I haven’t felt like written much lately. I guess events of the last year on the ecological front have been particularly dark. Sometimes I when things get dark I wonder, what’s the point of doing anything if nobody else cares?
What do I mean? What is so dark? Obviously there is the Gulf of Mexico. It’s as if BP stuck a fork in the carotid artery of the earth. No wait, it’s worse than that. This wound is a mile below the surface. This is internal bleeding. The kind that’s difficult to see and understand from the surface.
Awful amounts of oil have been spilling into the ocean for months now. And the BP strategy of dealing with it? Add toxic dispersant chemicals that are not a proven ecological solution but a clear first salvo in the PR and legal battles that BP is ramping up to fight for the next 20 years (as Exxon did after Valdez). If the oil is dispersed (or below the surface) it’s not a problem people can see. And problems that we can’t see are problems that fall down our priority list below those that we can see. What do we care about? Oil spill? Sure but after the economy. After the immigration problem (what ever that is). After what ever pointless political controversy of the day rules the headlines. Somebody’s mistress, somebody’s gaff. After the war (or do we even remember that is happening anymore?)
Here are a couple pictures of fungi. They are detritivores. That means they make life out of death.
So the oil spill is one dark thing. The other is a while back. Long forgotten in this cynical view of the American public’s collective memory. It’s our failure in Copenhagen to agree to do anything about climate change. This isn’t just an American failure, in my opinion, it is a failure of the human species. A species of individuals too concerned with there own individual accumulation of riches (or imagined riches) to do anything about the foundation washing out from underneath them. Sure we can argue about the details. China said this… The US said that… If only X country had agreed to Y, an agreement could have been reached. But in the end the story is just that we’re not going to do anything significant to slow climate change in the next few years. The economic downturn/recession/whatever in the US has effectively killed climate legislation before it started. The administration, understandably, has to bow down to the public and corporate world’s demands for handouts so we can all still feel like we’re rich. The only successful legislation is that which can be cast as a hand out to public and corporate interests alike (healthcare anyone). Climate legislation is so easily cast as hurting both of these interests that it is a no go from the start.
It’s not as if I’m surprised. I’d be surprised it our species woke up one day and suddenly started acting as though the future mattered. In the history of our species the future has more often then not been better than the past. And understanding that invisible gasses or unseen oil spills are more important in the long run than making the mortgage payment on the house we “own” but can’t afford is probably too much to ask. Those unemployment checks are running out. Gas prices are going back up. You’ve got to leave work early to beat the traffic and pick up the kids on time to make it to Sam’s club and back through traffic to get home and get dinner ready and still have time exercise to keep your weight down not to mention read, watch, and listen to the news so you know what all the pundits have to say about what Sarah Palin said on her facebook page today.
Someone smart brought up the idea of collective madness to me the other day. I think of it as a group of people doing something totally crazy that seems normal because everyone else they know is doing the same crazy stuff. It’s even more bizarre when those collective mad recognize the problems with their behavior but keep doing it because everyone else is. But we do. We keep contributing because it’s the easy thing to do. Even if it means that future generations will not be richer, healthier, and happier than us (though we generally don’t feel rich, healthy, or happy now).
So how is collective madness stopped? What about human psychology got us here in the first place? Will we only change when we are forced to? What exactly would it take to force such change?
If I was smarter I would wax hopeful at this point. But I wont. I’m plum out of hope. At least in the short term. Right now I only hope that the thing that forces us to change is big enough to make deep changes in the culture of our species. I hope for a “never again” attitude to arise with respect to the destructive culture with created. But at the same time to hope for that kind of change means to hope for disasters so bad that we all feel the pain of them and that pain causes us to change. And I don’t hope for painful disasters. Only for the lessons learned through them.
This is a video of a dung beetle. He is rolling a ball of poop. One man’s poop is another man’s pleasure.
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