I gave it one last gasp on my Facebook wall. One last effort to try to convince my friends and family on BOTH sides of the spectrum that we were focusing on the wrong things. Now, I’m done. I’ll focus on my students and sympathetic peers only from this point forward, because I’m tired of getting the “looks” like I’m some overly pessimistic nut-job who will soon walk into the wilderness, grow a beard, and live with the wolves. They want to go on cheering at the Coliseum while the barbarians approach, let them. I’m done trying to organize a wagon train out of Rome at this point.
Here’s what I wrote, for all the good it did.
"At the risk of being further viewed as an “eternal pessimist” or “crazy loon” in the eyes of my friends and family, I’m going against my own better judgement and post this anyways. It’ll probably be the last post I’ll make along these lines, because I’m tired of screaming into the void of a world more determined to hide its head in the sand than even talk about The Big Things. Alas, the reservoir of fucks I use regarding how I am viewed by others runs dry, so here goes:
I still don’t know how to say it properly, but my sense as a historian is that until we truly analyze and correct the larger trends that are causing the frustration, anxiety, populism and anger that appear to be growing worldwide, things will only get worse. We are facing big challenges that will only get bigger, and we’re not even talking about them in any serious sense. So here’s a primer of things I’ve brought up before, consolidated in one shiny list. The first candidate of ANY party to start addressing these issues seriously will get my vote and my support.
-We’ve all but run out of low-cost-to-extract petroleum. It’s only been masked by a temporary glut in supply that is rapidly dissipating. If we think that oil pipeline is going to solve our oil problem, or that fracking/tar sands will, we need to look deeper at the EROEI equation. When the global demand for oil really meets the supply crunch that is coming, shit gets real. We gotta get ON this, now.
-Our climate is going ape-shit and haywire. It doesn’t lead to “longer growing seasons,” it leads to disruptions in food supplies, species collapse, and more extreme weather phenomenon. We all see it, but we write it off because it means we don’t have to wear mittens in January around here.
-Our ecosystem is collapsing as we speak. Bees, insects of all kinds, amphibians, all dying. These are canaries in the coal mine we seem content to ignore. Ever hear of the food chain? Yeah, we’re on there, and we depend on that chain for our own food, whether we choose to ignore it or not. Seriously, Bumble Bees are now at risk of going extinct. Think about that.
-The way free trade has happened has led to major global and domestic income inequality. It could have led to a more even distribution of wealth, but instead it went to the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else. One BIG reason so many people are pissed, I might add.
-Nuclear-armed nations are beginning to squabble over dwindling resources. Alliances and agreements that have kept things relatively peaceful for the last six decades are at high risk of crumbling. Protectionism and saber-rattling are now on the table. The last time that happened in the modern industrial era was in the 1930s, and it didn’t end well.
-Debt levels in every industrialized nation have reached previously unimaginable (and I would argue, unsustainable) levels. We have pulled too much prosperity from the future to fund our “wants” today, and the only way to fund the future repayment of those debts is either a massive debt-write-off - leading to a collapse of the financial system of the globe - or future growth needs to be so spec-freaking-tacular as to pay it all back and leave enough over for future generations to have any wealth left. I have serious doubts how future generations will do this in a low-growth environment.
-7.4 Billion people and still climbing exponentially. On a finite planet. How’s that math work again please? Oooh, maybe we can find another planet and move there! At least until we come up against the math on that one, too. Oh, and there hasn’t been enough funding for this kind of science in over twenty years, so currently we don’t even have the ability to build a base on our own moon, much less travel to, and colonize, other worlds. If such a thing is even feasible.
I GET the anger that many of my friends and family on the “left” are feeling towards those on the “right,” and I understand why the reverse is also true. The issues we are yelling about are important ones, to be sure, but my growing unease stems from the fact that I feel like we are arguing over what to do with the rabbit while the velociraptors are moving in behind us.
I don’t have the answers to all of these challenges, but as a collective species we’ve done some pretty amazing things, so I have no doubt that if we put our collective minds to them we’d come up with some pretty decent solutions. What I DO know is that we can’t solve problems we refuse to acknowledge or discuss, and ignoring the challenges will not make them go away.
So, what do we do? How do we get these issues out there, discussed in the mainstream? Will it only take a disaster on an epic scale? Do we have to literally be OFF the cliff before we realize there was one in the first place?
We need to start examining the illnesses rather than the symptoms, on multiple levels."
I did get 26 likes and 3 “hearts,” but no one single person contacted me to discuss what needs to be done, or anything.
Now I know why people walk into the woods, grow beards, and live with wolves.
