CASCADING APOCALYPSES NOW COMING—ECOLOGICAL OVERSHOOT

PART 1: MOTHER’S DAY (May 11, 2020)

Situation: COVID-19 dominates everything and everyone, whether they realize it or not. The United States wants to go back to normal, but that is gone and not returning. This virus could enable all of us to see through the delusions and contradictions that embody our collective and individual lives, and notice the interconnected crises abounding. Perhaps we can see behind the illusions that still govern us. Apocalypse means peering behind the curtain for revelations — they are coming, and fast.

Peeling back the curtain, viewing the revelations – What do we see?

Post-Earth Day “Celebration”

Waving goodbye to an extremely quiet Earth Day this year, it was stunning to compare the 50^th Earth Day to the original Earth Day and its aftermath. The first Earth Day in 1970 saw 10% of the people of the United States out in the streets and in that year the National Environmental Policy Act along with significant amendments to the Clean Air Act were passed and then-President Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency. Soon to follow were the Clean Water Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), and other environmental legislation. In addition, US state governments and foreign governments took similar steps.

In the early Earth Day years, almost everyone felt part of cleaning up air and water and eliminating poisons and pollution. Even extinction threats were acknowledged and addressed.

Since the 1970s, progress on these fronts and others—all of which can be called the “environmental movement”—skidded to a halt. At that point (the 1980s are a good demarcation), we accelerated backward into building the interconnected crises in which we all now live—crises that confront all living creatures who share the thin layer of life, labeled the biosphere, surrounding our planet. All of life lives within this thin sphere, the skin of an apple over our Earth apple.

This thin life sphere (TLS) is home, nest, and survival for all living beings. To call it the “environment” is to create a separation that has become quite lethal, particularly for the unfortunate creatures who share the TLS with humanity. Consider that populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians have declined on average by 60% over the last 40 years. Or consider just fish, soon we will have more plastic in our oceans than fishes. Or consider that if all of the land-based vertebrates on Earth were divided into three classes, then of the total, by body mass, humans would constitute 30%, domesticated animals 67%, and other 3%.^[1]

We humans are poisoning, polluting, disturbing, and slow-cooking our TLS, making it into something else, something inhospitable, something menacing.

Yes, menacing.

Now Comes the Warning Called Coronavirus

The coronavirus has pushed into the background the feeble care we are giving to the TLS. Its disruption and shutdown of what was considered “normal,” still only a few months behind us, has stolen the entire show for humanity. The overweening excesses of our collective way of running what we call the economy has met its Procrustean end.

Along with the deaths and debilities brought by COVID, along with the shriveling economy, and along with shriveling prospects (not only economic), COVID has forever changed our sense of mastery, particularly technological. Once our sense of control, continuous economic consumerism, and unquestioned superiority is crushed (and it has been already, even if we do not yet perceive it), then Reality may again be emergent. Reality, as in valid, reliable facts and data is the Reality meant and explored here.

Apocalypse and Apocalypses

Apocalypse means “lifting the curtain” to see the “revelations” behind it. The COVID-effect will allow us to peek behind the curtain of the illusions that we believed were the “economy.” Once the curtain is raised and Reality is perceived, then we can see what has been unleashed—unleashed and roaming free, but not as yet perceived clearly by most of us.

The terminal game we have been playing with ourselves and our Reality Mother, our real mother, will start to be clarified. Of course, we humans have a mammal mother, but our real mother is Mother Earth. Every molecule and particle of who we are and who we have been from birth comes exactly and directly from Mother Earth. We are not special; we are not separate; we are not dominant; we are Her: not figuratively, but literally, actually, and entirely.

To begin to have any future at all, we must drop the delusions.

Indeed, we humans are in the grip of many delusions and a myriad of contradictions. That grip can be visualized, then discussed. First, a picture of our plight, then some revelations behind the curtain obscuring the Hydra-Headed Dragon feasting on our ignorance, arrogance, and hubris.

*The Hydra-Headed depiction of humanity’s many excesses, by Jean Arnold*

Why We Cannot See the Dominating Dragon

The invisible Dragon dominating Life, Livelihoods, andMother Earth to boot is not visible to most of us because we choose not to look, and if we do, we believe we can simply wish it away. A deeper explanation is necessary, but first some revelations related to our Dragon’s many heads, along with his interconnected fire powers.

Revelations begin:

We have created the Dragon and hidden it behind our delusions, particularly the delusions of those of us in the “developed-rich” world.
Considering our Dragon’s heads, several are linked by the overweening excesses of our ways-of-life and lifestyles. A simple example is how much we are taking from Mother Earth compared to how much she can give us on a continuing basis. The gold standard of how we measure this is by our Ecological Footprint. And since we are taking 1.75 times as much from Mother Earth as she can provide (and we have been exceeding what she can provide for quite some time), then many of us will die and she will die as we have known her. The only alternative is for fewer of us to take far, far, far, less from her nurturance and restore, as best we can, her vital functions. The facts are here: Go to the Ecological Footprint analysis. Enter the world analysis and click on the United States. What one sees is that the US economy-society uses up more than twice of our domestic biological life support systems each year, and that this has been going on for more than 50 years. Meanwhile the biological capacity for each of us has declined by about 25%. (The situation for the other wealthy nations, i.e., the G20, is quite similar.) We humans are in ecological overshoot especially in consideration of the impacts of the G20 nations leading with the United States. Tragically, we have no plan for what to do except to attempt to return to what we considered “normal” by continuing to “goose” the economies of the wealthy nations of the world so that we can continue being the completely destructive dragons we are.
With the COVID pandemic, skies are now clearer, and waters are cleaner. Yet this year’s rise in CO2, measured in parts-per-million is expected to be 90% of what it would otherwise have been, 2.48 ppm, versus 2.80 ppm. CO2 is still rising faster than it was in the 1990s (1.5 ppm per year). The virus has not granted us a reprieve, we are still slow cooking our planet. While we are preoccupied with the virus and how quickly we can “open up,” we are still sailing along into perdition.

Humanity’s Collective Task

The task is to steer a course toward a survivable future. If we want to have a home or a nest for humanity with our Mother Earth, that future will have to mean that fewer of us take far, far, far less from our benefactor.

There is no option if we want humans to survive. So, can we see viability, and can we move toward it? What are the myths we live within, the fields of our dreams and cloudy fantasies? Will COVID awaken us to our fantasies that obscure Reality?

[1] Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017), 432.