This is the first in a series of articles reflecting on a recent study which predicts collapse of industrial society within a few decades. By destroying the ecological foundation on which all life depends, civilization makes collapse inevitable. Max Wilbert describes the destruction caused by the industrial civilization, and what we can do for a just transition to a more sustainable way of life.
The report, published on May 6th by Dr. Gerardo Aquino, a research associate at the Alan Turing Institute in London, and Professor Mauro Bologna of the Depratment of Electronic Engineering at the University of Tarapacá in Chile, uses statistical and logistical modeling to look at destruction of the planet, and specifically focuses on deforestation and population growth.
By plugging in statistics and trends in resource consumption and running thousands of model-runs with different assumptions, Aquio and Bologna predict the most likely course of future human society.
The researchers conclude that civilization has a “very low probability, less than 10% in the optimistic estimate, to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse.”
On top of this, civilization (and it’s modern form, industrial civilization) is causing a global mass extinction event, changing the composition of the atmosphere and instigating global climate change, polluting the highest mountains and deepest ocean trenches with industrial chemicals and plastics, desertifying and eroding vast portions of the planet’s soils via agriculture, and fragmenting and shattering what habitat does remain intact via networks of roads and urbanization.
Most people perceive collapse as a terrible thing, and indeed a global collapse will result in a great deal of suffering, disease, and death. But the reality is, a vast amount of suffering is happening now, caused by the continued functioning of industrial civilization. A full forty percent of all human deaths are caused by air, water, and soil pollution according to Cornell research. The CoViD-19 pandemic is a direct result of civilization and the destruction of forests.
On top of this, collapse at this point may be inevitable. As the book Deep Green Resistance explains, “We are in overshoot as a species. A significant portion of the people now alive may have to die before we are back under carrying capacity, and that disparity is growing. Every day carrying capacity is driven down by hundreds of thousands of humans, and every day the human population increases by more than 200,000. The people added to the overshoot each day are needless, pointless deaths. Delaying collapse, they argue, is itself a form of mass murder.”
If you are concerned about this, as I am, as we all should be, you should be working to relocalize food production and smooth the transition away from industrial agriculture. Collapse has both positive aspects (declines in pollution, reduction in logging, end of international shipping, reduction in energy consumption, etc.) and negative aspects (collapse of social structures, medical systems, increased demands on local forests, etc.). These need to be managed and prepared for.
In the long-term, collapse will benefit both humans and nature by stopping industrial civilization and its pollution, global warming, desertification, and so on. Another physicist, Tim Garrett from the University of Utah, has conducted research into global warming and concluded that “only complete economic collapse will prevent runaway global climate change.”
There are over 400 oceanic dead zones created by fertilizer and nutrient runoff from industrial farms. Only one has recovered: the dead zone in the Black Sea, which healed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crash of industrial farming in the area. The area is now home to healthy wildlife and fish populations which support a stronger local economy.
Ultimately, our health and success as human beings is inseparable from the health of the planet. To destroy the Earth for temporary enrichment a slow form of suicide. But deeper than that, it is matricide, patricide, fratricide. It is the murder of one’s own family. We will only thrive when the natural world, our kin, are thriving as well. Human beings are not doomed to destroy the planet. We can live in other ways, and indeed, that is our only hope.
Featured image by the author.
Our next piece will discuss how a Dyson sphere (one of the proposed “solutions” in the original article) will not save us from a collapse.
Today we share an excerpt of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. This selection comes from Chapter 2: Civilization and other Hazards. In the preceding pages, various ecological crises were presented.
The media report on these crises as though they [ecological crises] are all separate issues. They are not. They are inextricably entangled with each other and with the culture that causes them. As such, all of these problems have important commonalities, with major implications for our strategy to resist them.
These problems are urgent, severe, and worsening, and the most worrisome hazards share certain characteristics:
1. They are progressive, not probabilistic.
These problems are getting worse. These problems are not hypothetical, projected, or “merely possible” like Y 2K, asteroid impacts, nuclear war, or super-volcanoes. These crises are not “possible” or “impending”-they are well underway and will continue to worsen. The only uncertainty is how fast, and thus how long our window of action is.
2. They are rapid, but not instant.
These crises arose rapidly, but often not so rapidly as to trigger a prompt response; people get used to them, a phenomenon called the “shifting baselines syndrome.” For example, wildlife populations are often compared to measures from fifty years ago, instead of measures from before civilization, which makes the damage seem much less severe than it actually is. Even trends which appear slow at first glance (like global warming) are extremely rapid when considered over longer timescales, such as the duration of the human race or even the duration of civilization.
3. They are nonlinear, and sometimes runaway or self-sustaining.
The hazards get worse over time, but often in unpredictable ways with sudden spikes or discontinuities. A 10 percent increase of greenhouse gases might produce 10 percent warming or it might cause far more. Also, the various crises interact to create cascading disasters far worse than any one alone.
Hurricanes (such as Katrina) may be worsened by global warming and by habitat destruction in their paths (Katrina’s impact was worsened by wetlands destruction). The human impact may then be worsened further by poverty and the use of the police, military, and hired mercenaries (like Blackwater) to impede the ability of those poor people to move freely or access basic and necessary supplies.
4. These crises have long lead or lag times.
The problems are often created long before they become a visible issue. They also grow or accelerate exponentially, such that action must be taken well in advance of the crisis to be effective. Although an alert minority is usually aware of the issue, the problem may have become very serious and entrenched before gaining the attention, let alone the action, of the majority.
Peak oil was predicted with a high degree of accuracy in 1956. The greenhouse effect was discovered in 1824, and industrially caused global warming was predicted by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1867.
5. Hazards have deeply rooted momentum.
These crises are rooted in the most fundamental practices and infrastructure of civilization. Social convention, the concentration of power, and dominant economic systems all prevent the necessary changes. If I ran a corporation and tried to be genuinely sustainable, the company would soon be out-competed and go bankrupt.’ If I were a politician and I banned the majority of unsustainable practices, I would promptly be ejected from office (or more likely, assassinated).
6. They are industrially driven.
In virtually all cases, industry is the primary culprit, either because it consumes resources itself (e.g., oil and coal) or permits resource extraction and global trade that would otherwise be extremely difficult (e.g., bottom trawling) . Furthermore, industrial capitalism and industrial governments offer artificial subsidies for ecocidal practices that would not otherwise be economically tenable. Factors like overpopulation (as discussed shortly) are secondary or tertiary at best.
7. They provide benefits to the powerful and costs to the powerless.
The acts that cause these crises-all long-standing economic activities-offer short-term benefits to those who are already powerful. But these hazards are most dangerous and damaging to the people who are poorest and most powerless.
8. They facilitate temporary victories and permanent losses.
No successes we might have are guaranteed to last as long as industrial civilization stands. Conversely, most of our losses are effectively permanent. Extinct species cannot be resurrected. Overdrawn aquifers or clear-cut forests will not return to their original states on timescales meaningful to humans.
The destruction of land-based cultures, and the deliberate impoverishment of much of humanity, results in major loss and long-term social trauma. With sufficient action, it’s possible to solve many of the problems we face, but if that action doesn’t materialize in time, the effects are irreversible.
9. Proposed “solutions” often make things worse.
Because of all the qualities noted above, analysis of the hazards tends to be superficial and based on short-term thinking. Even though analysts who look at the big picture globally may use large amounts of data, they often refuse to ask deeper or more uncomfortable questions.
The hasty enthusiasm for industrial biofuels is one manifestation of this. Biofuels have been embraced by some as a perfect ecological replacement for petroleum. The problems with this are many, but chief among them is the simple fact that growing plants for vehicle fuel takes land the planet simply can’t spare. Soy, palm, and sugar cane plantations for oil and ethanol are now driving the destruction of tropical rainforest in the Amazon and Southeast Asia.
Critics like Jane Goodall and the Rainforest Action Network argue that the plantations on rainforest land destroy habitat and water cycles, worsen global warming, destroy and pollute the soil, and displace land-based peoples. This so-called solution to the catastrophe of petroleum ends up being just as bad-if not worse-than petroleum.
10. The hazards do not result from any single program.
They tend to result from the underlying structure and essential nature of civilization, not from any particular industry, technology, government, or social attitude. Even global warming, which is caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, is the result of many kinds of industries using many kinds of fossil fuels as well as deforestation and agriculture.
To learn more about the true environmental costs of renewable energy, read Bright Green Lies to be released in 2021.
Featured image depicts major floating garbage patches in the Pacific Ocean.
An unsustainable way of life is bound to end in collapse. Numerous civilizations and empires have met the same end. In this piece, Kara Huntermoon discusses patterns of civilization collapse.
Ecology is the basis of all economies. No human economic system can exist without the gifts of water, land, plants, animals, insects, air, and other members of our ecological communities. When capitalism treats “natural resources” as free and unlimited, it ignores the fact that these are living, spirit-filled entities who have needs, preferences, and boundaries. All over the world, we have already crossed their limits.
‘Economy’ means how humans meet their daily needs.
Human groups have options about how to meet their daily needs. Capitalism is only one option. It is a relatively new and short-lived option which is coming to an end. Capitalism is inherently oppressive and relies on separating people into constituencies which are given more or less power and privilege. Capitalism is also inherently destructive to the ecological basis of all life. It is not possible to have capitalism without oppression and ecological destruction.
Humans need direct relationships with ecology in order to receive feedback about whether their economic activities are enhancing, destroying, or neutral to the systems of life that support daily human needs. Ecological feedback is often so slow that multiple generations of humans must be engaged in the conversation before the feedback is understood and human communities are able to respond to the information. The information received through ecological relationships is often coded into religious practices and educational systems, including stories told to children.
‘Civilization’ means a human community organized around cities and their adjacent exploited ecological communities.
When human populations concentrate in cities, large areas of surrounding ecology are required to support urban human life, but the ‘consumers’ are not able to directly listen to the ecological feedback. Consequently, the human culture becomes disconnected from the information needed to support all life. Humans throughout time and place have tried organizing in urban centers and importing their needs from their surrounding ecology, including through empire (controlling adjacent ecological communities and importing goods from them).
No civilization has ever been sustainable. Civilizations collapse when the human-ecological relationship breaks down far enough for the ecology to be unable to continue supporting the urban infrastructure and population. Cities are not a sustainable way to organize human communities and ecologies. When city-states are organized into empires, the civilization collapses unevenly. In some areas, life seems to continue in a way that would support the city continuing. In other areas, cities collapse and are abandoned earlier in the widespread empire’s collapse.
‘Collapse’ means that social and physical infrastructure is abandoned or destroyed as it becomes obvious that it is obsolete. The amount of true wealth available from ecological relationships is no longer enough to maintain the unsustainable infrastructure. The amount of physical infrastructure decreases, the overall population of humans decreases, and a greater proportion of the human population returns to a direct relationship with ecological communities (subsistence agriculture, foraging, hunting).
The Early Stages of Civilization Collapse. During the early stages of an empire’s collapse, people flee collapsing cities and move to other cities that are not yet collapsing. Sometimes those cities collapse because of empire-related economic shifts (as in the “Rust Belt” cities of the US), sometimes because of ecological destruction (as in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or Paradise after the Camp Creek Fire). Regardless of the reason, the cities are not rebuilt because the ecological basis for creating true wealth (the capacity to meet human needs) is unable to support the rebuilding.
Later stages of collapse.
During later stages of an empire’s collapse, people flee cities to return to the countryside where they can grow food and attempt to meet their needs. There is a steep learning curve while the relationship communication between humans and their ecology is not robust enough to support the current human population size. People die because they do not know how to relate to the plants, animals, soils, and waters who support life. The conversation also begins with the ecological communities running at a deficit, impoverished by the collapsing civilization’s exploitation.
It takes time for recovery, relationship building, and forgiveness.
Historically speaking, the average time it takes a civilization to collapse is about 300 years. Civilizations collapse in a stair-step pattern, with large-scale economic shocks followed by partial recoveries. In our recent history, collapse shocks happened in the 1970s (“Energy Crisis”), in 2007 during the sub-prime mortgage crisis (“The Great Recession”), and now during the Covid-19 Pandemic (“The Global Downturn of 2020”).
Most of us remember the “Great Recession” and the Occupy Movement, and we have heard federal officials claim that the economy recovered from that and was booming (“the best ever” before Covid-19). Concurrent with these claims, visible markers of decline have led to an increase of the number of homeless people on the streets in most major cities, including Eugene. Buildings are demolished without funding to replace them, including Eugene’s City Hall. There is increasing personal and government debt and decreasing possibility of gaining stable well-paid employment, even with a college degree.
It is reasonable to assume that we are in the early stages of our civilization’s collapse, and that we will continue to see stair-step degradations in physical and social infrastructure.
Considering history, it is likely we will have a partial economic recovery after the pandemic ends. Considering climate change, we need to be prepared for further rapid down-steps as ecological shocks increase and spread. We may not live to see the end of our civilization, but we will see continued disorder, political circuses, domestic and international violence, and rapid economic shifts as a ‘new normal.’
Within seven generations, our descendents will see the end of our civilization.
Marked by a complete abandonment of city infrastructure and a return to direct relationship with ecological economies. There is much we can do now to prepare them. For the purpose of our own preparation for the future, we should assume that there will never be a recovery. This is it. Things will never “return to normal.” We are not going to get through this and continue our previous lives. We cannot expect our children to have access to the same privileges we have enjoyed.
How can we impact the way our communities respond to the Covid-19 Pandemic and the resulting economic crisis? In what ways can we support and organize alternatives to the current economic system and its inherent systems of oppression? How can we organize our own lives to be fully in service of sustainability and liberation? How can we reach for people we love, people in our neighborhoods, people in our workplaces, and model for them the changes we wish to see?
The pandemic will bring up early feelings that are not about present time.
Unhealed emotional scars from childhood can confuse us as we try to think about responding to novel situations. To help free our minds of early distresses, we can spend time journalling, talking to trusted loved ones, or meditating on the following: In what ways do you try to avoid suffering? What suffering of your earlier life do you never want to experience again? Go back there and give that young person a hand. You survived that. You won. It’s actually over, and you won. I know it doesn’t feel like you won; it feels like you barely escaped and you are irreparably harmed, no longer intact. But that is just a feeling.
The truth is that you won.
If you can make friends with those feelings―of loss, isolation, hopelessness, discouragement, terror, powerlessness―you will be able to notice that you are intact. You survived. You won. You get to have a big life now. You don’t have to settle for what you can salvage. You get to have people close-in who can fully support you.
We get to work together to make big lives for ourselves.
It is possible to see the current pandemic, economic collapse, and climate emergency as a fascinating challenge that will never stop giving us meaningful work to do.
It is possible to feel satisfied that we are fulfilling our reasons for coming to this life, that we are giving fully of our gifts to our communities.
Let us reach for each other, reach for full acceptance of ourselves at all stages of our lives, and reach for implementing our visions of a sustainable society in full communication with its ecological community.
Kara Huntermoon is one of seven co-owners of Heart-Culture Farm Community, near Eugene, Oregon. She spends most of her time in unpaid labor in service of community: child-raising, garden-growing, and emotion/relationship management among the community residents. She also teaches Liberation Listening, a form of co-counseling that focuses on ending oppression.
Featured image: Deep Green Resistance food distribution in response to the CoViD-19 pandemic.
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Right now, Deep Green Resistance organizers are at work building a political resistance resistance movement to defend the living planet and rebuild just, sustainable human communities.
In Manila, Kathmandu, Auckland, Denver, Paris—all over the world—we are building resistance and working towards revolution. We Need Your Help.
Not all of us can work from the front lines, but we can all contribute. Our radical, uncompromising stance comes at a price. Foundations and corporations won’t fund us because we are too radical. We operate on a shoestring budget (all our funding comes from small, grassroots donations averaging less than $50) and have only one paid staff.
Current funding levels aren’t sustainable for the long-term, even with our level of operations now. We need to expand our fundraising base significantly to build stronger resistance and grow our movement.
Whether by war, famine, resource depletion, socioeconomic failure, or destruction of the natural environment, all empires eventually crumble. What will happen when the collapse of the American empire culminates?
History is a graveyard of civilizations: the Western Chou, the Mayan, the Harappan, the Mesopotamian, the Olmec, the Chacoans, the Hohokam, the Mississippian, the Tiahuanaco, the Mycenean, the Roman, and countless others.
These societies were overrun by disease, or war, or famine. In most cases, they undermined their own ecological foundations—a situation that may sound familiar.
“Collapse,” writes archaeologist and historian Joseph Tainter, “is a recurrent feature of human societies.” But there is an important distinction to be made between societies that create an ideology of growth and an economy of ecological imperialism, and those that do not.
To choose two examples, both the San people of the Kalahari and the various Aboriginal Nations, in what is now Australia, existed in a more or less stable-state for tens of thousands of years. But these were not civilizations, according to the definition I am using. In other words, they were not ecological imperialists, but rather ecological participants.
For the average person living today in Washington D.C., Beijing, or London, the collapse of civilization is hard to fathom. Similarly, the people of ancient cities could not imagine their world crumbling around them—until it did.
Goods and services are traded around the world. The average dinner plate contains ingredients grown in five different nations. Rather than living in an empire with discrete boundaries, we live within a global civilization. It feels stable, permanent.
At least, it did until recently. The past month has upended many of our preconceptions. And the reality, of course, is that modern civilization is neither stable nor permanent. This society is destroying the ecological foundation that not only allows it to exist, but supports the fabric of life itself.
People living in rich nations are insulated from the reality of this ecological collapse, since our food no longer comes from the land where we live, but is imported from far away. Technology allows us to ignore the collapse of fish populations, of plankton populations, of topsoil. When the cod fisheries collapse, the industrial fishing corporations can simply begin to fish another far-flung corner of the globe, until that ocean too is devoid of fish. When the soil is lifeless, desiccated, and eroded, industrial farmers can simply apply more chemical fertilizers.
Modern life is based on the use of non-renewable resources, and on the over-exploitation of renewable resources. By definition, this cannot last.
The decline and fall of the American empire has already begun.
McCoy estimates that, no later than 2030, the US dollar will cease to the currency of global trade. This “reserve currency” status makes the US the center of the global economy, and directly provides the US economy with more than $100 billion in “free money” per year. As McCoy writes, “One of the prime benefits of global power is being on the winning side of grand imperial bargain: you get to send the nations of the world bundles of brightly colored paper, whether British pound notes or US Treasury bills, and they happily hand over goods of actual value like automobiles, minerals, or oil.” A fall from reserve currency status will lead, McCoy says, to sustained “rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness” in the United States.
“Will there be a soft landing for America thirty or forty years from now?
Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state.”
The mechanics of the decline and fall of the U.S. American empire have been well documented by others. But what hasn’t been discussed, and what I am interested in exploring here, is the implications of this decline and collapse for revolutionaries.
What will the decline of the American empire mean for those of us fighting for justice?
As revolutionaries, we must be “internationalists.” That is, we must understand and design our strategy in a way that confronts capitalism, civilization, and empire as global systems, not merely national ones. So in this sense, a reorientation of global power is nothing more than that—a shifting of polarity.
We need to be prepared for the international impacts, but also the domestic implications of these shifts. As the axis of global power moves away from Washington and towards “the world island”—Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow—we are seeing a rise in imperial impetuousness, racism, and reaction typified by Trump. Author Richard Powers calls this “a tantrum in the face of a crumbling control fantasy.”
How will the collapse of American empire play out?
Will it (ironically) mirror the decline of the USSR, where Russia now has the most billionaires per capita in the world, an ex-KGB dictator, and an economic system dominated by collaborations between organized crime and corporate capitalism? Will it mirror the more gradual, socially moderated collapse of the UK? Will we see a full-on Children of Men or Elysium-style dystopia?
As society becomes more volatile, those who have best prepared themselves will be the most likely to survive and influence the course of the future. As Vince Emanuele has written, “the next recession will be the icing on the cake. Once the economy collapses and the American Empire is forced to retreat from various parts of the globe, immigrants, Muslims, blacks, and poor whites will be the targets of state and non-state violence. The only way we’ll survive is through community and organizing.”
Vince wrote those words months ago. Now, that recession has now arrived. Times have changed faster than minds have changed.
How should we respond to the current situation?
In crisis lies opportunity. Emergencies clarify things. Bullshit gets less important and truth becomes more self-evident. That is the case now, as well. Reality is imposing itself on us. Any faith in capitalism, in globalization—hell, in the grocery store—has been shattered. The ruling class is weakened. And the lessons are clear.
Globalization is dying. Sure, the system might repair itself and reassemble transnational supply chains. Coronavirus is unlikely to end it all. But the fragility and unreliability of just-in-time industrial food delivery is now obvious. We need to build robust local food systems using sustainable, biodiverse and soil-growing methods.
Organizations already exist that are doing this work. They need funding and support to rapidly scale up. Local governments should be pressured to direct funds towards these projects and make land available for urban and peri-urban gardening, and people should begin volunteer brigades to do the labor.
Food is just the beginning. Globalization isn’t a threat just because it will collapse; it is a threat if it continues as well. Local production of water, clothing, housing, healthcare, and other basic necessities must begin as well. There are cooperative and truly sustainable methods with which this could be done.
Mutual aid is the new rallying cry of the 21st century. There will be no individual survival. Our best hope for creating a better world—and for survival—lies in banding together, building small-scale, localized communities based on human rights and sustainability, pressuring local governments to join—or simply replacing them if they cannot respond—and preparing for the challenges to come.
The longer business as usual continues, the worse off we will be. Governments are already descending into fascism in a vain attempt to be “great again.” Expansions of the surveillance state, police powers, and repression will only deepen as ecological collapse undermines stability.
Each day more forests logged, more carbon in the atmosphere, more species driven extinct. More wealth in the hands of the elite and more poverty, disease, and hopelessness for the people. Remember: the air is cleaner now than you have ever seen it. It can only remain that way if these global supply chains do not re-start.
The sooner we dismantle industrial supply chains, the better off the people and the planet will be. Tim Garrett, a climate scientist at the University of Utah, says that “Only complete economic collapse will prevent runaway global climate change.” He bases this conclusion on climate models he designs. Garrett’s calculations show that industrial civilization is a “heat machine,” and only the total collapse of industrial civilization will permit life on Earth to survive the ongoing mass extinction, and global warming.
To borrow Marxist language, we need to not only seize the means of production away from the ruling class, we need to destroy much of the means of production, because what it produces is ecocide.
Collapse Does Not Have to Be Bad
Some people inaccurately view collapse as a state of total lawlessness; in other words, the disintegration of society. More accurately, collapse refers to a rapid, radical simplification in society, such as the breakdown of “normal” economic, social, and political institutions.
Under this definition, a more or less global collapse of industrial civilization within the next 50 or 100 years—possibly much sooner—is almost a certainty. A NASA-commissioned study in the journal of Ecological Economics found a few years ago that “the system is moving towards an impending collapse” due to destruction of the planet and economic stratification. They write that their model, using conditions “closely reflecting the reality of the world today… find[s] that collapse is difficult to avoid.”
This does not have to be a bad thing. A managed collapse, or reduction in complexity, is the best way to ensure human rights and sustainability moving forward. In the book Deep Green Resistance, the authors advocate for a political movement that could help speed up certain aspects of collapse, while fighting others, to maximize good outcomes. As the book explains:
“Many different mechanisms drive collapse, not all equally desirable. Some [can be] intentionally accelerated and encouraged, while others are slowed or reduced. Energy decline by decreasing consumption of fossil fuels is a mechanism of collapse highly beneficial to the planet and humans, and that mechanism is encouraged. Ecological collapse through habitat destruction and biodiversity crash is also a mechanism of collapse, but is slowed or stopped whenever possible… The collapse of large authoritarian political structures allows small-scale participatory structures. The collapse of global industrial capitalism allows local systems of exchange, cooperation, and mutual aid.”
Uncontrolled collapse is a dire alternative. Even now, local and regional collapses are occurring around the globe. This is especially true in places like Syria, Libya, Pakistan, and Iraq where ecological destruction has combined with war.
But the problems are global. Water shortages, refugee crises, religious extremism, exploding population and consumption, toxification, mass extinction, soil drawdown, desertification, and extreme weather are all driving increased instability. It is emerging first in the poorest countries, but it is spreading fast.
Like revolutions and climate change, collapse is an organic process driven by the interplay of countless human and non-human factors, not a single event.
The world is changing.
We need to plan for tomorrow rather than building strategies purely based on the past. These times call for a two-pronged approach. First, we must build additional resiliency into our communities, relocalizing our food systems and reducing and eliminating reliance on big business and national/state government alike. Second, we must be prepared to take advantage of coming shocks to the economic and political system. We can use these breaks in normality as openings to dismantle oppressive systems of power and the physical infrastructure that is destroying our world.
This excerpt comes from the Introduction to Dahr Jamail‘s book, The End of Ice. Dahr Jamail is an award winning journalist and author who is a full-time staff reporter for Truthout.org. His work is currently focusing on Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.
Featured image: a rapidly melting glacier on Tahoma (Mt. Rainier), by Max Wilbert.
Our planet is rapidly changing, and what we are witnessing is unlike anything that has occurred in human, or even geologic, history. The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, both greenhouse gases, has been scientific fact for decades, and according to NASA, “There is no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.” Evidence shows that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the Earth to warm ten times faster than it should, and the ramifications of this are being felt, quite literally, throughout the entire biosphere. Oceans are warming at unprecedented rates, droughts and wildfires of increasing severity and frequency are altering forests around the globe, and the Earth’s cryosphere—the parts of the Earth so cold that water is frozen into ice or snow—is melting at an ever-accelerating rate. The subsea permafrost in the Arctic is thawing, and we could experience a methane “burp” of previously trapped gas at any moment, causing the equivalent of several times the total amount of CO2 humans have emitted to be released into the atmosphere. The results would be catastrophic.
Climate disruption brings with it extreme weather, too, such as hurricanes and floods. For instance, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leading to an increase in the frequency of severe major rain events, such as Hurricane Harvey over Houston during the summer of 2017, which dropped so much rain that the weight of the water actually caused the Earth’s crust to sink two centimeters.
Earth has not seen current atmospheric CO2 levels since the Pliocene, some 3 million years ago. Three-quarters of that CO2 will still be here in five hundred years. Given that it takes a decade to experience the full warming effects of CO2 emissions, we are still that far away from experiencing the impact of all the CO2 that we are currently emitting. Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions, it would take another 25,000 years for most of what is currently in the atmosphere to be absorbed into the oceans. Climate disruption is progressing faster than ever, and faster than predicted. Seventeen of the eighteen hottest years [now, eighteen of the nineteen hottest years] ever recorded have occurred since the year 2001. The distress signals from our overheated planet are all around us, with reports, studies, and warnings increasing daily. Every single worst-case prediction made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the rise in temperatures, extreme weather, sea levels, and the increasing CO2 content in the atmosphere have fallen short of reality. Countless glaciers, rivers, lakes, forests, and species are already vanishing at a pace never seen before, and all of this from increasing the global mean temperature by “only” 1°C above preindustrial baseline temperatures. According to some scientists, it could rise as much as a 10°C by the year 2100.6
A study led by James Hansen, the former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned that even staying within a 2°C temperature-warming limit has caused unstoppable melting in both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. This will raise global sea levels by as much as ten feet by the year 2050, inundating numerous major coastal cities with seawater.7 New York, Boston, Miami, Tampa, New Orleans, Jakarta, Singapore, Osaka, Tokyo, Mumbai, Kolkata, Dhaka, and Ho Chi Minh City are only a few examples of cities that will, sooner or later, have to be moved or abandoned to the sea.
Mountaineering in today’s climate-disrupted world is a vastly different endeavor than it used to be. Glaciers are vanishing before our eyes, having shrunk to the lowest levels ever recorded, and they are now melting faster than ever. In North America, 70 percent of the glaciers in western Canada are projected to be gone by 2100. Montana’s Glacier National Park will most likely not have any active glaciers by 2030. The Matanuska Glacier’s ancient ice is, by now, rapidly vanishing. Dramatic changes are occurring even in the planet’s highest and coldest places. Even Mount Everest (Sagarmatha/Chomolungma) is transforming, as thousands of glaciers across the Himalayas will likely shrink by up to 99 percent by 2100. A child born today will see an Everest largely free of glaciers within her lifetime.
…
Before embarking on this book, I already knew the extent to which human-caused climate disruption had advanced. I had lived in Alaska for a decade beginning in 1996 and had spent time on the glaciers there. As early as the late nineties, large portions of the holiday season would go by in Anchorage without any snow on the ground, the waterfalls that my climbing friends and I had used for ice climbing barely froze some winters, and we could see the glaciers we used to traverse to access peaks shrinking from year to year. But I wasn’t aware of what was happening in the oceans and the rain forests. I wasn’t aware of the rise in sea levels and the changing climate’s impact on biodiversity.
I started reporting on the environment and climate in 2010, and since then I’ve published more than one hundred articles about climate disruption and given many lectures and radio interviews on the subject. This work established the foundation of my research, so by the time I began my field research for this book, I knew what to expect: that humans had already altered planetary climate systems. That is why, rather than the more commonly used “climate change,” I prefer to use the term “anthropogenic (human-caused) climate disruption.” Without question, the human race is responsible.
My original aim with this book was to provide a view of what was happening around the world: from the heights of Denali to the Great Barrier Reef; from the remote, windswept islands in the Bering Sea to the Florida coast. I wanted to explore how the forests across the western United States were impacted by drought and wildfire and investigate what was happening to the Amazon, the largest rain forest on Earth. Knowing that most people will likely never visit most of these places, I hoped to bring home to the reader the urgency of our planetary crisis through firsthand accounts of what is happening to the glaciers, forests, wildlife, coral reefs, and oceans, alongside data provided by leading scientists who study them.
The reporting in this book has turned out to be far more difficult to deal with than the years I spent reporting from war-torn Iraq. But I have come to realize that only by sharing an intimacy with these places can we begin to know, perhaps love, and certainly care for them. Only by having this intimacy with the natural world can we fully understand how dramatically our actions are impacting it.
In Nepal, the sacred mountain Machhapuchchhre rises abruptly on the eastern boundary of the Annapurna Sanctuary. As a child, I came across a photograph of this peak in a geography textbook and was immediately captivated by its majesty. Shaped like a fish’s tail, the knife-edged ridge that forms its summit is a seemingly paper-thin line of rock that drops precipitously on either side, causing the apex of the peak, which is nearly half a mile higher than the top of Denali, to be one of the more dramatic summits anywhere. It is a masterpiece of nature.
The Nepalese believe Machhapuchchhre is sacred to Shiva, one of the primary deities of Hinduism, who is known as both “the Destroyer” and “the Transformer” and believed to be without form—limitless, transcendent, and eternally unchanging. The mountain is forbidden to climbers, and to this day no human has ever stood atop that summit. I believe this is a just decision, and I have always wished more parts of Earth could be placed out of human reach.
Staring at that picture as a youth, time would cease to exist. I fell in love with Machhapuchchhre, and in the process I became enraptured with all mountains. When I was ten years old, I saw the Rocky Mountains of Colorado for the first time, their silhouettes against the setting sun, and I was awestruck. In the fall of 1995, I traveled to Alaska and drove a short way into Denali National Park and Preserve. When the afternoon clouds parted to reveal the majesty of Denali’s summit, my first inclination was to bow in wonderment. A year later I moved to Alaska and trained myself in the mountaineering skills I needed to access these sanctuaries that stand far from the violence, speed, and greed of our increasingly dystopian industrial society. The Scottish American naturalist, author, philosopher, and early wilderness-preservation advocate John Muir captured my feelings precisely: “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”
A glacier is essentially suspended energy, suspended force. It is time, in that sense, life, frozen in time. But now, these frozen rivers of time are themselves running out of time. The planet’s ecosystems, now pushed far beyond their capacity to adapt to human-generated traumas and stresses, are in a state of free fall. Similar to how I watched hundreds of years of time compressed into glacial ice flash before my eyes in a matter of seconds as I fell into the crevasse, Earth’s species, glaciers, rivers, lakes, and forests are, in the blink of a geologic eye, falling into oblivion.
Modern life has compressed time and space. Through air travel or instantaneous communication and access to information you can traverse the globe in a matter of hours or gain knowledge nanoseconds after a question is posed. The price for this, along with everything we want, on demand, all the time, is a total disconnection from the planet that sustains our lives.
I venture into the wilds and into the mountains in large part to allow space and time to stretch themselves back to what they were. The frenetic pace of contemporary life is having a devastating impact on this planet. Humans have transformed more than half the ice-free land on Earth. We have changed the composition of the atmosphere and the chemistry of the oceans from which we came. We now use more than half the planet’s readily accessible freshwater runoff, and the majority of the world’s major rivers have been either dammed or diverted.
As a species, we now hang over the abyss of a geoengineered future we have created for ourselves. At our insistence, our voracious appetite is consuming nature itself. We have refused to heed the warnings Earth has been sending, and there is no rescue team on its way.
The term “Anthropogenic Climate Disruption” is used to highlight the origins of current climate change in human activities, as opposed to other climate changes that have occurred in human history. Melting of the glaciers is one such effect of the Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.It can, in turn, cause problems like climate migration, rising sea level, etc. Learn more about the issue in Dahr Jamail’s book, The End of Ice.
