GAIA STRIKES BACK!

It is time to revisit Uninhabitable Earth

Infamous NY Mag Cover from July 10, 2017

“Climate change seems to embody a trauma response on a grand scale — the greatest trauma on the grandest scale.” (White, B. 2015)

"The end of the world already happened, but we haven't yet arrived at our new reality." (Morton, T. 2014)

Get ready for for a new reality... it’s almost upon us now, and one way or the other, it’s going to be a real game-changer.

I’ve been following the science of global warming since Dr. James Hansen first informed Congress and the American people about the phenomenon in 1985, when he was still with NOAA and I was working as a specialist on intergovernmental relations, tasked with monitoring National Academy of Science publications dealing with environmental issues. While I’ve always cast a critical eye on climate science reporting, I also knew early on that climate denialism was just industry propaganda.

But it wasn’t until David Wallace-Wells’ (DWW) viral article, “Uninhabitable Earth” was published by New York Magazine in July of 2017 that the propaganda bubble burst, putting DWW right up there with my other Mt. Rushmore Climate heroes: New Yorker journalists Bill McKibben (The End of Nature, 1989) and Elizabeth Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, 2014), Dr. Hansen himself, and Greta Thunberg, who came on my radar when she first began her lonely “School Strike for the Climate“ vigil outside Sweden’s Parliament building in 2018.

Ever since the publication of “Uninhabitable Earth,” which is the most-read article in the history of the magazine, polls have consistently showed that over 70% of Americans think their government needs to do more to address the climate crisis, which finally brought us in line with global attitudes. In America, at least, the other 30% are called “MAGA” ~ the most traumatized elements of our society who simply do not have the psychological bandwidth to absorb and integrate a “hyper-object” like warming oceans or the end of life as we have always known it on planet Earth.

We are now coming upon the 10-year anniversary of that watershed cultural event, and Wallace-Wells, whose important contribution won him the climate beat at the NY Times, has just given us fair warning of the coming eco-catastrophe almost nobody is prepared for. Dr. Hansen, who after being expelled by Obama established himself as one of the leading critics of the consensus-driven, politically correct climate science establishment, has set off the scientific alarm, and McKibben has also weighed in with his own commentary.

So buckle up, capitalist cowboys ~ this perfect storm on steroids is likely to break the global economy teed up by Trump’s war of stupidity.

THE STORM IS COMING: GODZILLA El Niño Rising From the Ocean

“[A] monster El Niño will give us at least a brief preview of a hotter and more chaotic world — a 2027 like we might’ve expected to see in 2035, and which not that long ago didn’t seem likely before 2050.” DWW

“Prepare for bedlam.” McKibben

Collective trauma is hard enough to get a handle on, without enacting it at a global scale. Trauma is cumulative. So it becomes even more problematic when one global trauma is added to another. We’ve seen this play out with disastrous consequences over the past several years.

On the heels of DWW’s piercing of the climate denial bubble, we saw some promising developments that seemed to be pointing towards a global response, after decades of inaction. Jem Bendell’s seminal paper “Deep Adaptation” (2018) went viral - something we rarely see with academic papers like Bendell’s.

That was quickly followed by the sudden emergence of Extinction Rebellion, demanding that governments and corporations tell the truth about climate risks. In a similar vein, my own academic paper, re-casting “climate change” ~ a denialist term propogated by a conservative think tank ~ as Climate Trauma (2019), also gained widespread notoriety and, eventually even APA sanction. Partly inspired by these two academic papers, the renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator Thomas Hübl held the first Collective Trauma Summit online (2019), which drew over 50,000 participants that first year, and then doubled that level of participation the next.

Countries began declaring a climate emergency!

You could really feel the momentum for telling the truth and taking action building. The following year, a climate fire in Australia that came to be known as the “Black Summer” killed an ungodly 3 billion animals, and the summer after that a heat dome along the Pacific Coast killed another billion sea creatures. People were starting to wake up to the scale of this crisis.

And then, unfortunately, yet another hyper-object was piled on top of this one: a global pandemic that would drive people apart, both literally and figuratively, while taking more lives than the Holocaust. Humanity’s collective psycho-defenses withered in the face of what was now starting to be referred to as a “poly-crisis.”

We rather quickly transitioned from the communal responsiveness catalyzed by DWW, XR and Greta to societal overwhelm catalyzed by people afraid to wear a mask. Authoritarians were quick to take advantage of this social dislocation by scapegoating climate refugees arriving on their doorsteps from the Global South.

It’s been quite a confusing journey in the 2020s. In fact, We have yet to recover our bearings. Even the term “poly-crisis” begins to feel inadequate to the task of describing our growing predicament. In his most recent reporting, DWW describes what social thinkers are now referring to as the “meta-crisis”:

“Conventional wisdom [holds that] the public has moved on from climate anxiety, burned out from the alarmism of the Greta Thunberg years and fixated now on a series of successor panics, many of them no less apocalyptic: first about Covid and then about A.I., about smartphones and fertility rates and income inequality and the crisis of American democracy (to name just a few).”

Widespread panics, traumas, apocalyptic threats...

In spite of all this, as DWW goes on to point out, “nearly as many Americans say they ‘worry a great deal’ about [global] warming as they did at previous peaks in 2017, right after Donald Trump was inaugurated the first time, and 2020, right before the pandemic hit.”

That’s one thing that distinguishes climate trauma from all previous forms of trauma we’ve become familiar with over the past hundred years or so: it’s chronic, not episodic. It is cumulative, and accelerating. It keeps outpacing the science. And because we are part of this living Earth, we are feeling it even more than before. It’s not going to subside anytime soon.

And now, in the wake of COVID, another force-multiplier is on the horizon.

Not only are we not ready for it, we are actually much more vulnerable to its menacing impacts than we would otherwise be if we hadn’t elevated a conspiratorial climate denier to the highest office in the land. Rather than leading a global effort to tackle climate trauma, as any sane human being would feel called to do by the science of heating, melting glaciers, floods, and fires, our “Perpetrator-in-Chief” has decided it’s a good time to divide the world and start yet another war over fossil fuels.

Just as Emperor Trump made COVID much worse by pretending it would just magically go away, needlessly killing at least 200,000 of our mostly elderly mothers and fathers with his gross incompetence, and just as he effectively killed another 750,000 Africans in his first year since regaining power (a recent study published study in a British medical journal forecast that Trump’s aid cuts will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of 5), he is now ensuring that this new monster El Niño will have much more devastating consequences on humanity than it might have had with Kamala Harris in office.

Does America have a suicide complex?

Illustration by Arcadio Esquivel

SO what is DWW and Dr. Hansen et al. even talking about here? Could this end up being much ado about nothing?

To answer this question, it’s important that people understand that global warming is not just about every successive summer being the hottest on record, the way the press normally presents it, as if we’re talking about the weather. Temperature is just a relative way of measuring energy and order in a system. To frame it more accurately, as greenhouse gases trap more heat in Earth’s atmosphere, this increases entropy, a measurement of disorder in the system.

Increasing temperature translates into increasing chaos. Global Mayhem might be a more accurate term. And because humans are organically integrated within this global system, we can’t help but reflect that chaos and disorder - at least, to the extent that we act out our unresolved trauma. That’s the framework for all that follows.

Oceans have already soaked up about 90% of the excess we’ve emitted since 1950, fueling increasingly violent atmospheric and oceanic movements. According to NOAA, the natural variations in ocean temps we refer to as El Niño and La Niña are the Earth’s natural way of "sloshing" energy back and forth across its largest heat reservoir: the Pacific Ocean. They’re part of a single cycle called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. As you might expect, by increasing the energy going into this natural system, we end up with unnatural extremes and quicker cycles.

While the tropical Pacific Ocean is presently in its cool La Nina phase, it will likely move into the El Niño phase this summer ~ only 3 years since the last one. That is unusually fast. The heat engine is starting to overheat and wobble, like a washing machine that has lost its bearings.

Now here’s the important point. As DWW points out, the “El Niño building right now, and expected to crest around the end of next year... appears stupendously intense — almost certainly stronger than the ‘Super’ El Niño of 2015-16, and perhaps the most intense since the epochal El Niño of 1877.” That 19th Century El Niño event he refers to? It caused widespread crop failures and famines, resulting in between 31.7 million and 61.3 million deaths in India, China and Brazil alone, at a time when the global population was only about 1.5 billion.

Got that?

Now get this: Trump’s unnecessary and stupid Iran War has already resulted in a 35% drop in fertilizer, which all by itself will mean lower crop yields and higher food prices. As José Andrés of World Central Kitchen warns, we are looking at a multiyear famine beginning as early as the end of this year - even if war ended today. Worldwide, 45 million people are likely to suffer severe hunger this year, according to Cindy McCain of the U.N World Food Program. All because of Trump and Bibi’s excellent adventure.

Which does not appear to account for the impacts of this new climate force-multiplier Hansen and his colleagues have just sounded the alarm over ~ this Godzilla El Niño. As you can now appreciate, comparing it to the reptilian monster Japan created as a symbol of the nuclear devastation we inflicted in its people is not hyperbolic. We’re no more ready for this than the mostly elderly, women and children were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Hansen and his colleagues correlate all of this with accelerating climate change, predicting that we will arrive at +1.7°C increase in average temperature during this El Niño, and that:

...the principal drive for global warming acceleration began in about 2015, which implies that 2°C global warming is likely to be reached in the 2030s, not at midcentury.

When the sham Paris Accords were finalized in 2015, the IPCC was predicting we wouldn’t reach 1.5°C until 2040–2045. We’ve already passed that threshold now, just 11 years later.

WARNING: HYPER-OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR IN YOUR FUNHOUSE MIRROR!!

As McKibben says, “this El Niño will probably provide the final proof that global warming is actually accelerating sickeningly from its previously merely alarming pace.”

So here’s some simple math for you all to consider:

Trump War + Godzilla El Niño = Global Depression

I’m not sayin’ ~ I’m just sayin’... I’ve consistently maintained, the global economy will break long before the global ecology. As Henry David Thoreau put it way back in 1841:

"I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while."

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Kali Ma

It has been quite clear to me for some time now that Gaia is not just a living organism, whose biome we inhabit, but that She is instead a highly intelligent super-organism. Gaia theory continues to produce surprising results, like plant intelligence and the awareness exhibited by forests, and the latest scientific speculation on consciousness correlates it with complexity. And yet, for quasi-religious reasons, science and psychology can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that this living planet just might have a psyche! And so the biggest unknown variable in climate science happens to be an unspoken one: Gaian agency.

How might Gaia respond to our reckless endangerment of Her life?

People wrongly jump to the conclusion that we are a cancer that She will eradicate. It’s not that simple. Some of us may act like cancerous cells, but just as many of us act like cells She has activated in Her immune defense system. We even call ourselves “activists.” And, of course, there is nothing cancerous or threatening about Indigenous people, who have a long-standing, symbiotic relationship with Her that we are still learning about.

At the same time, I’m not going to anthropomorphize Gaia. She is obviously intelligent - and Her intelligence is as high above ours as our own is above bacteria that live in our gut - but I have no idea what Her sentience must be like, or whether She experiences emotions that are like human emotions or animal instincts. I kind of doubt She experiences emotions, actually.

But one thing I am certain of: like any sentient being, Gaia wants to live, She wants to be well, and She doesn’t want to suffer. And while She may not be emotional, vindictive, forgiving, or anything like that, She is without question self-regulating, and we are a small part of that self-regulating system we label “homeostasis.”

I would venture to say that She is at least considerate of all those creatures who make up Her biome - why wouldn’t She be? I highly doubt that She favors one over another, just as we don’t favor one organ over another, or fingers over toes. As I’ve been saying for a long time now, we can do this easy or we can do this hard, but one way or another, Gaia will eventually bring us to heel. Her homeostasis is an overarching law of nature that we disregard at our own peril.

So when the pandemic hit, it seemed to me that Gaia was trying to get our attention with some medicine that may not have been easy to take, but was hardly as serious as chemotherapy either. We all faced death together at that pivotal time, but mostly it was the aged and infirm who suffered the consequences. She even showed us what it was like to have a compromised immune system, with the advent of long Covid in a small percentage of those infected.

Many people got the message right away. We felt like our Mother had sent us to our room to think about our current situation. We were shown how beautiful nature could be when planes stopped flying and cars were left in the garage. I was living in the Puget Sound area at the time, and remember how shocked I was to suddenly be able to see the Glacier Peaks to the north. Wild animals even started returning to urban areas.

We all had a moment, didn’t we?

And then trauma reared its head, revealing its ugly, unmasked face. We somehow went from cheering overworked care providers to attacking them. Turning on one another became a political movement.

Because of being over-saturated with the unresolved generational traumas of genocide/ecocide (Native Americans and buffalo), misogyny/patriarchy (manifest destiny), and racism/colonialism (slavery and Civil War), we Americans suffered a collective mental breakdown. We projected our collective shadow psyche onto the filthy screen of politics. Culture wars ensued.

A collective trauma that should have served to unite us against a common foe, to come together in beloved community ~ the way the Greatest Generation came together before us to overcome fascism and pave the way for all the privileges and advantages that have marked our lives ~ instead served the interests of fascism itself, and ended up driving up apart in isolated, conspiratorial communities united only by common hatreds and insecurities.

In America, we elevated a racist, misogynist convicted felon who condemned science and promised a return to some mythical, gilded age. All across the Global North, colonialist sentiments were revived under the guise of nationalism, scapegoating climate refugees from the Global South for the decline in living conditions brought about by our own unsustainable lifestyles.

Trump may be able to pass a simple cognitive test, but our civilization is failing the self-survival test.

And so now, since grounding us didn’t work, our Mother is about to go from stern matriarch to wrathful goddess. We have a perfect archetype for this kind of tough-love homeostasis, as depicted in the illustration above, and described here:

With her fierce appearance and commanding presence, Maa Kali epitomizes the destruction of evil forces and the restoration of cosmic balance. Depicted with a dark complexion, adorned with a garland of skulls, and wielding various weapons in her multiple arms, Maa Kali’s... fierce countenance symbolizes the destruction of ego and ignorance, while her garland of severed heads represents the conquest over death and time. Beyond her terrifying appearance lies a deeper philosophical essence. Maa Kali is revered as the embodiment of [] the divine feminine energy that fuels creation, preservation, and destruction.

According to McKibben: “One way of summing up this moment is to say that [America’s abandonment of] the endangerment finding, and the politics of climate, are puny in the face of physics. We’re going to see that physics in action again in the next 24 months, and it will drive many changes. Some of them will be political.”

I would amend that prediction by saying that more of them are going to be psychological. Because in an age of climate trauma and meta-crisis, it is the collective psyche that is driving the polity. Whereas we used to say that all politics is local, I think it is now safe to say that all politics is global. While the Global North is responsible for climate trauma, it is the Global South that is suffering the disparate impacts of Gaia’s lament. And this gross disparity has given rise to neo-colonialism, as evidenced by a revival of white supremacy, religious intolerance, and other racist tendencies - like, most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court’s roll-back of the Voting Rights Act.

As is the case with individual chemotherapy, things have to get a lot worse now before we can even begin to get better. Are we prepared for that kind of radical treatment from our Mother? Can we deal with Her homeostasis rationally, instead of emotionally?

Given our failure to confront, let alone address, our unresolved generational traumas, it is hard to be optimistic here in the near term. Right now, we have a trauma-deformed, disgruntled arsonist at the helm who seems quite determined to pour gasoline on our world-on-fire. Fortunately, he also seems determined to burn the bridges to his former supporters, and there is good reason to believe that the Epstein Files will be his undoing sooner rather than later. That public reckoning, in turn, holds great potential for untying a BIG trauma knot - the unresolved childhood sex trauma epidemic that still plagues our country - which could set off a whole chain of cascading effects, beginning with the patriarchy upon which neo-colonialism depends.

You see, Gaia works in mysterious ways. It’s just a matter of time, and She has all the time in the world.