We regularly read discussions and opinions on the topic of how many years remain for bold action on climate change. What this profusion of rhetoric neglects or ignores is the sad fact that, in fact, we have ZERO years to act to attenuate or reverse ecocide, the decrease of animal or plant populations and wholesale disappearance of species. For instance, it’s pretty clear that insect populations have crashed in the past few years. Scraped your windshield of insects much this past summer? Yeah, me neither.
Wake up. There is NO time We are currently enmeshed in a major extinction event, one that’s probably been in progress for at least the 300 years of industrialization and that environmental scientists have dubbed the “Sixth Mass Extinction.” A more comprehensive view is that this extinction event has been operant for the 10,000 or so years since the onset of agricultural societies. Every action or inaction, every ecological impact of our unregulated economic engines will either promote or attenuate these impacts on species.
Nor can we ignore the more indirect ecocidal impacts of climate change. For example, the California forest fires are usually examined in the context of higher temperatures, drought and carbon emissions. But after several years running, it’s clear that a major consequence is the fragmentation of habitat, segregating resident animal species into islands of smaller populations. As this occurs, it becomes more likely that those small populations of a species will necessarily resort to inbreeding. Inbreeding reduces genetic variation. This, in turn diminishes the species’ flexibility and renders it more prone to changes that can quickly cascade to extinction.
This is where we are. NOW, not 10 years or 12 years or x years in the future. Now. Bottom line is that there’s only so much you can remove nodes from the network of the energy-materials-and-information exchanges that underpin the health of a complex system. As species are lost, as the system becomes less complex, it’s also loses some of its adaptability. At some unknown point, ecosystem crash is possible.
Do I have a therapeutic prescription? Sadly, no, that’s far too tall an order. I just try not to get too hopelessly depressed about it. because both inept political parties exhibit a mentality akin to that of of brains on heavy doses of opiates — robotically doing the bidding of their corporate masters on Wall Street and in Big Energy, Big Pharma, and the Military-Industrial complex.