Extinction Rebellion

The other day Chris Hedges wrote about the UK-based Extinction Rebellion:

There is one desperate chance left to thwart the impending ecocide and extinction of the human species. We must, in wave after wave, carry out nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to shut down the capitals of the major industrial countries, crippling commerce and transportation, until the ruling elites are forced to publicly state the truth about climate catastrophe, implement radical measures to halt carbon emissions by 2025 and empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the termination of our 150-year binge on fossil fuels. If we do not do this, we will face mass death.

The British-based group Extinction Rebellion has called for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience on April 15 in capitals around the world to reverse our “one-way track to extinction.” I do not know if this effort will succeed. But I do know it is the only mechanism left to force action by the ruling elites, who, although global warming has been well documented for at least three decades, have refused to carry out the measures needed to protect the planet and the human race. These elites, for this reason alone, are illegitimate. They must be replaced.

“It is our sacred duty to rebel in order to protect our homes, our future, and the future of all life on Earth,” Extinction Rebellion writes. This is not hyperbolic. We have, as every major climate report states, very little time left. Indeed, it may already be too late.

In Britain, Extinction Rebellion has already demonstrated its clout, blocking roads, occupying government departments and amassing 6,000 people to shut down five of London’s bridges last Nov. 17. Scores of arrests were made. But it was just the warm-up act. In April, the group hopes, the final assault will begin.

I recently finished reading E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth. Things are bad. The die off of species is happening so rapidly we don't even have an adequate gauge of all we are losing. Wilson's solution is to take half of the planet and designate it as wilderness. The book's main shortcoming is that it doesn't map the politics of how such a change could come about. Wilson's assumption is that doomsday will soon be so obvious for all to see there will be some sort of impetus for collective  international action.

The Horrible Hope

One can arrive at a place of what appears to be maximal personal virtue. Vices have been eliminated. No drugs, no alcohol, no meat, no dairy, no tobacco, no junk food, no fornication. I buy organic. I am vegan. I exercise. I recycle. I compost. I consume on average less three kilowatt-hours of electricity per day in my humble studio apartment. I don't take public transit to work; I walk.

But recently I have been nagged by a suspicion that my apparent virtue is fraudulent. What makes me feel this way is that just about whatever I consume I deposit a nib of non-recyclable plastic into the garbage -- the little pull-top to the coconut milk container; the cap to mango juice bottle; the bag that holds the stir-fry faux-beef soy strips. Granted, it takes a while to fill up a trash container with these non-recyclable nibs and sheets. But in less than a month's time I have a shopping bag full of plastic destined for the landfill and from there likely the ocean.

That's why this blurb from today's Significant Digits caught my eye:

8,300 million metric tons of plastic

We humans have made a ton of plastic during our time on Earth — well, about 8,300 million metric tons. Most of it is now in the ocean or the dump. But some of it — like Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit or works of contemporary art — we’re trying very hard to preserve. Unexpectedly, plastics are a great challenge for conservators. The material is unpredictable and there is “huge variation in forms of deterioration.” [The New York Times]

If you're going to read one thing this weekend read Troy Vettese's "To Freeze The Thames," which appears in the May-June issue of New Left Review. It is a revelation.

The Little Ice Age of the 17th Century was likely triggered by a massive die-off of humans indigenous to the Americas. This returned a huge amount of agricultural land to the wild, which took a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere.

Vettese says that we can achieve the same results without the die-off if we take most agricultural land out of production and return it to the wild. People will have to go vegan because a significant portion of agricultural is tied up in producing feed grain for livestock. 

Basically, E.O. Wilson's half-earthing is possible but almost everyone in the developed world is going to have to live a radically different life.

Sadly, this is politically impossible. So what we are left with is a hope that is hard to swallow: A massive human die-off in the next few decades.