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Just when you’ve figured out where the enemy is and where the threats are, they come at you from a different direction.
Kills you. Because the bullet travels faster than the sound of the shot, you can be dead before the sound arrives. Which is kind of what is going on now — deadly events are arriving at such a pace, and from such strange directions, that we are dying in large numbers without a clue about what hit us.
Some of us who have been predicting many of these outcomes — the collapse of the industrial age, which seems now to be well under way — have been caught as flatfooted as the choristers who have been singing hymns to eternal growth while we have been grousing about time running out.
I, for example, have been writing for years about the coming crisis of fossil fuels, but I always thought it would be peak oil — the failure of supply to keep up with demand — that would do us in. As it turns out, it would appear the death blow is being delivered by the failure of demand to keep up with supply, with the result that prices are below the cost of production.
Failure to supply fuel to the trucks and planes, I always thought, would be the thing that crashed the globalized, just-in-time supply chain for food and brought a population that has forgotten where food comes from and how it is created, face to face with famine. That supply chain is broken now, not for lack of fuel but because infectious disease has shut down the industrial plants that process our industrial food. Still, this bears out my long-held belief that everything industry does to increase scale simultaneously concentrates risk.
Many of us had our eyes firmly fixed on global warming’s storms and droughts and rising sea levels, without giving a thought to the way it, and the human practices that cause it, are contributing to the worldwide explosion of infectious diseases. The diseases have always been there, hidden in remote jungles or frozen in permafrost — but warming temperatures, loss of diversity and habitat destruction are flushing them into the human population like cornered rats.
“God always forgives,” Pope Francis said recently, relating the recent pandemic to climate change, “man sometimes forgives. But nature never forgives.” Forgive me if I didn’t hear that bullet coming — a pope making a clear delineation between a merciful God and vengeful nature. This is what he said: “If we have deteriorated the Earth, the response will be very ugly.” Ouch.
I always expected the stock market to lead us down into the eventual depths of depression, but here we are, down here, and there is it, up there, its little legs churning happily away like Wile E. Coyote’s.
I thought perhaps debt would bring us down, as more and more people realized that it is mathematically impossible to repay what is already owed, as people, businesses and governments began to fall to their knees under the unbearable burden of ever-increasing interest expense. But they made money imaginary (for the federal government only) and began sprinkling it like pixie dust on endless wars, subsidies and tax breaks for the morbidly rich, and — reluctantly — for pandemics. But not a dime for health care reform or student debt relief.
Like an infantryman in a pitched battle, I’m hearing all these shots hit, and maim, and kill, because none of them has found me yet. When one does, it will probably be true what they say, that you never hear the shot that
Having anticipated collapse for more than a decade, I am always vague about which of many simultaneous threats will manifest as the first domino of a larger cascade effect. Full-on ecological and financial collapse are perennial favorites among those foolhardy enough to predict with specificity, and they no doubt await. One could debate whether the pandemic is more about anthropomorphized Mother Nature killing her children or the catastrophe of human and institutional mismanagement. Could be both. Lots of collateral effects to observe.
Regarding concentration of risk, I interpret our set of living arrangements in the opposite way. Risk has been distributed widely in hypercomplex societies, which have morphed into a global Rube Goldberg Machine. Failure at any junction can be patched temporarily, but the overall machine was always going to fail eventually. Whether the killing stroke is economics or supply or nature is immaterial insofar as any one failure affects all others.
It is written: “And behold – a Pale Horse! Its rider was Death, and Hell followed close behind. They were given authority…to kill by sword, famine and PESTILENCE, and wild animals.” – The Revelation 6:8
’nuff said.
I regard any pontifications from any pope about nature and its limits with contempt,just as the catholic church has treated the explanations from ecologists regarding the need for restraint on human procreation with contempt.
The Pope is just a politician.
We may look back on the 2020 pandemic wistfully as representing the time when we could respond to a relatively modest new virus with a full frontal industrial response with lots of disposable suits, gloves and masks, the leisure to take time away from scrambling to hide from the virus until…..and unlimited research funds to find……. Instead of just hoping we don’t catch it, or our immune system happens to do the job.
Robert Frost’s poem says: Some think the world will end in fire/some say ice…”
We could only wish it was so simple.
Gramma Windy
Tom! Speak to me, Tom!
I think you just took a round, Tom, judging from all the blood. But don’t worry; I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
Well don’t just stand there, give me some money.
Uh, well, they didn’t send any money, Tom, but I do have a truck full of ventilators. We can hook you up to one of them in case that bullet was carrying the virus…..
So he will have heard the fatal bullet, but he will have died of SARS-CoV-2. It will say so on the death certificate.
Well, JMG predicted in the comments-section of his most recent blog-post that the economy will come roaring back once the states “re-open”. That left me seriously wondering if his usefulness as a source of ideas for navigating collapse might have come to an end.
Are you talking about the Trump supporting – and up until quite recently – climate change denying, John Michael Greer?
If that’s the case, I’m not surprised.
correction: we could only wish it were so simple.
Gramma Windy
Tom, you’ve outdone yourself. This piece is stunning. Thank you.
Thank you so much.