In Australia, we have witnessed an “atomic bomb” of environmental destruction with blood-red skies and a half a billion animals believed dead.
Some 8,000 miles away at an international airport in Baghdad, a drone fires a guided bomb and kills a general. Now trending: #WorldWarIII.
Here we are just 10 days into a new decade and we have simultaneous world events of epic proportion with apocalyptic, end of times overtones. It’s the stuff of science fiction and a disturbing dystopian nightmare.
I’ve been obsessed with futurists my entire life — fiction and nonfiction. On my shelves are the works of Alvin Toffler, H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, Arthur C. Clarke, Phillip K. Dick, Paul Ehrlich, Wendell Bell, Ray Kurzweil, E.O. Wilson, Bill McKibben and Stephen Hawking.
Through them all, I felt humanity had a chance. With innovation and science, we could overcome any challenge. I’ve placed my faith in our institutions and in our elected leaders. I guess you could say, I drank the “American way” Kool-Aid — a story with a happy ending.
But this past decade has tested me unlike any other period in my life. World events now point to a very grim ending. It didn’t take Australia or Iran or the current state of affairs in Washington to predict this narrative.
Some very smart people at MIT, Stanford and the like, have been looking at various models for some time. With great precision, they have calculated pollution levels, population growth, climate change and available natural resources. The habitability of the entire planet is quite real and imminent, they say.
Many of us are ill prepared for what’s coming. Half of Americans don’t have $1,000 in savings and cannot put $500 together in the event of an emergency.
Let’s face it: we are a world controlled by plutocrats. The top 1 percent controls more than 40 percent of all wealth. It’s a system based on growth and more growth and more growth until it all ends and Mother Earth says enough. And our demise — what scientists describe as “biological annihilation” — is being forecasted sooner than later in more alarming numbers.
Today we’re fixated rightly so on events in Iran. But regardless of how that chapter ends, the most existential threat facing us is climate change.
At this point, I’m sure, dear Gazette reader, I am telling you something you may already fear and, like me, you are in a great state of depression over it. If we deal with the science and hard facts, you may also agree that it’s completely hopeless.
But we must fight for our future and that of our children and their children.
It will take going into contested and deeply divided areas where people don’t agree and finding common ground.
It will take demanding green power and a fossil fuel free future.
It will take turning our capitalist model upside down.
Defeating the current occupant in the White House, you say, is the first step? Odds are he will once again lose the popular vote and by an even greater percentage, but he will still win the Electoral College.
That will mean no Green New Deal, more climate deniers, more corporate-friendly judges, more defense spending, never-ending wars and more fossil fuels. It could even mean a third term.
If I had to make a bold prediction, I would say we are headed toward an American civil war and a revolution within the next two decades. At least that’s the opinion of some sage political scientists.
“We’re in a triage situation,” states Yvonne Chouinard, the 81-year-old French Canadian founder of the company Patagonia, and a leader in sustainable business practices.
If we are to survive as a species, we must defeat capitalism, much like the free world conquered fascism in the last century.
“It’s World War III,” said Chouinard in an interview last fall in the magazine Fast Company. And he wasn’t describing current events in the Middle East.
Victory for the future of planet earth, he describes, will take unimaginable hardship and sacrifice.
“I lived through World War II, and I remember what the country had to do to mobilize,” he says. “You couldn’t buy sugar. You couldn’t buy meat.”
What’s in store for us this time will be far, far worse.
“The eyes of all future generations are upon you,” said Greta Thunberg in her famous speech before the United Nations last year. “And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line.”
Welcome to the 2020s. This is our screenplay, our novel. But with this story, you can’t turn the channel or put down the book. Be fearless and fight. Or else … The End.
John Paradis, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, lives in Florence and writes a column published the second Friday of the month. He can be reached at columnists@gazettenet.com.