Four Things to Fear (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

I am afraid of many things. Nuclear waste disposal. Copyright wars setting civil rights back for decades. Surveillance culture in the government. Expert culture leaving us deliberately infantilized. But four tightly inter-related things top my list: species extinction, over population, peak oil, and climate change.

Everything starts with overpopulation. There are 7 billion of us on a planet which can maybe support 2 billion of us. This is a problem.

We are defying that natural limit by using fossil fuels to synthesize fertilizer and pesticides, transport crops vast distances, mechanized agriculture to an industrial scale and venerate a car culture that makes possible staggering urbanization.

The problem with fossil fuels is that the earth is not making more and we have no viable alternatives that work on the scale needed to replace them at the moment. Plenty of contradictory evidence is swirling around right now, but a decent body of evidence suggests that we have used more than half of our favorite fossil fuel, and the others won't be far behind. This is a problem.

The turn of knife here is that although we are running out of fossil fuels, we have more than enough to turn climate change from the problem that it is now into a permanent nightmare on earth.

Climate change has already rendered the Northwest Passage ice-free in the summertime. Something that has never happened previously in recorded history. Climate change is already resulting in melting of the permafrost to begin releasing methane trapped within it. This is a problem.

These are the effects of climate change. But both also contribute to climate change themselves. At a certain point even if we stop contributing to climate change the damage will be done and climate change will accelerate on its own. This is a problem.

And as a result of over population and the effects of climate change the rate of species extinction has increased 1000 fold in the last ten thousand years as a direct result of our civilization. An estimated 200 species are going extinct every single day because of how we choose to live. This is a problem

We now have the choice of maintaining our lifestyle temporarily at the cost sacrificing our life support system permanently, or dramatically reassessing how we live and accepting inevitable heavy sacrifices. We want to ignore these things it seems and continue living in a fantasy land. And this really is a problem.