Solution … Living in “The Eternal Now!”
Yes, home planet is dying. Good news? Yes, if you choose to live in peace. Yours. A choice you must make. Cannot avoid, for too long. The Guardian headline: “Warming of oceans due to climate change is unstoppable.” Yes, they said “climate change is unstoppable!” You hear, you accept it. Just one of more than two the three hundred climate news stories I get every week from around the world. Okay, so Planet-Earth is on a fast track to burnout. Maybe ending up like Mars, the Red Planet? Good news? Yes. Listen:
Of course climate science deniers like Big Oil billionaires and the GOP dismiss all this as liberal activist hype. Good old American ingenuity and Silicon Valley tech geniuses can solve anything, right? Save the world. Same with America’s liberal left activists, progressives and environmentalists, hope springs eternal, there’s always a bright light at the end of the tunnel.
Even when the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change got all 197 member nations signed onto the 2015 climate accord, with the support of Pope Francis and President Obama, they freeze greenhouse gas emissions, climate scientists still predict “the sea will actually continue to warm for centuries and millennia … and sea levels will continue to rise.” A new president will just accelerate the inevitable.
How much will sea levels rise? James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, warned Congress about all this 25 years ago. He just updated this study. It’s brutally honest. There’s a disaster dead ahead, a 10-foot sea level rise in 50 years, even higher in later decades. Yes, 10 feet. New Superstorm Sandys. Manhattan, Miami, underwater.
The United Nations Environmental Report’s annual update went further. In an InsideClimateNews report, “Last Chance to Limit Global Warming to Safe Levels, UN Scientists Warn,” John Cushman said: “The next three years provide the last chance to limit global warming to safe limits in this century.” The U.N. says that “unless nations move before 2020 to cut their emissions more aggressively than they have promised, the window of opportunity will close.” Apparently, our planet is not only dying it’s the endgame is accelerating.
Consciousness: A “Master Algorithm” Within Your Soul!
Optimism made America the greatest nation in history. The American Dream, our can-do spirit, our sense of being the “chosen,” exceptional, challenged, winners, like our mission to the Moon. We build the future on hope and renewal. Even as we admit future trends are already baked in, unstoppable, inevitable. Admit minds are made up, rusted rigid.
Forget the relentless warnings made by the 2,500 scientists working on UN-IPCC research since 1988. They changed few minds. Our stone-deaf fossil-fuel conspiracy of deniers fear efforts to tax and regulate carbon emissions. Even as they still have billions in war chests to defeat scientific claims, pay off privately fund academic deniers, buy senators’ loyalty, and then lie about their hypocrisy for decades.
Yes, our planet’s dying, that’s our civilization’s new normal. Live with it. Forget about exposing the elected officials like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (scientists are “cooking the books”), Sen. Jim Inhofe (global warming is the “Greatest Hoax”), and Sen. Mitch McConnell (protecting Kentucky’s dying coal economy). Just three of the three hundred GOP favorites who get tens of millions in campaign cash to protect the fossil fuel industry.
Same goes with the Koch Bros billionaires. Their mindset is rigid. They have ten times more money than Trump, far more power and influence, already spending $1 billion to push the 2016 election further right for conservative causes, like killing EPA power plant regulations. They are of the New Normal.
And forget about repeating passages from Pope Francis’s Climate Encyclicals. Yes, he’s got a lock on the moral high ground and an army of billions worldwide. But campaign cash buys votes faster than the morality bully pulpit can change leaders and trigger meaningful action. Don’t waste your energy, you just harden conservatives, encourage opposition, embolden enemies.
Too Late? Be Thankful, You’re Alive Today, Today, Now!
Acceptance of this new reality is powerful. Not passively endurance, but acceptance that this is a time to focus of what really matters, preparing for a future, helping friends and family, living, rather than wasting time in ventures that have zero chance of succeeding.
Already “too late,” says activist Bill McKibben. Physicist Stephen Hawking is even scarier, warns of a “catastrophic ending” for Planet Earth. Physicists generally share the long view, which capitalists cannot grasp in their fleeting world of daily closing prices, quarterly shareholders reports, annual bonuses.
Capitalists cannot understand Nobel Physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox: “Where is everybody? Why no signs of intelligence life in our universe?” Nowhere? Modern astrophysicist Adam Frank questions: “All planets hit a sustainability bottleneck, and none ever make it to the other side.”
None? Why? Because every “civilization inevitably leads to catastrophic planetary change.” Yes, we are the only intelligent life out there, our civilization is self-destructing, our home planet is dying.
You need a new consciousness. Living in the now, accepting the unstoppable. Old ways of living, working, investing, voting, loving, relating are dying, too.
Evangelicals also see what’s ahead, in biblical warnings of End Days, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation and the passing of Heaven and Earth. Also seen powerful metaphors in brilliant theater Avatar, Star Trek, Interstellar, where humans leave their dying planet in search of new resources, a new home.
In this new normal, you live in a new consciousness where, in the words of the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest: “You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.”
“And I Say To Myself, What a Wonderful World!”
Louis Armstrong
Anthropologist Jared Diamond, author of the classic Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, tells how centuries ago two million people lived in the Mayan civilization. And like “so many societies the elite made decisions that were good for themselves in the short run and ruined themselves and societies in the long run.”
As a result, their civilization collapsed “because of a combination of climate change, drought, water-management problems, soil erosion, deforestation.” Their rulers “managed to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions … kings didn’t recognize that they were making a mess … until it was too late.”
Yes, history is repeating again. No wonder Stephen Hawking sees a “catastrophic ending” ahead for our dying planet. Why? Because all civilizations eventually hit a sustainability bottleneck, and none ever make it to the other side. They all self-destruct. That’s the new normal.
The good news is you can live in peace and prosperity on a dying planet. I carry the answer with me, Jazz great, Louie Armstrong’a great song on an endless loop, ” And I say to myself, it’s a Wonder Life, Oh yea!” Whatever works, acceptance is a choice, a powerful antidote, a new consciousness, new way of living, totally aware you are a spiritual being having human experiences, and as Eckhart Tolle put it, “The New Earth arises as more and more people discover their main purpose in life is to bring the light of consciousness into this world and so use whatever they do as a vehicle for consciousness.”
