gracchusdixit

To anyone who isn’t on intellectual life support, it should be obvious that the relatively brief reign of homo sapiens as the evolutionary übermensch of planet earth may soon be coming to a end—and perhaps more quickly than the Cassandras of catastrophic climate change once imagined.  For thousands of years, our species has roamed and raped the earth as if it were ours for the taking and with little regard for the consequences.  It is becoming abundantly clear, however, that consequences eventually have a way of catching up.

It wasn’t very long ago that even the gloomiest of doomsayers was suggesting that we still had time to stave off a global melt-down, thereby saving ourselves from living in a world in which rising sea levels submerge cities from Miami to Mumbai, drought reduces the most fertile regions of the planet to barren desert, and famine stalks the land.  This grudging glimmer of hope now seems to have been at best naive.  Those who once consoled themselves with the heedless notion that climate change was something for their children or grandchildren to worry about are now condemned to watching their lawns die, their energy bills soar, and their prospects for a comfortable future wither.  

The technical explanations for the galloping pace of climate change—”feedback loops,” ‘tipping points,” and so on—may be of academic interest to some but won’t matter to most of us in the end.  The only thing that will matter is the results.  And by all accounts, they are dire.  

What the experts did not anticipate or declined to tell us was that pent-up natural forces, once unleashed, have a nasty propensity to grow ever more ferocious until they can no longer be contained.  In the roiling-broiling case of climate change, no amount of recycling, conservation, or technological “innovation” will be capable of sparing us from the whirlwind that is already sweeping across the earth.  It may simply be too late.  

In fact, we are already getting a glimpse of what “too late” can mean.  Large swaths of the planet are quite literally on fire.  The vast ice fields that once covered the two poles, which have for eons regulated the natural pendulum swings of the climate, are melting.  The glaciers of Greenland and the Alps are, respectively, falling into the sea or crashing down on anyone clueless enough to come too close.  Europe’s most important river, the Rhine, is so depleted that commercial barge traffic is about to shut down.  Italy’s greatest river, the Po, which has for centuries sustained the fertile agricultural regions of Lombardy and the Veneto, has been reduced to a trickle.  The most iconic and economically important river of Asia, the Yangtze, has turned into a bed of mud, baked as hard as bricks.  The Colorado River, on which most of the American West depends for its water and hydroelectric power, is so dry that, in a matter of days, the federal government will soon be forced to intervene and ration both.

The implications of all this are inescapable.  Envision a future in which the cornucopia of California’s Imperial Valley, which supplies the bulk of the nation’s fruit and vegetables, reverts to the sterile desert it once was.  Contemplate a future in which the wheat fields of the American Midwest, which have fed much of the planet for more than a century, turn to dust.  And finally, prepare for a future of sustained social, economic, and political turmoil.   

The desperation caused by climate change will drive millions of the world’s poorest people to abandon the increasingly uninhabitable parts of the planet they presently occupy in the hope of escaping the worst of what is to come.  They will head north, to Europe and the United States.  The nations of the so-called “developed world” will then face a stark moral choice.  After centuries of colonial exploitation, after living lavishly off the fat of once captive lands, they will be forced to justify to themselves and to the rest of the world why they should be allowed to lock their borders against peoples they so recently oppressed.  The only possible justification would be cruel indifference, callous self-interest, or the suicidal delusions of fascism, nativism, and race.

We can already see which way this brutal wind is blowing.  In Poland, Hungary, and Russia, in Turkey and India, in France and Italy, in the United States and the United Kingdom, large swaths of the population are rushing to embrace authoritarian “populists” who promise a glorious future in exchange for the license to govern through fear and exclusion, tyranny and oppression.  The answer served up by populist demagogues to the moral dilemma posed by environmental catastrophe is:  let “them” suffer—in other words, those who don’t look like us or speak like us, who don’t think the same thoughts or worship the same gods, who don’t “qualify” as citizens or even as human beings.

It will not matter that no right-wing strongman on earth will be strong enough to save his own people from the catastrophe sweeping the planet, that neither Trump nor Putin, Orbán or Erdoğan, Berlusconi or Bolsinaro will be able to skirt the all-consuming wrath of nature.  By the time their deluded followers wake up to their utter impotence, it will be too late.  When the end finally comes, as it inevitably will, it will sweep away not only the false and feckless dictators but their gullible victims.  We can only hope that it does not drown the rest of us in its deadly undertow.

There are those who still cling to the fantasy that our Faustian bargain with technology—the bargain that got us into this fix in the first place—will somehow get us out.  This fantasy is as old as humankind:  a line that runs straight from Icarus to Los Alamos, from Prometheus to the atom bomb. 

After World War II, we were assured that a new era of “atoms for peace” would provide a limitless supply of clean, safe energy; instead, it gave us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima.  In the dawning days of the internet, we were told that a new age of democracy was about to be born; instead, all we got was greedy manipulators like Mark Zuckerberg.  

Even now, well-intentioned environmentalists argue that nuclear plants should be reactivated because they emit no global-warming co2, but they have no solution to the problem of toxic nuclear waste; proponents of “green” technologies urge that we shift to solar and wind power, but they have no plan for reconstituting a global economy based almost entirely on petroleum and its byproducts.  

The unpleasant and unspeakable truth is that none of these “solutions” will allow us to live as we have lived for the last hundred years.  Our much vaunted “way of life”—which depends on global capitalism’s demand for limitless growth and insatiable consumption—cannot possibly continue.  If we hope to survive, our “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” must come to an end.   

This is not to say that humankind faces mass extinction, a la Hollywood or H. G. Welles.  Nor is it to say that the catastrophe that imperils us will be as sudden and decisive as a thunderbolt.  It is entirely possible that our species will, in some form or fashion, survive for millennia to come. 

The same, however, cannot be said for our current economic and political systems.  They will eventually collapse in their impotence.  When the dust finally settles, if it ever does, there will be fewer human beings, and those who remain will have to make do with less.  Whether the future we face turns out to be the “nasty, brutish, and short” existence once described by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes is anyone’s guess.  But it certainly won’t be the self-indulgent and luxurious existence now enjoyed by the most prosperous people on the  planet.  

For them, and for all us, the jig is up.