I've become a bit obsessed with the apocalypse lately. My roommates are always creating environmental doomsday scenarios, so I decided to immerse myself in movies and whatnot. (I've just started.)
Mostly for amusement -- but even then, people don't like to hear about it. Almost everyone suggests I find another distraction.
My cousin for instance. He (more blunt than most) said, "Maybe you should take some time off to get a little perspective on things."
"A quarter of all mammals could go extinct in the next 30 years," I said, as matter-of-fact as I could. "Isn't that perspective?"
Isn't it?
Since then, though, I've been trying to get perspective. "Is this the big picture?" I'll ask myself. "Is that the big picture?"
So I thought I'd ask you all: what do YOU think is the big picture?
My nominations follow...
George Bush's presidency and Republican power. Addressing this one gets a lot of bandwidth here - Fitzmas, etc. But I believe it's overrated. Useful, yes. Obviously, we need more power. But (I think most people here would agree) it's hollow, without ideas about what we want the power for. It's a tool, not an end in itself.
War in Iraq. 30,000 innocent civilians dead, 2,000 US soldiers dead, countless others injured, raped, or tortured. Risk of Iraqi civil war. Oppression of women worsening. Money siphoned from U.S. social programs increases suffering here. Civil liberties and public debate constrict, and the public education system continues to crumble, crippling U.S. democracy. Torture (further) tarnishes US image abroad and (further) debases our expectations of ourselves. Long-lasting resentment against the U.S. is generated.
Truly, intense suffering right now. But the long-lasting effects -- maybe four human generations?
Corporate impunity. Globalization of extraction and exploitation. Economic centralization and concentration of power. Toothless environmental laws, health and safety laws, labor laws. (Oh, the dirt that has not been dug up!) Global suffering, impoverished democracy. Arguably at the root of all of the other issues.
Peak oil. Cheap oil ends. We cannot heat or cool our poorly-built buildings. Long-distance travel and shipping becomes quite expensive. Food shortages occur (no tractors). Hospitals can't get energy they need. Wars for oil intensify -- the horrors of the Iraq war repeat themselves over and over. Depending on how oil declines, and I'm really no expert, a very difficult transition could occur -- maybe it's a gentle landing, maybe not -- but in a relatively short amount of time we have to recreate our entire method for powering our society. Already, the poorest who can't pay this winter's heating bill are beginning to suffer.
Climate change. The ocean "conveyor belt" stops heating Europe, whose climate becomes like Canada's. California encounters major water shortages since its drinking water storage system is mainly snowpack. Agricultural failures from cold and droughts lead to famine and conflicts. Storms intensify. Deserts expand. Coastal towns get flooded. Major populations get dislocated. Animals and plants cannot shift northward due to habitat fragmentation, so species go extinct. Wars occur for water, resources, and agricultural land. The transition could be horribly violent, or not, but eventually, the biogeography of the entire globe changes (some places in a minor way, some places in a major way). During the transition, maybe a hundred years, maybe a thousand, the planet may simply be able to support many fewer people. Like peak-oil, our preparations could make a major difference in how bad it is.
Toxins. Depleted uranium, radioactive waste, persistent organic pollutants already pollute our living environments, and us. Many die from cancer now. Yet these chemicals are mostly still being used. Schwarzennegger vetoed a bill that would monitor the accumulation of toxins in Californians' bodies. These toxins will increase in concentration. They move up the food chain, from plankton to fish to whales and humans. They will keep cycling through the ecosystem, causing cancer, deaths and suffering. What will future generations think of us, as they try to sequester the pollutants, deal with the dead zones, or themselves die of cancers from these same molecules we released?
Even worse is radioactive waste, and the depleted uranium we're now scattering across Iraq. The waste to be (hopefully not) stored at Yucca Mountain could make a region of our country uninhabitable for, oh, four hundred human generations (up to thirteen thousand). Depleted uranium is quite possibly causing two generations of cancer and horrible birth defects to Iraqis and US soldiers. But where DU leaches into the groundwater table, the problem is worse: DU has a half life literally the estimated age of the earth. (When the water wars start, those wells may be the only ones not in high demand.) (To be clear, I don't mean "Groundwater pollution is worse than birth defects." I mean "Birth defects for hundreds of generations due to groundwater pollution are worse than birth defects for two generations.")
Extinction. Species extinction is similarly permanent. Species diversify on the order of, what, one per 100,000 years? (It took 65 million years for 4000 mammals to evolve into being after the extinction of the dinosaurs.) In the meantime.....? The loss of species leads to permanent reductions in human quality of life. Already, the collapse of the U.S. fishing industry has left many unemployed. And worldwide, it's much worse. And these animals are dying off in cruel and painful ways like whales.
One Derrick Jensen horror story has stuck with me: 50 years from now, post- some ecological collapse, three people are sitting on the banks of the Columbia River, facing starvation. There are no salmon in the river for them to eat -- almost no fish at all, where once horses would not enter the water because the fish were swarming so thick. And these humans are pissed. We kept the dams in place, we used that cheap energy to make beer cans, and now the fish are extinct, and the people are starving.
So why don't we spend our time digging up the corruption that allows species to go extinct? (And there is plenty.) After every one of jillian's great "news you can use" roundups, someone comments they wished more Kossacks cared about environmental issues. Do you? Don't you? I'd really like to know. Think I'm just talking science fiction? Is it out-of-vogue? You're more into something else? What? Why is it more important? More at the root of everything? A bigger threat to humanity? Greater present-tense suffering? I'm not arguing, I'm curious.
What's your big picture?
Because politicians come here asking us.
Please recommend if you think this discussion should happen.
Poll below, I apologize -- lots couldn't make the list -- please add your own in the comments.