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by Charles Carreon
04/08/07
Global Warming is so yesterday. Let’s talk about
Global Rhythm. All life is based on rhythm, and I don’t mean of the
beat-box variety. The rhythm I’m talking about is what we might call
Planetary Predictability. The sun rises every morning, the moon and the
tides follow rhythms, and the seasons repeat themselves year after year.
Rainfall, wind, and heat, alternate and blend rhythmically in what has
become a relatively predictable pattern. That's all changing as the
Earth's patterns are stretching, slipping, and falling apart altogether.
The Earth, already warmed to perfection by the sun's rays, is being
whipped into a fever by human carbon burning. As a result Earth is
getting dizzy, missing some of her dance steps, and losing her sense of
rhythm.
Unfortunately for us, even though our human lifestyles
have evolved from hunting and gathering to herding and horticulture, to
agribusiness and manufacturing, our current survival style is based on
predictable seasonal patterns. Plants and animals can be knocked out of
rhythm with devastating results by what seem like tiny changes in
rainfall, temperature, prevailing winds, and ambient water conditions.
Fish die out altogether simply because there's not enough water in the
stream at spawning time, or it's too hot, too cold, too acid or to
alkaline for fish eggs to survive. Caribou starve when they are unable
to break through the ice covering their forage, that forms when warm
days melt snow, and cold nights freeze it. Fishermen and caribou hunters
are then forced to abandon their ancestral homes and livelihood. Even
mechanized agribusiness will find it ever more difficult to power its
way through the increased complexity of keeping the planet fed when the
seasons come at the wrong time.
It’s not just a matter of things getting too hot. That
might be the case if the planet were a simple system like a building
with a cooling system, which when it goes down, will cause there to be
more sweat on your beer bottle in the hotel bar. But the Earth is so
much more complex than that, and the complexity of the Earth’s rhythms
relates directly to the productivity of people and land. If the prices
of producing products change too rapidly, markets will simply dry up.
Agricultural businesses will stop producing very quickly if prices go
out of whack, and even ordinary weather fluctuations cause commodity
crises. Wait until crop yields start fluctuating radically due to
changing seasonal rhythms. Being a farmer will be as exciting as playing
video poker, and about as profitable.
Right now, the planet is being rocked out of rhythm by
the excessive energy inputs of industry. I visualize the people
responsible for the loss of Global Rhythm as some old white guys in
Panama suits, drinking cold beer and mopping their brows, talking about
the price of coffee and gold, oil and mercury, women and cocaine. I
imagine these can-do guys calling the shots in mining and logging,
fishing and ranching, dam construction and electrical generation,
manufacturing junk, polluting skies and rivers, taking their cut of the
gold, and leaving others waste. If they had been Martians, we would have
recognized them as enemies of humanity and of Earth. They have
controlled the industrial leviathan for nearly two centuries, and our
nation now sits astride a collapsing planetary ecosystem and economy,
the world's greatest energy hog, declaring that it will never change its
ways.
The acme of this folly is the way the Bush regime is
flirting with Armageddon in a run-up to the Hundred Years’ Oil War, as
if no life would be worth living without the black juice, as the makers
of Road Warrior put it prophetically. A friend of mine once said he
hated Road Warrior because it was utterly inane to imagine that people
who were running out of gas would still be revving their engines and
engaging in vehicular aggression. The more I look at the current
situation in Iraq, the less this seems like a legitimate objection to
the film.
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