Surfing between Scylla and Charybdis

     Friends, it has been an incredibly long time since I posted anything. 2013 has been a tough year for this worker-bee, locked into industrial civilization. As the saying goes, life intervenes. I got furloughed from my full-time job, and put to part-time. Now I have to piece a living together with two part-time jobs until I can construct a better way to make a living. We had to work through a serious health challenge with my wife, and move my mother-in-law into a new place, and on top of everything else, my teenager is now driving. Yikes!

      Well, dear reader, if you have followed me this far, you have likely reached one of three conclusions. Either I am as crazy as a pet 'coon and a paranoid, I am a heretic who lacks faith in the human spirit of creativity and intelligence and questions the dominant paradigm of the free market, or human beings have inadvertently (emergently?) gotten themselves lost in a box-canyon from which there is no escape- we are well and truly fucked.

      If you are in the first camp, I have nothing much to say to you, But as the consequences mount, and the chickens of industrial civilization come home to roost, please know that I will hold the asylum door open for you.

      If you are of the second belief, though I believe the free market is delusional, understand it is not the human spirit I lack faith in. Human beings are brilliant, amazing creatures, possessed of a wellspring of ingenuity. It is the hierarchical institutions we are so prone to constructing, in which I no longer have faith. Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Maya, the Mississippians, time and again, we discover a rich energy source, virgin topsoil along with wheat, maize and so on. Civilization grows, emperors and their courts emerge, they expand by conquest, they overshoot, and collapse. This time the energy source is fossil fuel, the Emperor is an agglomeration of CEOs, and the Imperial reach is global.

      But, friend, if you are of the third, well then, welcome and good morning! You have begun to awaken. If you feel overwhelmed, or are despairing our fate, know that you are not alone. It is normal to feel groggy and disoriented after too much sleep.

      Once, when I was a lad, I asked my seventeen-year old high-school friend Laura, in a fit of melodramatic teenage pseudo-profundity, what she would do if she woke up and found out everything she believed in was a lie. I think collectively, as a global society, that is one very serious question we all now face. What happens when everything we believed in turns out to be a lie? Can society withstand it?

      Capitalism, supposedly the most advanced (only?) economic model available, is failing the vast majority of the world's population as it sucks the wealth from the periphery and concentrates it at the top. As the third world was literally sucked dry, the capitalists turned to the working and middle class of the first world, and began to feed.

      Our entire energy system is an addictive drug. We know it is killing us, but we cannot abide the withdrawal.

      And the environment, well we have fouled our own bed. When most of the large fish-stocks are gone, the old-growth forests are nearly gone, the vast majority of the prairies are gone, nuclear waste is sitting there in cooling pools- a malignant ticking time-bomb, we have Superfund sites, and dead-zones in the ocean, and there is a Texas-sized patch of plastic garbage trapped in the middle of the Pacific, how could we think otherwise? We have changed the composition of the very air we breathe and each and every murderous day another 200 species vanish into the eternity of extinction. We are unraveling the very web of Creation.

      What they taught us in K-12, in university (It is Morning in America) is a lie and we are swimming in a sea of cognitive dissonance.

      So what to do? A great many people, probably the vast majority, will pull the covers over their head roll over, and go back to sleep. Unfortunately they will be awoken by the shock of hitting the wall. Like a bug striking the windshield, the last thing that will go through their mind is their asshole. A few however, may not be content to wait. For them (us?) perhaps we choose Resistance.

      Resistance is a loaded word, it conjures up some of our deepest cultural fantasies. We may imagine ourselves encamped at Valley Forge, holed up in the Alamo, ensconced in the glacial fastness of the ice planet Hoth. But Washington is not there to lead us across the Delaware. Sam Houston will not avenge us. The Force is not at our command. We have only our tiny, feeble selves.

     This brings us to the piece of the essay, which you may wish to skip. For we are about to tread on the thin ice of sedition.

      Understand, dear reader, I did not arrive at this place lightly. It goes against all I was taught, all that I cherished. The American Dream is the pinnacle of human achievement. The rising tide of the free market will lift all boats. The arc of history (representative democracy?) bends towards justice. All of this pales in the harsh glare of the sixth mass extinction, the Anthropocene.

      The damnable thing about it, we can watch it happen, and understand. The trilobites that were lost in the Great Dying, the dinosaurs who perished in the KT event, were not sentient. They were neither the engineers, nor the documentarians of their own destruction. We are both. And as we drive our pickup trucks to work for yet another day of debt peonage, knowing full well our consumption and our emissions are omnicidal, we can contemplate our choices. Walk away, disengage, become a hermit? That road may lead to divorce, despair, pauperism, and an early death. Continue as we are? Perhaps we live until famine and chaos set in, and we can contemplate the works of Shakespeare, Picasso, Mozart, and our own genetic heritage all disappearing into the void, for the sake of the almighty dollar and a few more gallons of gas.

      There is a wonderful book called “Who moved my cheese?” It is written to assist the economically displaced (fired, laid-off, outsourced) in overcoming the psychological barriers to moving on after a job loss. I highly recommend it for anyone who was bitten by the Great Recession. The central premise is that, like rats in a maze, once we humans discover an easy food source (our jobs in the industrial economy) we will keep returning, day after day. If someone moves the cheese (we get laid off) we will go through a period of disorientation and grief until we find a new source.

      The central task of our time is to intentionally move the cheese, for we know the moldering block, on which we currently feed, is perched on the wire-bail trap of collapse and potentially near-term extinction .

      Here is the conclusion I have reached, though it pains me to say it, we must bring down industrial civilization before it sterilizes the Earth. I really think the choice may be as simple as preemptively collapsing industrial civilization or near-term extinction. Remember, the rat will keep returning to its cheese, as long as it is there, no matter how nasty the supper, until the day the trap breaks its neck.

      This means that despite the limp actions (fuel economy standards, power plant emissions regulations) and grandiose promises (“This is the day the oceans will cease to rise”) of the Obama administration, we will pursue an “all of the above” energy strategy and exploit every last drop possible of the Alberta Tar Sands and Arctic oil, knowing full well this will put us many times over our carbon budget for 2C. I have seen nothing over the last decade that could lead to any other conclusion. Have you?

      Again, I think the choice may be between bringing down industrial civilization and near-term extinction. Is this an example of a straw man, of simplistic binary thinking? Is there a third path? The third path most often cited is something like a Green New Deal or Transition.

      The Green New Deal envisions a massive push by government to scale up renewables to the national level, perhaps incentivized by a carbon tax or fee and dividend. By doing so, we get to keep all our techno-goodies and continue to live the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. It requires corporate, social and political consensus (a voluntary buy-in) that seems utterly out of reach as well as suspending the laws of thermodynamics. It also requires time, up to 40 years, time we simply do not have. It is the essence of having your cake and eating it too.

      Transition is a voluntary power-down; it is an engineered soft landing. We could, if we chose to, re-localize our economy. We could apply the principles of Permaculture to revamp our industrial farming system. We could actively de-carbonize out energy systems, and deploy a renewable distributed power generation system, albeit at a much lower level of output.. We could opt for an economic model that values human contentment more than GDP. We could, if we chose to, de-fang the corptocracy that has bankrupted and corrupted every layer of governance, municipal, county, state, federal, even (especially?) international. We could opt for a de-centralized, directly democratic approach.

      The real sting of the argument for either a Green New Deal or Transition is the word voluntary. Does anyone honestly believe that the American populace will opt for a voluntary transition to a local, de-carbonized steady state economy or a massive Green New Deal? Would you be willing to pay a carbon fee when your salary isn't keeping pace with inflation? Even if it were available, would you (or your Mom) park your car and take mass transit to work, the local market, school every day because Obama, Mitt Romney, the Pope himself implored you to do right by your children?

      Even if the American public at large were to suddenly have an epiphany and “get it”, what then about the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa)? Will they deprive their citizens of the “right” to a western standard of living that the industrial economy affords? Take China, for example. In order to maintain political stability, the Communist Party has constructed entire cities, that are unlived in, in order to juice the construction section of their economy, suppress unemployment, and forestall political turmoil. If they are willing to spend the resources, energy, and capital building and maintaining a vacant city, can you see them adopting de-growth and putting their political futures on the line. I think not, though their path is omnicidal.

      Thus, this brings us full circle and back to a rather binary choice, take down industrial civilization or near-term extinction. The first objection that is usually raised when this taboo subject is broached is the human cost. The carrying capacity of the earth, when human society operates within a solar budget, is thought to be approximately 1 billion people. Even if we are generous, and arbitrarily double that number for arguments sake, that means we are in overshoot by 5 billion people. And taking down industrial civilization would mean a die-off of 5 billion people over some period of time. That is horrific, almost beyond contemplation.

      But if we wait until the system collapses from its own weight, what will be the ecological cost? As carbon blows through the 650 ppm mark, and ecosystems collapse like dominoes, will there be enough of a planet left to support 2 billion? 1 billion? Or will we be left with scattered bands of nomadic humans scrabbling for subsistence in the polar regions, as James Lovelock posits? As runaway greenhouse takes hold, will the last human wonder if we could have chosen differently in 2013?

      I sat on the idea for this essay for some time after the Boston bombings and other incidents. Feelings are still raw, and rightfully so. Boston was a clear example of terrorism, the attempt to make political change (US foreign policy in the ME) through inflicting violent terror on the populace. The spectators and runners were not directly responsible for the foreign posture of the US and targeting them is morally unjustifiable. It is as reprehensible as the setting of a car bomb in a open market, or gunning down innocents in a hotel. The average American family is not directly responsible for the colossal mess we are in. They are locked into a system they did not choose and do not understand. This means, in my mind, direct militant action is off the table.

      At any rate, I think it is time we admitted we are living in a soft-core police state. As long as you play by the rules, don't step out of line, you are left alone. But step out of line, as the original Tea Party or Occupy did, well the IRS scrutinizes you, or perhaps NSA analysts dig into your meta-data. Or local police take an interest. For example, I know for a fact that the local chapter of Occupy had undercover police officers as guests at their meetings early on.

      So even if widespread support for militant resistance existed, which it most certainly doesn't, the moment they took action the full force of the Homeland Security apparatus would descend on them like Mjolnir, and under the NDAA, they would most likely become permanent guests at GITMO. Members of the Earth Liberation Front learned this lesson the hard way.

      The other option for resistance falls under the mantle of non-violence. In the West, this is the option that should be fiercely pursued. 350.org, Great Plains Tar SandsResistance, Occupy, and others fall under this mantle. They are doing fine work and should be supported. But in my experience, a great many members are operating under the delusion that the capitalist monster we have grown up under can be reformed and his appetite restrained. What we must do is attempt to educate.

      We seem to have stabilized somewhat economically, albeit at a lower level of GDP and growth. This has taken some of the steam out of Occupy, but I suspect another crises will come, and people will once again be in the streets. Look around the world and one sees turmoil in Egypt, Syria, Brazil, Greece; it is not hard not to believe.

      One of the most promising things in my mind to come out of Occupy was the model of the General Assembly. It offered an alternative for direct democracy. It showed there is a different path. As things heat up, we must point out that it is the very nature of industrial civilization that is pushing us over the cliff. With a whole lot of luck, when we hit a tipping point, when the Tower of Pisa needs just a little push, industrial civilization can be sent toppling into the dustbin of history. With a whole lot more luck, groups like Transition and Occupy will be there to help build a new future.

      Unfortunately, there may be a very large monkey-wrench in the gears. Remember the malignancy sitting in those nuclear waste pools? Take down industrial civilization too quickly, or if it collapses of its own accord, too chaotically, and you end up with 437 Fukushimas. Dmitry Orlov posted an essay recently that points the problem out beautifully. Keep industrial civilization propped up in order support 7 (heading towards 9) billion people, and face financial, energy, and ecological collapse. Bring it down prematurely, and set off hundreds of Chernobyls and Fukushimas, and face ecological collapse.

It seems we are riding the wave between Scylla and Charybdis.