SPOILER ALERT: Harsh facts and grim forecast only ahead…
Tough talk from the streets this week…feels like they’re trying to rile us up. As if we weren’t riled up enough..we maybe need a bit less rile in our lives or maybe we need more? These are a call to action. To shake us out of our apathy. It feels we are sleepwalking along the path to doom, incapable or unwilling to deal with anything that the future might hold. We are really on just getting on in the hope that it will all go away. It won’t, and with this total lack of urgency or action…not a chance in hell, which is kinda where we’re heading if we maintain this ‘can’t deal with it’ attitude…
In London this week The “Extinction Rebellion’ , a new eco movement group are mounting a series of protests trying to pressurise the energy dept of this country to start seriously implementing the policies that are essential to stop us from heading into climate meltdown. Will they listen? 500 or so protestors are willing to get arrested for their actions. Will they pay attention? Unlikely. But what if it was 5,000? 50,000? 50 million? What if the entire country went down there? Would they do anything then?
Even with mounting public pressure it seems unlikely because they are already fully aware of the facts, they’re not stupid but they are corrupt. This accounts for the lack of any credible initiatives as they are essentially in the pockets of the oil industry and energy firms who, by the way, will never get out of the way whilst they have power and money; two things they have spent the last few decades stockpiling in abundance.
Last week, over in America, a bill designed to initiate the first big wave of environmental policy and bring in serious carbon taxes for all polluters was destroyed by the Fossil Fuel Fucks who pumped millions into lobbying and advertising to sway the minds of those that continue to be bought. We need to find a way to eliminate their stronghold on societies and governments all over the world and The Extinction Rebellion is maybe just what we need right now to shake things up a bit although honestly am not very hopeful.
I don’t wish to sound defeatist to the efficacy of action as apathy is what has got us to this point in the first place but what we would need to do as a species is a gi-normous gargantuan and immediate unified effort. Every country across the entire globe would have to agree to radically change everything almost overnight and be 100% together in their commitment to removing all the activities that cause emissions. We would need total human harmony across the board. Which is clearly in abundance everywhere. Unfortunately as there doesn’t seem to be a country on the planet whose population can agree on anything right now, especially this one, and what actual chance is there of that? Answer: slim to none.
The only way would be to fire everyone in government and replace them with politicians strong enough to turn down their cash which would mean finding/ growing (accelerated cloning) morally impregnable human beings devoid of self-motive & greed. Once in place they could then ditch fossil fuels entirely. This is obviously utterly in the realms of fantasy and sci-fi and pretty pre-tay unlikely. The saddest thing is renewable energy sources could sustain us, all the know how is there and it would work. We might just have to go back to simpler living for a while, but that might not be such a terrible thing. But those who stand to lose from their implementation will not get out of the way. They would rather everyone lost everything. They would rather render this planet uninhabitable for humans than suffer a profit drop. That’s how fucked up it is.
It was never about saving the planet, it was about saving ourselves and we are doing a really shit job of that currently. I saw this doc on vimeo recently called “earth rise” which was about the photo taken of Earth from the Apollo 8 mission in ’68. They were told to photograph anything of interest on their journey but didn’t realise that the most mind-blowing shot would be of the planet they had just left.
As they looked back they saw it in all its beauty. Watching this film (link) made me realise as I’m sure it did those astronauts that Earth is actually paradise. This is it, its not elsewhere, not after this, paradise is here and now. This floating spinning blue marble is an oasis in a massive sea of nothingness. There is nothing else around for light years and there might not be any other life out there. The fact that life exists here is a miracle. In the film, Gravity, the opening tagline is “In space, life is impossible”. We cannot make life impossible here. It doesn’t matter if we don’t survive as a species as long as life is able to continue after us. Desertification is increasing at the rate of 130,000 sq kilometres a year which means at this rate we are going to turn this functioning eco system into another Mars. Maybe Mars was once like Earth and something similar happened. We cannot let that happen here.
So what’s left? Keep your head down and your eyes on the screens in your hand and wait for the storm to hit? Umm, yep. That’s about the size of it. One of the main reasons that we are big on talk but lack the ability to engage in action is that we have been spoonfed our existence. We don’t know how to fight for anything anymore. Everything is given to us on a plate so maybe when the shit hits the fan we will return to survival and maybe that is exactly what we need. We currently live in a world ‘beyond survival’ and it has clearly made us all crazy trying to fill the void of not having to fend for our lives. What we have filled it with is really utter nonsense and so spending our days trying to hunt and not get eaten in the process could actually be the best solution for the human race.
I personally won’t be engaging in such activity. I ain’t killing anyone or anything for my dinner. I’m a peace baby. And an 85% indoor vegan. What the fuck do I know about fighting for food? And we’re definitely going to have to breed a generation tougher than the snowflakers…they’re hurt by words so fuck knows what sticks n stones are going to do to them..
So what do we do in the meantime? We could all join the Extinction Rebellion, more productive than watching netflix and at least we’d feel we were doing something…otherwise you have to choose between total denial and abject fear and neither are great options lets be honest…
Apologies (ish) for the negative take on current situation but realism and pessimism seem now sadly to be the same thing. Soz. I have been saying for a while that there was no point wasting a perfectly good present on a perfectly hideous future but the future has come to find us…and by our actions, or inaction. we will get to choose what it looks like.