Severn Suzuki made that speech in 1992. She was 12 years old. She ended her speech with these words:
At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? Do not forget why you are attending these conferences, who you're doing this for. We are your own children. You are deciding what kind of a world we are growing up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying, "Everything's going to be all right. It's not the end of the world, and we're doing the best we can." But I don't think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My dad always says, "You are what you do, not what you say." Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown-ups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, make your actions reflect your words. Thank you.
That was in 1992, some sixteen years ago. Is anybody listening?
Between 8-9pm on 29 March, millions of people around the world will take part in Earth Hour 2008 – a WWF initiative asking people to turn their lights off for one hour.
Read more, if you are interested, at the link above, or watch here.
It's possible that someone out there is wondering why I've been silent for such a long time, so I feel like offering some kind of explanation. Actually, I'm meant to be working today, so I don't want to make this very long. Also, I don't know exactly what I'm going to say. I mean, I know why I haven't been posting here, but there are actually various reasons, and some of them are not so easy to explain.
Let me start by saying that, for one thing, just about everything I say embarrasses me anyway. I don't really think any of it is true. It seems practically impossible to say anything that is true. If I have seemed to crusade at times in what I say, it's probably because I get fed up with other megolomaniacs stalking the world shoving their truths down the throats of others, and so want to counter that in my own small way. Some people are possibly surprised by my choice of targets, since I haven't been picking on religion a la Richard (Tedious) Dawkins, but have been mainly going for science, which seems to me far more POWERFUL, far more convinced of its own rightness, and therefore far more important as a target. Also, I think some 'truths' are more destructive than others, and the various 'truths' that bolster human materialism must be the most destructive of all.
However, I've never really considered myself to know the truth about anything, and it has been a source of considerable shame and embarrassment to me to spout opinions on this blog as if I know anything at all. I don't know anything. I am simply a dreamer. I no longer really know what to write here.
I haven't had much time to post on this blog either, since I've been busy trying to earn some money, since my financial situation is no longer funny. I've also been working on a number of writing projects about which I suppose I care more.
Something that has been occupying my thoughts very much of late is the content of something recently published on the Net. It is the latest work by author Thomas Ligotti, and it is called The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Short Life of Horror. It is being presented for free perusal (and free download for registered members) by Thomas Ligotti Online. I would urge people to read it here while it is still available without charge. It is a virtuoso essay dealing with the problem of human consciousness, and eloquently arguing that the only solution to human suffering is to cease from reproducing. I believe that this is a topic that should be brought out into the light of day, that it should not be marginalised. It is, after all, only the despair that is at the back of ALL OUR MINDS anyway, and if this were not the case, why would we be destroying the world in the manner that we are? It's the end; let us admit it.
This thread in the forums of the site was one that I started, and contains some commentary by me on the essay.
If we don't stop reproducing, it's quite likely that this job will be done for us, by Mother Nature, who spawned us in the first place, and who now seems to be protesting strongly against our attempted matricide. The latest report gives us ten years to drastically change our ways if human civilisation is not going to be destroyed. It's that simple. Anyone who claims to care about their children can no longer ignore this.
With all these considerations on my mind, and with other things to occupy me, I haven't been very keen to post here. On the one hand, it seems like there's nothing left to say except that we're all doomed, and everything else is hollow - the hollow scene at the end of the Holocene. On the other hand, it seems like, after all, the human race should simply let itself die out, anyway, since there is nothing here for us except pain and broken dreams.
But then again, I don't really want to write that kind of stuff. It's fairly easy for me to be nihilistic; I've had a lot of practice. More than that it's easy because that's what people want. If that were not the case, why would we be destroying the planet in the way we are? If I talked about the things that really mattered to me here, the things that really sustained me, I'm sure that people would find them far less acceptable than the idea of the end of the human race. So I won't talk about those things. I've had enough experience of human beings to know that anything precious would be torn to pieces out of spite.
My only regret in writing all this is that I have always had a sense of enormous potential in the human race. It's true that the potential seems thwarted at every turn, but that's the thing I can't quite stand the idea of throwing away. What is that potential? I sense it in the kind of dreams that children have about life. Yes, that's right, I would like people to think of the children. We're supposed to be the adults, after all. You wouldn't think it to look at the world that we have made out of our own despair. What do children have to look up to? Really, what? A bunch of liars and cowards and businessmen. It's enough to make you puke. Some people would say that it's people's personal dreams - in the form of rampant individualism - that have got us into this mess. But I wonder if there isn't some other element apart from selfishness in those dreams. Does being unselfish consist of negating yourself and imposing the same negation on others? Surely there should be some kind of mutual nurturing. This nurturing of children and their dreams certainly does not happen in our current pathetic education system. How could it? The system is only an extension of our society at large, which is fixated on the values of business, that 'respectable', 'useful' pastime that just happens to be destroying the world.
This might sound like I'm leading up to a conclusion, but, as I said, I haven't planned anything to write here. Perhaps the best I can do at the moment is to pose the question, should we cease, for their own sake, to bring children into this stinking cesspit of a world? Or should we somehow admit and face our own despair and go through it to something else, if, indeed, there is something else, so that children's dreams do have a place here? If they don't have a place here, then let's give it up as a bad job.
Thank you. I shall now plaster a smile on my face and continue with the sad cabaret. Or shall I?
"Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end," the scientists warn. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth's remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. "To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built," they say.
The world is ending. Okay, so some form of life - maybe even human life - might possibly survive, but it will only be in a world unrecognisable to us. We are on the deck of a sinking ship, and we don't even have the option to jump overboard. So, what, exactly, do we do? What do I do? I spend a lot of my time wondering just what the correct response to ecologocial armageddon could possibly be. Not long ago I read an article in a newspaper about this issue. I don't have the newspaper any more, as it has now been recycled, so I can't remember what it said in any detail. It was something about doom-mongering and other such self-flagellation being perhaps understandable but ultimately pointless. Then, a little later, I read an item in Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (Volume Two), about ethical consumerism. The verdict seemed to be that it was a fairly shallow response to the problem. It is, said the book, a bit like looking at the impending armageddon and saying, "It wasn't me!" Well, what are we supposed to do, exactly? To be fair, the authors of the book do concede that even ethical shopping is "all to the good". And, if I were feeling petulant, I could point out that Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur are merely two dry British wits selling cynicism as Christmas stocking-fillers. Actually, though, they are quite funny, and they do, on the whole, pick the right targets, and shoot with great accuracy, as here.
Anyway, the point is, there are various people pointing out the inadequacy of our various responses to THE END OF THE WORLD THAT IS NOW UPON US, but there doesn't really seem to be anyone who is coming up with an adequate response. Perhaps there just isn't one. It's not as if anyone has even been inspired to say something profound in the time that's left to us. It's the usual trivia. For instance, Supermodel Naomi admits maid attack, or Complaints of racism on Celebrity Big Brother increase. It's almost as if there really is nothing profound to be said, anyway, as if, maybe the very banality of the universe is what has brought us here to the brink of utter destruction. We just couldn't find anything worth living for. There is a fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, and he is Light Entertainment.
Even I (makes extravagant dramatic gesture) cannot think of anything to say that is really worthy of the occasion. And my general response to the end of the world, is, apart from the lame old ethical consumerism kind of thing, I'm afraid, usually to get really, really depressed and generally not want to get up in the mornings or talk to anyone or do anything at all (what's the point, after all?). Not very edifying is it? But what's the alternative? Choose life, as they say? In other words, a family of more consumers of the world's resources and a job to support them that also diminishes or pollutes those resources. There's no way out of it really. So, let's all join in a chorus of, "We're all going to die!"
I can state clearly that I do not like this world and I do not like life, but previously there have been consolations. One of my favourite writers, Nagai Kafu, spent a lifetime lamenting the encroaching modernism that was destroying all that he most loved about his native country, Japan. He also had a philosophical, fatalistic streak in him, though, and occasionally would sigh in a literary sort of way, and, figuratively, say, Oh well! On one such he wrote that, however much the natural beauties that once surrounded Tokyo, and the more picturesque ways of life that once flourished there, might be destroyed, at least beauty would remain in the eternal cycle of the seasons, in the geese flying south for winter overhead and so forth. I remember thinking these beautiful and deeply consoling sentiments when I first read them. Unfortunately, we now know better than Kafu. Not even the seasons are eternal. The encroaching cities have destroyed them as they have everything else - it was naive to think the seasons were separate from the rest of nature in this regard. Vile science has made a marriage of materialism with rampant commerce - the issue of this union is plain to see all around us. Now nothing in nature remains undistorted, and since nature is the ultimate source of all beauty, all beauty has gone from the world, and there is nothing left for me, except, perhaps, in memories and dreams.
And what do I do? Well, as I said, I get depressed, and in other news, I write. Yes, I continue to write, like the Emperor Nero fiddling with himself as Rome went up in flames. As a matter of fact, I have been engaged, as many of you will know, in the rather pointless and hypocritical composition of a grand, apocalyptic novel called Domesday Afternoon. It looks like being such a vast undertaking that the world will probably end before I finish it, anyway, and even if I do finish it, well, it's not as if its publication will somehow avert disaster or have any useful effect whatsoever. So why am I doing it? Well, I don't really know, to be honest, except that, in my life, writing has always been one thing I actually can do, perhaps, in a way, the only thing, though I don't necessarily do it well.
I have asked myself, any number of times, why I bother to carry on such a task. A little while back I came upon something that seemed close to being an answer. It is, in fact, an interview with the late singer/songwriter Elliott Smith:
The interviewer talks to Elliott about the rationale behind the title of his album Figure 8, and reads out a quote (his quote) to him: "I just like the idea of figure 8, of figure skaters trying to make this self-contained perfect thing that takes a lot of effort but essentially goes nowhere."
Funny, I expected 'figure 8' to be some sort of reference to the moebius symbol of eternity that reembles a figure 8 on its side. However, Elliott confirms the interpretation suggested by the quote. The interviewer expressed some surprise, asking if he really feels that music is pointless, to which he replies, "Yeah, of course. I mean, what's the point? Is music supposed to be a tool to get you somewhere else? No, it's just worth doing on its own."
I may have removed a few "like"s and "kinda"s from the quotation there.
Just in case anyone is wondering how I can think that life is inherently meaningful - as I seem to suggest in this blog entry - but ultimately purposeless, I suppose I should add that I think meaning and purpose are two different things. Meaning is diffuse, like the air, and allows freedom of movement in all directions. Purpose, however, is linear and one-track. Purpose builds roads. Usually to nowhere. Or over a cliff, as it now seems. Because purpose has behind it the notion of progress. But to what are we ultimately progressing? How can there be anything? Science, for instance, eschews meaning, but champions progress, or uses progress as an excuse for its own purposeful agenda. But where are we going with this? Who can plot the ultimate destination that the course we are on will take us to, the genetic tampering, so redolent of Nazi ideas of a master race, the mechanisation, artifical intelligence? If we survive that long, it will take us - this is my guess - to a utopia in which life will not be worth living, since there is no meaning, no soul left to live it anymore, only machines (biological or otherwise) purposefully building and maintaining more machines.
(Incidentally, this post is prompted in part by the fact that, at 5.49 pm on the 14th of January, 2007, I finished the longhand version of the first draft of the first volume of Domesday Afternoon. In longhand, the first volume comes to 1,284 pages. I am currently typing it up, and have typed about half. I will send copies of this first draft out to anyone with my e-mail address who writes to me and expresses an interest.)
I was reading New Scientist, as I often do, and came across an article entitled 'Earth Without Humans'. The article begins thus:
Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet's land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we're leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.
The premise of the article is that the animals do vote us off the Earth, and their wish is, democratically, granted. What then? How long will it take for the Earth to recover from our poisonous influence? Because, let's face it, the only reason that we don't view humans, as did the King of Brobdignag in Gulliver's Travels, as "The most odious and pernicious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the earth", is because we are human. That is the only reason. All information available shows the King of Brobdignag's assessment to be true. Our influence upon the Earth has been wholly poisonous, and therefore, after our disappearance, the only sensible question is, how long till the stored up poison is flushed out of the system?
Of course, one little symptom of our pernicious nature is the way in which we project our own vile and selfish values everywhere. Would animals really vote us off the Earth? We would certainly vote off the Earth any species that did to us what we do to the rest of the planet. That's for sure. But perhaps animals are not as selfish as that. I once heard the story of a man who had survived a shipwreck and was adrift in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. He would have starved, had it not been for some friendly dolphins who came up beside the boat and exposed their bellies for him to harpoon, so that he might have something to eat. Now, I'm not sure if this story is apocryphal, but let's suppose it's true. The wise, beautiful and gracious dolphins offer themselves to save the life of another. That other, the scraggy human, thinks nothing of it. I am a human, therefore I am at the apex of all things. Great, this dolphin's sacrificing itself! I can live! Mmmm, this is delicious! Would a human being ever dream of offering him or herself to, let's see, a pack of starving wolves? Of course not. See, whatever way you look at it, humans are utterly vile. And maybe the dolphins only actually wanted their bellies tickled, anyway, and the man, in his I-am-God's-gift-to-nature way, made his own interpretation.
Anyway, my point is, maybe nature would be too gracious to vote us off the planet. Then again, if you are into Gaia theory, not in James Lovelock's original form, but in its mystical reinterpretation, then you might think that nature is, in fact, in the process of voting us off the planet right now, and that the hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, viruses and so on, are going to get worse and worse until the human vermin are all finally exterminated.
Is this a depressing thought?
Well, reading the article, although some of it filled me with a sense of cosmic melancholy at the transience of all things, and the ultimate dominion of decay, I found this offered a way of looking at our current environmental problems that was more consoling than depressing.
"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?
The article goes on to track the changes that would take place, immediately, then within days, then within years. The first thing to go, of course, would be electricity. Without humans to maintain them, roads, buildings, and so on, would begin to crumble surpringly soon. Offered as an illustration of this is the example of Pripyat, which lies inside the exclusion zone created by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster:
"From a distance, you would still believe that Pripyat is a living city, but the buildings are slowly decaying," says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who has worked extensively in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. "The most pervasive thing you see are plants whose root systems get into the concrete and behind the bricks and into doorframes and so forth, and are rapidly breaking up the structure. You wouldn't think, as you walk around your house every day, that we have a big impact on keeping that from happening, but clearly we do. It's really sobering to see how the plant community invades every nook and cranny of a city."
Apparently, for roofs to fall in and buildings to collapse takes a matter of decades. Wood structures are the first to go, and all buildings of a jerry-built nature. Then come all monuments to hubris, such as skyscrapers and suspension bridges, which are more precarious than masonry structures. The ruins, of course, will last some thousands of years before crumbling, Ozymandias-like, into oblivion.
I was particularly pleased and intrigued to read of wolves appearing in the Chernobyl exclusion zone:
The first few years after people evacuated the zone, rats and house mice flourished, and packs of feral dogs roamed the area despite efforts to exterminate them. But the heyday of these vermin proved to be short-lived, and already the native fauna has begun to take over. Wild boar are 10 to 15 times as common within the Chernobyl exclusion zone as outside it, and big predators are making a comeback. "I've never seen a wolf in the Ukraine outside the exclusion zone. I've seen many of them inside," says Chesser.
I won't go into all the details of what will recover and what won't recover, should Humans all be transported OFF EARTH NOW. Towards the end of the article, though, is this serene paragraph:
All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.
The article concludes:
The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.
I'm well aware of the feelings of defiance that environmental causes can provoke. I have such feelings myself sometimes. Why did Mother Nature give birth to us in the first place if we are so inimical to her? Why were we ever cast out into the cold and hostile wilderness of this planet? We had to survive. We had to build shelters and find food, and make clothes. We were only trying to build some kind of comfortable life for ourselves. Is that a crime? And if one believes in a Cartesian deus ex machina - always handy if you want to be angry at something - one can rail against such a god, saying, "Why did you give us this hunger in our bellies, and this hunger in our hearts, and then put us in a world where all things are limited? Why did you tell us to go forth and multiply, knowing our numbers would choke the Earth?" And so on. I can even take the cold stance that, since everything is, in fact, a part of nature, it doesn't matter what happens. And, of course, it doesn't.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, but became violently depressed again after finding a link to this article on Momus' blog. The article concerns the fact that, due to overfishing, ocean life could be more or less wiped out within fifty years. Someone expressed the opinion on the blog that this was merely evolution. I replied as follows:
I don't think the problem is that fish aren't having sex, it's that we're eating them quicker than they can reproduce. Once numbers drop below a certain level, it's hard to ever get back to original numbers. Of course, all of this - anything you can think of - is within nature, and therefore could be called evolution. But that's another way of saying nothing's ugly, and another way of relieving ourselves of moral responsibilities. Personally, I do find human greed and short-sightedness ugly. I think human values are, in the main, wrong, and that they have created an ugly world. Just as in the film The Mission, we create an ugly world, and then we say, "That's just the way the world is."
Momus responded to my reply as follows:
We're not just talking about the natural cycle of extinction, we're talking about the possibility of all the wild species which live in the sea being wiped out, and within the lifetimes of people now living. When one species becomes so "successful" that it wipes out many of the others, it becomes very clear that this "success" itself is failure on a massive scale. We're failing the planet, and failing ourselves.
I responded to his as follows:
I agree completely. The most pernicious political concept ever is that of continual expansion. Things have really come to a head for the human race. People have talked about utopias in one form or another, and failed to acheive them, for centuries, but now, if we don't fundamentally change our values, it looks like we're done for, unless science manages to manufacture the kind of brave new world that will allow us to sustain our selfish habits even longer. But personally, I think that Mary Shelley was prophetic, and one way or another, our rape/enslavement/manipulation of nature has created and will continue to create monsters that will come back to us.
Whatever attitude we take in order to console or justify ourselves, as Momus has pointed out, when it comes right down to it, our 'success' is really our failure - failure on a massive scale.
Personally, I have more and more sympathy with the Church of Euthanasia and the Gaia Liberation Front. I no longer care so much if humans disappear. I even have more than a slight longing for a world without humans. My only regret would be that I could never be there to see it myself.
Unless I'm researching something specific, I usually find very little of interest when 'surfing the net'. However, having sifted through the entire web for you, like a whale sieving plankton, or something very similar, I am now prepared to offer you the very best in Internet... er... stuff.
First of all, the loveliness of possible reconciliation in the following podcast, containing a New Scientist interview with biologist E.O. Wilson, in two parts:
WIDGETIZE