System

everything is connected

Tonight for supper I ate a hamburger and a can of hominy. Without the hamburger the hominy tastes much like old fashioned library paste. I don’t eat meat every day, but I eat some most weeks. I know this disgusts some people, but I am at peace with it.

I am not going to permit my body to be embalmed. Living, dying, being eaten. It is the way of all life and I respect it.

Recently I read a statement in a climate activist’s essay that the biggest thing anybody could do for the climate was to quit eating meat.

Please do not reply to this essay with the talking points. I won’t be having that conversation.

If everybody in the world quit eating meat, would the portion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere grow at a slower level? Unlikely. Would the sudden extinction of genus bos and the removal of their digestive byproducts from the total of daily aggressions we commit against the atmosphere reduce the 6th mass extinction? Well, it would remove one excuse that homo Industrialensis uses to clearcut forests, but it’s far from the only one and probably wouldn’t solve even that one problem, and aside from that - no.

The cattle industry is a symbiotic entity with the corn industry. The can of hominy I had for supper tonight was made of field corn. Aside from taco shells, tortillas, and corn chips there’s not much else human food in the whole industry. Just this year Chuck Grassley, Iowa corn farmer, saw his wish come true that the portion of corn ethanol in America’s motor fuel be increased. Cars don’t need corn. Cows don’t need corn either. Cows are just machines that package field corn for value added sale. People like me who eat three hamburgers a month don’t support that business plan.

Advertising can do it, though.

But it doesn’t make any difference. If everybody in the world quit eating meat, things would continue to go to Hell in a handbasket. It’s our entire system.

For years I’ve been saying Slow Down. By itself, slowing down would have the same effect as quitting beef. I’ve been trying to sneak a system-altering idea in as a simple action.

Because there is no part of modern techno-industrial high energy life that is consistent with a survivable ecosystem.

You can’t pick up a climate writing and not see about the overpopulation, expressed as equal to overshoot, which requires the assumption that 8 billion people could not survive with any lower per-person withdrawals on the planet, therefore overshoot can only be addressed via population reductions.

The oligarchy has heard their people’s cries. Even now they are doing everything in their power to reduce human populations.

They say you should be careful what you wish for.

Meanwhile, modern technological high energy life gets faster and faster. Every year we increase the energy throughput. Pedal to the metal.

What happens when you put the pedal to the metal? Your car goes faster. Why does it go faster? Because you added energy to it.

What happens in an atmosphere when you add energy to it?

It gets faster. The wind blows faster. The water falls faster. Storms go faster.

What happens when something goes faster?

It gets larger. By adding energy to a mass we also increase its mass. Ask Edison.

There is no one thing in our socio-economic disaster that could address the overall mess we’re in.

It has recently become fashionable to insist on using the term predicament instead of problem, because problems have solutions and predicaments have outcomes. I don’t like this framing, because I still believe that we could take actions, humans in the aggregate worldwide, which would ameliorate the problems we face.

Whether this is a predicament or a problem depends entirely on what “this” is. Climate change is a predicament. We’re stuck in it and it’s not going away. We like to act like the 6th mass extinction is also a predicament and just happens because there are 8 billion people and our needs and requirements mean we must. But that’s crazy.

The biggest single thing we could do right now to reduce the rate of extinction would be to quit paving things. We don’t need another big box store in order to survive. We don’t need another strip mall. We don’t need another lane from Kansas City to St. Louis. We don’t need a longer runway because we don’t need bigger jets because in simple point of fact we don’t need to fly.

We don’t need renoobles because the entire system they exist to preserve and provide power for can no longer exist. The only open question is whether we, homo Sap, continue to exist.

So I would propose to you a problem which might have a solution. That problem is to maintain enough of a habitable Earth to make it possible for our species to continue to exist as a feature of our ecosystem.

I’m writing this essay from the point of view that it would be desirable that our species might continue to exist. I am confident that not all people alive today share that viewpoint. I read essays. For me, I just take the fact that we did evolve to mean there should be a place where we can fit in the ecosystem.

The general trend since the begging of lifeforms on Earth is that each generation of each life form has further enriched the planet. All the limestone used to be critters. Almost all of the topsoil was. All the oil was, all the coal, most or all of the shale. The once seemingly bottomless pit of fertility was created by all the creatures who had ever lived and died.

Then came along homo Civilus and turned the whole thing on its head.Since we invented agriculture fertility has been falling. All the “cradles of civilization” are deserts now. If we were smart as we think we are I thing we could bring back fertility and life where we once wasted it away. It would be a slow process and no amount of machines could do it as well as human attention.

The amount and types of food that grow on the Earth that will support h. Sap in strength and health is beyond imagining. Some of the native peoples ate their house mice. But one day somebody said, “Hey, if everybody eats this one grass seed and I own the buildings we store it in, they’ll all have to beg me for every meal they eat,” and everybody else said, “Hey, great idea.”

Two weeks later somebody said, Hey, this sucks, why do we have to have a government?

We have to have a government to protect the people who control all the food. We also have to have a job where we do something that has nothing to do with food so we can have food. After all, money doesn’t grow on trees.

Food grows on trees. Take the shortcut.

Two things have been destructive throughout human history. The first one is civilization. For reasons nobody knows for sure, some people have lived within the cycles of Earth, the cycles of growing, eating, adding back, enhancing, never inventing civilization, while others have risen, civilized, and collapsed. There is very little doubt that groups of people who have been viewed from a civilized perspective as primitive, as savages, have in fact been groups of people enhancing, grooming, harvesting, shaping the world they lived in, discouraging plants and animals they couldn’t live comfortably with, encouraging those they could. Just like the beaver, when humans came into a place that place changed, but in some cases, also like beavers, overall fertility and productivity grew. There is good evidence that at least parts of the Amazon rain forest had been gardened and managed for generations by their humans. Personally I believe that the incredible richness of this continent when the white people found it was to the credit of its humans. It’s obvious at a glance where all that richness went. Civilized Man™ cashed it all in. I don’t think humanity writ large has benefited any from it.

I don’t “romanticize” or otherwise have an unrealistic view of life as a global species of villagers, nomads, horticulturalists, working with rather than against the forces of Earth which bore us. Neither do I romanticize the life we have. Life has good days and bad days. Sooner or later everybody dies. Personally I’m having a good time.

If this life was so great, it wouldn’t spawn the richest industry in the world to tell everyone every day how desirable this life is and what they need to buy tomorrow to be satisfied because yes, we know you’re unhappy, listen to this horrible thing the Other did to your tribe, but buy this and you’ll feel all better. It goes faster.

The other worst thing that ever happened, besides civilization, is the heat engine. The worst single step was the invention of the automobile, but even the pure, sacred train’s first important task was enabling the white people to kill damn near every buffalo on the continent.

But the automobile. Civilized Man™ was bad enough before the automobile, but Katie bar the door.

First thing Civilized Man™ did was kill virtually every beaver on Turtle Island, trade them for trinkets that they called Money and began the end of the working hydrosphere. Next they cashed in the trees. My home state, Missouri, the last wooded state before the Great Plains, sent her native ancient forests west to lay on the ground and rot under railroad tracks. We traded the Great Plains for ever decreasing yields of three or four grass seeds and a couple of beans, plus cattle, cattle, cattle. Kill off the buffalo, kill off the pronghorn, the elk, for cattle and sheep. And hogs, don’t forget the hogs.

It’s not humans who did this to Earth. It’s civilization. Humans were here when this land was getting richer. Civilized humans came and started making it poorer.

And they’ve never stopped.

The car came. Then the gravel. Then the oil. Then the concrete. Then to two lanes, the three, the four, six, eight, it’s like how many crimes will it take to get Trump arrested? Just one more. How many lanes do we have to pave? Just one more.

I’m not convinced.

First the car took the farmer to town faster. Then the store in the next town was cheaper, so he could go there. The store in his town went broke and closed. Since he had to go farther he needed a better road. A gas station. Another gas station.

The airplane. More faster.

We don’t need, never needed, and still don’t need today, any of these cars or airplanes to feed ourselves, house ourselves, dress ourselves. It would be relatively easy to redesign that part of our system.

What we need is a habitable planet. We need water to fall from the sky and soak into the land. We need topsoil to grow back. We need beavers to slow down all the flash floods, harvest all the topsoil, bring again the mud that the Great Spirit used to build the Earth.

Every missing animal, every missing fish, every missing bird, every missing microbe, every missing leaf, root, and stem, is made of carbon. All of that carbon must come from the atmosphere. We have no place else to get it. It’s not just the trees, it’s not the grass, it’s not the algae. It’s every living thing. Every living thing is made of carbon. Most of them are about half carbon, give or take, by dry weight.

Water and carbon. Some metals, iron and calcium. A fair amount of nitrogen twisted up in fancy shapes. That’s all we are, us and every other living thing, Earth herself, all of us. We’re not different. We’re not separate.

We can’t go back. In the first place we’ve never been there and don’t know our way. In the second place, back there is where we fucked everything up in the first place. We’ve just been doing more of it faster because we never admitted that it wasn’t working, and it was not human nature.

People living according to their human natures do not die deaths of despair. The death of despair is a characteristic of civilization. The higher energy the civilization becomes the deadlier their despair becomes.

We we born here. Every cell in our bodies is made of Earth. When we die we will go back to her. She needs our help. She is crying out to us. She doesn’t need more machines. She needs loving human attention. The system which requires mines and concrete and 2,000 pound steel boxes to enable us to scurry around like beetles is an utterly failed system.

We can do better. Hobbs was wrong. A healthy human life among an increasing healthy Earth is neither nasty, brutish, nor short. He was thinking of civilization.