Apocalypse has been given a bad name. The Seventh Day Adventists are still around. The Nike sneaker cult failed to open Heaven’s Gate. The new millennium brought us George W. Bush, not Jesus H. Christ. And everybody’s terrified of “drinking the Kool-Aid.”
But our species is living beyond its means. If we continue down this path, the planet, our food supplies, our climate, and life as we know it will collapse. If we bring population growth, consumption, and pollution under control, the damage already set in motion will play out for centuries, but complete catastrophe will likely be averted.
Nobody likes to be told that the end might be near. Either it is or it isn’t. And the question is resolved by a personal lifestyle choice. Do I wish to be a pessimist or an optimist? Of course, optimist is far more popular. Even most predictors of apocalypse have actually believed they were predicting a good thing. The world was to be replaced with something better. Even our best environmentalists who understand the radical changes needed for survival guarantee they will happen. Harvey Wasserman says he simply believes in happy endings.
Meanwhile, we can barely get half of us in the United States to “believe” that global warming is happening. Of course, we step outside and there’s a sauna, but that could just be “natural.” So what if the ocean is a few inches higher? The people who’ve been predicting that for decades have been wrong until now, and now they’re only a little right — if you even believe them. The ocean looks about the same to me. And if they predict exponential acceleration of such changes, meaning that once the changes have become visible it won’t be long before they’re enormous, well that just proves one thing: they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. They’re pessimists.
In 1992, governments finally got together in Rio and took some baby steps. In 2012, they reconvened and collectively proclaimed, “To hell with all that. This rock may be doomed, but that’s our great-grandchildren’s problem. Screw them! This is Rio. Roll down the windows. Turn up the air conditioning. Pass me a drink!” Well, actually, a few scientists and diplomats stood off to the side and muttered, “What we need to save us is a really bad catastrophe.” And a 17-year-old girl stood up and blurted out the truth, which made everybody feel really important. Imagine: you were at the meeting that could have chosen to save the planet; how cool is that? Imagine how the judge feels who is sitting in Washington, D.C., deliberating on whether the atmosphere ought to be protected or destroyed. The atmosphere! Of the earth! Now that’s power, and the longer you deliberate the longer you can fantasize about possibly even using that power.
In 1972 a group of scientists published a book called Limits to Growth. It passionately urged the changes needed before human growth and destruction exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. In 1992, the same authors published Beyond the Limits. There were by then, they found, too many humans doing too much damage. We were beyond sustainable limits and would need to change quickly. In 2004, they published an update, arguing that we were already 20 percent above global carrying capacity, and that we had “largely squandered the past 30 years.” Their warnings grew sharper: “We do not have another 30 years to dither.”
The updated book charts the course we’ve been on these past 30, now 40, years. Population has exploded in less industrialized countries. Many millions of poor people have been added to our species, while a shrinking percentage of the world’s population has continued to hoard most of the wealth. The planet has become less equitable through the repeated act of giving birth. Then it has become less equitable still through economic growth that has been made to benefit most those least in need. Meanwhile, nations with high population growth have been least able to invest in infrastructure, being obliged to take care of their people’s immediate needs. This has resulted in still greater poverty, triggering higher birth rates in families dependent on children to survive. These vicious cycles can be broken, and have been broken, but not by wishing or hoping. And time is running out.
Sustainable agriculture is being practiced in some places and could feed us all if practiced everywhere and the food distributed to everyone. The problem is not figuring out what to do so much as simply doing it. But we can’t do it individually, and we can’t wait for those in power to do it on their own.
Corporations will not learn to make more money by behaving responsibly, not to a sufficient extent to reverse current trends. The logic of the market will not correct itself, except in the most brutal sense. If we wait for Wall Street to decide that destroying the Earth is a bad idea, the basic systems of life on Earth will collapse in shortages, crises, and widespread suffering. Instead, we have to enforce change as a society, and we have to do it now. If we’d acted in 1982, write the authors of Limits to Growth, we might have avoided serious damage. If we’d acted in 2002, we also still had a fighting chance. By 2022, it will be too late to avoid decline. We’re halfway there.
Limits to Growth offers the crisis of the ozone layer as evidence that humanity can face up to a global environmental disaster and correct it. Of course, we can. We have always had that option and always will. Even beyond 2022, we will have the option of lessening the destruction to as great an extent possible. But slowing the damage to the ozone layer required changes to a relatively small industrial cartel, nothing to compare to big oil. The question is not, I think, whether the world can act collectively on behalf of the Earth. The question is whether the world can act collectively against the organized strength of the fossil fuels industry, its closely aligned military forces in the United States and NATO, and governments far gone down the path of inverted totalitarianism.
For you optimists, I should point out that living sustainably need not mean suffering. We could live better lives with less consumption and destruction. Our culture can grow while our population declines. Our society can advance while our production of waste products retreats. Our mental horizons can broaden while our food sources narrow. Millennia from now, people living sustainably on this planet could look back with wonder at the insanity of the notion that everything had to grow, and with gratitude toward those who gave their fellow passengers an awakening smack to the face.
Here’s one small place to start.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.