We face so many challenges that the task of choosing which ones to emphasize and which can be edited out for the sake of brevity is nearly impossible. So many injustices afflict our fellow human beings that, of those that make the shortlist to be attacked and redressed, determining an order of priority is best left unattempted even by, especially by, those with the best intentions. (Yet we must and we shall. This process is called “politics.”)
One matter, however, is so self-evidently far ahead of the rest that calling it an “issue” doesn’t come close to doing it justice: the environment. Without a clean, healthy planet to live on, nothing else matters. Human extinction or, failing that, the collapse of civilization as has been predicted by 2050, renders all debate on all other issues and policies moot.
Without a planet that sustains life, college affordability is irrelevant. If you are starving and there isn’t enough food, access to free healthcare cannot save you. A nuclear war would not be as devastating or as final as environmental collapse.
Because it somewhat granularizes the daunting magnitude of ecocide, it feels easier to focus on various aspects of environmental degradation: global warming/climate change, water pollution, smog, drought, species extinctions, food insecurity. There’s nothing wrong with that—we need our best and brightest experts on each facet of the environment. If ever there has been a phenomenon that requires holistic analysis by society as a whole, however, it’s ecocide. You can’t separate drought from rising temperatures. These problems are so intricately and inexorably intertwined and intimately interdependent that it’s nonsensical to discuss them discretely on a political level, lest we get lost in the dying weeds. There is one issue, the biggest issue ever: humanity is killing its habitat and so is imperiling our survival as a species.
Healthy soil, a basic necessity for life on earth and agriculture, is composed of at least three to six percent organic matter. But forty percent of the earth’s dirt has so few nutrients that it is completely degraded. By 2050, an additional area the size of South America will be depleted. And that will be with a global population of over nine billion. Even if we abolish rapacious capitalism on a close to global scale in order to prioritize feeding the hungry over profits—an essential move toward saving ourselves—there won’t be enough decent soil to grow enough food to feed everyone.
Thirty percent of the world’s commercially-fished waters are overfished. Not only does this mean less to eat, fish-free waters are under-oxygenated and have become dead zones for other life. Oceans absorb a third of carbon dioxide emissions—or they did, before ocean acidification and seas of plastics destroyed it.
So it goes, on and on and on. Air pollution kills millions of people a year. Ninety percent of humans breathe air containing sky-high levels of toxic particulate. Within five years, the world will be down to ten percent of its forests; they’ll all be gone by 2100. Populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians plunged an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. Plenty were lost before and since. Oceans are boiling, hurricanes are more powerful than ever, sea levels are rising, hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants are going extinct. Even among scientists, few are aware of what we’ve lost before industrialization.
“It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,” Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology says. “Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.” Pongratz was referring to her work on the 13th century Mongol invasion of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Millions of Genghis Khan’s chomped their way east, with a massive impact on what are now grassland steppes. Native Americans subjected North America to mass deforestation. Likewise, ancient Romans cut down so many trees that they contributed to global warming.
A recent survey of successful prognosticators found that the average forecaster believes there is a six percent chance that humanity will go extinct by 2100 and a ten percent chance that a catastrophic environmental event or series of events could kill ten percent of global population. (World War II killed under four percent.) Considering that we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, those are high odds.
Many climate experts say that the climate crisis poses a relatively low risk of human extinction. Others disagree. Calling the existential threat “dangerously unexplored,” a 2022 statement in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned: “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”
Dr. Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis, explained: “Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.” A cyclone might destroy infrastructure needed to cool them during a heatwave. Crops could fail. Countries might go to war over geoengineering.
A relatively low risk of catastrophe should be weighted more heavily than a higher risk of problems with lower consequences. If there was a six percent probability that an asteroid impact might wipe out the human race, no sane astrophysicist would advise us not to worry about it. Logic suggests that stopping that asteroid would become the world’s top priority, with massive resources directed toward averting the catastrophe as lesser threats were put on hold. Six percent is too high to cross your fingers and hope for the best. It follows logically that we should do the same now when it comes to the environment.
The U.S. and other nations—but we’re Americans, so let’s us do us and hope other countries join us after we set an example—should adopt a prime directive into our constitutions that puts the planet first. It should read something like this:
In any situation where there is a conflict between a policy or law or regulation that would benefit the environment and a competing concern, including but not limited to the economy, the natural environment shall take precedence.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
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Two scientists’ work come to mind. And it is no coincidence that each of their main concepts are resisted violently by the opposition: Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Marx’s economic theories.
Who runs the planet? Rich people. How do they get rich? It isn’t by helping others out. It isn’t by taking long-term views. It’s by buying up industries, firing people, slashing salaries, busting unions, assassinating dissenters, etc., etc. Being greedy, being aggressive, being hostile is a winning strategy. The only fix I see is the one Marx spoke about: the masses have to be put into a mindset of the struggle for survival being one framed by economic class: how much stuff do you have and how do you acquire it. You can either have an imbalance (and the evolutionists will tell you: if the predators get TOO good, they run out of prey) in which the workers suffer OR you can eliminate the power of the owners.
The democrats, on the instructions of the masters, have done yeoman’s work convincing many of the workers that any sort of equitable system even close to socialism or communism must be wicked and wrong, so much so that now most of us are in a real-world example of the TheFiveMonkeys hypothetical experiment.
At this point, I suspect that nothing short of a full-blown class uprising will suffice. Maybe this time, it’ll be enough to lock them up in prison for life. Or maybe we’ll need to start ordering tumbrels off of Amazon.
@Ted Rall: Even if you are a little late on pushing the ‘Save the planet’ theme, you forgot to wish a happy Thanksgiving to the millions of US turkeys that are going to fly for the event.
AAA projects 79.9 million travellers will head 50 miles or more from home over the Thanksgiving holiday travel period. For the first time, AAA’s forecast includes the Tuesday before and the Monday after Thanksgiving Day to better capture the flow of holiday travellers. This year’s projection of nearly 80 million travellers is an increase of 1.7 million people compared to last year.
An excellent point. Does anyone make a hue and cry each year about how much climate killing happens because of this holiday? All those planes, trains, and automobiles!
And I haven’t heard a single “holistically centered eco-warrior” arguing that every company that tries to return workers to the offices should be boycotted, picketed, and endlessly harassed. Yes, firefighters have to be at the “office.” The guy handling insurance forms does not.
But, there you go. Why would the democrats pick an issue that EVERYONE who works for a living would grab at with both hands: “By staying home to do my job, my stress levels have plummeted, I’m saving at least $10K a year on transit/food/clothing costs. I’m willing to kill people to stay at home for my job.” Keep screaming about identity issues. That’s how Harris won the Electoral College 537-to-1. (I apologize for using numbers — hegemonic, patriarchal, and neurodiverse-hostile.)