how to save the world

Three people have sent me links to Paul Kingsnorth‘s recent two-part diatribe opposing vaccines and vaccine mandates. Two of them said they were persuaded by his argument. Here’s what I replied to them:

“The Vaccine Moment” is a warmed-over op-ed, driven by fear, poorly thought out, and pretty much fact-free. You know, like a Thomas Friedman piece.

I respect your opinion, and Paul Kingsnorth’s, though not without great sadness.

My viewpoints and decisions on CoVid-19 are informed by the science, in particular by the work of epidemiologists, a number of whom I worked with for two years with the Ontario Ministry of Health during the aftermath of the SARS pandemic, preparing for the “next” pandemic, which we are now struggling with.

I have no love of government bureaucracies, and even less for “law enforcement” agencies. But I believe absolutely in the wisdom of getting vaccinated, including getting a booster now, not only for my own protection but for the protection of my fellow citizens.

When Paul Kingsnorth says “It is [a] fact that these vaccines, whatever their efficacy in other areas, do not prevent transmission of the virus”, he is simply wrong, and in saying that he is spreading misinformation. The facts are:

• Vaccines drastically reduce the likelihood of being infected, and, even when a vaccinated person is infected, they are dramatically less likely to infect others because their body produces much less of the virus.
• When you are vaccinated, the probability of getting infected (and hence possibly getting chronic Long Covid diseases) is much lower, the probability of being hospitalized even if you do get infected is much lower, and the probability of dying if you are hospitalized is much lower.

On that basis, I have been double vaxxed and boosted, and did so as soon as I was able to and without hesitation or concern. We have a century of experience with vaccines, their development, and their risks. The risk is not zero, but is much lower than the risk of not being vaccinated.

My opinion on that is completely unconnected to my opinions on government oppression, or on what steps should be taken when people refuse to get vaccinated. Those are political issues, and they should not be muddied with the scientific issue of whether vaccination is effective.

I know people of colour, and people who are poor and/or sick, and the way they are treated by government and law enforcement and health agencies is deplorable. They have every justification in distrusting people and systems which have never done a thing for them except to label and harass them. I still encourage them to get vaccinated, because it is the informed and morally appropriate thing to do, not because if they don’t they’re going to end up in some “camp”.

For the same reason, I wear seat belts and I don’t drink and drive, because it is the informed and morally appropriate thing to do, not because I fear being arrested if I fail to comply.

Am I concerned about overreach by the rich and powerful in the exercise of control over citizens? Of course. We have been propagandized and conditioned by the rich and powerful all our lives to act in their interests (go to school, don’t challenge authority, go to work, be a ‘responsible’ adult ie responsible consumer, accept that corporations have the same rights as citizens, pretend you live in an actual democracy, do what you’re told, obey the rules etc). That’s ghastly, and it’s getting worse.

But to conflate this outrageous abuse of power with a belief that vaccines that happen to have been developed and urged by the powerful are evil by association, is just muddle-headed thinking, and it has largely created the horrible mess we’re in right now.

But we believe what we want to believe, and no one can change what we want to believe.

Paul is a brilliant thinker and has done some excellent research and writing on collapse and how we might best prepare for and/or cope with it. But when it comes to epidemiology he knows diddly-squat, and his spreading of misinformation on vaccines is, in a way, an abuse of the power he has acquired by virtue of his recognition as a leading thinker on collapse. He’s not alone — collapsniks from The Automatic Earth to Dmitry Orlov to Charles Eisenstein to Jim Kunstler have gone down the same path, pontificating on epidemiology when they know nothing about it. Doing a little personal research does not make you a credible expert on anything.

That’s my rant. I’m immensely disappointed in Paul’s articles, and in Dmitry’s and Ilargi’s and Charles’ and Jim’s. They are a sign of the madness that accelerating collapse is inflicting on all of us. We are no longer thinking clearly. We have given up on the truth as even something that exists, and are now reacting purely with our emotions, following the same pattern as the Trumpists and the other neo-fascists. It does not bode well for our capacity to deal with the catastrophic crises we are just beginning to witness.

As you probably know, I don’t believe we have free will or control over what we believe or what we do. So while I am disappointed, I am not surprised, and don’t blame anyone for their particular way of acting out their distress over what is happening. We’re all doing our best. What that will lead to, is anyone’s guess.

Dmitry Muratov, Russian journalist and co-winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, has expressed concerns about the world’s slide into fascism. Image by Elena Anosova for The New Yorker.

We humans are pretty easy to manipulate. We want to believe things are simple and understandable. We want to believe things are under control. We want to believe in “good guys” and “bad guys” and that we are, after all, the “good guys” and hence destined to win in the end. We want to believe that our “peeps” are right, so we tend to believe what those we trust tell us. We want to believe in the inevitability of progress, if we’re willing to work for it.  Most of all, we want to believe that things will be better for our children than they were for us.

And so we believe what we want to believe. And we are suckers for stories. Tell us one moving story that reinforces our beliefs, and we’ll gladly discount a terabyte of data that refutes them. That’s our nature. That’s how we make sense of things. That’s how we cope with the horrific and relentless stresses and fears of modern life. For whatever strange reason, that has proved to be a successful evolutionary strategy.

And, understandably, we want to be “free”. That doesn’t mean most of us want anarchy. We want other people to take most of the responsibility for looking after things, especially when the scope and complexity of things seems increasingly onerous. But we want them to be responsible, and to do the work, according to our instructions. If the people we delegate responsibility to don’t follow our instructions, don’t believe the same things we believe, then we feel we are not “free”. But if they do, then we believe we’re “free”, and we accept the limitations that living in a complex world controlled by us “good guys” requires.

And finally, we want to be safe — free from existential danger and fear.

For more than half a century, I have been studying what this means for human civilizations. I learned how populists, under a variety of authoritarian and anti-democratic banners, have so often propagandized people through fear, misinformation and disinformation, into believing the same things they did, and into ignoring the atrocities they committed. Stalin, Hitler and Mao, between them, killed over 150 million people in the last century, and, while they were feared, they were also immensely popular. They galvanized the majority of the population around opposition to perceived common enemies, enemies that were already distrusted, and then they recruited them to go to war against those enemies in defence of their common beliefs.

Fascism is defined as “standing for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” Doesn’t sound very “free”, unless you’ve been propagandized to believe that that autocracy is fighting a powerful enemy that has robbed you of your freedom and safety, and that the dictator is one of you, one of the “good guys” trying to restore your freedom and safety.

Moneyed, colonial, imperialistic interests successfully controlled, oppressed and exploited most of the world for their personal gain from before the dawn of the industrial era, until the early 20th century. It was only really then that the information age seemed to began to awaken people to their subjugation. The emergence of new media set off a power struggle over the instruments of propaganda that were used to keep the people ignorant and in thrall. The result was the bloodiest century in human history.

When the dust settled in the middle of that century, there had been an astonishing shift in knowledge and power. A large proportion of the population was now going to university, and being exposed to ideas that threatened the existing power structure. The New Deal had dramatically redistributed wealth and power to the working class. The witch hunts of “communists” in the 1950s, instead of re-establishing repression of the enemies of the ruling castes, turned into a PR disaster. Students by the millions were allowed to demonstrate against the imperialists’ wars with virtual impunity. The dominant castes were losing their edge.

Something had to be done. So the ruling castes began what has become a long and enormously successful propaganda campaign to win back the hearts and minds of the belligerent, disobedient under-castes, through a three-pronged strategy:

1. Control the media to propagate misinformation and disinformation
2. Divide and conquer — figure out how to pit the working castes and the liberal castes against themselves and against each other to neutralize them
3. Give up the moral high ground — the end justifies the means

The objective was to restore the power of the ruling castes, and enable the re-oppression of the under-castes. In other words, to restore the old order. This was achieved through trial and error starting in the Reagan/Thatcher era, intensified during the Cheney/Bush era, and has been finalized during the Trump era, which is still ongoing.

To reiterate: This is all about power, and who has it. Political ideology is just a smokescreen, a means of manipulating and shifting power.

The obvious model for the ruling castes to use was the fascist-populist model employed so effectively by Stalin, Hitler and Mao. The key to implementing this model was to systematically undermine public confidence in government, public institutions, and the media. Fascists had seized and kept power by convincing opponents that no one could be trusted, but that they (the fascists) had the backs of the “common man”. Its modern manifestation is Norquist’s vision of making government so small “you can drown it in a bathtub”.

But theirs is not an anti-authoritarian, anarchistic, libertarian utopia. By “government”, the fascists mean the democratic institutions of government that distribute wealth and power and are subject to the whims of popular opinion. Under the new fascists’ vision, power would not be transferred from pseudo-democratic governments to the people; but rather to the unelected, ruling caste elite (including the military-industrial-security apparatus) which had dominated for centuries before it had been disrupted by institutional and educational reforms, and the power of new media, in the early 20th century.

And they have accomplished this quite spectacularly over the past half-century. Suspicion and distrust of government has never been so high. Public institutions in health, education and other sectors focused on the common good have been starved to the point of total dysfunction, destroying their effectiveness, credibility and reputation. Progressive taxes have been eliminated, and the reputations of tax authorities destroyed. Inequality of wealth and power has reached staggering, obscene levels exceeding even those of the Robber Baron era.

How was this accomplished?

Giving up the moral high ground meant that it was now perfectly fine for the new fascists to use their bought-and-paid-for media to propagate deliberate and carefully orchestrated lies to further their aims, even as they repeated the myth of “liberal” media. So, for example, while there is no longer any controversy that the justification for the Iraq War was completely fabricated to suit the military-industrial-security apparatus, Big Oil, and anti-Arab imperialists, there have been no absolutely no consequences for anyone who participated in this deliberate, egregious, and staggeringly-costly lie. We all know who lied, and why. The end justified the means.

Goebbels famously said that if you tell people lies often enough they’ll eventually come to believe them, and this tactic is now a standard part of the new fascists’ playbook. It’s been used to extraordinary effect in the campaigns to deny climate collapse, to deny the current pandemic, and to deny the effectiveness and safety of vaccines. Of course, decades of fear-mongering about government, and starving and undermining the credibility of public institutions, made this all pretty easy.

The “divide and conquer” strategy began by smearing labour unions, spreading lies about wholesale abuse of public medical, environmental and social security programs, and fear-mongering in small towns about crime in multi-ethnic cities. In two short decades the non-urban working castes were wrenched away from their support for progressive political parties and government support programs, and are now staunchly allied with the new fascists’ anti-government, anti-regulatory, anti-democratic, and anti-public-services agendas.

Dividing and conquering progressives was a bit trickier, but not by much. The new fascists started with the libertarian and anarchist segment of progressives, exploiting their innate fear and distrust of governments to the point they could be convinced that anything done by government was suspect: 9/11 was an inside job, governments are building prison camps and gulags to round up dissidents, troops are being used as guinea pigs to test dangerous new drugs and vaccines, governments want to surveil everything and everyone and have recruited Bill Gates to implant chips in us all, etc. I bought a lot of these arguments for many years until I realized who really benefited from their widespread acceptance. And that they didn’t make sense.

So now we have a situation where new fascist regimes have been installed in states from Texas to Florida and beyond (including an increasing number of countries around the world), offering, for example, huge bounties to vigilantes to rat on their fellow citizens if they seek abortions or buy abortion pills through the mail. States where voter suppression, gerrymandering and other anti-democratic laws are being institutionalized to ensure that only the new fascist party can ever win. Where systemic racism, misogyny and homophobia are being formally and “legally” legitimized. Where new fascists buy their children machine guns for Christmas and encourage them to use them to intimidate people who “aren’t like us”. And no one, least of all the new fascist US supreme court, is stopping these regimes from taking ever-more-extreme, dangerous, and hate- and violence-inciting laws and actions.

So what are progressives doing while all this is going on? Why, we’re arguing among ourselves about whether vaccine mandates and mask mandates are anti-democratic and whether the science behind vaccines is suspect.

The new fascists have won the propaganda war. It has taken a half-century, but that war is over. By 2024 the US will likely have a new fascist federal government (in some senses, under the war-mongering right-wing Biden administration, it may already have one). And there is now no counterbalancing force on the planet to rein them in. Many countries around the world are on a similar path, or are already there.

So the plutocratic ruling castes will continue to use these governments to consolidate their money and power, and continue doing whatever they want, with impunity. Opposition parties may try to swing hard-right to emulate the success of the new fascists and try to wrest some power back, but for the most part they have already compromised so much to the wealthy and powerful that they will be dismissed as irrelevant. Any true opposition will be ruthlessly repressed.

This is what, I fear, we are most likely to be dealing with when global economic collapse weighs in with full force, followed by the rapid acceleration of ecological collapse. It’s tragic. It’s going to be a lot harder than it needed to be. But that, it seems, is the nature of the human species. When it comes to power, the use of it, and the fear of not having it, we don’t seem to be able to help ourselves.

mitochondria (red) in human cells, electron microscope photo from Flickr, D. BURNETTE, J. LIPPINCOTT-SCHWARTZ/NICHD via The Scientist

About 4.5B years ago, it seemed that a giant mass of gases formed into a cloud and coalesced into a planet we call Earth, and shortly thereafter the seas seemingly formed on its surface, and shortly after that the first forms of single-celled life (prokaryotes) emerged in the oceanic soup. That emergence seems to have been an accident, one of nature’s endless experiments with variety that somehow sustained itself. An electric spark, for no reason, with surprise consequences.

It was another two billion years before another apparent accident — the engulfing of an aerobic bacterium by an anaerobic bacterium — generated an explosion in the quantity of available energy to the symbiotic pair, sufficient to enable the creation of multi-cellular life (eukaryotes).

Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker explains what happened next:

According to what is known as the endosymbiotic theory of biological complexity, [the unexpected emergence of mitochondria] is the reason we exist. That [engulfed] aerobic bacterium evolved into what we call mitochondria, the organelles that fuel all living creatures: the powerhouses of the cell. Each of us has hundreds of trillions of mitochondria. They convert glucose and oxygen into adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the primary cellular fuel. They also help produce the essential hormones—among them estrogen, testosterone, and cortisol—and regulate cellular proliferation and death.

It’s not inconceivable that the rest of the body (brain, hands, heart, lungs, digestive tract) is merely an elaborate and sometimes clumsy apparatus for the nourishment of the mitochondria—that it is the mitochondria, and not Homo sapiens, who rule and foul the earth. Our cardiovascular system, that fantastic and vulnerable machine, is essentially a delivery system for the oxygen they require. The mitochondrion is the creature and we are merely its husk, its fleshy chrysalis. A newborn’s first breath? That’s the mitochondria, calling the shots.

This energy revolution was so extraordinary that it empowered, over the next two billion years, the creation of a vast proliferation of new self-replicating containers for these mitochondria, called ‘organisms’, using this energy to self-propagate, transport, and protect themselves. The containers are what we call plants and animals (including the human variety), and the transporting mechanisms evolved from flagella to roots to fins and feet and wings.

And then there was another energy revolution. One of the new mitochondria containers, called a ‘human’, evolved the capacity to use tools and extract energy from the earth, to create yet another layer of containers to protect itself and hence the mitochondria it hosts, containers called ‘buildings’, and yet another layer of containers to transport itself and hence the mitochondria it hosts, called ‘vehicles’. The buildings, vehicles and other products of the human containers were collectively called ‘artifacts’.

So now these mighty mitochondria, veritable miniature energizer bunnies, were running a staggeringly complex multi-layered empire: They’d evolved organisms to protect and transport themselves in ‘packs’ of hundreds of trillions, and some of those organisms had in turn evolved artifacts to protect and transport billions of organisms.

But something went wrong along the way. Due to an accidentally-evolved error in the wiring of the feature detection system (called a ‘brain’) of the ‘human’ containers, these containers mistakenly came to believe that the human ‘self’, a construct of the brain, was in control of the organism. This delusion was propagated through another human tool called ‘language’, and soon all human containers were infected, and began behaving in erratic and dysfunctional ways, attacking and killing each other and other organisms, and fouling the planet, threatening the survival of all organisms.

But this aberration did not last long, and the massive extinction event it precipitated reduced the total number of mitochondria on Earth by over 97%. What followed was a long period of rapid and then gradual decomplexification, with other smaller extinction events, and most of the mitochondria that survived propagated in much simpler containers. There were a few surviving human containers, but they were not well-adapted to the post-extinction environment and finally became extinct about a million years later.

And then about twenty million years after that, an unprecedented series of cosmic storms, created by exploding supernovas, ionized the planet’s surface and atmosphere, creating a new primordial soup in a world filled with fire and lava and lightning, and by accident an entirely different type of powerhouse emerged in some simple bacterials cells that had just been awaiting their turn to explode with newly-infused energy. And the two billion year long reign of the mitochondria on Earth was over…

But of course, it’s only a story.

one of many recent anti-mandate protests in Europe and the Caribbean, this one in Croatia; AP photo via Al Jazeera

The arguments against getting vaccinated are now coalescing around the issue of “mandates”. These arguments no longer insist that the vaccines are necessarily useless or dangerous (though many of course think they are), but instead assert that making them mandatory is political overreach and/or a potentially dangerous abuse of power and authority, a “slippery slope”.

This seems to be a “big tent” type of argument, designed to bring together three disparate groups of the vaccine-hesitant: the misinformed and paranoid who believe the vaccines are unnecessary and/or dangerous; those with PTSD and other medical histories that have made them afraid of needles; and those across the political spectrum who think governments have too much power and that that power needs to be reined in.

Whipping up anti-government anger, distrust and fear is easy to do when our modern governments are disconnected from their constituents, when the news is replete with stories of government corruption, graft and abuse of power, and when many people, full of dread about the future and shame about their current situation, are looking for someone to blame. Right-wing ideologues and populist psychopaths have exploited this easy path all over the world to seize and entrench power in recent years, and have already established what are effectively fascist regimes in much of the world. In the process, they have destabilized democracies in most of the remaining countries.

As global information and communication leads to ever-more cultural homogeneity, it becomes increasingly doubtful that our remaining fragile democracies can survive the systematic attack by the rich, powerful and psychotic to undermine them by disseminating misinformation, disinformation, and fomenting distrust in all public institutions.

As a result of this distrust, the current pandemic, which would have been over by now if 90% of the population had been promptly vaccinated this summer before the delta variant exploded, is now likely to go on at least another year, and longer if new deadlier or more transmissible variants emerge in the huge pool of the unvaccinated. With prompt and full masking from the outset, the global death toll would almost certainly have been less than a million. With prompt and universal vaccination, it would likely have been less than three million. But now it stands at close to fifteen million, and is likely to kill at least another seven million as the world remains paralyzed into inaction.

And that’s just one of the costs of the destruction of trust in public institutions.

I have said before that I think we believe what we want to believe, regardless of what is actually true. So it seems to me that what we are now witnessing is a classic symptom of civilizational collapse — the giving up of belief that the current systems that govern our behaviour are still serving us well, and at least metaphorically the “walking away” from our teetering global, centralized, industrial culture. Sadly, in our horrifically overpopulated world, there is nowhere to walk away to (although the tech billionaires in their space suits are still in denial that their experiment is over, and still trying to sell us on the next one).

This suggests to me that we won’t be able to avoid the social collapse that often accompanies political, economic and ecological collapse when civilizations fall apart. To avoid social collapse would require a willingness to relearn how to create and live in radically relocalized communities, and to trust and even love the others who happen to live in those communities. As collapse worsens, it would seem naive to think we are going to learn to trust each other when our trust has been so recently and severely destroyed by those seeking to profit from our disconnection and disunity, and by the sheer dysfunctionality of the oversized, bureaucratic, centralized, one-size-fits-none systems we naively built thinking they would make the world better.

Gene McCarthy warned fifty years ago about our society’s growing proclivity for acedia — an incapacity to care for or about other people, especially those “different” from us. As horrific as the consequences of that might be (if we don’t care, there’s nothing we won’t do), this emotional distancing of ourselves is actually pretty understandable. We can’t care when every time we do, we are let down. We can’t care when it hurts too much to care. So we protect ourselves by inuring ourselves to others’ suffering. Once we’ve given up trust in others, and in our public institutions, and given up caring for others, social collapse is inevitable. It’s everyone for themselves.

That means that, just as this pandemic has been much worse than some previous ones, and much worse than it needed to be had we all pulled together, so will our civilization’s collapse be more brutal and violent than it needed to be. That’s tragic, but understandable, and probably the only way it could have ended up. There will still be pockets of mutual care and community-building as collapse deepens, among those not badly damaged by civilization’s excesses and atrocities, and we will have to settle for that. It’s a long way down.

With that context, what does this explosion of fear, distrust, acedia and despair mean for the trajectory of the current pandemic? While the virus will do what it will do, either fading out as it runs out of hosts, or resurging with new mutations, my current sense is that we will see additional manifestations of this “giving up” in our pandemic-related behaviour.

Currently, we sit idly by and witness tens of millions of unnecessary deaths, and unfathomable amounts of unnecessary suffering, every year, from eighty diseases clearly caused by poor diet and malnutrition. The reasons we eat so badly, and refuse to admit it or correct it, are complex. We could blame the industrial food system, capitalism, false advertising and other forms of misinformation, the overly frenetic pace of our lives, inequality, or, as we are increasingly inclined to do, we could blame the victims. When we can no longer care — when the feelings of overwhelm, shame, grief, and helplessness force us to turn away — we have to blame the poor, the sick, and others who are struggling, for their own suffering. It is the only way we can cope.

I think we will, likewise, turn away from this pandemic and its victims. Those of us vaccinated will blame the unvaccinated for their own suffering, and for exposing the rest of us to additional unnecessary illness. Views will harden. Violence, like we are seeing in many countries by citizens railing against “mandates”, will increase. Mandates will increasingly fail because they rely on a certain level of acceptance and compliance, which will no longer exist.

Until and unless the pandemic wanes as more and more of the population gets infected with it, events will polarize into “vaccines and masks” activities, and “no mandates” activities, with inevitable protests and scuffles resulting from that. If a new, more (or differently) virulent strain emerges before that, we are well and truly fucked. And then, there’s the huge unknown of “Long CoVid” with its potentially billions of sufferers further straining our already-faltering health care systems.

It’s interesting to compare the reaction to vaccine and mask mandates to the reaction, fifty years ago, to seatbelt mandates in cars, and even to mandatory testing of apparently drunk drivers. I know people who still object to seatbelt use mandates, and their arguments are virtually identical to those made against vaccine mandates. They even fall into the same three categories (“they don’t work”, “I have a medical/psychological condition that exempts me”, and “governments have no business telling us what to do when it comes to our own bodies and property”). They tell the same worn stories about someone they knew who died because they got pinned in by a seatbelt, and the statistics be damned.

But their numbers are tiny compared to those opposed to mask mandates. Are things, and people, just different now when it comes to mandates? I suspect they are. There is a lot less trust now.

What happens when the bulk of humanity becomes permanently angry, distrustful, fearful, and uncaring — when that’s the only way they can cope with the sheer overwhelm of a society that seems headed for catastrophe, that seems incompetent to address it, that seems beyond understanding, inexplicably and outrageously immoral, and insensitive to the suffering it is causing? The same thing that all animals do when they no longer have the option to fight (the “enemy” is too strong to engage, and too amorphous to identify) or to flee (there are no frontiers left to run to)?

We freeze. We become paralyzed. We refuse to comply, to be complicit with what we can neither appreciate or condone. We resist. We stay still and do nothing. When it’s a seatbelt mandate, we cut them out and disengage the alarm. When it’s a vaccine mandate, we refuse, instead falling for quack cures — we’ll deny there’s a problem, or we’ll try anything provided the government and public institutions haven’t authorized or demanded it. Even better if the government rails against these “alternatives”. In other words, in our infantilized, dumbed down modern society, we have a temper tantrum, screaming and punching and sitting down with our arms crossed and refusing to budge.

When everything is seemingly unfathomably complicated and unacceptable and hopeless, we demand the right to do nothing. I kind of get it. Were it not for my education, my passion for research and knowledge, my analytical skills and my experience working with really smart, caring people in public service, I might be caught up in the same reactionary paralysis. I am extremely blessed by my life’s circumstances and by the relative lack of trauma affecting my thinking and my judgement.

The humanitarians I know say the answer is to quietly, patiently educate, inform, and help heal our fellow citizens, to help them move past their fear, their anger, their distrust, and their incapacity to see what, on the balance of probabilities, makes sense. I admire their idealism, but I think we’re long past that point. If a large, and growing proportion of the world is still in denial about the existential threat of climate collapse, why would we think we can find common ground with them on issues that are more personal, more immediate, more triggering?

.     .     .     .     .

I am often asked how, when my views on collapse and other issues are so relentlessly pessimistic, I don’t shut down in despair. Again I would say it’s due to my privilege — to have had, and to have, access to the information, time to think, capacity to think things through and to imagine possibilities, a relatively healthy and stress-free life, and people and resources to help me make sense of things. Most of the world’s people have not been so privileged, and as much as their beliefs and behaviours perturb me, I get why they are where they are and why they react the way they do. We are all healing. Some of us better than others.

Take care, everyone.

cover art by Eric Drooker

This week’s (Nov. 15) New Yorker is pretty depressing reading, but as I read it I realized that all of the analyses in the issue are focused on complex, intractable problems, and, refreshingly, none of them proffers any solutions.

The first and most harrowing article is about the accelerating challenges of wildfires in the US. In it, science journalist and author MR O’Connor, a certified firefighter herself, describes how incompetent forest management practices, and decisions based on politics not science (sound familiar?) have produced the current situation of exorbitant firefighting costs, futile containment efforts, incredible risk to firefighters’ lives and health, and the ever-increasing danger of mega-fires. And that was before the climate emergency weighed in with record storms, heat waves and droughts. With “containment” proving to be an unsuccessful and unsustainable strategy, and leaving wildfires to burn themselves out not a viable solution either, there are no answers left.

The next article, by Brooke Jarvis, describes the quandary of trying to humanely limit the numbers of deer and other creatures, encroaching on and being encroached upon by human settlements, when natural predators and natural habitats have both disappeared. Again, there are no answers.

The lead Talk of the Town article, by Elizabeth Kolbert, describes the fiasco of COP26. Enough said.

In other articles in this edition, Ian Parker explains the impossibility of reliably certifying organic produce (describing the huge Organic Land Management fraud case), and Jon Lee Anderson describes the horrific challenges of corruption and crime in the ecologically and economically desolated nations of Central America.

So it’s only fitting, I suppose, that the magazine’s cover, by Eric Drooker, reproduced above, would depict a dejected Don Quixote facing a modern windmill farm against a blood red background, in a work brilliantly titled The Impossible Dream. We are finally coming to grips, it seems, with the symptoms and consequences of collapse, and the realization that no god, no government, no humanist enlightenment, and most certainly no technology, is going to prevent it.