Times of Change

I stand nude on the balcony, staring at the soft December rain.

The thousand year wind, the Twilight Storm has begun…

The Time of Change is here. I know that. It is like Hide and Seek. The Earth cries out, loud and clear to humanity: Ready or not: here I come.

The Earth is not committing suicide. We are. The Earth will prevail, long after we’re mud. At the very least if we don’t stand up for ourselves.

Change is a constant in our lives, in all our lives, whether we wish it or not. But sometimes when a society and its majority of people have become so stale, so locked up in themselves that they hardly know how to dress themselves in the morning… change has to be imposed.

This is one of those times. Humanity is standing at such a crossroad right now.

The Roman Empire crumbled and collapsed under its own weight. So did a number of other societies throughout history. Now… it’s happening all over the world. Civilization itself is going down.

Good riddance.

This is no doomsday prophecy, like in religious texts. These are simple observations of our surroundings, telling one, inevitable conclusion.

We have excessive human-created Global Warming, with its many facets, the melting of ice on a global scale, causing the approximately 70 meters rise in sea levels, the increasingly powerful storms, desertification and similar effects, drawing moisture from the very ground.

But the climate breakdown does more than affect the weather: It’s putting added stress on systems, both ecological and human made. It’s making it even harder to feed the world’s human population. It causes social relations to come even closer to its breaking point. And it makes the upcoming worldwide, devastating pandemonium even more likely.

Currently, when a storm ravages a country, aid organizations or other countries will probably offer help, to help cleaning up the ruins and in the painful and hard rebuilding process. But what happens when this is happening on the entire continent or all over the world simultaneously, when there is no one left to help?

We are reaching that threshold right now.

The ice on Greenland, in the Arctic and in Antarctica is melting faster than anyone or very few have predicted. The melting of the sea based Arctic ice won’t make the sea levels rise. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctica ice will. According to the scientists quoted by Al Gore (yes, that early) merely the melting of half of the ice on Greenland and half of the West Antarctica Ice Shelf will cause the sea levels to rise 14 meters. The melting of the enormous ice masses of inland Antarctica will cause the sea to rise four or five times that. Eighty-four percent of the world’s population lives by the coast, and most of them in cities. It’s all pretty much self-explanatory, really, and there should be no need or draw a picture. Unfortunately there is.

The thousand year wind is blowing… And it will blow that long because the warming already in the system will linger that long, no matter what we do or don’t do. If we stopped all releases of greenhouse gases tomorrow the thousand year wind would still blow. And long before it has stopped raging, all major human settlements will be Gone.

And since we are not stopping our releases of greenhouse gases at all, but on the contrary are increasing them, it will blow even longer, and stronger, of course.

Some people claim that civilization will return, even after such an all-encompassing event, but I’m confident that it won’t. All the minerals, all the paths that led to civilization are exhausted by now, and an eventual alternative return to a technologically based society will have to be just that.

Good riddance.

I am basically agreeing with those saying that if civilization should prevail, it will be the greatest tragedy of all.

Civilization is a tailspin suicide run, destroying everything making life worth living, and will always be that, a spiritual bankrupt society without much humanity and far removed from our natural, fabulous state. And before you say it: There is no «noble savage», and no perfect society, but while civilization encourages all the worst parts of humanity, tribal, nomadic societies encourage the best in us. We are, after all, natural nomads, born to be wild and free, to a life in a land without borders, to a life without limitations and limits. The Neanderthals faded from the Earth when they stopped being nomads, and we have been repeating, emulating their mistake for some time, now, existing (not living) through ten thousand years of misery, degradation and spiritual death.

A land without nomads is a land without freedom.

And today we are stuck, both in mind and body. It has to stop, one way or another.

There seems to be a kind of self-correcting mechanism in nature. If a population grows too big, too full of itself, to the point of threatening the ecosystem, that mechanism takes care of such minor and insignificant pleasantries like cities, factories and overpopulation. The numerous human-created poisons, the spiritual death, the devastating social-political circumstances, they are destroying us. But the galloping greenhouse effect… sorely needed… is humanity’s salvation, the salvation of all life on Earth.

I'm an optimist. I believe it will happen