Category Archives: Extinction

What Did I Learn This Quarter?

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While my action project experience in this class could have been better, I am able to recognize the valuable lessons I learned from it – primarily about the importance of having a group leader. If we had one person taking charge, I think we could have gotten a lot more done. Regardless, I am proud of how we came together in the end to create engaging and informative content, despite our busy schedules.

In the context of our class, I found that our project, promoting the passage of legislation aimed to revolutionize plastic recycling in Washington, perfectly represents political ecology. We live in a system where we elect individuals to make environmental policy decisions on our behalf, and this recycling bill relies on them to pass it. I don’t want to say that my group’s action project was worthless (because I think there is a lot of value in public education), but we should acknowledge that a social media campaign will likely have a limited impact on the decisions made in Olympia.

Honestly, that is the reality of political ecology in the Anthropocene.

As far as the other action projects, WashPIRG’s Save the Orcas campaign was what finally allowed me to understand what our class was about. I could see that, like my group’s, theirs hinged on the actions of legislators, and that Senator Cantwell’s refusal to support breaching the dams might be motivated in some way by her fear of dying. Relatedly, the Ernest Becker group was contributing to the study of conceptions of death, which is beneficial in helping us to predict whether future environmental reforms might be possible in the face of climate disaster, given that Terror Management Theory explains our actions in response to death reminders. As this group mentioned in class, they were frustrated at the constraints they were given by the people in power over them, which is exactly what the ICA is for. This last group’s action project was directly investigating the political ecology of UW in the Anthropocene and trying to get our Board of Regents to follow through on their fossil fuel divestment commitments, again relying on people in power.

All in all, while it wasn’t my own group’s action project that led to me discovering the true meaning of our class, it was the action projects of our class in general that helped me to understand what it means to survive the political ecology of death in the Anthropocene.

How then shall I live?

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My major takeaway from this course regards how I want to proceed with living my life.

We have learned that death anxiety rules our lives and decisions, and that we cope through various forms of terror management. This constant fear drives our species to war, industrialization, colonization, exploitation, and now to the brink of a planetary climate disaster.

One of our contemplative practices asked us to consider three mindsets. Where 1) the world is generally getting worse, 2) the world is generally getting better, and 3) the world is how it is. I find the 3rd mindset to be the most realistic and empowering. In this view, we see the world as it is without sugarcoating it or focusing purely on evils. In this view, humanity has agency. We can sit back and continue our trajectory toward a terrible future, or we can choose to collaborate, innovate, and save our species from collapse.

With this mindset of agency, I am struck by the question: “how then shall I live?”

I need to start with my forms of terror management. Before this course, my management consisted of spree online shopping to fill a non-existent gap in my life and constant distractions because silence allowed intrusive thoughts to run rampant. These are unsustainable strategies.

Professor Jem Bendall in his video about Deep Adaptation asks viewers to cherish what they have. To enjoy life in the short time that we have it. Though I talk about why I dislike Bendall’s perspective in another blog post, I have come to accept this concept when taken alongside the strategies presented in Active Hope, the relief and fulfillment of volunteer work like my action project for WashPIRG’s Save the Orcas, and the hope that humanity still has agency to change.

Image Credit: Syracuse Peace Council

To answer the question “how then shall I live?,” I must adjust my terror management. Rather than needlessly consuming, I can focus on being grateful for what I already have. Rather than constantly distracting myself, I can spend more meaningful time with friends and family to feel reassured that I have people I care about who also care about me. I can take part in local efforts that better my community and environment. I can make changes like being better about recycling and using my purchasing power to favor local, sustainable businesses. I can choose to live with hope.

There are easily implementable things I can do to live a more conscientious and sustainable life without drastically changing my lifestyle. I don’t know if this is enough, but I hope that between collective individual action, death anxiety harnessed by corporate inventors to find technological solutions, and global politicians trying to one-up each other, we will find a way to persist as a species.

Parallel to Climate Politics

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Walking around a room with 18 other people, eyes on the floor, lights off, mind adrift in thoughts of death, climate change, and politics, was a confounding experience.

My takeaways from this strange contemplative practice did not become clear until days later. In the moment, the practice seemed somehow ironic and meaningful, yet I could not understand why. I now see my experiences in this practice as almost representing or paralleling the politics of climate change.

Mindfulness among the masses. Image Credit: Unknown

With our eyes on the ground, I felt overwhelmed. Listening to Karen’s descriptions of the world, I felt helpless in the face our extensive problems. There is so much to unpack, not enough time, and I don’t even know where to start. Amongst all these other shoes walking around the floor, how can anything I do be significant? How can I sway people to my side if we all come from different backgrounds, have different priorities, and live in a polarized playground where everything is black and white, or so gray in between that it is unintelligible? This overwhelming feeling is matched in the politics of climate change. It is such an extensive issue that leaders and individuals have no idea where to start or how to help. This overwhelmingness is dangerous because it can lead to stalling on solutions, and inaction which could effectively cause voluntary human extinction.

When we lifted our eyes to acknowledge each other I struggled to remain serious. I found the reality of 19 of us aimlessly wandering the tiny classroom, trying not to hit each other, while listening to poems about death funny. Sort of a “laugh because otherwise you’ll cry” response. This reaction is similar to how many people handle the climate crisis—they don’t take it seriously. They laugh because it is a wild idea that humans could unintentionally cause so much destruction and death while wandering the earth industrializing. They ignore it, because if they believe that there is nothing they can do, then it is better to laugh and cherish what they have while they are alive, rather than to get lost in a spiral of despair waiting to die.

In this practice I felt myself putting on a face for my peers. I couldn’t just acknowledge them with an honest expression of my feelings because that would have been too vulnerable. I felt like I had to smile, exaggerate my expressions, and communicate a false narrative. This, too, is similar to the politics of climate change. World leaders go to climate conferences and exaggerate their actions and intentions, project their virtue and strength, and hide their vulnerability and honest reality of confusion and disaster. We want to die with pride, and for our largely old politicians, acknowledging a problem would mean dying guilty.

Bonn, Germany Climate Conference. Image Credit: UNFCC

Contemplative Practices Ease Existential Anxiety

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Perhaps the best place to look at Terror Management Theory on a personal scale isn’t in the worldly examples we talk about in class, but rather in our class environment itself. Whether we’re talking about mortality directly or circling around it through conversation of climate change and world strife, one could argue that our class content serves as a continuous series of death reminders. 

What’s the result? Well, we see it every class session. People strongly assert their values, speak with fervor, and often try to sway others to their own beliefs. This isn’t a bad thing – it simply means that the role of contemplative practices is especially crucial and has the potential to have a great impact.

Contemplative practices break open an environment full of seemingly-endless existential pondering. During our first practice, after a class period that overwhelmed me in ways my calculus and biology classes never have, I let myself simply let go of an obsession with thoughts. I treated them like clouds moving across the sky and found a peace that I often lose when engaging in difficult conversations. 

When we spend so much time thinking and talking about death in our class, contemplative practices offer a time to decompress. It feels like a reversal as we move from brain to body. Contemplative practices ground me. When life’s larger questions and existential dread become too much, our class contemplative practices give me the space to focus on my body rather than my thoughts. 

For some people, perhaps the practices are about an appreciation of the mind, thoughts, and thinking. I personally find the most peace when I let my mind do what it wants and focus rather on the physical space I occupy in the world. We spend most of our class time leaning into our thoughts and thinking deeply about the world. Then through contemplative practices we’re away from the structured, analytical thinking we bring to class discussions. I feel my presence in our classroom and always am in a better mental state to connect with my classmates afterwards.

Contemplative practices ease the jarring effects of death reminders. In practices, I don’t feel the pressure to prove my world views and cling to social beliefs, but rather a sense of stillness in appreciating my presence in our world. I’m not pessimistic about the future or fighting against an overwhelming sea of issues. For a precious moment, life is as it is. 

 

Death, Institutions, Capitalism, and Climate Change

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This week in class we began with a reading of James Rowe’s article “Is a Fear of Death at the Heart of Capitalism?”. The article reflects and derives its thesis from Ernest Brecker’s work. Brecker theorized that humans act reactively to their mortality in the sense that they create structures and cultures that allow them to redirect their fear of their own death or the feelings of impermanence and smallness that accompany their understanding of death. The fear that our death is inevitable and thus out of our control leads us, as a species, to try to create structures that we feel can immortalize us. This leads to us creating systems such as capitalism allows us to determine a way to value one’s existence in a tangible way. These systems allow us to act to win within these systems in order to immortalize ourselves in these assumably immortal structures. Thus, such structures have contributed to the incredible innovation but also to the destabilization of the conditions needed to allow life to flourish. Rowe believes that the solution to reconstructing capitalism and other such detrimental systems is by understanding and changing how our fears of death enforce our desire for permanence in the form of these institutions. Through discussion concerning these pieces, I find that though there is value in this approach in the long run it doesn’t seem to address any of the problems we face in the short term, specifically that of our climate crisis. However, a potentially more suitable solution for our current situation is one that Mark Hertsgaard posits in his piece the God Species. Hertsgaard claims that humans should posit that we should also understand our role in death and rather than use that to shift the foundations of our destructive activities refine them with our current capabilities that though the byproduct of destructive practices gives us a godlike power to positively shift or minimize our impact on our planet to sustain our current systems simply not at the cost of the planet. Ultimately, I believe that the idea of explaining these generally exploitative and oppressive systems, as a result of our discordant relationship with death as a species, does very little in changing the very damning impact of them on the state of our planet. Realistically if we want to address the climate crisis we must question if we have the time to reconstruct institutions that will then adequately address the pressing crises we face now or whether we must learn to work within the constraints of our current institutions.

The false choice between capitalism and saving the planetPhoto: David Cliff / NurPhoto via Getty Images- The general discontentment with systems such as capitalism by climate activists Climate Change And Global Pollution To Be Discussed At Copenhagen SummitJANSCHWALDE, GERMANY – NOVEMBER 24: A loan wind turbine spins as exhaust plumes from cooling towers at the Jaenschwalde lignite coal-fired power station, which is owned by Vatenfall, on November 24, 2009 in Janschwalde, Germany. The CO2 emission will be one top of the agenda and will be discussed at the summit in December in Copenhagen. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

 

The Most Important Keystone Species

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Since the first week of this quarter, I have been considering the question: “What are people for in terms of the basic ecological functioning of the Earth?” There isn’t an all encompassing answer to this question, but there is a definition that we fit into.

Keystone species are often defined as a group of organisms that hold an ecosystem together, or have a disproportionately large effect on the system compared to their abundance. When the keystone species is removed, the system will collapse.

A demonstration of the importance of a keystone species (sharks in this case). Find it Here

It’s easy to make the argument that humans have an immense effect on the entire planet – it’s in the news everyday. But how are we holding the ecosystems of the planet together? We are unique in this world because we have the awareness and the ability to want to save the biodiversity that we are quickly killing. We can take a collapsing ecosystem and prop it up with resources and breeding programs so that it lives on. We put patches and glue over cracks in our failing global ecological system in the hopes that what we fix will ripple and stave off extinction in other parts of the world. It’s a valiant and necessary effort, and without it, the biodiversity on our planet would collapse and disappear much faster.

However, humans have created a culture around the death of species that makes it hard to make the most logical decisions as we try and patch our ecosystems. More often than not, if a species is seen as cute, cuddly, or ‘good’ (the giant panda, tigers, blue whales) we pump resources into trying to save them. If a species is seen as dangerous, scary, or ‘bad’ (sharks, tuna, rhinos) then we turn a blind eye as their numbers dwindle further. This is often the case even if a group like sharks or tuna are proven to be much more ecologically important compared to something like pandas. In our culture, we are conditioned to want to save the things that we are emotionally attached to and that provide value on a surface level.

A sign found in Cape Cod warning of the dangers of sharks. Find it Here

As the Anthropocene continues, and the number of species on the Endangered Species List rises, it will be important to remember that what we need to save may not be what we are conditioned to think needs saving. We are the most important keystone species on our planet, so we need to wield our power carefully.

A graph of the declining shark populations for eight species. Find it Here

Further Thought:

Sharkwater from Rob Stewart following themes about the necessary conservation of misunderstood species.

Terror Management and the Meat Industry

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Credit: Nasser Nouri, Flickr

“Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse” by Avi Solomon raises several questions from our course theme: why do humans care about separating ourselves from animals? How is our indifference to slaughtering farm animals similar to our indifference to loss in worldwide biodiversity? How do we frame this for ourselves so that we can remain moral and virtuous?

As The Worm at the Core and our class have discussed, animals are a harsh reminder of our mortality. Our pets die, we see roadkill as we drive down the highway, and we watch nature documentaries where wild animals kill each other. Animals remind us that we are not immortal, so we distance ourselves hoping to overcome their failures. In the meat industry, we separate ourselves so that we can continue to eat the products, work in the slaughterhouses, and excuse ourselves of wrong doing. If we embraced animals as our kin, are slaughterhouses not the same as Nazi death camps? Is our man-made 6th mass extinction not a multi-species genocide?

Solomon’s article describes how the meat industry has been designed to minimize human contact with animal deaths. Only one person works in the room that shoots each animal in the head. Everybody else works along the conveyor belt handling “beef,” allowing them to wash their hands of regret and blame because they weren’t responsible, they’re just working a job handling the aftermath.

Credit: maol, Flickr

This brings up an uncomfortable parallel for me and my desensitization to plastic waste at Starbucks. When I first began working as a barista, I was very away of every plastic cup that I unnecessarily threw away. Now I do it with ease­­­­––it’s so much faster to throw away a lid with accidental whip cream on it than to wash it. I save myself time and an irritable customer. This minor convenience for me comes at the expense of our overflowing landfills and the countless creatures that will have to endure that lid for 450 years while it slowly decomposes.

For many people, even if they refuse to become desensitized to the slaughtering of the meat industry, or the plastic waste of the food industry, they can’t escape it. As is described by Solomon, a majority of the workers in the slaughterhouse are illegal immigrants, desperate for any work and money. As I’ve seen at Starbucks, many of my coworkers are without other job prospects­­––sure they could move to another fast food chain, but they are stuck in the system of constant, unnecessary disposal of plastic. They’re stuck relying on terror management­­­–­–distracting their consciousness, relying on culture for purpose and beliefs, and maintaining their self esteem by reminding themselves that their job is necessary to provide food to millions of people around the world.

Reframing the Climate Issue

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I’m taking this class with the firm belief that climate change, and by extension, climate justice, are inseparable from capitalism and the legacy of colonial and imperialist resource extraction. 

The Anthropocene documentary we watched in class got me thinking about the role of China as an eco-development state, coined by editors of the book Greening East Asia (Esarey et. al). Regions in East Asia are notorious for being some of the most polluted in the world, yet, paradoxically, within the last decade or so, East Asian countries have developed green energy, technology, and conservation, waste management, and urban design efforts at a scale that far surpasses developed Western countries. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that resource extraction has by and large happened within their own countries, so the costs of industrialization are borne by the domestic populations themselves. What would environmental policy look like in Western countries (including Scandinavia) if so much environmental destruction wasn’t externalized onto other parts of the world, or onto marginalized domestic populations?

A group of older Chinese ladies practicing taichi amidst heavy air pollution

I thought that the documentary presented a complicated history of Mao’s poor environmental policies as one of the single greatest contributors to climate change in order to attempt to lift the masses out of poverty. What would a documentary that centered Indigenous movements in North America look like? Would it discuss the impact of the near extinction of bison, hunted by white colonizers as part of their ‘Indian Removal Policy’, from 10 million to just over 300 within a couple decades (Phippen, 2021)?

A wall of stacked American bison skulls in the mid-1870s

Ultimate mass extinction might be inevitable unless radical change happens. Honestly, I can’t realistically foresee a timeline in our current reality past 2050, which is in 30 years. Who gets to live and who do the powerful let die? I have to believe that the earth will heal itself eventually, but what will happen between then and the more current future we are headed into?

 

Citations:

  • Bradshaw, S., Richards, J., Kyriacou, S., Gabbay, A., Ostby, M., Cassini, S., Steffen, W. L., Ellis, E., Zalasiewicz, J. A., Revkin, A., McNeil, J., Gonzalez, M. B., Odada, E. O., Vidas, D., Steffen, W. L. (William L. ., & Odada, E. O. (Eric O. (2016). Anthropocene. [Distributed by] Bullfrog Films.
  • Esarey, A., Haddad, M. A., Lewis, J. I., & Harrell, S. (2021). Greening East Asia: The rise of the eco-developmental State. University of Washington Press. 
  • Magazine, S. (2012, July 17). Where the Buffalo no longer roamed. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/ 
  • Meyer, R. (2017, March 21). How climate change covered China in Smog. The Atlantic. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/how-climate-change-covered-china-in-smog/520197/ 
  • Phippen, J. W. (2021, June 7). “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone”. The Atlantic. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/ 



Reflection on “Deep Adaptation”

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Watching the video “Deep Adaptation” by Jem Bendall this Monday was rough. The combination of depressing content, black and white footage, sorrowful piano music, and the fact that it was 11 pm led me to abandon the remainder of my homework, curl up under my blanket, and pass out. I couldn’t bear to be awake with my thoughts any longer. The next two days, all of my quiet moments were filled with tiny tendrils of dread and grief nagging at my subconscious.

Watching Deep Adaptation was rough because it left me with no room for hope. Though it is only one perspective, it comes across as fact: “We are not in control anymore.” That it is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetime of the people alive today. That any attempt to offer a bright vision of the future is an exercise in delusion. That we will be extinct in the century and should give up, start arranging our species’ affairs, and die while cherishing our remaining life. This video strikes me as a suicide note for humanity.

After further reflection and additional reading, I feel reassured about humanity’s journey and our potential extinction.

It would have happened anyway. One day I will die, and that is a guarantee regardless of if it is by car crash, natural causes, or a global environmental catastrophe. One day we would all still die and eventually go extinct, as Erik Assadourian says in his article We’re All Gonna Die! I could die any day from numerous causes, yet I don’t live my life paralyzed by constant fear. Whether by climate change or an asteroid, the human species has an expiration date.

We still have a say in when that expiration date is. As Rehs van Munster and Casper Sylvest write in their article Nuclear Weapons, Extinction, and the Anthropocene “the future can no longer be taken for granted, it must be earned.” I appreciate this because it establishes the severity of the issue while centering control in humanity and our individual and collective decisions. It reminds me of the quote “hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”

Perhaps Jem Bendall will be correct. Maybe we will go extinct this century and nothing we do right now can change that outcome. But we don’t know that. And I can’t live in a world where I prematurely give up and lose hope. I recognize the significance of pointing out the severity of humanity’s path and the extinction it could lead to, yet I believe we need to approach it by harnessing the power of hope. We can still give climate change our best fight, and if we don’t succeed, at least we go out knowing we tried. It’s time to roll up our sleeves.

Climate nihilism and community care

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I worked through two responses before deciding on this one, which I chose for its attempted honesty in the face of real, violent, and discriminative political/ecological threats. This short response argues for an understanding of community care as a means to mitigate the effects of climate change on the most marginalized. I assume several things which are not necessarily true and are framed imperfectly, listed below. 

  1. There is nothing the masses can do to “stop” climate change
  2. There is nothing the capitalists and imperialists can/will do to “stop” climate change
  3. Climate change is resulting in mass extinction
  4. Climate change will not kill all humans, and will discriminate along geopolitical, racial, and class lines 

These assumptions are at best incomplete and at worst false. That said, I adopt them in my life to move toward an acceptance of “our” collective fate, and move forward in my own actions. I’ve come to terms with this as “climate nihilism,” which strikes me as similar to Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander’s This Civilization is Finished, and builds off the anonymously-authored Desert (which is kind of worth the read, but not at all working toward an Indigenous analysis of climate change and its effects).

Indigenous struggle as climate struggle and struggle against the colonial state—a blockade in so-called Toronto in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation in so-called British Columbia displays a banner reading “NO PIPELINES: Stop RCMP Invasion on Indigenous Lands.”

With this acceptance, I try and often fail to do actions that have the greatest immediate impact on those that are most affected by climate change. This can be described as community care, which I define in line with bell hooks’s All About Love, where she attempts to redirect her readers toward a constant and true practice of love in their lives. Mutual aid, whether true to its theory or not, comes to mind—in Seattle this seems to be one common way for community care to manifest. It especially stems from the knowledge that our disproportionately Black and brown unhoused neighbors are also disproportionately affected by climate change. Long, hot, smoky summers, and long, cold, rainy winters lead to preventable deaths from exposure. A meal or a cigarette for a neighbor can be a radical act of love.

Climate change is here—orange smoke in Seattle 2020 shrouds the buildings and trees.

This line of thinking, admittedly, is dangerous. It ignores opportunities to mobilize mass lines, work on long-term campaigns, and otherwise organize in politically powerful groups. I describe it, though, in an attempt at an honest answer to the question of “first thoughts”—an acceptance of collective semi-destruction must not mean apathy, but instead move us toward care for each other. 

After this wordy response—more words! Here are so many books (should be linked to free online versions) that inform these thoughts. In no order:

  1. All About Love
  2. Accomplices not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex
  3. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (will have to make an account then download)
  4. Desert
  5. Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla
  6. The Progressive Plantation: racism inside white radical social change groups
  7. The Land of Open Graves 
  8. National Union of the Homeless: a brief history
  9. Primer: Transnational Weapons Corporations (click through to w-tnc.pdf)
  10. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next!)
  11. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Liberalism

Citations:

Abbas, Freya. “What Canadians should Know about the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s Struggle.” InkSpire, https://inkspire.org/post/what-canadians-should-know-about-the-wetsuweten-nations-struggle/-M2R80RtqjuC-63LBrof. 

Alexander, Samuel. “This Civilization is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire—and What Lies Beyond.” The Simplicity Collective, June 14, 2019. 

Anonymous. Desert. E-book, The Anarchist Library, 2011. 

hooks, bell. All About Love. HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. 

Live Storms Media. “09-12-2020 Seattle, WA – Wildfire Smoke – Major City With Worst Air Quality in the World.” Youtube, September 12, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH6Spfsntjc.