The Grim Truth

It might be possible for humankind to step off the path to destruction, but it would be a giant step.

The way we live today would have to be abandoned as quickly as possible.

Author harvesting transportation energy, 2019. Photo by Gloria McFadden

A survivable world for humankind would require that virtually every part of modernity be thrown away.

There can be no cars. I don’t care what they burn or where it is burned. There can be no heavier than air flight. There can be no ships except sailing ships.

There can be no concrete. What concrete there is will have to be torn up, broken into bits, and used in that way.

There can be no computers. No internet. Don’t even think of AI.

The only worthwhile activity for the human race would be ecosystem restoration. Soil regeneration. Beaver reintroduction everywhere they lived before we extirpated them.

There can be no tractors.

There can be no engine driven machines.

All the work has to be done with muscles. Every tool we build has to last lifetimes. Iron will be forged over fire, shaped with hammers. Whenever we start we’re going to be dirt poor, ignorant of all the skills we have thrown away these past 150 years, desperately mining the landfills we so joyously filled with our crap only yesterday.

There can be no mansions, no palaces. Homes have to be as small as we can possibly live in. Homes have to be the size of yurts, tipis, wigwams. Homes can be grass shelters on stilts. Homes can be flatboats in swamps. Homes can be built with hands. Heat will be little fires, sit close.

There is no reason for megalopolises. Humans can live in tribes, in extended families, any way that enables us to nurture and restore the natural systems we have spent the past seven hundred or thousand years cutting down, plowing up, degrading and destroying.

We can grow resources of wood or grass. We can wear natural fibers which we manipulate in ways we have known for tens of thousand of years.

What we can’t do is build “clean energy” to continue to rape and pillage the last bits of life left within our reach.

What we can’t do is find some way to go on as we are.

There is a meeting going on now, where representatives of almost all the modern nations on Earth join together and ignore the voices of all the people who aren’t causing ecosystem destruction and global heating. There won’t be anything discussed except make-believe ways to preserve the status quo and keep business as usual running.

For God’s sake, they had to build a four lane concrete highway to hold the meeting. That tells you all you need to know.

My writing of slowing down for these past 7 years has always implied that the end goal is no cars, no airplanes, no diesel or coal ships. Nothing that goes faster than a galloping horse or a sailing clipper. At the very beginning I wasn’t so guarded about admitting the objective, but of course, to say what I have said today is entirely unacceptable in modern societies, so I learned. Be mealy-mouthed. Be a coward. Don’t tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Developed society humans would rather die than walk. We prove it every day.

Even the idea of slowing surface speeds to 55 miles per hour / 80 kilometers per hour makes modern people shudder and scream. I can’t express the levels of outrage I have received over writing slow down. In an entire world of climate concerned people, even the doomest of doomers, no other writer in 7 years has followed in my footsteps and advocated for slowing surface speeds to reduce emissions.

This in spite of the fact that it’s the only available action which would have the result of reducing emissions overnight and keeping them down for as long as we stuck with it, the only action that would reduce emissions more the more we did it, the only path to emissions reduction with no cost and with no lead time.

I got it. We actually don’t want to reduce emissions. What we want to do is fly around the world, build new highways, new meeting centers, new data centers, and flap our jaws.

And slowing would only be step 1. Step 1, meaning, not nearly enough to make any useful difference, but enough to make a measurable difference. Just barely enough to show that we were serious.

Developed societies are not serious. Anyone who reads the news and reads the charts knows that. Emissions reductions are five years in the future, have been for twenty-five years, and will continue to be five years in the future until they came yesterday. And yesterday they will have dropped to zero.

There’s a pretty good chance that this will be my last publication on Substack. If you’re not already one of my fewer than 400 subscribers, don’t start now. I am confident that the day will never come when developed societies will voluntarily take any action to reduce our ever increasing destruction of the ecosystem from which we evolved, the ecosystem which makes our lives possible.

In fact, I am confident that the day will never come when we even talk about it.

Seven years is enough. I have better things to do with my life. If we cared enough to quit lying to ourselves and each other we could begin tomorrow, slowing, shrinking, planting, nurturing, and redesigning. We might be able to build a survivable culture before the roof falls in on the one we’re destroying Earth with, but we’re not interested. We’re a society of people whose only skill is typing and driving cars, calling ourselves knowledge workers. We don’t know how to feed ourselves. We don’t know how to find potable water. We’re too busy poisoning it.

It could have been different. It wouldn’t take governments. Amish people know much of what we need, and there are 400,000 of them scattered around the United States.

But we’re too good. Fast is fun. Y’all go ahead on.