Discuss: The Consolations of Extinction

Loved the article, full of paradox. I feel the way Cokinos describes every day, every minute some days.  On days when I am more Buddhist than Quaker, I can go with the flow he describes.

But just this morning I burst into tears upon learning that yet another developer in this town of Oxford, Mississippi, tore down yet more trees to put up condos(right on the edge of the native plant garden we planted at the Oxford Public Library).  The city has no protection for trees on private properties (not even subdivisions) and so our tree canopy as at the minimum considered healthy and will fall below next year.

I live in the county and so don’t have as much political influence as city folks, but seems like NO ONE can stop developers. 

And what we have left are NO MORE TREES, and lots of $300,000 - $900,000 condos.  Forget trees, not even middle to low income humans are welcome in Oxford.

So, do I quit my full time job to lobby for the trees?  This morning, I make 5 phone calls to city officials, only one of whom gives me a straight answer.  I do everything in my personal life to live as green as possible in a state 20 years behind the rest of the country (which isn’t saying much).  I work with a student environmental group, and I bring my farm animals (endangered breeds) to schools and libraries.

I love the Earth as one would love a person.  As an former organic farmer,my relationship with the Earth, soil, plants, trees, animals, worms…. feels very intimate, in a way that sounds crazy to others who drive their Hummers around town!

Actually, this is directed to the person from Oxford.  I too live in a rural part of the country.  My relationship to the land and all life in my part of the world is very important.  Never give up.  After years we came up with a little effort that has gone across country and over to Gr. Britan, Ireland and Mx.  This last year has been up and down but now it is definitly forward.  We greened the slow moving sign on the back of wagons and tractors and came up with a educator for the back of passenger vehicles.  The sticker encourages people to “drive easy…conserve” It is a simple action with a message that resonates with all people…politics are not a issue.  So far we have over 10,000 supporters slowing down and conserving.  A action in conservation that is basically free. I would like to send you some to spread the word in Mississippi.  You could really get to know your neighbors and have some fun.  I have a web page and a orion story…greenslowmovingvehicle.com
Hope to hear from you…Fulton

The big view helps. Thanks to Chris for putting things in perspective.

I actually find some hope for life on earth in the first great climate catastrophe: the “oxygen extinction” of 2 billion or so years ago. As the prokaryotic bacteria wallowed and died in their waste (oxygen) a new form of bacteria emerged that took advantage of the changed environment. The best theories I’ve read about eukaryotes (Lynn Margulis is the one I’ve read)suggest that their ancestor was a particularly large bacterium species that played host to one or two parasites - these sheltered parasites transformed the poisonous free oxygen back into CO2 and/or or utilized it for carbohydrate manufacture.

Eukaryotic protists are the ancestors to every living thing on this planet. When we look around us, everything we would consider “life” emerged from this deadly epoch in life’s evolution. With this in mind, a part of me actually looks forward to whatever it is that we shall become when we have weathered this next ecological crisis (yes, I’ll probably be long gone, but…).

“Too much grief for the world means less energy to help it along” Succinctly stated…and I will remember that when people’s actions overwhelm me with their lack of respect for the earth and compassion for other living things.

The sorrow indeed is not that we humans will die out…and I agree that eventually we will become extinct, either in the natural cycle of the planet or by our own hands…but that we do not ardently savor the life we do have, that we too often twist our uniquely human gifts into destructiveness and absurd behaviors, and that belief in our own superiority has distorted our understanding of human life as one ingredient in the amazingly rich and diverse brew of all life on this planet, creating the imbalance that is now making us squirm with discomfort.

Perhaps Mother Nature is teaching some of us valuable lessons now; however, these necessary lessons regarding the natural world appear to be lost on the economic powerbrokers, the megalomaniacal heads of the multinational corporations, the bought-and-paid-for politicians and their minions in the mass media, all of whom seem unimpressed by the potentially profound implications of the good scientific evidence regarding the unsustainability of unrestrained per human consumption of limited resources, seemingly endless expansion of human production capabilities on a finite planet, and unchecked human overpopulation of the planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit.

Rather than accept limits to growth of human enterprise and Earth’s limitations as a finite celestial orb, the self-proclaimed masters of the universe among us have chosen to cling to the illusory thinking prefigured by Henry George and espoused by Julian Simon and other like-minded cornucopian economists.

As surely as the pernicious spread of communism was eventually seen to be an enemy of human beings everywhere in the twentieth century, so also will the rampant spread of economic globalization be seen as an archenemy of Mother Nature in the twenty-first century.

Always,

Steve

Dear Friends,

Please find on the internet the trailer for the film, CALL OF LIFE: FACING THE MASS EXTINCTION, which has been produced by the Species Alliance of San Rafael, California.

Thanks for everything each of you are doing to protect biodiversity from extinction, the environment from irreversible degradation and the Earth from reckless dissipation.

Sincerely,

Steve

(Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D.,M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population

http://sustsci.aaas.org/content.html?contentid=1176

1834 North Lakeshore Drive
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-6733
USA
Tele: 919-967-5764
Email: .)

As the evidence piles up that we have met the enemy and he is us, I’m frustrated with the fact we don’t have any real answer to fight the enemy. We’ve created the social system we exist in and are nearly helpless to extricate ourselves individually or collectively.

America the leader of consumer capitalism seeks to spread that system across the globe. The economic creation of wants and more wants in a world that can’t forever sustain that increasing demand for wants much less the increasing basic needs of an expanding world population.

But maybe our savior is ourselves through the unthinking greed of our lust for oil. The days go by to the point where the oil that is the lifeblood of the consumer society will become in such demand as it becomes less available that America’s society won’t continue as it does this day. With no real answer to replace gasoline for our cars we will have to regress consumerism. I believe we are at the beginning of the fall of consumerism, just when we have begun to realize that it could end.

We will probably continue to have wars over that oil, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing (war does increase the need for oil as we fight over it, a resource catch-22). At some point the price of oil will become too prohibitive to bother to drop bombs in order to secure it. Not that war won’t end, humans have the unique ability to create ways to not get along.

Somehow I think the Earth could certainly do without most humans, including me I suppose. Something might come along to rid a large portion of our species, maybe a disease or huge war or massive starvation to be our lemmings to the sea event.