Variegated fritillary (Euptoieta claudia)
Madison, Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
2012-08-28-0638-56 IMG_6907aaaa2
Data From 500gb OS Drive\Users\Pictures\PHOTOS\Photos\Fritillary\Variegated
Imminent Mass Extinction
Transcribed Chris Hedges’ video (with minor edits) https://youtu.be/cbH_o-96qZI
“Perhaps the most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Hermann Melville's “Moby Dick.” Melville, in his novel, makes our murderous obsessions, blinding hubris, violent impulses, moral cowardice and lust for self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a doomed whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle, what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoevsky to Czarist Russia.
In Moby Dick, our country is given shape in the form of a ship, the Pequot, named after the Pequot Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship's 30-man crew (there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel) is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which in a previous encounter maimed the ship's Captain Ahab, by dismembering one of his legs.
The maniacal quest, much like that of a civilization dependent on fossil fuel and the profits of global speculators, assures the Pequot’s destruction. And those on the ship on some level, know they are doomed, just as many of us know that our civilization and our ecosystem cannot stand the continued assault by corporate capitalism. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions, even from himself Ishmael says in Moby Dick. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing and tried to think nothing.
How much longer can a financial system that depends on the Federal Reserve to purchase 85 billion dollars in US Treasury bonds (much of it worthless subprime mortgages) each month, survive. How much more money (we are now at 15 to 20 trillion dollars) can be looted from the US Treasury by big banks and Wall Street before the financial system again implodes. How much longer can wages be driven down and suppressed, and I speak of course on a day when 47 million Americans have seen 5% cuts in their food stamps. While interest rates, which (can sort of xxx?) 30% of us with debt peonage.
The ecosystem is at the same time swiftly disintegrating. Scientists from the International Program on the State of the Ocean, issued a new report that warned that the oceans are changing faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life. The excess co2 and heat from the atmosphere is rapidly warming and acidifying the oceans. This is compounded, the report noted, by increased levels of deoxygenation from nutrient runoffs from farming and climate change. The scientists in this report called these effects a deadly trio that when combined are creating changes in the seas that are unprecedented in the planet's history. And this is their language, not mine.
The scientists wrote that each of the Earth's five known mass extinctions were preceded by at least one of these deadly trios: acidification, warming and deoxygenation. They warned that the next mass extinction of sea life is already underway, the first such mass extinction in 55 million years.
The University of Hawaii also released a new report saying that the effects of climate change are now inevitable. They cannot be stopped. At best, the rate of devastation can be slowed. The report predicted that over the next 50 years temperature levels will rise, at such a rate that human life in many parts of the planet will become unsustainable. Millions upon millions of people will flee as refugees. Millions of species will face extinction. Coastal cities, such as New York and even inland cities such as London will become unlivable. Microbes seem set to inherit the Earth.
Yet we, like Ahab and his crew, do not change course. We do not trust our eyes or our intelligence. We trust in the myth of human progress, the absurd belief that human technology and ingenuity will save us. That somehow, although no one spells out how, we will all be able to adapt. This myth is abetted by the corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts and critical thinking. Those who speak truth are marginalized and ignored, dismissed as pessimists in a culture that prides itself on a child-like optimism at the expense of reality. We have a mania for hope which our corporate masters lavishly provide across the political and cultural spectrum to keep us passive.
Frederick Nietzsche, in “Beyond Good and Evil,”wrote that only a few people have the fortitude to look into what he calls the “molten pit of human reality.” A handful of artists and philosophers for Nietzsche, are consumed by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth, a desire for meaning and this sends them down into the bowels of the pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and the heat drive them back.
This understanding Nietzsche wrote comes at a high cost. Those singed by the fire become burnt children, eternal orphans in empires of illusion. Dying civilizations make war on independent intellectual inquiry, art and culture, on their burnt children. The masters of the corporate state do not want us to peer into the pit or heed the cries of those who have seen what awaits us. The corporate state rather feeds the thirst for illusion, happiness and hope. It peddles the fantasy of endless material progress. It insists (and this is the argument of globalization) that our voyage is unalterable and decreed by natural law. It is part of the march of human progress and those who challenge this myth are heretics.
Clive Hamilton, in his book “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change,”describes a kind of dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of false hopes he says requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable, the second because it means that those we love including our children will face insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to collapse is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth intellectually and emotionally and yet rise up to resist the corporate forces that are destroying us.”
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