted into skyscrapers and bridges, plows and combines, solar panels and wind turbines, mines and missing mountains; with ink made from chemical waste and nuclear contamination, plastic and the dead bodies of trees. The skies, too, tell our most recent story. Once source of inspiration and mythic tales, in the skies we now see airplanes and contrails, space junk and satellites we might once have mistaken for shooting stars, but can no longer because there are so many; with vision obscured by layers of too much PM2.5 and CO2 and NOx and SO2 and ozone and benzene. In the dreams of techno-utopians, we see space ships leaving a rotting, smoking Earth behind.
One of many tales of our Earthly sins is deforestation.
As the saying goes, forests precede us, and deserts follow; Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino chose a good metric for understanding and measuring our time left on Earth. Without forests, there is no rain and the middles of continents become deserts. It is said the Middle East, a vast area we now think of as primarily desert, used to be covered in forests so thick and vast the sunlight never touched the ground (2). Without forests, there is no home for species we’ve long since forgotten we are connected to in that web of life we imagine ourselves separate from, looking down from above as techno-gods on that dirty, inconvenient thing we call nature, protected by our bubble of plastic and steel. Without forests, there is no life.
One part of one sentence in the middle of the report gives away man’s original sin: it is when the authors write, “our model does not specify the technological mechanism by which the successful trajectories are able to find an alternative to forests and avoid collapse“. Do they fail to understand that there is no alternative to forests? That no amount of technology, no matter how advanced–no Dyson Sphere; no deserts full of solar panels; no denuded mountain ridges lined with wind turbines; no dam, no matter how wide or high; no amount of chemicals injected into the atmosphere to reflect the sun–will ever serve as an “alternative to forests”? Or are they willfully blind to this fundamental fact of this once fecund and now dying planet that is our only home?
A different vision
I’d like to give the authors the benefit of the doubt, as they end their report with a tantalizing reference to another way of being for humans, when they write, “we suggest that only civilisations capable of a switch from an economical society to a sort of ‘cultural’ society in a timely manner, may survive.” They do not expand on this idea at all. As physicists, perhaps the authors didn’t feel like they had the freedom to do so in a prestigious journal like Nature, where, one presumes, scientists are expected to stay firmly in their own lanes.
Having clearly made their case that civilized humanity can expect a change of life circumstance fairly soon, perhaps they felt it best to leave to others the responsibility and imagination for this vision. Such a vision will require not just remembering who we are: bi-pedal apes utterly dependent on the natural world for our existence. It will require a deep listening to the forests, the rivers, the sky, the rain, the salmon, the frogs, the birds… in short, to all the pulsing, breathing, flowing, speaking communities we live among but ignore in our rush to cover the world with our innovations in new technology.
Paul Kingsnorth wrote: “Spiritual teachers throughout history have all taught that the divine is reached through simplicity, humility, and self-denial: through the negation of the ego and respect for life. To put it mildly, these are not qualities that our culture encourages. But that doesn’t mean they are antiquated; only that we have forgotten why they matter.”
New technologies, real or imagined, and the profits they bring is what our culture reveres.
Building dams, solar arrays, and wind turbines; experimenting with machines to capture CO2 from the air and inject SO2 into the troposphere to reflect the sun; imagining Dyson Spheres powering spaceships carrying humanity to new frontiers–these efforts are all exciting; they appeal to our sense of adventure, and align perfectly with a culture of progress that demands always more. But such pursuits destroy our souls along with the living Earth just a little bit more with each new technology we invent.
This constant push for progress through the development of new technologies and new ways of generating energy is the opposite of simplicity, humility, and self-denial. So, the question becomes: how can we remember the pleasures of a simple, humble, spare life? How can we rewrite our stories to create a cultural society based on those values instead? We have little time left to find an answer.
* I dislike the word resources to refer to the natural world; I’m using it here because it’s a handy word, and it’s how most techno-utopians refer to mountains, rivers, rocks, forests, and life in general.
