We're headed up to New York beginning tomorrow, with a weekend stop in DC. I should have been making preps yesterday, but I fell down a rabbit-hole at the National Archives, reading the deck logs of ships in the Pacific near the surrender of Japan. It was fascinating and disappointing and a story for another time.
I saved a story in Apple News, my apologies if you can't follow the link. It resonates with my own struggle with anxiety bordering on depression. But...
There is never going to be a point when it’s too late to be a good planetary roommate, he insists. “It’s late. It’s very late, and it’s very tragic that it’s gotten to this point, but it’s not too late because it’s not a binary on or off thing. It’s like every gallon, every litre of petrol that gets burned, every aeroplane that flies, every cow that is raised and slaughtered for meat makes it a little bit worse.”
I welcome the possibility of being surprised, too. Tom Murphy has been playing with some numbers (He "does the math."), and they reveal some interesting things.
I would like to read or hear more from demographers about the UN's projections and what seems to be happening with fertility rates around the world.
What Tom writes seems to at least suggest the possibility of a controlled descent. I've read various opinions on what earth's "carrying capacity" is, and the numbers I've seen range between 1 and 3 billion. I have no idea how accurate those may be, and I suppose they depend on what level "degradation" of the "natural" environment is desirable. For what it's worth, there is no "natural environment" left on earth, in the strictest sense. I think we're looking for a sustainable level of species diversity versus an ongoing mass extinction event, as a minimum.
The decrease in fertility rates allows for a significant decline in the world's population that doesn't require famine, disease and war to achieve it. Those things will still occur, of course, but perhaps not on a scale that might include a nuclear exchange and wholesale slaughter on global scale.
Inequity will still be the defining characteristic, with those of us in the global north likely suffering the least. It may prompt a serious reexamination of our way of life, though.
May.
It should certainly illustrate the genuine "limits to growth," that should inform how we choose to organize our economic activity and what a sustainable, reasonable quality of life might be. Consumption shouldn't be the primary goal of living a "good life."
There's still plenty to despair though. I just finished Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, by Colin Woodard. It's a fascinating book, and a good companion volume to The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson, or Robert E. Lee and Me, by Ty Seidule.
The Civil War was fought to end slavery and preserve the union. It was not fought to end white supremacy. If slavery is America's "original sin," the fruit we were deceived into biting was the myth of white supremacy. I've had to think about this a bit, and I'm not certain I've got it right, but in the "chicken or the egg" matter of racism and white supremacy, I think white supremacy came first.
And white supremacy is still with us, though I don't understand why.
When I was on Twitter and Ta-Nehisi Coats was as well, I recall reading tweets from him that suggested the role of white supremacy/racism was to serve the psychological needs of poor white men. That, while they were still poor, they weren't at the bottom of the social hierarchy because they were still superior to other "races" and people. And I guess I still don't understand how someone grows up to need that. I'm certain it's passed along from parent to child, chiefly fathers to sons, but how much psychological or emotional utility does it actually have?
I know we're born with some sort of intrinsic sense of fairness and that we can experience unfairness with a negative emotional response. Poverty, being poor, is inherently unfair, though I suppose it can also be a learned experience as many people can truthfully say, "We didn't know we were poor," because there was no other or larger experience to compare it too.
And ambitious people, again, mostly men, can exploit this characteristic to serve their own ambition or agenda. But only in an environment of ignorance. White supremacy, or any form of bigotry, requires othering some group. Making them seem undesirable in some fashion, and that only works if the people they're making this appeal for bigotry to, don't know the "other." Because none of the undesirable characteristics are especially unique to any group being "othered." Because we're all people. So bigotry relies on ignorance and deception.
I don't know where I'm going with this. I just meant to say that Woodrow Wilson was a real racist and a genuinely weird dude too. I knew he segregated federal civil service because I visited his presidential library (unofficial, because it was before "official" presidential libraries) in Staunton, Virginia. The only thing I knew about Josephus Daniels, Wilson's Secretary of the Navy, and just one of the racists he surrounded himself with, was that he banned alcohol aboard navy ships. They never told us he was also a vehement racist and white supremacist (if that's not too redundant). Let's not name another ship after him.
In any event, white supremacy, and the ignorance it requires, is behind so much of the unfairness and inequity in the world, and will play a shameful role in how the great simplification plays out.
And we should be ashamed.
Now I've got to start packing.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:07 Wednesday, 19 June 2024