Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

A Horror of Great Darkness

And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.

-- Genesis 15

Monday finds you like a bomb
That's been left ticking there too long
You're bleeding
Somedays there's nothing left to learn
From the point of no return
You're leaving

-- Eurythmics, "I Saved The World Today"

Sustainability workshop today at work.

The Shorter Millennium Ecosystem Assesment: We're all screwed.

Five years ago, we had ten years to save the Earth. Assuming we had the political and economic will to even begin to try to do what is necessary - and assuming we agreed in the first place on just what *is* necessary - none of which we have.

Now it's 2009, we haven't fixed any of the big problems, we didn't succeed in stopping the war in Iraq, electing Obama didn't drawdown the military in Afghanistan, Peak Oil is upon us, we've heard two clicks from the Russian Roulette revolver of pandemic flu and we're still spinning the barrel, and deep ocean fish stocks are still being depleted. We're *really* screwed.

And I'm personally, physically and emotionally, exhausted just from trying to do the tiny, ineffectual things I've tried to do for the past two decades to try to fight this planetary death machine - or at least even just to acknowledge its existence and stay sane.

The magnitudes of the global problems we seem by any reasonable interpretation of science to face here at the dawn of the 21st century are so huge that it's really hard to even fit them into my brain. Except as a series of Dante-esque images: mass extinction, mass starvation, a world reduced to smoking desert. The drought in Australia feels like the harbinger of the dragon's breath, coming ever closer.

Visiting Brazil in January-February brought the depression further home. How the rest of the world lives is intolerable by Western standards, and yet still over the carrying capacity of the Earth by ecological standards.

The equations are simple. The world has a finite amount of stuff. The human race is on an exponential growth curve. Something has to give. We might be able to change, but it's probably too late and things have already broken beyond repair in the basement. We're locked into the internal combustion engine, into fossil fuels, sprawling suburbia, electric grids, fertiliser and pesticide dependent farming, strip mining and deforestation, a global food transport grid.

Compared with the ecological crisis, nuclear war seems trivial. At least to stop that we just had to get two superpowers to agree to not pull the trigger. To stop the death of the planet... we have to change our way of life. We have to choose to destroy everything we've spent the last century building. In the face of an economic system which rewards cutthroat competition and mercilessly slaughters anyone who achieves less than total productivity. At the same time as the entire Third World is climbing aboard, and we're trying to get off, but we don't want to lose our place in the sun either.

Common sense says it can't be done. We've built a death machine. What is there left except to decide the manner of our planet's burial?

How can you build any kind of movement on the assumption that our civilisation and probably our whole biosphere is already doomed and all we can do is accept our fate?

And yet. Against this is the spiritual view which says 'this world is actually only a shadow of a much more real world in which there is no limitation'.

How do these two apparent irreducible truths - the absoluteness of finite planetary resources, and the reality of an unlimited dimension of mind and spirit - go together?

How can we possibly fix things when we still don't agree as a society that they're broken? But if we do agree that they're broken - how do we bear the guilt, pain and anger?

How can I get up and go to work in the morning knowing that just by living, I'm bringing the Apocalypse one step closer?

How do you un-fuck a planet?