species

Eschatology, or the study of the end of times, is at least as old as the written word. The concept spans many of the world’s major religions, usually referring to some future day of judgement or reckoning. Beyond the realms of theology, eschatology as a concept is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, especially after the tempestuous and chaotic first twelve months of the Trump regime. In this time, almost everything we once took for granted about inherent stability, even inevitability, of western democracies and the robustness of our institutions has been shaken profoundly. As if to add to the sense of impending calamity, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous Doomsday Clock for 2018 forward in late January– to two minutes to midnight. This is the closest it has ever been to the witching hour. The authors of the Bulletin excoriated the US government’s reckless nuclear brinksmanship, but poured special scorn on its efforts to derail international climate diplomacy. “Avowed climate denialists have been installed in top positions at the EPA and other agencies, and the administration has announced its plan to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In its rush to dismantle rational climate and energy policy, it has ignored scientific fact and well-founded economic analyses”. The Bulletin was particularly scathing of the role played by climate deniers in stymieing action. “Despite the sophisticated disinformation campaign run by climate denialists, the unfolding consequences of an altered climate are a harrowing testament to an undeniable reality: The science linking climate change to human activity is sound. The world continues to warm as costly impacts mount, and there is evidence that overall rates of sea level-rise are accelerating – regardless of protestations to the contrary”. The toxic wave of US science denialism has swept right across the Atlantic. As previously reported in Village, last May saw the first meeting in Dublin of the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) a denialist group with opaque membership and funding sources. February sees it host its fifth meeting in just 10 months, featuring a fringe Italian academic with strong ties to US neoliberal think tanks, the latest in a procession of climate contrarians to present new (thoroughly debunked) ‘findings’ to an eager audience mostly of Irish contrarians and deniers. Their agenda appears to be to hobble effective Irish government response to the existential threats posed by climate change. Their standard operating method is to cherry-pick data, float red herrings and exaggerate uncertainties in the scientific consensus often as political cover on behalf of special-interest groups, for continued inaction. Above all, groups like the ICSF are engaging in ‘post-truth’ assaults on reason itself. A recent edition of New Scientist magazine stated baldly: “There are disturbing hints that western civilization is starting to crumble”. The article quotes intriguing research from Yale university, which examined the two broad modes of human thought: 1) fast, automatic and inflexible, and 2) slower, more analytical and flexible thinking. As flexible thinkers within society solve our various problems, from transport to energy, with complex technologies, this relieves the great bulk of the population from even being aware of these problems, and so inflexible, automatic thinking ensues as the population, in a sense, dumbs down, since technologies can create the beguiling illusion that life is magically simple. One of the psychologists who developed this theory, Jonathan Cohen, suggests this may help solve one of the great puzzles regarding societies heading for catastrophe: why do they persist with their self-destructive behaviour, in the face of overwhelming evidence of future harms? “The train had left the station”, according to Cohen, and the forward-thinking, analytical types were no longer at the controls. Separately, computer modelling carried out at the University of Maryland in 2014 examining the mechanisms that can lead to local or even global system collapse, identified two key elements. The first, unsurprisingly, is ecological strain. The panoply of chronic environmental stressors, including resource depletion, widespread pollution, ocean acidification and sea-level rise are generally well understood, at least in expert circles. What was less widely known was the systemic risk posed by economic stratification or, in plain language, the rich getting richer at everyone else’s expense. In the scenario modelled, “elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour”, according to author Rachel Nuwer. Eventually, she argues, “the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities”. She notes that the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Here, extreme inequality and ecological stresses converge to form a toxic cocktail capable of crashing our civilisation into the dust. US academic Thomas Homer-Dixon published the influential book: ‘The Upside of Down’ in 2005. It presciently anticipated the global economic crash that occurred some three years later. The financial crisis was, he wrote, one of “five tectonic stresses which are accumulating deep beneath the surfaces of our societies”. Others include population, energy, pollution and resource exhaustion; and climate system stress. The 2008 economic crisis, along with more recent shocks, such as Brexit and the Trump election in 2016 can, according to Homer-Dixon, be seen as a series of non-linearities, or sudden and unexpected jolts to the assumed world order. These may be viewed as a random pattern of tremors presaging a truly global catastrophe, a word that derives from the Greek, meaning ‘to overturn’. To view catastrophe as imminent rather than already occurring requires a deeply anthropocentric perspective. The sequestration, plunder and simplification of the entire biosphere by a single species is without parallel in a billion years of Earth, let alone human, history. Irrespective of our own narrow fate, the human stain will be etched