Capitalism and Extinction
Before I get started on this article, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who participated in my article last month asking how people feel about ecological overshoot. I saw many parallels to my own story and learned a lot from the exchange. It is somewhat comforting knowing that others see the same incongruencies that I do. For me, this is a huge part of my love for Tom Murphy's articles and material. He had a similar trajectory to realizing exactly where we are as a species and I can see the same optimism I once had in his earlier articles. I guess most of us go through this same learning phase. It's good for humility, I'll give it that.
I always have so many questions about the situation we find ourselves enmeshed within, so it really is nice to hear from others routinely about these topics. This is one of the joys of bringing these topics up to strangers on my trips. It's such a depressing subject that I generally don't discuss much about it locally; but on my trips, the people I discuss this with don't know me and it seems much more honest to discuss something of substance than to discuss "the weather" or some other inane topic. This is just a small part of what makes me feel so alive on my trips.
On my recent trip to New York last month, I was excited to see living mature ash trees at Glimmerglass State Park. Later, as I was cruising through different parts of the park, I noticed the telltale signs of emerald ash borer infestations - the tops of the trees were bare of leaves. Typically, the tops go first over a series of 2-3 years, until only an area of the trunk near the first limbs above the ground still has leaves. Usually, the tree will die the following year. More questions in my mind erupted. Were these trees initially saved by insecticide treatments or did the colder winters up there keep them alive longer?
I was treated to the same scenario almost a decade ago on my trip to Alaska. In the lower 48 contiguous states, the pine beetle and many other pests and diseases have taken out huge stands of trees (sometimes entire mountainsides) especially noticeable in the Rocky Mountains and the Intermountain West, the Cascades, and the Sierra Nevada. In the eastern US, Hemlock Woolly Adelgid infestations have removed millions of hemlocks from the landscape. So, it was refreshing to see the forests in Alaska green rather than spotted with red and gray dead trees. Sure, there were a few dead trees, but nothing like in the lower 48. A few years after I went, I saw pictures showing the same scenario I saw in the lower 48 the previous decade.
I have written about these topics in my article on trees, my article about invasive species, The Beauty of The Silence, my story about man-made disasters, and even the article I wrote about flooding closures (which brings the flooding in North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia caused by Hurricane Helene into focus). It does appear that my trip planning teaches me more than just how to get from point A to point B or which new campgrounds to visit. In fact, this year, it is showing me just how many places in my favorite travel areas were destroyed by flooding this year.
Now, on to the topic I originally had in mind for this article before including my thank you note and branching off into a discussion about my trips.
Recently, I came across this video production, For Land - Part one: Capital as Extinction. It blames our current mass extinction on capitalism. I see capitalism blamed for many things, primarily because most all of those things that capitalism gets blamed for are, like extinction, symptom predicaments of ecological overshoot.
Unfortunately, this is denial of reality. Blaming capitalism for something that started way before capitalism existed is magical thinking.
It is important to delineate these facts, as casting or assigning blame frequently has the effect of backfiring and is generally non-productive. I do think that finding the root source of any particular issue is important. But blame in and of itself is pretty useless. One often must look in the mirror first and see if perhaps he or she might be to blame, as it's always easy to point towards someone or something else, and hypocrisy is often common and widespread. In this particular case, capitalism does play a role; since the imperative of capitalism is endless growth, which is impossible on a finite planet. However, capitalism is simply a part of the unsustainable system of civilization. Even with a different economic system, civilization would still remain unsustainable, producing overshoot and all the symptom predicaments just like it always has. While it is easy to blame civilization, who ultimately is responsible for civilization? Aaahhh, that would be us! This is precisely why looking in the mirror is important, since it is our behavior of using technology which harnesses far more energy and material resources than we could ever manage without it and reducing and/or removing the negative feedbacks which once limited our ability to reproduce, producing the result of ecological overshoot.
So, the question then becomes what to do about technology use. I've written multiple articles about what can be done, but one must also ask whether or not society even wants to reduce technology use. Take a look around you. Do you notice anyone asking if they could do without any of the technologies we use each and every day? In fact, most people don't even realize the negative aspects of technology use, nor do most people have any idea what ecological overshoot is. There would have to first be demand for reducing technology use in order to reduce overshoot and therefore all the various symptom predicaments of overshoot like climate change before anyone is going to embark on such a program.
I recently reposted this post in a group:
In my opinion it's a death trap for humanity - just a part of all the signs we have that heat is accumulating increasingly across the upper 300m - it's a strongly regional signal but happens over vast ocean areas...
What I celebrate is that the elites do not know how f**ed they are - they already lost everything as capitalism won't survive this onslaught...
The main question is: will we? In my opinion, only if we the people understand the gravity of the situation and give all we've got to get out of this mess...
For the following graph: 3-D fields of oceanic temperature changes at 2021 (January to September) relative to 1981–2010 baseline in the North Pacific Ocean (30°−62°N) (upper), and in the Southern oceans (78°−30°S) (bottom).
Forgot the source: "Another Record: Ocean Warming Continues through 2021 despite La Niña Conditions"
In my post, I reiterated his quote:
Before I continue, here is last week's article about "getting out of this mess." Then I included this part:
"Well, there ya have it. Is there ANY indication that society is ready to embark on a mission to reduce overshoot? I see no indication of such but see plenty of indication of INCREASING overshoot."
"Well, there ya have it. Is there ANY indication that society is ready to embark on a mission to reduce overshoot? I see no indication of such but see plenty of indication of INCREASING overshoot."
Perhaps it is the constant stream of bargaining articles pointing to new ways of attempting to utilize technology to extract more energy and materials from the planet to serve the human domain. The latest fads are nuclear SMR (Small Modular Reactors) and geothermal schemes (often to generate electricity). Both are exceedingly expensive and just like all electricity-generating ideas, unsustainable. Isn't it ironic how all these schemes are supposed to "solve" something and yet none of them reduce overshoot, meaning that they all make the existing predicaments we face worse. Of course, I could just simply post my articles such as how the New Green Deal has ultimately been a failure but I think it is important to note some of these other types of fads apart from solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries and point to their inevitable failures as well (since powering civilization differently doesn't actually change anything about civilization's sustainability or reduce overshoot or the inevitability of collapse and die-off).
As long as the goal for society is to produce more energy, continue extraction of all types, and utilize the planet for human gain at the expense of all other species in an effort to extend civilization, we only wind up fooling ourselves into making collapse even worse. Some people who understand the basics on our energy addiction plead for hope, although I'm not sure what they're hoping for in reality, since what I often hear makes no real sense. That is the topic for next week.
Until then, I hope for something that is actually attainable - that you'll enjoy checking out Eagle Rock!
Every word here is true and backed by data, but who cares but for a few. We should however dire the predicament work to extend the lively hood of all the other species.
ReplyDeleteYes I feel Bill Gates is in an uphill battle to provide nuclear power to the masses and so does Gail at Our finite World in her latest article. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteI consider myself a realist who has postulated that pessimists and optimists are actually cut from the same bolt of fabric, and are both part of a cycle by which they flip-flop back and forth with each other. Where optimists become discouraged by all the awful stuff that humans are up to, upsetting their notions of things getting better, and forcing them into the corner of becoming pessimists. Meanwhile, the pessimist becomes so depressed over the same awfulness that is driving this train, and in order to escape he converts to optimism. And around and around they go.
ReplyDeleteHistory, the one not written by the victors, tells us that the maniacal potential of the human mind never goes away no matter how many times they are killed off. The Alexander the Greats, Genghis Khans, Charlemagnes, Napoleons, Queen Victorias, Adolf Hitlers, Stalins, George W. Bushs, that keep reemerging in spite of our efforts. And yet we, as optimists, keep on telling ourselves, as the Beatles would say, "Got to admit it's getting better, it's getting better all the time (it can't get much worse)."
I can't help but agree with what Erik is putting forth about our so-called civilization (very little civil about it). I mean the history of Europe is fraught with one or more wars going on constantly, each leading to the next, for thousands of years.
On Erik's central theme of ecologic "overreach", knowing that the human elements of self-destructiveness had been at play well before it, I see the simultaneous occurrence of the end of all powerful monarchies and the establishment of the Industrial Revolution, as when overreach got on an exponentially increasing trajectory. While studying the history of wastewater treatment my professor at Penn described how in England in the mid 1700s, with all the industries dumping their toxic wastes in the Thames, and all the slums that provided living quarters for the factory workers, further contributing sanitary pollution to the river (to say nothing of the smog that was so thick you couldn't see across the street in London), the river went septic and plagues broke out. The general living conditions being abysmal enough as it was. The powers that be started looking for ways to treat the wastewater before it reached the Thames.
For this reason I tend to disagree with Erik about the large portion of responsibility for eco-overreach falls directly into the lap of the factory owners and their disregard for human health and wellbeing. That mentality has not, and will not ever go away. It is a fatal flaw of human beings that see others as dispensable for their greed. People that flocked to the cities from the countryside with the hope and promise of a better life, one that ended up being far worse.
Another reality that needs to be considered is just what greed is. To those that suffer from it, they call it "ambition" that others are just jealous of, because they just aren't clever enough to work their own program. Bearing in mind that like yeast digesting sugar and excreting alcohol and CO2 will continue to do so until they asphyxiate themselves in their own waste. Imagine that, no smarter than a single-celled microorganism.
It is all about consumerism whereby success in capitalism is a function of "growth". And a percentage of the growth is the result of the increase of population. So instead of realizing we have reached (exceeded) the load bearing capacity of the planet and its ecosystems, industry and the economy want more. Not to mention the need to fill the ranks of the military so the armament industry and its advocates can have the necessary cannon fodder.