The archeological remains of past civilizations, including those of the prehistoric Cahokia temple mound complex in Illinois, are sobering reminders of our fate.
To paraphrase Derrick Jensen: “It is easier for us to imagine extinction of the human species in the collapse of industrial civilization than to fight back.“ He asks why? https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/
He writes it is not a failure of our humanity. It is a failure of imagination in our species. He continues to believe, as I do, that it's not over until it's over and we as human beings are collectively capable at any moment to completely shift the trajectory of our evolution.
It's our cynicism that is a gift to the oligarchs. They WANT us to believe all is lost. They win by default when we throw up our hands in despair and give up. But it takes enormous courage not to become cynical. It takes our deepest experience of love and connection in the face of utter hopelessness to triumph. Humans have demonstrated this countless times over history.
Just sayin'. Stay in a space of love and reverence for life. No matter what. 💗
This alarm has been ringing since at least Rachel Carson. It really got loud in the late 1980s, when I was in high school. I remember Hansen's 1988 testimony to Congress on the perils of 'global warming', the same year that Yellowstone burned.
I had some hope back then. CFCs were banned in 1987, and a green resurgence from then until the early 90s was felt even in conservative backwater Dallas-Forth Worth, where I went to college. But when Clinton didn't do anything meaningful, and the 1992 Earth Summit was revealed as just more political theatre to shut people up and put them back to sleep, I began to realize nothing was going to change.
It's certain now that our civilization will collapse. It is possible--maybe--that we could truly reverse all the damage and make a 'glide path' to a sustainable future. This in no way involves the techno-futurism pushed in the mainstream media, but more like the 19th century with the internet and medicine that works. Albert Bates has the only workable plan I've come across that could achieve this, relying on large-scale carbon farming and sequestering the carbon we thoughtlessly dumped in the atmosphere back into biochar, which will stay locked away for thousands of years. https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/burn-audiobook/ (I don't know Bates or have anything to gain, but have read this book and been following him for years. Like Hedges, he walks the walk.)
But, such a change would topple the stupid and useless elites, and threaten Americans who have been trained to believe they need an SUV and suburban single-family house. The fact that both these things are destroying us and making our daily lives miserable will only make us cling harder. As I've gotten older, I've become convinced the strongest psychological force is the psychotic break. Challenging any deep belief only makes people double down, and become violent.
Charles C. Mann's "1491" has a discussion of the Missouri mound civilization. Along with many other American empires, they were struggling and going out before the Europeans showed up. Worth a read.
Glad to see Ronald Wright and Joseph Tainter getting some love from Hedges, too. Wright's "Brief History of Progress" is a short, dense, meaty yet digestible book. The day reading it will change your life forever. Wright says we have the most knowledge, and the greatest capacity, of any humans ever to change course. I wish we would. Given our idiotic response to covid, and now the other diseases following, I think the only way out is a great population reduction that seems to be already in motion. We can't save everybody anyway.
"We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth."
One of the most painful truths, so well expressed - thanks for providing that source. Gotta get the book.
"Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible."
The parasitic elites promote the collapse of society with their exploitation of artificial fear based on the faked up science of anthropogenic climate change.
- We don't know the actual cause of warming temperatures. We don't and it is a lie to say we do.
- Global heat waves, droughts and extreme weather have happened forever.
- Over 10 times the number of people die from cold than die from heat.
- The global warming set wring their hands over the impact to crops while banning organic fuels and fertilizer needed to grow crops.
- The global warming set ban organic fuels and shut off the electricity needed to power air conditioners and charge electric cars... and jack up the cost of heating homes.
Civilizations die because armchair intellectual elites that think they know better, but are actually the least capable of all to contribute positive productivity to better society, gain too much power and make mistake after mistake after mistake building a house of cards that eventually comes crashing down from the weight of all the mistakes.
With more than 4 billion inhabitants of this planet paying homage to the war god known as YHWH, who have access to an ever increasing stockpile of easily transported and launched nuclear weapons that will likely be pointed at nuclear power plants and the neighborhoods of despised "others," the prediction of 1 billion survivors of the climate catastrophe may be wishful thinking.
Thanks Chris for providing me with food for thought and the space to express my concerns.
Well that is a defensive ideological perspective, not one of a curious thinking person open to different opinions.
I see Chris as being stuck in an ideological pool... seeing part of the truth but clutching the rim of his old ideological tribal boundary while he tries to swim to the deeper waters. That will not work.
The climate change narrative is a scam perpetrated by the same cabal perpetrating the woke narrative scam. They are part of the globalist Great Reset project which is primarily focused on destroying the working-individual and small business economy of the US and other western nations. So as Chris correctly identifies the threat to civilization from the degradation of urban centers and other abandon regions and people, he fails to recognize that he is contributing to the ongoing reasons for this decline by supporting the hyped narrative of climate change which prescribes more economic and social destruction of the very same people.
Climate change is a luxury virtue signaling ideological position of the elite. If you subscribe to this ideology, then you are responsible for what will be continued decline of places like St. Louis.
Thank you Chris, for posting this. It has taken far too long for people to begin telling the truth about what we are facing and that, in fact, we passed tipping points that cannot be passed without collapse. These days, in my writing and teaching, I tend to make several points over and over again:
1) Our species will survive, our civilization won't.
2) "WE" are not the problem (and the universal we should not be used in this context), unrestrained corporate capitalism combined with a reductionist science which breaks the world into parts that corporate capitalism can use as they wish is the problem. (Corporate capitalism could not do what it is doing without the research being done by scientists and engineers and technophiles.) People sometimes attack me for being anti-science; i am not. But i do hate and am against the lack of moral thought and behavior in those fields. They are not innocent of the side effects of their work. As Hannah Arendt put it, "When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. ”
3) it is clear that things could be done to lessen the degree of collapse but it is unlikely they will be done. Top down control during these kinds of situations does not work as the systems in place cannot deal with a background they assumed to be stable becomes unstable. John Ralston Saul in Voltaire's Bastards lays out a lot of the reasons why (as do the people Chris quotes herein). FIRE: A Message from the Edge of Climate Catastrophe by Margi Prideaux reveals exactly what that breakdown looks like in real time through her experiences in the Australian bush fires. What is needed is for millions of people to begin using their own genius to deal with the problems they find in front of them without waiting for permission.
Belinda H. is right on when she says she had the best of the USA; those of us born after WWII (and yes, i am aware that this does not include a lot of people) did come of age in one of the best times of all. But of course there are going to be people who continually insist on remaining optimistic (Margi Prideaux refers to this as the drug "Hopium." It is fine for adolescents but not so good for grown ups.) The truth is, if we do not accept our terminal diagnosis we will not come to terms with what we need to do now.
Again, thank you Chris, please keep the articles coming.
Thank you, Chris, for an excellent and brutal analysis of the coming collapse. All the ingredients are here now and rushing pell-mell down the hill to annihilation.
Analyses like yours (this one and others you've written) need to be seen by as many people as possible. Perhaps a few prepared folks can survive, if the end isn't nuclear, and rebuild smaller communities and perpetuate the species. Nevertheless, I'm not particularly optimistic.
It seems that Gaia has had enough of us screwing things up and is ready to be done with our entire species.
Wise words, as always. Thank you Chris. I wish they would be more widely viewed, and heeded.
In other countries I've seen where they post the newspapers on public display boards. At least there were many years ago when I traveled more. People, usually older men, would stand and read them, slowly moving down the length of the board as they read the stories. Then they could discuss the news with other readers. Quite different from here and now.
I am thinking of this after reading today's piece. I would love to see Chris' words posted in public squares to be absorbed by the population at large. Then they could be discussed and debated, and most importantly, acknowledged. I've been reading these warnings for several decades, and they keep being made and repeated and reiterated. And they've been slowly, steadily coming true. Yet the one thing they all seem to have in common is - they keep being ignored. It's more than enough to make one despair.
Still, I am grateful people with insight and intelligence are sounding the alarm. It's a tough slog, but it does give me hope. Keep it up!
Fatalists have been lamenting the end of civilization throughout the history of civilization. This would be easy to accept as a respectable alternative view had not the fatalists become the prime culprit in social and economic destruction.
“This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid.”
I think a small subset of modern people have the capacity to see the long range consequences of greed, resource hoarding, and murder. In many hunter gatherer societies, these traits or deeds were looked down upon and considered taboo, even deserving of exile.
Many of us still are content with only what we need and sharing the rest, as are many in other countries like Colombia. I don’t know if it’s all of humanity or just those peddling this ‘humans own the earth to exploit everything in it bs’ that has given rise to rapacious capitalism.
We will have to live through a period of technofeudalism, but as Chris says, every empire decays under the weight of the greed of the few at the top. Instead of glorifying billionaire asshats like Musk and Bezos, we should exile and shame them. Their money is worthless without a society that accepts it.
It's worth pointing out that the existing world population of ca. 8 billion people is probably not sustainable even under current conditions, let alone at a global temperature increase of 4 degrees C! The global footprint for the current human population corresponds to the consumption of about 1.7 Earths each year. Climate change is a symptom of a larger problem called ecological overshoot. This year Earth Overshoot Day fell on July 28th, which means that the activities of the human species became non-sustainable on July 29th.
Impossible to hit the “like” ❤️ after reading such a brilliantly written, albeit chilling, account of history and what appears to be our hopeless future. However, as usual, I so appreciate your succinct and vivid accounting of the horrors of the past that we incomprehensibly seem to insist upon hurtling toward; and now on an even grander and seemingly more final scale (!). How “exceptionally” American of us! “Now total destruction!! Bigger and better than ever before!” (Brought to you by: insert corporate name here). Sheesh 🙄! I will go to my grave shaking my head at the hubris and absurd idiocy of humankind willing to throw it all away, despite massive warnings, for the sake of what? Ego? Greed? Fear? Vengeance?
What a cowardly and egotistical species we are that we will forfeit and sacrifice everything for everyone because some of us who have amassed power, somehow feels unloved and/or can’t share with others. And the rest of us who refuse to band together to take back power and demand what might slow or stop this insanity are scarcely better. How criminal and bizarre! Ultimately, I can’t help but feel what a pathetic and tragic waste of evolution is humankind! But, who knows? Perhaps this is the way it’s supposed to ultimately devolve.
Well I had the best of the USA (California in the 50’s - 60’s)
Now I may unfortunately get to see the very worst -for all humanity
It’s difficult not to be depressed when there is NO obvious way out - thx oligarchs and sociopathic greed
It was fun- while it lasted
We’re a failed species I’m afraid
😢
To paraphrase Derrick Jensen: “It is easier for us to imagine extinction of the human species in the collapse of industrial civilization than to fight back.“ He asks why? https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/
He writes it is not a failure of our humanity. It is a failure of imagination in our species. He continues to believe, as I do, that it's not over until it's over and we as human beings are collectively capable at any moment to completely shift the trajectory of our evolution.
It's our cynicism that is a gift to the oligarchs. They WANT us to believe all is lost. They win by default when we throw up our hands in despair and give up. But it takes enormous courage not to become cynical. It takes our deepest experience of love and connection in the face of utter hopelessness to triumph. Humans have demonstrated this countless times over history.
Just sayin'. Stay in a space of love and reverence for life. No matter what. 💗
This alarm has been ringing since at least Rachel Carson. It really got loud in the late 1980s, when I was in high school. I remember Hansen's 1988 testimony to Congress on the perils of 'global warming', the same year that Yellowstone burned.
I had some hope back then. CFCs were banned in 1987, and a green resurgence from then until the early 90s was felt even in conservative backwater Dallas-Forth Worth, where I went to college. But when Clinton didn't do anything meaningful, and the 1992 Earth Summit was revealed as just more political theatre to shut people up and put them back to sleep, I began to realize nothing was going to change.
It's certain now that our civilization will collapse. It is possible--maybe--that we could truly reverse all the damage and make a 'glide path' to a sustainable future. This in no way involves the techno-futurism pushed in the mainstream media, but more like the 19th century with the internet and medicine that works. Albert Bates has the only workable plan I've come across that could achieve this, relying on large-scale carbon farming and sequestering the carbon we thoughtlessly dumped in the atmosphere back into biochar, which will stay locked away for thousands of years. https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/burn-audiobook/ (I don't know Bates or have anything to gain, but have read this book and been following him for years. Like Hedges, he walks the walk.)
But, such a change would topple the stupid and useless elites, and threaten Americans who have been trained to believe they need an SUV and suburban single-family house. The fact that both these things are destroying us and making our daily lives miserable will only make us cling harder. As I've gotten older, I've become convinced the strongest psychological force is the psychotic break. Challenging any deep belief only makes people double down, and become violent.
Charles C. Mann's "1491" has a discussion of the Missouri mound civilization. Along with many other American empires, they were struggling and going out before the Europeans showed up. Worth a read.
Glad to see Ronald Wright and Joseph Tainter getting some love from Hedges, too. Wright's "Brief History of Progress" is a short, dense, meaty yet digestible book. The day reading it will change your life forever. Wright says we have the most knowledge, and the greatest capacity, of any humans ever to change course. I wish we would. Given our idiotic response to covid, and now the other diseases following, I think the only way out is a great population reduction that seems to be already in motion. We can't save everybody anyway.
"We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth."
One of the most painful truths, so well expressed - thanks for providing that source. Gotta get the book.
"Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible."
The parasitic elites promote the collapse of society with their exploitation of artificial fear based on the faked up science of anthropogenic climate change.
- We don't know the actual cause of warming temperatures. We don't and it is a lie to say we do.
- Global heat waves, droughts and extreme weather have happened forever.
- Over 10 times the number of people die from cold than die from heat.
- The global warming set wring their hands over the impact to crops while banning organic fuels and fertilizer needed to grow crops.
- The global warming set ban organic fuels and shut off the electricity needed to power air conditioners and charge electric cars... and jack up the cost of heating homes.
Civilizations die because armchair intellectual elites that think they know better, but are actually the least capable of all to contribute positive productivity to better society, gain too much power and make mistake after mistake after mistake building a house of cards that eventually comes crashing down from the weight of all the mistakes.
With more than 4 billion inhabitants of this planet paying homage to the war god known as YHWH, who have access to an ever increasing stockpile of easily transported and launched nuclear weapons that will likely be pointed at nuclear power plants and the neighborhoods of despised "others," the prediction of 1 billion survivors of the climate catastrophe may be wishful thinking.
Thanks Chris for providing me with food for thought and the space to express my concerns.
Well that is a defensive ideological perspective, not one of a curious thinking person open to different opinions.
I see Chris as being stuck in an ideological pool... seeing part of the truth but clutching the rim of his old ideological tribal boundary while he tries to swim to the deeper waters. That will not work.
The climate change narrative is a scam perpetrated by the same cabal perpetrating the woke narrative scam. They are part of the globalist Great Reset project which is primarily focused on destroying the working-individual and small business economy of the US and other western nations. So as Chris correctly identifies the threat to civilization from the degradation of urban centers and other abandon regions and people, he fails to recognize that he is contributing to the ongoing reasons for this decline by supporting the hyped narrative of climate change which prescribes more economic and social destruction of the very same people.
Climate change is a luxury virtue signaling ideological position of the elite. If you subscribe to this ideology, then you are responsible for what will be continued decline of places like St. Louis.
Thank you Chris, for posting this. It has taken far too long for people to begin telling the truth about what we are facing and that, in fact, we passed tipping points that cannot be passed without collapse. These days, in my writing and teaching, I tend to make several points over and over again:
1) Our species will survive, our civilization won't.
2) "WE" are not the problem (and the universal we should not be used in this context), unrestrained corporate capitalism combined with a reductionist science which breaks the world into parts that corporate capitalism can use as they wish is the problem. (Corporate capitalism could not do what it is doing without the research being done by scientists and engineers and technophiles.) People sometimes attack me for being anti-science; i am not. But i do hate and am against the lack of moral thought and behavior in those fields. They are not innocent of the side effects of their work. As Hannah Arendt put it, "When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. ”
3) it is clear that things could be done to lessen the degree of collapse but it is unlikely they will be done. Top down control during these kinds of situations does not work as the systems in place cannot deal with a background they assumed to be stable becomes unstable. John Ralston Saul in Voltaire's Bastards lays out a lot of the reasons why (as do the people Chris quotes herein). FIRE: A Message from the Edge of Climate Catastrophe by Margi Prideaux reveals exactly what that breakdown looks like in real time through her experiences in the Australian bush fires. What is needed is for millions of people to begin using their own genius to deal with the problems they find in front of them without waiting for permission.
Belinda H. is right on when she says she had the best of the USA; those of us born after WWII (and yes, i am aware that this does not include a lot of people) did come of age in one of the best times of all. But of course there are going to be people who continually insist on remaining optimistic (Margi Prideaux refers to this as the drug "Hopium." It is fine for adolescents but not so good for grown ups.) The truth is, if we do not accept our terminal diagnosis we will not come to terms with what we need to do now.
Again, thank you Chris, please keep the articles coming.
Hi I am a music composer lyricist and world’s
oldest rapper (81)
Here is a rap I wrote 4 years ago. If you want to
hear it go to SoundCloud.com and type BK Climate Change in the search engine.
I want to talk to you today
About a subject that wont go away
It should important to everyone on earth
And you should be concerned for what it's worth
For millions of years this place we call home
has survived many disasters and carried on
Ice ages earthquakes and many other events
Even some that heaven sent
Then not so long ago in the distant past
Man came to this place that was so vast
That it took many years for him to roam
This wonderful place that we call home.
Verse 2
Man roamed to places near and far
Sailing on ships guided by the stars
He was amazed at the things he saw
And he held in respect and awe
So for mellinia still in the past
He multiplied and occupied this place very fast
And coexisted with the life that was already here
Until things started to change one year
The long time balance between nature and man
that should have been the gospel of all lands
Started to swing towards mankind
And it affected nature for the very first time
Verse 3
So in recent years scientists became concerned
And decided to study and to learn
What was causing the balance to change
cause indeed it was very strange
So they soon discovered man's drive to control
The earth from sea to sea and pole to pole
Was starting to effect nature in a bad way
So they studied and here's what they had to say
The earth is experiencing climate change
Words that seemed to us very strange
And if we dont change our ways
Nature would soon cope in it's very own way
Verse 4
So that's the subject I speak of today
That simply will not and should not go away
So all the earth's peoples of all the earth's lands
should come together and understand
That climate change is not a joke
Cause the whole world could end up going up in smoke
So the time is now to start to plan
To start making changes to how we occupy our land
Cause if we don't act immediately
Nature will make changes don't you see
When we finally decide to act
It may be too late and that's a fact
Thank you, Chris, for an excellent and brutal analysis of the coming collapse. All the ingredients are here now and rushing pell-mell down the hill to annihilation.
Analyses like yours (this one and others you've written) need to be seen by as many people as possible. Perhaps a few prepared folks can survive, if the end isn't nuclear, and rebuild smaller communities and perpetuate the species. Nevertheless, I'm not particularly optimistic.
It seems that Gaia has had enough of us screwing things up and is ready to be done with our entire species.
Wise words, as always. Thank you Chris. I wish they would be more widely viewed, and heeded.
In other countries I've seen where they post the newspapers on public display boards. At least there were many years ago when I traveled more. People, usually older men, would stand and read them, slowly moving down the length of the board as they read the stories. Then they could discuss the news with other readers. Quite different from here and now.
I am thinking of this after reading today's piece. I would love to see Chris' words posted in public squares to be absorbed by the population at large. Then they could be discussed and debated, and most importantly, acknowledged. I've been reading these warnings for several decades, and they keep being made and repeated and reiterated. And they've been slowly, steadily coming true. Yet the one thing they all seem to have in common is - they keep being ignored. It's more than enough to make one despair.
Still, I am grateful people with insight and intelligence are sounding the alarm. It's a tough slog, but it does give me hope. Keep it up!
Fatalists have been lamenting the end of civilization throughout the history of civilization. This would be easy to accept as a respectable alternative view had not the fatalists become the prime culprit in social and economic destruction.
“This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid.”
I think a small subset of modern people have the capacity to see the long range consequences of greed, resource hoarding, and murder. In many hunter gatherer societies, these traits or deeds were looked down upon and considered taboo, even deserving of exile.
Many of us still are content with only what we need and sharing the rest, as are many in other countries like Colombia. I don’t know if it’s all of humanity or just those peddling this ‘humans own the earth to exploit everything in it bs’ that has given rise to rapacious capitalism.
We will have to live through a period of technofeudalism, but as Chris says, every empire decays under the weight of the greed of the few at the top. Instead of glorifying billionaire asshats like Musk and Bezos, we should exile and shame them. Their money is worthless without a society that accepts it.
It's worth pointing out that the existing world population of ca. 8 billion people is probably not sustainable even under current conditions, let alone at a global temperature increase of 4 degrees C! The global footprint for the current human population corresponds to the consumption of about 1.7 Earths each year. Climate change is a symptom of a larger problem called ecological overshoot. This year Earth Overshoot Day fell on July 28th, which means that the activities of the human species became non-sustainable on July 29th.
Mr Hedges is a clear thinking observer and writer.
Impossible to hit the “like” ❤️ after reading such a brilliantly written, albeit chilling, account of history and what appears to be our hopeless future. However, as usual, I so appreciate your succinct and vivid accounting of the horrors of the past that we incomprehensibly seem to insist upon hurtling toward; and now on an even grander and seemingly more final scale (!). How “exceptionally” American of us! “Now total destruction!! Bigger and better than ever before!” (Brought to you by: insert corporate name here). Sheesh 🙄! I will go to my grave shaking my head at the hubris and absurd idiocy of humankind willing to throw it all away, despite massive warnings, for the sake of what? Ego? Greed? Fear? Vengeance?
What a cowardly and egotistical species we are that we will forfeit and sacrifice everything for everyone because some of us who have amassed power, somehow feels unloved and/or can’t share with others. And the rest of us who refuse to band together to take back power and demand what might slow or stop this insanity are scarcely better. How criminal and bizarre! Ultimately, I can’t help but feel what a pathetic and tragic waste of evolution is humankind! But, who knows? Perhaps this is the way it’s supposed to ultimately devolve.