Earth's Breaking Point?

Jem Bendell's new book, Breaking Together, argues that modern civilization has already started to collapse. I agree with him.

I guess I am going to address, once again, the ecological emergency looming over us. I used to speak and write it this all of the time. But a while back, I turned my attention to other topics.

I found harping on the ecological emergency to be fruitless, self-defeating. Trying to bring attention to the ecological emergency negatively impacted my psychology, my life, and my career, without changing anything substantive. I still write about it from time to time, as in this essay on a few demoralizing new books (An Inconvenient Apocalypse, etc), from some months back.

I feel it, now and often, welling up from within me: This sense of grief, pain, fury, and futility. I think about the ecological catastrophe we have unleashed every day. At times I think about it compulsively. I can’t say I am “worried” about it anymore. For a long time, I believed our actions were important: We had the opportunity, the agency, to change the dynamics of what will come. To somehow lessen the impact. I no longer feel such optimism. In some way I have surrendered — and in fact, surrendering, detaching, brought me peace.

As a species, it feels like we are sleepwalking into oblivion. We are in a strange sort of trance. My friend David Sauvage calls it, “primal numbness.” People linger in this state because they can’t process the gravity of what’s taking place. I sympathize with them.

We live in a society that does everything it can to constantly distract us with trivialities, vacant amusements, and local, proximate causes to feel fear and anxiety (shark attacks in Rockaway Beach, vaccine side-effects, Artificial Intelligence turning the world into paperclips). Still, I find it astonishing that the vast majority of people do not speak about the ecological emergency constantly — scream about it, gather in communities, organize around it. At times it does feel like we are, as a species, subliminally preparing for our own extinction by becoming progressively more alienated and detached.

We all know, on some level, that this summer unleashed a new threshold of accelerating change in the climate system that portends imminent catastrophe for our human family, along with thousands of other species. Phoenix — the fastest growing city in the US — experienced searing heat, over 110 degree temperatures for 19 days straight. A level of heat which, if sustained, makes life impossible. The oceans around Florida are over 100 degrees, causing an accelerated die-off of the coral reefs. The ocean around the UK several degrees warmer than the worst predictions of climate scientists from a few years ago. There are similar red alerts flashing all over the world — too many to mention — although the prospect the entire Amazon rainforest may collapse as a functional ecosystem in a decade is hard to fathom.

I link the mental health crisis among young people to this societal-wide knee-jerk suppression of the truth about the biospheric crisis.