The authors take a big picture, second level approach to our future. They don’t offer charts and tables and rates of ice melts. They take a really long view, stretching back to the dawn of the man – the emergence of the genus Homo, over two million years ago. Homo sapiens (us, including the Elders of WLBOTT) emerged between 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.
And then, around 11,700 years ago, we started tossing seeds in the ground and rounding up the chickens. And we opened a line of credit with Mother Nature, whose balance has grown to gigantic proportions.
The authors emphasize the point that we are animals on planet Earth. Not special animals, not exceptional animals, but regular old animals that are bound by the cold, uncaring rules of Mother Nature. (Note: the authors use the term “ecosphere” in the sense that I’m using “Mother Nature”.)
The industrial revolution was an inevitable point on the timeline, which begun with planting grass seeds and beans on the banks of the Nile.
The authors give no prediction of the timeline, and no scenarios of the collapse, but it is easy to read between the lines. There will be tremendous suffering during this transition period.
As I was reading this book, I was wondering if the authors had lived through the pandemic before writing this book. The reason for this question was because the pandemic showed, without a doubt, how selfish, ignorant and brutish so many people can be – storming state capitols with assault weapons because they don’t want the inconvenience of wearing a mask during a highly communicable and deadly global virus outbreak.
Here’s Elder G’s vision of the human timeline, based on key events in the Inconvenient Apocalypse timeline.
You can watch an interview with the authors here….
Notebook for
An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity
Jackson, Wes; Jensen, Robert
Citation (APA): Jackson, W., & Jensen, R. (2022). An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Introductions: Who Are We?
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How are we to proceed? We should consider possible actions in the context of multiple cascading crises3— three words we would like to etch into everyone’s consciousness. The concurrent and unpredictable failures of social systems produce short- term threats that demand a response immediately, as well as long- term threats that will not be resolved anytime soon and perhaps cannot be resolved. We do not face discrete problems that can be solved in isolation. We have to struggle to understand all of these destructive forces and how they interact so that our actions will be as effective as possible. All of these threats demand everyone’s immediate attention, yet no one person can act on all fronts in any given moment or even in a lifetime. In view of all that, it is not surprising that many people find it easy to lose hope that the necessary change will happen in time.
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Still, we believe that feeling some despair in the face of these threats is a rational, reasonable, and responsible reaction.
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Analysis (no matter how grim) and action (no matter how slim the chances of success) are antidotes to despair,
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We realize that much of our success is not the product of unusual effort or extraordinary intelligence. Both of us have tried to use our abilities to the fullest, but obvious advantages have come our way because we were born white, male, in the United States, during a period of rapid economic expansion. If we had been born good- looking, we would have had it all.
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On humility: Throughout our lives we have had access to resources that we have not earned and have been accorded status in the world that cannot be justified, all as a result of the accident of when, where, and to what parents we were born.
Four A Saving Remnant
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How do we evaluate one person’s desire for just the right beans to make morning coffee against another’s desire for an overpriced scone from the bakery down the street? Again, this may seem trivial, but in a society in which many people’s sense of identity is so often connected to lifestyles and products, what happens when we no longer have the resources for most of it? Whose wants, desires, and yearnings will count, and whose will be ignored? How do we resolve the differences of opinion after so many years of indulgence?
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Perhaps Tolentino’s conclusion is warranted, but we’re focusing on the day when this move to simpler living will not be voluntary. Frugality will have to be imposed through collective action. Whether that imposition will involve what we recognize today as “government” or some new form of political association depends on a trajectory we cannot predict. But at some point, “fewer and less” will not be a matter of choice but will be reality, whether we like it or not.
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But there likely will be some common features, captured in one of Jackson’s favorite philosophical formulations. For some years now, Jackson has advocated what he calls the “mill around” philosophy of life. “How do we mill around, amuse ourselves, and live cheaply until we die?”27
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There’s a saying in the minimalist movement that less is more; a good life is not only possible but also more likely when one reduces consumption. Fair enough, but it’s perhaps more accurate to say, “Less is less, but less is OK.” Whatever we may want, our future will be marked by less consumption. The pleasures of consuming will have to be offset by other activities that provide satisfaction.
Five Ecospheric Grace
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As far as we can tell, we live in a universe that has no inherent meaning or direction, which means we are responsible, individually and collectively, for producing meaning that fulfills us and direction that guides us.
Conclusions: The Sum of All Hopes and Fears
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We use “ideology” here not as a pejorative but simply to mean the set of social, political, and moral values, attitudes, outlooks, and beliefs that shape a social group’s interpretation of the world. If ideology is a synonym for the framework within which people make sense of the world, then everyone has an ideology or ideologies.4 The goal is to be self-reflective about the ideologies we articulate and adopt, in the hope that we can avoid being ideologues, people who mistake their ideology for a set of truths that are beyond challenge. To steer clear of that trap, we all should constantly ask ourselves two questions: How accurately does our framework capture the real world outside our heads, and how open are we to changing our framework in the face of new evidence?
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but to acknowledge that there is no decent human future possible within existing economic and political systems, that we are at the end of the age of those systems.
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“Why is this not enough?,” Jackson asked. Why are the sights and smells of the world, along with the questions that the world generates, not enough for us humans? Why are our everyday questions about the world, which can help us appreciate the world more, not enough? Do we really need male sky gods? Do we really need to dream about colonizing Mars? What if sky gods and Mars colonies are the sign of an atrophied imagination? Indeed, why is this not enough?
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Of course, when stated like that, no thoughtful person would say, “Yes, that’s all the meaning in life I need.” But in practice, those rewards of affluence can quiet the internal voice that reminds us that consumption is never really enough for anyone. The meaning that comes from affluence is seductive because it’s easy, because it asks nothing from us but to conform to the values of a system that has no values beyond greed and acquisition. It’s fragile, but as long as the money keeps rolling in, many people can stay afloat that way.
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The problem is captured succinctly, once again, by the nineteenthcentury Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach in her book of aphorisms: “To be satisfied with little is hard. To be satisfied with a lot is impossible.”
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An important caveat here: We are talking about a frugality that can enrich everyone’s lives, not austerity policies that are imposed by people with wealth and power on people already struggling.
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Our conclusion: • Capitalism’s demand for endless growth is incompatible with a livable human future, but • there is no economic or political system, no matter how democratic or just, that can deliver even a relatively modest version of the lifestyles generated in fossil-fueled capitalism, which is a way of saying that • first world levels of consumption are unsustainable no matter how the world is organized, and reorganizing the world along criteria of ecological sustainability is going to be difficult because • the modern industrial world and a global consumer culture have generated expectations that can’t be met, and coming to terms with that will be difficult because • the Industrial and Digital Revolutions have not only changed our relationships to each other and created unrealistic material expectations; they have fundamentally changed the way most people interact with the nonhuman world.
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I have gravitated toward projects for social justice and ecological sustainability because they have provided some meaning in my life, and by the time I made those choices I had concluded that the only meaning in our lives is created through our own thoughts, words, and deeds. I don’t recall ever searching for the divine or seeking epiphanies to provide meaning. Instead I developed a rather banal workaday attitude: get up in the morning, day after day, try to find something worth doing, and then do it as well as possible, realizing that failure will be routine but that
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small successes—sometimes really small, maybe even too small to see in the moment—make it possible to continue.
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Like most of us, I have had to meet the demands of various employers so that I can pay my bills and live a kind of normal life. But I have carved out as much space as possible for activities that challenge me personally and intellectually. I have sought the company of others who also seek those challenges. I have tried to create opportunities to help remedy problems in whatever small way possible. I have done this not out of hope for dramatic change in the world but because it has been for me the best way to live a decent life.
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If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.24 Love does not make the world go ’round—that’s physics—and the world will go ’round without us. But love is essential to how we humans go ’round in this world for as long as we have left. We end on what we believe is the most upbeat note possible, offering a strong endorsement of love in action, recognizing that at our moment in history that love is bound to be harsh and dreadful. But it is still love.
