How We Wrecked The Oceans

Like the Indo-Aryan God Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson is here to turn your comfortable, complacent Mental World upside-down. He's able to do that because we are destroying the Physical World—in this case, the Earth's Oceans.

Before I continue, I want you to watch How We Wrecked The Oceans (18:19). What do you say? Too busy, maybe later? Maybe never? If you have any interest, however small, in the future of Life on this planet, including Human Life, I suggest you watch it now.

Finished? That was tough, I know. Are you feeling a bit less confident about the future? I hope you didn't conclude that wrecking the oceans is inconsequential, that we can easily fix it—denial is not just a river in Egypt. Let's talk about that much ignored, much maligned subject called Reality.

I'll start with a quote from a review of Eaarth, a new book by the earnest but "grudgingly" optimistic environmental activist/writer Bill McKibben.

It is in this final section [of the book], called “Lightly, Carefully, Gracefully,” that the real problems begin. If you are, like McKibben, a grudging optimist who believes that human society can willfully transform into a better version of itself, you might be persuaded by his arguments, some of them new, others a little old hat. Arguments that a smaller, diversified agriculture could add stability to our compromised industrial food-production system. That “growth” as an economic model is inherently flawed and will no longer be viable. That an “uptick of neighboring” will spread the sharing and implementation of practical, Eaarth-friendly how-to-ism. That the Internet could alleviate the rural boredom so many of us dread when we contemplate chucking it all and going back to the land, as he argues we must

But many of these proposed solutions inadvertently resemble the list of things Christian Lander lampooned in his 2008 best seller Stuff White People Like: “farmer’s markets,” “awareness,” “making you feel bad about not going outside,” “vegan/vegetarianism.” It’s not that these things aren’t important. But in the absence of some overarching authority, a kind of ecologically minded Lenin,they will remain hipster lifestyle choices rather than global game changers...

Let's have Jeremy Jackson retort from the end of the video—

What will the oceans be like in 20 or 50 years? Well, there won't be any fish, except for minnows, and the water will be pretty dirty, and all those kinds of things, full of mercury, etc, etc ... and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global coastal ocean, and you sure won't want to eat fish that were raised in it because...

The question is how are we all going to respond to this? And we can do all sorts of things to fix it, but in the final analysis, the thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It's not about the fish, it's not about the pollution, it's not about the climate change, it's about us and our greed and our need for growth, and our inability to imagine a world which is different from the Selfish World We Live In Today.

So the question is will we respond to this? Or not? I would say that the Future of Life and the Dignity of Human Beings depends on our [response]. Thank you.

There are two levels of change with very widely separated degrees of difficulty described in the two quotes.

At a deeper level, the question turns on whether human behavior is malleable (almost) without limit. McKibben believes human society can (in the words of the reviewer) willfully transform into a better version of itself. This quote is from the Eaarth website—

Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.

Presumably, in such communities we will all be vegetarians, listen to National Public Radio, surf the internet to relieve our boredom, and go to community-run Farmer's Markets to eat locally grown food. Sounds nice, but none of this gets to the heart of the problem Jackson describes. McKibben's solution amounts to Stuff White People Like for survivalists.

Jeremy Jackson doesn't offer Hope. Instead, he states correctly that there is one and only one way out of this awful mess. He doesn't pretend that forming local, self-sufficient communities is going to ameliorate the terrible effects of dead stratified oceans, of a Marine Extinction on a global scale. In Jackson's view, the Human Species must be Born Again. We have to somehow change who we are. We have to fix ourselves. And no procrastinating allowed, because we're out of time—we have to do it now. This is your wake-up call.

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether humans can radically change their collective behavior. Here at DOTE, I make it a point to avoid the usual Obligatory Hope. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. I believe Human Nature is fixed, despite enormous but ultimately superficial cultural diversity. We're a Species, so what you see is what you get.

Tomorrow I will update my past writings on Earth's biodiversity crisis.

Comments

[Randy]

It is going to take the collapse of industrial society to force change because we as humans are incapable of changing in large enough numbers to stop the death of the oceans or any of the other problems we face (and I'm sure, Mr. Cohen, that you figured that out a long time ago). Once the dust settles and 80% of us are gone, the earth might heal somewhat in a 100 years or so and those left might have a chance at surviving and starting a new civilization. Without easy access to fossil based energy we hopefully won't get a chance to destroy everything a second time.

[Rebecca Redfield]

Thank you for your work on this blog. I hope you’re not disheartened by the scarcity of comments… I’d like to see more commentary here, and since I’ve been lurking quite a while, and this post really struck me, here are some thoughts.

Jeremy Jackson suggests those of us in our 60s or 70s can remember a different world. He’s correct; I’m in my 60s; have lived most of my life in suburban Chicago and rural southern Wisconsin. The changes are shocking, though perhaps apparent only to people who pay attention to the outdoors. Our rural areas are industrialized - that’s the only term for the type of farming practiced now. What’s left of Wisconsin’s dairy cows are indoors, in confinement. You see few to no animals in pastures nowadays. Open space is all precisely cultivated, multiple cropped (zero time or space for birds and other wildlife to raise their young), crop spacing and acreage calculated via GPS, etc. Birds such as meadowlarks, bobolinks, field sparrows - common when I was a child - are scarce or gone. Honey bees - gone. As a child, I stepped carefully if barefoot in a lawn full of white clover! Now, most homeowners poison any clover in their lawns, and pollinators of any kind are scarce.

Jackson says we need to fix ourselves, but good luck with that project. We pretend that Tibetan gurus or Amazon tribespeople or indigenous medicine men from somewhere will reveal some great ecological wisdom that will save us, but as you note, human nature is of a piece. This looks to me like a form of environmental millennialism. The book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by John Gray, examines the attraction millennial ideas have for humans, and the harm these ideas have caused. (John Gray is a British intellectual who has written several books dealing with aspects of the human predicament; I particularly recommend False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, and Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals.) Gray’s points on human nature are similar to those in your post. No “great transformation” is going to change our natures. Ever hear of the book, The Greening of America? The “Age of Aquarius?” How about the “Harmonic Convergence?” I can recall all these New Age, hippie-type ideas, and similar others, were going to bring peace, love, and ecology to America and the world. This sort of wishful thinking is probably as old as forever.

Which brings me to Bill McKibben. Just as you’ve stopped reading Baseline Scenario, I’ve stopped reading McKibben - and probably for similar reasons. (OK, I still occasionally look at McKibben - and Baseline - but I don’t expect to find real solutions in either place.) Forget the whole head-up-its-anatomy environmental movement, worried about growth but so terrified of appearing politically incorrect on “diversity” and “women’s rights” and “immigration reform” it can’t talk about American - and world - overpopulation. Example: a local “green” group’s “action” suggestions: don’t idle your car, support a local May to September leaf-blower ban, recycle, shop at farmers’ markets, use CFLs, cut back on consumption generally. These suggestions will help you feel good about yourself, but won’t effect much real change. Cut consumption? Consuming is what humans do. Vegetarianism (to free up grain to feed the increased number of humans on their way to share the planet)? Tell that to the 3rd world billions whose very first move, at any economic improvement in their lives, is to add meat to their diets.

It’s not just the decline of the empire, it’s the decline of the whole human race. I suspect Ma Nature is going to do something about us humans quite soon. Who knows what? But you can be sure we won’t like it. We’ll wish we’d imposed rules on ourselves - everything from mandatory birth control to strictly regulating economic behavior will look quite pleasant compared to what’s coming, I think. I hope I’m wrong. It does look like it’s very late in the game, and it does feel like Ma Nature is getting ready. She’s going to clean our collective clock, she’s going to fix our little red wagon, and fix it good.

[The Deadbeat Dad]

SOYLENT GREEN IS COMING

[Dr. C.]

So this is what it feels like to be toast... Thanks for linking to the video Dave, I'd've missed it otherwise.
That old saw about "are humans smarter than yeast" is really insulting to the poor yeast.

Rebecca:

Great commentary, couldn't a thunk it better myself! I hope we're wrong too, but I don't think we are.

[Carol]

Thanks for the video.

You and your readers might want to check out Incredible Edible Todmorden (http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/) in the north of England. It's an answer to the middle-class stereotyping of the localisation movement.

Back to working in the veggie garden.

[Ralph Dratman]

No doubt we're heading for a big decline in human numbers. Yet I'd hate to see most of our knowledge lost in the process of population reset. Even though technology has caused most of the problems we face, some part of me wants to see our knowledge remain available to future humans.

I don't mean to suggest that our technology could survive intact and unchanged, only that the knowledge on which that technology is based should remain behind even after most of the people are gone.

Maybe the best outcome would be for a significant fraction of the population to succumb to some sort of famine or possibly a novel illness. Ideally, the population decline might occur gradually enough, say over ten to twenty years, that the surviving populace could keep things working to some extent.

After a big drop in human numbers, there would be far less pressure on the oceans and the atmosphere. I don't know how far our population would have to fall before the biosphere could begin to rebuild its robust diversity. My guess is that 10% of the people we have now might be able to exist in for a while without doing much more damage.

As for the alternative of reshaping human nature, I don't think that can ever happen. Our history as a species is simultaneously too grotesque and too successful to suggest any reason for optimism in that respect.

[Walter Carter]

Everyone is asking "what should we do" but that's just so much verbal masturbation. What's important is what we WILL do, which is nothing. We naturally destroy our environment. Its what we do. The earth will shake off its humanity like a dog shakes off fleas. Global population will be hitting its peak soon (for sure, within 50 years) and once we hit that peak and start to decline, we will never come close to those population maximums again. We created the population we have now by exhausting resources. Soon there will be little left to exhaust. Mother nature will force sustainable lifestyles, not governments... and we're not going to like it.