The end of the world as we know it already IS

Beware: this entry is, frankly, not a lot of fun. I'm not particularly feeling "fun" and this is serious stuff. But it's my party and I'll cry if I want to blog and I'll write what I am thinking about..

According to EAARTH by Bill McKibbin, the planet we knew, the one we've been living on since the year dot, it is gone.

"massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth."

I posted a typically depressive post about it on facebook the other day when I was in the middle of the first chapter, because it IS scary, sad stuff.  But the news is not completely hopeless. McKibbin believes that we will have to scale back our consumption, learn to rebuild communities where we produce more of what we need locally, and learn to live more civilly. If we do those things, maybe humanity survives.

I hope so, but frankly, my view of humanity is that we are fucked. Most of us can't get along with enough people to create community, and we here in the west (and I do include myself in that) are used to having quick cheap energy at our fingertips, and we don't want to learn how to live with less. We don't want to simplify our lives, eat less meat, stop burning gasoline. We want more: more food, more luxury, more gasoline, more house, more, more more! And we poison the planet to get what we want. And we take advantage of other people to get what we want. And we want people to stay our of our bidness and not tell us what to do. And so what if another species or another hundred species go extinct while we have kid after kid after kid who all want more of everything?

A friend said to have faith. And I have a kind of faith. But my faith doesn't include the people of the world wising up and stopping the destruction we've wrought on the planet. Nope, I have faith that we're on the road to destruction, and have the pedal to the medal.

On a brighter note, if the whackaloons are right, maybe after tomorrow all this is moot!