Field Notes to Life During the Apocalypse
Shell’s Arctic drilling rig. Photo: Greenpeace.
When the apocalypse arrived no one knew it could be so seductive. In the Pacific Northwest global warming has meant winter days fit for lounging outside in t-shirts. Wildfires feeding on drought-stricken forests are producing surreal tangerine-orange sunlight. The heat has wreaked havoc on everything from snowpack to marine estuaries, but it is also resulting in a longer growing season and greater crop diversification.
This is not to put smiley faces on the four horseman. Humanity, after taking over the driver’s seat of evolution, has crashed it into the brick wall of industrial civilization.
Nonetheless, the apocalyptic world is what we make of it. We are now in a salvage operation where our goals are to recuperate and regenerate the disappearing world.
Blame cannot be spread equally. The culprits, the states, corporations, and institutions, are so few they can be named. For decades they have worked feverishly to block any meaningful transition away from a fossil-fuel economy. In 2015 atmospheric carbon dioxide blew past400 parts per million, the highest level in the last 23 million years, and greenhouse gas emissions are increasing. The old world, formed over hundreds of millions of years, is ending because of the sixth great extinction, deforestation, collapse of fisheries, pollution, sea-level rise, wildfires, invasive species, and coral-reef die-offs.
The new world is the “anthropocene biosphere.” Some scientists say our impact is so profound humans have initiated just the third stage of evolution in 3.8 billion years. This includes mass loss of biodiversity and homogenization of what remains. Carried on the arteries of commerce, “neobiota” like cats, rats, and mussels are so prolific they’ll be immortalized in the fossil record. We’ve broken the “photosynthetic energy barrier” with oil coal and natural gas. We have colonized or modified every ecological niche. We have reset evolution through industrial and monoculture farming, pollution, breeding, genetic technologies, and emerging synthetic biology.
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