The Rain in Spain

 In March of 2018, my wife and I were traveling in and around Sevilla, in the south of Spain. During our entire week in this gorgeous, historically rich area of Andalusia, it rained...an incessant downpour, with intermittent thunder and lightning. (So much for "sunny Seville!"). And on the day when we took a bus tour to the magnificent Alhambra palace, our Spanish tour guide looked ruefully up at the stormy sky, and said "We are killing the Earth."

She didn't know how right she was.  Now, only a few years later, her words seem prophetic, as everyone who pays any attention to science and to reality knows. We are, indeed, killing the Earth, for the simple reason that the maximizing, zero-sum logic of our global market economy ("Glomart") is fundamentally incompatible with the optimizing, positive-sum logic of our biological support system (Gaia). S o all the negotiations in Glasgow are just arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. But the ship has already hit the iceberg, and we are slowly sinking.

The "iceberg" in this metaphor is simply our total dependence on fossil fuels. Their discovery and systematic exploitation of fossil fuel energy--coal, then oil, then natural gas--starting back in the late eighteenth century and spreading worldwide ever since--has been like a feeding frenzy, as generally happens when a rich motherlode of easily accessible energy suddenly becomes available for any species. And as Lynn Margulis once pointed out, we are a highly successful species due to our unique gift of linguistic communication, but highly successful species never last long; their very success leads inexorable overshoot and collapse. And so our sudden, seemingly endless supply of cheap, easily transportable energy through fossil fuels has led, equally predictably, to an explosion in population, in per capita resource consumption, and in ecological devastation.

All the techno-optimism we hear about creating a "next industrial revolution" based on a fossil-free renewable energy infrastructure--wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, ethanol, nuclear, or whatever--overlooks one basic fact: available net energy, which is the energy you have left after the energy you invest to get that energy, is the very foundation of any economy, industrial or otherwise. And the net energy available from fossil fuels vastly exceeds the net energy of renewables (which, when you add in the embodied energy needed to build out these facilities, store, or transport that energy, generally dips into the negative numbers). You cannot use wind energy to build windmills, or solar energy to build solar arrays. All these new infrastructures, in short, require a vast initial investment of net energy. And the only readily available source of net energy is...fossil fuels. Yet fossil fuels, as we now know, are killing the Earth, whether through floods, hurricanes, droughts, mass die-offs of whole ecosystems, heat waves, deforestation, or depletion of aquifers (pumped, of course, by yet more fossil fuels).

So our whole global industrial infrastructure--on which our vast and growing global population depends--is collapsing, at first slowly enough to enable the current patterns of denial (for most people, but especially among Republicans) or bargaining (as in Glasgow). But the pace of collapse will accelerate inexorably, turning denial to panic, and bargaining back to denial (and panic) and of course, rage--especially among the young, as they realize that their very future has been stolen from them.  It won't be pretty, especially as our overstressed civic institutions  that maintain social coherence are strained to the point of collapse, followed by chaos and starvation...

So what can we do? Cultivate the art of dying.  I am not being facetious here; there are many spiritual traditions, especially in the Far East, that can help us learn to embrace impermanence, yet still act with wisdom, diligence, equanimity, and compassion to take care of everyone and abandon no one.  These disciplines can--and should--be taught, especially to the young.  So I would like to share a poem by Robinson Jeffers called "The Answer" that I myself have found useful in coming to terms with the impermanence, not only of myself, but also of my community, my civilization, and our magnificent, life-sustaining planet. 

Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.