Drought | J. Zornado

September 5, 2012

If Only the Earth Would Stand Still

Possible solutions to current global environmental problems remain, at least in first-world economies, mostly all talk. At least we’re talking, but it’s high time we moved well beyond talk and addressed the serious crisis that’s unfolding all around us. One web-site that denies global warming declares that people just don’t care about it, not really. Perhaps it’s not as bad as all that—and conferences and papers like mine are merely hysterical rituals of chicken-little –like minds. I hope so, for all of our sakes. But what I believe is that the situation is bad, very bad, and we’re so inclined to self-delusion, cognitive denial and ego-rationalizations that we cannot handle the evidence that scientific researchers of all disciplines continue to gather about the state of the human habitat.

As a way into the current ideological discourse about the myriad problems that plague us, I want to tell you about a recent film, at once a speculative warning, a mechanism of ideological consensulization and a pretty bad piece of movie making. But even bad films, like bad dreams, have something to tell us about what’s on our minds.

As a film the remake, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a failure. The narrative is saddled with an earlier sensibility—when the world was larger and there were no cell-phones or internet, or spy-satellites, or Google earth, and we were all just waiting for the Cold War to become a nuclear holocaust.

In the original film from 1951 Klaatu and Gort visit earth on a mission to warn Earth: either live peacefully without nuclear weapons or be destroyed! In the 2008 remake, nuclear holocaust has taken a back seat to environmental holocaust. And in this version our not so friendly space alien is humanoid in the shape of Keanu Reeves. The remake retains the limited scope of the first version—the attempt to communicate with all nations turns into a very local affair and our space visitor ends up hanging out with two other rather ordinary human characters. The end result keeps special effects shots to a minimum. This may have worked in 1951 but in our brave new world of digital movie making this cautionary tale leaves one feeling a little gypped in terms of the sci-fi we’ve come to expect on screen these days.

Still, the film for all its limitations can be understood as a kind of dream our culture—or someone in Hollywood–is having, and it’s a dream about human extinction.

In this latest version of the story Klaatu is an alien intelligence in human form born of human DNA. He is, the film establishes, fully human yet alien at the same time. The point here is to establish that the alien is new to the human body and doesn’t “get” being in it, and this he states from the outset that it will take some time adjusting to his new material condition. He is, though, fully human, and when he finally “gets” what it means to be human—to love, to feel connection to others, to fear their loss—we’re supposed to “get” it too, and his change of heart should be ours. This, Klaatu realizes, is what it means to be human, but just what “this” refers to is where the film’s ideological agenda unspools. “I feel it now,” Klaatu declares near the end of the film just as the human race is being swallowed by a swarming storm of mighty metallic grasshoppers unleashed only moments before by Klaatu himself. This plague of locust he unleashes feeds on the material world eating all the steel and concrete in their way.

Klaatu initially has determined that the human race is guilty of crimes against the planet. In the film we learn that life-supporting planets are rare and that Earth is in serious trouble. Keannu plays Klaatu like a latter-day Neo from the Matrix, and the parallels don’t end there. In the Matrix Agent Smith informs us that the human race is “a cancer on this planet” and in The Day the Earth Stood Still, we’re still the cancer but now Keaanu as Klaatu—rather than Agent Smith—is the cure.

“You’re killing the earth,” declares Klaatu, and the film explains that it is the Earth—and, gasp, not humans!—that is special, and in order to save the planet and its biosphere humanity must be removed, for it is a cancer, and Klatuu and his robot Gort have come to do some radical surgery in a last-ditch attempt to save the diseased and dying blue gem.

But then, suddenly, as the film winds down and the plague of locusts swarm, and feed, and grow, Klaatu finally “feels” what it means to be human—his body and his mind catch up to one another and he understands that humans—not just the earth—are special. He’s heard from humans that we can change, but now he understands why they believe it, and what drives them. And so fulfilling his role as a kind of figuration of the Christ, Klaatu decides to sacrifice himself, or at least his human body, to turn off the savage swarm of judgment day and save humanity. Now, as in the original, and as in the Matrix, humanity gets a second chance and the message of the film is a familiar one: the rest is up to us.

But will we change? Can we change?

In the film Klaatu is won-over by an argument made by a scientist played by John Cleese. This scientist defends humanity and its future by arguing that it is precisely these “precipices” of survival that drive the evolutionary process, and our current crisis will finally register on our collective consciousness and so motivate us to change, to evolve. But what the cause of our problems is the film remains silent, and so the solutions are reduced to an emotional platitude: “we can change!”

But how?

Evolutionary crisis, the film blithely implies, will force change upon us and then the indomitable human spirit will step up and respond. We’ll be okay! It will all work out. Have another soda, have some more popcorn. Drive safely on your way home!

But this is nothing short of lulling us to sleep in the name of waking us up. The film’s ideological narrative casts the viewer back onto familiar and reassuring assumptions: first, that humans are, in short, special. The film challenges but then ultimately endorses our unshakable belief in biological exceptionalism.

I’ll admit that in a way we are special—if only because we’ve come to dominate the planet as no other species has—7 billion, going on 9 billion by 2050 and still on track to make 12 billion by the turn of the twenty-first century. Why there are so many people on the planet today is debatable. That population growth continues to expand exponentially is an obviousness that has become almost invisible. Yet it remains the greatest, most pressing symptom of our dysfunctional relationship to the ourselves and our environment.

And The Day the Earth Stood Still tries to address this in its own way by quietly suggesting that pollution is such a problem because there are so many people polluting the planet. Yet in the end the film draws away from this conclusion and represses the uncomfortable reality of over population in the name of “hope” and “change.” As if talking about things is the same as changing them. It’s a start, but it’s not an end.

I am no believer in a determined fate that leads us to Armageddon or judgment day. There may be a Malthusian catastrophe this century, or a truly devastating pandemic, or a catastrophic war over water, but any and all of these fates will be of our own making, yet I believe that they are not inevitable. The best we’re being offered right now is the chance to make a few adjustments to our way of life so that things can go on as they are but this is a dubious proposition.

My argument is that our problem is not just our “carbon footprint.” It’s the human foot print—nearly seven billion and still trending upwards at an alarming, exponential rate. Even if we do manage to cut green house gas missions substantially—say, by 80% by 2050–the population by then will have grown by nearly 25%, from today’s numbers. In other words, even the most draconian cuts will not, in the end, be enough to account for the billions more consumers who will join the planet between now and 2050.

What will these people eat? Drink? Let alone drive? Consider that, according to the UN’s 2007 report, Global Environment Outlook known as GEO-4, on average human demand for natural resources currently equals 21.9 hectares per person while the report states that the carrying capacity of the planet is only 15.7 hectares per person. This is one way of saying what Klaatu says in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Our footprint is too big, and there’s just too many feet.

Even now we can pull back from the precipice the film assures us, if we want to. Klaatu realizes that humans are special—they love, they suffer, they sacrifice—and so he shuts down the genocide machinery he brought with him. He shuts it down because he has realized the great obfuscating, ideologically conservative truth that reassures and benumbs: in spite of everything he has come to know about human civilization, he chooses to forget the facts and instead the film retreats to the greatest of romantic myths in order to offer humanity a stay of execution. Humans are special. Especially American ones.

And this is where the film can’t help but reveal its conservative agenda.Apparently through terrible, unimaginable crisis we’ll grow, we’ll change and we’ll survive. I hope so, but what that crisis might look like, and how we move from this world to a smaller, more sustainable one remains a riddle shrouded in a mystery.

The biggest challenge to wholesale political, cultural and societal change in the near term are deeply ingrained notions of “private property” and unconscious practices that are rationalized by a latent, though potent, Social Darwinism. A just and sustainable world will only come when our cultural discourse moves beyond “a form of society which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness.” We must reject, he says, those social and economic practices that appeal “solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human nature” (Edward Bellamy).

In short, Greed does not work. Greed is not good. Sorry, Gordon.

We need a new vision–we need a new story. And I suspect this story will include the need for great sacrifice for all, everywhere. The symptoms of our greed and our arrogance—pollution, population, climate change and human misery–are already too great to ignore. We may already be in the midst of an evolutionary crisis that will make clear that it is in our self-interest as human beings to end plutocracy and re-direct our concerted efforts towards global environmental justice. A new vision must include the radical transformation of civilization’s “market ideologies” of unending “growth” and “profit” into a sustainable way of life based upon universal rights of birth and the inherent right to dignity of all sentient life.

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September 4, 2012

2050: A Future History

2050 a.s.

PROLOGUE

Volume One: Gods of Little Earth

The Book of M

There is SIMON who in Little Earth is called Blessed, and the One, and World-Killer, and the Great God, and He came into the world as the Ancients fell and He fashioned a Little Earth from the frozen wastes of Antarctica at the bottom of the Ancient’s world. He raised the Arclight and He raised His Great City and He called it the Seventh Realm.

After the Blessed Simon came upon the land and took it as His own, the lesser gods banded together to contend against Him and out of jealousy and spite they plotted together to cast Him down and steal His Power of M, and they did. And it is a great mystery for on that day they scattered Simon to the seven corners of the Seven Realms, and Simon’s face disappeared from the surface of the world.

And on that day the Four took the Little Earth into their own hands and used what Power of M they could master to re-make the Seventh Realm, and they tore down what Simon had built up and put their own works upon the land, all but Simon’s Great City and His Arclight—these things of Simon the gods took as their own.

For in their hubris the gods decreed that the Seventh Realm would become a Little Earth where immortals reigned over the children of the gods. The children of the gods would work to tame the land and draw a new world from the ashes of the old, and the gods would look on the work of their children and take credit for their accomplishments.

But always the Four sought to claim the greater power of Simon as their own, but Simon had hid it from them when the Four overmastered Him. And so the Four were forced to contend among themselves for that portion of the Power of M each desired, but none of the Four were contented. They chafed and bit at one another in vengeful greed until finally they turned their minds to making war against each other. Because of war all they turned their hand to took seed only to fail, and finally, the Arclight of Simon failed and the long day grew cold and the long night grew dark and Little Earth stood upon the edge of ruin.

Even as the gods despaired of ever finding where Simon had hidden the Power of M, Vilb Solenthay set out on his Pilgrimage to the Great City in search of the truth about why his world was dying. Of his companions, and how he met them, and who they were, and how he found his answers and embraced his fate, more follows in this record. Little did Vilb know that he would become an ember to ignite a great conflagration across the Seven Realms.

To know the gods of Little Earth

Pilgrim needs a second birth.

Go seek the Martha about her Son.

(for His is the name for our Destruction)

Next Lord Qir, who blinds the just,

Then Quadros Prang who feeds his lust,

Last is Azo who serves the Martha’s trust.

What deed provoked the Four against the One?

Simon, Simon, where have you gone?

2050: A Future History

Volume One: Gods of Little Earth

Volume Two: The Power at the Bottom of the World

Volume Three: When Immortals Reign

September 4, 2012

Cartoon Apocalypse

Save us from ourselves, Wall-E

It’s 2012, and we are fast approaching the latest apocalypse deux, at least according to Mayan calendar aficionados. It reminds me of the most recent (of many) back in Y2K. Other prophets have warned us the end is nigh (or is it Nye?) but they and their predictions have come and gone, as will the latest Mayan prediction for reasons that go beyond the scope of this meager blog post. Suffice to say that these faux-Casandras distract from real threats that face all of us even as they stand as symptoms for some greater sense that, well, things just ain’t right.

As varied and diverse as culture and religion tend to be in this world, there is something in us that loves an end. Since I began reading—and now writing—speculative fiction (more on what that is in a minute) I have come across what I’m calling the “speculative tradition.” I’ve written about that already in a previous post, “What is the Speculative Tradition.” What I will say here is that the speculative tradition in fiction and film is not necessarily a western thematic, for the Mayans had it too, and the Hindu tradition comes complete with an end of the world story, as do other traditions and cultures. I’m interested in the western thematic because that’s where I live. Be that as it may, the “speculative tradition” has been, like so many other global cultural traditions, taken up and given a particular spin by western culture going back as far as Plato on the one hand, and the Book of Revelation on the other.

I think it is important to note here that that though speculative fiction can also be described as science fiction, science fiction is not always speculative fiction. Science fiction includes the heroic romance—as in the case of Star Wars–where as speculative fiction of the sort I am talking about takes up a cultural discourse motivated by critical questions like, “How will we then live?” which is another way of asking the question, “how do we live now?” Implicit in the question is that there is something most decidedly wrong with the status quo and pursuing its path will result in catastrophic disaster. Suffice to say the speculative tradition takes a dark and disturbing turn in the twentieth-century, around the time of the great wars as well as at the beginning of the environmental movement of the 1960s and Rachel Carpenter’s environmental warning, Silent Spring.

Perhaps Orwell’s vision is the most consistently dystopic, the most bleak, and the most depressing writer within the speculative tradition. Even today, I would argue, it’s difficult to find a story as uniformly hopeless (and important) as 1984. As a result, the dystopic fiction and film of the later twentieth-century is usually alloyed by the promise of hope—the latent feature of the Christian mythology rises again, like the ghost from the machine to save the day—from Neo in The Matrix to the miracle birth at the end of Children of Men, the contemporary speculative tradition looks into the existential abyss and blinks, pulls back, and offers us a blast of hope from the past. To sell tickets, we have to be told again and again that the proverbial phoenix will, finally, rise from the ashes.

Even as the dystopic warnings about the impending apocalypse (or is it the apocalyptic warnings about the impending dystopia?) continues to vie for our attention—consider the hysteria around Y2K and now the Mayan 2012 purported apocalypse—we hold utopia and its dark twin in our collective consciousness like two sides of the same dream coin. Consider for a moment the enduring popularity of Star Trek franchise. Star Trek in all of its many iterations is a prominent example of the utopic in contemporary speculative fiction, and its popularity demonstrates the pervasiveness of the utopic-born-of-human-reason mythology, that is, the representation of a future world in which the human colonization of space is the great fruit of humanity’s conquest of war, hunger, political strife, and so on. I think it is worth noting that the future Star Trek imagines partakes of both the utopic and the apocalyptic, for on the one hand we learn that some how human beings, along with technological innovation, has put an end to human suffering on earth after a devastating global war in the early twenty-first century. From here, the phoenix rises, and the rest is all warp-drive. Note how our “re-birth” apparently justifies the conquest of other civilizations for we’ve “perfected” ourselves and so we have something to offer the less evolved species out there.

I want to focus finally on a recent film that is a unique example of the Speculative Tradition—Pixar’s Wall-E (2008). Wall-E is a narrative torn between two visions. On the one hand, the film invites the young and old into the charming vision of a post-apocalyptic Earth buried in garbage. Along with the image of the City awash in waste, the film offers up short scenes that do little to explain the back-story about why things have turned out so badly for humanity. We’re left to surmise that we simply consumed too much, wasted too much, polluted too much. It all rings true, at least at first.

“Buy ‘n’ Large” represents the film’s serio-comic condemnation of the Wal-Mart/corporate/consumer culture run amok. The first twenty minutes or so of Wall-E make it clear that corporate entities like Buy-n’ Large are bent on ruling humanity for their own gain, even if it means killing the world in the process. This critique of corporate power is implicitly present in the opening half of the film on earth as well as the second part of the film on the Axiom, the “Buy-n-Large-Love-Boat-City-in the Sky.”

At work in Wall-E remain all the dominant themes of the Speculative Tradition, with special emphasis on what concerns us in the present moment figured as a vision of the future: beware, the film tells us, of over-consumption, pollution, environmental collapse and the fall of human civilization.

Wall-E is also a buddy film, a romance, a love story and a meditation on the desire to reach out and touch—and love—and perhaps regain–what we’ve lost. What, according to Wall-E, have we lost? The film makes it clear: in the not too distant future we lose the Green World, the world of Eve, the world of Life; we lose the Garden.

In case you missed it, let me summarize it here: Wall-E the robot’s mission is to clean up the City (civilization) and as he attempts to fulfill his programming he also collects (or perhaps hoards) human memorabilia from a dead past. His collection of yard-sale items is a symbolic representation of what he’s lost and what he longs for—love and connection. His only access to community is through material items—junk that can only stand for what he longs for, like the video of Hello, Dolly! All are substitutes for the real thing, but not the real thing. It is both ironic and pathetic that Wall-E’s desire for love can only be obliquely addressed through his hoarding of junk, and his desire for a relationship with a robot that looks suspiciously like an iPod. In many ways it is a sly commentary on the emotional roots of addiction even as it pushes our buttons to feel nostalgic for all-things Apple.

Wall-E is going in two opposite directions at once. On the one hand, the cautionary vision of Wall-E, especially the first twenty minutes, represents one of the most poignant, devastating speculative visions since the spate of dystopic films from the 1960s and 70s. On the other hand, Wall-E is for children and so there has to be a happy ending, and plenty of consumer products that go along with the film. And so, like so many other films influenced by the dystopic yet bent on selling tickets and junk, the film invites us to stare down into the abyss of environmental apocalypse, but then look up as if looking in offers an inoculation against such a vision. The film’s solution to the end of life as we know it is as ridiculous as the problem is overwhelming as the film imagines it. Suffice to say that by the end of Wall-E, the “phoenix” rises from the ashes. Eve finds life, Wall-E finds Eve. Humanity returns to Earth. Life goes on. See you next time.

But who among us would, if we were the denizens of the Axiom, prefer to return to a life of toil and hard labor when all our work is done for us by a willing crew of self-correcting robots? By the end of the film it’s as if we’re being thrown out of Paradise all over again, but this time in reverse. The Axiom appears to be a perfect, self-sustaining habitat. Why return to a world still overrun by pollution and garbage?

The ridiculousness of the film’s final scene and dialogue–when the Axiom returns triumphantly to Earth–allows for the child in the audience to take away a hopeful message—but finally, the ending makes no real sense, for it violates the cautionary message established most vigorously at the outset of the film. We’re told by the end that the infantilized, obese inhabitants of the Axiom want to leave their spaceship-home-utopia in which robots tend to their every need and whim for the hard toil of agriculture in a barren and garbage-covered land. It’s absurd, it’s comic, and it’s almost certainly a sell-out.

Perhaps the ending of Wall-E is a satiric plot-device meant to allow the cautionary dystopic message to exist just under the thin veneer of saccharine glaze. Or perhaps it’s all just a device to sell popcorn and computer games. After all, it’s just a cartoon apocalypse. No need to panic.

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August 17, 2012

Global Warming Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner!

As far as I can tell from the data environmental scientists have been presenting for the last two decades, we have passed the point of no return, and we have entered a time where much more of the world—and future generations– will be trapped in misery. The term ‘misery’ as I use it here refers to: high infant mortality, low standards of sanitation, malnutrition and famine, inadequate drinking water, widespread diseases, war, and political unrest.

The vast majority of the world’s scientists agree that carbon dioxide is a green house gas that contributes to global warming—gas that comes from cars and factories and, well, gas of the methane variety, from vast herds of cattle farting all day and all night all across the globe.

In 2008 goal for the Obama administration was to cut CO2 by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. We’ve made no progress. In fact, CO2 emissions have risen since 2008. This is bad. And now with Greenland and Antarctica melting precipitously, Jim Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientists suggests we may already be too late. I would agree, though what I believe is neither here nor there.

Scientists tell us that it took 250 years to burn the first half trillion tons of fossil fuel and based on current usage we will burn the next half trillion by 2050. As the artic ice retreats, Big Oil is already making plans to drill and pump. Why do we continue to ignore the evidence? We increase the amount of carbon dioxide we spew into the atmosphere at our own peril.

But not just carbon dioxide. Pollution of all kinds is slowly poisoning us and there are more of us everyday consuming what remains of our dwindling resources. The world’s oceans come to mind. Why are they full of mercury? Why are the last of the wild fish unsafe to eat? Because coal-fired plants spew toxic pollution as they generate electricity. There is no such thing as clean coal. Burning coal releases many tons of mercury into the atmosphere that enters into the water cycle of the planet, and finally, finds its way into your tuna sandwich. I think this fact puts to shame all those nay-sayers—like Sarah Palin and some members of the Tea Party—who claim that humanity is too small and pathetic a creation to have the power to screw up something so big as the environment. This kind of ignorance is deadly, and it almost certainly dooms us if the majority of American believe it.

More bad news: nitrogen run-off threatens to engulf the world’s ecosystems as a result of petroleum based fertilizers and insecticides. . In The Little Green Handbook the authors argue that,“by 2050, the whole globe will be strongly polluted [by nitrogen run-off]. Nitrogen pollution is deadly. It suffocates aquatic animals, it is harmful to humans, and destructive to biodiversity.”

Meanwhile, the acidification of the world’s oceans threatens sea life and widening dead zones are an ominous symptom. Already massive islands of garbage float aimlessly across the Pacific formed by, you guessed it, plastic, another petroleum derivative. The death of coral reef along the continental shelves around the globe continues unabated and represents an ominous symptom. And as Greenland and Antarctica melt into the Southern Ocean and the North Atlantic, rising sea levels threaten low-lying coastal cities and communities. It’s happening. Now. Potable water around the world is getting harder and hard to find for up to 1.5 billion people on the planet. On-going threats of famine stalk developing nations.

Perhaps Mark Lynas’ alarming argument might balance the misinformation that has for years now confused people: he writes his book, Six Degrees (2007) that should the planet warm even only two-degrees above pre-industrial levels, all bets are off for human survival. According to Lynas we may be eating each other sometime around 2050.

I’ll have mine medium-rare, please.

Global warming and climate change are only the melting tips of the icebergs. Industrial civilization cannot survive based upon mythologies of the past and dreams of unrestricted growth for profits, populations or waistlines. We need a vision for a sustainable future and we need it now.

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Tag: Drought