Deeply Dystopian

Based on a free excerpt captioned "A quick rundown of the ecocidal empires that came before us", I purchased the electronic version of "Extinction: A Radical History" by Ashley Dawson.  Upon reading the entire book I was not surprised, having been forewarned, to see the typical finger pointing at capitalism - but it was more disappointing than usual since the author, who is a superb writer, did an excellent job delineating just how destructive humans have been ever since we emerged from Africa and learned to use fire and weapons to extirpate dozens upon dozens of animals we preyed upon or whose habitat we burned.  It's worth reading if only to follow up on his bibliography and find works such as "Ecocide" published in 2004 and "The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture" from 1979.

He started off on sound footing based on archaeological facts but then veered into the usual illusions about human behavior to be found in the writings of just about every apocaloptimist offering stealth hope to the steadily increasing numbers of petrified witnesses to the Great Convulsion of our deteriorating environment.

Overshoot, hand in hand with destruction of the natural world, culminating in societal collapse, war, and migration, is essentially what our species does perpetually and recurringly, with monotonous repetition, over and over.  To frame the global precipice we now teeter upon as a recent, especially gluttonous aberration based on the modern financial system and consumer culture is to willfully ignore the pattern that Prof. Dawson himself elucidates so comprehensively.  It also exposes a sad lack of understanding of the exponential function that is almost universally ignored, one prominent feature of which is to look FLAT for far, far longer than a sudden acceleration revealed in various hockey stick graphs - whether population, global temps, fresh water depletion or species extinction.

The contortions he employs to make his thesis work are unconvincing, citing for example the Egyptians as having been "sustainable" for thousands of years while ignoring their use of slaves to fuel their economy (unless perhaps he considers slavery some sort of balance).  Humans have been driven by greed, a desire for status, and have exhibited a thorough lack of concern for preserving natural resources throughout our existence - a heedless exploitation that was limited only by technology and energy, despite what the tenets of almost all religions like to proclaim is our genesis from a sacred mother Earth.

He reveals the reason for his bias quite clearly in this statement:  "An anti-capitalist perspective also prevents us from attributing ecocide to humanity as a whole."   Like others who blame capitalism and ignore the brutality and devastation perpetuated by societies around the world including primitive, indigenous tribes, from ancient Asia to the Maya and Inca and Mound people of North America - he is willing to believe in fantasies rather than admit the rather obvious fact - ecocide IS being wrought by humanity as a whole.  His further statements make this agenda even more clear:  "Such a perspective is truly hopeless," and "Understanding that capitalism is responsible for the lion’s share of the sixth extinction helps us avoid the deeply dystopian idea that human beings are innately destructive of the natural world."

Yes, yes indeed it is hopeless.  That's because there IS no hope.  Yes, it is deeply dystopian, but preposterous to suggest otherwise since these statements followed one of the most compelling reconstructions of human-caused mass extinctions going back over 15,000 years I have yet to see.  The leopard can't change its spots, and humans can't avoid the Tragedy of the Commons, because we are hard-wired for short term self-interest and optimism bias...and it is that desperate desire for hope that insulates us from an ability to take the necessary steps to save ourselves and most of the rest of the living things on this planet.  Take away the top 1% and there will be a good 75% and probably far more who will happily replicate their level of consumption.

He is correct in this pronunciation however:  "We face a clear choice: radical political transformation or deepening mass extinction."

However, there is absolutely no objective evidence there will be any sort of radical political transformation, or even if there were, that it would be sufficient to stave off mass extinction (which is already well under way) including ourselves.  This is because politics is not the fundamental problem.  The problem is the genetic imperative to grow, a trait we share with every other living thing.  The problem is there's not much external holding us in check, and believing we should be able to rationally do things differently is just another form of anthropocentrism.  We're not much better than yeast, or at least, not better enough.

According to Werner Herzog interviewed in the Daily Beast, humans might quite likely go extinct, but there's no need to panic - it won't be for a thousand years!  Infatuation with technology is the reverse side of the coin of demonizing modern industrial society and romanticizing wilderness, and equally limited.  I just watched X Machina, a creepy fictionalized account of a robot takeover that delves uncomfortably close to the misogynist tendencies of AI enthusiasts, and there's also a more decorous (but equally fantastical) documentary in Herzog's latest film, "Lo and Behold, Reveries of a Connected Age".  

Dread of nature perhaps underlies a powerful desire in human consciousness to control, even destroy it, and is a strong theme Herzog described about making his 1982 film, "Fitzcarraldo," mirroring Conrad. The clip he narrated is below this transcript, mesmerizing (in a deeply dystopian way).

Werner Herzog ~ "...Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is - is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists has - has created in anger. It's the only land where - where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment."


 

Earth Embalmed

There are so many calamities - fish kills in Florida and birds falling out of the skies, epic floods and droughts, the slowing of the ocean currents - that when I prepared the 26th Dispatch From The Endocene I left out a major incident I had intended to include - the abrupt and near total coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.  The fact that it is just one item on the roster of grotesque environmental disasters that will catalyze NO change whatsoever in the engine of human civilization - even though it has to be the most egregious, most atrocious, most stunningly heinous example of anthropogenic ecocide - is astonishing. It is proof, were any to be needed, that nothing - nothing, not an ice free Arctic, not a huge ice shelf breaking off Antarctica raising sea levels a foot in a week, not thousands of deaths in a heat wave, not storms so violent they lift boulders from the bottom of the sea - NOTHING will stop people from availing themselves blindly and greedily to the bounteous largess of Earth...until it is all gone, and there is none left.  The debacle in the reef is the latest example of humanity ceaselessly rendering the biosphere into a morgue.  It’s as awful as though all the forests were dying, and we managed to ignore it.

Oh, wait.

Following is the transcript for the April 1, 2016 broadcast, and no, sadly, it’s not a joke.  You can listen to it streaming at the Extinction Radio website tonight, where it will be archived with the rest of the show, or listen here.

Thanks as always Gene, and welcome listeners to the 26th Dispatch From the Endocene.

Even in the best of times, people search for meaning and crave a sense of purpose in their lives.  It seems a very human trait to wonder who we are and why we are here, effectively alone as we drift through the universe.  So often, we find ourselves helpless victims to the incoherent caprice of nature, and it is difficult to find the stability we desire when we are buffeted by forces we cannot control.  Sometimes we respond with despair, and sometimes with hope, when we are confronted with the randomness and cruelty of an arbitrary fate.

How much more difficult is it then, to contemplate the irrevocable loss of species due to our own actions, not to say our own extinction from relentless destruction and pollution.  The prospect of human extinction lays waste to all philosophy and faith that places humanity at the center of cosmic consciousness, and posits existence beyond materialism.  How can we respond when we acknowledge the shrapnel of our explosive growth has rendered the biosphere unsalvageable?  In the midst of ever more evidence of horrifically accelerating climate change, from melting Antarctica and sea level rise to the lack of any remaining carbon budget, the ecological tipping points are fast receding into the past.  We have entered a phase of universal, rancid toxicity in the air, water and soil, ultimately to become inhospitable to all but the most intrepid simple organisms.

The conundrum of being authentic in a contrived system has always been absurd, and for many who are aware of the ubiquitous ominous trends it becomes an insurmountable task to detect joy in face of the Tragedy of the Commons.  That parable is one of the most potent descriptions of how intractable the plight of humanity has become, now that we are suffocating and squeezed on this fragile, finite beleaguered planet.  The interests of the individual must eventually doom the entire community, and then of course the individual with it.

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan, where he wrote “…in the first place, I put forth a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”

The response as formulated by Albert Camus still resonates; make your own meaning.  Find what you love to do, and do it.  In these times careening towards collapse of many sorts, I would add, bear witness.  It is a futile act, but I feel it is my moral obligation to the life we are consuming…and I don’t know what else to do.

So this Dispatch is going to consist of acknowledging some events and issues that deserve to be known, starting with the absolute inevitability of human extinction.  All of the links will be posted on my blog, Wit’s End.  It will be illustrated with the art of Ruud Van Empel.  I first saw his work on a Facebook post, accompanied by fatuously enthusiastic endorsements from commenters who were certain that the ridiculously large lotus leaves are from an actual, idyllic forest on a Caribbean island.

Suspecting there was something more enigmatic being communicated (albeit too esoteric for the average face booker), I looked him up and discovered a fascinating hyper-realist whose digital collage photographs were described by one critic as “the subtle undermining of true Paradise”.  Another observed:  “Everything is so consistently, motionlessly, too beautiful to be true that it seems immediately suspicious and perhaps even threatening.  Ruud van Empel makes technically perfect use of these ambiguities.”  Look carefully at the mask of serenity and you will find themes of innocence and historic guilt, exploitation and redemption, wilderness and artifice.

Probably one of the most important and penetrating articles that will be swiftly forgotten was published in, of all places, Climate Network News.  With the ominous title, “Renewable energy demands the undoable”, the article discusses a study called “The 21st century population-energy-climate nexus” published in the journal Energy Policy.  This analysis decisively shatters the fairytale that humanity can power modern civilization with renewable energy in anything like the timeframe required to spare us from utterly catastrophic climate change. Right now nearly 1/5 of the world’s population lives without access to electricity yet, we need to reduce emissions immediately.  Currently renewables are only a tiny portion of the mix - just 10.3% of electricity and that’s including hydropower, a highly damaging source.  Obviously, all transport is almost completely dependent on burning fuel.

This is the sort of factual reality that climate crusaders don’t want to hear, because it completely refutes the ability of their idol, new technology, to save the day and enable industrial civilization to continue - never mind extend to those people who have yet to enjoy its benefits, equivocal though they may be.

The study echoes and reinforces the conclusions made by Ozzie Zehner, the author of “Green Illusions”.  In an interview from 2013, he was quoted as follows:

“The modern environmental movement has rolled over to become an outlet for loggers, energy firms and car companies to plug into. It is now primarily a social media platform for consumerism, growth and energy production - an institutionalized philanderer of green illusions. If you need evidence, just go to any climate rally and you’ll see a strip mall of stands for green products, green jobs and green energy. These will do nothing to solve the crisis we face, which is not an energy crisis but rather a crisis of consumption.”

“There is an impression that we have a choice between fossil fuels and clean energy technologies such as solar cells and wind turbines. That choice is an illusion. Alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels through every stage of their life. Alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels for mining operations, fabrication plants, installation, ongoing maintenance and decommissioning. Also, due to the irregular output of wind and solar, these technologies require fossil fuel plants to be running alongside them at all times. Most significantly, alternative energy financing relies on the kind of growth that fossil fuels drive.”

In his book of philosophy “Straw Dogs”, John Gray wrote in 2007:  “The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, “Western civilisation” or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.”

This brings us to the latest example of celebrity hypocrisy, in which Jeff Bridges stars in a video urging a reduction in the use of disposable plastic products with an emphasis on shopping bags, water bottles and straws.  Somewhat disingenuously, the emphasis is on "single-use" plastic, as though the earth cares how many times plastic is used before it enters the landfill and ocean for eternity. Not to mention, that the footprint of replacements like metal water bottles isn’t insignificant either.  Coincidentally or perhaps due to some internet spying algorithm, after I watched that video a link popped up on my home page urging me to check out Jeff Bridge’s “magnificent home beyond stunning” which turns out to be an obscenely enormous mansion full of expensive furniture, carpets and paintings each one of which, I am certain, was delivered swathed in protective single use plastic wrapping.

Meanwhile, a post-mortem on thirteen stranded whales found they were emaciated, their stomachs full of plastic, and a study finds that we all, especially the adventurous nature-loving campers, hikers, skiers, and other outdoor enthusiasts among us, are sending 2,000 plastic microfibers into the water system every time we wash one article of fleece clothing…and indeed fleece and Gore-Tex clothing is the biggest source of the more than 100 million particles of microplastic being deposited via wastewater into the fiord from a community of a mere 2,000 on the island of Svalbard.  100 million particles.  EVERY DAY.

Hungry killer whales are looking for the salmon they usually eat off the shores of the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, but they’re not finding any.  At the mouth of the Columbia River spring chinook are at around 1% of their historic numbers, and 96% of sockeye died before finishing their journey up the Snake River last year.  In March it was reported that a massive algae bloom killed 23 million salmon in Chile.  “Oceana, an environmental group in Chile, says the problem has been made worse by nitrate-rich runoff from livestock from nearby land around the salmon farms, which are typically offshore or in estuaries.”

And small wonder.  “Nitrogen fertilizer applied to farmers’ fields has been contaminating rivers and lakes and leaching into drinking water wells for more than 80 years. The study, published this week in a special issue of the journal Environmental Research Letters, reveals that elevated nitrate concentrations in rivers and lakes will remain high for decades, even if farmers stop applying nitrogen fertilizers today.  The researchers have discovered that nitrogen is building up in soils, creating a long-term source of nitrate pollution in ground and surface waters.”

Lastly I would like to make a few remarks about our corroded trees and embalmed forests.  Of course, we continue the tradition of chopping trees down, either for their lumber or to make room for so-called development or mining.  The Atlantic magazine has a shocking layout of images in an article titled “The Violent Remaking of Appalachia”, which is well worth a visit.  Recently it has been reported that over the objections of many in the public, the government of Poland is going ahead with plans to raze parts of Europe’s last primeval forest.  The article says “It is home to 20,000 animal species, including 250 types of bird and 62 species of mammals—among them Europe’s largest, the bison.

...Europe’s tallest trees, firs towering 50 metres high (164 feet), and oaks and ashes of 40 metres, also flourish here, in an ecosystem unspoiled for more than 10 millennia.”  The government claims they have to log it to protect the trees that haven’t yet been infested with beetles…and in this instance they might not be lying.

Biotic attacks are epidemics everywhere in the world.  The UK Guardian reports that between a disease and a beetle, the ash tree is likely to be “wiped out” in the UK and Europe and separately, that a disease with a “massive list of different host plants” is mutating and migrating.  “First confirmed in Europe three years ago when it ran rampant across olive plantations in southern Italy, a subspecies of Xylella has since been detected in southern France, where it has destroyed vines and lavender plants, and in Corsica. Xylella fastidiosa has also been found in both South and North America where it is commonly referred to as “phony peach disease” and where it has caused severe damage to citrus and coffee plantations. In New Jersey it has attacked more than a third of the state’s urban trees.”

Over in Hawaii a previously unknown fungus is decimating that state’s most iconic tree, the Ohia.  One article says, “In 2012, diseased ohia covered about 2,300 acres in Puna. By 2014, dead ohia littered more than 15,000 acres of pristine rainforest. The disease was marching across the island of Hawaii, uncontained.”

If you want to see truly harrowing documentation of forest decline, check a video at the site Ready For Wildfire where you can learn about the bark beetle in California.  There are some interesting facts there about the 29 million trees that have died in this four year drought and 58 million more suffering from “severe canopy water losses”.  It says, “Ponderosa pine, Jeffrey pine, and pinyon pines are most impacted by bark beetles, but many trees have died just from lack of water in the current drought. Most other pine species, white fir and incense-cedar are also heavily impacted by the prolonged drought and by bark beetles. There is also an increase in tree mortality among oaks, although it is primarily attributed to drought, not bark beetles.”

Maps of mortality by year can be seen at the state government Tree Mortality Viewer [click on continue at the bottom of the page].  Interestingly, there is almost no documented dieback in their earliest graphic from 2012, yet, when I visited California before that, it was quite obvious to me that the trees were in serious decline already.  The bark beetle faqs page states:  “Under normal conditions, bark beetles renew the forest by killing older trees and those weakened by disease, drought, smog or physical damage.”

Exactly.  Beetles are opportunistic, preying on trees weakened by pollution, just like all the fungus and disease rampant in the world today.  A thirteen-year study in China determined that smog-creating nitrogen emissions in the atmosphere are causing a “silent massacre” of the entire world’s forests.

Seattle meteorologist Cliff Mass posted a blog warning about the dangers of falling trees.  He stated “During virtually every major windstorm that has hit our region, someone has died from a falling branch or trunk,” and went on with the assumption that it is perfectly normal for that to occur.  IT IS NOT.  The trees are dying; that is why they are falling on people and killing them.  In one article about a death in New Hampshire just this week, it was stated that in wind gusts at the highest 46 mph, a tree killed a man in his truck, adding “The tree did not seem to be rotted”. This was an idiotic statement since anyone looking at the pictures that accompany the article can see that, indeed the trunk was black with rot.

Unfortunately, it seems that almost the only people who realize our trees are being poisoned are convinced that it is from a chemtrail conspiracy, or radiation of some sort.  You can watch one woman, in South Carolina, demonstrate how pathetically sick they are in her neighborhood.

The New Internationalist published an article by Chris Rose in 1988 in which he discusses “tree blindness”.  I will let him have the last word on what is happening to our forests, and why still, nothing is being done about it, with some excerpts.  He gave it the simple title:

The Forest is Dying

“In conifer trees the needles fall years early, often first turning a sickly yellow indicating a shortage of essential metals such as magnesium. As the decline progresses the tree loses its ability to feed itself through photosynthesis (because the leaf area is reduced) and in its weakened state falls victim to diseases. In deciduous species such as the beech and oak the pattern is similar. Official surveys show that over half of Britain’s broadleaved trees have lost a quarter or more of their leaf area. In fact Britain’s oak and beech are probably the most damaged in Europe.”

“Like the much-cited canary in the coal-mine, the dying forests are potent indicators of what is to become of us, for the chemicals that cause acid rain also attack people. Water on already slightly acid rocks and sands becomes more acid with pollution, releasing toxic metals such as cadmium, lead, mercury and aluminium. This last, it is claimed, accounts for the high rates of Alzheimer’s disease (senile dementia) in southern Norway.”

“Vehicle exhausts spew out oxides of nitrogen and hydrocarbons which include cancer-inducing chemicals. Diesel is particularly rich in such pollution. Together in the air, these chemicals react in sunlight to form ozone, a substance which is essential outside the atmosphere where it protects the earth from harmful ultra-violet rays. Inside the atmosphere, however, it is a pollutant which eats through leaf-cell walls, making them permeable to acidic rainfall, and leaching out key nutrients. Ozone also attacks the lungs of mammals and birds. The American bald eagle used as a mascot at the Los Angeles Olympics died from lung disease caused by air pollution.”

“…air pollution once concentrated in urban areas is now spread thinly over the previously clean countryside. Ice cores analyzed from the Arctic and Antarctic show that eventually it reaches there too.Only recently have the effects of acid rain on trees begun to be recognized, which may be one reason why the implications of acid rain for humans have not really hit home. As Canadian Gilles Gagnon wrote in 1986: ‘Each year the beauty of the forest is somewhat diminished but one gets used to it and finds it natural to see trees withering along the roadside’. The same could be said of almost every country in which the insidious decline has taken hold.”

“When the blight first started to be recognized in West Germany, slogans were daubed on the rocks of the worst affected Black Forest hillsides. ‘Do not weep forest,’ said one, ‘the desert will not last forever’. Others referred to the Christmas carol, Oh Tannenbaum, which celebrates the beauty of the silver fir tree, a tree which not only occupies a central place in German folk-mythology but has been hardest hit by waldsterben. Yet within a year or so, the trees were being felled and others planted. After all, they look healthy. The signs were scrubbed from the rocks at the request of the local hoteliers. Acid rain and dying forests, they said, were bad for business. If it couldn’t be cured then perhaps it should at least be denied.”

“The prospect of a civilization which can happily accept the Black Forest without trees is more than unsettling. On this basis attacks of tree blindness become an act of mass delusion as society turns its back on an apparently insoluble problem. The question is whether we open our eyes before the delusion becomes suicidal.”

I made a video called The Silent War on Trees, which ends with a poem by Stanley Kunitz, written in 1958.

In closing, I’d like to read it.

The War Against the Trees

The man who sold his lawn to standard oil
Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show
While the bulldozers, drunk with gasoline,
Tested the virtue of the soil
Under the branchy sky
By overthrowing first the privet-row.

Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids
Were but the preliminaries to a war
Against the great-grandfather of the town,
So freshly lopped and maimed.
They struck again and again,
And with each elm a century went down.

All day the hireling engines charged the trees,
Subverting them by hacking underground
In grub-dominions, where dark summer’s mole
Rampages through his halls,
Till a northern seizure shook
Those crowns, forcing the giants to their knees.

I saw the ghosts of children at their games
Racing beyond their childhood in the shade,
And while the green world turned its death-foxed page
And a red wagon wheeled,
I watched them disappear
Into the suburbs of their grievous age.

Ripped from the craters much too big for hearts
The club-roots bared their amputated coils,
Raw gorgons matted blind, whose pocks and scars
Cried Moon! on a corner lot
One witness-moment, caught
In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars.

Thanks for listening.

Love Is Not Enough

Following is the transcript for the 25th Dispatch From the Endocene, which can be heard at ExtinctionRadio.org 43 minutes in.  The artwork is by Arthur Rackham, whose depiction of trees rendered them veritable sentient characters in his illustrations of fairy tales.

Thanks as always Gene, and welcome Listeners, to the 25th Dispatch From The Endocene.  The transcript and pertinent links will be found on my blog, Wit’s End, under the inspirational title, “Love is Not Enough”.

Last fall, the organization Conservation International launched a glitzy campaign to save the world with a sophisticated video series featuring wealthy superstars like Robert Redford and Julia Roberts.  After I did a little research about the actual lifestyles of their environmentally conscious celebrities, I wrote a post excoriating their monumental hubris.  It struck me as amazing that people who travel on luxury jets and own multiple mansions and vehicles can simultaneously believe that while THEY can buy their way out of responsibility, they have no shame in telling everybody else to consume less and respect Mother Nature.

Robert Redford is described in an interview as having a life-long love affair with the American West and is quoted:  “I love to explore and love to drive”.  Isn’t that perfect?  That must be why he built the Sundance Resort in Utah, where countless affluent airheads fly in annually for the Film Festival, and even more prosperous tourists take private planes to ski down the slopes of the mountains, denuded of trees.  Apparently he had to kill them to save them.

Harrison Ford, another spokesman for Conservation International, said “There's nothing better than seeing a herd of elk right outside the window of my house in Wyoming.   My land gives me an opportunity to be close to nature, and I find spiritual solace in nature, contemplating our species in the context of the natural world.”  Apparently he finds no irony in adding “All of my planes are great to fly, and that's why I've got so many of them.  I have a Citation Sovereign, a long-range jet; a Grand Caravan, a turboprop aircraft capable of operating on unimproved strips; and a De Havilland, a bush plane. I have a 1929 Waco Taperwing open-top biplane; a 1942 PT-22 open-top monoplane trainer; an Aviat Husky, a two-seat fabric-covered bush plane; and a Bell 407 helicopter. I also have more than my fair share of motorbikes - eight or nine. I have four or five BMWs, a couple of Harleys, a couple of Hondas and a Triumph; plus I have sports touring bikes.”

Trust-fund baby Edward Norton probably feels he is helping the earth by promoting healthy soils in the campaign, and no doubt feels he needs a Mercedes and a couple of Range Rovers because, hey, he has several mansions scattered around the world and besides, he also has a hydrogen-fueled BMW.

A comical vanity enables us to reconcile our supposed love for nature with helping ourselves to whatever abuse of it that suits our wishes - and it seems to apply to just about everyone, not only the 1%, to one degree or another.  I was reminded of this when the professional activists got into an excited dither because Leonardo DiCaprio used the occasion of his Oscar win to pontificate about climate change.  Meanwhile, he has bought an entire island off the coast of Belize with the intention of “restoring” it - while building an extremely high-end eco-tourist resort.  His reason?  He said, “As soon as I got there, I fell in love.”

Never mind that any benefit to the local flora and fauna will be more than obviated by the construction.  Plus, in perpetuity, the destination will generate emissions from travel.  Likely much of it will be by even more impactful private jet - since hardly anyone who can afford to spend $2,000 per night, or to purchase one of the 48 opulent vacation villas valued between 5 and 15 million, surely can’t be expected to fly commercial with the hoi polloi.  Mr. DiCaprio apparently sees no conflict in choosing to work with a builder who is a former partner at Goldman Sachs, and his architect was quoted:

“The goal was to create something that wasn’t contrived — a tiki hut or some image of a Hawaiian getaway — but rather the history of the place, the Mayan culture, with a more modern approach,” Mr. McLennan said. “We want to change the outlook of people who visit, on both the environment writ large and also their personal well-being.”

[update:  I have learned that Leo felt it was just essential for him to go to Greenland to see the melting ice for himself.  No doubt this raised so much awareness, that dozens upon dozens of people have given up flying, thus offsetting his emissions.]

According to the [oxymoronic] Center for Responsible Travel “The ecotourism market is large and growing, with eight billion ecotourist visits a year worldwide.  Ecotourism is travel that minimizes negative impact on a location and seeks to preserve its natural resources.”

Does anyone but me see how ludicrous this is?  There seems to be a peculiarly common human ability to be utterly blind to one’s own self-justifications - much like hunters, whether contemporary or ancient, offer a prayer to whatever god or spiritual entity they believe in before they shoot, bludgeon, or stab their prey - as though that means the animal they kill is any happier about dying.

I wonder if the people who colonized Pedro González Island in the Pearl Archipelago off of Panama thanked the spirits for their prey.  Scientists have just discovered that settlers arrived there 6200 years ago and for perhaps 8 centuries remained, “…farming maize and roots, fishing, gathering palm fruits and shellfish and hunting…opossums, agoutis, iguanas and large snakes - the major predators”.  Oh and the dwarfish, tiny deer they hunted to extinction.  The scientists discovered that:

“Some deer bones had cuts indicating butchering, such as disarticulation and slicing meat from the bone, or had the marks of human teeth. Others had been burned or smashed to get at the marrow. Antlers and long bones were often cut for making everyday tools and ornaments. Hunting appears to have been indiscriminate, including adults as well as juveniles.”

“The number of deer bones decreased in the youngest layer of the midden, and those of older adults were absent, suggesting that the species was becoming scarcer and life expectancies lower. No deer bones were found in later layers left by pottery-using people after 2,300 years ago, indicating that the species had become extinct on Pedro González by then.”

Islands are often illustrative microcosms, analogous to the whole of planet Earth.  They become hot-beds of biodiversity, as they are cut off from outside competition - and when humans arrive their species are especially vulnerable to extinction.  No matter how much the people love the animals and plants they encounter, too often it doesn’t stop them from overwhelming the ones they value the most.  Native Americans, north and south, had no horses and few domesticated animals, because their ancestors ate them all soon after they migrated to the continent.

This is a pattern that repeats throughout history, around the world, writ both large and small.  I’ll give you a current example.  Wilderness enthusiasts have already bought out all the berths on the lavish new cruise ship “Crystal Serenity”.  The first luxury liner of its size to navigate the northwest passage, it is scheduled to depart next August.  A mere $22,000 is all that was required, unless you wanted a penthouse for $120,000 -  based on double occupancy - plus insurance up to $50,000 per person in case an emergency evacuation is required.  So now for the very fist time, thanks to ice melting from global warming, 1,070 passengers and at least an equal number of crew can pollute the pristine arctic ocean with their shit, piss, vomit, and fuel emissions AND add to the underwater cacophony that has already made it difficult for orcas to feed and right whales to communicate.  The passengers will no doubt love the view of the collapsing glaciers from their privileged vantage on the deck.

It’s not only the famous and fatuous who think they are so special that the rules they would impose on everyone else don’t apply to them.  Each and every human is convinced that their needs are sacred and must be fulfilled - and that the definition of their needs is determined by their own desires, without regard to the requirements of other forms of life.  In an earlier Dispatch I mentioned the delicate alpine wildflowers being trampled to extinction by mountain hikers and bikers.  It turns out that prickly cactus are no safer.

Smugglers posing as hobbyists travel through the American west and elsewhere in the world, using satellite coordinates to mark the locations of especially rare, endangered - and therefore more expensive - specimens.  Like other illegal wildlife products, the internet has facilitated the trade, and the numbers are staggering.  Collecting is endangering the very survival of many prized varieties, as they are plucked from deserts in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Mexico.  Customs officials can’t keep up with the volume of material.   Some hunters steal or trade in the market for money, but there wouldn’t be any money in it if there weren’t people who feel what The Atlantic called a “spiritual affinity”, an “obsession”, a “passion” and, yes, love - some for the tremendous size of the iconic saguaro, and others for the seldom but spectacular blooms of more diminutive varieties.  The article notes that cacti are particularly vulnerable to what humans call “love”, because they they “…tend to grow slowly, live a long time, reproduce infrequently, and concentrate in one area.”

This conviction that each person carries within them - that their priorities are exceptional and that the rules don’t apply - leads to absurdities such as taking air travel off the table at the climate negotiations in Paris.  Nearly everyone who participated, obviously, had flown there.  Flying is the third rail of climate activism - the organizations with a mandate to avoid catastrophic climate change won’t touch it, because there is no way to reduce emissions by even the unrealistic thresholds agreed to by negotiators without drastically reducing if not eliminating the exceptionally high impact of airplane emissions.

About a year ago at the American Geophysical Union conference, James White from the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research gave an inspired lecture about abrupt climate change.  I’m going to paraphrase his compelling description of a tipping point.  His analogy begins with an explorer traveling downstream by canoe on the Niagara River .  He can hear an immense roar in the distance, but doesn’t recognize it as being the massive falls.  The current becomes faster and more irresistible, and by the time he realizes that he is going to cascade over the immense verge plunging to certain death, it is too late to paddle to the shore.  The time to have done so was behind him.

In other words, tipping points are by definition seen only in hindsight.  They aren’t recognized ahead of time, or even as they occur, except possibly by a few odd Cassandras, who are borderline insane by normal standards. 

Probably one of the foremost scholars on ecological tipping points is Anthony Barnosky of UC Berkeley.  He was lead author with 22 colleagues of a pivotal study published in Nature, warning of impending tipping points in reductions to biodiversity.  Their point of reference in 2012 was the time frame of “within a few generations”.  Now he and his wife Elizabeth Hadley, also a paleobiologist from Stanford, have published a book, titled “End Game - Tipping Point for Planet Earth?”.  This time around, according to a review in Newsweek, they have upped the ante and warn that the world will tip into environmental and social catastrophe within 20 years.  Interestingly, the snarky reviewer inquires:

“Do we really need a wake-up call? Another one? Because the world arguably woke up to the Barnosky message long ago. The canon of eschatological literature is old and long. The trouble is that we've stopped listening to the warnings. Indeed it sometimes seems as though the louder the alarm clock, the more inclined we are, these days, to roll over and hit the snooze button.”

He then describes the Barnosky/Hadley juggernaut to effect their research:

“There is more than a touch of missionary zeal in the way they have travelled the world, sometimes with their two young daughters strapped into baby carriers (the authors are Californian, after all), in order to attend international conferences in Africa, measure the retreat of the Himalayan pika, or record the blood toxicity of Costa Rican bats. Each chapter is prefaced with another illustrative tale from this adventurous and enviable life, to jolly along the science.”

So despite their long-held conviction that earth cannot sustain the current level of population and consumption, they have two young children and travel around the world to prove it.  That makes sense, right?

The review ends with the following:

“When tipping points are reached, the change can be violent as well as sudden, like the moment that water reaches boiling point. Endgame may amount to a triumph of hope over experience, but you cannot fault the authors' determination to try to warn us.”

Can’t we? They warn us, but they do not heed their own warnings.  I think that is quite likely because, deep down, they know that the tipping point for maintaining the healthy, thriving, magnificent panorama of life has already been passed, some time ago.  The exquisitely complex tapestry of life is unraveling, it is inevitable and irreversible - scientists now know that marine animals are dying of domoic acid from toxic algae, that corals are already doomed by acidification, that climate chaos will worsen, that we have poisoned the air, water and soil.  It’s risible that they justify their travel and grant money by claiming more research is needed, and continue the farcical pretense that the tipping points await perpetually in the future.

I recently re-connected with an old friend, I’ll call her Meredith.  She has retired as an agricultural studies teacher for high school students, and now that our children are grown and we have more time on our hands, we’ve been catching up once a week, having lunch together and taking our dogs for walks in the woods.

Meredith is the product of an ultra-conservative background, and is even a Donald Trump supporter - but in that increasingly common bizarre confluence of far right and far left, I discovered that she’s a bit of a catastrophist too.

In her case, the suspicion that the future will be less than rosy derives from her concern about agricultural pesticide and growth hormone use.  She thinks that the government agencies aren’t doing anything to protect the public from toxic accumulations in our food, and thinks not only are humans being poisoned but so is the rest of nature.  A recent exposé about how a senior researcher at USDA was hounded out of his laboratory for reporting on the relationship between chemicals and the disappearance of pollinators like bees and butterflies corroborates her fears.

Unlike most people who are oblivious to the phenomena of shifting baselines, Meredith has also noticed the incremental deterioration of the landscape.  She grew up on a dirt road, riding horses every day, and the subsequent development which has obliterated the fields and woods she once roamed as a child has led her to conclude that there are far, far too many people in the world - and that we are bumping up against implacable limits.

I can’t explain why but Meredith ate a tuna fish sandwich every day for lunch since she was a kid, and she found out her mercury levels are trending through the roof.  So when I said that there is some pollution you can see, and some you can’t, she readily agreed.  Thus it wasn’t much of a leap for her when I said that all the fallen trees and broken branches she noticed around her home and in the woods around mine during our walks was the result of invisible airborne ozone and acidic depositions in the soil and water.

She told me that she first noticed trees in decline around her house about five years ago, and initially worried that it was a result of discharge from a water softener she had installed.  But then she quickly added that she realized the trees far away from the septic system were just as sickly.  I was surprised to find someone whose observations mirrored mine, because I am usually scoffed at.  At the end of our conversation she said ruefully that she had long suspected something was very wrong with the forests, but hadn’t wanted to articulate it.  Because it’s really scary, and depressing.  I told her I cried almost every night for months when I first realized the trees are all dying.

Last fall a census by Yale foresters demonstrated that even without pollution, humans have removed half of earth’s trees already, and we are losing 15 billion trees every year.  At this rate, they calculate there would be NONE left in 300 years.  Much of the loss is due to logging, but even before that, humans burned forests to improve hunting and foraging.  People set fire to Madagascar’s forests 1,000 years ago, turning it into grassland for pasturing cattle.  Worse still, researchers have found that even without logging and burning, the hunting of large mammals that is occurring in places like the Amazon and Africa would eventually doom the forests even if they’re not cut, because those animals are essential to disburse the seeds.  Without them the rest of the ecosystem system will collapse.

Meanwhile the concentration of nitrous oxide, a byproduct of burning fuel and agricultural fertilization, and a primary precursor to ozone, is skyrocketing.  Air pollution is already linked to heart disease, cancer, emphysema and asthma - now doctors are finding it is connected to the obesity epidemic and Alzheimer’s.  How could we expect it to be any less injurious to trees that absorb it year after year?  Several decades ago, there was widespread concern about the health of forests and then, a memo went out to the foresters that the problem had been solved, long-term fumigation and monitoring experiments were cancelled, and much of the funding evaporated.  Yet, a few experts persisted and in 2012 a report was published which analyzed 4,057 plots from national and regional forest health surveys.

Titled “Susceptibility of Forests in the Northeastern USA to Nitrogen and Sulfur Deposition: Critical Load Exceedance and Forest Health”, the abstract states:

“We observed significant negative correlations between critical load exceedance and growth and crown density; we observed significant positive correlations of exceedance with declining vigor, with crown dieback and crown transparency. These results indicate that significant detrimental responses to atmospheric deposition are being observed across the northeastern USA.”

“…projected emissions of acidifying S and N compounds are expected to have continuing negative impacts on forests. Atmospheric S and N deposition have contributed to acidification of soils and surface waters, export of nutrient cations, and mobilization of aluminum in soils, which can be toxic to plants and other biota. When exports of nutrient cations are greater than inputs to an ecosystem, soil nutrients may decrease to inadequate levels, a condition known as cation depletion. Cation depletion may result in a wide range of forest health problems: reduced growth rates and increased susceptibility of forests to climate change; pest and pathogen stress, which results in reduced forest health, reduced timber yield, increased mortality; and eventual changes in forest species composition.”

“Twenty-one tree species in the northeastern USA exhibit detrimental impacts from atmospheric deposition.”

So, it’s not all in my imagination.

If only love remains - whatever that means - it’s not, and has never been, enough.  Not when, like its close cousin hope, it is an intellectual construct that merely serves to enable humanity to rationalize the destruction of the rest of life on this exceptional, extraordinarily and perhaps even uniquely glorious planet.

Thanks for listening.

Bonus for readers:  click here to see pictures of newly discovered ancient oaks in a forgotten castle park in England.  And then ask yourself why trees that huge aren't found everywhere.