I don’t usually repost what I’ve put on my FB page, but the world just keeps getting crazier politically, so much so that our new reality is being lost in the chaos. Now is not the time to give up. As bleak as things may seem to be becoming…it will be far worse if we don’t do what we can to implement a course correction.
If you want to keep your head in the sand, if you believe in the stagnant and bleak Trumpian promises of a return to a ‘golden’ past, if you truly believe that the MAGA movement contains all of the answers we require…don’t read any further. It will only upset you.
Picture from a Spokane, WA area newspaper of one devastated residential neighborhood.
As I write this the world is literally burning. Round it up and there are 2 million acres in Oregon alone either already burned or in the process of doing so this summer, with several months still to go in our ‘fire season’. There are multiple fires each over 100,000 acres. In Washington state Spokane continues to burn. In Bordeaux region of France hundreds of thousands of residents were evacuated while others were because of a fire threatening Madrid, Spain. Most of Europe is undergoing it’s fourth major heat wave with thousands having died as a result. As the drought in the American West and western Europe deepens the flow of rivers and the level of reservoirs across the Western US drop to or near record lows, all while demand for water keeps increasing. There is so much excessive heat and fire around the globe right now that it would overwhelm the news cycle to report it…so we only hear about those most local. Some are publicly claiming it to be a result of a singular ‘super-El Nino’, while most climatologists see this as the new normal, with much worse extremes to come, on an over heated planet.
Pundits dismiss and argue against climate change without evidence…just denials and random factoids. Western peoples tend to subscribe to the belief that because something hasn’t happened in their lifetime, it won’t or can’t. Such a belief actually insures that a WORSE outcome is likely as we do nothing to ameliorate it. That simply shows their ignorance of history, complex systems and ecology. They continue to deny the big picture and science, although as our new reality begins to dominate, more are becoming concerned, but few are acting. In some countries they HAVE been actively shifting away from their dependence on fossil fuels. Here, however, most of those efforts have been stymied or killed by the Trump misadministration, while programs to accelerate consumption have been increased masking it in claims of American energy/oil independence without even the suggestion of a backup plan as the limited resource is exhausted. We are thus ‘protected’ from even the possibility of climate change through shear will and belief….Good luck with that. This is a lot like waging war to gain the peace…we’ve seen repeatedly how that doesn’t work, but become ‘convinced’ time and again by those who profit from war, that it is a good and worthy cause.
Meanwhile politicians, especially here in America, continue to waffle, beholden to the billionaires, the petrochemical corporations and all of the infinite growth advocates across the economy, an economy that recognizes no limits, who only value MORE. We keep increasing extraction and consumption of resources, no matter what damage it imposes on the environment and landscape. We deny that it matters while the landscape and conditions deteriorate. The economic priority is still singularly focused on increasing demand and production, limitless growth of manufacturing capacity, increasing sales and extracting more profit. It isn’t so much that business is ‘king’ its simply about extracting profit. Where will it end?
The Trump misadministration, by chicanery and blatant disregard for law, continues defunding and dismantling virtually every program that attempts to address energy consumption, or supports alternative energy and technologies, celebrating our use of carbon fuels, alone…while much of the rest of the world is waking up to the crisis that is becoming not only impossible to ignore, but is worsening at a rate independent of what we do. More and more natural systems are beginning to crash and the predicted catastrophes many climatologists have predicted, are manifesting, earlier and quicker than anyone anticipated. Thresholds have been crossed. Cascades have begun, largely beyond human control…yet we continue to do nothing or worse. People, lulled into complacency or hopelessness, simply pray for rescue, while continuing their past habits, in denial of their agency…their responsibility. No one wants to talk about it. This isn’t just a regular head in the sand moment, this is a crashing of natural systems that have worked for millions of years to maintain stable living conditions, planet wide, crisis. This is biology demanding its due.
When James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis put forward their Gaia hypothesis in the early 1970s, the power brokers, economists and many of their fellow scientists, attacked and ridiculed them. The Earth alive? Preposterous! But that isn’t what they were really saying. The Earth with its impossibly complex diversity of life, is a system of interwoven local ‘communities’. Of resource and energy cycles that feed back continuously shaping and effecting the entirety. Each is related to the other in a way that supports the whole. Were competition, aggression, limitless consumption what drove the dynamism of life, what ecologists generally term the process of ‘natural selection’…there wouldn’t be anything left. Relationship, cooperation, communication, resilience, responsiveness are essential at every level.
The Earth, with all of its life, is an interlocking system. Extremes, of whatever kind, aren’t just unsustainable, they are anomalous, momentary outliers, short lived and cyclic. Today’s extremes, even our slavishly followed economic system, had its benefits, but that time passed, as everything else became subservient to it, but today, in our world of over 8 billion people our a global economy still only recognizes growth as the ultimate value, pushing the Earth system dangerously out of balance….Extremes have always cycled, rising and later disappearing in concert with every other individual, community, species and the non-living systems on the planet, including the oceans and the atmosphere. They are all of one piece.
Hoover Dam Lake Mead water level comparison 1983, 2003, 2026
Life, biologists and ecologists are saying, more and more, is an ‘emergent’ property. It arises out of complexity and wholeness. It is a product of that complexity. There is no ‘recipe’ one can follow in one’s lab, no pantry of organic chemicals, no matter how complete, that can be concocted in a lab, that can bring about life. It can only be modified…messed with, cajoled so far, before collapse. Life is a process at every scale and our own arbitrary delineations of it into independent individuals can never capture, completely, what it is. Nor can an individual survive for long absent other supportive life. It’s not possible. We kid ourselves with fantasies about going to Mars, terraforming it and creating a living planet of our own. Hell we can’t even keep this one alive!
Our own individual bodies work to maintain dynamic balance, homeostasis, the ‘forces’ and processes that maintain any organism in a state of health. They are complex and emergent. It cannot be ‘built’ piecemeal’. It arises out of a complex process, out of particular relationships. Relationships linked to all of those that preceded it, from the simplest forms to today’s.
Emergence is unpredictable, a product of the joining of the individual with! It allows for the novel, the previously unimaginable. It makes this life possible. Worked in reverse, when intact biological systems, whether those of an individual, a local community or the planet as a whole, are degraded, reduced, simplified, they begin to lose that quality of emergence as well as their resilience, their capacity to buffer themselves against a changing world. What was once sustaining, succumbs to collapse and this can occur in the form of catastrophic cascades that will continue to the point where a new ‘balance’, a new network of relationships begins to work in harmony, until life resonates with that around it. These aren’t things within our control. We are ‘of’ this world and cannot exist without or outside of it. Astronauts must bring everything with them to sustain life and return to Earth. The possibility of life on Mars, as portrayed in the film, ‘The Martian’ is simple fantasy. Divers can remain underwater only so long before suffering damage.
Respect, between the parts, is a given in healthy living systems, without that…well, that’s our problem. We don’t truly respect life. We use it. We value ourselves over all others. We have removed ourselves from the systems that sustain life. We take and we use. It is what our politics and economy are based on. We have failed to see this because first, we aren’t looking, we haven’t recognized the need to, and second, because there is a resilience in functioning natural systems built into them over Earth’s several billion years, we refuse to see it coming. We live under the lie that what we do doesn’t matter. The Earth has always been here for us and so it must and always will be. Life supports that which sustains it, until it can’t. We are in the process of learning this…I hope, and it is going to cost us dearly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/world/europe/wildfires-france-spain-bordeaux-madrid.html
GardenRiots 