This morning on Twitter, I came across Roger Hallam's tweets. Roger is one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion. He shared a video featuring James Lovelock, a renowned scientist and one of the founders of the Gaia hypothesis who passed away recently. In this video clip from a few years back, Lovelock stated that, according to his understanding of climate change, Europe will essentially no longer be producing agriculture, between 2040 and 2050. Lovelock also predicted the global population will decline to 500 million by the end of the century.
If we examine the current situation in Europe, it appears his predictions are becoming reality. Various articles, including one from The Guardian, discuss the floods in England, with farmers reporting a 50% or more reduction in agricultural yields and “a crisis in food production.” A friend of mine just returned from Northern Europe, encountering similar issues. The Guardian article suggested that Europe could compensate for these deficits with exports from Morocco, but Morocco is also experiencing a severe drought. While I don't think people will be starving as soon as next fall, the cumulative factors indicate a move toward radical and rapid change or hyper collapse. I find it extraordinary that we are still blocking this out.
In Embracing Our Emergency on Wednesday, we spoke with Margaret Klein Salamon, a psychologist specializing in climate awareness (check out her project, Climate Awakening). She discussed the reasons people struggle to focus on the climate crisis, noting that humans are less rational than we tend to believe. We are social beings. We look for social cues from others; if everyone else acts as though everything is normal, we convince ourselves it is, even when we know it is not.
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