The Lesson Out Of Rio+20 - We're Screwed, We're Done, We're Toast

As Nnimmo Bassey, Chair of Friends of the Earth, International said yesterday in Rio, “Politicians are spinning this outrageous deal as a victory but in fact it is nothing less than a disaster for the planet. This is a hollow deal and a gift to corporate polluters that hold UN decision-making hostage to further their economic interests." He was being diplomatic.

The facts are clear now 20 years later, we've been duped, self-duped really, by our own delusion. Back then it seemed that perhaps, if enough information could be communicated to enough people around the globe that meaningful change was, at least, still possible. Communicate we did, but even then it should have been apparent that bromides like recycling and reusing weren't nearly enough to actually make a real difference. And while we patted ourselves on the back for recycling our household trash the corporate criminals and the financial banksters secured their stranglehold on the earth.

Now we're screwed, we're done. We're watching the results of the exponential demise of our little blue planet's environment powerlessly. As Malcolm Light, of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, explains, "We’ve triggered one of the planets many positive feedback loops. This process of methane release will accelerate exponentially, release huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere and lead to the demise of all life on earth before the middle of this century.” Read that last sentence carefully, he's not talking about someday far off in the future, he's saying that in less than 40 years we're toast. Us and lottsa other species, his recent paper 'Global Extinction within one Human Lifetime as a Result of a Spreading Atmospheric Arctic Methane Heat wave and Surface Firestorm' makes me wanna cry.

What happened? How did we, the rogue primates, manage to screw things up so badly and why? How we did it was basically that we deluded ourselves into forgetting that we are connected to our environment and we forgot or denied the obvious, in the game of life on earth, Nature Bats Last. Why we did it is fear, fear of the unknown, mostly fear of the biggest unknown - Death. Since long before the dawn of history humans have sought comfort from their fear of the big D

Since the earliest hunter-gatherer clans a shaman or a witch provided our ancestors with comforting answers directly from the spirit world. As groups got larger and jobs a bit more specialized chiefdoms grew and the chiefs everywhere ruled because they were divinely chosen by the priests, or were themselves the priests, who were the absolute authority of the wishes of the gods. Time rolled on and chiefdoms became city-states, work became far more specialized - written language evolved, but humans still feared the big D big time and the priests continued to comfort and control their fellows with their exclusive connection to the great beyond. Through all these epochs the shaman, priests and bishops convinced the fearful humans that they had a special relationship with the gods or "God" and in their need for comfort the humans believed them. Many of them still do believe themselves exceptional, believe "God" made the world solely for human use, believe in some heaven and hell carrot and stick that the powerful use to control them and live their lives asleep because of that ancient fear. i fear it's to late to wake up now.