Resisting La-la Land
By Emily Spence
23 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Another Earth Day will come and go. Yet during its twenty-four hours, people around the globe will join together in a tremendous effort to address a host of varied woes facing planet. Some will pick up trash along highways and beaches. A few will build bat and bird houses for their neighborhoods. Others will pitch in to do a greater job in recycling. However and despite their good intentions, the stark backdrop surrounding these special events will not go away.
At present, some scientists pose that more than a million species, even up to one-fourth of them, will likely be dead within fifty years due to habitat loss and other impingements. They, also, state that traditional sources for energy (coal and oil) will likely run out during this century*. Likewise, they surmise that global warming will, initially, increase food production worldwide and, then, a dramatic drop is slated to ensue due to extreme weather, such as alternating droughts and floods, warmer winters and so on. In addition, the overall air quality will continue to worsen due to increased pollution of oceans and other waterways, which effects the plankton **. (The majority of the world's oxygen is generated via phytoplankton photosynthesis.) Meanwhile, massive human migrations will increase on a staggering scale away from countries that cannot, due to war and poor economic opportunities, support larger numbers. At the same time, the human population will continue to increase so as to produce many more consumers, and most of these will want to live as extravagantly as possible, ensuring that the dwindling resources (fish, trees, nonrenewable kinds, etc.) will even be more severely annihilated than is currently transpiring.
In the same vein, many up and coming nations, such as India and China, have every intention of radically increasing their energy consumption by any means possible regardless of dire predictions relative to global warming. And why shouldn't they want to achieve this aim? Why should it be the exclusive domain of only European and North American countries?
One can blame all sorts of myriad causes for this grave situation. One can, for example, cite that there are simply too many humans too quickly using up resources (which are, for the most part, composed of other living entities) for the latter to be replenished. One can evoke greed, suggesting that too many people expect to live with wanton disregard for their over-consumption of material goods and the carbon loading that follows suit. One can even assign inequitable resource use for the fact that second and third world countries have higher population growth than do most first world counterparts. However, one draws slightly different conclusions (although not mutually exclusive in causality) when looking at the data from an evolutionary standpoint.
In other words, this is not to imply that population expansion isn't positively correlated with poverty, etc. It is just that the members of every species that are most successful (resourceful in terms of acquisition of materials), also, are the ones who most likely have the greatest number of offspring that survive into maturity. Moreover, the ones from this group with a proclivity to breed (i.e., possessing a strong sex drive) will produce the most offspring, of whom many will, also, carry this trait.
Factor in that modern medicine (i.e., antibiotics) and nutrition have helped ensure that a larger portion of the overall population will survive to breeding age (as did not occur in earlier centuries) and the population will continue to explode regardless of whether universal access to affordable means of birth control exist or not. Indeed, it will do so regardless of whether there is more level resource distribution globally or not. In other words, the upward trend will continue despite that global population growth is slowing largely because of increasing mortality due to diseases like AIDS and other awful impacts.
Indeed, roughly 300 people are born, 120 die and world population grows by 180 each minute. Now, this might not seem like a lot, but the annual exponential growth rate is such that humanity will probably bulge to 8.5 billion from today's 6.59 billion by 2025 despite that wars, plagues, floods, starvation and other disasters will continue to decimate our numbers.
Factor into this additional mass, another problem that our species has, for a long time exhibited. It is that, relative to many other species, we are wildly successful -- maybe even too successful for our own good.
The suggestion being put forth is that we are perhaps overly adept at finding ways to use up just about anything at all in practically all our diverse environments regardless of the item's composition. For example, we can turn blocks of stone into bridges, wood into piles of advertising flyers, animal skins into shoes, palm fronds into roofs and on and on. How creative and ingenious while, simultaneously, predatory and devastating to our surrounding world! In short, we thrive at the expense of most other species and, inevitably, the overall planetary survivability.
So, how are we to cope with this set of dangerous circumstances that we inflict upon the earth? Some people, the self-serving rapacious sorts, will just continue as is with abject disregard for the overtly brutal devastation that they deliberately render to their fellow man and the environment. We all know who they are and from which economic tier they largely derive. Yet others snap under the strain and either lash out with great violence or quietly despair while sometimes immersed in the fog caused by anti-depression and anti-anxiety medications. Still others avoid taking action by focusing in la-la land -- the myriad stream of banal offerings presented by fatuous, lighthearted and mind numbing TV programs, the latest fashion wear, celebrity gossip, and other forms of personal entertainment that dull awareness of perils inherent in their apathetic malaise.
Yet others are striving to make meaningful change -- any change for the better -- as they understand the grave imperative to do so. And, I'll throw my lot in with them despite that they often are myopically off each in their own separate little areas of overriding interest.
As such, there is often an ensuing lack of coordination, neglect in analysis of common root causes for diverse social and environmental ills, and paucity of dialogue to identify the plausible measures that ought to be be taken to be resoundingly successful. Consequently, even while peace marches, memos on school security, volunteerism at soup kitchens, demonstrations near IMF and WTO meetings, and countless other efforts to bring assistance to those in need are all constructive, an overriding vision is needed -- one so undeniably and forcefully convincing that it mobilizes the various splintered groups into a spearheaded to revamp the social structure. I am not sure as to the topic that could serve, but I do know that without it, conditions are unlikely to radically improve any time soon.
All the same, they, at least, resist the cheap thrills of La-la Land -- the inane outlook that all is going just fine since one can gas up and drive over to WalMart or MacDonald's any time that they please or, as an alternative, sit in a vapid stupor before the boob-tube. They refuse to be lulled into thinking that all is well simply because their day to day circumstances seem roughly unchanged for the moment. They do know what is coming and they refuse to accept that vision without a huge exertion to soften its consequences. All considered, we owe each and every one of these heroes and heroines a great debt of gratitude.
* Please see: http://dieoff.org/ and http://dieoff.org/page120.htm.
** Please see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology).
Emily Spence lives in Massachusetts and deeply cares about the future of our world.
Please do not include any of my contact data. Thank you. It is Emily Spence, 22 Elm Street, North Grafton, MA USA 01536, Tel: (347) 217-1948, [email protected]
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