The coming apocalypse

There's a box of Twinkies in that grocery store. Not just any box of Twinkies, the last box of Twinkies that anyone will enjoy in the whole universe. Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some day very soon, Life's little Twinkie gauge is gonna go... empty. -  Zombieland Screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick

Lately I’ve been watching movies and reading books about utopias, dystopias and apocalypses in various forms. Sometimes it’s invaders from outer space, sometimes it’s a natural disaster, an evil mastermind or robots gone out of control. The trajectory is usually the same in these films, as one would expect from Hollywood. The hero (often some kind of scientist) tries to warn everyone of the danger. The powers that be ignore him (or less often, her). The hero’s friends and family think he might have gone a little bit loco. Before long though, the danger becomes imminent and people start to panic (cue car stunts, special effects, extras screaming and running for their lives). There is much discussion of what to do. Nobody ever listens to the scientist of course. The voices of the military industrial complex usually prevail. Financial, political and soldierly imperatives dominate for a time. However, as the story unfolds, naturally the good guys always win, true love finds a way and the world is saved once more through the heroic actions of a few ingenious individuals, often with the help of some miraculous technological breakthrough.

But this is real life, not a movie, even though some parallels with our current predicament are apparent. Although there are increasing numbers of individuals who are very alarmed and very active about the threats we face, as a species we have not fully emotionally or psychologically grasped the gravity of our situation. Just like in the movies, a growing number of brave and determined individuals have been crying out for some time trying to warn us that the earth is in danger, the problem is urgent, action is imperative. Again, not unlike the movies, we have largely ignored them. Financial, political and military voices tend to still speak the loudest. The scientists are being sidelined. The people are still largely a disempowered mass lacking leadership and purpose on the most imperative issues.

You can learn a lot from watching a zombie movie. A common theme is the quest of the survivors for food, water and zombie-proof shelter. All around are consumer goods of all kinds for the taking. Money blows down the street, but it’s all completely worthless now. The not-so-subtle point being that we have got everything backwards. The climate, the water, the earth and air that we breathe is beyond price. Although we absolutely cannot live without them, we treat them as though they were completely worthless. We use words like dirt, wasteland, swamp, weeds, vermin and pests to describe the parts of the natural world that we have not yet found a way to convert into cash. We use our rivers as drains, our oceans as rubbish tips and all the rest as a quarry.

But it is actually gold and diamonds that are worthless if you think about it. Despite a few useful applications in medicine, we could quite happily get along in a world where gold was simply left in the ground. Diamonds have a few uses in industrial processes, but nothing we couldn’t manage quite happily without. It is only their scarcity that causes us to lend these things some kind of abstract economic value. The fact that they are shiny I suppose originally led us to value them for aesthetic reasons, but everything else is just an abstraction.

The value of gold and diamonds is completely socially constructed. We can’t eat them. They don’t provide us with warmth or shelter and yet we destroy what has real value to us – clean earth, air and water – in order to extract these things. Then we jealously guard them against others and spend a lot of resources and even have started wars, keeping them in the hands of a select few individuals as well. 

If you look at it from the viewpoint of what is happening in the natural world, coal is a horror and oil is pure evil. Don’t even get me started on nuclear energy. At least we can use these things to create heat and light which is useful to our purposes I suppose. But we got along perfectly well for thousands of years without these things and we could get along perfectly well by replacing them with renewable energy sources, particularly if we managed to moderate our appetites and adjust our ideas of what makes a good life.   

Now is a critical point in our history where we must reconnect with our mother Earth and put her once more at the centre of things. If we are going to survive the coming catastrophes, it’s time to completely rethink our relationship with nature. We cannot continue to smash, kill and burn every part of the natural world that we come into contact with. We must start to care for, respect and repair the damage that we have already done to the biosphere. I am under no illusions how big this job will be or what a major paradigm shift this is going to be for homo sapiens. But if we don’t do it we will be making the biggest mistake we have ever made.

Gnomeaggeddon

I've been stressing about climate change again this week. I do that a lot, but it's got worse this week. My jubilant mood of last week has given way to somethig more sombre as I watch the mainstream media assuming that our new Prime Minister (brrrr!) is going to swiftly remove any pretense that we're even trying to tackle climate change and the ALP is showing ominous signs of getting the wobbles about stopping him in the Senate. He's going to 'axe the carbon tax' the reporters keep saying (even the ABC!) abandoning all pretense of journalistic correctness or even-handedness. The states with Liberal-National governments have already wound back most climate change action on the excuse that they weren't going to duplicate what Canberra was doing, waste of tax payers' money, etc. etc. Now, of course, Canberra doesn't want to do anything either except give the clean energy fund money back to the polluters. So what are we left with? Maybe the LNP will get a few trees planted, which I suspect is code for more pine plantations to replace the forests they intend to log? Maybe a few farmers will have a bit of a crack at 'carbon farming' which I deeply suspect is code for 'more timber plantations'. They want to ramp up coal and gas mining 'investment' and build '21st century roads' whatever that's supposed to mean.

It's difficult to stay optimistic when things appear to be getting nothing but worse. Rupert Murdoch's execrable publications have been out in force this week slamming the upcoming IPCC report before it's even been released, sowing the seeds of confusion in the minds of the masses. I've had people say to me - 'You must be glad. It seems like the climate change thing isn't as bad as we thought, eh?'. I have to patiently explain to them that they are being systematically lied to and it is indeed still just as bad as we thought, probably worse, but the report's not out yet. Abbott's own business advisor has been sufficiently emboldened by the recent events to write an opinion piece in the Financial Review, claiming that climate change is a myth and a fraud perpetrated by the Bureau of Meteorology. Barely anyone even commented on this outburst in the 'commentariat'. No doubt many people, even many now in high places, agree with him because they don't know any better, or do but don't care. If our respected newspapers publish these lies, and senior figures in society perpetuate them, what hope is there to convince people of the seriousness of our predicament?

I toss and turn and have bad dreams. I know I should be thinking more positively about it, but it's been difficult this week. I've been using up excess nervous energy hassling Rupert Murdoch on Twitter and picking fights with climate change deniers on Facebook. Always good for temporary relief of steam! I've also been trying to bend my mind toward solutions to the problem. Short of global popular uprisings, it's hard to imagine what's to be done to turn this thing around in time when many governments are either complacent or complicit. Not all of them of course. There are some shining examples.There are glimmers of hope of course. People are stirring, banding together, organising, mobilizing, doing stuff... I went to the Environmental Film Festival last week and saw 'Bidder 70' the story of Tim de Christopher and his courageous action against illegal mining lease auctions. I went to the demonstration in the city on Saturday by the brave people of Tecoma, who are fighting McDonalds. They might even win. I wouldn't put it past them, or their gnomes. I watched a documentary called ' Favela rising (Preview) ' which is about the people of Rio De Janeiro's slums rising up against the drug lords and winning, largely through organising music and dance groups amongst the youth, focussing on traditional Afro-Reggae music (strange but true). Even in the darkest times, little green shoots continue to struggle up where you least expect them. People are doing things, even if it doesn't merit coverage in our 'mainstream' media. Even if we are continually being bombarded and brainwashed with images of war and fear, consumerism, greed and stupidity, it's good to remind myself that in the real world there are good people everywhere and there is always hope that things will change for the better.

What gets measured gets done

I've been thinking about metrics this week. What sparked all this was the trusim that all voters really care about is 'the economy'. I was watching Planet America on ABC TV the other day. They were talking about the Obama inauguration speech. Obama talked about a bunch of things, including climate change and as usual it was a very inspirational speech, beautifully delivered. But when they did a 'vox pop' with people in the street, most of them said their main concern was 'the economy'. Now, why is this so? Sure, the US economy is in a terrible mess. Living standards for the '99%' are falling, unemployment is about 8%, the government seems too deadlocked to do anything about their monster deficit and naturally people find all this very worrying. But could it be the relentless media emphasis on money that causes this response? When a TV reporter shoves a microphone in front of someone they automatically say they're 'concerned about the economy', perhaps it's because they think that's the correct answer? I'll bet most people don't really spend all that much time thinking about 'the economy' if the truth were told.

There's a saying 'what gets measured gets done' and it's probably pretty true. Every day in the press there are repeated updates on 'finance' - share prices, interest rates, commodities, currency fluctuations and the like. Now this sort of thing is really only of limited interest to the vast majority of people, most of whom don't have shares and certainly don't scan them on a daily basis if they do. This info is of interest to share traders and bankers of course, but they have access to various sources of detailed information and are hardly likely to rely on nightly news bulletins for their data. But why on Earth is this sort of thing always given such prominence in nightly news bulletins when it's all Greek to most people anyway? I could go on about the emphasis on violence and sport too, and what that says about our 'culture', but that's a diatribe for another day.

It takes a lot of work to assemble all those financial figures and report them several times per day so the message the general public receives is that all this is terribly important need-to-know sutff. But just imagine if the same amount of time and effort was put into reporting far more important measures. Imagine if the nightly news bulletin always finished up with a summary of the state of the global environment - tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted, species gone exctinct/ off the endangered list, habitat hectares cleared/saved from the bulldozer, renewable energy projects given the green light / new coal mining leases granted on farm land ... How quickly do you think things would change? Do you think people would start to think the enviornment was terribly important if they did this? I certainly do. Imagine if politicians started banging on about this kind of thing ad nauseum as they currently do about 'the economy'. Imagine if journalists waited breathlessly for the announcements of the UN Enviroment Programme's monthly meetings the way they do the Reserve Bank's interest rate adjustments? Will it happen? Probably not any time soon, not while our 'culture' considers money, war and sport the things most worth reporting on.

Greed

I've been thinking about greed recently and how it seems to be a defining theme of our 'western' society. I stumbled across a TV show on hoarding 'Buried alive!' the other night. There are some people who are driven by the urge to acquire more and more 'stuff' at garage sales, second hand shops, or whatever it might be, but they just can't bear to throw anything away. They gradually acquire so much stuff they can barely get in and out of their houses. Morbid obesity has also got to the point where it is pandemic in many 'developed' countries, including Australia. Now, obviously these are psychological disorders and these people need help to be cured of them, but what about people who hoard money? What about the world's billionaires? What's with that? Rather than see these people as mentally ill for wanting to amass more than one person could possibly hope to spend in a lifetime, we are told by our 'media' to admire them. These people are considered heroes, idols, superstars. On reality shows, movies, magazine covers, lifestyle spreads, etc. these people are held up as an example to admire and emulate. Are we being brainwashed? Think about it. This behaviour is nothing to admire. This behaviour is completely dysfunctional. If I was going to be politically incorrect, I'd call it "nuts".

In other cultures, hoarding the vast bulk of resources produced by your society would be seen for what it is; a kind of madness. In many cultures such as the Innuit culture and Australian Aborigines, and various African cultures, not to share what you have with others is seen as nonsensical. It's OK to have personal possessions. It's OK to maybe have some personal possessions a bit 'nicer' than the next person - especially if you made it yourself. But to hoard 1000 or a million times more 'stuff' than you will actually ever need is really, really "bonkers". If you live 'hand to mouth' as a group there's nothing much to hoard anyway and if anyone did start hoarding, they would put the survival of the whole group at risk. Since those people are mostly your own relatives, and you have to live with them, there's not a lot of incentive. With the advent of the colonialism,t he industrial revolution and now 'globalization' a small number of world-class hoarders are now able to gather up OIympic sized quantiies of resources in industrial quanities and never need to see who's going without food or shelter because of what they're doing. They can strip forests, suck rivers dry, ruin whole continents, destroy entire coastlines whatever they want. No problem. Nobody to stop them or even disapprove. It's crazy. It's not sustainable. It's nonsensical and I said it, it's wrong!

Regular readers will know I like a good zombie apocalypse movie. For those who are not afficionados of the genre, there's a key theme running through many of them which is what happens to a small group of people forced to depend on each other for survival. What's the point of money anyway? You can't eat it. Zombies don't use it. What do you do if there are people in your little band who won't share their food and refuse to get along with others? Well, it's a pretty simple decision when you're surrounded by thousands of hungry zombies... Let's all hope there's a middle way between the current unbalanced situation we find ourselves in and some form of 'apocalypse-type' situation which is where we're going if we don't get our act together. Let's hope one day (soon) being ridiculously wealthy will be seen for what it is: ridiculous. Let's hope one day even sooner we work out what's really valuable (hint: it's not gold or diamonds). It's going to take a massive mental shift for a lot of people in the 'developed' world, but things are changing quicker than you might think. There's a lot we can learn from older cultures. Maybe it's about time we started paying attention?