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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Facing Extinction?

How to Save the World is a gloriously-named blog run by Canadian “survivalist” Dave Pollard. It’s a strand of North American life it’s easy to mock with its connotations of the frontier spirit – let alone of the paranoid streak made famous by historian Richard Hofstader. But survivalism represents an important contrarian element in what otherwise is a rather smug society – boasting such writers as Dmitry Orlov and John Michael Greer.
It was Pollard’s latest post which drew my attention to a powerful extended essay called “Facing Extinction” – and made me realise that 8 months have gone by since I noted the curious absence in my blog of references to global warming. That post had recognized a twofold problem which confronts those who write about climate change –

First, how to overcome readers’ resistance to ever-worsening truths, especially when climate-change denial has turned into a political credo and a highly profitable industry.

Second, in view of the breathless pace of new discoveries, publishing can barely keep up. Refined models continually revise earlier predictions of how quickly ice will melt, how fast and high CO2 levels and seas will rise, how much methane will be belched from thawing permafrost, how fiercely storms will blow and fires will burn, how long imperilled species can hang on, and how soon fresh water will run out (even as they try to forecast flooding from excessive rainfall). There’s a real chance that an environmental book will be obsolete by its publication date.

Naomi Klein, like most of us, had tended to hide her head in the sand on this issue – with justifications that equally explain my own blog silence on the issue - that
- it was too complex; 
- others were dealing with it; 
- technical change would sort things out; or 
- a few personal changes in life-style could at least salve the conscience….

In 2009 a chance encounter changed that for her – and she started to write This Changes Everything which became a bestseller in 2014.  My post of eight months ago on the issue
offered an annotated bibliography of no fewer than 17 books. But thereafter silence…….
But, hey, I’m no expert, I say in self-justification.
That is not, however, good enough…..since I have explicitly recognised in these columns that one of the few roles I can play (given the scale of my reading) is to IDENTIFY and then DISSEMINATE relevant and effective writing on the subject.

So, in that spirit, let me share with you some of the great stuff I found recently while I was reading the “Facing Extinction” essay – which I should really start with….
It may be long (almost 30 pages) but I urge readers to flick through it at the very least - since it is a very personal piece in which we actually meet Leonard Cohen, who was a close friend of the author. 
The essay starts with a summary of the signals which warn of our extinction and then moves to explore the possible reasons for our refusal to face reality – praying in aid Becker’s famous The Denial of Death (1973), terror management theory, Carl Sagan and Neil Postman.

That indeed is one of the things which make the essay so readable – that she is constantly introducing you to people…..some of whom were familiar to me such as Naomi Klein or Jerry Mander – although I had never heard of the latter’s book she referenced viz In the absence of the sacred; Jerry Mander (1991). Its first half is an assault on our fixation with technology – not unexpected from the author who wrote the superb book “Four Arguments for the elimination of television”
 Amongst the many new names were Christian Parenti author of Tropic of Chaos - climate change and the new geography of violence (2011); and Jem Bendell, the author of another very personal piece - “Deep Adaptation – a map for navigating climate tragedy” whose significance I recognise by virtue of its rejection by magazine editors
But I’ll let you know more once I’ve actually read the material…..

Suffice it to say that we should not be allowing the Coronavirus to take our eyes off an ecological crisis which threatens the human race.

Other relevant articles/podcasts

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