INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE

Long ago and far away I was one member of a nuclear family. A rich mans family they say. A son and a daughter. A day that took years to become the moment occurred and on the Ides of March in 1982 I became a man without a nuclear family and since nature abhors a vacuum I became a member of the extended family of man.

The day I left the burbs I really had no where to stay. I was a man without an address. A mutual acquaintance put me up for a week. My co-workers at the time were religious Christians but only a gay Jewish man offered me a place to stay until I created my future.

An act of kindness to be remembered yet not to be lost in the nostalgia was the hypocrisy exposed by those who preached then (as they do now) Christ’s love for one another while practicing Caesar’s greed for oneself and at the expense of one another.

During my stay with Peter I was introduced to Richard. A self described gay anarchist who recommended a movie to me that would alter my existence. “Koyanisqatsi” – 89 minutes of time lapse photography, well choreographed to the minimalist music of Philip Glass. Directed by Francis Ford Coppula based on the Hopi work “Koyanisqatsi” which has at least 4 definitions – the most profound being “we live a life which requires a new way of living”.

Peter returned to New York City to work and retire. Two years ago I sent a birthday day card to Peter but I haven’t from him since. Richard stayed in the capital area, opened a health food restaurant which became a gathering place for the political activists, and a few years ago he sold his business and disappeared into central New York State.

Yet Richard remains one of the most influential people in yova’s world for after I read the following article the implications of “Koyanisqatsi” became a reality and I was compelled to recall Kafka’s “there is hope, but not for us”. I provide only the highlights and the sources of the future which faces Peter, Richard, myself, more than 6 billion other people and all other forms of life that share this planet.

The Heat Death of American DreamsBy Ed Merta, AlterNetPosted on October 12, 2005, Printed on October 14, 2005http://www.alternet.org/story/25351/
http://www.alternet.org/story/25351/

A number of news reports and commentary on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita havelinked the disasters to global warming. Almost nobody noticed a crucialscientific finding, two weeks earlier, that foreshadows disasters on a fargreater scale in the decades to come. According to August 11 articles inthe magazine New Scientist and the Britishnewspaper the Guardian, a pair of scientists, one Russian and one British,report that global warming is melting the permafrost in the West Siberiantundra. The news made a little blip in the international media and theblogosphere, and then it disappeared.

Why should anyone care? Because melting of the Siberian permafrost will,over the next few decades, release hundreds of millions of tons of methanefrom formerly frozen peat bogs into the atmosphere. Methane from those bogsis at least twenty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbondioxide that currently drives global warming. Dumping such a huge quantityof methane on top of already soaring CO2 levels will drive globaltemperatures to the upper range of increases forecast for the remainder ofthis century.

The news of melting Siberian permafrost means, in all likelihood, that global warming is accelerating much faster than climatologists hadpredicted. The finding from Siberia comes amidst evidence, presented at TonyBlair's special climate change conferencelast February, that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be in danger ofdisintegrating -- another warming-induced event once thought to be decadesor centuries away.

Meanwhile, according to a September 29, 2005 report in the Guardian,scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder's National Snow and IceData Center have measured a drastic shrinking of ice floes in theArctic Ocean. Arctic waters are now expected to be ice-free well before theend of this century.

How many more milestones will there be? The prospects of a worst casescenario, with a temperature increase approaching or exceeding 5.8 degreesCelsius, are increasing dramatically, with all the attending disasters thatwould entail -- inundated coastlines, extreme storms and drought, diseasepandemics, collapsing agriculture, massive environmental refugee flows.
And how far will it go?

Climate forecasts have long noted that everyincrease in global temperature heightens the odds of runaway global warming,beyond any human control. Continued overheating could unlock more methanefrom Arctic regions beyond Siberia. It could cripple the vital ability ofplants and oceans to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, turning them intogushing sources of new CO2 that accelerate the superheating even further.The ice caps that help cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight into spacecould vanish. In the end, the relentless rise in temperature could induce acataclysmic venting of billions of tons of methane from the oceans.

A paper by British scientists Michael J. Benton and Richard J. Twitchett,published in the July 2003 issue of Trends in Ecology & Evolution , shows how this could happen. 251million years ago, at the end of the Permian era, a release of carbondioxide from volcanic eruptions apparently heated the Earth's atmosphere byabout 6 degrees Celsius.

This initial increase in temperature triggered, in turn, a massive releaseof methane from Arctic tundra and the oceans. The result of this runaway global warming was the greatest mass extinction since life emerged from the sea -- 95 percent of all species in existencedied. That from an initial temperature rise only 0.2 degrees Celsius morethan what the IPCC says could occur by the end of this century. We now knowthat human industry is causing in our lifetimes the same kind of methanerelease that triggered the Permian extinction.

The news from Siberia means that putting a brake on climate change in ourlifetimes, or our children's, is impossible. If the entire human racemiraculously slashed industrial carbon dioxide emissions today by the mostdrastic feasible amount, the temperature would continue to increase fordecades, maybe centuries. Unless something changes in the global zeitgeist, nations will debate and muddle along, and maybe eventually adopt some further showpiece compromises like the Kyoto protocol, and we'll tell ourselves it's enough.

By the time political and economic elites realize the ghastly scope ofwhat's happening, the truly catastrophic changes in our climate andbiosphere will probably be unfolding already. Katrina was a harbinger. The future will be far worse.

To imagine what it might be like is to invite charges of fear mongering,because it violates the scientific ethos of caution, restraint, andneutrality, the political and cultural norms of can-do optimism. But we'vereached the point now where we have to start envisioning what we will face.We have to see the data and projections in human terms, if we hope to beready for what our children and their children will have to endure. We haveto start thinking clearly about what the numbers might mean.

For decades, the right derided environmentalists as doom-sayers.Environmental organizations themselves often hesitated, for fear of losingcredibility, to put their case in stark, apocalyptic terms. It may not bepolitic to say so, but growing evidence suggests that the worst-caseforecasts are coming true. The ability of our planet to sustain life isbeginning to disintegrate.
The collapse will accelerate and intensify with each passing year. At somepoint, the cataclysm that ended Earth's Permian era, 251 million years ago,will repeat itself. During the decades or centuries of its recurrence, wewill see the end of technological progress, the destruction of ourcivilization, and quite possibly the extinction of our species.Preventing that outcome will, and should, override any other political andsocial issue. Quite literally, nothing else matters now. Every policy, every issue, must be viewed in terms of how it contributes to human survival. The impractical and the impossible are now imperative, whether we know it or not.

In the meantime, the environmental collapse will continue regardless, overmany human generations. Human societies face the task of riding it out asbest they can, minimizing the death and misery their inhabitants mustendure. In the end, they will have to redefine civilization. It's time for progressives to face what's coming. Normal politics isn'tenough anymore. Once, the left sought justice and plenty for everyone in theworld of material abundance created by the Industrial Revolution. The tasknow is to save something decent and humane as the former things pass away.What do we need to do, here and now? How can we do it? What comes next? Let the conversation begin here.

The article ends. The discussion begins with the questions - what would/could i do - what would/could you do - what would/could we do - to make this a better place for all forms of life that follow?