Constant growth is the cancer model whereby the disease kills its host. Whether the growth is population, land acquisition or capital, more is never enough.

By Susu Jeffrey  Original to Rise Up Times  May 1, 2022

We are Fighting the Wrong War

Not war, wars. Here is a partial list: Ukraine, Russia, USA, Yemen, Palestine/Israel, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, cyber space and planet Earth. Every war is a war against the Earth and everything that lives and casts a shadow upon her.

In Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (1), William Ophuls explains in only 69 pages that collapse is foreordained because the requirement of sacrifice to deal with present problems and current consumption is always met with “denial, evasion and procrastination.”

Constant growth is the cancer model whereby the disease kills its host. Whether the growth is population, land acquisition or capital, more is never enough.

Ophuls sees humanity’s tragic flaw as our Paleolithic hardwired evolutionary mental inheritance to live in a present-oriented world in small groups of intimates. Over and over the consequences of human hubris are enumerated, categorized, grocery-listed in order of import, hypothesized into a dire future while the same-same continues.

The author of Immoderate Greatness makes a substantial point in view of the universal failure of great civilizations. A strongman or empire always inspires a challenger. You see it in the rut when bucks butt horns until one of them runs away. But when a buck backs off he doesn’t take the whole herd with him or nuke the habitat. That’s the threat with climate catastrophe.

Take water, for example. Every life form on Earth requires H2O, animal or vegetable.

We can make more people, more money, more weapons but we can’t make more water.

“Most, if not all water on the planet came from countless small comets thumping against the atmosphere,” explains Craig Childs in The Secret Knowledge of Water (2). Everyday about 10,000 comets or comet fragments melt into the upper clouds adding infinitesimal moisture to our atmosphere. It would take 500,000-years to accumulate a 25-foot additional depth of water around the globe.

Compare that sea level rise with the 10-12-inches projected by NOAA with global heating by 2050. Still, the Colorado River that serves 40-million Americans in seven states is down 20 percent. It is American Rivers.org most endangered US river. Number six is the Mississippi, “threatened” along its entire length.

Water, a gas, liquid and solid, is unlike anything else on Earth. And water has positive and negative electrical properties. Furthermore water has a seemingly magical ability to cleanse itself by filtration through dirt, gravel or sand. But it’s a process, not a chlorine bump in a swimming pool.

Meanwhile we are experiencing the sixth mass extinction on this planet. Earth’s amazing creativity has produced innumerable species and an estimated 99.9 percent of them are extinct. The UN Convention of Biological Diversity estimates that we lose up to 150 species daily, for example frogs and orchids.

Mammals usually last about a million years according to Ashley Mamer writing in DISCOVERY (8/1/2019). Homo sapiens have only been around about 300,000 years (3).  The possibility of 700,000 more years of over population and habitat destruction with continued human life on Earth is inconceivable.

The Environmental Integrity Project’s March 2022 report notes that a little more than half of U.S. rivers, streams and lakes are too polluted for drinking, swimming or fishing. Of course our belief that homo sapiens are the apotheosis of evolved life on Earth is both ignorant and expected.

There exists one constant on the mother planet. The single element all the various life forms require is water. War toxifies water. From weapons manufacture through use and rebuilding, war is a poisoner of life. War is also a great profiteer for the few. In other words, we have met the enemy and it is us.

ENDNOTES

1. Ophuls, William, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail,
   North Charleston, SC, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012.

2. Childs, Craig, The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert, Seattle WA, 2000, 89.

3. Mammalian lifespan: SCIENCE “The Clock Is Ticking: Can the Human Species Beat the Odds?” Christopher McFadden, July 11, 2020, https://interestingengineering.com/the-clock-is-ticking-can-the-human-species-beat-the-odds.

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