Houston, SF, Bangladesh and Beyond

The parts per million of carbon in the earth's atmosphere rose from 270 to 406 between 1870 and today. That's about a 50% increase. And carbon is a heat-trapping gas. As hideously depressing as it is to state, what is occurring in Houston and Bangladesh and what is transpiring in San Francisco and now in the Caribbean, is merely the beginning of a very grave trend that is escalating and will continue to escalate each year – probably exponentially (given the presence of self-reinforcing feedback loops like melting Arctic permafrost, which releases trapped methane, which results in warming the atmosphere, which melts more permafrost, etc) unless the most massive psycho-spiritual-intellectual-socio-economic transformation in the history of humanity is enacted within a very, very, very reduced window of time. From the vantage point of today, this seems extremely improbable.

Each overly humid and overly hot day that passed in Baltimore this summer felt to me like a death crow perched on top of my head... not that all of the extremely hot and humid days in the city were the result of climate breakdown, but they now resonate as such within my psyche. It is evident to me that homo sapiens can no longer act like a spoiled baby among all of the other Earth species. Contrary to the libertarian ethic that infects the world and America more specifically, freedom does not consist of "doing whatever I want and damn the consequences." This Ayn Rand-championed notion actually constitutes the opposite of freedom: it produces oppression and as we see, ultimately, death.

Unfortunately, there is a vast and infinitely complex global apparatus in place that is designed to encourage humans to think in this self-destructive and, frankly, sociopathic manner. But the reality is that humans will either choose in the very near future to abandon the global industrialized consumerist deathtrap or they will dwindle and disappear after decades of chaos and suffering. Directly democratic localized economies of scale were practiced by our ancestors for at least 95% of the history of our species. And, contrary to what Thomas Hobbes declared, human existence within these lifeways was not "nasty, brutish and short." We now know that typical hunter gatherers, for example, work(ed) less (and the nature of their work was utterly distinct from the solitary hyper-specialized nature of our work), had richer social lives, better health and more time for cultural articulation than we have.

A return to the larger community of Earth species life and a walking away from our own species' severe isolation and death drive is the only thing that may prevent what now looks to be the grimmest of futures. There are many signs out there that this turning back toward what we truly are has begun. I hope its spreading and escalation may outpace the wrath of the angered climate.