It was 100ᴼ Fahrenheit in Santa Fe over the weekend. Okay, no big deal compared to Phoenix at, what was it? 114ᴼF? Of course, the waters around the tip of the Florida Peninsula this week hit near hot-tub levels of around 97ᴼ F. I could cite many other examples from all over the world, of deadly heating and the damage it is doing to ecosystems and living creatures. According to the New York Times, on Sunday the heat index—which measures how it feels—reached 152 degrees Fahrenheit (66.7 Celsius) at the Persian Gulf International Airport on Iran’s southwestern coast. In the last six months, 28 mass killings with 140 victims happened in one country: The USA. Things are heating up almost everywhere, and in more ways than one.
On the radio the other morning, Thom Hartmann was trying to explain why ‘white people’ tend to ignore the problem of racism in American life. He was not talking about white nationalists or neo-Nazis, just ordinary white people going about their daily lives, that is, as James Baldwin referred to them, “people who think they are white.” Hartmann opined that it is just human nature to ignore problems that are not your own; people recognize problems when they are problems for them.
The Others
Hartman is right of course, to a certain degree. Most folks are quite busy, just trying to make it through the increasingly difficult world we live in. The average middle-class American is no longer really middle class, if we consider both income and the cost of living. In the 1950s, even through much of the 1970s, the majority may have been ‘silent’ but it was more or less upwardly mobile. People expected to earn more than their parents had.
However, that ‘American Dream’ has faded. The research shows that more and more adults are falling behind the standard of living their parents worked so hard to achieve. Automation and outsourcing labor overseas have depleted the earning power of the American worker. Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatens to finish the job. When large populations lose status and income, fascism arises along with its handmaiden, racism.
At the same time, de facto racial segregation is more prominent than ever. De jure segregation was no longer legal when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, which outlawed segregation in businesses such as theaters, restaurants, and hotels. As Thom Hartmann reported, summarizing research by Bill Bishop in his book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart, “in 1968 when Jim Crow still dominated much of the US, 77 percent of Black students attended majority nonwhite schools. That number fell to 63 percent by the end of the 1980s as the result of school bussing, but then the Supreme Court outlawed government-run school integration programs in 1991. As a result, the number has risen up to fully 81 percent of Black children attending mostly nonwhite schools today.”
Now, segregation in housing and education is greater than ever. However, I distinctly remember that when the massive protests over the police murder of George Floyd, I remarked to someone that the crowds marching in the streets of America were so diverse in age, race, ethnicity, gender-identity expressed, and maybe even class, though that is not always so obvious even though clothing and demeanor are hints.
So why did the protest movement expressing outrage at the callous murder of George Floyd appear to be so integrated, with just about every social group in America represented? As it turns out, a deep cultural change has occurred in the US. Racists are still racists—and have been emboldened by the former fake president—and bullies are still bullies whether in police departments or elsewhere. Yet, the growing diversity of Americans has brought with it an expanded tolerance and acceptance of others within most communities.
The problem of course, is that most folks do not pay much attention to problems until and unless the problem reaches them personally, either psychologically or materially. The outrageous bullying that culminated in the murder of George Floyd and other recent cases, such as that of 5 Black cops, some with criminal records beating a young Black motorist to death, simply got to the moral center of many more people than some earlier cases had. One might say that ‘othering’ is less widespread than some believe, but it is no less intense than ever. The loudest voices are usually the most hateful and sociopathic, but they do not necessarily represent the majority.
Look Up!
The evidence would suggest that otherwise reasonable people respond to what climate scientists increasingly call a global emergency, do not respond much better to the existential threat of climate chaos than they do to racism and its many threat’s to society’s ‘others.’ People begin to sit up and take notice finally, when their town floods out, or wildfire engulfs their own village, or their family members succumb to extreme heat on what would otherwise have been a normal hike in the woods.
The latest evidence of scientific studies of the incredibly complex processes of climate change and its consequences are consistent with the warnings of complex systems scientists. The Earth System is far more complex than even most well informed citizens can imagine. What might seem minor changes in one factor or subsystem can wreak havoc in the whole system if the wrong conditions obtain. Complex positive (that is, self-amplifying) feedback processes within a system can spin the larger system out of balance in very destructive ways, breaking down long-standing stable relations among diverse components of the system. That can apply to societies just as much as to climate or ecosystems.
Scientists have attempted to determine exactly how potential “tipping points” may have cascading effects on the climate and ecological systems. These systems and the unprecedented human-caused interference in them, such as by injection of vast quantities of ‘greenhouse gases’ into the atmosphere, are extremely complex. That is why tipping points have been very hard to predict. Now, the latest research suggests that things are even more volatile and dangerous than scientists had thought. The collapse of climate, ecosystems, and society itself may be far more close to imminent than anyone had expected.
The Blind Eye Abides, But Not for Long
In a rather dense technical article—after all, the topic is extremely complex—in Nature Sustainability, a group of researchers has reported findings from a study of the factors that affect the probability that a system will collapse. Here is the Abstract from the article:
“A major concern for the world’s ecosystems is the possibility of collapse, where landscapes and the societies they support change abruptly. Accelerating stress levels, increasing frequencies of extreme events and strengthening intersystem connections suggest that conventional modelling approaches based on incremental changes in a single stress may provide poor estimates of the impact of climate and human activities on ecosystems. We conduct experiments on four models that simulate abrupt changes in the Chilika lagoon fishery, the Easter Island community, forest dieback and lake water quality—representing ecosystems with a range of anthropogenic interactions. Collapses occur sooner under increasing levels of primary stress but additional stresses and/or the inclusion of noise in all four models bring the collapses substantially closer to today by ~38–81%. We discuss the implications for further research and the need for humanity to be vigilant for signs that ecosystems are degrading even more rapidly than previously thought.”
Abstracts, like the science articles they briefly summarize, are dry, condensed and sometimes hard to follow in every detail. Nevertheless, while this one is pretty clear, the conclusion in this case is quite simple. Human societies and the ecosystems that support them are in much greater danger of collapse than previously thought. Ever since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing reports that combined the best available science, moderated by its member governments (and influenced by the fossil fuels industry), I noticed each new report had to adjust previous forecasts with more current data because those previous reports consistently underestimated the impacts of changes in climate. Reality is coming at us more rapidly than any official estimate has yet to admit.
Just like the average ‘people who think that they are white,’ and who underestimate the impacts of racism on ‘others’ (and on themselves until catastrophe strikes), the global governmental institutions tasked with assessing the threats of climate chaos and its ecological impacts have consistently underestimated the threat of ecological and ultimately societal collapse. Eventually, we hope not too late, Reality will force us all to Look Up!
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 