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Friday, July 11, 2014

A Fine Frenzy ~ the universal dance of delusion...and the paucity of hope


Hope
~ George Frederic Watts, 1886 

"To the philosopher, the physician, the meteorologist and the chemist, there is perhaps no subject more attractive than that of ozone." ~ C.B Fox, 1873

There is a man who lives on the other side of my village (it is said) who one day, setting out for errands, inadvertently ran over his child as he backed out of the driveway. Ever since I heard this tragic tale, I have thought I can imagine the moment that, thunderstruck with horror and frozen in disbelief, he gazed upon that little mangled body.  I think I know the ferocious dread that overcame him when first he realized that the car of which he was so proudly enamored - that quintessential symbol of success, the pinnacle of modern technology and shiny avatar of individual freedom - was the very same mighty instrument of folly that had literally crushed the one thing most important to him - his progeny, his future.

I suffer his tumultuous and inconsolable grief because that is how I greet every new day since abruptly I came to understand that the splendid, intricate, exquisitely entwined tapestry of life is unraveling. This realization rushed into my consciousness like a dark sinister flood by an odd circumstance.  In the summer of 2008 I suddenly noticed an irrefutable signal - that trees, the essential foundation of so much biodiversity, are dying prematurely.  It was a hot, dry August, and everywhere the leaves were drooping, limp and lifeless.  My curiosity piqued, the more I looked, the more I found indisputable, incontrovertible symptoms of irreversible decay.  It was only the beginning recognition of an ominous trend.  Now, the mute indicators of deterioration are common - swathes of bare branches protrude above the canopy.

Possessing just a rudimentary knowledge of the timescales involved in evolution was enough for me to realize the formidable outcome that must result as trees die off, when myriad crashes reverberate throughout the biosphere.  Eventually, a total collapse of the ecosystem will be inevitable. Initially I speculated that the reason trees manifest terminal afflictions could only be attributed to the changing climate - surely the sole influence extensive enough to instigate such a colossal catastrophe.  And yet, the climactic mechanisms - precipitation and temperature - did not consistently correlate with the empirical evidence I found, which was puzzling.  It turns out, as incredible as it may seem, that the primary reason all species of trees - old and young, coniferous and deciduous - are in precipitous decline is their exposure to pollution.

Following Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Clean Air Act, and Earth Day, like many others I had assumed that pollution was under control, at least in the US, where I live.  But after becoming immersed in countless books, articles, government reports and conference catalogs, the overwhelming data persuaded me to reluctantly admit that the opposite is the case.  I had no idea the extent to which an entire industry of corporate vultures and unscrupulous lobbyists had been systematically undermining regulations - in the courts, in elections, in universities.  The barrage of emissions from our cars and trucks, our planes and ships, our factories and power plants, our petroleum-based fertilizers, our fracking wells and flares…all rise and mingle and travel around the globe in devastating concentrations.  Unlike the visible, murky components of smog that have been, somewhat, regulated and reduced - sulfur dioxide and particulate matter - nitrous oxides continued to proliferate and have come to bathe the air, water and soil in a venomous chemical witch's brew.

Whenever fuel is combusted at high temperatures - such as, to run an engine - the abundant nitrogen in the air becomes oxidized, which is why little has been done to curtail it as a pollutant.  The single remedy would be to stop burning fuel.  Meanwhile, the reactive nitrogen traverses oceans and continents, as does methane, another ozone precursor that is increasing.  As they go in and out of complex chemical interactions volatile organic compounds, catalyzed by UV radiation, the air has become saturated beyond a threshold that is tolerable to plants.  Invisible but highly toxic, the persistent background level of ozone in the troposphere is inexorably rising, as more and more precursors are emitted - particularly from booming Asia.

Science has become ever more specialized, which is marvelous and elegant, but such compartmentalization tends to obscure and dilute a holistic picture of ecology.  And so even though ozone is a product of reactive nitrogen, the eutrophication of the world's waters and the ruin of the soil and air are almost always considered as separate issues.  In 2011, Alan Townsend of U Colorado termed the nitrogen cascade "the biggest environmental disaster nobody has ever heard of".  The disruption of the cycle was also was named in the Stockholm Resilience Centre's famed "Nine Boundaries" study as one of the thresholds that we must not - but already have - breached.  One fascinating paper that examined numerous nefarious processes - deemed "an onslaught of acid loading" - was written by Rice and Herman, titled "Acidification of Earth:  An assessment across mechanisms and scales".  Published in 2011, it should have instigated widespread alarm, but instead was promptly forgotten.

Many people become confused because naturally occurring ozone, high above in the stratosphere, protects Earth's surface from too much UV radiation.  But at ground level, anthropogenic ozone is extremely detrimental.  Medical research links it to huge spikes in mortality during extreme heat waves when levels tend to peak, which is why health alerts advise the elderly and children to stay indoors, and athletes to avoid exercise.  Chronic exposure to oxidative stress is linked to cancer, heart disease, autism and other neurological deficits, asthma, and diabetes.  Equally well-known but rarely publicized is the fact that ozone is even more poisonous to vegetation.  We are frequently encouraged to plant trees so they will clean the air - but few stop to consider what happens to the trees as they perform this service for us.

When trees and other plants absorb ozone as they photosynthesize, their leaves, needles, roots, and ability grow are directly harmed.  A far more significant ramification is that they become more susceptible both to abiotic stressors - such as cold, drought, wind, and heat - and to the biotic attacks that are currently world-wide epidemics.  One scientist from FACE - a controlled fumigation experimental facility - who described this unexpected and pernicious result, referred to those parasitic incursions as the "sharks that smell blood in the water".

Sporadically but increasingly, reports surface about looming shortages of favored commodities that can be traced to ozone - coffee and bananas, wheat, all types of citrus fruit, cocoa, cassava, maple syrup, ash wood for baseball bats, and oak stakes for whiskey barrels.  In a losing battle, nurserymen, landscapers and farmers seek to counter some of the repercussions, knowingly or out of ignorance, by applying fertilizers, lime, and pesticides.  The Department of Agriculture funds programs to genetically engineer ozone "tolerant" crops, with no success.

Climate change cannot account for the leaves of tropical ornamentals watered in pots that are typically blighted by the end of the growing season, as are aquatic plants, and even those in greenhouses.  Most of the intense warming from climate change has been confined to the higher latitudes but still, trees well within their range of heat tolerance exhibit identical symptoms.

A plethora of research indicating pollution as a cause of tree death goes back decades, to the well-documented demise of Ponderosa pines, besieged by opportunistic bark beetles, in the hills around Los Angeles.  In fact, astute observers have been recording this phenomenon for centuries:

"In 1661, the English diarist, John Evelyn, published his famous treatise, Fumifugium: Or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated, in which he described the contemporary air pollution problems..."

"Fumifugium contains graphic descriptions of effects on vegetation, such as ...Our Anemonies and many other choycest Flowers, will by no Industry be made to blow in London or the Precincts of it, unless they be raised on a Hot-bed and governed with extraordinary Artifice to accelerate their springing; imparting a bitter and ungrateful Tast to those few wretched Fruits, which never arriving to their desired maturity, seem, like the Apples of Sodome, to fall even to dust, when they are but touched…It would now puzzle the most skilful gardener to keep fruit trees alive in these places: the complaint at this time would be, not that the trees were without fruit, but that they would not bear even leaves."

~ "Air Pollution and Plant Life" edited by J.N.B. Bell of the University of London.

An excellent reference is An Appalachian Tragedy, a collaborative effort by several authors and one fantastic photographer.  It was published in 1998 and since then, the problem they chronicled from Georgia to Maine has achieved global dimensions and reached into areas generally considered pristine, and too remote to be touched.  A 2009 meta-analysis by Wittig, et.al., predicted that if ozone increases continue unchecked, the critically important CO2 sink of forests world-wide will be "diminished or lost".  In recognition of the seriousness of the problem, the usually tepid EPA attempted to enact air quality standards to protect the environment, stricter than those for human health, but political considerations left those efforts in a state of paralysis.

Injury occurs in plants before visible symptoms can be detected on leaves, which only makes it more worrisome that virtually every leaf is marred by the end of the growing season...and on evergreen trees and shrubs, year-round.  Particular signs that appear can be yellowing (chlorosis), necrosis (dead tissue) and marginal leaf burn.  Older leaves, lower on a stem or on the inner parts of branches, are generally the worse off for longer exposure.  Speckling, from injured stomates which are like pores, is common, as is bronzing or other abnormal discolorations.  The protective waxy coating is actually eaten away by the oxidation, meaning the direct damage is more readily exacerbated by the "sharks".  Rarely discussed but very familiar to agronomists is that ozone also impacts annual staple crops, reducing yield and nutritive quality by tens of billions of dollars yearly.  This is a photo of ozone-injured beans from the Cornell Vegetable Program:

The sight of sickly trees has become so ubiquitous that people have forgotten how unusual it was in the past.  In just a few years it seems most of us have become inured to formerly unheard-of accidents and even fatalities from trees falling on cars, houses, and people.  Such incidents are becoming staples on the local nightly news, and yet few see the broader implications.  Municipalities and utilities and parks are frantic to avoid liability for dangerous calamities to joggers and pedestrians and campers, but can't keep up with the necessary pruning and removal.  New York City has quietly dispersed millions of dollars to settle personal injury and wrongful death lawsuits in recent years.  Trees routinely fall and hardly anyone remarks upon the rotted interiors that are revealed when they do.

Signs of tree decline apparent in a cursory inventory include broken or bare branches, thin crowns, holes, splitting, peeling bark, bulging cankers (like cancerous tumors), epicormic branching (small twiggy growths poking out of the lower trunk due to hormonal signaling that the crown is stressed), lack of vibrant fall color and/or early leaf drop.  It's not unusual to see almost comical overproduction of cones, seeds, nuts and flowers, which is another hormonally triggered attempt to reproduce ahead of death.  All over the US, asthmatics and people with allergies complain about the high count of pollen, which buries cars and patio furniture in unprecedented layers.  Sometimes, desiccated leaves will hang on through the winter, because the tree is too exhausted to drop them in a process called abscission, that actually requires energy to complete.

The website ozoneinjury.org has an extensive library of photographs, and includes a telling fumigation experiment, the results of which are pictured below.  On the left are sweet potatoes grown in a chamber with clean, filtered air; the center, in ambient, polluted air; and on the right, in elevated pollution as is expected to increase in the future.  Given the dramatic reduction in growth, is it any wonder that trees topple over in winds that they were formerly able to withstand?

"The most curious result obtained appears to me to be that relating to the effect of a highly ozonized atmosphere upon the roots of plants." ~ M. Carey Lea, 1864.

It breaks my heart to contemplate all the animals and birds that cannot possibly survive the fragmenting, let alone the loss, of forests.  Among the many crucial services trees provide are evapotranspiration, their shade and habitat, their scented flowers maturing into nuts and fruit, their immense and tranquil beauty.  Should it be surprising that we are witnessing the loss of species that rely on forests, from bats to butterflies to moose...or that wildfires and landslides are increasingly frequent and larger?  We have radically transformed the earth, rendering it depauperate.

I can appreciate why those who have tried before me have given up trying to educate the public, or garner any support from established entities.  Even armed with a tremendous archive of peer reviewed literature, the disinterest, ridicule and often outright hostility I have encountered has been astonishing.  The futility of trying to bring this issue to the attention of the very people who should be most engaged - conservationists, foresters, and climate modelers - has stimulated some far-reaching, and decidedly unpleasant, lessons about the obtusity of human nature.

In the UK, where great oaks and beeches are integral to the landscape, arborists indulge in a xenophobic obsession with invasive pathogens, even though long before Darwin sailed off on the Beagle to collect specimens, enthusiastic gardeners had been avidly importing exotic species from around the world to augment their grand estates and arboretums.  Sweet chestnut and walnut were imported by the Romans and yet it is only now that the attacks from "invasive species" have exploded, leading to hastily convened meetings and declarations of emergencies.  It is far more comforting to assume that alien invaders are to blame, rather than our own lifestyle and numbers.  Who wishes to confess that we are all so fundamentally at fault?  And who is willing to reduce their consumption?

Repeatedly, I have been confronted with the inability of most people to squarely face what pollution is doing to trees, even though the preponderance of correlation is at least as convincing as that other ridiculous debate, whether smoking causes cancer.  It's small wonder - no amount of remorse can ever erase the shattering knowledge that instantaneously follows -  the unwelcome epiphany that we are bound to self destruct.

Almost no one, including professional climate activists and scientists who best know the risks, is willing to make the drastic sacrifices required to even slow the velocity of our hurtling towards disaster. When I ponder this soul-crushing prospect I can almost understand (though not quite forgive) their unwillingness to honestly grapple with this existential threat. It is the sort of shocking revelation that leads swiftly to a profoundly discomfiting contemplation of the vast meaninglessness of existence and the careless indifference of the universe.  Fate is not merely arbitrary and capricious - there is nothing to ameliorate the even more bitter conclusion that we have wrought our own destruction, and betrayed the legacy of a future for our children.  The fatuous absurdity of it all opens the mawing chasm of a horrible truth we all suspect but assiduously reject with all manner of ideologies and religious beliefs - humans are a plague species.

Ah years in which looking far away I saw ages long past
When still trees bloomed free in a wide country
And thus now all begins to wither
With the breath of cold-hearted wizards
To know things they break them
And their stern lordship they establish
Through fear of death

  ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

This haunting spectre runs contrary to all we wish to believe and everything we are taught about ourselves...the fond supposition that we are innately compassionate and kind.  In response to the worsening dire news, many who are aware of the perils entertain the comforting notion that if only we had all continued to live as hunter gatherers, we would be sustainable.  Some even preach the woo-woo that we can return to an idyllic, more spiritual existence in harmony with the forces of nature, as they speculate indigenous people lived before.  Blaming today's culture as uniquely culpable requires willfully ignoring the path of destructive expansion we embarked upon well over 50,000 years ago, when first we swarmed out of Africa in conquest across the continents, butchering dozens of species of megafauna until we had eaten them all.  A dispassionate assessment reveals that barbaric behavior has continued unimpeded other than for temporary, localized setbacks.  As advised in the indispensable work of Reg Morrison, author of The Spirit in the Gene - "Humans display only animal behavior. Watch the action without the sound track and this truth becomes obvious."  The only people who refuse to understand that are those who possess the extraordinary ability to read George Monbiot's memorable summary of the most recent research - Destroyer of Worlds - and miraculously dismiss it as "euro-centric scientism".

Humans share with all other species the tendency to produce more offspring than needed to carry on our population.  In nature, such unbalanced proliferation is kept in check, but humans, being nimble, adaptable top predators, have cleverly overcome obstacles in every nook and cranny of the earth.  Now that our growth is exponential, we also are on the verge of having our population checked by nature.

Climate change has come to dominate ecology - it certainly receives far more funding and media discourse than the crisis of biodiversity loss, which has been relegated into a tree-hugging ghetto - or peak oil, the third rail everyone is terrified to touch.  The emphasis on climate change almost to the exclusion of all else enables the illusory fiction that so-called "clean, green, renewable," energy will spare us from the consequences of our excesses, foster endless growth, and allow this fabulous energy-stoked party to continue unabated.  None of the alternatives can conceivably deliver the concentrated power of fossil fuels, which are irreplaceably dense, to a world of seven billion most of whom crave more, not less, energy.  Furthermore, any solution that provides additional energy will augment, not supplant, the existing use of dirty fuels, as a passing familiarity with Jevon's Paradox, Hardin's concept of Tragedy of the Commons, and the foibles of human nature make clear.

But the pretense persists, neglecting the genuinely inconvenient truth, which is that climate change is but one symptom of overshoot.  Even if someone waved a magic wand and made climate change disappear, we would still be on a trajectory towards self-annihilation.  It seems every paper ends with the caveat, "...more research is needed" when none is required - we know what we need to do.  We don't want to do it.

Nature is impervious to our desires and posturing and is reacting in ways that we can no longer rein in or control. The paleoclimate is a better predictor than models that do not account for amplifying feedbacks, which is why events are outpacing expectations by unimaginable margins.  Sea level rise will inundate coastal cities and fertile floodplains, and most people will become refugees with no place to go from extreme floods, droughts and the lack of clean water and food.  In addition to the loss of a carbon sink, dying trees will cause other amplifying feedbacks such as wildfires adding to more ozone, black particulates darkening ice sheets increasing the melt, and increased soil respiration.

Through the myths of Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cassandra, and Medea, the Greeks warned long ago that hubris, our voluminous appetites, our uninhibited greed, the negligent wielding of fire and technology and most of all, our delusional, optimistic hope would be our undoing.  It doesn't take anything more than common sense to intuit that you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet - and yet that simple truism is not only anathema, but entirely foreign.  It appears that evolutionary selection has favored the ability to function despite cognitive dissonance.  Even highly educated atheists are functionally incapable of imagining a universe without humans.  Whether any few individuals manage to survive the bottleneck is essentially moot; the violent journey from happy Holocene to the next epoch will be epic dread.

In his fierce lecture titled Ocean Apocalypse, the world's foremost expert and ocean advocate from Scripps Institute, Jeremy Jackson, lamented that if only people could view the coral reefs hidden under the sea as easily as they can see trees, they would be so appalled at the deterioration they would be motivated to save them.  Yet, he himself doesn't see that actually, the trees are deteriorating - in plain view - and hardly anyone notices the pattern, or cares.  The stunning loss of life in the sea led to the elucidation of the concept known as shifting baselines, whereby people are oblivious to incremental changes - even though in larger scales of time they are dramatic.  It is a part of the reason why so few people see the monumental change in the health of trees.  The late Farley Mowat's searing documentary and book, "Sea of Slaughter", examines the notorious history of interference in the Atlantic.  It stands as a parable of murder and mayhem, representative of all the other places we have contaminated and robbed and ransacked - as does the inimitable classic, Moby Dick.  A great book that captures the popular imagination about the parallel shabby spectacle of the dying trees has yet to be written...and probably never will be.

As there is almost certainly nothing to be done to halt this trajectory, since it is patently not hardwired in our nature to plan ahead or exercise restraint, does it really matter if all the trees die from pollution - when ten million species of flora and fauna are at risk from our reckless marauding? What, precisely, is a possible goal?  What should we be aiming to achieve?

The thing to remember is, trees are intrinsically resilient, able to thrive through far more adverse conditions than climate change has yet to throw their way.  There was a worse drought in California 500 years ago, but the old-growth sequoias and redwoods survived.  Millions of saplings planted in the Midwest at the height of the Dust Bowl as "shelterbelts" grew without ever being watered.  Trees have to be tougher than most other life forms - they cannot pick up and move in times of adversity.  Some are meant to live for thousands of years, and most, for hundreds.  Their tenacity is remarkable, and can be observed in mountainous terrain where they cling to sheer rock cliffs, and in cities where they stubbornly erupt from sidewalk cracks.  The excuses foisted upon a gullible public for why they are dying now - storms, road salt, too wet or too dry, compaction, invasive insects, crowding - are hazards trees would normally laugh at, if they could laugh.  Or if we could hear.  Tree roots think nothing of enveloping granite boulders, and gusty winds are play for them.

One of the most important things we could do to slow the rush towards extinction from climate change is to give the forests a chance to recover.  To do that, we would have to first see that they are dying; next, understand why; and then, be willing to give up nearly every luxury we are infatuated with.  We would have to accept - actually, demand - draconian government intervention in individual freedom, including the rationing of fuel, food, water, and children.

That, of course, is highly unlikely.  Most of us will dance through life as best we can, in a fine frenzy of denial, until the involuntary visitation from the Four Horsemen occurs.  As this scenario unfolds, each of us will have to reconcile our dreams and expectations with the ugly and inescapable reality of collapse.  For me, a love for my fellow creatures, and the indelible timeless truths enshrined within the laws of science, are all that remain in a world gone mad as Ophelia.

The painting at the top of this essay, Hope, was the subject of a lecture where it was described as a "study in contradictions".  That academic talk was attended by the pastor Jeremiah Wright, who in turn used the painting as the focal point for a sermon in 1990, which was attended by a young Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama.  Aspiring to the presidency, he took the title of the sermon as inspiration for a book and the campaign slogan that turned out to be so hollow, "The Audacity of Hope".

In his sermon, Wright concluded that "...hope is what saves us." I would submit that Hope, while once a useful trait, is what has condemned us, because we literally cannot see the cliff as we dance off it.  Instead of celebrating the failed audacity of hope, it might be prudent to contemplate, in the time we have left, the paucity of hope - because the most we can realistically hope for, trapped by forgone conclusions, is to vanquish fear...and find the grace of acceptance.

Hope in the Prison of Despair
~ Evelyn de Morgan

“I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe." ~ Albert Camus, l'Etranger




27 comments:

  1. Wonderfully done. I have some more to say about hope but first:

    To Die For
    Many parents work hard to assure their children’s future. Many if asked would give their lives for their children and grandchildren. If a culture/society is at threat from outside forces, starvation or environmental stress, this support for the next generations falls by the wayside. However, in general, mothers, fathers and grandparents will protect the future of their offspring.

    We are surrounded by a litany of threats to the future - fracking, deep ocean drilling, tar sands; pollution from mountain top removal, destruction of natural resources, dying oceans, climate disasters of epic proportions, dangers of genetic engineering; corporate control, and population overshoot to name a few of the less subtle. Some would have more technology to combat these problems or at best forestall them.
    “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
    Albert Einstein

    For citizens of developed nations, this is about lifestyle – energy and other resource consumption – will we change our lifestyle for the children and grandchildren’s future? NO.

    And now for a rousing chorus of – Yes, but . . .

    There is just one legitimate “Yes, but . . .
    You can’t get there (wherever there is) from here!

    http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2013/11/to-die-for.html

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  2. Gail - I would like to share my experience of hope.

    This is part of a speech I gave at a RelayForLife in 2006
    See: http://www.rea-alp.com/~dragnfly
    In February of 2003, I was diagnosed with a huge cancerous tumor growing out of my right lung. I was given weeks to live without treatment and minimal odds with treatment.
    My wood-cooking stove heated my home as well as that was how I cooked my food. I had lived this way, off-the-grid, for 30 years. In Minnesota, in March and April during treatment, it was cold so I need wood for heating as well as cooking. My kindly neighbor Dan came over and split some of my wood for me. (I love splitting wood so left it to be split each day.) However, I still needed to split some myself.

    My treatment consisted of radiation 5 days a week and chemotherapy one day a week. Either one alone is tough, both together are quite debilitating. Almost everyday during the seven weeks of treatment, I would split wood. I would cook on the wood cook stove.

    I never thought I would die. I don’t believe this was denial. Within a week of diagnosis I had taken care of all the necessary legal things should I die.

    When I gave a speech at the RelayForLife activities for cancer that take place here in the United States, I told the people that hope was doing. For me there were two types of doing. The first was splitting the wood to cook and heat. It had to be done and it was part of living each day.

    The second is what I did when I was through with the cancer treatment and it was declared in remission. I went to a billboard company and arranged for billboards to be put up around central Minnesota. I arranged with schools all around the area to speak to students about not smoking. During the time I was doing this I spoke with over 2000 young people. There were as many as ten billboards put up; two were put up and paid for by students at two different schools by holding bake sales.
    See the poster here.
    http://www.rea-alp.com/~dragnfly/poster.html

    The splitting of the wood was necessity. It was a necessary doing connected with hope. The speaking with students all around Central and Northern Minnesota, the billboards and the T-shirts with the picture on it arose in me and had a life of its own. It was hope doing me.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, John. Hope serves a critical purpose for people, it is part of our makeup, it is our inspiration to create, to love and to live. Without it, most of us would despair and do nothing. But it's a problem when it leads us to ignore dangers, especially the dangers we create ourselves.

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  3. A monstrous tale beautifully told with passion, clear ferocity and simplicity. Jared Diamond once posed the rhetorical question on the matter of ecological suicide and collapse about Easter Islanders - 'What were they thinking when the cut down the last tree? ' It is a riddle within an enigma and the answer is, they were not thinking and nor are we, it seems we are condemned by the selfish gene to depart the planet the way we arrived in small clusters of vicious, violent and ignorant primates roaming the wilderness in search of shelter, sustenance and comfort:

    I met a traveller from an antique land
    Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
    'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away."

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  4. OpEd News published this post, Yay! http://www.opednews.com/articles/In-a-Fine-Frenzy---the-u-by-Gail-Zawacki-Climate-Change_Climate-Change-Agreement_Climate-Change-Deniers_Death-140712-93.html

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  5. Thank you for your writings. Beautiful.

    C.

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  6. Thought you might enjoy reading this that I just found. i'll be commenting after I read your post.

    Tom

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  7. Great essay, reblogged: http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2014/07/gail-zawacki-fine-frenzy-universal.html

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  8. We think our cleverness will save us and that we are exempt from the control mechanisms of Nature: we are not. Very sad for all the other lifeforms we will take down with us.

    http://dieoff.org/page80.htm

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  9. Great essay Gail. I know what's coming, and that it isn't going to be decades before arrival. The effect of our pollution on plant life will be akin to running a car in a closed garage for humanity and will have a similar result, though the suffering will be unheard-of. Why we're so dense as to witness this steady decline and fail to see it, because we're all so distracted day and night (until the lights go out for good), is a testament to our being by no means wise.

    Tom

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  10. I wonder if other earth like worlds, if life was bestowed upon them, would suffer the same inescapable fate. The universe, I drearily conclude, is entirely indifferent.

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    1. Adherents of the Maximum Power Principle would tend to concur. Yes, they would all suffer the same inescapable fate. Personally, I lean towards the biological urge to grow as sufficient. Either way, the universe is entirely indifferent, and it is mainly our self-inflated importance that insists it should be different.

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  11. Energy is Hope

    There is a plan in the works that will address our problem of needing to produce tens of terawatts within decades at a cost at least an order of magnitude lower than what is available today. The key pieces of this technological puzzle have been feasible for development for decades, but has been largely ignored for political reasons. I will happily delve into some of the technical details if there is an interest here to do so. But rest assured, this approach will work as it is not speculative in nature. The placeholder name at the moment is The Planetary Sustainability Initiative: The Ethical Mitigation of Global Warming, and contrary to other 'green' proposals, the focus is on rapidly growing the sustainable economy through high energy return.

    Sincerely, on behalf of the Thorium Energy Alliance,

    Corey Barcus

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    Replies
    1. Thank you for your offer, Corey, but the problem facing humanity is not technological and will not be fixed by technology. The problem is that we have not evolved to think past the near future, and are willing to sacrifice the security of future generations for our own comfort now. Providing more energy will just make this tiger chase it's tail faster.

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    2. I must emphatically disagree with you on both counts:

      1) Our problem is fundamentally technological.

      2) This solution will be capable of eradicating global poverty within decades and will suffice as an energy solution indefinitely.

      This is the epitome of long range thinking. The implementation of this plan will constitute a new adaptation for civilization, so why stand in the way of conscious evolution?

      Perhaps you should consider addressing your own depression which is quite evident in your writing?

      May I humbly suggest this aged and still relevant text? http://www.sidis.net/nervousillscontents.htm

      Also available from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Nervous-ills-their-cause-cure/dp/1176870572/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405523483&sr=8-1&keywords=nervous+ills+their+cause+and+cure


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    3. Funny how people attack me personally rather than deal with the issues. More energy, even if it were clean energy, will not solve the problem of human overshoot, because it will simply encourage more growth of population and consumption. Any any suggest that our "consciousness" will evolve betrays an egregious lack of knowledge about what evolution actually is, how it transpires and the time scales required. Evolution is not purposeful, it is not based on our desires...and besides, we are out of time. Next comment from anyone that refers to me personally rather than dying trees or the myriad other rapidly unfolding crises will be deleted.

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    4. There is good reason to believe that we can slow or even reverse the global population growth rate by dramatically increasing energy per capita. Evolution does not only pertain to genes, but also our culture, and change can happen quite rapidly.

      And we are not out of time, even if we wish to keep the global average temperature rise below 1 C. As I said, I can get into the details about how this is physically possible. We also have a plan to deal with ocean acidification within decades, even though this problem will require the application of TWs of energy.

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    5. Corey, this is great! After 4 billion years of life, through hundreds of millions of species and multiple trillions of individuals every organism has reproduced at the maximum possible rate.

      By charging our iPhones with thorium fission power we will be able to alter human society & produce the behaviour of procreation at slightly below the level of replacement. Thorium will also bring back the 50% of land and marine animals that have been killed in the last 50 years, the 90% of commercial fish species, and of course the extinct species.

      I believe that a techno-utopia is possible. It will just require going against all historical behaviour of every organism known to exist.

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  12. We blew past any hope of keeping at 2C long ago - this is from 2011 and still emissions climb:

    "The commonly accepted threshold of climate “safety,” 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F] temperature rise over pre-industrial levels, is now properly considered extremely dangerous;
    even 2 degrees C is drifting out of reach, absent efforts of a scale and speed beyond anything currently proposed;
    our current trajectory is leading us toward 4 or 6 (or 8 or 10) degrees C, which we now know to be a potentially civilization-threatening disaster.

    http://grist.org/climate-policy/2011-12-08-the-brutal-logic-of-climate-change-mitigation/

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  13. Yes, I am well aware of the projections. With the right energy system, we will be able to deploy tens of terawatts within decades, rapidly decarbonizing the economy, and providing the excess energy required for sequestration of excess CO2.

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  14. If you are aware of the projections, you ought to know we don't have decades...particularly because there is absolutely NO indication that people will willingly going to reverse any of these trends: overpopulation, habitat destruction, deforestation, rising CO2 emissions, rising ozone levels, extreme extraction of fossil fuels such as fracking, deep-water drilling, and tar sands, creating ever greater amounts of garbage especially plastic, ocean acidification, overfishing to the point that the oceans are dying etc etc not to mention the feedbacks that are now beyond our ability to mediate such as more wildfires, melting of the Arctic, Greenland and Antarctic and glaciers all over the world, extreme weather events leading to crop failure, famine, epidemic disease and war, etc. As the world falls into chaos there will be even less ability to deploy new forms of energy production, plus, when the grid goes down, all 425+ nuclear power plants will melt down. Can I have some of what you are smoking?

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  15. Ocean acidification is a particularly pressing problem. There have been numerous proposals, but all are predicated on greatly reducing the cost of sustainable energy. We are developing nuclear-based thermal systems which will be able to produce the billions of tons of lime necessary to maintain ocean pH. The scale of this problem is about 2-4 TWth, so thousands of nuclear power plants. Needless to say, we will not be using LWRs for this task.

    POTENTIAL OF THORIUM MOLTEN SALT REACTORS :
    DETAILED CALCULATIONS AND CONCEPT EVOLUTIONS
    IN VIEW OF A LARGE NUCLEAR ENERGY PRODUCTION

    http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/02/55/24/PDF/democrite-00021911.pdf (note the theoretical deployment curve in fig. 14b)

    High temperature liquid fuel thermal-neutron iso-breeders (LFTR/Th-MSR) will be mass produced in the tens of thousands, synthesizing the carbon-free and carbon-neutral energy carriers that will displace fossil fuels. Fracking, deep-water drilling, and oil sands exploitation will be taxed out of existence once the sustainable alternative is in place.

    At the moment, we are having difficulty with the Department of Defense which has blocked our attempt to gain access to thorium by expanding domestic rare earth mining. It appears that our nation's defense contractors are content with forever relying upon importing these resources.

    https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s2006 (our rare earth bill)

    "Then, a week after the briefing, Senator Blunt's office sent out a memo that due to "DoD objections" to the National Rare Earth Cooperative Act, his office wouldn't move forward with the bill in the NDAA. This bold inaction essentially guarantees the United States' dependence on China for our national defense - probably forever."

    http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24445-dear-defense-contractor-ceos-why-is-the-pentagon-buying-weapons-full-of-chinese-parts-when-you-could-get-them-here-in-the-us


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  16. Super writing and research, Gail! (Henry Thoreau meets the internet?) One thing I have long wondered about while reading your research, doesn't tropospheric ozone damage to trees look the same as the damage done to trees by the increased tropospheric UV due to stratospheric ozone depletion? Both are probably at work simultaneously and determining the degree is uselessly academic. Still, I'm curious whether you have much pondered this issue? In commiseration, John

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  17. I think you are correct John, both are occurring. However, I am much less concerned about the thinning stratospheric layer (for now, mysterious processes and even newly discovered chemicals occurring up there are that no one really understands). Certainly over-exposure to UV radiation can harm foliage, but the extent to which the damage done by tropospheric ozone is well-understood, the ramifications of that are also well-established, and given the increasing levels, I don't think we need to look much further to explain the wide-scale decline that is accelerating. Also, I see equally sick plants inside conservatories that are protected from direct sunlight as well as wild plants outside.

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  18. Thanks Gail, very much enjoyed this post and have found your comments very sharp and accurate (both here and from Nature Bats Last a while back, when I first came across it).

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  19. Inspiring and insightful observations, thanks Gail! You may like to know i've linked your brilliant essay in my one-page essays on my Blog. Please see:http://mrpswords.blogspot.ca/2014/07/our-inner-inuksuk.html

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