Harvard Study on Bee Colony Collapse

[CS Globe] "One area we are waking up to is the massive amount of pesticides we spray (especially in North America) on our food that has not only been linked to human disease, but a massive die off in the global bee population within the past few years.

A new study out of Harvard University, published in the June edition of the Bulletin of Insectology puts the nail in the coffin, neonicotinoids are killing bees at an exponential rate, they are the direct cause of the phenomenon labeled as colony collapse disorder (CCD).

Neonicotinoid’s are the world’s most widely used insecticides." [READ MORE]

Vernichtungsschlacht

Well, the Greek bailout is being described by many and is trending on social media as a coup (♯ThisIsACoup), but I'm not sure if even that goes far enough. Krugman's initial comment on the deal, that 'this goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief', seems to capture the direction of my own thinking. I accept that the Greek "choice" has often looked like one between 'starvation and slavery' as events have intensified over the last few weeks. But this now looks like a decisive victory for the Troika and Eurozone-instantiated monsters of finance and neoliberalisation, an economic vernichtungsschlacht. Time to revisit Graeber and the moralisation of debt.

The Depressive Realism of Climate Scientists

If you can tolerate the ads, there is an excellent and pleasingly quite long article in Esquire exploring the attitudes and darker reflections of many leading climate scientists and activists. I found the response of the more moderate/hopeful scientist, Gavin Schmidt, the most personally provocative:

"Bad things are going to happen. What can you do as a person? You write stories. I do science. You don't run around saying we're fucked! We're fucked!  We're fucked!' It doesn't - it doesn't incentivize anybody to do anything."

Schmidt was responding here to the glaciologist Jason Box's now infamous July 29th 2014 tweet, "If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd." Unfortunately, on the question of how to incentivize people (a horrible term), it seems that the routes to human inaction and indifference with regard to global warming are many and varied. Not talking about it doesn't incentivize people, the facts don't incentivize most people, neither does the well-trodden path of presenting/peddling a hopeful or optimistic message incentivize people. The aesthetico-political, psychological and affective cocktail of forces needed to generate any significant response to the unfolding climatic catastrophe is likely to be more complex, and need to draw upon some fairly exotic pragmatic strategies, in order to meaningfully impact the systemic inertia of Business As Usual. Frankly, I consider a (large) number of well-informed and otherwise quietly reflective individuals shouting "we're fucked" to be a rather potent ingredient in any such cocktail.

A Picture is Worth a ...

I was originally going to post a link to the preview of these powerful pictures of human ecological overshoot at the Guardian here. However, I now note that the entire collection from Overdevelopment/Over-population/Overshoot has been made available via open access here (ht Gail). It's a potent visual testament to the ecocidal endgame of the human journey.

Is This How You Feel?

A valuable resource by science communicator Joe Duggan here, collecting together narratives and reflections by scientists and members of the public in response to the question: how do you feel about anthropogenic climate change?

What can be saved?

There is an interesting post by George Mobus here, one which closely parallels the best case scenario to be outlined in my current book project. I do worry that something like Dilworth's vicious circle principle would repeatedly and tragically re-engage itself in human affairs after a global collapse, even following many cycles of societal collapse in the mid to long-term human future; thus leading to recurrent periods of human ecological overshoot. However, given that such cycles would take place in a world that Clugston characterises as one of "continuously less and less", plus one where the climatological catastrophe of the anthropocene would be unfolding with considerable and painful vigor, it is at least possible that humanity - or at least the genus Homo, as Mobus puts it - would eventually be ground down to a point far closer to dynamic equilibrium than it is now. I'm certainly not optimistic, neither is Mobus, but it is conceivable that something recognizably human might transition out of the current fifty thousand year period of cultural experimentation and ecocidal expansion. Of course, whether it ought to is an entirely different matter.

How to Save the Human Genus

What Can be Saved?

I am on record as saying I doubted that humanity as a global population could be saved from certain destruction. I have also stated that the species, Homo sapiens is probably not salvageable in its current form. However, I have also suggested that the salvation of the genus, Homo is both feasible and desirable. Let me briefly recount.

There is at this point, in my opinion, nothing that can be done to save the vast majority of humans alive today from a catastrophic demise. I am sorry. And below I will summarize my findings. The simple truth, as I see it, is that humanity has set itself on an irreversible course of destruction that is equivalent to the impact on the Ecos that the meteor or comet that crashed into the Yucatan peninsula had on the dinosaurian Ecos 65 million years ago. That is, by our activities we have brought about a geologically recognizable age called the Anthropocene in which we are the agents of the extinction of vast numbers of species, including, possibly, our own. Whenever such die-off events have happened in the past the Ecos shifted its characteristics and dynamics such that the extant species either went extinct or gave rise to new species of the same genus that were better adapted to the new Ecos. I fully expect the same kind of thing to happen in the future.

In any case the populations of critters and plants were decimated or severely reduced in number and that is what I suspect will happen to our populations. Homo sapiens must, of necessity, go extinct simply because the future environment will be extraordinarily hostile to human life. The real question is whether the genus might give rise to a new species that is better fit for the new Ecos before the very last member of the tribe extinguishes.[CONTINUES HERE]

Look at the sparkly tambourine ... It's all gonna be Okay.

Thanks for this Gail, suddenly everything seems brighter. Watch the sparkly tambourine.