The effects of the climate crisis intrude with increasing regularity into our lives and yet we do not act. We are as paralyzed as past civilizations were when facing catastrophic destruction.
The truth of the ecological crisis that our technological terraforming, earth shattering civilization has set in motion is a hard truth to accept....but the science in unequivocal. We are where we are, Chris describes it accurately.........and the saddest part is, we'd rather enter the world of fantastical last minute rescues...than face the grim collective reality that is the Future.
The rise of the Christian right is a depressing reality....but so are those wild fires making life miserable in New York...takes Americans away from the equally depressing reality of daily mass shootings I suspect....but hey!!!
Why not Vacate On? Come to Canada for some fishing or hunting in our once glorious boreal?? Be part of the destruction of the lungs of the north...get a load of how we're dealing with our Summer of Fire: It's really a bit of a hoot.
In Alberta, where the disaster began as we fought a polarized election, the winner (our family calls them weiners) is a libertarian champion of the unvaccinated....who recently claims these fires have been started by arsonists.
Not off roaders....or campers with their off road vehicles and big trailors..no....ARSONISTS.
She's likely a hair breadth away from having us imagine Orange jumper clad NDP terrorists running across the country setting fires as part of our madcap efforts to defeat the ruling Conservative Right.
So its not only in America that the seeds of our common destruction are ripening Everywhere, we'd rather engage in a protracted war with each other, than deal with what we're actually facing. The War in Ukraine may be the big metaphor....but everywhere on the planet, the battle between the 'woke' and the sleep walking dead is prospering.
It's good for the arms industry. It's cathartic for many. And it more than proves Chris Hedges dire predictions.
I live in Brooklyn, New York. As the smoke crisis was easing, a friend asked about what starts the fires, and two of us listed a few possibilities—lightning, unextinguished cigarette butts, sparks from electricity, etc. She replied, "No, I think there's something they're not telling us." Someone else said that his wife believes the same thing. I felt both enraged and depressed afterward. Half a century of observation and analysis, most of it already proved true, hasn't made a dent on most. Thank you, Chris, for continuing to hammer away in the hope of making a dent.
A wonderful sermon on the coming end of times. One suggestion for you, Chris, why not read - yourself - all your articles, and attach the written article as well. Your voice, when heard, sounds like the "voice of authority", or a low-key Jerimiah "crying in the wilderness". We live in a "wilderness", a wilderness of illusions you often speak to, a wilderness of great greed, etc. Your wife does a great job in reading your articles, but [stating the obvious] she's not you. Your voice reading your articles [often sounding like sermons] brings gravitas and your whole experience to your words and message.
Thank you, Chris, for your hard work, your words of wisdom, and your deep, enduring love for humankind.
The collective West has become amnesiacal, where we see war as virtue signalling and have long forgotten the cycles of nature and the truths of history.
Sorry about the fires Chris, but our dumb ass cretinous government is too busy pouring gas on the empire's imperialist wars to bother putting out our forest fires.
It seems we have so many ways of burning down the future in the self-denigrating West.
1- CO2 is currently 420 ppm, which is 0.042%. Humans are responsible for 3% of that, which is 0.00126%. Thus, 99.99874% of all CO2 is created naturally.
2- At under 270 ppm CO2, plant life dies, and everything else dies with it.
The atmosphere has had periods where CO2 was up to and higher than 4000 ppm. Plant and animal life thrived, Alaska was a jungle.
3- When Mt. St Helens erupted in the early 1980s, it released the same amount of pollution as 270 years of human industrial activity in 1970. That's 270 x 1970 industrial activity--IN ONE DAY.
Let's cut the bullshit. Climate Change (global warming) benefits the oligarchy as they will tax us and starve us to create this 'perfect' world. Anyone tell me why Kyoto Treaty applied to the US but not China? Sorry but anyone with a thinking brain is going to look at the facts and see that this is a scam.
Before you send hate my way, I am ALL FOR taking care of our environment. Let's force recycling...let's force Monsanto to stop forcing Roundup on the world. Let's stop jetting to Davos and maybe use Zoom? Let's stop dumping plastics in the oceans. Let's stop abusing animals with these corporate farms. Let's stop military actions by the US which destroys the environment. Let's stop penalizing family farms at the expense of corporate farms. There is so much to do at the global corporate level but instead the little man has to do all the sacrificing.
C'mon Chris Hedges...are you a corporate sycophant or are your REALLY looking out for the common man? A true leftist? I wonder sometimes.
Hard to convince any climate denier about the reality of our pending doom. They probably will suffer more than the rest of us because of their feeling of guilt for not trying to avoid the collapse will be added . This is a great report from Mr. Hedges that hopefully will sink in some of those minds. in the report there is a link about the billionaire class trying to scape the catastrophe, and I'm extracting the words of professor Douglas Rushkoff when invited to talk about technology to a group of bankers.
" ...Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?” "That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape."
When I was an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia in the 1970's, parking on campus was forbidden, except in gravel parking lots some distance from the heart of the campus. Having walked 15 minutes from my car to the main library, I would carry on farther, and make an attempt to cross a large, flat expanse of bare earth, which from September until at least April or May would be guaranteed to be an ocean of mud. Across this expanse, someone had laid a wooden path, consisting of 1" x 12" planks laid end to end. It helped a lot but not enough. Each day, all day, a vast funnel of pedestrians would converge on each dry end of this bridge. When two walkers going in opposite direction would meet somewhere in the middle, a tacit negotiation would occur, usually involving an awkward sharing of the plank; usually each person would get at least some mud on their shoes as one or both pedestrians would have to take at least one step off of the plank and into the mud. One day, as I walked the plank between Brock Hall and the Student Union Building, I definitely slipped and immediately fell right into the sucking mud. As I cast about looking for one of my shoes from my new, ground level vantage point, I saw a field of white labels attached to sticks placed at regular intervals all over the sea of mud. They weren't actually sticks; no more than 30 to 40 cm tall, they were twigs that the university had planted. As I picked myself up and prepared to carry on, I remembered my Grandmother's saying, repeated often by my mother and her sisters, which had become a family motto of sorts. "Always plant a tree". Now, almost half a century later, all of those twigs have grown into and awesome, engineered canopy of Carbon Dioxide capturing, Oxygen dispensing, Solar Energy powered trees. "Always plant MANY trees" in places where trees will grow. If every human plants one tree for each and every year they have been alive and does so for as long as they have strength or breath, would the doomed planet object? Would things be marginally better, or worse? Resist. Plant many trees; now and forever.
Ronald Wright's "A Short History of Progress" is an astonishing little book. Read it in an afternoon and change your life. His observations and images are succinct and lucid. Most moving among these was his recounting of how the Easter Islanders destroyed their bountiful island: inexorably, every tree was cut down to service a status arms race, as different tribes tried to top each other's moa, the giant stone heads we all know. The passage where he describes cutting down the last tree--they knew it was the last tree, that no more could be coming because rats ate all the seeds, everywhere they looked they could see desolation--but they cut it down anyway.
I turned 53 this year. My life has been a front-row seat to technical civilization destroying itself, bit by bit, in the service of a small sociopathic aristocracy. I can remember life before 1980; even as a child, it was clear the bottom fell out after Reagan, and every Reagan clone after. I knew things would get bad by the late 80s, but had hope during the brief green renaissance we had then, centered around the 1987 Montreal Protocol which banned ozone-destroying CFCs. But the 90s were wasted, and idiot boy-king W sealed the deal.
I'd challenge two things Chris writes.
The common refrain that "the Earth will continue even with all of our damage" belies a lack of understanding Earth's past. The changes we have wrought are of such magnitude and speed there is only one equally destructive event in Earth's history: the asteroid impact that doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But our changes compress tens to hundreds of thousands of years of change into a couple centuries. There is really no precedent for what the Earth is experiencing. Hansen's latest paper describes 5°C of warming this century, with up to another 5°C to 2300. This is a sterilization event. Complex life cannot survive such temperatures, and likely changes to a toxic, anoxic atmosphere. It's possible Earth could go back hundreds of millions of years, to where there are only worms, maybe some hardy insects, and algae and similar plants. It will be too hot for everything else.
Second, while it's true that the mass of humanity (or at least rich, Northern humanity) is sleepwalking to their collective doom, I have to give them a break. Since global warming surfaced in the collective consciousness in a big way in the 1980s, the 24/356 disinformation machine cranked into overdrive. As if in denial, or as part of our elites' Ghost Dances, the aristocracy stomped the gas. People are happy to enslave themselves in jobs, so long as they can buy toys to compensate. The commercials will keep people doing that as long as they're on.
There really is no good news. Extinction Rebellion and other groups are well-meaning, but I don't think they really understand the kinds of changes that would really make a difference, and the implications. Any hope of "doing something" about biosphere collapse was really over by 2000. Maybe covid and succeeding diseases will cut human numbers enough to make a difference, but even that I doubt.
Wright also notes that Marx called capitalism "a machine for demolishing limits." It worked...for a while. But then the rubber band snaps back.
Three years ago, I think, when the forests in the US northwest were on fire, my stepson, his pregnant wife and toddler son were living in Springfield, OR, just across I-5 from Eugene. Then, at least, the EPA had no rating for anything over 500 ppm. When it reached 775, he made a break for it, going north on smoke-covered I-5 to the Portland airport, and all 3 got on a plane they reasonably feared would be a super-spreader of Covid and flew east. Spent a few weeks in the southern Midwest until the fires finally were extinguished, and went back. Until they could move permanently.
But there is no real shelter from this storm. And, if we do get rid of fossil fuels entirely, after it is way too late, what will happen is the end of the aerosol masking effect of all of this particulate matter that has actually decreased the warming effect of the sun, just as this catastrophic level of particulate matter has seriously decreased the amount of sunlight hitting solar panels. That stuff comes back to earth in a week or two. As opposed to the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere with it, which stays for many decades. The result of our 100% transition away from fossil fuels will be roughly an almost immediate 1 degree Celsius increase in average global temperature, while any benefit will remain decades away.
Thank you for these hard truths Chris. I work in science and frequently people will say to me don't worry science will solve it. Of course those people who say that are not in science. Science will not solve this , only a change in the Capitalist way of living will. One billion spent on CO2 reduction using a coal fired power plant fueled by burning trees, yes burning trees. If we burned all the trees in the u.s. that would power the grid for two years. Science will not save us. Science could have saved us IF we had followed the science decades ago. A new philosophy, Scientific Accelerationism , the thought that science will save us while doing nothing because science will save us.
There are posts appearing on some media sites with photographs of helicopters shooting giant flame throwers at the woods immediately below them in Canada. Weird, huh? Whose agenda is being served with these "wildfires"?
The truth of the ecological crisis that our technological terraforming, earth shattering civilization has set in motion is a hard truth to accept....but the science in unequivocal. We are where we are, Chris describes it accurately.........and the saddest part is, we'd rather enter the world of fantastical last minute rescues...than face the grim collective reality that is the Future.
The rise of the Christian right is a depressing reality....but so are those wild fires making life miserable in New York...takes Americans away from the equally depressing reality of daily mass shootings I suspect....but hey!!!
Why not Vacate On? Come to Canada for some fishing or hunting in our once glorious boreal?? Be part of the destruction of the lungs of the north...get a load of how we're dealing with our Summer of Fire: It's really a bit of a hoot.
In Alberta, where the disaster began as we fought a polarized election, the winner (our family calls them weiners) is a libertarian champion of the unvaccinated....who recently claims these fires have been started by arsonists.
Not off roaders....or campers with their off road vehicles and big trailors..no....ARSONISTS.
She's likely a hair breadth away from having us imagine Orange jumper clad NDP terrorists running across the country setting fires as part of our madcap efforts to defeat the ruling Conservative Right.
So its not only in America that the seeds of our common destruction are ripening Everywhere, we'd rather engage in a protracted war with each other, than deal with what we're actually facing. The War in Ukraine may be the big metaphor....but everywhere on the planet, the battle between the 'woke' and the sleep walking dead is prospering.
It's good for the arms industry. It's cathartic for many. And it more than proves Chris Hedges dire predictions.
There is no "climate crisis", but there is mass psychosis for holding luxury beliefs.
I live in Brooklyn, New York. As the smoke crisis was easing, a friend asked about what starts the fires, and two of us listed a few possibilities—lightning, unextinguished cigarette butts, sparks from electricity, etc. She replied, "No, I think there's something they're not telling us." Someone else said that his wife believes the same thing. I felt both enraged and depressed afterward. Half a century of observation and analysis, most of it already proved true, hasn't made a dent on most. Thank you, Chris, for continuing to hammer away in the hope of making a dent.
Hi Chris,
A wonderful sermon on the coming end of times. One suggestion for you, Chris, why not read - yourself - all your articles, and attach the written article as well. Your voice, when heard, sounds like the "voice of authority", or a low-key Jerimiah "crying in the wilderness". We live in a "wilderness", a wilderness of illusions you often speak to, a wilderness of great greed, etc. Your wife does a great job in reading your articles, but [stating the obvious] she's not you. Your voice reading your articles [often sounding like sermons] brings gravitas and your whole experience to your words and message.
Thank you, Chris, for your hard work, your words of wisdom, and your deep, enduring love for humankind.
The collective West has become amnesiacal, where we see war as virtue signalling and have long forgotten the cycles of nature and the truths of history.
Sorry about the fires Chris, but our dumb ass cretinous government is too busy pouring gas on the empire's imperialist wars to bother putting out our forest fires.
It seems we have so many ways of burning down the future in the self-denigrating West.
An eloquent, truthful, mournful essay. So few voices like this. Thank you.
It's Fun Fact day!
1- CO2 is currently 420 ppm, which is 0.042%. Humans are responsible for 3% of that, which is 0.00126%. Thus, 99.99874% of all CO2 is created naturally.
2- At under 270 ppm CO2, plant life dies, and everything else dies with it.
The atmosphere has had periods where CO2 was up to and higher than 4000 ppm. Plant and animal life thrived, Alaska was a jungle.
3- When Mt. St Helens erupted in the early 1980s, it released the same amount of pollution as 270 years of human industrial activity in 1970. That's 270 x 1970 industrial activity--IN ONE DAY.
Let's cut the bullshit. Climate Change (global warming) benefits the oligarchy as they will tax us and starve us to create this 'perfect' world. Anyone tell me why Kyoto Treaty applied to the US but not China? Sorry but anyone with a thinking brain is going to look at the facts and see that this is a scam.
Before you send hate my way, I am ALL FOR taking care of our environment. Let's force recycling...let's force Monsanto to stop forcing Roundup on the world. Let's stop jetting to Davos and maybe use Zoom? Let's stop dumping plastics in the oceans. Let's stop abusing animals with these corporate farms. Let's stop military actions by the US which destroys the environment. Let's stop penalizing family farms at the expense of corporate farms. There is so much to do at the global corporate level but instead the little man has to do all the sacrificing.
C'mon Chris Hedges...are you a corporate sycophant or are your REALLY looking out for the common man? A true leftist? I wonder sometimes.
Hard to convince any climate denier about the reality of our pending doom. They probably will suffer more than the rest of us because of their feeling of guilt for not trying to avoid the collapse will be added . This is a great report from Mr. Hedges that hopefully will sink in some of those minds. in the report there is a link about the billionaire class trying to scape the catastrophe, and I'm extracting the words of professor Douglas Rushkoff when invited to talk about technology to a group of bankers.
" ...Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?” "That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape."
When I was an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia in the 1970's, parking on campus was forbidden, except in gravel parking lots some distance from the heart of the campus. Having walked 15 minutes from my car to the main library, I would carry on farther, and make an attempt to cross a large, flat expanse of bare earth, which from September until at least April or May would be guaranteed to be an ocean of mud. Across this expanse, someone had laid a wooden path, consisting of 1" x 12" planks laid end to end. It helped a lot but not enough. Each day, all day, a vast funnel of pedestrians would converge on each dry end of this bridge. When two walkers going in opposite direction would meet somewhere in the middle, a tacit negotiation would occur, usually involving an awkward sharing of the plank; usually each person would get at least some mud on their shoes as one or both pedestrians would have to take at least one step off of the plank and into the mud. One day, as I walked the plank between Brock Hall and the Student Union Building, I definitely slipped and immediately fell right into the sucking mud. As I cast about looking for one of my shoes from my new, ground level vantage point, I saw a field of white labels attached to sticks placed at regular intervals all over the sea of mud. They weren't actually sticks; no more than 30 to 40 cm tall, they were twigs that the university had planted. As I picked myself up and prepared to carry on, I remembered my Grandmother's saying, repeated often by my mother and her sisters, which had become a family motto of sorts. "Always plant a tree". Now, almost half a century later, all of those twigs have grown into and awesome, engineered canopy of Carbon Dioxide capturing, Oxygen dispensing, Solar Energy powered trees. "Always plant MANY trees" in places where trees will grow. If every human plants one tree for each and every year they have been alive and does so for as long as they have strength or breath, would the doomed planet object? Would things be marginally better, or worse? Resist. Plant many trees; now and forever.
Ronald Wright's "A Short History of Progress" is an astonishing little book. Read it in an afternoon and change your life. His observations and images are succinct and lucid. Most moving among these was his recounting of how the Easter Islanders destroyed their bountiful island: inexorably, every tree was cut down to service a status arms race, as different tribes tried to top each other's moa, the giant stone heads we all know. The passage where he describes cutting down the last tree--they knew it was the last tree, that no more could be coming because rats ate all the seeds, everywhere they looked they could see desolation--but they cut it down anyway.
I turned 53 this year. My life has been a front-row seat to technical civilization destroying itself, bit by bit, in the service of a small sociopathic aristocracy. I can remember life before 1980; even as a child, it was clear the bottom fell out after Reagan, and every Reagan clone after. I knew things would get bad by the late 80s, but had hope during the brief green renaissance we had then, centered around the 1987 Montreal Protocol which banned ozone-destroying CFCs. But the 90s were wasted, and idiot boy-king W sealed the deal.
I'd challenge two things Chris writes.
The common refrain that "the Earth will continue even with all of our damage" belies a lack of understanding Earth's past. The changes we have wrought are of such magnitude and speed there is only one equally destructive event in Earth's history: the asteroid impact that doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But our changes compress tens to hundreds of thousands of years of change into a couple centuries. There is really no precedent for what the Earth is experiencing. Hansen's latest paper describes 5°C of warming this century, with up to another 5°C to 2300. This is a sterilization event. Complex life cannot survive such temperatures, and likely changes to a toxic, anoxic atmosphere. It's possible Earth could go back hundreds of millions of years, to where there are only worms, maybe some hardy insects, and algae and similar plants. It will be too hot for everything else.
Second, while it's true that the mass of humanity (or at least rich, Northern humanity) is sleepwalking to their collective doom, I have to give them a break. Since global warming surfaced in the collective consciousness in a big way in the 1980s, the 24/356 disinformation machine cranked into overdrive. As if in denial, or as part of our elites' Ghost Dances, the aristocracy stomped the gas. People are happy to enslave themselves in jobs, so long as they can buy toys to compensate. The commercials will keep people doing that as long as they're on.
There really is no good news. Extinction Rebellion and other groups are well-meaning, but I don't think they really understand the kinds of changes that would really make a difference, and the implications. Any hope of "doing something" about biosphere collapse was really over by 2000. Maybe covid and succeeding diseases will cut human numbers enough to make a difference, but even that I doubt.
Wright also notes that Marx called capitalism "a machine for demolishing limits." It worked...for a while. But then the rubber band snaps back.
So, homo sapiens is doomed to extinction. Just for the sake of balance, what's the bad news?
A panoply of feelings arise with this piece. And absolutely, resistance as a moral imperative and because we can, and must. Where else can love go?
Three years ago, I think, when the forests in the US northwest were on fire, my stepson, his pregnant wife and toddler son were living in Springfield, OR, just across I-5 from Eugene. Then, at least, the EPA had no rating for anything over 500 ppm. When it reached 775, he made a break for it, going north on smoke-covered I-5 to the Portland airport, and all 3 got on a plane they reasonably feared would be a super-spreader of Covid and flew east. Spent a few weeks in the southern Midwest until the fires finally were extinguished, and went back. Until they could move permanently.
But there is no real shelter from this storm. And, if we do get rid of fossil fuels entirely, after it is way too late, what will happen is the end of the aerosol masking effect of all of this particulate matter that has actually decreased the warming effect of the sun, just as this catastrophic level of particulate matter has seriously decreased the amount of sunlight hitting solar panels. That stuff comes back to earth in a week or two. As opposed to the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere with it, which stays for many decades. The result of our 100% transition away from fossil fuels will be roughly an almost immediate 1 degree Celsius increase in average global temperature, while any benefit will remain decades away.
We have well and truly screwed the pooch.
I miss the old Chris Hedges, before the pandemic ...
I thought he finally backed-off this ridiculous climate crisis issue ...
But no, here he is again telling us it's real ...
Thank you for these hard truths Chris. I work in science and frequently people will say to me don't worry science will solve it. Of course those people who say that are not in science. Science will not solve this , only a change in the Capitalist way of living will. One billion spent on CO2 reduction using a coal fired power plant fueled by burning trees, yes burning trees. If we burned all the trees in the u.s. that would power the grid for two years. Science will not save us. Science could have saved us IF we had followed the science decades ago. A new philosophy, Scientific Accelerationism , the thought that science will save us while doing nothing because science will save us.
There are posts appearing on some media sites with photographs of helicopters shooting giant flame throwers at the woods immediately below them in Canada. Weird, huh? Whose agenda is being served with these "wildfires"?