Well I hope you all had a good laugh? I mean, the world all willingly coming together, abandoning our dreams of an ever bigger TV, or of even just having electricity, uniting in rationality and facing the future in a mostly mature, coherent and structured way (sorry USA, you’re out ATM)?what a fiction indeed, what a joke! And that bit about the big bad Davos Boys, the righteous UN and its scientists the saviors of humanity and the world, the almighty Faith Leaders who start to atone their message in line with some harsh realities, humans ready to lay down the weapons and come together as one, embracing a culture that has recently been drowned, to face a sober but at least a future? Oh, please stop the insults to the intelligence!
The scary part is that it just feels so much more right for most of us to imagine any of the many blood, guts and gore virus, disease, war and/or famine scenarios that we are constantly bombarded with rather than this soap fiction. Why on earth would we prefer that destructive path, are we really ready to kill our neighbor just so we don’t have to give up on an ounce of freedom? Of course living in a very divisive environment doesn’t help and we could debate for hours as to whether this sad state of affairs is innate or cultural. Is it our genes at work or the thermo-industrial civilization throwing whatever fuel is left onto the raging inferno our planet has become and trying to make us believe it is deeply inground in us to just gouge each other’s throats over a mars bar? A bit of both maybe?
Honestly, the reason why we prefer to bicker and fight rather than concede and change is irrelevant, what is relevant is the resource crunch that is coming and that will stop our human world on its path to self destruction anyway. Hopefully you would have guessed that the phosphate is a metaphor, but who knows, keep an eye on the value of phosphate mine shares, won’t you? There’s even talk of recovering it from sewerage treatment plants, but no, surely reserves will last a while yet?
I would say that what is even more relevant here is the fact that we never stopped to think about what we were doing thousands of years ago, when the first species of plant or animal came to its demise through our actions, the first of many a death by human to come! And that happened thousands of years ago, simply accelerating once we subcontracted the destruction to our thermo- industrial infrastructure. It took us possibly a few thousand years to obliterate the Australian megafauna, it then took us barely fifty years to extinguish the most numerous birds in the world, the passenger pigeon, shortly after we set sail for the New World. We never stopped to think either when we started to toy with toxic chemicals as another part of our arsenal of destruction of life, when Antarctic penguin chicks started to be born with DDT in their system, and that was over 50 years ago! To me those two reasons are enough to justify the immediate obliteration of the technostructure by any means necessary. In this midst of the 6th extinction event, any day of the week should give us another 200 reasons or so to enact that will to stop our destructive machinery.
Ok, so I’m a coward, I chose to destroy the technostructure via my imagination and a bad boy plot by the mega villains countered by some honest to goodness scientists led by an endearing and initially slightly naive Secretary General of the United Nations. It is a well protected infrastructure defended by pretty much all the money in the world, but common sense eventually prevailed, we communally accepted that something had to give, and we chose to preserve life and humanity. To come to that compromise, a minority of us gave up a bit of comfort, the vast majority abandoned the dream that we could all have relished in those obscene comforts, and all of us gave up some reproductive freedom. But none got slaughtered, we all lived forever after, and unbelievably, happily!
Yes, I do believe the thermo-industrial infrastructure and its cancerous ways has to be destroyed before we can save ourselves as a species, retain some of what we strangely call humanity, and stop destroying what is left of the natural world. Just like we create new renewable energy infrastructure to simply add to our perceived energy needs rather than as a substitute for some fossil fuels we burn, another case of the cart before the ox. Humans can exist on earth, as incredible as it sometimes seem we are indeed from this planet! But we cannot exist as a civilization, that will and has always led to collapse, and many people at the time would have also thought that collapse could never happen to them, it was simply unthinkable! Humans can exist as societies intermeshed with their surroundings and interacting with one another, peacefully or not, that is our choice; but we simply cannot exist as a civilization. I don’t believe the current pitiful attempts to fix the world’s predicaments via climate, biodiversity or poverty summits is anything else than token gestures designed by rulers to appease the masses whilst increasing the momentum of the infernal machinery. People in high spheres may even truly believe that should be enough to cut the mustard. Now I’m having a good laugh myself! Is it a prerequisite to fail elementary maths to become a ruler, what exactly is hard to understand about carrying capacity, ecological footprint, the greenhouse effect, a finite world or the laws of thermodynamics?! Ok, you may be excused for the last one, but you don’t need to be a genius to understand that you can’t recycle 100% or that some energy is lost to another state that you can’t recover for your needs.
As I said, I’m a coward, I’m not going to blow myself up in a crude oil refinery, a GPS relay, PVC factory, insert a virus in servers that holds all the indexes for interbank transfers, or at any of the millions of nodes in the incredibly complex and comprehensive web of destruction we have created, I’ll pretend it’s futile because I hate pain too! I chose instead to set fire to the links between the nodes, to obliterate money to freeze the machine. Can there be other ways? Maybe! Probably! There has to be an advantage with having 7 billion brains in existence at the moment, and any way would probably work better than our current attempts! I’m not even convinced that slowing down the destruction rather than forging full steam ahead is the right approach if our aim is to limit damage to the natural world.
As an alternative to my silly little plot, how about a universal vote with a simple question, a world referendum on population regulation and lifestyle? Basically people voting for or against the Gaia Roadmap rather than governments voting at a UN summit? One person, one vote, bypass the governments, the corporate interest all now drowned by this simple ploy as an insignificant fraction of seven billions. Sure, most middle class lifestylers would rather die and have their children go through hell or beheaded than give up on an ounce of creature comforts, but let’s find out how many they really are. Nowhere near a majority, I suspect. And hopefully the rest of the world will have realized by now that reaching those privileges is not going to happen anyway. At least then with this universal referendum, we’ll get a clear answer as to where we’re heading, and how’s that for democracy? In this vastly interconnected world there are no more excuses for pretending we didn’t know about problems with our numbers and our lifestyles, except it seems in the minds of the ones supposed to represent us, the political, religious and industry leaders hell-bent on muddling that very message!
We can then choose to vote against the Roadmap, to outright reject degrowth in population and lifestyle in a manner that is required to see us through the next century. In other words we accept that our world will be uninhabitable in both physical and current moral conditions. We also accept that there is no longer any point in giving to any pseudo-charity that pretends to save this or that from destruction, hey, might save some coin there! A corollary is also accepting that having many children and the latest TV might start to be regarded by some peers as an incredibly selfish act, including with regards