HOW COME NO ONE’S NERVOUS ABOUT OXYGEN?

Everyone is talking about carbon dioxide.  Well, what about the flipside?  Excuse the high school chemistry, but doesn’t every carbon dioxide molecule (CO₂) formed by burning anything  imply the binding of an oxygen (O₂) molecule to a carbon, and therefore the loss of that oxygen molecule, plus heat?  This means the conversion of an oxygen molecule into something you or I could never breathe (although, indirectly, we could, provided there were enough trees to convert the CO₂ back into O₂—oops, no, wait, we cut those down, didn’t we?).  Instead of a nice, cool, breathable O₂ molecule, we now have a CO₂ molecule joining all its kin above to hold more and more of the produced heat to the breast of Planet Earth....whether you light the gas or not, it’s hard to breathe in an oven.  I’m sorry, but I breathe oxygen, and so does my son, who will, at the going rate, have even less oxygen to breathe than I do.

Scientists have figures, there’s math to be done.  But scientists often get their money from large corporations who have a vested interest in coming up with a certain result.  Put simply, the scientist whose trials show that a specific, about-to-be-launched antidepressant is likely to have its consumers throwing themselves down the atrium of the campus Psych Building, just may not get rehired by the lab that depends on corporate dollars for its very existence.  This is no laughing matter, either, none of this—the guys in the white coats feed their children with that money, dirty or no.  The guy lying in his own pulp at the bottom of the atrium left family behind, and maybe hungry mouths as well.

Numbers, in short, can be manipulated, proof of corruption can be flushed or shredded or waved away with sly lawyers and cunning PR.  Words are all too often the pink frosting on a pan full of moldy turds.  And you and I might be too busy to sort it all out on the fly, so whom do we believe?

Thankfully, there’s common sense, and there’s grade school biology.  Right now, the buzz (of words and saws) is about the Amazon Rain Forest and other relatively pristine ecological (read “oxygen making”) juggernauts that are being crippled and dismembered before the collective eye.  While we worry about our bills, huge tracts of the Amazon are being leveled and converted into desert.  While we worry about the Amazon, the forests of the great Northwest are being used to provide jobs and profits to the weary.  If we happen to concern ourselves with Oregon spruce trees, we may not hear the last trees falling in Africa.  If we turn off our mass media for a minute, or at least cover eyes and ears, we might hear the echo of bygone trees falling all over Europe, where once a monk could walk from Austria to the west coast of Spain without being able to see the sky, and where now you’d be lucky to find one patch of forest that blotted out the blue as you passed. 

Just where did all that freaking oxygen go?  Because my grade school biology tells me that trees convert a lot of CO₂ into our next breath. 

Or, take Southern Illinois, which is right now fairly well carpeted with juvenile forest (and Lyme-disease carrying deer ticks), but which, nevertheless, should sport more topsoil than the couple inches sprayed over thick clay that one finds there.  It was always a mystery to me—again, using grade school biology with its elementary knowledge of composting—why the soil wasn’t thicker.   All those years of leaves falling (millions years’ of trees’ worth) should have left a lot more humus than is evident now.  Finally, in the middle of a hike through this territory, I came across a publication in a restaurant which explained the enigma: when people first settled those hills, they did what they knew how to do (you see, they’d come from Europe, where a view of the sky overhead was once a rare commodity): they cut down all the trees and tried to farm it (one tiny patch of near-virgin forest, Beall Woods, is left in the northeast corner of the Shawnee Forest in Southern Illinois).  Being hill country, two or three feet of topsoil slid into the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.  Ouch.

Now, I may not have a Ph.D. in nature-ology, but I am willing to bet that A) relatively little of the original forest we now call the Shawnee is left and B) that an extensive, mature forest, blessed with a yard deep of rich topsoil built up over ages of leaf mold composting, can much more efficiently supply you and I with our next breath than an pre-adolescent swath of woods with only a few inches of dirt at its disposal.

WE’RE TALKING ABOUT OXYGEN, PEOPLE!

Survivalists will tell you that, if you’re lost or roughing it out in the wild, water is much more important than food.  Most of us (let’s face it—we’re Americans) could live off our fat for a lot longer than we think.  But there’s only one thing more important than water (unless it’s an environment that’s not cooking you or changing you into freezer meat—but I’ll get to that later), and that’s oxygen.  So why the hell is nobody worked up about our VERY most precious resource? 

Here’s a question I have, looking around at my home state of Illinois (“The Prairie State”, home of the very least expanse of intact prairie of any state except for Iowa, “The Tall Corn State”).  Again, I am thinking about oxygen here.  I have had the privilege of walking through prairie here in the city of Champaign, IL.  It doesn’t take long to do so; you can figure the dimensions of this patch of green, tucked behind a billboard downtown, with a construction worker’s tape measure.  But I  notice that nobody ever cuts it down and leaves the ground there an ugly stubble.  Of course, fall and winter temperatures certainly cut down and even cut off any oxygen production going on in this mini-prairie, but a prairie field produces more O₂ than a cornfield even before harvest (since every square inch is covered in plants), and, since its not barren ground, yay much more than corn stubble.    This is all the more true since every effort has been made during the life of the corn field to eliminate everything but corn by way of handy herbicides and the icy touch of  sterilizing liquid nitrogen fertilizers.

The irony is that Champaign was never a prairie.  It was a swamp that supported a stunning profusion of life, if reports are to be believed that once a person could shoot 100 ducks an hour here.  Now it’s got a lot of lawns, a fair amount of trees (for a city), and some songbirds, but it sure doesn’t have 100 ducks an hour.  And I don’t suppose I even have to point out the supreme lushness of an environment that could support that much waterfowl—but it would, of course, be an environment that supported a huge number of water plants (which is what ducks eat), which would in turn create a huge amount of oxygen (which is what we breathe).

So far: a gajillion fewer trees + a gajillion fewer prairie and swamp plants = two-gajillion fewer O₂  factories.  And they didn’t move to China, Taiwan, or Indonesia; they’re gone, and pretty much forgotten.  The reckless belching of CO₂ (burnt O₂) means less oxygen; ditto the mass sawing, tilling, bulldozing and spraying (if not paving) to death of green plants.  WHY IN GOD’S NAME IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT OXYGEN?!?!?!

Global warming is not just about oxygen depletion nor exponential increases in carbon dioxide.  They keep saying that the CO₂ acts as a blanket that keeps Earth’s heat from radiating out into space.  Now, if you put an early rising iguana (before she’s had a chance to bask and raise his temperature) under a blanket, you’ll only end up keeping her cold, since she has no warmth to trap.  Ditto the Earth.  But every reaction that took O₂ and burned it onto a carbon molecule to make CO₂ also created heat in the bargain....try lying across your engine block after a nice warm drive in July, and you will see what I mean.  Campfires, cars, furnaces and factories all create both heat and the carbon dioxide to trap it in the atmosphere. 

Which is bad enough.  But after the skin grafts have healed from your experiment with the engine block, lie naked on a rooftop at high noon on a sunny summer day.  The iguana might feel quite nice, but you will surely be frying and baking at the same time.  Sidewalks also get quite warm, also bricks, cars as well (inside and out), and you wouldn’t want to make love on a sun-drenched parking lot unless you’re into some very disturbing S & M....Once you have enough burn cream gingerly spread across your back, try the same experiment by lying in some prairie grass, or the floor of the nearest woods under the same weather conditions.  After you’re done scratching, you might notice that it was a hell of a lot cooler to lie down on natural stuff than it is to lie down on man-made stuff.  That’s because rooftops and parking lots convert the sun’s energy to heat (and glare), while trees and other plants convert it to stems, leaves and flowers and beauty and—yes!—cool, clean oxygen.  In the bargain, they swallow up glare and turn it into oxygen and shade.

If you consider just the sheer number of cars in the world, and all the heat they are generating by burning or just sitting there in the sun (this would include, then, cars parked anywhere outdoors; or, if indoors, the roofs of the parking garages they are in work just as well), and then consider all the green plants that they and their roads and lots and garages have replaced, you might just come to the conclusion that, hey, we are creating and trapping quite a bit of heat that never existed until we as a race proudly reached our newsworthy critical mass of population and technology. 

Then, consider the obvious: that the aim of the so-called global economy (I don’t find it very economical, myself.  For that matter, I don’t find the term “conservative” very fitting—they’re not trying to conserve anything but profits) is to increase sales of heat creating/heat trapping stuff indefinitely.  It’s grow or die, and I know I am not the first to point this out but that would a great go-fight-win motto for cancer, or plague. 

Deserts also create heat.  Sand, like asphalt, gets quite hot.  Barren ground, compared to rain forest, creates a lot of heat.  Cut down the rain forests, which miraculously grow up out of poor and scanty soil, and you have barren ground, which can boast of only the banal skill of heating up when hit by sunlight.  Desert.  Again, more heat, less oxygen.  The fires set in the slash-and-burn technique of converting rain forest to arable land (for a year or two) will be a small factor in the heat equation, because the land itself will now create heat whenever touched by the sun, indefinitely. 

So why is nobody talking about heat except in terms of the carbon dioxide that traps it?  As if 99% of our activities weren’t constantly creating more HEAT?  In Spanish, you don’t say “I’m hot”, you say, tengo calor—I have heat.  Here’s what I think: tenemos calor—we have heat.  Tenemos mucho calor.  Oof!

…OK, I have done a bit of research.  Here’s why no one is talking about oxygen, it’s because there is so much of it.  The amount of CO₂ in relation to O₂ right now is .17%.  Oxygen is the second most common component of the Earth’s atmosphere at 23.1% by weight.  CO₂ is less than .06% by weight.  There’s so much freaking oxygen, we NEVER have to worry about it’s running out on us, right?

Where have I heard this before?  There’s so much freaking oil, land, water, forest, glacial ice, blah, blah, blah, whatever might stand in the way of the next contract.  Virtually ALL of the oxygen blessing this planet came from plants, and if the plants go, eventually so will the oxygen.  All I know is, they keep revising the speed at which global warming is increasing—every ten years I hear, “10 years ago, no one thought that global temperatures (or glacial melting, or coral reef die-off) could have progressed to where it has now.”  Meanwhile, oil rigs are set to rise out of the sea off the formerly prohibited coast of California.  Meanwhile, the automakers conspire to sell every man, woman and teenager in China a new car—and everyone there, as well as in every Third World country, wants a new car, would feel left out, deprived, poor and pathetic if they were to not own one.

Oh—shit!

It makes me want to wear a houseplant on my back, with a tube in my nose leading to the plant.  Oxygen!

Author's note: since I have written this speculative article, it has come out that atmospheric oxygen levels are indeed falling (faster, alarmingly, than carbon dioxide levels are rising).  See link:  http://disinfo.com/2013/01/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-are-dropping-faster-than-atmospheric-carbon-levels-are-rising/ Also, there are major hypoxic ocean zones due to blooms of inedible phytoplankton, themselves a consequence of farm runoff and treated sewage.  A healthy marine ecosystem's plants would be creating oxygen for itself and the world, but...

REFLECTIONS UPON THE 53rd BIRTHDAY OF GODZILLA-Born Nov. 11, 1954

Not long ago I went and saw  “Godzilla”.  I was a big fan as a youth, but had never seen the original, all-in-Japanese version.  Something about the lack of a Raymond Burr as protagonist, or any American for that matter, along with the regular references to nuclear weaponry a-la Nagasaki, made it more poignant.  The Japanese are the only people who have had a nuclear warhead detonate in their midst, but they are not the only ones to suffer the consequences of berserker technology.

Godzilla is a lizard.  Researchers of trauma hold that the persistent memories of shattering experiences rest in the reptilian area of our brain.  As I watched Godzilla pound his way through Tokyo, I felt I was watching the towering incarnation of the vaporized host of A-bomb victims take form to rage against the machine. 

50 years ago they made the film, in 1954, and a strange double vision emerges.  “Godzilla” was one of the first movies to prominently feature science and technology as both the raw fixtures of life and the lens through which we construct our modern framework of meaning.  Machines abound, as do scientists to supply our interpretation of the impossible.  It is a scientist who heroically gives his life to kill the creature and safeguard civilization.  But on the other side of that coin was the monster lashing out at it all: at the electrical wires, at the machines, at the buildings.  On the one hand, I felt oddly comforted by the scenes of technicians activating huge banks of  electrical fencing to try to fry the beast, with their clipboards and rooms full of dials and switches.  I wanted to think, “They’ll make it right.”  Then again, the lizard in me couldn’t help cheering on Godzilla as he made trash out of urban grids of buildings and pavement.  I grasped the statement made by the film, as Blue Oyster Cult summarized it:  “History shows again and again how Nature points up the folly of man—Godzilla!”).  Godzilla is Nature’s revenge, a walking volcano, a mobile earthquake, a thick-skinned tsunami.  Although the beast was translated into English as “he,” I have heard that he was in fact originally a "she," which only makes the identification of her as a force of Mother Nature more exact. 

I was struck by the depiction of Tokyo, a city in the early 1950’s, as already being surrounded by high tension wires, already crawling with cars, already lit up like a mall parking lot at night.  This seems bad enough, but now we are 50 years further along that same path.  Somewhere inside the simple reptile within, which only wants to catch its daily quota of bugs (or giant squid?), must object to all this industrious clutter and the corresponding loss of pristine habitat.  Perhaps it was my own inner iguana that wondered, just the other day, how many organisms have to die to make way for one mile of paved road—counting all the impossibly tiny worlds with their miniscule critters, the number must reach the billions of billions—how’s that for genocide?  But my iguana, speaking in experiential terms, has never known any better.  It has never roamed free in the Galapagos Islands, only thumped around in a cage….Perhaps that is part of the purpose of art, to give form to unwitnessed, unlived realities, that are nevertheless real, and urgent. We may sense them only dimly, via some as yet unextinguished memory of Eden, until they stomp across the screen of one’s imagination, breathing radioactive fire, making the reckless pay.

The hero of “Godzilla” sacrifices his life in order to ensure that the powerful do not get hold of his “oxygen destroyer” and use it for military-political ends.  He feared that reckless governments would end up turning  Earth into a graveyard.  I wonder why.

Speaking of oxygen, my thoughts are these:  Post-industrial civilization replaces more and more green plants with buildings, highways, parking lots.  Even farms lower oxygen production by planting fewer plants per square inch, and plowing them under in the fall.  We convert to CO₂ the coal and oil born of forests that in their day produced oxygen enough to respirate the herds of impossibly huge dinosaurs.  We kill off, even make extinct, the plants’ symbiotic partners, the animals.  One has to wonder if the creators of “Godzilla” knew enough science to see all this coming, or if their talent was more intuitive-artistic.   We’re talking oxygen here—try going without it for 60 seconds—and yet without much effort I am able to name several clear and present threats to the supply.  No wonder the filmmakers in question felt they had to make such a strong statement; they wanted us to feel Godzilla’s gigantic foot hovering over our living rooms, to hear his savage foghorn cry, and tremble.

I could go on indefinitely about ecological holocaust, but what I am really wondering is:  50 years after Godzilla roared her warning, what am I  to sacrifice?  How does tiny me help turn the massive corpse of Godzilla into a mountain of compost from which new life may spring?...Tough, given that, despite the monster's de-fleshing at movie’s end, I don’t believe she’s even dead yet (because the problem that spawned her isn't; and because they made 25 more movies).  But all the same, one feels that, due to the gravity of our situation (we’re talking oxygen), to give one’s life (or lifestyle) in some heroic way is the least I could do.

copyright 2004 by James F. Kotowski

REBUTTAL OF NEW YORK TIMES' CRITIQUE OF JARED DIAMOND'S "COLLAPSE"

REBUTTAL OF NEW YORK TIMES CRITIQUE OF JARED DIAMOND'S "COLLAPSE"

This essay reacts to New York Times book critic Gregg Easterbrook's 2005 opinion on Jared Diamond's books, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed.   Find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/collapse-how-the-world-ends.html?_r=0 

With obvious admiration for Diamond's eruditon and cogency, Easterbrook nevertheless concludes that the books' warning that we are likely headed for our doom is "probably wrong".   The only problem is that he doesn’t back up this counterassertion well—or, well, hardly at all.

He does hint that things could change for the better, although the scenarios he chooses to illustrate (e.g., the supposed halt of deforestation in the U.S., and the possibillity of finding elbow room on other planets) are shaky at best.  The halt of deforestation, in light of the continued loss of topsoil (globally, around 12 billion tons per year), is certainly not assured at all.  We still make our houses out of wood; we still write on paper, our population is mushrooming (not to mention that the most ecologically crippling lifestyle of all—the highly consumptive Western one—is the model to which the rest of the world aspires).  When the topsoil we have is exhausted (and so are we), what scruple will deter us from lopping down what is left of the forests for fuel and shelter?  Has Easterbrook been to Oregon, or toWashington State, or Alaska, where they still are clear-cutting, as we speak, the last of the old growth forests?  Has he ignored the conflagrations claiming huge tracts of the forest most prone to fire:  immature, crowded woods of the type that abound in post-agricultural and post-logging lands?  Or the loss of vast stands of Canadian conifers to pernicious beetles following the world’s warmth as it heads inexorably north?  Why does Easterbrook gloss over the fact that what allows us to leave some tracts of land untilled is so-called "high-yield" farming, which is also highly toxic and erosive?  Does he doubt that the present administration is selling off public lands to its cronies to do with as they will?  Has he counted the megatons of flora and fauna eliminated as urban sprawl and Big Ag have overflowed great tracts of land—habitat  that once supported tall grass and immense trees? 

Easterbrook has exactly this to say about the possibly rosy future: "Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space.  If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten."  As a counter to this crass bit of naïve magic-bullet rhetoric, I offer the following quote from a Zapara shaman, Gloria Ushigua:  "We have visited communities that are affected by the oil companies.  The people are sick, the water is polluted, they are hungry because the animals and fish have gone away, and the children have disease on their skin."….To give the poisonous and degratory practices of petroleum exploitation the blessing of our potential salvation is a slap in the face to every person, animal and vegetable ever to suffer its ill effects.  And to pin our hopes on escape is to ignore the obvious implication:  if we export our "culture" anywhere at all, what is to stop us from wreaking havok there as we have on Earth?  Easterbrook's is a keenly disturbing vision—the glory of scorched-earth empire spreading like a disease across the cosmos.  A much more gut-level issue, a bit closer to home, surfaces with the question:  how happy is a people who treat their environment, and therefore themselves, so shabbily?  Well, ask the Zapara people, because Easterbrook seems to be asking oil tycoons.

As for Diamond, I strenuously doubt that the books' author is merely worried about the issues at hand.  One does not write more than 1,000 pages on a subject out of worry.  ….The characterization of Diamond's concerns as "worry" and the blatantly flippant title of Easterbrook's critique ("There Goes the Neighborhood"), trivialize and minimize the obvious depth and urgency (not to mention the apocalyptic scope) of the works in question and the issues they lay out. 

Just to belabor the odd association between Easterbrook, technology, petroleum, and salvation: he avers at one point, arguing for the possibility of the Developing World's living standards' reaching Western levels (Diamond doubts this), that "(a) century ago rationalists would have called global consumption of 78 million barrels per day of petroleum an impossibility, and that's the latest figure."  Through this shining

example—again, a crass one, given the once and future devastation caused by fossil fuels—Mr. E. reveals himself both as a person who equates quality of life with high levels of petroleum consumption, and himself as The Rationalist in the present debate.  His oily blinders, as he tries to goop them over our eyes, deflect us from, as Neil Young put it, "the needle and the damage done".

Easterbrook distrusts Diamond's use of deceased island cultures to exemplify our own probable future, arguing that islands are more vulnerable than continents, because "a stressed species may have no place to retreat to".  He presses the point even though Diamond does analyze the Maya and Anasazi cultures, both continental—even though, if one stands far back enough, "continents," surrounded as they are by those great oceans, are nothing more than huge islands...and the more bloated our human numbers, the more far reaching the consequences of our technology and lifestyle, the smaller they are becoming.  Why must he see the difference as most crucial?  Could not the Easter Islands, Pitcairn, Henderson, and Greenland be the canaries to our coal mine?  I hear Easterbrook saying, "These canaries are so small.  Let's go deeper into this mine!"…In a real mine, he'd be talking to himself, because the miners would have left him to suck fumes and enjoy the cave-in.   Unfortunately, he is speaking from the pages of the New York Times, and I wonder how many its readers know how screwed we all will be if the war between profit and Nature reaches its grim and certain conclusion.  

Easterbrook criticizes Diamond's use of "pretechnology" populations….By using technology as the element of contrast, he reminds us to support the point he is criticizing. Exactly that—our technology—has given us the gods' power to actually lay waste to the natural systems that created and sustain us.  He hopes that the same technology, that absolute power that has corrupted us so absolutely, will save us in the end, by providing us with an escape hatch, merely: the Holy Spaceship To Somewhere.  Here is his tacit acknowledgement that our technology is powerless to reverse the destruction it has wreaked; a biosphere 6 billion years in the making cannot be resurrected with some fertilizer and a few ‘dozers....Wait, does his plan to escape to the stars by spaceship include ALL 25 billion people projected to exist on Planet Earth, all the poor and destitute which by then will have become the vast majority?  Or just literary critics who have sucked up to the petroleum lobby? 

Easterbrook may not  have to state his case very clearly, because in a scenario which few would enjoy thinking about, the resolution of which would require major lifestyle sacrifices on all sides, all he needs are vague refutations and a bone or two to throw at the NY Times’ reading public: e.g., what we need to do is "manage social pressure….and provide everyone with jobs".  HA!  We are failing miserably at that already.  I can only imagine what life will be like when billions more homo sapiens sapiens come along, and that much more of our topsoil (not to mention air and water) is lost and tainted.  What "jobs" will there be (just curious) if our crops have nothing but rocks and clay in which to grow? 

The critic cites a figure by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, that only 9 percent of vertebrates are "in danger" (a comfortable minority of us vertebrates), whereas Diamond believes that a "large fraction" will be gone in the next fifty years.  I am sure that the folks at IUCN mean well, but surely—given the damage already done by our civilization to our neighboring flora and fauna, that is a very conservative estimate about which I have three responses. 

One is that this number addresses the danger to species—in other words, if anyone, anywhere, can find just one specimen of a certain organism, no matter how large its numbers may have originally been—not extinct.  If a few breeding pairs exist in zoos, the "vertebrate" is not extinct; But in a local sense, that animal may indeed be gone forever, even if it’s still hanging on in other parts of its range.  Thus, I can say with assurance that, here in the Midwest, the bear, the puma, the elk, the buffalo and the wolf are all extinct in their wild state.  Others, like badgers, are sighted only rarely whereas they were once common.  The remaining exemplars of the massasagua rattlesnake in Illinois are being rounded up by scientists to try to avoid their complete extinction.  My home county of Champaign, Illinois, used to be an upland marsh, a shallow bowl of swampwater rising up from the prairie, until they dug ditches into the sides of the bowl to drain it and make it all farmland.  Mineral-rich glacial deposits, plus 18,000 years of duck poop, made that an attractive proposition.  The duck hunters were, evidently, not consulted, even though, in 1880, a decent shot was able to take one hundred ducks per hour—ONE HUNDRED DUCKS—PER HOUR!  They were thicker than the thieves in a fossil-fuel industry boardroom.  Compared to this incredibly fertile ecosystem, the few ducks we might be lucky to see on a given day are clear evidence that we are living in a desert.  

Another, much more sobering measure of the health of the biosphere might be to gage the number of individual organisms that would be present right now if not for us.  If we stacked all the corpses into a macabre mountain of death, how much would that mountain weigh?  If we count every single organism, down to all the tiny soil denizens quietly suffocated beneath the asphalt, the numbers would be staggering, even sickening:  How many quintillions of pounds of plants and animals have we exterminated already?  One menacing ‘clue’ is the cleanliness of windshields in summertime: bug guts used to be a major deal during any trip, especially through the country.  It was truly gross.  But now the lack of bugs is just chilling, especially when you consider that all the animals that used to eat the bugs that used to smear all the windshields so liberally are now dead, starved. 

Or we could talk topsoil loss.  11-15 billion tons of it erode off of farmed fields yearly. A local clue for me is that the pioneers of my home state of Illinois extensively logged the southern hills, allowing 2 to 3 feet of topsoil to run into the rivers, and that some farmers, plying their trade on formerly ultra-thick, ultra-rich post-glacial soil, are seeing bald spots where the clay is clearly visible.

My second response is that the IUCN's figures are surely based on some linear model of extinction—if we continue mathematically at the present rate, and so on—but that the demise of life on Earth as we know it, if it does occur,  will surely do so with exponential speed once certain key elements are sufficiently weakened…thus the word "Collapse" in the title of Mr. Diamond's book.  Such a soothing estimate must ignore the intense interdependence of all life on the planet.  If ants and only ants went extinct as a class of insects, some claim, the rest of the world's life, opposable thumbs or no, would be wiped out in very short order.  To what degree this is true I do not know, but interdependent food and resource webs point to a chain reaction collapse when compromised.  Imagine this: pernicious microbes in ascendency, too much CO₂, too little 0₂, ozone holes, keystone species destroyed, the level of toxins too high and nutrients too low, erosion at crisis levels, human population reaching critical mass, per capita consumption rising indefinitely, neglected nuclear plants going into meltdown, etc., etc.  The whole game of Jenga could come crashing down without any help from meteors,volcanoes or even missiles—just us, hello, homo sapiens sapiens here, doing our clichéd business-as-usual thing (although missiles and business-as-usual are disturbingly close bedfellows).  A linear study assumes that only the forces currently at work will continue to degrade the numbers estimated, but Nature demands that interdependent and exponentially chain reacting elements be factored in.   

Which leads to my third response: the underwhelmingly tame and calming “only nine percent of vertebrates are in danger” may or may not be true at the moment, but other scientists and organizations thereof give state-of-the-biosphere speeches that are not nearly so reassuring.  These Chicken Littles state unequivocally that we are in the midst of a man-made mass extinction event, with the rate of extinction 100 or more times faster than Nature’s extinctions as they occur without our help.  Although, if I walk out into a cornfield, and compare the number of organisms present there compared to how many there once were on the prairie—well, I’m with the Chicken Littles.  I am horrified, aghast, desparing.  A whole ‘nother article, as well as some very sad and angry poetry, would be required to describe the enormity of the loss of life once a field is hit by plow, mega-tractor tires, seed, artificial fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides.

Easterbrook finds the enormity of the overpopulation crisis painted by Diamond to be very disturbing, if only because easy fixes would elude us.  "How," he wonders, "would Diamond prevent (overpopulation)?  He does not say."  The lack of easy answers means we should not even investigate this topic?  Preposterous that someone should point out a problem with no readily available answer!  What a waste of 1,000 pages, huh?

According to Easterbrook himself, though,  "Nuclear war, plague, a comet strike or coerced sterilization" are the only forces that might stop the human population from rising to its predicted peak…."People cannot be wished away.".  But nor can the weight of the world, Mr. Easterbrook, which in terms of noxious burdens is becoming greater every day.  What we can do, as at least a first step, is to look the truth in the eye instead of dangling carrots in front of readers' noses while the garden soil runs off in the other direction.  We must be convinced of the dire and massive nature of our mess, or sheer inertia will propel us forward into self-genocide.  

The answer is simple, really: to use our knowledge and technology to counter, as much as we possibly can, the forces of degradation, pollution and overpopulation which we have so haplessly set in motion.  Obviously, adapting new (or old) forms of farming that build up the soil, developing a chemistry of detoxification, facillitating birth control, and proliferating education (which has a halting effect on population growth) seem a little more possible and closer to home at this point than escaping to the stars…don't they?  Shouldn't they?  Can we really figure out how to reach Saturn and describe a supernova, but be so clueless about creating solutions here on Earth?  To destroy is easier than to create, it is true, but if all that is green and good is at stake, and if we truly have the will, can the way be far behind?   As we downplay the looming cataclysm, we facillitate it, as certain cancers flourish because they disable the immune system, stifling the alarm and thereby the response.  Let's not dance the zombie dance, too much is at stake.  We are not talking just about the future, but all futures, the Fate of one and all.  To alter this Fate demands more truth, courage, determination, and sophistication than our New York Times Book Critic can stomach.

Maybe Easterbrook feels that he is being positive and optimistic, but isn't looking reality in the face without flinching more positive—and more effective?  Ask the cancer survivors.  To deny reality is another way of saying, "This is hopeless.  The best we can do here is fool ourselves."  This attitude seems to me to reflect a very low opinion of people and what good they can do given the naked truth.

The "cultural" ideas (free will, etc.), which Easterbrook lauds in his article as part and parcel of our Western superiority, will not save us as he implies—not, at least, if our most powerful and popular media outlets are poo-pooing us doomsayers based on vain hopes and spacey dreams.  I certainly see no savior, either, in the abdication of the mass media's original dream and mission: to look long and hard at any potentially dangerous issue.  What Jared Diamond's books discuss is The Issue of all issues, and how great is the contrast between Its dire urgency and the offhand plea for business-as-usual by 'critics' seeking to lull us into a false security?  Whom, I wonder, does this false sense of security serve?

That’s a whole other article.  But we can surmise a few things about exactly whom Gregg Easterbrook serves.  He’s not steward of Mother Nature’s, that much is clear.  Judging from his thought, he has ties or at least extremely positive feelings about the petroleum and space-pod manufacturing industries, to the point where he names them our only potential savior from this little non-problem of global extinction.  Easterbrook is a fellow of the Brookings Institute, long labeled as “liberal,” but with personnel who have a history of staffing Republican administrations.  Since when are Nixon, Reagan and Bush staffers liberal?  Did they see the light at a Ralph Nader tent meeting?  Read an article here http://fair.org/extra/brookings-the-establishments-think-tank/ about Brookings’ bias, if you wish, but I think Gregg Easterbrook, the Brookings fellow, and his chalk-on-tissue-paper ‘critique’ of Jared Diamond’s works, is a living piece of evidence as to the rightward lean of this ‘liberal’ think tank.  Still, labels of conservative versus liberal are not terribly useful; the point is—who makes the best points?  Compare Diamond’s exhaustively researched tomes to Easterbrook’s diffident poo-pooing and PR for Space Pods, Inc., and it’s clear who has the tighter grip on reality.

Copywrite 2005 by James F. Kotowski

NATURE BOY ON APOCALYPTIC SCENARIOS

Whatever the threat may be, or combination of threats, it will come from our breakneck race to be superpopulated, supersophisticated and superconnected, which ultimately makes us vulnerable from any number of quarters.

With the human population ballooning, and the rest of the populations of plants and animals which support the viability of life on the planet crashing, and local areas dependent on continent-wide food/power grids–the homo sapiens digital aircraft is heading into a nosedive, people. It could be terrorists, volcanoes, military and/or solar events–the point is that almost none of us, with the possible exception of the Amish, are prepared to take care of ourselves should the Grid be compromised.
For just one other example, our bloated numbers inhabiting mostly urban environments are prime habitat for mutating germs eager for the feast…In the past (under what we might call the Gridde–i.e., Nature), if one spot in a certain territory got damaged or wiped out, at least part of the rest would just go on functioning its local way, like a worm that’s cut in half will just grow back the other half.  But now the land is so degraded and polluted that I don't think we can count on that.
Our civilization may never be hit with a huge solar storm, but it still makes sense to plant gardens and put in cisterns and create earth-friendly energy sources, and to reverse our population and economic “growth”. Doesn’t it? Any way you slice it, at some point in the foreseeable future our UNsustainable path is going to boomerang back on us, and people are going to die off in huge numbers, hell on Earth, and, yes, you could make a movie about it.  But it wouldn't be much fun.

…You could make a movie about it, but that movie would only take into account one main eco-cidal factor, so as to be able to employ the entertaining two-hour format, and leave room for (Nicholas Cage’s?) romantic interest to develop its passion-friction-distance-reunion cycle, which would make the whole idea of the cataclysm look silly, and make it fodder for on-line bulletin-board smart-asses, and rightfully so.

Here’s the rub: the further we push the makeup of our world away from the world within which we have evolved–the ecosystem to which we are most adapted–the less adapted we will be, and the more vulnerable to any threat, great or small. Compare the Earth we live on now to that on which we first appeared–in terms of genetically varied, viable biomass: She, and as a result we, are now much less stable because that variation and viability are in tatters.

Rats, if too many of them live in too small a space, will go insane and tear each other apart.

We are the rats.

Rats with guns.  Rats with nukes.  Rats with chainsaws and bulldozers and chemical fruits.  Well funded, insane rats.  With public relations departments.

Is It Myth, Or Is It Propaganda?

By their fruits we have known them: propaganda, and myth.  But what are they?  The definitions of both will for the sake of debate reflect a black-and-white understanding with each at opposite polar ends of a continuum that we might label, “helpful versus unhelpful stories,” or “truly human stories vs. truly inhuman stories.”  The extremely strong implication would be that myth, in its ideal sense, would be as nourishing culturally and spiritually as it is practical, whereas propaganda, as here defined, would be ultimately a deadening exercise in manipulation to the short-term advantage of a relative few. 

That propaganda is a life sappping tool is not to imply at all that it would, as a necessary consequence of this vampiric quality, be powerless to motivate large numbers of people, for propaganda has successfully motivated huge numbers of people to their detriment, and may yet accompany us to our doom.  The implication of the word “propaganda” is indeed that it is noxious in the long term, even if it succeeds in swaying the will of entire populations.  The overtones of the word “myth,” then, are, naturally, highly beneficial for the overall community, even if it fails to sway even the majority (in this case, keeping in mind the global consequences of many of the actions of our currently overswollen population of 7 billion souls, I will take the point of view that the “community” now means all of us—all other species, and the resources they depend upon—included). 

The above having been clarified, it would also make sense to delineate the similarities between the two media of communication.  Both can be intensely powerful, both have been present, most likely, since the beginning of story telling in our hominid line—whenever that was.  Myths always use archetypes, idiosycratic constellations of the different parts of our humanity, and of our world as we see it, instinctively recognizable to all on some level.  Propaganda often uses (here I must say exploits) the archetypes as well, in an effort to hook us on a deeper level into buying a certain thing, or approving or participating in a pointless war or some other mass action.  Both are efforts to reinforce or reforge social norms by appealing to this deep instinctual nature, to all that which is invariable in all of us and thereby makes us human. 

Both media use story and image to make their point—and to bury it in our breast (as treasure might be buried there, or a dagger).  However, the main point about “noxious” propaganda is that it would, in the end, betray those very instinctual traits that make us most human in some way, with consequences ranging from the everyday and banal example of the one who is persuaded to buy a product because the images associated with it in advertisements were appealing to her, only to find that the product brings none of the promised satisfaction; to all the ads and campaigns in the history of Western Civilization that have contributed to the gadget fever that has led us to the point where many of us are poised to drown in our own (glacial) meltwater, or eke a living out of depleted soil: the ecologist’s (and everyone else’s, in the end) waking nightmare. 

One might say that both have been contaminated, each with the other, myth with propaganda and vice-versa, so that no pure form of either actually exists.  A pure myth would be the version existing in oral form in the context of the society that invented it, in the language in which it was composed, not the paper-and-ink versions to which we mostly have access now, or even the renditions given by modern storytellers.  Even if pure forms of myth exist—unaltered by aims short on foresight and long on disaster—they may no longer apply precisely to our present, local situation, thereby compromising the “practical” element of myth mentioned above as necessary to its qualifying as myth.  Universal truths momentarily aside, along this axis the question is wide open as to whether old myths can guide us in our precarious, overcrowded global village. 

Myths very often reflect the means of sustenance in a given culture.  For example, Mayan leaders, up to and including their “death by corn”—or rather the overdependence upon that crop—were depicted as sowers of corn, so corn it had to be even if it meant the dissolution of that culture.  Now, our “sustenance”—our economies of grand scale with all their toxic waste and environmental degradation—offers the very disturbing probability of an epidemic die-off in the order of billions of people.  The byproducts of the means by which we “earn our daily bread” are precisely what threaten us.  Under such circumstances, any stories or beliefs that support the continuance of our society as we know it must be termed propaganda, and not myth. 

In fact, here is a more precise working definition of myth—that it supports a mode of sustenance that supports not only our survival—right now the least and most of our worries—but a real-time thriving for most all concerned.  Hence, stories that support sustainability over its opposite, cleaning up over polluting, creating rather than degrading the fertility of the land, by my definition fit one major requirement of myth.  Stories that reverse this proposed flow by distracting us from un-sustainability, pollution, and degraded fertility, qualify as propaganda….Of course, propaganda by its nature would never openly advocate for such horrors as carcinogenic chemicals in the milk, it would simply gloss over the existing risk with some flashy benefit, in a kind of “watch the birdie” move to distract our minds. 

By their fruits we have known them: the social, military and ecological holocausts of our time have been accompanied by the shouts of propaganda; myth, on the whole, was what supported homo sapiens in thriving in and supporting an intact ecosystem for the greater part of the tenure of our species.  These were tribal people with tribal, primarily hunter-gatherer mythologies. 

One could say, Ah, but those myths did not protect those people from the more militarily powerful cultures of “civilization”, where were guided to victory by their own myths.  Tribal myths, along with their people, were in large part effectively wiped out.

...But what if the real prize goes to the culture that was sustainable rather then powerful in the dominating sense?  What if our own culture, barely ten thousand years old—and much younger in its present, industrial incarnation—comes to what is in geological terms a screeching  halt, whether through nuclear or other means, leaving small bands of survivors behind to find their way?  In the aftermath of the collapse of modern economies and factory-produced goods, toward which way of life would the myths of these people tend?  Would they repeat Budweiser commercials to each other around a campfire?  No, the myth that grew out of this situation would most likely be geared toward survival in a demanding world with fewer resources, more need to depend on each other, and only one way to live—off the land.  They would come to resemble the myths of tribal folk everywhere because their lifeways would resemble tribal ways.  Most probably, their campfire narratives would include the earth and its resources within the equation of “all that is holy”, in an effort to motivate the conservation of resources. 

 In other words, it is logical to believe that any such myth would resemble those of the “conquered peoples” whose myths, we may sniff, hadn’t been up to snuff.  And that people with an eco-centric mythology, with a desperate need to remain in balance with their immediate surroundings, who lacked the huge machinery with which to exploit nature, would initiate a mutual conditioning between their myth and their practices that would only make both the former and the latter more and more “green”.  Their myth would, as it became more and more adapted to local needs and joys, become as well more and more “mythical”.

Conversely, the image-laden effort to promote practices that would further environmental degradation in this, my post-apocalyptic scenario, would become more and more propagandistic equal to the amount of further nature despoiling likely to flow from it.  This could be likened to advertising cigarettes in the lung cancer ward (unfortunately, some of those doctors and nurses would undoubtedly take the bait).  More concretely, it would be just exactly like…glorifying, in a commercial, the hard work of Big Oil's employees coupled with the convenience and cheapness afforded by the product itself…this in a world already starting to slow-simmer under a blanket of man-made CO2.

I mention the "green" issue first due to it's urgency.  But other elements bring on (or fail to) other types of balance.  For one, the masculine-feminine continuum.  In a world wherein many, many men run around never even having met their feminine side, what Jung called the anima, and the woman in their hyperrelatedness wouldn't recognize their masculinity (their animus, said Jung) if it bit them on the ass—which it would, sooner or later, following the law that states that repression breeds overexpression.  And because biting a woman on the ass is just a masculine thing to do.   So you need your prince and princess stories, to represent both sides of the coin. 

I believe, by the way, that embracing royalty in such a basic way as to make them main players in our core tales is problematic for anyone interested in long-term democracy.  Because both myth and propaganda make use of the archetypes, the former, in the interest of universal application, might present itself as a representation of the inner princess and prince; whereas the propaganda camp's version might resemble more a rosy endorsement of royalty—in this case, actual monarchs existing outside oneself—and submission to it. 

Propaganda might take two possible tacks:  to look at stories in this fundementalist way, or to deemphasize one side of the gender coin at the expense of the other.  One example of the latter strategy is the excisement of and deemphasis on feminine characters such as Asherah, the ex-wife of Yahweh.  Or they might be demonized, as Lilith and others.  If the myths themselves contain insufficient evidence to damn or demonize, then the religious body at large can create co-legends that establish the desired effect—for instance, the 'history' portraying Mary Magdalene as a redeemed prosititute. 

The fluctuating practical needs of a given culture make it difficult to say exactly how a balanced offering of myth might look at a particular moment—perhaps it has more need of the feminine, right now?—but a fair distrubution of masculine versus feminine emphasis would seem to be half of each.

I intend this discussion to be thought-provoking.  To be more than that, it would have to include more concrete and specific examples of myth vs. propaganda in their historical contexts, delineating, likewise, their perceived effects over time.  That myths, even "good" ones, always lead us to some desirable result is far from a universal truth, for they can be conveniently ignored.  That propaganda always tempts people to their doom is also questionable—sometimes ad campaigns, for example, backfire and benefit competing companies, or even contribute through their crassness to the avoidance of consumerism in favor of a simpler and more sustainable lifestyle (and thereby to lost profits). 

It also may be misleading, by way of circular reasoning and ends justifying means, to say, "Well, it led to a good result, so it must have been myth!" or vice-versa regarding propaganda.  No, something more mystical and precisely less practical comes through in a myth.  They are the stuff of dreams, which cannot (or perhaps should not) be planned or foreseen.  By definition they come whirling out of our blind spots, and so they are as difficult to pin down as, say, God.

Even so, a detailed study of " myth vs. propaganda in their historical contexts, delineating, likewise, their perceived effects over time" would be fascinating and perhaps life-saving, and I hope that this article has the effect of causing me or someone else to undertake such a study, if one (or more) hasn't already been authored.  In the meantime, beware: there's a sucker born every minute, which might be you, mindlessly absorbing commercial pap; but also, potent, urgent myths are lying around gathering dust, or waiting endlessly to be born, when what is needed are campfire tellings and retellings (assuming a sustainable source of firewood, balanced off by replantings to offset the carbon dioxide produced, and of course no broken beer bottles…..).