Excerpts: Climate & Ecological Emergency: A Sanity Check

“Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analysing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanise action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses.”

– From ‘Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios‘ by Luke Kemp, Chi Xu, Joanna Depledge, and Timothy M. Lenton, edited by Kerry Emanuel, MIT, Cambridge, March 2022

Earth, Our Only Home

From households to communities to countries, we have House Rules or Laws of the Land for the citizens and for guests and visitors. Adherence to these rules is considered quintessential for their smooth functioning and for their continuance as sustainable entities. We not only follow these rules, we reward good behaviour and penalise those who break those rules. Further, there are deterrent penalties for repeat and serious offenders. Framing these rules and abiding by them are a key feature of civilisation and very often they are heralded as markers to distinguish advanced civilised countries from the backward ones.

In the same way, there are House Rules for living on the lovely green and blue planet Earth, that the indigenous see as a mother and which is our only home. This home of ours is in the danger of losing its ability to support life, due to gross violation of its House Rules and the perversity of modern civilisation that rewards the violators and even puts the biggest and repeat offenders into positions of influence and decision making, where they can frame laws for their impunity. These laws are at times, cleverly disguised as helping the poor and underprivileged but as we shall highlight in the next section, its hidden objective has been to feed their greed and pathological addiction to polluting lifestyle and vested interests. This pathological addiction has now turned into a full-scale paranoia in which they are now hiding behind religious cults with delusional ideologies of anti-humanism and trans-humanism. This has further complicated our response to the Climate and Ecological Emergency. We need a sanity check to come to terms with this grotesque situation in order to save our only home.  

“Earth is the home we know and love not because it is Earth-sized and temperate…(but because) it has a billion-year-old relation with life. Present-day Earth is our life-support system, and we cannot live without it. ..Just as life on Earth has evolved with our planet over billions of years, forming a deep, unique relationship that makes the world we see today, any alien life on a distant planet will have a similarly deep and unique bond with its own planet. ..Living on a warming Earth presents many challenges. But these pale in comparison with the challenges of converting Mars, or any other planet, into a viable alternative. Scientists study Mars and other planets to better understand how Earth and life formed and evolved, and how they shape each other. We look to worlds beyond our horizons to better understand ourselves. In searching the Universe, we are not looking for an escape to our problems: Earth is our unique and only home in the cosmos. There is no planet B.”

House Rules of Mother Earth

Like in any home or in a homeland, following the House Rules of Mother Earth are necessary for our peaceful and harmonious coexistence and at this late stage when we are pushed to the brink of extinction, our very survival as humans. 

House Rule #1 Every species on Earth must have a species-appropriate and species-scale habitat. It is noteworthy that even as every species from ants to elephants, birds and fishes follow this rule, it is only the modern industrial society who have been violating this rule. The violation of human-scale habitats is primarily caused by automobile-dependent land use planning and sprawl. The violation of human-appropriate habitats are caused by artificial heating and cooling of living spaces in regions which are not hospitable for non-indigenous ways of life. In other areas that are hospitable for humans, violation of the house rule occurs due to wasteful and harmful use of electricity, piped water supply, fossil fuel supply, roads, and communication networks. 

“Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, after having rebounded from the COVID economic decline to an all-time-high in 2021, continue to rise in 2022 and hit another record high… With emissions still rising, weather extremes continue, and were even more clearly attributable to climate change.” 

– Sivan Kartha, Board member of Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists and scientist at the Stockholm Environmental Institute

“Humans will be extinct by 2026” – Professor Guy McPherson, climate scientist on abrupt climate change on 20 January 2023 

“Scientists warn humanity is running low on the resources that sustain it, leading to the destruction of our way of life within decades. This is considered the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, but it isn’t the first caused by a natural disaster. Fossil record research says today’s rate of extinction is 100 times faster than typical history.” – Humans Will Soon Go Extinct Unless We Can Find 5 More Earths, Stanford scientists Paul Ehlrich and  Tony Barnosky , report by Tim Newcomb, 5 January 2023

“Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” the scientists said, adding that there were “ample reasons” to suspect global heating could result in an apocalyptic disaster.” – The Guardian, Climate endgame: risk of human extinction ‘dangerously underexplored’, August 2022

Healthy Emissions vis-a-vis Toxic Pollution 

The central challenge in our efforts to address the climate and ecological emergency, as we come out of denial and face the reality, is to uncover the mystery on how the nature of emissions from slow combustion of biomass in indigenous societies varies from the rapid combustion of fossil fuels by modern industrial society. The reason why this mystery at the heart of the climate and ecological crises remains ‘dangerously unexplored’ even amidst a plethora of scientific research on everything under the sun is not difficult to track. This follows the pattern of ‘towering conceit’ that we find in the case of ‘development’, ‘poverty alleviation’, ‘environment conservation’ and ‘vaccines’ as part of an elaborate psychological war against humanity.  

In the traditional indigenous cultures that have existed for thousands of years, extraction of fossil fuels, minerals and even water from deep below the Earth’s surface is prohibited. The emissions from slow combustion of selective biomass – tree sheddings, wood, herbs, crop residue, dung cakes from indigenous breeds etc., on the other hand, obtained from forest or farming income, are beneficial for humans and all kinds of flora and fauna. 

A major concern with current climate change in the past 200 years, however, is due to the indiscreet, large-scale and unabated use of fossil fuels – coal, petroleum, (un)natural gas, shale oil – by the modern industrial society fueled by greed and apathy that has created pathological addiction and acute dependence throughout the modern industrial civilisation. Unlike in earlier periods of healthy emissions from the Yagya way of life which was part of the natural cycle of Earth, the feedback mechanisms now are causing a ‘runaway’ warming effect in modern times that is proving to be extremely difficult to halt or reverse, unless we take urgent actions to completely ban extraction and use of fossil fuels and other toxic pollutants.

Climate and ecological emergency is a direct result of violation of the House Rules of Mother Earth by the modern industrial society, primarily due to its pathological dependence on coal, petroleum, minerals and water extracted from deep below the surface of the Earth over the past 200 years and the impunity of its offenders rooted in their abjectly vulgar belief of Earth, not as mother that feeds and nurtures us, but a ‘kept’ to be ravaged and plundered. 

Religious Cults – Ánti-humanism and Trans-humanism

We are witnessing today a highly shocking mass suicide pact driven by dangerous ‘neo-religious cults’ that wants to take whole of humanity down with them. Needless to add, this criminal behaviour is in gross violation of the established global norms of protection of human life and respect for human dignity

This horrendous act of mass murder at an unprecedented scale in the history of humankind, is goaded primarily by two diverse ideologies – ‘anti-humanism’ (that blames humanity for destroying nature and therefore wants to exterminate humans to save nature) and ‘transhumanism’ (it believes human bodies are not needed as their minds can be merged into supercomputers and achieve ‘technological singularity’, fueling the ongoing destruction of nature’s life support systems that will lead to human extinction). Like the dialectic of capitalism and communism, that together colluded to further the industrialisation agenda in the garb of development, even as they were perceived as opposing ideologies, the new dialectic of anti-humanism and trans-humanism has been planted to further the depopulation agenda that is essentially, a mass suicide pact fueled by a real HIV pandemic of hubris, ignorance and vanity. 

Driven by highly powerful and ‘wealthy’ people on either side, humanity is thus trapped between a rock and a hard place. Both however, covertly and overtly agree on the human depopulation agenda, working in insidious collusion behind the scenes, to expedite human extinction, with the Covid Pandemic as its ‘trojan horse’ for a treacherous bio-psycho-spiritual warfare. 

Out of their hubris and vanity, these dangerous criminals are not only apathetic to the rest of humanity, emboldened by their success so far in taming the global institutions and deluding the masses, they are even the loudest voices demanding a New World Order. Mindless of the fact that they are the ones who control the Old World Order. These greedy and selfish megalomaniacs have also given a bad name to globalism, even though their interests are only to serve a few and shrinking number of the rich and powerful money bags and their planted political agents through whom they control the other institutions from media to academia.

The Farce of UN Sustainable Development Goal #13

Although bad-to-worst case scenarios remain underexplored in the scientific literature, statements labelling climate change as catastrophic are not uncommon. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called climate change an “existential threat.” Academic studies have warned that warming above 5 °C is likely to be “beyond catastrophic”, and above 6 °C constitutes “an indisputable global catastrophe”.

The Deeper Simplicity

The dehumanising and despiritualising ideologies of anti- and trans-humanism are offshoots of the same materialistic development paradigm that has dominated the global narrative since the middle of the Twentieth Century, as the last and most treacherous stage of ‘colonialism’ and ‘European renaissance’ for over past 500 years. 

Wolfgang Sachs in his treatise on Development : A Guide to the Ruins pins down this deeper simplicity at the bottom of the raging chaos of delusion and derangement to the discovery of ‘poverty’ by America, the new military superpower just after the Second World War. Without this important discovery, the powerful and massive foundation of development with its wide universal appeal could not be laid.

‘Poor is not necessarily poor’

“Binary divisions, such as healthy/ill, normal/abnormal or, more pertinently, rich/poor, are like steamrollers of the mind; they level a multiform world, completely flattening anything which does not fit. The stereotyped talk of ‘poverty’ has disfigured the different, indeed contrasting, forms of poverty beyond recognition. It fails to distinguish, for example, between frugality, destitution, and scarcity.”

Frugality is a mark of cultures free from the frenzy of accumulation. This is akin, in modern parlance to just-in-time, lean and agile, but robust and resilient systems. In these, the necessities of everyday life are mostly won from subsistence production with only the smaller part being purchased on the market. 

In Indian culture, this value of non-hoarding or aparigrah is held as a key to spiritual progress and socialised in the practice of ‘daan’ or giving away your surpluses periodically and all of it after three to five years and starting afresh. Frugality is upheld as a high virtue among professions such as educators (guru / shikshak), healers (vaidya) and protectors (kshaatra).  These ways of life maintained by cultures which recognize and cultivate a state of sufficiency is a resonating feature of all indigenous societies around the world; it only turns into demeaning ‘poverty’ when pressurised by an accumulating society, that puts its most wretched and despicable accumulators on the cover page of their magazines and glorifies them as its ‘role models’.

The World As a System

A new category of problems – ‘global issues’ – emerged which demanded a forum and the UN seized the opportunity. Stockholm was only the beginning of a series of major conferences (on population, food, science and technology, desertification and so on), which helped alter our perception of global space. The world had previously been seen as open country in which a multitude of nations pursued economic growth, each for itself and against all the others. This was slowly replaced by the image of an interconnected global system in which all nations had to operate under an array of restrictive conditions. Global space was experienced less and less in terms of opportunity and ever more clearly in terms of limitation.

After these readjustments had been made, both conventional and socially-aware adherents of growth were able to live with a call for a conserver society; environmentalism was no longer in contradiction with the traditional debates on growth and basic needs. In effect the Brundtland Report incorporated ecological concern into the idea of development by erecting ‘sustainable development’ as a conceptual roof under which the environment could be both violated and healed. As so many times in the last 40 years, when the destructive effects of development were recognized ‘development’ was stretched in such a way as to include both injury and therapy.

Transition to the Yagya way of life 

Kim Kendall is a retired Clinical Psychologist and Political Ecologist with a specialty in social barriers to adoption of sustainable lifestyles and livelihoods. In an essay titled ‘Against the Economic Grain: Addressing the Social Challenges of Sustainable Livelihoods’ published by Resilience.org on in January, 2023, he shares the challenges on the way to cut fossil fuel emissions in half by 2030, which many observers would consider the least that we could do to avert human extinction. We not only need to completely reorganise our energy systems (deep decarbonization), he says, we also need to completely reorganise our day-to-day lives. 

When thoughtful authors speak of the need for “the deep transformation” of our values and sense of connection to Earth, the need for transformative or “quantum” social change, what exactly are they getting at? What would that transformation look like on a day-to-day basis for the majority of us? And what is getting in the way?

Going down the hill slope of fossil fuel dependent industrial civilisation might have had its own set of challenges. Giving up fossil fuels as we need to climb back will inevitably require two things: one, a world government to create an enforceable global mandate to level the playing field in order to overcome the socio-economic and socio-cultural challenges. That would make it possible to give up fossil fuel altogether within the next three years, if not earlier. Two, even as the west seems determined to end the fossil fuel story, giving up fossil fuel dependencies, as Kim Kendal elucidates in the passage above, also creates a void. The western world doesn’t have a new story that can enthuse a new sense of purpose. Not surprising, suicidal religious cults of anti-humanism and trans-humanism are gushing in, towards this depressing and vacuous atmosphere. 

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