Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumNature Bats last: Collapse Awareness and the Tragic Consciousness
Infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide. Industrialization is destroying the world. Resource depletion, pollution, and climate change will make industrial civilization impossible much sooner than is generally admitted.
It is traumatic to realize this, and the process involves an intense need to discuss the issue. But the predicament of everyone, the squirrels, the trees, the elephants, all of humankind, the acid oceans caked with plastic how to discuss all that with oneself or anyone else? Daily there are more people consciously concerned with it, yet most of the discussion happens online, not face to face; in person, with a few exceptions, one simply does not discuss it. To do so reminds people of the terrible danger in which they are already living their everyday lives; it also delivers them over to difficult feelings of helplessness (they cannot stop climate change), humiliation (the legal person called Exxon-Mobil is more powerful than mortals can imagine), and anomie (what matters on a doomed world?). Activating those difficult feelings is, at the very least, rude even if the values of both parties to the conversation are largely in accord. So it costs something to go ahead and disrupt the game and hold forth about the state of our world, so people generally dont do it.
The phenomenon of collapse is so frightening that the trauma of realizing it has to be mastered in a way that derives meaning, or deposits meaning, or configures meaning, or some basket of verbs that will comprise the spectrum of how this stuff called meaning comes to be, in and through the pain of awareness. Meaning is the redeemer which leads people to hope and when hope is shattered, it is meaning that sweeps up the fragments and sculpts them into monuments and tombstones. Success of body is survival; success of soul is making sense of loss in a mortal world. Sometimes both of these successes are available, sometimes one or the other, or at the worst, neither.
I believe a real physical metamorphosis of civilization into a harm-reducing culture was still possible until just a few years ago. Most people continue to believe it possible still; they havent changed their minds about that yet. Possible or not, it is vanishingly improbable not as a lottery win or a bet at a roulette wheel is unlikely, where the problem-space happens to include a large number of equally unlikely outcomes, but as victory is unlikely in a war between equal armies after one side is decimated while the other is unscathed. Maybe the last ten green-shirted soldiers will somehow slaughter their remaining thousand black-shirted opponents it is philosophically possible but everything speaks against its occurrence.
An excellent summary of where the world is today.
WovenGems
(776 posts)A virus isn't smart enough to know how to coexist with the host. Regardless of how smart the virus is it still won't be able to balance its wants with the hosts needs.
postulater
(5,075 posts)dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)I "got" that in 1970.
So did my 2 sons, at an early age.
People had to chance to get it starting with the first Earth Day.
I can only conclude our species has a suicide gene.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Combined with an intelligence that is entirely dedicated to removing any limits we encounter, that's a recipe for suicide, yes.
The interesting question for me is where the "don't ever stop" gene came from. I'm now convinced that it's not just a human characteristic, but is s built into the nature of life itself. As long as a species is still subject to the restraining forces of predation, disease and resource limits, things go along normally. When a species develops the ability to circumvent those forces, as we have, but has not brought its genetic growth imperative under control (as we have not) then the game changes dramatically. As it has for us.
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)Thank you so much for posting it....
cprise
(8,445 posts)I don't care for it personally.
They are becoming to environmentalism what the New Left eventually was to Liberalism: Narratives and rationality are the problem, and anyone thinking they have a modest grasp of the truth or visions of a way forward is undoubtedly delusional. Rational narratives are OK only to the extent that they chronicle tragedies unfolding.
It is beginning to stink of the old 1980s ex-hippie catharsis; Post-modernism twisted into a neat little system for giving up in style and raising a generation of cynical libertarians-cum-neocons.
Most of DU and other Liberal sites are monuments to the mindset. Take commondreams.org, for instance: It should be called commonnightmares because, incisive as it is, the overall function is to act like a wailing wall.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Everyone has a different response to how things are unfolding. Rather than just see those whose approach you disagree with as "wrong", how about asking what the emergence of this set of reactions says about the situation?
For instance, I don't care whether people give up "in style" or not - just so long as they do, in fact, give up.
cprise
(8,445 posts)...eating organic food, or commuting by bike, etc? Should I stop informing people I know about the benefits of doing these things?
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Do whatever you think is right. I just advise against expecting it to "save" anything. Give up expecting that anything is going to save the world, and you might suddenly find your life a whole lot lighter.
cprise
(8,445 posts)Just the opposite, actually.
Expectation is not the same thing, and I don't feel drawn to a dualistic assessment of people's attitudes.
CRH
(1,553 posts)Puts words to what many intuitively realize and emotionally feel.
Back to the future, until there is realization the future doesn't include the materialist whims of our specie. Then the unobtainable emotional need for a solution, leading to a struggle with enlightened visions of the mystery of destiny awaiting human concepts of perceived elevated states of consciousness.
In all it leaves many fanciful hours to question philosophy and essence, as if either really matters to mere mortals, we discover we are.
Thanks