Hi John,
It was great talking with you recently. Afterwards I had some reflections – here they are. You said you were a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. I understand why you said this. However, my views ae different. I am a short-term optimist and a long-term pessimist.
Why am I a long-term pessimist? The greed and mendacity of so many people are disheartening. It is true that one can get depressed by this. People are incredibly self-centered. We have great difficulty in seeing beyond themselves and looking into a more communal future. Especially in our affluent world, people will not easily give up their privilege. This excessive self interest has been the hallmark of our species, and in fact of all surviving species. In our evolution we fought tooth and claw to survive. It was only the fittest that survived. The problem is that that which enabled us to survive can now become the cause of our demise. We have evolved as the dominate species on the planet. We have developed a very comfortable lifestyle and we will not easily give this up.
Therefore, I am a long-term pessimist. We have overpopulated the planet and trashed the place. For the last 100 years we have powered modern civilization by using fossil materials. Now 80% of the world’s energy is fossil-fuel based. We have burned fossil fuels and thrown carbon waste into the air. We are also rapidly deforesting the planet. All this increases greenhouse gases and is causing global warming. It is getting harder to deny the global changes that we have produced. Glaciers are disappearing. The polar ice caps are shrinking. Extreme weather events are increasing. Slowly, the oceans are becoming more acidic and their levels are rising. If we do not change drastically, rapidly and globally, we will look back at this moment as a tipping point.
For the last 12,000 years in the Anthropocene, the world’s temperature has been moderate. This has allowed our species to develop at a remarkable rate. However, this moderate temperature regime is only possible because the planet has built-in air conditioners; the polar ice caps, the massive oceans, and large forested areas. All these are being weakened. At a certain point they will not be able to recover and the temperate climate system will move beyond our control. There is not total agreement as to when this “tipping point” will occur. The UN appointed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that at our present rate of consumption this could occur as early as this decade 2020-2030. When this happens, all bets are off. We will have lost control of the climate change process. Because of our present self-centered lifestyles, it is difficult to see us avoiding this outcome. For this reason, I am a long-term pessimist.
Now, why am I a short-term optimist? I am an optimist because I am part of a privileged minority at this time. Human evolution has reached a peak. Never before have we known so much convenience, technological growth and reasonable governance. However, this high level of advancement may be headed for a crash. This fact troubles my present short-term optimism. In the meantime, I have reasonable health in a protective culture and I have lots of activities to occupy my time (more on that later).
The real question is that the evolving universe does not really care what I think. I am just a small speck in an evolving universe. This is the flip side of saying that we are all connected to a much larger whole. So here I am placed in this time and place, and lucky enough to have the ability and strength to do something positive. I am not sure of the outcome. In fact, in the light of evolutionary history we may not be able to avoid a final collapse. So, my short-term optimism is mixed with long-term dread.
So, what to do? Given the background noise, all one can do is to fill one’s days – which for us seniors are numbered in any case. Standing on earth and gazing at the stars; grounded in physical reality and yet grasping a Spirit; logic and allegory must meet. Reason, faith and action must combine.
Practically speaking, I have appeared at the end of mankind’s massive exploitation of the world’s resources. This is especially crucial when we consider the fossil exploitation that has energized the last 100 years of development. We now know that the wastes from fossil materials are dangerously polluting our nest. The air is filling with carbon dioxide and methane and we are warming the planet. The use of renewable green technologies seems to have arrived just in the nick of time to give us more efficient, lower cost energy. However, mankind’s excessive self interest will not allow that precious fossil material to remain in the ground. There is now a huge effort to produce more and more single-use plastic in order to wrap everything with it.
How do we address this? For me, doing away with plastic water bottles is a good place to start. Here in Canada, our government is slowly waking up to the threat of excessive plastification of everything. Instead of spewing CO2 into the air we are now scattering single-use plastic waste everywhere. If this keeps up, even the world’s businesspeople at the World Economic Forum in Davos have accepted the fact that with no changes, in 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish!
It is truly weird being a short-term optimist and a long-term pessimist. The ancient Greeks knew this conundrum. They spoke of Stoicism. The Stoic carries on the struggle to maintain his sanity in a perilous world. He will not be captivated buy the temptation of religious fantasy. He instead walks bravely on, staring nakedly into the coming chaos.
Finally, a story. My dad died at the age of 90. As he approached the year 2000, he was curious about the possibility of a world-wide collapse of all the computers due to the Y2K scare. It was feared that the computers of the world would not be able to detect the new millennium and there would be a global collapse as a result. He stayed around and saw that nothing happened on January 1, 2000. At that point he must have seen that the scare was unfounded, and he then died peacefully on January 2, 2000.
I am now 84 years old and the year is 2020. By the end of this decade, there is a strong possibility that the climate crisis will be so evident no one will be able to deny it. By then, I will be 94 yeas old (if I survive that long). Then people will say, “Rebellious Seeker went on and on about a climate collapse and it did not happen”, or they may say, “Holy s---, it is happening, why didn’t we do more about it sooner!”
Rebellious Seeker, December 10, 2020
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