An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity

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Scope: Our magical thinking about the relationship of the growth economy and the ecosphere in a finite world allows us to believe that an economics of endless growth will not end badly. This bleak future is “not pleasant…to ponder and prepare for, so it’s not surprising that many people, especially those in societies where affluence is based on dense energy and advanced technology, clamor for solutions to be able to keep the energy flowing and the technology advancing.” Thus, our civil religion tainted by technological fundamentalism becomes necessary [(5); the term is originally from David W. Orr]. Regarding fundamentalism of any kind – scientistic instead of scientific, religious, political, economic – I follow Janisse Ray who wrote that “ fundamentalism thrives only where imagination has died” (paraphrase from Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, 2004). Along with fundamentalism comes the naked hubris leading us to believe that humans understand complex questions definitively. No, we never do. In our secular analysis, there but for the specific geography, climate, and environmental conditions go we. For example, because of the differences in initial conditions, not all cultures developed the technologies to plow the ground, smelt ores, or exploit fossil fuels to do work in machines. The cultures without those technologies have not depleted the carbon in soils, forests, coal, oil, and natural gas in the ways that societies with those technologies have done.

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I think that appeals to “the apocalypse” are fundamentalist and that KLG’s essay should seek to short-circuit monotheistic thinking. The apocalyptic thinking in the U S of A — and one only has to recall the Burnt-Over District, the Millerites, and the origins of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — leads to a kind of passive illogic. Well, there’s one god, one way forward through the arrow of time, and, ooops, the angel is unsealing the seventh seal. We also have these incredible capacities for collaboration, cooperation, empathy, compassion, right? So human nature is real. but it’s variable. But there is what Wes and I, borrowing from our friend, Bill Veatch, call human carbon nature. That we’re also just organisms. We are biological entities. And Wes has long said, you know, probably the easiest definition of life on Earth is, life is the scramble for energy rich carbon. And human beings have just gotten incredibly good at getting at that carbon. Now, we can make choices to control the way we do it today. But we also have to realize that part of human nature is that biological desire to maximize our use of energy. Howard Odum called it the maximum power principle. And it’s not just a human creation, it’s part of life on this planet. Well, again, it doesn’t absolve everybody who’s doing bad things. It doesn’t mean that if you’re the CEO of an oil company, you get to say, “Well, that’s just the way it rolls.” We have to be accountable for our actions. And we have to understand the deeper forces that shape our actions. Both things are true. Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, and individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. I would argue for stewardship. I would argue for looking at the Flowers of Saint Francis instead of the Book of Revelations. And there’s always Buddhism and the prayers for *all* sentient beings. Yeah. So I always start with this realization. It’s just so happens my father was born in 1927. And my father is, in his last days now. The world population when my father was born was 2 billion. And my father will probably live to see a world of 8 billion. That means in one human lifetime, the human population doubled, and doubled again. That is unprecedented, tight? That’s three generations. I use that to remind people of the, in some ways, really bizarre world in which we live. Now, all of that population growth is pretty much a direct result of fossil fuels, especially through the Haber-Bosch process, which some people will recognize as the way we manufacture synthetic fertilizer, anhydrous, ammonia fertilizer. Well, you take away the fossil fuels needed for that process and a whole lot of us wouldn’t be here. So we’re dealing with a human population that is completely anomalous in human history. And that’s important to recognize. How are we going to get from 8 billion, which I think is quite clearly an unsustainable human population pretty much at any level of consumption. How are we going to get to a sustainable level with considerably less consumption per capita? And again, I say, per capita because we all know that the distribution of the material resources in this world is not equitable. It’s morally unacceptable. But if we look at kind of aggregates, what is possible? Well, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not a scientist, I don’t pretend to have an answer. And of course, nobody has a definitive answer. But people I find reliable, like, take Bill Rees, a really first-rate ecologist who has been doing good work on these subjects for you know, 50 years now. Bill suggests that a sustainable population is probably going to be something like 2 billion, right. Dennis Meadows of the “Limits to Growth” subject group says roughly the same thing. Some people say three or 4 billion. The final number doesn’t matter. What is clear is we’re talking about reducing the human population by at least half and maybe half again. And at the same time, getting people to accept that much of what we take to be “normal.” And I put normal in quotes there. Like, for instance, being able to jump in a car and drive a couple 100 miles to see members of your family. Well, a lot of people take that for granted now. You know, we’re coming up on a holiday and people are gonna say, “Well, yeah, sure, of course, I should have a right, it’s a human right to jump in a car.” Well, that’s not going to be part of a human future that’s sustainable. So the magnitude of that necessity to reduce the human population is really quite striking. Now, you know, some people will say, well, we just have to have better birth control. And there are ways to reduce the birth rate. We know about them. The main one is educating women and girls and raising the status of women and girls in society. That tends to bring down the birth rate. But that also often comes with increasing lifestyle consumption, you know, middle class status. So we have, you know, some real tensions on the birth end of it. And if you want to go to things people really don’t like to talk about, it’s not just a question of getting better birth control, it’s probably changing the way we think about death control. So we now, through the use of high tech, high energy technology, can keep people alive much longer than in any other era. And are we willing to start talking about, you know, withdrawing that kind of end of life medical treatment that keeps people alive? Well, we know that’s hard, you know. When a family talks about when to withdraw care from, you know, a grandparent, it’s emotionally wrenching. But we’re talking about having to do that collectively. Now, personally, I’m 64 years old, and I’ve made a commitment to myself and talk to others around me that I will not use any life extending medical technology. That if my time comes, I’m going to do that. Now, of course, the rubber hits the road when you actually get the diagnosis, and you have to make good on it. So I’m not being glib about how hard that is. But that conversation I’ve had with friends and family has been very wrenching. There are people who are really angry at me for saying this. Now imagine trying to do that at a collective level where we all agree. Well, you know, these are why these are hard questions because nobody can imagine an easy answer to the birth control, the death control, the limits on consumption. But that’s where we start those four large questions.Now Walter Brueggemann is anything but a Fundamentalist. He’s a modern biblical critic employing all the tools of rhetorical criticism to his chosen object of the study: the Hebrew Bible. And he has employed that methodology to highlight how the “Christian nation” of America is anything but by biblical standards. Many (most?) indigenous nations operated under an entirely different concept: land cannot be ‘owned.’ It may be territory lived on, hunted on, cultivated, by a group of people, but the concept of ‘owning’ land, with inherent rights of complete domination, destruction, extraction and sale to someone else, (similar to the rights exerted by the slave owner over the bodies of his slaves) is beyond understanding. Does this really apply to the so-called American democracy in the 21 st century? Well, we are a “nation that has been at war – either in shooting wars or cold war for domination – for our entire lives (since World War II; we are participating in both, one by proxy, in early 2023). Economic inequality and the resulting suffering have deepened in our lifetimes, facilitated by a government so captured by concentrated wealth that attempts to renew the moderate New Deal-era social contract seem radical to many.” And we are left with a culture “competent to implement almost anything (relating to government power) and to imagine almost nothing.” Just another example of fundamentalism thriving in the absence of imagination, “where both the Right and the so-called Left either endorses or capitulates to royal power.” Yes, “royal tradition” applies to us. Graeber and Wengrow write about how our ‘Western’ concept of land ownership derives from Roman law: ‘ownership’ of the land implies certain rights over it, including the right to extract and profit from its use, as well as the right to destroy it, which mining and fossil fuel companies, as well as corporate agriculture with its destruction of top soil, engage in with unholy joy.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate

So at a certain ethical level, I’d advocate the Metta Sutta instead of angels with fiery swords. (If one is required to have religious metaphor to engage a problem so urgent.)I believe “we” all will suffer in the coming Apocalypse — but who is this “we” that has the agency to “transcend”? I have no say in dealing with any of the “multiple cascading crises” or transcending the “growth economy”. Scale, scope and speed refer, respectively, to the natural size limit of human social groups, the maximum technological level of a sustainable industrial infrastructure and the speed with which humanity must undergo its transition toward a sustainable society. The authors cite 150 people as the natural size limit of a human community, a figure rooted in human cognitive capacity and known as "Dunbar's number." They argue compellingly for an industrial infrastructure that is technologically simpler and far less energy-intensive than today's. As for the speed with which we must shift our society onto a sustainable path, they say we need to do so "faster than we have been and faster than it appears we are capable of." Climate disasters may render hope for the future tenuous, but the philosophical book An Inconvenient Apocalypse asserts that working toward social justice is still purpose-giving.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Excerpt - resilience An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Excerpt - resilience

Describes echospheric grace in a secular way. “We like the idea of ecospheric grace because it doesn’t depend on the ecosphere loving us or bestowing on us special favor or giving us dominion over anything else. That’s important because, as far as we can tell, the ecosphere does not love us. The ecosphere does not care that we exist. We are, in ecospheric terms, just another species in a long list of species that usually end up going extinct at some point.”

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