Technology Addiction and Lessons, Part Two

Otsego Lake at Cooperstown, New York

How often have you seen this post (below this paragraph)? I've seen it many times, and it always reminds me of how we inadvertently have destroyed the planet we live on in ways that cannot simply be "wiped away" as if though it was dirt on a window. This is an important concept, because most people do not comprehend the meaning of the word predicament and instead treat it as if though it was a problem. Repeatedly over and over I find myself reiterating the difference because millions if not billions of people still don't understand the difference. Here's the post:

"The root systems of prairie grass and agricultural crops differ significantly, and this contrast played a major role in the Dust Bowl when drought struck.

Prairie grasses have deep, extensive root systems that anchor the soil, preventing erosion and retaining moisture. These roots can reach several feet underground, creating a dense network that stabilizes the land and helps the ecosystem withstand harsh conditions, including drought. Because prairie grasses are perennial, their roots remain year-round, continuously supporting soil structure and fertility.

In contrast, most agricultural crops have much shallower root systems. These plants, often annuals like wheat and corn, focus their energy on rapid growth and high yields rather than deep root development. Since they do not provide the same level of soil stability as prairie grasses, the land becomes more vulnerable to erosion, especially when crops are harvested, and the fields are left bare.

When vast areas of native prairie grass were plowed under for large-scale farming, the deep-rooted vegetation was removed, exposing the soil to wind and water erosion. When drought arrived in the 1930s, the already weakened soil had little to hold it in place, leading to massive dust storms that devastated farms and displaced thousands of people. The loss of the prairie’s natural root system was a key factor in the environmental disaster known as the Dust Bowl."

This is just one reason that agriculture is unsustainable. Soil loss and nutrient depletion are two consequences of agriculture, but replacing the original plants and trees that grew on land that now supports agriculture not only wiped those trees and plants out, but millions of microbes and organisms that also lived there. Agriculture requires destroying that habitat, and just like all technologies, it also created new problems that required new technologies to solve. If it had stopped there, like many people think, then perhaps we could continue living with agriculture. Unfortunately, it didn't stop with solvable problems, it continued with predicaments that have outcomes and can never be solved. So, an endless barrage of technological "solutions" proceeded to be implemented, which in turn produced many problems and predicaments leading to where we are today. 

Cutting down trees and clearing land to convert that land to agriculture causes local climate changes. Removing transpiration from trees creates warming and drying and as more and more land becomes converted in this way, it can have a rather dramatic effect on local climate. Salinization can become a serious issue, transforming once pristine areas into salt-laden deserts. Still, the main reason that agriculture is unsustainable is because along with it comes the requirement to prepare, plant, maintain, and harvest the fields, requiring settlement of people to accomplish these jobs. Thus, the development of civilization began, and with it came a whole new level of extraction. Throughout this process, many species are displaced, killed off, or even extirpated. 

Agriculture and civilization are just two pieces of the puzzle, however. Wherever we go, we tend to cause environmental destruction as part of our desire to control said environment. Agriculture is extraction of nutrients from soil, and we have done a considerable amount of damage in that area. But we have also created a mass of various man-made disasters caused by extraction of all types in many other areas as well. Sooner or later, one comes to the realization that practically everything we do today is unsustainable or destroys resilience. Naturally, many people come to the conclusion that we must rebuild resilience and learn how to live sustainably. This is definitely a noble goal, but how does one do this without utilizing agriculture and civilization?

In my last article, I described how believing in space aliens (or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, for that matter) to save us from ourselves is just plain ridiculous. So many people talk about ideas that require massive societal change but don't appear to realize exactly what would be required. Similarly, many people talk about ideas that sound great but that we lack agency to be able to actually implement. Then there are ideas that quite simply put could never attain their stated goal like The Venus Project.

The trouble with practically every idea I have come across is that the idea either doesn't reduce overshoot, that it can't be attained because it goes against people's own self-interests, it doesn't take the ecological collapse that is currently occurring into consideration (making future conditions impossible to continue such efforts), or that it can't be attained because the idea depends upon unsustainable systems to continue. Anything and everything that requires agriculture (permaculture, vertical farming, regenerative agriculture, back-yard gardening, lab-grown meat, or any subset thereof) can be weeded out right now, which includes civilization. These systems are unsustainable. They CAN'T be sustained. I've reached the point where I'm not even interested in discussing such ideas because they are pointless. Those are ideas which will only work today and the near-future.

Many people argue that we should attempt to "restore" soil or the planet or biodiversity or sustainable living. This is a noble goal and one that an individual or even a small group can work to attain on a local level. However, this restoration project will never be finished due to ongoing pollution loading and it cannot be scaled up to work globally. How would one remove microplastics, PFAS, toxic chemicals and elements such as mercury, and other contaminants from soil? Unless you have a plan to eliminate wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, derechoes, and other extreme weather events from the entire planet, I'd say that such a plan is pure hubris and illogical.

Only someone who has spent the time to read my previous 7 articles will truly understand why all the ideas brought forth so far are not going to work for very long into the future. Spermageddon is one reason. Toxic microplastic and PFAS pollution is another. Agriculture is another. People need the awareness that what got us into this mess to begin with certainly won't help extract us from it, but more importantly, they also need to realize that we have manufactured with our behavior of technology use the inevitable extinction of our species along with millions of others through the symptom predicaments of ecological overshoot (link in first part of this article) we brought forth. For a more complete rundown on that, see Denial of Reality, Part Two. 

I'm going to post a few articles I don't think I've already posted before below to highlight the simple fact that the predicaments we face have outcomes and not solutions. Just like with the predicaments of agriculture and food and water security, one cannot "fix" this within the next two or three decades. Water security is going to become endemic everywhere due to pollution loading and the same is basically true with food as well. These are things which will require centuries or even thousands (possibly millions of years with regard to nuclear radiation) of years to return to how they were in the early 20th century. Here are the articles:

• A pronounced decline in northern vegetation resistance to flash droughts from 2001 to 2022

• Officials sound alarm as a major staple food is becoming increasingly scarce: 'We don't know what will happen'

• Forest restoration is booming but biodiversity isn’t

• Validating new limits for human thermoregulation

• Elevated extinction risk in over one-fifth of native North American pollinators

• A Different “Abundance Agenda”: Avoiding Delusions and Diversions

• Glacier meltdown risks food and water supply of 2 billion people, says UN

• How we could survive in a post‑collapse world

Please ignore the toxic positivity and hopium in some of those articles. The last one has demonstrably the most, in my opinion, although while it does admit serious doubts about our ability to survive, it appears to ignore the current existential issue of pollution loading as something which will prevent survival (see this article). Still, once one adds in the articles and studies over the past couple of months, how can anyone truly see a way through this? By the way, for anyone taking that question literally, I'm interested in any empirical evidence you may have. Not beliefs, opinions, or other certifiable nonsense, mind you. 

What I see from many people online is a failure to be able to synthesize all these studies, articles, and actual events into a cogent scenario of a future. That being said, I do not claim to know the future any better than anyone else; however, when I see projections that do not match current trajectories, I feel it necessary to call out such projections as incorrect. Any projection incorporating some sort of "new" energy source or "new" technology extending civilization can easily be rejected based on the simple fact that increasing overshoot has the unfortunate effect of steepening the Seneca Cliff once said extension runs its course, which of course is always shorter than the extended tail would otherwise be, and the points on a graph that coincide with a particular point in time will always be lower after the fact versus before said extension. 

Those of you who regularly read my articles I suspect understand this completely; most others I suspect by default do not. Some may fall somewhere in the middle I suppose, so the bottom line is: There is always a tradeoff, as there is no free lunch when it comes to physics. 

Projections incorporating relocalization and self-sufficiency appear to ignore pollution loading as something which will prevent survival, as human sterility will prevent new generations from being born and as habitat for humans disappears, more and more people will die off. 

Of course, I have also seen ideas to rid the world of wetiko and other types of ideas I consider fantasy. Perhaps I should qualify that statement a bit further - if we had several generations before these predicaments started killing us off enmasse, that would be one thing. But I don't see that as being a possibility, so the likelihood that such an idea would come to pass is very remote. Even if it did come to pass, however, It has no capacity to "undo" the toxic legacy we are leaving behind. Wildfires will still continue burning houses and other buildings, releasing all sorts of toxic chemicals into the soil, waterways, and atmosphere. Plastics currently in use today will continue to be thrown away once they are obsolete or are otherwise no longer desired (some of them might get burned up in those fires mentioned previously). I have seen houses, cars, and other objects float downriver in these massive floods we're having nowadays. Many plastics find their way into lakes, rivers, and streams which ultimately find their way to larger bodies of water such as the oceans. So, even if the production of these toxic chemicals, plastics, and compounds stopped completely right now, the pollution that these complexities leave behind will continue worsening for decades to come.

I could go on for another week before releasing this article, as there are many other items to discuss. One in particular is the creation of entirely new species, not through evolution, but through human meddling with genetic engineering. Many of you may remember Dolly the sheep. But a new story has become popular - the "de-extinction" of dire wolves. (See also this CNN article.) What could possibly go wrong (aside from the fact that these aren't actually dire wolves, but cloned grey wolves)? Every technological development has come with unintended consequences and with humans being notoriously blind to long-term consequences, the one thing I note here above and beyond all that is the cruelty of reintroducing an extinct animal species on a planet in a mass extinction. I have little doubt in my mind that we will learn yet another lesson as a part of these attempts. Here is what Will Falk had to say about it, quote: 

"This is absolutely horrifying. The extinction crisis is an existential threat on the level of climate change. But, you cannot genetically engineer dire wolves. Dire wolves are not just animal bodies. Dire wolves are the hundreds of square miles of healthy, unfragmented land they need to roam and the countless animal bodies they need to eat. Dire wolves are clean water, old growth forests, and a stable climate. Dire wolf pups need dire wolf mothers. Dire wolf individuals need dire wolf packs. Dire wolves need the world they evolved to live in -- a world that cannot be genetically engineered, a world that can only begin to heal if humans stop trying to control her.

Make no mistake, technology will not stop the 6th Mass Extinction. Industrial technology -- and the extraction, the devastation of land, the destruction of habitat, and the addiction to 'resources' that technology requires and perpetuates -- is driving the 6th Mass Extinction. More industrial technology will not solve the very problems it creates.

Please do not celebrate this. We all feel the despair that is a natural reaction to the ecological collapse we're living through. But there are no technological fixes to the horrors. The only way through is to dismantle this insane, ecocidal culture currently dominating the world."

Albert Einstein famously said, "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." I might add human arrogance as a third item to that short list.

On a more inspirational note, I have pictures from the Barkhausen-Cache River Wetlands Center and Panoramic View and Wolf Creek Dam for you to treasure!