how to save the world

The results are remarkably similar to what happens in real populations. There are, to use the now-famous expression, limits to growth. Exceed them, and the population goes into collapse, either following a normal curve or until some new self-sustainable stasis is reached. If the collapse is too severe or too prolonged, the species becomes extinct.

In our modern world, we keep trying to change the rules of the game in our favour. We have developed antibiotics and hygiene practices to try to defy the diseases that specifically target overcrowded species like ours. We have learned to steal resources from future generations to prolong todayís population spiral, a staggering population explosion that is utterly unsustainable. We may delay the inevitable a while longer, but nature always bats last, and no species can defy her astonishingly complex and effective self-regulation mechanisms (or the laws of thermodynamics) forever. The longer we drag out our unsustainable growth, the more severe the correction that will take place to restore stasis, and the greater the risk of total extinction. The bigger we get, the harder we will fall.

Two of the most amazing and adaptable creatures on the planet are bacteria and poxviruses. Despite the antibiotic (literally, anti-life) chemical soup we soak ourselves and our habitats in, bacteria remain greater in total biomass on this planet than humans (they’re the only species that can claim that honour). Bacteria have an astonishing ability to mutate quickly to become immune to anything we can throw at them. They exist in the hottest deserts, the coldest places on the planet’s surface and far underground where gravitational pressure makes life impossible for other creatures. They are far more resilient and diverse than our species.

Poxviruses exist for virtually every animal species on the planet, and some of the more prolific species have many different poxviruses, each designed by evolution to target only that one species. As the population density of that species rises, the contagiousness and ability of poxviruses to thrive both increase exponentially. Were it not for mosquito poxviruses for example, the world would be covered in swarms of mosquitoes thick enough to block the sun and render most species (including us) quickly extinct. As part of the delicate balance and interconnectedness of life, we owe our very existence to poxviruses. We have, in thanks, eradicated the only currently-known poxvirus targeted at our species: smallpox. We did it by inoculating billions of humans, by contaminating them with the cow poxvirus. The bovine pox is not targeted at us, so it does us no harm, but it is close enough to the smallpox virus to give us immunity to the latter. How long it will take for a new human poxvirus to emerge, or for some latent strain of smallpox (buried underground, where anthrax also lies, or deliberately released by some antisocial person) to discover a whole new generation of uninoculated victims, we do not know. Itís not a matter of if, itís a matter of when.

Much of the current attention of pandemic planners is focused on the influenza virus. Like poxviruses, most influenza viruses are targeted at specific species, and do best where the populations are horrifically overcrowded and homogeneous (no genetic diversity). The modern factory farm with hundreds of thousands of weakened (through lack of sun, exercise, freedom and other essentials of life), nearly-identical animals crowded into an obscenely small area and subjected to horrific daily stress provides an absolutely perfect breeding ground for such viruses. That’s the role of viruses in nature, after all ñ to weed out unnaturally overpopulated creatures and bring the ecosystem back into healthy balance. And voilý ñ poultry flu.

Although viruses rarely make the jump from one species to another, they are very adaptable creatures, and such jumps will occur as random events as the species looks to identify other overcrowded creatures. The more interactions between an infected species and another species, the more opportunity for such a jump to occur. The huge amount of handling of poultry by humans is an open invitation for such evolutionary transformations, and the risk is compounded by the fact we now move poultry from place to place around the globe as often as we move people. As volume and distance of travel of infected creatures from one overpopulated area to another increases, the risk of cross-contamination and inter-species infection rises exponentially. We are just asking for it. So it is no surprise that scientists now predict that the next flu pandemic is overdue and will probably be the result of evolutionary advances enabling easier spread from poultry to humans and then from humans to other humans.

Our solution is to pre-emptively kill hundreds of millions of healthy birds (often gruesomely, but arguably we are at least and at last putting them out of the misery of their horrendous caged lives), and to inject and soak the poultry in other toxins that will encourage even more rapid mutation of bacteria and viruses to forms that are immune to the worst poisons we can invent. Our anti-life inventions will wipe us out long before they will render ‘germs’ extinct. An alien watching all this from afar would conclude we had taken leave of our senses.

One of the most remarkable results of the excessive use of antibiotics is a new strain of bacterial infections generally referred to as MRSA: methicillin (and orthocillin)-resistant staph bacteria. MRSA infections are usually controllable through isolation of sick patients, but they’re highly contagious and have caused fatalities, especially in patients undergoing surgery, and flesh-eating disease. Our predictable response to infections that resist the most inexpensive, safe and popular antibiotics is to prescribe more expensive, less safe antibiotics. But now even the second level of more unpleasant antibiotics ñ vancomycins ñ has been trumped by new bacterial infections (called VRSA and VRE) that are resistant to them too. And to make matters worse, many common bacteria like e.coli and salmonella have now evolved an enzyme called ESBL that makes them immune to known antibiotics as well. Nature always bats last.

If that weren’t enough, nature is also working on an even more ingenious way to bring our numbers back under control. Itís called a prion, and unlike bacteria or viruses, prions aren’t even alive. They’re a kind of toxic evolutionary protein that is also, surprise, species-specific. Mad cow disease (BSE) is caused by one kind of prion, and sheep scapie by another. These are horrible diseases, quite contagious within species. And, surprise, they also sometimes make the jump from one species to another. There is compelling evidence that a variant of Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (vCJD) is caused by the same prion that causes BSE. That’s why we’ve recently added tens of thousands of healthy cows to the list of slaughter victims in our mindless effort to prevent an epidemic of vCJD. Until very recently we have been casually feeding ground-up waste products from cows to other farmed animals and even pets (creatures that would not, in the wild, eat cows), increasing the likelihood of inter-species prion transmission. The problem is, because it’s not alive, we can’t kill prions with antibiotics or anti-anything. Nature has quickly moved ahead of us in this baseball game, and our casualties and costs in a losing cause are already massive.

I could go on, but I think you get my point. In our fight against diseases, we remain blindly convinced that medicine and technology are somehow going to keep us ahead of the game indefinitely. Such a belief is pure theology, and flies in the face of any rational study of science and history. Sooner or later we must drastically reduce our numbers and concentration, and the numbers and crowding and ill-health of farmed animals, or nature will do it for us, in ways that will be increasingly unpleasant the longer we delay. I think most of us appreciate this instinctively, ‘in our bones’. Whether we have what it takes to act on that voluntarily, to overcome our foolish pride, isanother matter.

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

• Finding & Working With Others to Save the World: Ways to enable billions to sync with us, on their own terms, in their own context, developing their own plan of action, and then to connect and collaborate in powerful ways, in experiments and in creating and refining working models in their own self-selected Earth-stewarding intentional communities, so that they no longer need the systems that are destroying our world.
• Diseases to Fear More Than Flu: MRSA. Prion diseases. Modern chronic diseases of the auto-immune and other systems that are epidemic without being contagious, environmental rather than viral. Diseases that neither medicine nor pharmacy can cure, or prevent.
• What’s Holding Us Back: Our modern society’s three-way tension between falling into the Centre, progressing to the Edge, and just giving up.

What I’m thinking about:

What I wrote about yesterday, about the collective change of mind that seems to be spreading, peer-to-peer, through the mainstream of our society, unaffected by anything in the mainstream media, by political press releases, or by corporatist propaganda. I saw this “something happening here” in the late 1960s, and never expected to see it again.

The Fourth Turning. There are signs of this too, with consequences almost too grim to imagine. Which will prevail, the collective change of mind (an opening of a new global consciousness) or the fourth turning (an era of repression, violent reactionary tyranny)? Or neither? Or both?

My colitis flare-up continues, but it’s much different from the initial disease. This time I’m getting a fair amount of bleeding but very little pain. My stomach’s noisy but not irregular. I’m tired but not exhausted. My mood is much better and my stress level is much lower.Any sufferers out there have any thoughts on this?

What’s on your mind this week?

What’s Going on Out There?: I’m finding myself increasingly impatient with the so-called ‘news’. What appears in the headlines seems more and more disconnected from what is really going on out there. So what is really going on?

1. A slow, major mindshift: A year ago, for me to talk about civilizational collapse by the end of this century would merely have raised eyebrows. Now, suddenly, it is gradually becoming a credible worldview to many, and for some, accepted wisdom. There is enormous cynicism that we can do anything about it in time, but across the political spectrum there seems to be a growing sense that ‘this can’t go on’. This has happened despite the mainstream media, despite the politicians, despite the scientific reports (none of which most people pay any attention to). It is as if the bodies of the public have suddenly woken up to what a synthesis of all the conscious and especially the unconscious information they are absorbing is telling them: “There’s something happening here.” I can still hardly believe it. Strange. Important. Anyone else out there on the Edge getting this vibe?
2. Embracing complexity: Simple, efficient, homogeneous = fragile. Complex, effective, diverse = resilient. In what we grow and what we eat. In what we buy and sell. In how we determine what to do, in organizations and in letting-ourselves-change. In everything. 
3. The end of coddling obsolete and dangerous religions: First it was Dawkins’ book criticizing organized religion as anachronistic. Now there’s even an acknowledgement that drastic reductions in human population are needed if we’re to have any hope of putting a dint in the major social problems of our time. Organizations that claim we all have a right and/or duty to overpopulate our planet to the point of extinction must be confronted and made as socially loathsome as those that advocate genocide. 
4. The end of trust of leaders and the demand for transparency: FEMA, Enron, the Bush Administration’s rogues’ gallery, have all started to bring about a growing distrust of leaders, their infallibility, and the need for the ability to oversee and second guess, and even replace egomaniacal decisions with the Wisdom of Crowds. Bush’s ‘signing statements’, which allow him to put himself above the law, are now being recognized as the outrageous abuse of power that they are.
5. Thinking a little further ahead: A new CDC study on emergency preparedness acknowledges, at last, that it’s the actions of the people, not the political and emergency organizations, that will make all the difference in an emergency like a flu pandemic. That means closing schools, workplaces and shopping malls, and teaching children to be the vanguard by coughing into sleeves and washing their hands faithfully. And it means thinking past the next newsday, election and quarterlyfinancial statement. Aha!

We were not meant to live in cities, in climates that our naked bodies are not suited to, in lands where finding wild and healthy food isn’t easy and delightful. We are creatures of the jungle. There is no room for us now, in the jungle, and we have forgotten how to live there anyway. And within a few decades the jungle will all be gone in any case. If we long for that home we will do so in vain.

A couple of years ago I wrote a passage, from the perspective of a duck, that I still get comments on from time to time:

When I wrote this, I had been sitting quietly at the edge of my wetland home, watching the ducks and imagining what they could say to me if only I understood their language. And I began feeling ‘homesick’. Not the nostalgia for the sanitized, idealized past, in the place I grew up. Not the insecure yearning for a simpler, secure, responsibility-free existence. Rather, a longing for a place I had never known, calling to me.

My current home is a lovely place, one that I leave as rarely as possible and spend as much time as possible exploring and learning more about. It is my connection to this current home that allows me to hear the call of my true home, in some faraway jungle that exists only in my imagination and in my bones and in my genetic code, my intuition. I can only describe it as a joyful ache, because the mere thought of it, and what I, and others for whom it is also home and with whom I am meant to be living, would be doing there, if only we could make our way forward to that place, makes me smile.

I am very content with my current home. It is the best home that one could hope to find in this terrible, crowded modern world. It has allowed me to discover a great deal about myself and what it means to be human, and alive. And it has enabled me to Let-Myself-Change. But it is not my true home, and much of the learning I ache for is not possible here or anyplace that is left for humans to choose to live.

This is what makes me despair most about our future. With all the challenges we face in this century, we are not very well equipped to know what we must do, because we are so disconnected from the only place, our true home, from which such knowledge can come. We can, of course, adapt to any place, learn to call any place home; that is the great strength of our species. But in that adaptation so much learning and knowledge and capacity is inevitably lost. Even indigenous peoples — who appreciate this far more than most, and more than I, lucky as I am to have found a wonderful half-way surrogate home — cannot really know what must be done. And as they, and we, become further displaced, again and again, by what we strangely call ëprogressí, that knowledge fades even further from our grasp. We may call these astonishing places ëhomeí, but we do not belong here.

Most of the very bright people I know have spent all their lives in cities, and when I speak to them about this it is as if I were speaking a foreign language. They have no idea what I mean. Soon, this will be true for all of us. We will have such knowledge as the world has never seen or imagined.

But it will not be the knowledge we need to be human, to be who we really are. We will have lost the final compass that could have shown us, at last, theway home.