Opinions vary. We don’t really know exactly how little time is left before humanity must mount a massive campaign to reconfigure our relationship to the planet before it’s too late. But I would be willing to bet that we have next to none.
Examples of such human folly abound. The historical/archeological record shows that a number of human groups have collapsed by failing to recognize their peril. They defiled their local ecology to the point where they could no longer survive as a group within their environment. It is interesting to note that in many cases, the elites engaged in excessive programs of self-aggrandizement, monument building, and lavish privileged religious rituals and festivals. They finally crossed the point of no return and were essentially doomed by their failure to act in a way that would lead to their survival.* Take away the cultural garb and our own elites look the same.
Yet, as an industrialized people, we don’t seem to believe it can happen to us, no less to all of humanity. Wall Street, Pentagon, and media corporate elites seem to be mimicking in their actions those historical failed elites. They have far more power, but can hardly be excused for ignorance. The world’s political “leaders” have diddled and dodged for decades since the first clear indicators of impending climate disruption became widely known. World “leaders,” after all, follow the dictates of their corporate benefactors.
Failure to Respond
We don’t know exactly even if enough time remains to avoid collapse. What we do know is that the little time left is rapidly shortening and the task ahead is increasingly monumental. Yet, we face several very serious psycho-social and political-economic barriers to major movement down the right path.
We need neither romanticize nor demonize any former or currant culture to realize that each has its strengths and weaknesses — in various proportions. Jared Diamond and others have demonstrated the folly of very different groups that have ignored the requirements of the relationship they had with their micro-environment. In some cases they could have continued to sustain themselves if they had not ignored the problem. In some cases, such as the Vikings in Greenland, invaders failed to take lessons from the indigenous people and simply died off. The self-absorbed character of today’s industrial-consumerist culture is a study in not taking lessons from the real world in which our economy operates. Our economy is, as they say, unsustainable.
With today’s industrial-consumer culture, we are so estranged from the natural world that we have become extremely vulnerable to large scale system failure. The cult of “science will save us” as we continue down the same consumerist path, will only distract from the hard facts of the massive changes already clearly necessary. Today, it is no mere micro-environment that we are contaminating; we have already seriously disrupted the homeostasis of most major earth systems.
Inconvenient Science
Much of Western science has been corrupted by its subordination to the corporate growth machine. That machine perpetuates the myth that all we need to do is come up with some new [profitable] “technological breakthrough” and all will be fine. Only independent scientific research and analysis will have a chance of pointing to the specific material changes that are necessary to stop the lemming-rush to societal collapse.
Climate science has been relatively untainted by corporate corruption, since its subject matter was of little political importance until recently. Its findings were either generally practical or merely academic. Farmers, airline pilots, and many others benefit from weather information and understanding of climate processes. Academics pondered the nature of earth systems. But now, the facts of climate change have major political implications for many economic policies and practices. The most powerful institutions and people will be profoundly affected. Climate science has been supported by governments around the world for decades because the knowledge gained is of general economic benefit. But now, that knowledge is poised to change the course of history.
Whatever his shortcomings may be, Al Gore certainly picked an appropriate title for his film on climate change: “An Inconvenient Truth.” The realities of climate disruption could not be any more inconvenient for the political-economic elites that operate the corporate state. The continuation of the growth economy is of prime importance to them – it is the source of their ability to continue extracting wealth from the rest of us. The elites who run the largest institutions are not unaware of the impending crisis of climate and economy. Yet the financial/corporate elites remain addicted to their various money-power trips no matter how much they understand. Their expansionist extractivist industrialist ideology maintains them on their fiscal drug habit until the next quarterly report and their next obscene ‘bonus’. Death is inconvenient, but it happens anyway. The extinction of a species is far more tragic.
Ending Illusions
In this light, the unabated accelerating consumerism and productivism we see today are much like a gambling addiction. Facts, timing, and probabilities are easily distorted just to get that next fix. But the marker will be called in. It has been said that the greatest satisfaction in buying a new [fill in the blank] is at the point of purchase, not in its ultimate use. It’s the addict’s brief rush. That is because so much of what is produced and consumed is not useful. It is only an image of some form of satisfaction, but is fundamentally waste. Many things can be both useful and beautiful. But most of them do not emerge from the marketing of industrially produced “consumer products.”
Only by re-establishing a collective awareness of the roots of human existence will we be able to find a balance in our relationship to the earth systems that have sustained us, until now.
* The best known documentation of ecologically failed societies is Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 