When is the point of no return?

Canadian forest fires, urban smog: Now can we end Capitalism please?

As someone with asthma, I woke early this morning in the East Village suffering from the horrific air quality due to the raging fires — the burning down of Canada's boreal forests, which, of course, act as massive carbon sinks, along with performing many other crucial ecosystem functions. Sleeping with the windows closed, AC on, plus an air purifier, I got up at 6 am with a cough, wheeze, burning throat, reddish eyes, nausea.

This brought home — perhaps I needed the reminder — how completely unsustainable our current system is, as well as the fragility of life — my life and all of our lives — as we enter this next stage of… what else can we call it but crisis? Meta-crisis? Poly-crisis?

We have already blown past many critical tipping points in the climate system. We are long passed any return to "business as usual.” Still, we are hardly trying to interrupt the momentum of our current civilization as it hurtles toward our collective doom (with the exception of a few movements like Extinction Rebellion and other uprisings). Most people still have the hope that some kind of technological miracle will save us — or they have accepted fatalism.

Perhaps you have heard that the oceans around Europe are currently an unprecedented three to five degrees Celsius warmer than average? Many warning signs tell us the Earth has entered a far more severe, unstable state. Nobody knows exactly what happens next, but the contours are clear. Inevitably, we will see erratic disruptions in basic resources — perhaps in the next few years (something like 22% of the US is in drought conditions at the moment, including 266 million acres of agricultural land). People will be dying in larger — maybe much larger — numbers from excessive heat and hunger than they are today.

Perhaps it requires some terrible cataclysm, collectively witnessed, to force a change of heart — to finally engage humanity’s collective will to move in a new direction.

Our collective future: Wondering if we can safely breathe

I started to reflect on the ecological crisis in my first book, Breaking Open the Head (2002), after visiting the Amazon in Ecuador and witnessing the impact of the oil companies on the rainforest. I explored indigenous prophecies about this time — focused on our alienation from natural cycles — in my second book, Quetzalcoatl Returns (originally published as 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl in 2006). Not knowing what else I could do, I tried to devise a rapid action plan for human society to confront the geophysical emergency in my third book, How Soon Is Now (2016).

(Here is a link to a 2014 paper, ‘Toward Regenerative Society: Plan for Rapid Transition’, I put together when I briefly ran a think tank. The paper needs updating but the basic ideas on how to reorganize society remain, I think, cogent. Please add your comments and ideas in the margins — I hope to update and re-issue it sometime soon. These ideas were expanded on in How Soon Is Now).

Personally I don’t believe we can seriously address this crisis while we are in a Capitalist economy, with all of its legal restrictions and its focus on private wealth accumulation. A debt-based system that is inherently unstable, Capitalism forces the vast majority of us to keep producing, working, and over-consuming. The system requires “conspicuous consumption” and “planned obsolescence.” It maximizes waste — like the 390 million metric tons of plastic we produce each year, which also end up in our organs and cells, causing worsening epidemics of cancers and reproductive dysfunctions.

I think of Capitalism as an immature or adolescent system. Over the last centuries, it propelled rapid growth — growth of the human population as well as extensions of our industrial and technological infrastructure. But our planet is finite: This kind of growth cannot continue indefinitely. We have passed the point where it can continue, yet we still push on, in the same direction.