"The end of civilization..."

From Guy McPherson's blog Nature Bats Last:

........As I wrote in one of my recent books, the problem is not that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions -- it's that the road to Hell is paved. We have, to the maximum possible extent allowed by our intellect and never-ending desire, consumed the planet and therefore traded in tomorrow for today. And we keep making these choices, every day, choosing dams over salmon, oil over whales, cars over polar bears, death over life. And when I say we keep making these choices, I do not mean you and me -- we have essentially nothing to do with it -- I mean the politicians and CEOs who run this country. They are killing the planet and, when they notice the screams, they turn up the volume on Fox News. Meanwhile, most Americans took the blue pill without really thinking about the consequences. In the wake of these endless insults to our only home, perhaps the biggest surprise is that so many native species have persisted, thus allowing for our continued use and enjoyment.

When I tell people about Peak Oil, the immediate response is something like, "C'mon, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is setting records; the economy looks great."

Uh-huh. Never mind the asset bubble built by shaky investments. Never mind the manipulation of the money supply by the Federal Reserve Bank since the Fed's monetary policy was removed from public view by Ben Bernanke. Never mind that the Dow, which is based on a whopping 30 companies, is in free-fall when measured against any metric except the U.S. dollar, which is falling even faster. Never mind that serious stock-market investors represent a slim minority of the world's populace.

Ignore all that, and think about this: When you jump off a 100-story building, everything seems fine for a while. In fact, the view just keeps getting more clear as you get closer to the ground. What could possibly go wrong? Well, maybe one thing. It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the bottom...

It appears humanity will be restricted to a few thousand hardy scavengers living near the poles within a century or two. Shortly thereafter, Homo sapiens will join, in extinction, every other species to occupy the planet. Recent projections indicate that, by century's end, there will be no planetary ice. That's dinosaur days, and the end of the human experience. It's very small consolation to me that, as the home team, Nature bats last.

We will persist about 10% as long as the typical species of mammal, giving credence to Schopenhauer's view that the human experience is a mere blink of an eye bounded on either side by infinities of time. Despite our apparently brief stay on this most wondrous of planets, it has become clear we will take a large percentage of the planet's biological diversity along with us into the abyss....

Knowledge of Peak Oil and runaway greenhouse leads me, again, to the question of Schopenhauer: How to get through a life not worth living? I have struggled mightily with this question – much to the chagrin of my wife, I can assure you – and have turned to my intellectual predecessors and heroes for answers.

I start, as I often do, with Socrates. Socrates pursued a life of excellence by questioning those who would tolerate him and his many inquiries. He knew we were beings singularly tuned to quality. Within the next few minutes, I will mention each of the six primary questions of Socrates, the questions that represent the qualities he found so important to the human condition: What is good? What is piety? What is virtue? What is courage? What is justice? What is moderation? These questions are as vibrant and relevant today as they were more than two millennia ago....

Hope, then, rooted in friendship, is my response to Schopenhauer. Hope, in other words, rooted in friendship -- let's call it Platonic love -- rooted in the right-brained friendship expressed by honoring each other and hugging trees.

Will to live is no solution: It's a problem, as Schopenhauer himself admitted when he proclaimed, "to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake."

Our will to live – rooted in the evolutionary drive to survive – makes us shortsighted and self-motivated (or, in the case of many of us, self-absorbed)....

If Schopenhauer's Will to live offers no viable solution, Nietzsche's Will to power is even worse, for it reveals our darkest nature. It's small wonder Nietzsche abandoned the Overman late in his career. Or perhaps the Overman abandoned Nietzsche.

Maybe Said wasn't so far off the mark:

Said said "optimism" … I say "hope."

Said said "intellectual and political work" … I say "the common good."

But we seem not so far apart, Said and I. Just like, on close inspection, those of us in this room: Our intellectual and political work require, nay demand, optimism. For without it, hope is lost for both kinds of humanity:

Without optimism, hope is lost for the individual, personal variety of humanity that is themeasure of our character.

And without optimism, hope is lost for our entire species, and many others on this planet. That hope is lost, too, without big doses of courage, justice, moderation, and virtue...

Step 1: Expand our horizons beyond the question of how we will run the cars by means other than gasoline.
...It's time to abandon the car, time to make other arrangements for nearly all the common activities of daily life.

Step 2: We must produce food differently.
...say hello to locally grown food, recognizing that you might have to grow your own....

Step 3: We must inhabit the terrain differently.
...Our towns must be re-inhabited and the areas around them must be re-structured to accommodate small farms and the manufacture of goods to serve the towns....

Step 4: We must move people and things differently.
... we could restore public transit....then...move to the waterways and then restoring the piers and warehouses...

Step 5: We need to transform retail trade.
...there are plenty of career opportunities for energetic individuals interested in small, local businesses...

Step 6: We have to start making things again.
...We will have far fewer choices when we go to the store, but we still will need clothes and household goods....

Step 7: We need artists again.
...We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls, albeit without high-tech light and sound systems. And we'll need musicians and actors and playwrights and stagehands and theater managers. We'll need storytellers, too, to keep history alive ...

Step 8: We must reorganize the educational system.
...Yellow fleets of school buses are on their way out....

Step 9: Our medical system must be completely reorganized.
...Without power-hungry high-tech tools, we'll need real doctors again: people who understand how the body actually functions...

Step 10: Our entire socio-economic and political system will become much more local.
...the worst possible outcome would be a battle to the death in a game of Last Man Standing. Our focus on the common good precludes a mentality of Us vs. Them; with the common good, there is no "Them."

There you have it: a thumbnail sketch of the agenda. I'm sure I've left out many important items, but take heart: any number can play, and there is so much to be done. We're sleepwalking into the future -- headed for a cliff of our own making -- and it's time to wake up....

During the time of Christ, in the Mediterranean region, the population of humans was viewed through the same lens as other populations. As such, human deaths often occurred in large numbers, as a result of war, conquest, famine, and pestilence -- these are the Four Horsemen ofthe Apocalypse, as described in the gospel of John....

Until very recently, large-scale die-offs were viewed as "normal," in much the same way we view as "normal" our K-12 system of education, or weekly shopping trips to Safeway, or using a cellular telephone. The description and management of human populations back in the days of the Greek Cynics was oriented along population lines, with relatively little societal regard for individuals. Contrast that perspective with our laser-like focus on individuals. Let's take a quick look at the Four Horsemen, one at a time. Famine's as good a place to start as any, considering that my limited understanding of public health tends toward eating … or, eating less....

Some countries have looked back to move forward. Ireland uses medical generalists in their communities to advance the public health. They preserve the good of the many at the occasional expense of the one, or of the few...But perhaps, in focusing on communities and therefore letting go of some individual lives, Ireland has preserved something we've lost: something economic, environmental, political, social … or moral...

Without the common good, and the struggle on its behalf, there can be no Aristotelian friendship. There can be no justice. And there can be no virtue.

Therefore, I am forced to conclude that: 5,000 generations into the human experience, with the end of humanity in clear view, our shared goal must be … the common good.

And I further conclude that: As friends, we reveal our differences, we appreciate our differences, and then we set them aside … for the common good.