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Previously: Bulletin 260: Trinity: “The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project,” Jul 15, 2019

Bulletin 261: Public discussion: “The Steepest Time: Youth and Crisis at the End of an Age,” Thursday July 25, 2019, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm, Phil Space Gallery, 1410 Second St, Santa Fe (map).

July 18, 2019

Join filmmaker Godfrey Reggio (Qatsi Trilogy, Visitors) and Greg Mello (Los Alamos Study Group) as they explore the unprecedented challenges and opportunities facing citizens and community leaders in an era of mass extinction, war, and widespread political failure.

"But even you I think feel the steep time build like a wave, towering to break / Higher and higher; and they've trimmed the ship top-heavy."

– Robinson Jeffers, "Thurso's Landing"

Dear friends and colleagues –

If you are in the Santa Fe “neighborhood” next week, we hope you will join us for the discussion above, a week from tonight.

We face the end of an age, with no certainty there will be another. So far there is no sign of any effective, scalable societal or governmental response to the converging global crises we face. There is no full-scale mobilization in either society or government.

Far too few lives have changed despite the majesty, joy, and fulfillment possible – indeed, only possible – in a whole-hearted response to the crisis. Lives -- billions of lives – will change, that’s for sure. It’s a question of how.

The habitually-understating Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tells us that by roughly 2030, world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be cut roughly in half to avoid what amount to existential, holocaustic outcomes (October 2018 Summary; full Report). This requires unprecedented economic and political transformation.

Meanwhile positive global warming feedbacks threaten to push the Earth into a self-reinforcing “hothouse” condition. Proceeding along our present course entails increasing risks of exceeding tipping points beyond which climate recovery will be impossible, leading to a full-on major extinction event involving most higher life forms.

Humanity is already cutting down the tree of life. Species extinctions, population declines, and habitat destruction are proceeding at very high rates worldwide for various anthropogenic reasons, not just climate change.

Even if the worst is avoided and human emissions begin to fall by 2030, there is a significant possibility that by 2050 much of the world’s land area and most of the human population will experience devastating weather extremes, including periods of lethal heat, severe drought, or inundation. In such a scenario, agriculture would become nonviable over wide areas, with predictable main consequences.

Already, hundreds of millions of people are facing water shortages in the coming decade, in India alone. Mass migrations are inevitable – indeed there are between 200 and 300 million international migrants now – as is the political destabilization of states. Major wars, including nuclear wars, are not at all unlikely. All Four Horsemen are saddled up.

“Peak oil” meanwhile never went away. Cheap, efficiently-obtained oil is forever behind us, with major implications for the complexity (aka “standards of living”) of societies. Net growth in world oil production now more or less rests on the slender reed of growth in – wait for it – our very own Permian Basin. Good luck with that. The oil we pump now in the U.S. is increasingly paid for by unpayable debt.

Thus an enormous wave of ecological, economic, political, and social upheaval is rising, as in the Jeffers’ poem quoted above, from 1931. As Jem Bendell recently put it, societal collapse or breakdown – by which he means “the uneven ending of our current means of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity and meaning" – is inevitable, and soon.

Many of you reading this Bulletin are experiencing this right now. You don’t need a stove-piped academic to tell you about it. Just look around.

As Greta Thunberg said, “I want you to panic.”

In an emergency, we stop doing less important things. The sooner we wake up, the more life-saving options we have.

In any case, there is no escape. As we wrote to some of our colleagues on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in government, it is high time to begin preparing our country for the deep adaptations now required. But the U.S. government isn’t going to respond appropriately and soon enough. Let’s skip all the reasons.

What about us, then? It is a momentous fact that highly-motivated people are very powerful. You are very powerful.

“But what can I do?” This is the plaintive question we often ask ourselves, in our “culture” of learned helplessness. It is the wrong question. We love technique, so it is mostly a cry for a better technique, for a way to achieve major historical change without too much personal change or risk. It is a question with no answer.

Ask instead – “Who am I, really? What can I become? What indomitable goodness is in me, waiting expression in this time and place? Where and how will I take my stand? How will I answer the call I am hearing? How many can I save? What legacy will I leave to the children, those I see and those I will never see?”

Then you act, before you have “answers.” You are those living questions. You and they are verbs. You do what is necessary, not what you thought was your limit yesterday.

We desperately want to work with you. That is what we want to discuss this coming Thursday in Santa Fe. We hope some of you will come.

Sincerely,

Greg Mello, for the Study Group