What would a sane, compassionate, ecological response be to the glaringly obvious and disturbing information
illustrated in the graphs shown on this page, which show that the natural world is disappearing before our eyes, while fossil fuels that allow humans to dominate and damage the planet are depleting? Here are my suggestions:
1. Plant a garden, grow some of your own food, improve the soil, less by importing nutrients and more with cover
crops.
2. Cycle the organic material coming from your own life: food compost, urine, excrement. These are critically
important sources of soil fertility and ecosystem vitality. Stop flushing organic matter underground. You'll know you have become an Earthling when you want to participate in the cycles of life on Earth.
Of the total weight of mammals on Earth, 36% consists of the planet’s 8 billion humans, 60% consists of livestock, and the remaining 4% is wild animals. Click the image to enlarge.
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3. Go for 99.9% ethical behavior. That means you can still steal cookies from the cookie jar when your mother or wife is not looking, but you can no longer pay for nuclear weapons and 'constant war' against other human beings and the Earth. This is not as difficult as it sounds; it is simply massively unethical to spend your life paying for nuclear weapons and then check out, only to leave such a curse to your own children. Is this how you want to live? No it is not. You have been conditioned for your entire life to think of this 'death tithe' as 'taxes,' but it is just mental conditioning. You are a child of of the Universe, no less than the trees and stars. That's your long-term identity. As historian Howard Zinn noted, ‘Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders. and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.’
4. A corrollary to the above would be a Declaration of Interdependence, a recognition of the interrelationship of all life. ‘Our task, said Albert Einstein, ‘must be to free ourselves from the delusion of seperateness by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.’
A graph of oil discoveries in billions of barrels from 1950 to 2016; almost no new conventional oil fields are being found. Click the image to enlarge.
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5. Cut down on consumption by about 90%, other than food. You can cut down on food by 25% and you will
probably live 20 years longer. That means, no more airplane flights, no more 3000 or 6000 mile drives to
entertain you restless mind. Everything you need is right here, within a 20 mile radius. As biologist E.O. Wilson
observed, ‘A magellanic voyage can be taken around the trunk of a single tree.’ Similarly, Marcel Proust noted that,
'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.' The assignment from the universe is to wake up to the constantly unfolding miracle of life around and within you.
6. Just for example, every time you take a breath you are inhaling oxygen gas that was pumped into the atmosphere by the proccess of photosynthesis--by plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. It is often referred to as a ‘waste product’ of photosynthesis; how do you feel about breathing in waste products? The good news is oxygen is not a waste product, it is part of a near-miraculous geo-biological cycle that captures the energy coming from our nearest star (the sun, which is 93 million miles away) in hydrocarbon bonds (photosynthesis produces high-energy sugar), and then that solar energy is released to enable life’s processeces when that previously released oxygen reacts with the hydrocarbons.
As expressed in red print on the right, half of the fossil fuels consumed by Humans through history have been burned in the past 30 years. Click the image to enlarge.
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The challenge we face is that 1) we live in a society completely dependent upon and addicted to the
concentrated solar energy bound up in fossil hydrocaerbon bonds: petroleum, natural gas, and coal, 2) these fossil
fuels are rapidly depleting, whiile global consumption is at an all time high. The ‘oil age’ is 150 years old, but 50% of all petroleum burned has been consumed in the last 30 years, 3) Unfortunately so-called renewable energy
technologies (solar panels and windmills) can not be fabricated, maintained and replaced without fossil fuels,
and 4) With nearly 8 billion people now on the planet, humanity is far into the ecological condition known as
‘overshoot,’ exceeding the long-term carrying capacity of the Earth for any one species.
7. Life has existed on Earth for nearly 4 billion years without fossil fuels, Homo sapiens lived without them for
most of its 200,000 year existence. For 199,800 of those years the human population was under one billion; in the last 100 years it has burgeoned to 8 billion. Because we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth, the human population is going to decrease dramatically in the next 50 to 100 years, either by intelligent, compassionate, ecologically informed effort or through tragedy. This is just basic reality, no more challenging than 2+2=4. One can struggle against reality, but not successfully. As folk singer Jim Croce admonished us, ‘You don’t tug on superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind,’ and you very simply cannot argue with a finite planet.
An excellent new book titled Reality Blind by Nate Hagens which address at length themes similar to those brought up in this essay is available to download at no cost at this link: https://read.realityblind.world/view/975731937/8/
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dana Visalli is a botanist, pro-sanity activist, and organic farmer in Washington state. He produces a natural history journal, The Methow Naturalist.
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