An acquaintance forwarded a link to an online copy of Gaya Herrington’s book, Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse: What a 50-year-old model of the world taught me about a way forward for us today (2022), with an email telling me that if I don’t know about her, I need to, and suggesting that I read her book.
I disagree with this reviewer on a few minor points, but in general, I agree with around 95% of this review.
I disagree with the remarks about covid. I think covid should have been welcomed as a much-needed cull to get rid of at least a small number of the expendable excess humans. My only problem with it is that it failed to get rid of enough of them.
I suspect the big push to ban fossil fuels is from the nuclear industry, which stands to gain public acceptence of more nukes by claiming they are ''safe, clean, and green'. That boondoggle should be mentioned in any critique of any so-called ''transition'' to a so-called ''green'' system. .
There is now zero possibility of avoiding a total collapse of this industrial civilization and there is nothing that can OR SHOULD be done to prevent it. The sooner civilization collapses the better off all other species will be and the better off the few human susvivors will be too. Therefore efforts should be directed at bringing about the collapse sooner instead of vainly trying to avoid it.
The most important factor in the destroying of ecosystems by humans is the sheer numbers of humans now living. Unless the number of humans infesting the earth is reduced very soon and very drasticly there is no point in even considering anything else.
But that happy day is already happening. Half of all adults in the industrialized countries have at least one cronic medical condition and would not live long without ongoing medical treatment or are functionally sterile andeither phyysically unable to reproduce or unwilling to engage in reproductive behavior for alleged psychological / social reasons which are probably really due to prenatal brain damage to their hypothalamus from maternal ingestion of hormone-mimicking chemicals released into the environment in the manufacture of plastics.
I do not think carbon emissions fro0m burning fossil fuels is a significant factor in the climate breakdown now going on. I think there are many other things humans are doing that have far more significant impacts on the atmosphere, nuclear power, electromagnetic technologies of all kinds, damming of large rivers, deforestation, overgrazing by livestock, paving large urban areas, and over-fishing, to list only a few of the most important ways humans are screwing up the weather.
The climate collapse is well underway already and within a few vyears will make any large-scale agriculture impossible in most of the major food.producing regions of the world. Social unrest will the result on a scale not seen before in modern times.
The collapse of civilization is not something that is GOING to happen; it is ALREADY happening NOW. The process is already well under way and the rate is acccerating rapidly. There is no possible social or technological change that can stop it. It is too late for that. The thing to do is to protect as much as possible of the remain9ing wilderness areas and wildlife species as possible so0 there will be some seedbeds of wildlife left to start the long process of recovery after the overwhelming majority of humans have recyled each other fighting over scraps left in the supermarkets when the deliveries stop.
The sooner the better for all other species and the few remaining humans too when the dust clears.
Thanks for your comment. I agree collapse is happening now, both in the human realm (largely invisible to the wealthy among us in "developed" countries, but horrifically real to, say, the children working in the cobalt mines in DRC) and of course it has been happening for millennia in the natural world. And I agree there is nothing we can do to stop it, and the sooner it happens the better.
Unfortunately, the collapse of human civilization will leave behind a wreckage that will continue to impact the natural world for millennia to come. Some scientists anticipate it will take the natural world 10-20 million years to "recover" from the destruction we are leaving in our wake.
It is our duty to protect as much of the natural world as we can, including species who are exterminated daily in an ongoing wildlife holocaust perpetrated by humans, and habitat for those species who might be left when we are gone. So I agree completely our most important work is to "protect as much as possible of the remaining wilderness areas and wildlife species as possible". This is what keeps me going in the mornings.
Unfortunately this book did not address any of this, as it focused entirely on the fantasy that we can prevent collapse via a slight variation of business-as-usual. Avoiding reality will not help the wild beings. Today I am desperately sad because the slender billed curlew has been declared officially extinct, and I happen to adore curlews, but of course this beautiful bird is just one of many species, so many of whom we don't even know exist yet, going extinct on a daily basis. How anyone, including the author of this book, can paint a rosy picture about the potential future of civilization and humanity in the midst of this devastating reality is quite beyond me.
You say: ''Unfortunately, the collapse of human civilization will leave behind a wreckage that will continue to impact the natural world for millennia to come. Some scientists anticipate it will take the natural world 10-20 million years to "recover" from the destruction we are leaving in our wake.''
I am a little more optimistic than that. But that optimism is based on some information that is hardly ever mentioned in most orthodox scientific education and is coventionally considered debunked.
There are some bacteria that can digest radioactive materials and convert them into some element relatively harmless. This was discovered by Louis Kervran.
There are also some bacteria that can biodegrade plastic. Both of these forms exist in nature so nature may be able to clean up the debris left by civilization much faster than the orthodox scientists think.
There is also evidence that I myself have personally observed that has convinced me that some of the mainstream theories accepted in biology are wrong or at least seriously incomplete and development of new species or ''reprints'' of extinct ones directly from non-living materials without any ancestors can and do happen frequently under normal conditions. If Francisco Redi and Louis Pasteur were wrong, as I think they were, there is a possibility life forms now extinct will form again if conditions revert to those under which they were formed the first time. I have seen convincing evidence that this can actually happen.
That does not mean the restoration of the earth will take place overnight, of course. But in a few centuries I expect to see much more life on this planet than orthodox scientists expect.
''A thousand years from now, when wolves and grizlies hunt huge herds of bison across the unfenced plains, little bands of hunters, sitting by their lonely campfires in the wilderness will be the only men alive. And to be born among those people shall be the best of fates.''
There are some who think that no mid- or large-sized mammals, only very small ones, will make it out of the wildlife holocaust. In which case it's very possible there will be no wolves or grizzlies or bison or humans. In that scenario 10-20m years seems about right. If some large mammals do make it through, perhaps a shorter timeline will work. I am concerned that we are fraying the threads of the web of life so much that it will leave most life remaining after we're done and gone with very little ecological support. I suppose I'll never know!
I once visited a biologist the late Bernard Grad, at McGill University in Montreal. He showed me blown-up photos of some alge he had made from nothing but fully charred coal dust which had been passed through the flame of a Bunson burner on a spatula so there could be nothing alive in it. He had thousands of feet of time-lapse motion pictures showing the alge developing from the coal particles in a sterile solution with a few other sterile ingredients added.
I am not an alge specialist. One alge looks like another to me. But these alge had been identified by other biologists at McGill as belonging to KNOWN SPECIES. Even though the time-lapse pictures showed they formed by a process of natural organization without any ancestors or ancestral connection to the known forms they resembled so closely they could not be told apart from them.
Dr.-Grad told me he had actually been trying to make ameboas, which he had been able to do before on several occassions, but one time he got the recipie wrong and got alge by mistake. He then went back over the experiment and found what he did wrong so now he could get either ameboas or alge at will.
He also showed me a stack of papers he had written that he said he did not dare publish because he wanted to keep his job. That a fully tenured member of the faculty could have such a fear explains at nleast in part why this type of discovery is not better known.
This had me wandering around Montreal in a daze for three days mumbling to myself as I assimilated the astounding implications. If the process goes on all the time in nature, all around us, as he thought, but is undetected because of the predjudices of modern science, it implies that an extinjct specis is not gone forever, but if the exact conditions under which it first formed are duplicated it will form again.
These conditions mainly consist of temperature, salinity, CO2 to oxygen ratio, and wave length and intesity of light the forming organism is exposed to. Colored glass slides used as a filter to change the wave length of sunlight will change what species will form. This can never be seen by a scienjtist because in a modern laboratory they always use artificial lighting and only direct sunlight will have the desired effect.
Other biologists have reported the formation of large, multicelled organisms also, directly from non-living matterials without any ancestral connection to the organisms they closely resemble. Grass, a macroscopic multi-celled plant, has been seen under a microscope to form from desert sand that contained no seeds under the right conditions. A biologist told me he had seen it but, ''I still don't believe it.''
But no single species normally forms alone; usually a cohort of organisms forms and they all fit together in an integrated ecosystem. That is why an introduced species is usually harmful. It originally formed under different conditions.
Science made a mistake in throwing out the theory of spontaneous generation in the 19th century debates between Pasteur and Bastian. Bastian was right and Pasteur was wrong.
The formation of life is a commonplace ocurrence and every species not living must have formed that way in the first instance, them continued to reproduce itself afterwards by the well-known means.
I fully agree with you in your take on civilization and deplore the exterminations now going on. But I am optimistic that after the humans go away the earth will be able to recover much more rapidly than the modern scientists think.
And if you would rather carry on this conversation in private emails instead of this comment section, feel free to send me an email and I will provide more information.
Re. Greta: to her credit, she did start talking about capitalism and colonialism and that's when the mainstream media started ignoring her. I don't know if she's touched on human supremacism yet but she's young and her perspectives are still evolving. Given her large audience I hope she does get there. A very minor point in the context of this article, I know.
Right? There is an insane amount of gaslighting going on these days with "green X" where X is some industrial activity. "Green mining" is what Lithium Americas claims about the Thacker Pass mine, which I investigated and discovered a whole literature about how corporations can devise rules for themselves to use the word, which gives them false legitimacy. It's such a complete and total boondoggle. (I wrote about "green mining" in How Destroying the Land Became Green, https://radfembiophilia.substack.com/p/how-destroying-the-land-became-green.)
I've been becoming more and more aware of the kind of rules you're talking about. "Forestry products" was where I first ran into it. Unfortunately, it's working for them because they can put out press releases about whatever certification process they've manufactured and the mainstream media just repeats it without investigating. So then these ideas enter cultural awareness unexamined and are just bought at face value. Gaslighting indeed!!
I disagree with this reviewer on a few minor points, but in general, I agree with around 95% of this review.
I disagree with the remarks about covid. I think covid should have been welcomed as a much-needed cull to get rid of at least a small number of the expendable excess humans. My only problem with it is that it failed to get rid of enough of them.
I suspect the big push to ban fossil fuels is from the nuclear industry, which stands to gain public acceptence of more nukes by claiming they are ''safe, clean, and green'. That boondoggle should be mentioned in any critique of any so-called ''transition'' to a so-called ''green'' system. .
There is now zero possibility of avoiding a total collapse of this industrial civilization and there is nothing that can OR SHOULD be done to prevent it. The sooner civilization collapses the better off all other species will be and the better off the few human susvivors will be too. Therefore efforts should be directed at bringing about the collapse sooner instead of vainly trying to avoid it.
The most important factor in the destroying of ecosystems by humans is the sheer numbers of humans now living. Unless the number of humans infesting the earth is reduced very soon and very drasticly there is no point in even considering anything else.
But that happy day is already happening. Half of all adults in the industrialized countries have at least one cronic medical condition and would not live long without ongoing medical treatment or are functionally sterile andeither phyysically unable to reproduce or unwilling to engage in reproductive behavior for alleged psychological / social reasons which are probably really due to prenatal brain damage to their hypothalamus from maternal ingestion of hormone-mimicking chemicals released into the environment in the manufacture of plastics.
I do not think carbon emissions fro0m burning fossil fuels is a significant factor in the climate breakdown now going on. I think there are many other things humans are doing that have far more significant impacts on the atmosphere, nuclear power, electromagnetic technologies of all kinds, damming of large rivers, deforestation, overgrazing by livestock, paving large urban areas, and over-fishing, to list only a few of the most important ways humans are screwing up the weather.
The climate collapse is well underway already and within a few vyears will make any large-scale agriculture impossible in most of the major food.producing regions of the world. Social unrest will the result on a scale not seen before in modern times.
The collapse of civilization is not something that is GOING to happen; it is ALREADY happening NOW. The process is already well under way and the rate is acccerating rapidly. There is no possible social or technological change that can stop it. It is too late for that. The thing to do is to protect as much as possible of the remain9ing wilderness areas and wildlife species as possible so0 there will be some seedbeds of wildlife left to start the long process of recovery after the overwhelming majority of humans have recyled each other fighting over scraps left in the supermarkets when the deliveries stop.
The sooner the better for all other species and the few remaining humans too when the dust clears.
Thanks for your comment. I agree collapse is happening now, both in the human realm (largely invisible to the wealthy among us in "developed" countries, but horrifically real to, say, the children working in the cobalt mines in DRC) and of course it has been happening for millennia in the natural world. And I agree there is nothing we can do to stop it, and the sooner it happens the better.
Unfortunately, the collapse of human civilization will leave behind a wreckage that will continue to impact the natural world for millennia to come. Some scientists anticipate it will take the natural world 10-20 million years to "recover" from the destruction we are leaving in our wake.
It is our duty to protect as much of the natural world as we can, including species who are exterminated daily in an ongoing wildlife holocaust perpetrated by humans, and habitat for those species who might be left when we are gone. So I agree completely our most important work is to "protect as much as possible of the remaining wilderness areas and wildlife species as possible". This is what keeps me going in the mornings.
Unfortunately this book did not address any of this, as it focused entirely on the fantasy that we can prevent collapse via a slight variation of business-as-usual. Avoiding reality will not help the wild beings. Today I am desperately sad because the slender billed curlew has been declared officially extinct, and I happen to adore curlews, but of course this beautiful bird is just one of many species, so many of whom we don't even know exist yet, going extinct on a daily basis. How anyone, including the author of this book, can paint a rosy picture about the potential future of civilization and humanity in the midst of this devastating reality is quite beyond me.
You say: ''Unfortunately, the collapse of human civilization will leave behind a wreckage that will continue to impact the natural world for millennia to come. Some scientists anticipate it will take the natural world 10-20 million years to "recover" from the destruction we are leaving in our wake.''
I am a little more optimistic than that. But that optimism is based on some information that is hardly ever mentioned in most orthodox scientific education and is coventionally considered debunked.
There are some bacteria that can digest radioactive materials and convert them into some element relatively harmless. This was discovered by Louis Kervran.
A book on Biological Transmutation is available. https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tFP1zc0SsozsjTNzjVg9FLPyS_NLFbITi0qK0rMU0jKzM_JT89MTsxRKAHyi3NLSxJLMvPzigH73hPP&q=louis+kervran+biological+transmutations&oq=louis+kervran+&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j46i512j0i22i30l3j0i10i22i30j0i512i546l2.12231j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
There are also some bacteria that can biodegrade plastic. Both of these forms exist in nature so nature may be able to clean up the debris left by civilization much faster than the orthodox scientists think.
There is also evidence that I myself have personally observed that has convinced me that some of the mainstream theories accepted in biology are wrong or at least seriously incomplete and development of new species or ''reprints'' of extinct ones directly from non-living materials without any ancestors can and do happen frequently under normal conditions. If Francisco Redi and Louis Pasteur were wrong, as I think they were, there is a possibility life forms now extinct will form again if conditions revert to those under which they were formed the first time. I have seen convincing evidence that this can actually happen.
That does not mean the restoration of the earth will take place overnight, of course. But in a few centuries I expect to see much more life on this planet than orthodox scientists expect.
''A thousand years from now, when wolves and grizlies hunt huge herds of bison across the unfenced plains, little bands of hunters, sitting by their lonely campfires in the wilderness will be the only men alive. And to be born among those people shall be the best of fates.''
----Ted Lazar
Fascinating, thank you.
There are some who think that no mid- or large-sized mammals, only very small ones, will make it out of the wildlife holocaust. In which case it's very possible there will be no wolves or grizzlies or bison or humans. In that scenario 10-20m years seems about right. If some large mammals do make it through, perhaps a shorter timeline will work. I am concerned that we are fraying the threads of the web of life so much that it will leave most life remaining after we're done and gone with very little ecological support. I suppose I'll never know!
I once visited a biologist the late Bernard Grad, at McGill University in Montreal. He showed me blown-up photos of some alge he had made from nothing but fully charred coal dust which had been passed through the flame of a Bunson burner on a spatula so there could be nothing alive in it. He had thousands of feet of time-lapse motion pictures showing the alge developing from the coal particles in a sterile solution with a few other sterile ingredients added.
I am not an alge specialist. One alge looks like another to me. But these alge had been identified by other biologists at McGill as belonging to KNOWN SPECIES. Even though the time-lapse pictures showed they formed by a process of natural organization without any ancestors or ancestral connection to the known forms they resembled so closely they could not be told apart from them.
Dr.-Grad told me he had actually been trying to make ameboas, which he had been able to do before on several occassions, but one time he got the recipie wrong and got alge by mistake. He then went back over the experiment and found what he did wrong so now he could get either ameboas or alge at will.
He also showed me a stack of papers he had written that he said he did not dare publish because he wanted to keep his job. That a fully tenured member of the faculty could have such a fear explains at nleast in part why this type of discovery is not better known.
This had me wandering around Montreal in a daze for three days mumbling to myself as I assimilated the astounding implications. If the process goes on all the time in nature, all around us, as he thought, but is undetected because of the predjudices of modern science, it implies that an extinjct specis is not gone forever, but if the exact conditions under which it first formed are duplicated it will form again.
These conditions mainly consist of temperature, salinity, CO2 to oxygen ratio, and wave length and intesity of light the forming organism is exposed to. Colored glass slides used as a filter to change the wave length of sunlight will change what species will form. This can never be seen by a scienjtist because in a modern laboratory they always use artificial lighting and only direct sunlight will have the desired effect.
Other biologists have reported the formation of large, multicelled organisms also, directly from non-living matterials without any ancestral connection to the organisms they closely resemble. Grass, a macroscopic multi-celled plant, has been seen under a microscope to form from desert sand that contained no seeds under the right conditions. A biologist told me he had seen it but, ''I still don't believe it.''
But no single species normally forms alone; usually a cohort of organisms forms and they all fit together in an integrated ecosystem. That is why an introduced species is usually harmful. It originally formed under different conditions.
Science made a mistake in throwing out the theory of spontaneous generation in the 19th century debates between Pasteur and Bastian. Bastian was right and Pasteur was wrong.
https://www.amazon.com.mx/Sparks-Life-Darwinism-Spontaneous-Generation/dp/0674009991
The formation of life is a commonplace ocurrence and every species not living must have formed that way in the first instance, them continued to reproduce itself afterwards by the well-known means.
I fully agree with you in your take on civilization and deplore the exterminations now going on. But I am optimistic that after the humans go away the earth will be able to recover much more rapidly than the modern scientists think.
I suggest reading
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248787.The_World_Without_Us
And if you would rather carry on this conversation in private emails instead of this comment section, feel free to send me an email and I will provide more information.
Re. Greta: to her credit, she did start talking about capitalism and colonialism and that's when the mainstream media started ignoring her. I don't know if she's touched on human supremacism yet but she's young and her perspectives are still evolving. Given her large audience I hope she does get there. A very minor point in the context of this article, I know.
An impressive deep dive not just into this book but all the myths it emerges from. I learned a lot. "Green steel"?! Wtf?!
Right? There is an insane amount of gaslighting going on these days with "green X" where X is some industrial activity. "Green mining" is what Lithium Americas claims about the Thacker Pass mine, which I investigated and discovered a whole literature about how corporations can devise rules for themselves to use the word, which gives them false legitimacy. It's such a complete and total boondoggle. (I wrote about "green mining" in How Destroying the Land Became Green, https://radfembiophilia.substack.com/p/how-destroying-the-land-became-green.)
I've been becoming more and more aware of the kind of rules you're talking about. "Forestry products" was where I first ran into it. Unfortunately, it's working for them because they can put out press releases about whatever certification process they've manufactured and the mainstream media just repeats it without investigating. So then these ideas enter cultural awareness unexamined and are just bought at face value. Gaslighting indeed!!
Your method of wordsearch is so simple and yet so effective.
Thanks Karen, yes it's interesting to see what shows up when analyzing something like this.
Anthropocentrism is evident even in the cover art: androgynous—but unmistakably human—hands reaching out to collect ... to manipulate ... to ingest.