We're stalled in our institutions at the intersection where the street of our ordinary daily lives crosses an evolutionary track. There is an express train hurtling towards this spot, where you and I sit paralyzed, right now, right here. There is no time for calm, meditative processes, even though we may be required to "keep our cool."
"We" can be defined as narrowly or broadly as any reader wishes, but the action, the moving off the stuck place of everything "as usual," whether for a resident of Ukiah, or London, or Peking, or anyplace anywhere, must happen so precipitously that it will be tantamount to revolution.
A brilliantly written summary by David Quammen entitled Planet of Weeds: Tallying the Losses of Earth's Animals and Plants in Harper's magazine (October 1998) portrays a disastrous culmination immediately ahead for our biosphere,
Quammen's piece goes far in laying out the overwhelming consensus among "conscientious biologists" about a looming "sixth" major extinction of life forms (over the past half billion years, there have been five major ones).
The most "recent" extinction came at the geological boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, roughly 65 million years ago, and destroyed 76% of all species including fish, mammals, amphibians etc.
Now we are told (by W. V. Reid of the World Resources Institute, via Planet of Weeds) that by the year 2040, even if all current environmental regulation planned or in place is fully enforced, the prospect is that "between 17 and 35 percent of tropical forest species will be extinct or doomed to be."
Over the ensuing two or three hundred years, in the dismal scenario of Quammen's article, a major mass extinction of life forms will have reached critical momentum.
The great reservoirs of genetic diversity, the huge numbers of "narrowly endemic" species (species that make up the bulk of our biodiversity, and which require either unique local conditions or a large but specific kind of wild range) will be eradicated and along with them their untapped potential as food, medicine and, yes, genetic resources, leaving the world with a genetically impoverished cluster of "weedy" species.
Meanwhile, "weedy" is defined not merely as a negative adjective, but as describing "Éspecies that survive by reproducing quickly and surviving almost anywhere: kudzu, Mediterranean fruit flies, boll weevils, and the primary culprit in the chain of catastrophic events, homo sapiens."
The fact that "by the middle of the next century Étropical forest will exist virtually nowhere outside of protected areasÉ currently 6.3 percent of the planet's land area," leads us to another of the converging forces leading to mass extinction.
Those scattered ecological islands,which at best can be defined as "fragmented habitat," will suffer the same fate as most ocean island ecologies. As a direct result of habitat fragmentation, Robert M. May, an Oxford ecologist, concludes that "most extant bird and mammal species can expect average life spans of between 200 and 400 years."
Quammen says: "The lesson of fragmented habitats is 'things fall apart.'"
And finally, the paleontologist David Jablonski, Hinds Geophysical Laboratory, University of Chicago, "foresees unpredictable levels of loss in many physical and biochemical functions that ordinarily come as benefits from diverse, robust ecosystems" ranging all the way from "cleaning and recirculating air and water and creating new soil," through "damping short-term temperature extremes and longer-term fluctuations of climate and shielding Earth's surface from the full brunt of ultraviolet radiation."
Two giant factors loom in the chain of events: "continuing landscape conversion and the growth curve of human population." Though human population likely will level off somewhere in excess of 10 billion, population pressures in the equatorial belt will be accelerating degradation of the landscape at an alarming rate.
But the international investment community is concerned with the world only as an arena for an infinitely expanding consumer base. To match this new world "marketplace" of expanding "opportunity," our entire education system is being subverted to provide high tech skills for "high tech job readiness."
It is clear that our economic and social institutions must change radically.
The institutions I refer to are twins which seem to oppose each other, but really are acting in collusion: nation states on the one hand, and corporate capitalism on the other. Both must be shown the door, and along with them the mythic confusions of personal liberty with private property, of human dignity with ethnic/national pride.
The change must occur within no more than a generation so that aversive action can occur, and so that panic from an unplanned social collapse doesn't lead us into destructive forms of anarchy.
The fact that the United States has taken on a world leadership role is opportune. If ever there was a time for a non-violent domino principle to work, this is it. It will have to be the great middle American public which acts through its political potential. And it must be galvanized to do so.
How?
The big corporations already are helping to radical-ize that public, exploiting every piece of action as though they owned people's rights to live and breathe. As a result, unions are reviving, and elsewhere in this newsletter you will see cooperative action themes which are gaining ground.
Still, the process is too slow. Given the urgent message outlined by Quammen in Harper's, one senses that something dramatic is going to have to happen if we are to mitigate impoverishment and crowding in the Third World (Planet of Weeds also analyses how equatorial population pressure impacts the rate of degradation).
The first step in that "mitigation" for the Third World is the step which breaks the grip of corporate power in the First World.
We must countenance political events close to home which change laws so that corporations are no longer regarded as "equal persons." We must come to understand the fundamental opposition: "human rights versus corporate ownership of all resources."
In view of the urgency, nearly tantamount to the approach of an asteroid on collision course with Earth, we may have to expropriate corporate holdings and re-direct their use. In parallel, we are going to have to restructure all of our social values away from consumption and "wealth accumulation" towards long range spiritual goals like enabling universal wisdom.
A certain circle will have been completed in strange irony as America becomes the revolutionary inspiration for a New Communalism!
Or, we (and the world) shall simply slide into the scenarios depicted in Harper's, in the words of the poet (T. S. Elliot), "not with a bang but a whimper."
Readers are encouraged to read Quammen's article. The highly selected information used here cannot do justice to the complexity of the phenomena, described in Planet of Weeds, which are devolving towards "The Sixth Major Extinction."
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1999
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited