diebackandcollapse.com

29 July 2008

Introduction: Waking from humanity’s sleepwalk, p. 2-3

Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback; Future .

Excerpt from Chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 2-3.

Refugees by the millions stream across borders like the Ganges flooding its banks, for what is a border and the name of a nation when there is no grain for one’s children and no water to slake their thirsts? No one can count the wars there started and the nuclear warheads tossed in the fray. And now there is talk and fear by all those with enough food in their bellies to worry of such things about all the nuclear weapons known and unknown, secured and loose, hydrogen, atomic, suitcase and dirty, and about those who might be desperate and full of hate enough to use them. That most explosive chemical, testosterone—Civilization’s bargain with the devil—now fuels the passion of many young men filled with resentment, greed, fear, rage. For but a few dollars they will hungrily trade a pound of plutonium. And young boys banded in their newly formed clans skitter about the earth with bullets singing from their gun belts. Led by ruthless, psychotic men with guns, jeeps and tanks, or even on horseback and camels, they run across the barren and scorched earth like plagues of ants, eating, plundering, raping and shitting upon all that is true and profane, equally.

But the skies are yet blue and the oceans wide and deep: so how can there be limits to what our species may do? Let us look deeper, then. Let us peer underground where is revealed salt waters where once there was oil and where once there was fresh water to drink. Let us wonder at the great aquifers of the earth, under the American Midwest, under China, India and the Middle East, all these once flush with ancient waters now emptied of their liquids, having been spilled for decades as irrigation onto foods fed on steroids, on oil, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, hormones, antibiotics, their very genes modified in ways nature has never before known. The great rivers—once gods to this race—are now but open sewers. Some never reach the ocean, so drained are they by the billions of thirsty mouths they must pass on their ancient journeys to the coast. And the oceans themselves have become deserts, where no fishing boat will waste its time hunting. The glaciers upon the mountains have all melted to the seas, and there is great fear as to the future of the polar ice sheets.

Although who really has time for such worries? Who but the wealthiest few do not spend their days foraging for their sustenance? A father’s eyes downcast as daughter goes out to give herself, to feed him. The lands of our forbearer’s daily bread, for eons lush and fertile, have become suddenly barren. Or it seemed sudden. Three years ago, in 2027, when the droughts, floods and plagues came upon us—just a natural coincidence of variables, really, any archeologist will tell you this, these things happen and have happened and will happen many times more—the lands cropped for centuries finally died and the forests all about the tropical earth were razed for farmland. From the fires that consumed all this life, smoke roiled up black and thick, as if from a ceremony of massive sacrifices. And still the famines mounted. And the economies came to a screaming halt. There was no wage for a day’s work, and the amnesiac Americans remembered the dust bowl and the depression, and there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. The churches and temples and synagogues were filled with the uplifted cries of, “O God, what have we done?”

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