Revenge of the ReGENerates

"Will youth take up the challenge — “grasp the nettle” as it were — or will they follow the example of their parents and grandparents?"

Last week we parsed some excerpts from Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation, published in 1833. The author described the seasonal cycles of his Mississippi Valley village in the 18th and 19th centuries, before the Lewis and Clark expedition.

In David Holmgren’s over-lengthy mea culpa for Baby Boom depravities inflicted on the planet, he writes:

By many measures, the benefits of global industrial civilization peaked in our youth, but for most middle-class baby boomers of the affluent countries, the continuing experience of those benefits has tended to blind us to the constriction of opportunities faced by the next generations: unaffordable housing and land access, ecological overshoot and climate chaos amongst a host of other challenges.

These are all things that previous generations were warned of by Massasoit Ousamequin, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull (Húŋkešni), Wovoca, Geronimo (Goyaałé), Cochise, Crazy Horse (Čháŋ Óhaŋ), Black Elk (Heȟáka Sápa), Chief Joseph (Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it), and many others, so one need not place too much blame on the boomers. Still, the postwar period was an inflection point.

I am a white middle-class man born in 1955 in Australia, one of the richest nations of the ‘western world’ in the middle of the baby boom, so I consider myself well placed to articulate an apology on behalf of my generation.

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We were the first generation to have clear scientific evidence that emergent global civilization was on an unsustainable path that would precipitate an unraveling of both nature and society through the 21st century. Although climate chaos was a less obvious outcome than the no-brainer of resource depletion, international recognition of the reality of climate change came way back in 1988, just as we were beginning to get our hands on the levers of power, and we have presided over decades of policies that have accelerated the problem.

One could also say adequate scientific proofs had been adduced much earlier by Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius, Keeling, Broecker, Calendar, Malthus, and many others. I was litigating climate change over water protection issues in the early 1980s, using these types of proofs, and I was not the only one. To claim we did not know before 1988 is a bit disingenuous. Wim Sombroek’s published research on Amazonian dark earths (terra preta) as a means to reverse climate change came in the 1960s.

Over the years since, the adverse outcomes have shifted from distant risks to lived realities. These impact hardest on the most vulnerable peoples of the world who have yet to taste the benefits of the carbon bonanza that has driven the accelerating climate catastrophe. For the failure to share those benefits globally and curb our own consumption we must be truly sorry.

He then goes on (a bit too long) detailing the transgressions of his generation and concludes by saying:

We might hope this apology is itself a wake-up call to the younger generations that are still mostly sleepwalking into the oncoming maelstroms. In raising the alarm we might hope our humble apology will galvanize the potential in young people who are grasping the nettle of opportunities to turn problems into solutions.

We hope that this apology might lead to understanding rather than resentment of our frailty in the face of the self-organizing forces of powerful change that have driven the climaxing of global industrial civilization. Finally, the task ahead for our generation is to learn how to downsize and disown before we prepare to die, with grace, at a time of our choosing, and in a way that inspires and frees the next generations to chart a prosperous way down.

This perspective pinpoints the source of hope, the direction that could and should be taken, led by youth. But will youth take up the challenge — “grasp the nettle” as it were — or will they follow the example of their parents and grandparents and wind up like the tele-tubbies in Wall-E, slurping Biggies while cruising the galaxy in a Tesla Skyliner searching for another habitable planet?

Jem Bendell, in his “Deep Adaptation” white paper, provides readers “with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change.” Writing for Resilience, Dahr Jamail breaks Bendell’s thoughts into three possible human strategies once reality sinks in: 

The first is characterized by intensifying efforts to fix the mess we have created. The idea here is that if we just work harder, we can change the situation. The second is mitigation of inevitable suffering and loss, easing the pain and harm that is already underway. Mitigation slows the demise down, giving us the time for the third, which is adaptation to the life-threatening scenarios before us, or in Bendell’s words, “deep adaptation.”

Jamail adds, “Given that with even our own extinction a very real possibility, even if that worst-case scenario is to run its course, there is time left for amends, honorable completions, and the chance to reconnect to this Earth with the utmost respect, and in the gentlest of ways,” recalling the advice of Václav Havel, who said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.”

Personally, I think we need to step back and stop wringing hands. We are going to be pursuing all three of those strategies. To ignore the latter two would increase our suffering and loss, but to ignore the first would doom us for certain. What that step back should bring into view is the liminal era we are in, and the greater context surrounding all our problems and dislocations.

In the 1970s, anthropologist Victor Turner advanced the notions of “limen” or threshold, and “liminality,” the individually dangerous but culturally fertile border zone where the candidate in a rite of passage straddles “betwixt and between” (in Turner’s phrase) extraterritorial structural conditions, passing between identities and cultures while not adhering firmly to any. The liminal zone is dangerous in the sense that it is easy to lose your way and waste an otherwise happy and productive life, but fertile in that it invites imagination and fantasy; symbols and magic; creative expression and deep transformation. It is a region of vague possibilities for profound change.

Precisely when we entered the liminal phase of our civilization is difficult to say, because global consumer culture is a relatively recent phenomenon made possible by the caloric density and abundance of fossil energy. While coke-forged Toledo steel and Chinese gunpowder allowed Europeans to evict the Moors and then turn to enslaving and ethnically cleansing the Americas, coal and fireworks had been around a long time before then. I would hazard to say the fossil era only really got going about the mid-nineteenth century, but was in the long stem of the J-curve until mid-20th, approximately until the Second World War, when it entered the gradual upward arc of the J — the “hockey stick.” In this, Holmgren has his dates right. Since the start of the 21st Century, a juggernaut machine culture, propelled by inventions of the boomers, has been in something approaching a singularity of planetary devastation, accelerating infinityward, as if the hockey stick were flipped to put the blade on the horizontal axis and the handle now running towards vertical, except that at this very pinnacle of seeming unending apogee it has struck a small snag. It is running out of fuel.

After peaking its affordable (from an energy return on energy invested calculus) conventional fossil fuels, boomers dove headlong into unaffordable unconventional fossil fuels (fracked gas, oil shale, deep offshore, etc.) and are closing in on the inevitable financial and geophysical reckoning, including climate change, plastic pollution, cancer, etc. The global empire, mirroring the pattern of Maya, Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and others, has reached a new liminal, theater phase, or silly state, evidence of which is all around us.

It is a region of vague possibilities for profound change.

David Holmgren, Bernie Sanders, or Alejandra Ocasio-Cortez can wail about income disparity, student loans or unaffordable health insurance, but such minor inconveniences are inseparable from this stage of separation. Living in a liminal period is like simultaneously occupying parallel universes, where some people believe in Y2K, aliens, peak oil, climate change, Russiagate, or angels, while others, even friends and family, may adamantly believe the opposite. These universes never merge but instead rhythmically collide, inducing instability — economic, social and political. Science and logic are irrelevant. Adrift, people flail about for life rafts to grasp. If a charismatic right-or-left wing tyrant promises return to stability, he draws followers like moths to a flame. If a cult leader says he or she can offer mental tranquility amidst the chaos, you jump, no matter how ridiculous the specifics of that discipline would have seemed to you back when things appeared more normal. If an authority figure offers you a special diet pill, a revolutionary app, or some other fantastical cure for the ennui you are feeling, you buy. Don’t be ashamed. All normal. This is what liminality looks like.

To get to the other side, however, requires a plan. Daniel Wahl has taken to calling those who are sensing this change the ReGeneration. It is a useful term. What needs to be regenerated is not a human society that was appropriate at the beginning of the industrial era, or for that matter, the desert religions developed to preside over apportionment of artificial scarcities after humans foolishly cut down forests and salted their soils 3000 years ago. What needs to be regenerated this time are those trees and those soils. Humans regenerate, nature deliminates.

To guide these ReGENerates and to beckon legions of fresh converts to see what is right in front of them and join, we have Transition Towns, the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and Ecosystem Restoration Camps. These councils, each in their own way, have been exploring the other side of these rites of passage: post-liminal bioregional tribes; patterns of living that can be sustained into fragile, hazardous and uncertain futures; terraforming damaged landscapes to bring forth water from rock; permacultural, equitable, gift economies. What happens every year at Burning Man or Glastonbury, and perhaps this year at Woodstock 50, may not be perfect representations but they are open source laboratories where anything goes and no idea is spurned.

To the degree that we are really seeking a compromise — some sort of denouement between collapse and the status quo ante — we are on shaky ground. We’d be better off studying Black Hawk or Black Elk.

Ecosystem Restoration Camps

There also exist in these times what Turner called “ritual liminars” or “edgemen,” who recognize both the peril and the opportunity but do not seek personal advantage in the moment, rather serve as guides, ferrying candidates to the far shore. They fit Joanna Macy’s definition of an activist — “anyone who does something for more than personal advantage.”

One such edgeman is John Dennis Liu, currently Ecosystems Ambassador for the Commonland Foundation and a Visiting Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. Liu is progenitor of the Ecosystem Restoration Camps. 

He writes from a recent meeting in California, where some one hundred of his far-shore designers met to formulate a resilience masterplan for the town of Paradise after 2018’s devastating wildfires:

We know enough to say that Biodiversity, Biomass and Accumulated Organic Matter are the evolutionary factors that have always regulated the Earth’s climate (as well as soil fertility, biodiversity and the fresh water system (hydrological cycle).

Each of us affects this every day with all sorts of choices. When we are unconscious of the importance of the need for total vegetative cover, the role of the accumulating organic matter and the amazing diversity many of our choices are negative. Consider over-consumption, energy use, urban design, industrial agriculture, even just how we make grass lawns in all biomes.

When we understand how natural ecological systems work to cool, to infiltrate water, to support the microbial and fungal communities that transformed the Earth making it possible for us to exist then we act differently.

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It really gets interesting when we realize that together we are powerful. We can join together in Ecosystem Restoration Camps and immediately and directly have a major impact on maintaining total vegetative cover, encouraging biodiversity, growing fertile soils, lowering temperatures, increasing moisture availability, and regulating the Earth’s climate.

When we have this level of understanding we realize that it is not just our negative behavior that affects the Earth’s climate. We can learn and implement all the best practices to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Then we are the answer to climate change.

Liu’s dream is to have camps all over the world and engage millions of candidates in this rite of passage, embodying the change they want to see. ERC created a non-profit foundation in the Netherlands and set up a prototype camp in Spain in 2017. A second camp began in Mexico at the Via Organica Ranch in San Miguel de Allende in 2018. Now in California the edgeman met with his neophytes to discuss making camp in Paradise.

ERC is using social media to generate subscriptions of 10 Euros per month or 120 Euros per year. Liu’s message is catchy— “Let’s go camping and restore a little bit of paradise every day.”

What may coalesce from these kinds of experiments could be something like Black Hawk’s village; it could be something like the “technicolor Amish” phase of The Farm; or it could be something entirely different and unpredictable. Holmgren is right about this: it will be the ReGeneration’s choices that matter, not the Baby Boom’s.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

― Wendell Berry

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Black Hawk's 11 Percent Solution

"They built a model whose proof of fitness for purpose is that it sustained not only the two-leggeds but soils, forests, lakes, rivers, and bounteous biodiversity."

Last week I left you with the usual litany of advice/warning/prognostications that one who travels these familiar circles reads all the time. As such, my rantings only serve the cause of confirmation bias, or perhaps a normalization process, but can’t really alter anyone’s thinking. I reiterated, among other things,

• Growth, whether of material “wealth” or population, cannot be sustained and some serious degrowth is overdue. You can get as much from looking at the Baltic Exchange Dry Index or the Dow.

• If production cannot be decoupled from quality of life then we are chasing a paradox because we live on a finite planet of limited resources.
• There is good news in that at least some of our problems can be addressed by reversing climate change and building ecosystem health through a multitude of natural, antifragile and frugal means.
• However, none of these things are being done at any significant scale, and that scaling seems dangerously far off.
• We are poised at the edge of the Seneca Cliff and will need to find a better way down than leaping without a parachute.

If you found your way here you probably have heard all this before. Likely you have also heard me or someone else explain the exponential function and why that matters so much. The recent IPCC report on the Paris Agreement 1.5 degree target said, owing to our procrastination, human society will need to go on a near-starvation diet of fossil fuels and to decarbonize the global economy, taking a glide path for industrial civilization with an angle downward of approximately 11 percent per year in order to halve production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases every 7 years for the remainder of the century.

Trying to imagine this is like picturing the surprise of a pilot at the controls of a 737-MAX when his flight computer takes over and pitches the plane into an uncorrectable 11% dive.

By 2050, we need to be at or close to zero emissions, IPCC says. And that will not be enough.

Because we exceeded then-considered safe concentrations for warming the planet in the late 1980s to early 1990s when we crossed the 350 ppm CO2 boundary, we will need to keep reducing for an extended period after we pass zero emissions. We have to remove the legacy emissions we generated while delaying. We have to stay on the decline slope until we bring back the natural carbon equilibrium of the oceans and arrest whatever tipping points have already tipped. We can't rebuild the ice at the poles or put back melted glaciers but we can restore the atmosphere and oceans to something more closely resembling conditions before Col. Drake first raised oil from the ground in Titusville Pennsylvania in 1864. That is our current mandate.

The alternative is near term human extinction.

My readings this week pursued a different context, but the curious mind being what it is, connections were made and so now we come back around full circle. I read Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation published in 1833, 5 years before the author expired at age 70 or 71. Among the stories the great Sauk chief related was how his people had lived in the Mississippi Valley in the centuries before Europeans arrived.

Last week we spoke of surfer lifestyles as a way to decouple production and consumption. This week we can look at how indigenous peoples in North America created a steady-state human economy that harmonized with natural limits for tens of thousands of years or longer. They built a model sustainable society, with some features we may find abhorrent and others we could value, but whose ultimate proof of fitness for purpose is that it sustained not only the two-leggeds but soils, forests, lakes, rivers, and bounteous biodiversity, some megafauna losses notwithstanding.

Black Hawk describes the annual cycle of life for his village:

Here we found that troops had arrived to build a fort at Rock Island… we were very sorry, as this was the best island on the Mississippi, and had long been the resort of our young people during the summer. It was our garden (like the white people have near to their big villages) which supplied us with strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, plums, apples, and nuts of different kinds; and its waters supplied us with fine fish, being situated in the rapids of the river. In my early life, I spent many happy days on this island.

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Our village was situated on the north side of Rock River, at the foot of its rapids, and on the point of land between Rock River and the Mississippi. In its front, a prairie extended to the bank of the Mississippi; and in our rear, a continued bluff, gently ascending from the prairie. On the side of this bluff we had our corn fields, extending about two miles up, running parallel with the Mississippi; where we joined those of the Foxes, whose village was on the bank of the Mississippi, opposite the lower end of Rock Island, and three miles distant from ours. We had about eight hundred acres in cultivation, including what we had on the islands of Rock River. The land around our village, uncultivated, was covered with bluegrass, which made excellent pasture for our horses. Several fine springs broke out of the bluff nearby, from which we were supplied with good water. The rapids of Rock River furnished us with an abundance of excellent fish, and the land, being good, never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squashes. We always had plenty — our children never cried with hunger, nor our people were ever in want. Here our village had stood for more than a hundred years, during all which time we were the undisputed possessors of the valley of the Mississippi, from the Ouisconsin to the Portage des Sioux, near the mouth of the Missouri, being about seven hundred miles in length.

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When we returned to our village in the Spring from our wintering grounds, we would finish trading with our traders, who always followed us to our village. We purposely kept some of our fine furs for this trade; and, as there was great competition among them, who should get these skins…. When this was ended, the next thing to be done was to bury our dead, such as had died during the winter. This is a great medicine feast. The relations of those who have died give all the goods they have purchased as presents to their friends — thereby reducing themselves to poverty, to show the Great Spirit that they are humble, so that he will take pity on them. We would next open the caches and take out corn and other provisions, which had been put up in the Fall, and then commence repairing our lodges. As soon as this is accomplished, we repair the fences around our fields, and clean them off, ready for planting corn.

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The crane dance often lasts two or three days. When this is over, we feast again and have our national dance. The large square in the village is swept and prepared for the purpose. The chiefs and old warriors take seats on mats which have been spread at the upper end of the square, the drummers and singers come next, and the braves and women form the sides, leaving a large space in the middle. The drums beat, and the singers commence. … What pleasure it is to an old warrior, to see his son come forward and relate his exploits — it makes him feel young, and induces him to enter the square, and “fight his battles o’er again.”

When our national dance is over — our corn fields hoed, and every weed dug up, and our corn about knee-high, all our young men would start in a direction towards sundown [across the Mississippi River into Iowa], to hunt deer and buffalo — being prepared, also, to kill Sioux, if any are found on our hunting grounds — a part of our old men and women to the lead mines to make lead — and the remainder of our people start to fish, and get mat stuff. Everyone leaves the village and remains about forty days. They then return: the hunting party bringing in dried buffalo and deer meat, and some times Sioux scalps, when they are found trespassing on our hunting grounds. At other times they are met by a party of Sioux too strong for them and are driven in. If the Sioux have killed the Sauks last, they expect to be retaliated upon and will fly before them, and vice versa. Each party knows that the other has a right to retaliate, which induces those who have killed last to give way before their enemy — as neither wish to strike, except to avenge the death of their relatives. All our wars are declared by the relatives of those killed; or by aggressions upon our hunting grounds.

The part about returning with Sioux scalps may seem barbaric to our sensibilities but if we can step back and see what that process was about, it was really resource stewardship. Black Hawk says elsewhere in his narrative that the Creator placed the nations in their particular places but in actuality these bioregional borders were fluid. Changing climate and other factors brought about migrations. Nations patrolled their borders to keep out poachers and to protect their own winter provisions. Within their hunting range, they secured the balance of predators and prey. The Sioux were plains nations, horseback buffalo hunters. They were kept from expanding into the forests of the Sauk, Fox, and Iowans only by vigilance. Between the Sauk, Fox, and Iowans, there was a tenuous truce that permitted shared hunting grounds and provided for retribution when offenses were committed.

It might be noted that Black Hawk says they had lived on the Rock River for one hundred years. Indeed, the Sauk only arrived to the area in the 1730s, following the Second Fox War. During that conflict, occasioned by the Fox resisting being made French slaves (more than 1000 were held as slaves in New France) the French and their Huron allies pursued destruction of the Fox to such an extent that what had been one of the largest, most powerful and wealthiest nations in North America was nearly extinguished. The destruction of the Fox allowed the Sauk to settle where today is the Illinois Quad Cities.

Black Hawk relates the story of a young brave who killed an Iowan. To keep the peace, he orders the brave to present himself to the Iowan village and surrender his life. The brave is overwhelmed with sickness, and his brother steps forward to go in his place. At the Iowan village, although the young braves taunt and want to kill the boy, the elders learn this story and decide to pardon the brother, sending him back to the Sauk with horses and corn. Black Hawk says the Sauk always respected the Iowans for their mercy and honor on that occasion.

We find it difficult to imagine fitting the population of Moline into the lodges of the Sauk, Fox and Iowans and sustaining it on fish, corn, squash, beans, bear meat and dried venison. And yet, that is what 11% implies.

These lives may seem overly simple to us, to the point of being boring, or brutish. If we look at Quad Cities Illinois today, the Rock River running through, Moline city limits separated from Davenport Iowa by Rock Island in the middle of the Mississippi, we find it difficult to imagine fitting that population into the lodges of the Sauk, Fox, and Iowans and sustaining it on fish, corn, squash, beans,  bear meat and dried venison. And yet, that is what 11% may imply. When we take an 11% per year decline slope out past negative 100%, and negative 200%, we take ourselves back to something more closely resembling the ways of our ancestors before the steam engine.

What I confirmed by reading Black Hawk's account is the same as we might learn from any number of anthropology studies; that voluntary simplicity and gift economies provide for all, allow ample time for leisure, celebration, and sport, foster honesty and integrity as the highest social values, and encourage exploration of natural spiritual powers through deep observation, revelation, and clairvoyant dreaming. It is no worse than the lives we live now and in many ways better. This is why in the history of the American colonies those who switched sides and became Indians remained so, while Indians who tried out Western Civilization usually lasted only a short time in their strange surroundings before returning home.

Most of us likely cannot conceive of how a society as complex and populous as modern techno-consumer culture could transition in a century or less to something resembling Black Hawk's village. We take half measures, like installing renewable energy, supporting a Green New Deal or joining transition towns, which are steps along the path, but not nearly enough to get where we must go. Next week we will have a look at David Holmgren's latest missive, the strategies of the Global Ecovillage Network and Ecosystem Restoration Camps, and how to adopt the most realistic patterns of living that can be sustained into a fragile, hazardous and uncertain future.

In an Esquire interview, 2020 presidential candidate and mayor of South Bend Indiana Pete Buttigieg was asked, “Would you support reparations to compensate for America’s history of slavery?” He replied:

I’ve never seen a specific, workable proposal. But what I do think is convincing is the idea that we have to be intentional about addressing or reversing harms and inequities that didn’t just happen on their own.

In the aftermath of the superfloods now striking the former domains of the Sioux, Iowans, Fox and Sauk, one policy that might be worth considering is rather than spend billions of fiat currency to compensate farmers for losses and rebuild an unnatural economy there, to simply buy up all that river bottom land and give it back to the Nations still in exile in Oklahoma. Let their young people who want to do it rebuild a model that was once and for a very long time regenerative by design and could be again.

Go take a sister, then, by the hand
Lead her away from this foreign land
Far away, where we might laugh again
We are leaving, you don’t need us

— Crosby, Stills and Kantner, Wooden Ships (1968)

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You encourage me to do more and then tell you about it. Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. Those are how we make this happen. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

A Home in the Sea

"African female elephants dropping tusks may be an epigenetic adaptation similar to Surfers Ear."

 I am fortunate these days to find myself in a place where I can swim every day. I will head offshore about 250 yards and then paddle along, parallel to the beach for a quarter mile, before returning to where I started. Tucked inside the Mayan Reef, the shallow turquoise waters in this part of the world are usually safe from sharks and jellyfish and the waves are calmer, making swimming easier on this old body.

We are of the oceans, you and I. Floating in the sea, gazing up into a blue sky, I return to humanity’s womb. Indeed, the amniotic fluid I “breathed” for my first nine months in 1946 was about 2% salinity, about a third less than the ocean’s.

George Freeth

While we speak reverently of Madre Tierra and Terra Firma, all life depends on water; the élan vital, the universal solvent, aqua mater. Our mythology is full of these stories of great deliverance — the raising of Mount Ararat out of floodwaters to heel Noahs Ark, the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, George Freeth’s heroic rescue of 11 fishermen caught in a gale off Venice Pier in 1908. In a small fishing village in Japan, they still light candles to remember that deliverance and rebirth.

In Evolutionary Water: Wombs, Seas, Tears and their Utraquistic Relation, Shè Hawke writes that this is why the catastrophe of birth and expulsion from the ocean are a connected theme — our ancestors began in aquatic environments and, like salamanders or mosquitoes, passed from something like gill-breathing to air breathing. When animals emerged from the ocean to live on land, they needed lungs — to take oxygen into their blood and exhale the wastes of cellular metabolism. Lungs function to charge the blood so that vital oxygen and just the right trace of nitrogen can reach all other body cells.

Land-dwellers also needed a colon to retain and conserve internal body fluids by removing excess water from digestive wastes. Our marine skin needed to adapt to shield the body from stronger solar radiation, especially ultraviolet, and to better regulate heat, using hair follicles and sweat glands.

When animals left the ocean, they chose to carry water with them as internal stores since they could no longer be continuously supplied. The skin converted the body into a portable canteen. Over 70% of us is water, and the lymph system is the internal ocean we carry about with us. All our organs float in this sea of fluid, our intracellular, pericardial, blood, cerebral and spinal fluids fed by electrolytes regulated by kidneys. Our respiratory tracts — nostrils, sinuses, trachea, bronchi, and lungs — and digestive and reproductive systems are lined with another salt-watery ring of protection — mucus membranes.

Some of our kind returned to the oceans some 50 million years ago after having already evolved to mammalian creatures resembling dogs or cats. Earlier in their evolution, without water to provide buoyancy, these animals had lined their skeletal joints — including between vertebrae — with synovial tissue to pad and lubricate joints against the greater force of gravity. Once freed of the gravity of land, their pelvises reduced in size and separated as their vertebral columns extended to improve locomotion. Dolphins and whales swim with horizontal tailfins that move up and down, rather than back and forth like the vertical tailfins of fishes. Cetaceans’ backbones bend up and down like dogs or cats when they are running.

Humans share with elephants, iguanas, turtles, marine crocodiles, sea snakes, seals, and sea otters our ability to weep salt tears. Other primates have no tears or any sort of nasal gland. Of the various salts found in solution in our bodily fluids and in oceans, by far the commonest is table salt, or sodium chloride (NaCl). On average there is a little over 6 milligrams (mg) of NaCl dissolved in each milliliter (ml) of our tears’ lacrimal fluid. Average ocean salinity is 3.5%, or nearly 6 times our tears (35 mg/ml). Most of that salt is the same as in our bodies — sodium chloride.

‘Knudsen salinities’ are expressed in units of parts per thousand. Average seawater is euhaline, in the range of 30 to 35 Knudsens. Metahaline bodies, like the Red Sea, range from 36 to 40. In some places, inland seas can go as high as 300 Knudsons. The saltier a body of water is, the less likely it is to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and the more likely it is to give it off. This is an important recovery element at the end of ice ages, when salinity peaks due to ice impoundment of fresh water from rain or snow, causing more CO2 to off-gas to the atmosphere and positively force the greenhouse effect (6.5% more CO2 at the end of ice ages from this), re-warming the world.

The degree of salinity in oceans is a driver of the world’s ocean circulation, where density changes due to both salinity changes and temperature changes at the surface of the ocean produce changes in buoyancy, which cause sinking and rising of water masses. This is what drives major ocean currents like the meridional overturning circulation (MOC) to exchange warm water from the surface and equator with cold water from the depths and the poles, stabilizing interior climates of continents by thermohaline circulation.

Last November The National Geographic ran an article revealing that female African elephants have been evolving to lose their tusks so as to better protect themselves from ivory hunters. At first, this seemed nonsensical to me because I had been led to believe that evolution is a very long and slow process. And yet, if true, it leads to stranger speculation.

Dropping tusks may be a morphological adaptation that elephants have latent in existing genes waiting only for the right epigenetic triggers to switch on. It is similar to when the ears of surfers bend inwards as protection against relentless cold from air and water, a condition called Surfer’s Ear. Darwin knew nothing of epigenetics.

If humans so screw Earths atmosphere and contaminate the planets surface that life on land is no longer a viable option for mammals, might we not consider following the example of the cetaceans and return to our ocean home like so many Jacques Cousteaus, but eventually shedding scuba for gills? That may not be an option we are leaving ourselves. The ocean is as badly damaged, if not worse, than the land and skies. We just can’t see it as well from where we are.

More than 80 percent of ocean pollution comes from land-based activities. From coral bleaching to sea level rise, entire marine ecosystems are rapidly changing.

• Through the thermal expansion of water and ice melt, climate chaos is causing sea levels to rise, threatening coastal population centers.
• Many pesticides, fertilizers and animal pharmaceuticals end up in rivers, coastal waters, and the ocean, resulting in oxygen depletion and toxins that kill or maim marine plants and shellfish.
• Factories and industrial plants discharge sewage and other runoff into the oceans. This too results in oxygen depletion and toxins that kill marine plants and shellfish. In the U.S., sewage treatment plants discharge twice as much oil each year as tanker spills or drilling disasters.
• Oil spills and nuke spills like Fukushima pollute the oceans, although air pollution is responsible for almost one-third of the toxic contaminants entering water. Microplastics dumped by cruise ships, container ship spills, or factories and garbage dumps on land or rivers will soon outweigh all the fish in the sea.

• Invasive species such as poisonous algae, cholera, and countless plants and animals have entered harbor waters and disrupted the ecological balance.
• The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 31.4 percent of fish stocks are either fished to capacity or overfished. As climate changes rapidly and microplastics take their toll, the capacity of fish stocks to replenish will drop dramatically, leading to fishery exhaustion, fish population extinctions, and widespread famines.

Another UN report, the Global Resources Outlook, released in Nairobi on March 15, tells the story behind the story. The real story is the increasing material weight of global civilization.

As I swim along looking at the coastline, I am seeing massive new hotels and homes of concrete and steel, the materials brought in by barge, literally weighing down the sandy beach. More arrives each day, the sand and gravel from quarries in Yucatan, the steel from China, the cement from factories in Mexico City. From where I sleep, I can hear the barges start to unload even before the first chirps of the dawn chorus.

Each year, more than 92 gigatonnes (Gt) of these materials — metals, minerals, fossil fuels and biomass (mostly food) are drawn out of the Earth and deposited in places like this — and this number is growing at the rate of 3.2% per year, or doubling roughly every 20 years.

Since 1970, extraction of fossil fuels has increased from 6 Gt to 15 Gt, minerals such as sand and gravel for concrete have gone from 9 Gt to 44 Gt, and biomass harvests from 9 Gt to 24 Gt, but accelerating now. Land use change — for agriculture and mountaintop removal — accounts for over 80% of biodiversity loss and 85% of water stress, even before the fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are applied. The entire extraction economy accounts for 53% of climate change, even before the fuels are burned. What will it be at the next doubling? Without change, the report said resource demand would more than double to 190 Gt per year, greenhouse gases would rise 40% and demand for land would increase by 20%.

Jonathan Watts, writing in The Guardian, observes that for rich countries, this works out to the weight of two elephants per person per year. In poor countries, it is about the weight of two giraffes, but appearing less as second homes on the beach and more as smaller items like mobile phones. The piles of materials that went into making them are invisible to the consumer.

The UN report said it is essential to decouple economic growth from material consumption. They have to say this because many of the Sustainable Development Goals speak of “economic growth.” Goal #8 calls for “sustained and inclusive economic growth” which it proposes to accomplish by expanding access to financial credit to create more jobs. If production cannot be decoupled from consumption then the UN is chasing a paradox. It has about as good a chance of catching that as it would a pair of ducks. 

There is good news in that at least some of these problems can be addressed, as we have outlined in BURN: Using Fire to Cool the Earth, by redirecting sewage flows, arresting agrochemical overuse, and reversing climate change through a multitude of natural means.And yet, to date, none of these things are being done at any significant scale, and that scaling seems dangerously far off.

But I also wrote about this subject from here, this very place in México, in 2006 in The Post Petroleum Survival Guide. Back then, I was also grappling with this question, because if we were then, and are still, at the point of peak everything and poised at the edge of the Seneca Cliff. We will need to find a better way down than leaping without a parachute. This is not BREXIT, after all. The analogy I came up with then has guided my choices in life ever since.

The analogy was that of a surfer. What do they produce? What do they consume? Are they healthy? Are they happy? Can that sort of lifestyle be sustained? What would it take, extrapolated to world population scale?

I decided and wrote at the time that indeed the surfer lifestyle could be sustainable if it could find a permacultural balance with coconuts, fish and other staples. Growth, whether of material “wealth” or population, however, could not be sustained and some serious degrowth was overdue. I referenced the Odums’ classic work, “The Prosperous Way Down.” (2001)

A Prosperous Way Down
A Prosperous Way Down (2001), the last book by Howard T. and Elisabeth C. Odum, has shaped politics and planning as…books.google.com.mx

The oceans are not merely our birth home, they sustain us now. It is possible to live within their limits and the limits of the good earth. The sooner we can learn that lesson, the better off we will be.

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Zombie-fiIled Death Ships

"Each passenger’s carbon footprint while cruising is roughly three times what it would be on land."

In 1996, the late essayist David Foster Wallace described his excursion on a cruise liner as a “special mix of servility and condescension.” He exhaustively journaled every event, person, and feeling during a seven-night, all-inclusive voyage. In “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” he found it insulting that in the name of pampered luxury you are told what to eat, what will entertain you, what will relax you. No matter how many unlimited shrimp and lobster buffets, Wallace found the repetition so banal as to be infuriating.

When a ship docks for a few hours, cruise lines give passengers suggestions of what to do with their time before returning to the boat. But instead of offering sincere recommendations, cruise lines employ a certain pay-to-play model in which vendors on the island can pay to be recommended.

— Aditi Shrikant, vox.com

By registering their companies in foreign countries, cruise lines are able to dodge not only corporate income and property taxes but also labor, environmental and insurance laws. Carnival earns $3 billion yearly and pays zero income tax because they are registered in Panama. For Carnival, Panamanian minimum wage laws cost it from $1.22 to $2.36 per hour, high by industry standards. Royal Caribbean is incorporated in Liberia where the minimum wage is $4 to $6 per day. Norwegian Cruise Lines is registered in Bermuda, where there is currently no minimum wage. According to CruiseCritic.com, crew members in housekeeping or food and beverage may only get $2 a day. Tips make up 95 percent of their income.

All of that is really inconsequential compared to the real horrors of the 30-million passenger, 100-billion-dollar industry, where building an 8–figure ship can pay itself back in as little as 5 years, after which it’s all profits. Each ship has the pollution footprint of a small city, nearly unregulated and unpoliced.

Instead of paying for more expensive but less sulfuric fuel, such as liquefied natural gas, ships are installing “emission cheat” systems, called scrubbers. A scrubber allows a ship to wash cheap fuel and meet the IMO requirements, then discharge the pollutants from the cheap fuel into the ocean.

The two most popular cruise lines, Royal Caribbean and Carnival, both received a D score from environmental advocacy group Friends of Earth, which tabulated the score based on sewage treatment, air pollution reduction, water quality compliance, and transparency.

— Aditi Shrikant, vox.com

The volume of wastes these floating cities produce is large — sewage; wastewater; hazardous wastes; solid waste; oily bilge water; ballast water; and sooty, sulfurous air pollution. Cruise ships can emit as much particulate matter as a million cars every day and the air quality on deck can be as bad as the world's most polluted cities. Researchers found that the air on the upper deck of the Oceana Rivera, downwind from the boat’s funnels, had 84,000 ultra-fine particulates per cubic centimeter, about a third the concentration measured directly above the stacks. Air quality in London’s busy Piccadilly Circus, using the same recording devices and found 38,400 ppcc. That 84,000 reading is closer to what you might find on a hot day close to the center of smog-choked Delhi or Shanghai.

Pampered passengers produce up to 7.7 pounds of consumer waste per person per day, from supersoft toilet paper to plastic water bottles. Many ships shred their plastic to save space, but some take advantage of the difficulty in monitoring ocean microplastics to discard it with treated sewage and greywater. Because cruise ships tend to concentrate their activities in specific coastal areas and visit the same ports, their cumulative impact on a locality can be significant. In US coastal waters, the Coast Guard has regulations prohibiting the discharge of oil or oily mixtures into the sea within 12 nautical miles (22 km) of the nearest land, except under limited conditions. However, because most cruise lines are foreign registered and because the rule only applies to foreign ships within U.S. navigable waters, the regulations have little effect on cruise ship operations.

In 2015, the MV Zenith, owned by a Spanish subsidiary of Royal Caribbean, dropped anchor near a reef off Grand Cayman. Actually, it was more like “dragged anchor.” The anchor chain “draped across the entire reef, constantly moving back and forth.” The damage was immeasurable. In 2017, MV Noble Caledonia ran aground on an Indonesian reef, removing 1,600 square meters – about 17,200 square feet – of coral. Were it not that corals are declining worldwide due to climate change, the reef might repair itself in 100 years. Now the damage is permanent on any timescales humans can fathom. And these are only among the incidents we know about.

What cruise ships are really about is legal rape of the environment by the wealthiest countries and their one-percenters. Each passenger’s carbon footprint while cruising is roughly three times what it would be on land.

Overpaid or financially independent, the average cruise taker is not a pensioned postal worker, but a 30- to 39-year-old pulling down a high five- or low six-digit annual salary. In wealthy countries where governments tell their citizens to fear and revile other peoples and places, cruise lines offer the illusion of secure vacation travel. If you don’t want the risk or hassle of booking hotels, rental cars, tour guides and restaurants in unfamiliar destinations with a language you don’t speak and a culture you little understand, or care to, then for about the same price as an economy flight and all-inclusive resort you can get all that taken care of and have the security of familiar, unchanging culture constantly surrounding you. So what if your unchanging culture is the worst form of throwaway consumerism? So what if it is killing sea birds, whales, and dolphins? So what if you are flouting the Paris Agreement (which cruise lines finagled their own special exemption to)? So what if by purchasing your ticket you enter a tacit agreement to end homo sapiens evolutionary line this century? You only live once, right?

Tell that to your grandchildren.

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You encourage me to do more and then tell you about it. Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. Those are how we make this happen. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

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Cheerleaders for Doom

"Exaggerated is in the eye of the beholder."

 I just finished reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Then, in a climate change webinar, I was asked whether I thought focusing on predictions of doom — and Wallace-Wells is hard core in this respect — is productive or just numbing. Wallace-Wells says he had to ask himself that continuously and where he came down was that complacency poses a greater risk to our species than panic. A little panic can be a good thing, especially if you have become complacent.

William Brangham (PBS): You have actually argued that panic can be — that panic is appropriate in response to this, and that panic can be productive. How so?

David Wallace-Wells: The U.N. says that, in order to avoid catastrophic levels of warming, we need a global mobilization at the level of World War II. We know, from history, we didn’t fight that war out of hope or optimism. It was out of fear and alarm.

An opportunity we lose when we tamp down the rhetoric so as not to frighten or berate is the chance to deploy a whole new suite of tools that only by acknowledging the full scope of the threat do we even think we should be reaching for. For example, negative emissions technologies hardly seem worth investing in if the contemporary narrative has it that windmills, solar cells, and Tesla sports cars will do the job. It is only when you realize that 4 or 5 degrees of warming — our present trajectory — puts cities underwater to the depth of the Sydney Opera House or New York Grand Central Station, that you might feel inclined reach for these useful tools. Only when it is clear to you that plugging the hole in the lifeboat clearly will not be enough do you then reach for a bailing can.

In the PBS NewsHour interview, Wallace-Wells said:

Four degrees of warming, we would have, the U.N. suggests, as many as a billion climate refugees. That’s as many people as live in North and South America combined. We would have $600 trillion of climate damages. That’s double all the wealth that exists in the world today.

Less obvious, but no less important, is the opportunity a dilemma offers — to shift the operating system of civilization from one that exploits minorities, widens divisions, and propagates perennial insecurity (food, water, medicine, peace) to one that is inclusive, unifying and regenerative (of food, water, medicine, and peace).

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose…www.penguinrandomhouse.com

 

I was thinking this week about those Artificial Intelligence programmers who were teaching a machine to correctly predict the price of a bicycle just by looking at it. They noticed that as the machine self-developed its algorithms, it would go first to the back wheel and study that. It took the programmers a while to figure out why. It was because the AI was looking for training wheels, an immediate tell for a low price. I wondered, suppose we programmed AI home devices to tell us whether we were making progress in combating climate change. What would they look for? What is the quickest tell? It wouldn’t be our light bulbs or our choice in cars. It wouldn’t be a super-efficient refrigerator or even what was in it. Perhaps the AI device need only examine the sine wave of the AC wall current that provides its own power.

Anyway, that is what came to mind when the webinar I was part of went dark because the power to my thatch palapa in this remote Mexican village failed, as it is prone to most days, taking all cell and internet service with it. Maybe another tell would be whether your walls are made of bamboo, mud, and straw.

Most of us have so far to go, a little panic could help. Wallace-Wells’ book began as a July 2017 article in New York Magazine titled “The Uninhabitable Earth — Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.” Editors worried the doomerism would sink that issue. No need to worry. It went viral. The issue had to reprint.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Wallace-Wells said:

“For every half a degree of warming we are expected to see between 10% and 20% increase in conflict, so if we get to where we are going, by the end of the century we could have twice as much war as we have today, and that conflict happens even at the individual level, so we’ll see rises in murder rates and rape, domestic assault. It spikes the rate at which people are admitted to mental hospitals. Absolutely every aspect of life on this Earth is scheduled to be transformed by climate changes, and that really is what my book is about, not just what the science tells is going to happen, but how the way that we will live will be changed by these forces.”

Consider that the popular narrative would have it that humans have been altering the chemistry of the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution (if not the agricultural one). Actually, about 85% of greenhouse pollution has only been around since World War II. Wallace-Wells observes that more than half has only been aloft since Seinfeld premiered three decades ago. A third has only been there since 2010. We are in a curve of acceleration, accumulating greenhouse gases faster today than in any other period before.

I think we had long thought that climate change was happening very slowly, that it was unfolding, at fastest, at about a decade timescale, more usually like centuries, and we didn’t have to worry about it in our own lives, maybe even our children’s lives, but it was something to worry about for our grandchildren.

More than half of all the emissions that we have put into the atmosphere in the entire history of humanity, we have done in the last 30 years. And that means that we’re doing this damage in real time and in the space of a generation. So the speed is really overwhelming.

There is more carbon in the atmosphere now than there has been for 15 million years. Humans have never lived with this much greenhouse cover before. We might not have been able to evolve if we had. When you wrap yourself up in a down quilt in the middle of summer, you will warm very quickly. As we are. At what point do you begin to wonder what it might be like if you could never throw the quilt off?

Wallace-Wells is an eloquent writer, reminiscent of Jonathan Schell, whose The Fate of the Earth woke many to the peril of our dark deal with the nuclear weapons Devil. Fate, driven by the poetic writing of Schell, forced even the most reluctant reader to confront the unthinkable: “the destruction of humanity and possibly most life on Earth". 

In an unpublished paper, “The Fate of Extinction Arguments” (1983), Brian Martin, a mathematics professor at the Australian National University, writes:

When nuclear weapons are exploded, the high temperatures cause nitrogen in the air to react with oxygen, producing oxides of nitrogen. In explosions larger than about one megatonne, the fireball of the explosion rises the 10 or 15 kilometers necessary to deposit much of these oxides of nitrogen in the stratosphere, where the oxides of nitrogen destroy ozone. Since stratospheric ozone absorbs ultraviolet light from the sun, the net consequence of large nuclear explosions is an increase in ultraviolet light at the earth’s surface.

Shell described the effect in more poignant prose…

“the blinding of insects, birds, and beasts all over the world; the extinction of many ocean species, among them some at the base of the food chain; the temporary or permanent alteration of the climate of the globe, with the outside chance of ‘dramatic’ and ‘major’ alterations in the structure of the atmosphere; the pollution of the whole ecosphere with oxides of nitrogen; the incapacitation in ten minutes of unprotected people who go out into the sunlight; the blinding of people who go out into the sunlight; a significant decrease in photosynthesis in plants around the world; the scalding and killing of many crops; the increase in rates of cancer and mutation around the world, but especially in the targeted zones, and the attendant risk of global epidemics; the possible poisoning of all vertebrates by sharply increased levels of Vitamin D in their skin as a result of increased ultraviolet light” (p. 93).

If this all sounds a bit like climate change, it should, because that is one of the great capabilities of a nuclear exchange — a long, radioactive, nuclear winter followed by set design from The Road, Waterworld, or Mad Max.

The Fate of the Earth…books.google.com

 

Martin takes Schell to task for precisely the criticism being leveled at climate doomers and peak oil catastrophists.

The belief in nuclear extinction seems to have inhibited peace movement thinking about the development of long term strategies … for transforming the institutional roots of war. A less-exaggerated assessment of the effects of nuclear war does not necessarily mean less concern. Instead, hopefully, it can lead to more penetrating analyses and more successful strategies for ending the nuclear threat.

I think exaggerated is in the eye of the beholder. Wallace-Wells is the first to say he hopes the lower bound of the estimates scientists are giving us is what turns out to be right. The point is, most people are not discussing the upper bound at all. It is a discussion we need to be having. Most predictions end in 2100, but that could be just when the party really gets going. If we stay on track for 3.9 to 4.3 degrees Celsius this century, we will cross thresholds that trigger tipping elements (permafrost, Arctic Sea albedo, African desertification) that can double or triple the damage in the next century and perhaps even in this one. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, possibly the most conservative source, told us just last year that by as soon as 2030 some of these cascading effects could be irreversible.

Contrary to what the voices for moderation counsel, confronting an existential threat rather than watering down the rhetoric can lead to more penetrating analyses and more successful strategies. Softening the risk leads to underestimating the enemy.

I urge everyone to read The Uninhabitable Earth and then see if they don’t agree. This is a “hair on fire” moment for the sake of everything we hold dear.

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You encourage me to do more and then tell you about it. Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. Those are how we make this happen. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

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