What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #5

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and you shut off the conveyor belt.

And if that happens, this will cause dramatic

changes in the climate in England.

I mean, England would literally become Norway

or Sweden, if you look at them on the globe, if

the conveyor belt were to be slowed down.

And we're starting to see

changes of those magnitudes.

this is why I tend to use the term climate

change, rather than global warming.

A warming planet can have heating and drought

in some areas, and freezing in others, such as

Europe and North America would experience if

the Gulf Steam shut down.

The impact of that would be huge.

those portions, much of which supply the

agricultural bounty for Europe and the US,

would have dramatic changes in climate,

particularly affecting agriculture.

There are a number of self-reinforcing

feedback loops now in operation.

Here are two such processes.

You know the polar ice melting, which is opening

huge areas of sea in the polar regions.

Without that ice, which normally reflects sunlight,

that polar sea is now going to be absorbing

a lot more sunlight and, therefore, heat.

We have a lot of carbon stored in the

permafrost. And those permafrosts

are starting to defrost.

And when they defrost that carbon dioxide - that

carbon - is going to be oxidized

to carbon dioxide, or brought out

as methane and so on.

And that will be a dramatic

increase in greenhouse gases.

This may get out of hand and we'll suddenly

be looking at a very rapid warming of the planet.

This may get out of hand.

given that there seems to be a

consensus that we need to reduce carbon

emissions by 70 percent or more,

and given that we live in a world where

economies must grow or die,

and given that our carbon emissions grow

along with our economies,

and given that many countries are working

feverishly to emulate the American way of life,

it's difficult to see a way to STOP

it from getting out of hand.

I've yet to see a proposed solution

that even comes close to realistically

addressing the situation.

Talk about a snowball's chance in hell.

I used to take this martial arts class. And a lot of

these guys, it was kind of a kung-fu thing,

a lot of the guys in class would be saying,

'well, what if i meet a guy that's really good

in tae-kwon-do?',

or "what if i meet a really good boxer?"

And the teacher would say, "well, you're

going to get your butt kicked". You know?

You say, "what if we run into a tipping point

where we have this kind of accelerated

scenario of climate change?"

We're going to get our butts kicked.

It's very possible that global climate

change is out of our control at this

point no matter what we do.

Whether we implement Kyoto, or

Kyoto on steroids, or whatever it ls.

I don't know how it will be manageable.

If they can't manage the fallout from

the New Orleans catastrophe

what's going to happen when they try to

manage a society-wide catastrophic situation?

We can take a lot of punches.

Nature takes punches pretty readily.

Global warming is a really severe punch.

And all that we depend on for

natural systems and agricultural systems

is about to be wiped out pretty drastically.

About to be? What is he saying? Do we

dare speak of such disasters as inevitable?

If we speak of inevitability,

will that overwhelm people?

Will they slide into apathy and diversion?

Isn't that where people already are?

I don't feel like I can afford to look

at anything less than the truth.

And then I must ask.: what are we made of?

Who will we be in the face of such truths?

If we don't look at these

things, one thing seems certain.

Generations to come are not going to be very

happy with us for refusing to get serious

about these hugely important issues.

What really gets me is it's not just our human

descendents. Millions of species and more are

now threatened by our behavior.

And for many of them, there will

be no "generations to come".

We're killing off all the life forms that give us life.

We have black holes in the ocean.

There are no fish in places in the ocean.

What's happened to the fish?

What's happened?

That's my friend Barbara, who spent

her life as a teacher and activist,

working for the life of this planet.

The thing is, we know what's happened. My son

Jack knows. He's known since he was a kid.

I mean, everyone knows the problems -

the deforestation, the pollution of rivers,

the garbage, overpopulation.

All of these things the planet

isn't built for us to do that.

It's not built in such a way that it can take that.

I mean, we have to live on the planet, so

if we're going to destroy where we're

living then that's going to be a problem.

Hmm. Destroy where you're living. A problem?

What are the analysts and scientists saying?

Geologists mark geological time by catastrophe.

When did the comet hit and wipe out all those

species? When did the fossil record change?

so what was there yesterday was not

there the next day? And we're in one of those

periods right now. But it's human-caused.

And we're seeing an order of extinctions

now that ranks with the great

catastrophes on the planet.

Currently we are driving species to

extinction probably a thousand

times faster than they should be.

We will lose somewhere between a

quarter, maybe as many as a half,

of all the species on earth

within the next century.

I think what he's saying is.:

that would be bad.

When I spoke with Daniel Quinn,

he seemed to agree.

if this goes on, and on and on and on,

there's going to come a point

when the system is going to collapse.

What is it that's going on and on? Nothing

less than the people of Empire devouring

the world. As my friend Kevin put it.:

Humans are taking over the whole planet.

And everything else is being crowded out.

Crowded out. Felled and milled. Caught,

cleaned and canned. The numbers show

that the culture of civilization is eating

itself out of house and home.

On land, we consume forty percent of what's

known as the primary productivity of the planet.

If you look at how much green

"stuff" the planet produces every year,

we use about two-fifths of that.

We consume it, our domestic animals consume

it, and we use wood, and fibers like cotton.

I drive through the country and see it. Forests

are now fields and parking lots and box stores.

We grow crops and livestock and billboards

and cell phone towers, buildozing and bush-

hogging our way around the globe.

And it's the destruction of the places

where species live that's the principal

cause of species becoming extinct.

It's the same story in the oceans.

Many people think that the oceans are vast and

untouched. And in actual fact we take about a

third of the production from the oceans, too.

Our fish stocks, all over the coast of the

United States and certainly around the world,

are getting perilously close to collapsing.

Most of the desirable, large, predatory

fish - snapper, swordfish, and the like -

have been reduced

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