{"id":29069,"date":"2017-12-22T06:46:31","date_gmt":"2017-12-22T11:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29069"},"modified":"2017-12-22T06:46:39","modified_gmt":"2017-12-22T11:46:39","slug":"the-great-unraveling-using-science-and-philosophy-to-decode-modernity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29069","title":{"rendered":"The Great Unraveling: Using Science and Philosophy to Decode Modernity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Great Unraveling: Using Science and Philosophy to Decode Modernity<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cForty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It\u2019s agriculture. It\u2019s golf courses. It\u2019s domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the Gulf.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Sylvia Earle<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our civilization is headed for a downfall, to be sure, in part due to the massive gulf between our hopes for the future and the omnipresent inertia regarding social change in mainstream politics, though a more apt analogy for our society might be circling the drain. The dark, shadow side of our industrial farming practices in the US has resulted in the hypoxic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, approximately the size of New Jersey and growing every year. Caused by excess nitrates, phosphates, and various chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides draining from farmland into the Mississippi river basin, toxic algal blooms kill millions of fish, shrimp, shellfish, and, almost certainly, thousands of marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico every year. There are hundreds of these dead zones around the world\u2019s oceans, caused by agribusiness and sewage runoff from the world\u2019s largest cities. There are also garbage patches in the Pacific (actually diffuse swathes of ocean littered mainly by microplastics) comparable to the size of Mexico.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile on land, we have lost half of our wildlife in the past 40 years. The implications are inconceivable and beyond words, and calls for global action on a coordinated scale beyond anything that has been seriously considered by the so-called political leaders of the \u201cworld community\u201d. This will require an immediate mobilization of international resources (a Global Marshall plan, which will need trillions of dollars of aid redistributed to the developing nations over decades) to combat three main crises: global warming, habitat loss, and accelerating species extinction rates, all of which are interconnected.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Great Unraveling: Using Science and Philosophy to Decode Modernity\u00a0 Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | CC BY 2.0 \u201cForty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It\u2019s agriculture. It\u2019s golf courses. It\u2019s domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the Gulf.\u201d \u2014Sylvia Earle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1638,5493,369,8488,3666,3638,705,4503,7017,881,17616],"class_list":["post-29069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-collapse-of-civilization","tag-counterpunch","tag-global-warming","tag-habitat-loss","tag-modernity","tag-philosophy","tag-science","tag-social-change","tag-species-extinction","tag-wildlife","tag-william-hawes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29069"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29071,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29069\/revisions\/29071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}