Candide for Neoliberals

Last Monday Brad Plumer's "Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace" was published by The New York Times. Its opening two paragraph read:

WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Times columnist Margaret Renkl contemplates this morning the immensity of this contemporary mass extinction in "Surviving Despair in the Great Extinction: One million species of plants and animals are heading toward annihilation, and it’s our fault. How can we possibly live with that truth?"

That’s one million species. Every individual creature in a species — times one million. We can’t possibly conceive of such a thing. We can hold in mind, however uncomfortably, the image of a single animal who died a terrible death. Devastation on this scale is beyond the reach of imagination. How could we hold in mind a destruction so vast it would take not just one sea turtle but all that animal’s kind, as well as all the kind of 999,999 other species?

Whole expanses of the natural world are disappearing. It’s not just poster animals like polar bears, tigers and elephants; it’s life on earth as we know it.

I hear a truth like that and succumb to despair. I look around at all the ways I’ve tried to help — at the reusable grocery bags and the solar-field subscription, at the pollinator garden and the little meadow of wildflowers, at the lawn mower blades set high enough to harm no snakes or nesting cottontails, at the recycle bins and the worm composter, at the nest box for the bluebirds and the nest box for the house wrens and the nest box claimed this year by a red wasp — and it all strikes me as puny, laughable, at best a way to feel better about myself. How is any of this a solution? Or even the path to a solution?

Renkl concludes that seemingly meager, personally virtuous acts are better than nothing; that absent systemic change, it's better to compost and keep your backyard free from chemicals than succumbing to despair.

It reminds me of the end of Voltaire's Candide. "Tend your (organic) garden!"

What's interesting are all the comments readers have attached to Renkl's column. They're mostly very good; a common one is that Renkl's prescriptions for solitary commitment are no substitute for government action. There are even a few comments that mention capitalism as the culprit.

The sixth mass extinction underway requires a radical paradigm shift, and every indication is that the elite who govern the planet are fulsomely attached to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism needs to be cracked before we can even consider governments working together to address the extinction crisis.

David M. Raup, an Originator of the Idea that Mass Extinction Events are Periodic, Died July 9

David M. Raup, one of the founding fathers of the hypothesis that mass extinctions are periodic, died earlier this month. The New York Times ran a decent obit last week by Bruce Weber, "David M. Raup, Who Transformed Field of Paleontology, Dies at 82":

Dr. Raup’s most famous contribution to the field may have been the revelation in 1983, after a six-year study of marine organisms he conducted with J. John Sepkoski Jr., that over the last 250 million years, extinctions of species spiked at regular intervals of about 26 million years. 

Extinction periodicity, as it is known, enlivened the study of huge volcanic eruptions and of changes in the earth’s magnetic field that may have coincided with periods of mass extinction. It has also given rise to numerous theories regarding the history of life, including that the evolution of myriad species has been interrupted by nonterrestrial agents from the solar system or the galaxy. 

One prominent hypothesis involved an undiscovered companion to the sun — it was christened Nemesis — that every so often swung close enough to the solar system that it redirected comets toward the earth. 

Extinction periodicity remains unproven — further published analyses of the Raup-Sepkoski data have been divided on their original conclusions — and Dr. Raup was open about the fact that the data could lead him only so far. (“I believe they really are periodic,” he said of mass extinctions in a 1997 interview published online, “but I can’t prove it.”) But throughout his career, it was the questions that arose because of his work that established him as among paleontology’s most creative thinkers.

Twenty years ago, in my late twenties and into my early thirties, I was fascinated by periodic mass extinctions. I read most of the books on the subject, which at the time were numerous, including Raup's The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science, as well as Richard Muller's Nemesis: The Death Star.

Here is a short book review of The Nemesis Affair by Jonathan Weiner published by NYT in 1986:

THE NEMESIS AFFAIR: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science. By David M. Raup. (Norton, $14.95.) 

In 1984 David M. Raup and his colleague Jack Sepkoski published a theory of periodic mass extinctions. Statistical analyses of fossil data suggested that the world has endured a Great Dying roughly every 26 million years. This theory added fresh fuel to the controversial hypothesis of Luis and Walter Alvarez, a physicist and geologist, and father and son, who in 1980 had suggested that the dinosaurs were killed when a big chunk of rock or ice fell from outer space. The astrophysicist Richard Muller, a protege of Luis Alvarez, soon linked both extinction theories in a long-shot, third hypothesis: the Sun has an obscure companion, Nemesis, the Death Star. Sweeping close every 26 million years, Nemesis is said to dislodge comets from their orbits and send them falling through the solar system like cannonballs. In ''The Nemesis Affair,'' Mr. Raup, Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, tells how each one of these theories, and some of their rivals, was born and how they were seized on by the news media - sometimes before the theories were ready. He stresses the social side of science - the roles of collegial advice, rumor, preprints, editors, editorials, peer review and especially the news media. A hot topic short-circuits the system, he argues - for better and worse. Mr. Raup is clear, low-key and good-humored. ''The Nemesis theory,'' he says, ''may turn out to be a major step forward in our understanding of the natural world or an embarrassing period of near-insanity in scholarship.''

I was intrigued by the idea that mass extinction might be linked to magnetic reversals on the planet. I read Alvarez's book too.

Somehow I was going to link this up with E.O. Lawrence and color television. One of the hypotheses I was working on is if Lawrence's version of the technology would have taken off a decade or more before color TV's wide introduction in the middle- to late-1960s, the American cultural revolution would have happened sooner; the idea being that part of the freak-out of the 1960s was due to the introduction of color television. It was just too powerful a new medium for people to absorb at first.

Now that mass extinction is a popular topic once again, it would interesting to see how the Sixth Extinction fits in with Raup's periodicity hypothesis.

New Cold War Another Sign of Neoliberalism's Collapse

In a post I do on Fridays called Hippies vs. Punks I explore the spiritual platform (in Schopenhauer's sense that music is pure spirit) of the industrialized Western world when our current listing, foundering political-economic paradigm was inaugurated. That paradigm, neoliberalism, has been dominant for 40 years; but for the last 15, it has lurched from crisis to crisis, from economic meltdown to war back to economic crisis. During this 15-year period it has been well known by both the ruling elite and a significant segment of those who are ruled that the planet is experiencing a man-made ecological crisis, what is being called "The Sixth Extinction."

The paradigm, neoliberalism -- defined by a worship of markets and mammon, a concentration of wealth in the 1%, the immiseration of the 99%, brutal wars of choice and record numbers of displaced persons -- is obviously bankrupt. Not only is it bankrupt and destructive to life on the planet, it is anachronistic. The United States has in little over a year reestablished a Cold War with Russia, the thawing of which 25 years ago was probably the greatest triumph of the neoliberal paradigm.

David Herszenhorn reports in "Russia Assails Extension of E.U. Sanctions in Ukraine Crisis":

MOSCOW — Kremlin officials reacted furiously Monday to the European Union’s extension of sanctions on Russia through January, calling the measure self-defeating and accusing the West of crass anti-Russian bias by timing the decision to the nation’s commemoration of the Soviet victims of World War II. 

The Russian government said it would retaliate with an extension of countersanctions in response to the decision by European Unionforeign ministers, at a meeting in Luxembourg, which had been widely expected after European ambassadors reached a tentative agreement last week in Brussels. Russia had lobbied against the renewal of sanctions, which were first imposed in July 2014 in response to the Kremlin’sinvasion and annexation of Crimea.

***

“We are deeply disappointed that once again the opinion of the Russophobic lobby, which pushed through the decision to extend illegal restrictions, dominated in the E.U.,” the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, Aleksandr K. Lukashevich, said in the statement. “At the same time, in Brussels they are deliberately tight-lipped about the fact that this is guaranteed to be followed by hundreds of thousands of Europeans, or millions, according to some estimates, losing their jobs.”

Mr. Lukashevich also complained that the West was placing unfair responsibility on Russia for carrying out the Ukraine cease-fire agreement, which was signed in February in Minsk, Belarus. Russia has long insisted that the Ukrainian government bears the largest responsibility for the failure so far to put the accord in effect.

“The E.U. keeps laying all the responsibility over the implementation of the Minsk agreements on the Russian side,” Mr. Lukashevich said. “The absurdity of this approach has been long clear to everyone. The key to the internal Ukrainian crisis was and still remains in the hands of Kiev, which is not hurrying to implement its responsibilities.” 

As for the timing of the announcement, Mr. Lukashevich added: “It looks especially cynical that the decision to extend the anti-Russian sanctions was taken by the E.U. states on June 22, the day when fascist Germany attacked the U.S.S.R. We would like to believe that this is a coincidence, and not an intentionally planned step.”

Couple this with a story from Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Myers, "NATO Returns Its Attention to an Old Foe, Russia," and you get the picture that the New Cold War is here to stay:

It has involved a marked increase in training rotations on territory of the newer NATO allies in the east, and stepped up patrols of the air and seas from the Baltic to the Black Sea intended to counter an increase of patrols by Russian forces around NATO’s periphery. 

Most of those are temporary deployments. But in February, NATO announced that it would set up six new command units within the Eastern allies and create a 5,000-strong rapid reaction “spearhead” force. 

And the Pentagon now plans to preposition heavy American tanks and other weaponry in Eastern Europe for the first time, prompting unease in some quarters ahead of the NATO defense ministers’ meetings, and strong protests from Moscow that coincided with an announcement by President Vladimir V. Putin that he was bolstering Russia’s arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons. 

With the leaders of NATO’s 28 members scheduled to gather in Warsaw for an important summit meeting next year, the alliance is now considering what other measures are needed to adjust its forces, to increase spending that had plummeted as part of a “peace dividend,” and to revisit NATO’s military strategy and planning.

Soon "megadeath" will return to regular usage in our vocabulary as both the U.S. and Russia upgrade their nuclear arsenals.

Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize POTUS, will see his legacy defined as the leader who recreated the Cold War; hopefully when he is remembered he will be thought of with a feeling of nausea. Neoliberal leaders will go to any length to maintain their failed system.