Lockdown to Save Our Planet

 We are staring at the extinction of the humanoid species. Our actions have set in motion a series of positive feedback loops. The Arctic water are warming, Greenland icecap is imminently melting, the Gulf Stream is on the brink of shutting down and extreme weather events are now the new norm, be it fire, heat, rain, tornadoes or even cold. Extreme rising sea levels, no longer modest rises, will displace tens of millions from low lying areas, many coastal cities will become uninhabitable, extreme events will destroy food production for hundreds of millions dependant on their yearly crop. To make matters worse we are dumping increasing amounts of waste and pollutants that leach out threatening the health and reproductive success of the wildlife we rely on. As a consequence biodiversity is under such an onslaught that it unable to respond to such rapid climate changes. Added to which we are cutting down the heart and lungs of the planet that might absorb or at least abate some of these extreme events. We in the rich West have plundered the Planet for stuff to feed our insatiable appetite for novelty whilst two thirds of the Worlds population, living a subsistence life, have no hope of ever improving their lot to even a fraction of what we in the West take as our inalienable birthright. Our Planet just does not have the capacity to let them achieve even a modicum improvement to their subsistence living. Yet meeting the Wests insatiable demand for yet more brighter, glossier, snappier, trendier must haves, the rich west are so close to exhausting the supply of the rarer elements. Extraction continues unabated in yet ever more fragile environments. This relentless thirst for more yet more consumer consumption is exhausting out Planet. It is not just the extraction of course but the energy required to then turn these raw materials into the so desirable baubles We have to stop consuming.  The wheels of the financial systems which support our civilisation are about to fall off. We have so abused this Planet that the very environment we depend on is changing in ways that may well be unsupportable to human life. If, and a big if, we havent previously killed each other in the scramble to retain some of our assumed rights or claiming the last of what might still be habitable or usable.

This is not some far off speculation. At this very moment we are recording such rapid increases in positive feedback loops, within those that are known, whilst there are many other loops still to be discovered. Climate changes are occurring at an accelerated rate which greatly exceeds even the more pessimistic climate change models. We are way past the point where governments prepare policies and discussion papers, way beyond waiting for the international agreements on what climate change limiting measure they might introduce some time soon. We are even beyond the point of implementing an (already?) agreed government action plan. We, that is you and I, need to take action right now. No need to seek permission, as individuals it is up to each of us to change our life style right now. If our children are to have some hope of a survivable future. We each must go into a Lockdown to Save Our Planet today. No more flying, no more driving, no more consuming. We have to go back to living local, self-sufficiency, no more taking out or extracting from the Planet that which cannot be replaced within our lifetime. No more flying novel fruits, out of season storing, warehouse, handling, distributing and selling just to tempt a jaded palate. No more discarding last seasons to buy this years newest twist. No more extracting materials then using huge amounts of energy to convert them into something convenient. Instead we must reconstitute existing products that have already been fashioned, but now abandoned in this changed world, into something lasting and useful. Recycling but big scale, think all the empty factories, aeroplanes, cars. So much material to be creative and technically innovative about without plundering the Planet from yet more new material or requiring yet more energy to convert. Our cyber infrastructure does give me pause for concerns. Huge data stores consume vast amount of energy and the hardware used requires exotic and increasingly rare minerals to make them. Yet this crucial moment is when we need to be in a joined up world, sharing problems, seeking clever answers and checking that all are benefiting equitably, not being left behind. So an exception? Maybe. One existing resources which we have in abundance is decades of landfill. We have to get smart and learn how to extract from our past landfill those scarce, non-renewable resources rather than plunder anew. We have to get back to limiting our living to that which our Planet can afford to offer, without detriment to its essential wild spaces, without compromising the health of all our flora and fauna nor denying other populations their right to comparable standards.  That is how our ancestors lived for ten of thousands of years. We have to go back to nurturing our Planet, living within that which it can offer without detriment, when it will then respond and payback in dividends. Act now and we might have a chance as a species to survive, your choice. Live or Consume? We cannot do both.

Time to Share.

We look at it, we know it, we are almost bored with the thought but we carry on doing nothing. We humans have replicated to such a point that our capacity to plunder exceeds our limited Earth's capacity to provide. Been like that for a long time and what do we do? We sail on stripping the Earth of its irreplaceable assets as if there is no tomorrow. At least no tomorrow for our children now born, us, oh we will be all right, be enough to see us through! But we put so much time and energy into protecting our children and giving them best start out possible why bury our heads and ignore that that we know is going to happen? 

It is too big a problem? We are many, we are the cause and we can also be the solution. 'They' will sort it out. No, too set in a rut, 'they' can only carry on the way they always have, too much at stake for them to want to change. Ignore it and it will go away? It just gets to be an even bigger problem the longer we leave it. Scaremongering, just another false crisis made up for some political agenda? No. This is for real. There are so many fronts, each are telling the same story. Many, not just oil, essential minerals have a known finite reserve. Climate is going to change and our food sources are going to suffer. We strip the Earth of its lungs, the rain forest, we trash the soils with monoculture, we poison the ground with insecticides and fertilisers, we drive species to extinction just for our greed, it goes on and on. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, you cannot deny every single aspect. We have a problem.

On another tack we in the West have expectations of what we need to surround ourselves with to cope with life. The whole gamut, homes, furniture, food, transport, leisure activities, technology, we want it, we need it, we cannot survive without our access to it, to it all. China's millions are now waking up to these self same expectations. Their government pro-actively is out there now buying up rights to resources around the world, so their people can have what you take for granted. Not just China, but India, Africa and the S.America's are all looking and their appetite's to have also are awakening. The stuff they want does not come out of thin air, is not 're-cycled', it all comes out of the Earth, in one way or another. We have a problem.

We have to change tack. Put an end to this winner takes all attitude. The biggest, the most powerful take all they want. Be it hundred times, one thousand times, one million times more than the next person. It is their sovereign birth right to take it, to have it, protect it and stop you from getting a morsel. Whether we are thinking about individuals, companies, bank bosses, governments, continents, the same attitude applies. Those with the power take, take all they have a fancy to and those without, do with that much less.

We have to stop. We have to begin to care for that person next to us. They have as much right to what we have as we have to it. Nothing, nothing at all, gives us the right to have more, more than our neighbour. We have to share to make sure that what we enjoy is not disproportionate to what everyone else has. Only when we can be satisfied that others have had the chance to take their portion are we free to go back for more. This is the heart of being human. Whether we think about person to person or country to country, this is the true spirit of humanity. The takers have usurped us, now it is time for all of us to stand up and shame them for what they are. To claim back, on behalf us all, what is rightfully ours. To say no you are not entitled to that bonus, to use those share to your own advantage, to enact that legislation which is inequitable, your title deeds do not allow you sole occupancy, call it out as it is. Stand up, together, and shout out loud, "Fair for All or None at all".

Head in the sands

Now I am not particularly concerned about diminishing oil reserves. As the scarcity increases so up go the prices, increasing the economics of finding a successor energy source. Whatever that may prove to be.

We must expect sea levels to rise by at least 2 metres and the seven metre total rise may well prove to be not so far wrong. What is of concern is the speed of rise. We are seeing every indication that it will not be a nice steady even rise but a series of catastrophic collapse of systems that then feed in to fuel the next collapse. So expect a huge storm and the sudden inundation that then goes on to re-occur with increasing frequency. All the worlds major cities are sited at seaports. If London is anything to go by, their essential umbilical cords linking and servicing the city, are buried underground. Not good news when major inundations are to be anticipated. So dreadful inconvenient consequences, huge infrastructure reorganising costs and some billion people moving further inland into already congested hard worked land. But survivable.

Lets not forget either about that very small percentage of the whole worlds population that take for themselves an enormous huge slice of all the worlds resources, whether food, consumer goods, energy or rare metals. The US of A takes more than the lions share and seems to be in dream trance that it can just carry on and only needs to make token gestures. The problem is of course, if the whole of those resource that they take for themselves, were taken away and redistributed evenly the poorest people would only see a very small improvement in access to water and food and little benefit in improved housing, health or education. Which is not a reason to not address an imbalance. US of A is now a weak spent nation and it is only a matter of time before they have to concede and give up what they have taken to be their birthright. It is just becomes a matter of how painful and disruptive is that process.

The most likely scenario looming around the corner is that, on past performance, we, the world populations and our governments, still have not learnt the lessons of peaceful negotiation and, under the duress of food crisis, rising seas, scarcity of essential minerals, someone somewhere will resort, as they always have in the past, to power tactics. Where, as the end result, the world, to all intents, is lost in a radioactive maelstrom. Lets hope, more on a wing and a pray than derived from any rational thought process, that we manage somehow to side step that particular insanity.

It is also just possible that we humans have now so tinkered with the gearing's that those world eco-systems that tend towards a stability are now put into question. So that not only might we be the cause of the gulf stream shut down, or least its moving off, but that we might have introduced an incipient instability into what were otherwise complex self-referential regulating systems, always veering towards some stability. Even if not a stability necessarily supportive of any current biological forms. Though the scale of our human activities do now have impact on our planets regulatory systems, the proportion of our inputs to the planet's mass are still, hopefully, so small that any time-scale of consequence will be long after any humans have any cause for concern. But we do now significantly impact on all those feedback loops that, in the past, use to enable a confident assurance for future environment trends. Not any longer.

This then is my real concern, our impact on climate change. But not only on the climate but the organic lifeforms we are interdependent on. As high-tier feeders and need healthy and vigorous lower forms to provide for the forms we get to eat and survive on. There is the rub. We now control and contain how almost all of the environmental issues that lifeforms depend on. There are only a few patches left on earth of raw natural lifeforms diversity where 'Nature' has any chance of responding to the climate changes we have induced. Elsewhere we rip up centuries of soil micro-organisms, dump loads of narrow range fertiliser's and dowse anything that survives with herbicide and pesticide. Left alone, my money is on 'Nature' to re-establish new lifeforms best suited to the conditions that will come to prevail. That of course might not serve our best interest. Worse than that of course we are not in a position to leave 'Nature' to do its own thing. We limit and control too much. Yet we do not have a blueprint for future lifeforms to suit our needs. Our grasp of how organisms are interdependent and self-supporting is paltry. We are not even at first base to having any clue as to how 'Nature' can respond and recover from the climate change disasters staring us in the face. If 'Nature' has time to adapt to a very likely swift series of changes on the horizon we have to give it a real chance. We have to rapidly reverse diversity decline as diversity is 'Nature's only real tool.

We are entirely at the end of the road for the Roman approach of dominate and control all natural forms as well as those rebellious tribes. We so urgently need to get back to something approaching an Iron Age relationship to the world around us. As an immediate stepping off point we must stop right now the relentless pillaging of our Earth's resources, see previous, Right to Plunder . We have to make a major commitment to living intune, support and in harmony with the organic forms around us. We have to vitalise a rich and diverse habitat where all organic forms can flourish. We have to give up eating when and what we want and desire to surviving on what 'Nature' can offer us without detriment. Then we might just have a hope of surviving the next tumultuous decades ahead.