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Deep Green - Rex Weyler
May 2008
Since the late Pleistocene, 100,000 years ago, when a few thousand Homo sapiens poked around Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean, human population has doubled 22 times. We have one more such doubling left, and that's it. Human population will likely level off at 10 to 14 billion sometime around 2100, exceeding the Earth's carrying capacity. Mass human starvations are already underway in degraded environments.
Economists imagine that average consumption is going to increase, so we must also consider a projected annual world economic growth of approximately 1.5% in wealthy nations and 10% in China and other developing nations. Economists consider anything below 3% world economic growth to signal a global "recession."
Humanity is trapped in a dilemma. Our economic theories suggest we can't stop growing without economic collapse, but unfettered growth also leads to collapse. We cannot rewrite the laws of nature and calculus for our own convenience.
April 2008
History shows that human society can change if some moral force (civil rights, women’s rights) challenges convention. However, before we can be optimistic about solving the environmental crisis, we must be realistic. Otherwise, our confidence is delusional.
Human analysts struggle to assess our predicament because we live inside the experiment we are attempting to understand. We are the fastest changing variable in the experiment. Sixty-thousand years represents only a blink in the story of life on earth (one-thousandth of one percent), yet those millennia comprise the entire history of humanity from a million wide-eyed hunter-gatherers to six-billion humans clinging to a shrinking resource pool. From inside this surging human wave, particularly from one single lifetime, it is difficult to witness the forces that erode civilization. We must take a step back.
March 2008
Elle magazine announces that eco-friendly fashions are hip and features Stella McCartney vegan, silk dress sandals at $495, which would work well on a date in the $100,000 Tesla electric sports car. “In this epoch of global warming,” declares Green Guide online fashion consultant Anne Wallace, “fall fashion rules are undergoing climate change: it's OK to wear knee-high faux fur boots with a light cotton skirt and wool sweater.” Vogue magazine advises, “prepare for erratic weather by putting warmer wraps over something skimpy.” Like your awareness of the issues?
To be fair, for decades, those in the environmental movement have wanted ecology to become popular, so we can hardly complain that it is. Consumer choices impact the environment, and we might rejoice that the shopping public is aware of this. Nevertheless, since consumption itself remains a root cause of our ecological crisis, we must ask: “Who is really gaining ground and who is blowing promotional smoke?”
January 2008
When the first Greenpeace boat sailed across the Gulf of Alaska in 1971 toward the U.S. nuclear test site in the Aleutian Islands, the crew and their supporters in Canada had no idea that the campaign would launch a global organization. Irving Stowe, Quaker leader of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee that launched the campaign, belonged to a dozen such groups and believed that after a campaign the group should disband. His idea of keeping things simple and grassroots has merit, but as we know, that’s not how things turned out.
The Quaker boat Golden Rule invented the seagoing protest in 1958 when they attempted to enter the U.S. nuclear test site at Eniwetok Atoll. Captain Albert Bigelow and his crew were arrested and spent sixty days in a Honolulu jail, but the news stories reached Earle and Barbara Reynolds aboard their sailboat, Phoenix. They changed course for Eniwetok, reached the test zone, and were also arrested. By 1969, these protests had inspired the peace activists in Vancouver, loosely associated with the Quakers and Sierra Club. In 1972, the ad hoc Don’t Make a Wave Committee changed its name to “Greenpeace” and contemplated a more complex problem than simply stopping human warfare.
