Our Anthropocentrism and Psychology

 

East Fork Campground, Durbin, West Virginia

One of the most honest assessments of the predicaments we face comes from Robert Jensen, and in an article from July 13, he discusses the dangers of dogma. This is far more important than it might appear, as is laid out in his article. I've found that most people know about climate change and pollution loading, far less people know about energy and resource decline and biodiversity loss, and even fewer have much comprehension of extinction. Most folks only know a few parts of climate change and don't realize how many various symptoms exist. Some know what feedbacks (both positive and negative) are and some even know what self-reinforcing feedbacks are. More people are becoming aware of oceanic thermal inertia and the lag effect, but still too few understand them. Sea level rise (SLR) is known about but few people know that ecological overshoot is the root predicament causing all of this. Jensen explains why he is labeled a "doomer":

"Climate change may be today’s most dramatic environmental challenge, but other threats to ecosystems are no less vexing: soil erosion and degradation from agriculture, chemical contamination from industry, and biodiversity loss from human exploitation of land and water. The problem is not just fossil fuels but overshoot—humans drawing down the ecological capital of the planet beyond replacement levels. Consumption is not equally distributed, of course, but too many people are consuming too much in the aggregate. Eight billion people living in high-energy/high-technology societies—no matter what the economic system or energy sources—is unsustainable. Because almost no one—left, right, or center—endorses collectively imposed limits on consumption, my writing on ecology gets me labeled a “doomer” by people across the political spectrum."

People tend to be aware that all three poles (North, South, and the third pole, the glacial cryosphere, commonly thought of as the upper elevations of the Himalaya, the majestic mountain range in Asia that separates the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau) are melting and/or thawing (ice melts, permafrost thaws), but are often far behind on the science of it all and just how quickly things are heating up. 

What isn't as obvious is the lack of understanding what the interactions of various symptoms of overshoot lead to and how they become threat multipliers to each other. Drought, for instance, is insidious enough by itself, especially in its capacity to render entire fields of crops nonviable. But when combined with wind and a spark it can fuel wildfires which can in turn burn entire towns and cause severe air quality downwind of the fires. This can then in turn cause worsening asthma and other cardiovascular issues in people. 

Quite some time back, I wrote about methane and why it is such a threat.

A new study explains how paths carved into boreal peatlands for oil and gas exploration could be are speeding up climate change. Once again, another interaction of different symptoms (energy and resource decline spur the search for more sources of energy which contribute to all three issues - methane emissions, climate change, and energy and resource decline plus one can add in another predicament - pollution loading - for free) is the ability of each to multiply (not just add) the effects of each of the existing predicaments when combined with each other.

One of the biggest mistakes I constantly see is the conversion of these predicaments into dollar amounts (cost in terms of money). While I can see value in presenting such a synopsis, I pointed out over a year ago that ecological collapse supercedes financial collapse. So, one must take discussion of economic issues with a grain of salt, keeping in mind that money is a human concept that nature cares not one bit about. Financial collapse will be a human disaster, one which other species will have no comprehension of. No other species will understand loss of electricity as a big deal, nor loss of the internet, or satellite communication, or the loss of our road networks. Civilizational collapse will be a uniquely human experience. How ironic it will be that our obsession for innovation and fixing problems will have created the destruction of the pinnacle of our creativity.

This is all much closer than many people realize. A new article in Nature outlines the climate change aspect to all of this, explaining "climate free fall." The article points to well-documented facts regarding climate change and how various extreme weather events will collapse society as the systems we depend upon no longer provide the required stability for agriculture, infrastructure, and the economic systems that surround us. But what the article fails to synthesize is a combination of other overshoot symptom predicaments, such as biodiversity loss, energy and resource decline, pollution loading, extinction, geopolitical fallout and wars, starvation, and disease which will overpower society's ability to deal with them. For those of us who study these predicaments, we realize that the synthesis of these converging predicaments will generate chaos and confusion that can be seen in every wildfire, flood, power outage, tornado, hurricane, the COVID-19 pandemic, and on and on.

It is rather obvious that a quote from William Rees is the most accurate assessment of the situation we find ourselves in:

"Unlike our Paleolithic ancestors, modern techno-industrial (MTI) humans

• Live in a mind-numbingly complex, rapidly changing world system of overlapping subsystems that we ourselves have created and that constantly challenge our limited cognitive capacities.

• Are not cognitively equipped to fully understand, let alone control the workings of any major cultural sub-system - the global economy, the internet, AI, geopolitics - or their interactions with the climate system or any other biophysical sub-system of the ecosphere.

• Again, we don't - in fact we cannot - fully connect the dots.

• In effect, with our functionally obsolete brains humans are no longer adapted for survival in a mega-system of our own making."

Dave Pollard explains this a bit more and adds context to all of this with this article, which explains in detail our lack of agency.

Despite my prognostications here over the years, it seems that even I have been too conservative, and not just about climate change, either. If one looks at various articles and videos about Artificial Intelligence, it appears that what we have here is another illusion. Let's face it, if agriculture, infrastructure, and the economic systems that surround us can't function properly and well, then neither will AI data centers. Besides, the narrative about AI appears to be wrong anyway. I do understand the visions the CEOs of those companies have, but I think that they have some rather serious blind spots that cannot be mitigated, no differently than all the other so-called "solutions" that don't actually solve overshoot.

For anyone out west in the U.S., water is going to be the huge issue, and this is even before the data center issues are taken into consideration. One must consider the drying up not only of river basins, but also of aquifers (especially the Ogallala, which covers 8 states!).

Of course, all this talk of water, drought, and extreme weather made me think of my file on Wildfire Links. Right now, this link might be of interest to those of you reading from the U.S., Canada, or even the Northern Hemisphere. I can spend hours looking at Maps - whether they are maps of roads, railroads, rivers, mountains, wildfires, or other features is irrelevant. Maps always provide a wealth of information and because I have traveled through every state except Hawaii in the U.S. and British Columbia, Alberta, and Yukon in Canada, I obtain great entertainment finding new places to learn about or even visit! It's true that wildfire maps are quite different from road maps, but that's a whole different topic.

Something that tends to be part of wildfires is fire thunderstorms, and they frequently start more fires in a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop where a wildfire generates a fire thunderstorm, which creates new wildfires, which create more fire thunderstorms, and so on in a vicious cycle until conditions change so that fire weather is not favored or all fuels are exhausted.

Something else to consider with regard to wildfires is that many of the fires in northern Canada happen to be in areas which have no road access, hampering any efforts to get them put out. Some of these fires may have to burn until the first snow falls, and even then, some of them simply burn underground in peat until the following year when they spring back to life once fuels dry out. These are known as "zombie fires" and this article describes them and points out how at least 100 of them were still burning in February of 2024. In an article in The Guardian, Lori Daniels explains how zombie fires change the hydrology and the soil, and, as I mentioned earlier about self-reinforcing feedback loops, this article also explains the scenario here:

"The problem can also compound itself. Patrick Louchouarn, a professor at the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University, says: “This has the potential to become really problematic. The more of the permafrost dries out and some of those organic, rich soils dry out in the Arctic, and the more you increase the temperature, there’s greater possibility for that fuel to be ready to burn.” "

While writing this article, Steve Bull wrote this article about the Canadian wildfires, their smoke, and the recent political turmoil in the USA over it. He sees the situation the exact same way that I do and understands facts that few people comprehend. It really is an excellent article about the situation, one I wish more people knew about and saw not from a human perspective but from an ecological one. 

George Tsakraklides brings to the forefront what many people have probably never thought about...only just in recent times have entire towns burnt to the ground, forcing those who live there to migrate to other locations with little else but the clothes on their backs. But he also accurately points out how we are trapped within the technosphere we have created, very similar to the energy trap which fuels it.

Meanwhile, corporation after corporation is ditching the whole "net zero" thing, realizing that it was nothing more than an illusion to begin with. What would really be great is if the same phenomenon would happen with regard to all the other so-called "solutions" where reality interjected and some sense of sanity prevailed as a result. However, I am well aware of the invasion of the idiots, so I am not expecting for a broad public acknowledgement of said reality and/or sanity. In fact, what I am seeing instead is a public overloaded with information, and because people will form their beliefs around their worldview, the true and actual facts matter very little.

Next week I will have my normally scheduled article with both links from the previous two weeks of Treasured Traditions posts and the following week I will have Part Two of this article.