It has snowed six inches in the last week, and as of this morning, three inches remain on the ground outside our windows. Our woodpile has continued to shrink due to nighttime temperatures in the teens. Later today, I’ll clean the ashes out of the stove and sweep the chimney, maybe for the last time this spring, maybe not if the snow keeps up.
April weather was harsh enough to discourage the steelhead people, who haven’t shown up in their usual numbers. Steelhead haven’t either. It’s because of warming conditions in the oceans, or difficulty with dams, or contamination from upriver sewage, or the non-coincidental appearance of masses of algae in formerly clear water. Where the river flows through our back yard, an overflow channel is choked with slime, bank-to-bank. Against the night’s skiff of snow, it’s a shocking lurid green that makes us think of horror movies.
Julie asked me if there was anything we could put in the water that would get rid of the stuff, and I said, “Not without killing a bunch of other things.”
It’s a dictum that applies to almost everything we do these days.
Chicken barns, literal and metaphoric:
This morning’s news tells us that a single American egg factory has killed 5.3 million hens by closing off air circulation in their barns and letting the temperatures rise to above 104 F. It’s not a humane way to kill chickens, but it takes less time than less cruel methods. The reason the hens were killed is the discovery of a single case of bird flu, which makes me think that the whole factory wasn’t making the return on investment its owner, Glen Taylor, was expecting. After the birds were pulled from their cages and buried en masse by bulldozers, two hundred and fifty employees, many of them with the factory for years, were permanently laid off. (Taylor is the billionaire owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves, in case you’re looking for an NBA team to root for.)
Also, the country of Nauru, a 21-square-kilometer island in the South Pacific, has given the International Seabed Authority two-year notice to finalize regulations for mining the seabed or it will authorize mining without regulations. Nauru itself has been strip-mined for phosphate fertilizer by successive colonial powers, leaving its citizens stuck on a barren rock without productive soil, making a living by running a concentration camp for refugees caught trying to get into Australia. It’s using its status as a principality to start a new gold rush, the gold being trillions of baseball-sized metallic nodules scattered on the seabed between Hawaii and Mexico, there for the taking. Yet-to-be perfected submarine robots will harvest these nodules, and they’ll be processed for rare earths, cobalt, copper, and manganese. Nauru is doing this for Deep Green, a deep-sea mining company based in British Columbia (now, having merged with the Sustainable Opportunities Acquisition Corporation, it’s known simply as The Metals Company).
Although the deep seabed has been declared a desert with little life, we can assume that there are more than 5.3 million creatures, nine-tenths of them unknown to science, on the ocean’s floor between Hawaii and Mexico. Strip-mining the seabed is going to be as beneficial to these creatures as the Minnesota Timberwolves have been for chickens. (A spokesman for Aker BP, a Norwegian-British oil company, said that its undersea mining operations would eventually be “bigger than oil.” The BP in the company’s name stands for British Petroleum, in case you’re looking for an international mega-corporation to root for.)
Also, the war. Vladimir Putin seems to be intent on converting the entire country of Ukraine into a large, unventilated chicken barn. The last time anything happened like what’s happening in Ukraine was World War II, which makes you believe in reincarnation. Putin was born in October of 1952, which gave Adolf Hitler seven years to hang around the Bardo with the shades of Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering, devising new and better ways to bring evil into our world, before he was reincarnated as Putin.
Putin has hit on the idea that a single Nazi necessitates the culling of an entire people, which is right out of the egg farmer’s playbook.
The trouble with metaphors like this one is that they can go absurdly cosmic on you if you’re not careful. What if God, looking at the earth and its vast soul-farm, which has yet to show a profit despite millennia of divine capital investment, discovers a single case of Putin and decides to cull all of humanity? And then lay off a bunch of angels and archangels, most of them with nowhere to go because they’re not even legal denizens of this planet?
We have passed the boundaries of good taste here, but not because I’m comparing the earth to an egg mine, and humans to eminently disposable chickens, and God to an NBA owner, and Ukraine to an acquirable sustainable opportunity, and the corporation currently known as Aker BP to plain old BP. It’s because humanity has made eight billion copies of itself, and a substantial portion of those copies are insatiable enough to make a swarm of locusts hang its heads in shame.
Infinite growth on a finite planet is the concept our economic system depends on. It’s incompatible with life. The humans who believe we can keep on keeping on are, in a word, insane. A good many scientists, historians, and economists are recognizing that insanity and putting forth arguments showing just how insane it is.
Small comfort, I know, now that the ventilation seems to have been shut off.
The Ukraine War brings with it the possibility of a wider war where nuclear weapons will be used. Most computer simulations predict that after the first tactical nuke goes off, a rapid tit-for-tat escalation ensues, ending with an all-out nuclear exchange. Human (and chicken) extinction occurs within a few decades, mostly due to radioactive fallout, nuclear winter, and the end of food and clean water and share-and-share-alike ethics.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, most people haven’t lived in the shadow of The Bomb, and it’s reasonable for people in their thirties to assume nuclear weapons won’t be used simply because they’ve only been used once. Nuclear war is only real for those of us who went through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the various early-warning false-alarms of the 70s and 80s, and the development of nuclear arsenals by India and Pakistan.
But it’s looking more real by the minute. Recent videos have caused some medical personnel to diagnose Putin with Parkinson’s Disease, which causes tremors, difficulty in movement, distractibility, and problems in “planning, organizing, and regulating behavior to meet goals.” The first line of treatment for Parkinson’s is Levodopa, whose side effects include unusually pale skin, impulsive behavior, “false beliefs that cannot be changed by facts,” and “seeing, hearing, or feeling things that aren’t there.” All this, in addition to having a thing for making live animals into dead ones, makes Putin a good candidate for Billionaire Egg Farmer of the Year.
The biggest problem with autocracies is that autocrats get old, get tired of marinating in sycophancy, get sick, go crazy, never feel like they’ve done enough, never feel like they’re complete. They’re like unhappy children on Christmas morning, kicking and screaming in the midst of piles of presents. Except they’re old. Older than their years. Sicker than their diseases.
Even the people they love—if there are any—are waiting for them to die. That’s the subliminal truth of the rest of their lives, and it’s a constant battle to keep it from consciousness.
Putin commands five thousand nuclear weapons and vast stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Draw your own conclusions.
The most accurate book of prophecy I’ve ever read is The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by four MIT systems analysts. They postulated—with the help of computer models—that industrial civilization was unsustainable, and that without totalitarian-level efforts to limit population and industrial production, things would start falling apart. Graphed on a quantity/time axis, their model predicted that humanity’s natural resources, food per capita, industrial output, and pollution would all go into steep decline by 2025. Population would start declining in 2040.
The book was the object of critical scorn and outright rejection of its premises until the 2009 recession. Then, its graphed curves began to correspond with real-world declines. By 2019, it didn’t seem unreasonable that the vast system of farms, mines, supply chains, factories, cities, highways, subdivisions—the constructed world that the majority of humans depend on for life itself—would fall to pieces by 2030 if not before.
The Covid pandemic provided distraction from this crisis, and demonstrated that humans could survive without airplane travel, at least for a while. They could survive lockdowns, the loss of family members, takeout, compulsory masking, social distancing, and quarantines. Work-from-home, distance learning for schoolchildren, and distance mourning for the bereaved became societal promises that more and more of life could become virtual. Shortages of computer chips—already in the works before Wuhan became famous—became excuses for shortages of anything that required a computer chip.
The pandemic has been edging toward endemicity lately, and a sense of normalcy was returning until Putin decided to invade his neighbor. Now war and sanctions are the excuse for inflation and empty shelves.
The problem with pandemic and war is that while they might be existential threats in themselves, they obscure the existential threat that was talked about in The Limits to Growth. Simply put, most of us aren’t going to survive without industrial civilization, and the ones who do aren’t going to want to survive. Human conflict is going to wreck any chance we might have had to consciously move resource extraction, industrial production, energy consumption, and population toward any kind of sustainability.
I didn’t think we stood much of a chance before pandemic and war, but afterward, I don’t think we stand a chance at all. Those still alive in ten years are going to live a much more basic existence, the one—except for the cannibalism part—we should have been living all along, but we’ll be doing it for the wrong reasons, and those wrong reasons will have killed most of us.
We’re going solve the existential dilemma the hard way, the way 99% of the species that ever existed on earth did it, and let the issue of consciousness—and its attendant issues of ethics and love in the face of death—be the problem of some other species, on some other planet, billions of light-years away.
What does a human do when he starts feeling that he has the same amount of agency as a hen in an egg factory?
Not much, you might think, but it doesn’t work out that way.
The weather: today and Tuesday it’s going to snow four inches or so, which is a lot for May. I’m hoping for a foot by June, and then a month of cold rain. That should get us through fire season, barring the flash of hydrogen explosions.
There’s a fire in the stove now. The chimney is clean. I emptied a couple buckets of ashes on the field between the house and the river. Wood ash works as fertilizer if you spread it finely enough. You’ll get dirty doing it, though.
I’ve chopped a bunch of kindling and piled a couple of nights’ worth of wood next to the stove. We cut it fine this time of year so a morning’s small fire will burn out by afternoon. Otherwise the house gets too hot.
As soon as the snow goes off, I’m going to rake the lawn, and attend to the fence rails that need to be replaced. I’ll give the garage a badly needed spring cleaning.
I’ll do all these things in the face of despair about the world’s burden of death. It’s cheerful work. It keeps your mind off war and chicken factories and God’s apparent fascination with evil, and metallic nodules a mile beneath the ocean surface, and the hermit creatures that live down there, and what’s about to happen to them.
It’s work that keeps you and the people you love alive, and it’s worth doing, no matter how small it appears in the grand scheme of things. It’s work that suggests that good things lie in small gestures and dignity can exist in the moment. It’s work that stays done for a while. It builds instead of destroys.
It’s work that tells you that you are still alive, which is a good thing, if a temporary one. And when it’s over, as Epicurus noted two thousand years ago, you’re not there anyway.