POEM: THE COVID-19 EDITION

Nero 2.0   

Burn. Burn away your empire—

Burn all of it.       

Burn down your sad towers,

with their jagged spires

that pierce the sky with illusions.

Watch them crumble and become lost

in the dust of their collapse.

Burn it all away!

But not with the flames of past thrones

that saw baths laid in the place of ruins.

Burn it with hotter fires

that are fueled by all the bent,

broke-backed and wearying days

that come with their ever-advancing 
tomorrows.

Then go among the ruins.

Look for the glitter of false joys.

Smash those carnival mirrors!

Break those gilded devices

with their painted stars

and clever surfaces 
that reveal nothing

of the true face of lives spent

furiously polishing time’s brighter reflections.

Make them gone.

Then scatter the heedless, the needless,

the vain and wayward.

Spill them like seeds upon stony fields

you will choose for your sacrifice.

Leave what remains for the carrion-eaters

and the small deciders of the world.

…

Then come away with me.

Come to where the air rims the world

with winds so pure and high,

and where there soon will be

other thrones and crowns

and banners for our sky.

I THOUGHT I'D END THE MONTH ON AN UPBEAT NOTE….I’m not sure I like this poem. Just finished it? [Progress in the writing process seems stalled. Ed.]

Yep, good ‘ol Covid-19 has spread-eagled the planet and everything has ground to mostly a standstill. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, after all viruses total 0.2 Gt of carbon*, and humans weigh in at a paltry 0.06 Gt! For those who need to know, the most biomass tonnage on Earth goes to plants, which are still on top even though we’ve been paving paradise and putting up a parking lot for some time now. Plants are followed by a bit of a surprise—Bacteria! Then come Fungi and microscopic Protists. Who would have thunk it? (Animals, including Humans are waaay down on the list.) And even though viruses comprise a much smaller amount of biomass when compared to the top contenders, there is still much more of it than there is human biomass around. Who knew?! (Not me.) So, watch out! Viruses can throw their weight around and we better start behaving!

I watched the new Michael Moore film (he’s the producer) on YouTube last night. It’s called Planet of the Humans and I highly recommend it. For anyone questioning the dominant tropes of modern environmentalism, climate change, global warming, etc., and who have grown tired of warn-out platitudes which always start off with something like ”If we  just [fill in the blank], then Bob’s your uncle!” If you’ve ever had concerns about how effective various environmental groups**—some quite well known—have been as far as making actual changes in the world; or if you have ever wondered why is it there is a great deal of talking and drawing up of “accords” and “manifestos” and so on, yet relatively little action on the horizon, and in fact things have been getting worse, environmentally-speaking; if such doubts have crept into your mind from time to time, then this is the film for you.

Released a week prior to the anniversary of the first Earth Day, it is a sobering examination of the real-world feasibility (and scaleability) of renewable sources of energy. Producer and composer Jeff Gibbs narrates this scathing, yet also compassionate and evocative journey through the difficult terrain of environmentalism and renewable energy.

Jeff Gibbs

He opens his film with a challenging question: “How long do you think we humans have?” In interviews with passersby on a pleasant, sunny sidewalk, the answers range from a chipper “two years” all the way up to “infinity” (a popular answer). There’s humour and honest deliberation from many of the respondents, but my favourite was one curmudgeon's reply: “Being kind, I’d say about ten years, unless we get to another planet—and then fuck it up like we’ve done this one.” And the overarching question the film asks is: How long do you think we humans have--going the way we’re going?   

Gibbs uses interviews, news reports, amateur and archival footage in his attempt to answer this difficult and seemingly unanswerable question. Throughout the film he examines various schemes for renewable energy—wind and solar in particular, as well as schemes deemed “green energy” like biomass generation, bio-diesel fuels, natural gas power plants, electric cars, etc. 

Michael Moore

One of the questions Gibbs kept asking activists and green-tech promoters was how much fossil-fuel was being used in the construction, maintenance and operation of each so-called “clean” energy process. Unsurprisingly, the use of fossil fuels—coal, oil, natural gas—was embedded in each and every one, sometimes much more than you would expect. And the EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) ratio that measures how efficient each process is in providing clean energy from the particular resource or system is not nearly as favourable as promoters of green tech would have you believe. Furthermore, each process comes with its own negative environmental impacts, some that are surprising, as Gibbs discovers. (His review of biomass power generation is quite revealing.) I won’t detail his findings—you can and should see them for yourself;  the film is free on YouTube, so what's your excuse?

Decommissioned Windfarm

The take home is that, as far as climate change is concerned, renewables will have only a modest impact and none of the processes to date—from old-tech waterpower (just how many rivers in the world are there left to dam?) to new-tech “micro-algae” oil and the like—can realistically scale-up to supply the vast energy requirements of our modern civilization. And if environmental movements and initiatives have, for the most part, been sequestered and put out for display like pretty, stone Buddhas in corporate Zen gardens, where do we turn? Who do we trust? Where do we go from here?

Refreshingly, Gibbs and Moore do not provide us with the standard list of environmental ‘to-dos’. The question we need to answer, they say, is much larger (and also more personal) than what to do about climate change or global warming or the horrible pollution of our environment and the mechanized slaughter of the living world. Yes, we’ve all seen the ‘hockey-stick’ graphs of Co2 emissions, population rise, industrial growth, rainforest clear-cutting, coral reef depletion, etc., etc., etc. We just don’t care. Too many of us drank the Kool-Aid laced with poison labelled: Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet. And while the drink is a long time killing us; kill us it will.

"Arr, Billy! Don't you be drinkin' thar swill!"

The question we need to ask is a simple one: Will we be masters of the world or masters of ourselves? It’s a question that’s always been with us, in all civilizations and all times. It’s one that’s even been answered, from time to time. Today, however—well really for the last, mad century or two after we'd discovered the “black gold” of coal and the “Texas tea” of oil—we’ve simply forgotten the question entirely. The time-out we’ve received because of Covid-19 could go a long way to help refresh our memories, though I doubt it will. But the world will thank us for this brief respite as our industries stand for the moment silent and shuttered.

Downed trees around Mt. St. Helens after erruption.

The movie's final scene of rainforest deforestation reminded me of photographs of the land around Mt. St. Helen in Washington state after the volcano erupted there in 1980. There was devastation for miles around! Trees were flattened everywhere from the force of the volcano's blast. But the images of the man-made devastation Gibbs records of a tropical forest cut down to make way for a coconut plantation were shocking. The lone stand of remaining woods held a group of orangutans, clinging precariously to the limbs of trees as they neared to toppling over. And later, the displayed bodies of the dead and dying apes was a scene as strikingly viseral as any taken of the liberated concentraion camps of  WWII. Both depict living beings being slaughtered. In this case it's because we've been told that biofuels are good to use in our cars.

The film ends with a quotation by famed environmentalist Rachel Carson. It was taken from an address she gave to the graduating class at Scripps University in California in 1962. Silent Spring, her ground-breaking study on the effects of DDT in the environment, the book that arguably started the modern environmental movement, had just been published. And though she had been diagnosed with with breast cancer (she would die in 1964 from complications resulting from the disease), and physically weak, she nevertheless undertook the arduous cross-country flight to present her thoughts on nature, "Man" and the sciences to the Scripp's graduating students that year. Her closing words include the quote Gibbs and Moore paraphrase for their film.

           

“I wish I could stand before you and say that my own generation had brought strength and meaning to man’s relation to nature, that we had looked upon the majesty and beauty and terror of the earth we inhabit and learned wisdom and humility. Alas, this cannot be said, for it is we who have brought into being a fateful and destructive power. But the stream of time moves forward and mankind moves with it. Your generation must come to terms with the environment. Your generation must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and a sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery—not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny. In today already walks tomorrow.” [from Scripps College Bulletin, July 1962—Rachel Carson’s speech to the graduating class.]

 Words as true then as they are now. But what about tomorrow?

Cheers, Jake.

*Gt=giga-tons of carbon (for those with a science-deficit, like me, “giga” is the metric system’s short-form for billion. The decimals I’ll leave to you.) Biomass “is the amount of living matter (as in a unit area or volume of habitat")—Merriam-Webster dictionary.

**Another question the environmental movement is incredibly uncomfortable being asked is who funds their organizations, initiatives and studies. The surprising (or perhaps not so surprising) fact is that a number of large, well-known environmental groups have big business donors, including Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Ag—which you’d think would be a serious conflict of interest. The long and the short of it is this: Listen Fats, where big business and environmental movements intersect, eventually profit wins out. Suffice it to say that greenwash is everywhere.

Premiering on April 21, already Moore's and Gibbs' film has garnered much pushback from environmental groups. It will be interesting to see how the producers weather the storm of criticism....[One helpful commentary on Moore's film is by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti of The Hill's Rising news webcast on YouTube.]  

I feel that the environmental movement has failed, to a large extent, in its stated goal of arresting climate change and protecting the biosphere. There are a number of reasons why this is the case. One reason is because there is too much focus on "new-and-improved" techno-fixes and elaborate schemes for switching out fossil fuels for some either unproven (fusion power, anyone?) or unscaleable (wind, solar) energy sources or power distribution system. 
It's not our technology we need to re-examine--it's ourselves. We need to ask ourselves questions such as: what is it to live a good life? How much is enough? And how are we to share this world with our fellow humans and with the myriad other beings and lifeforms that surround and support us? We'll either find answers to these and other questions or we'll go the way of the Dodo, and deservedly so.  

 

"All righty! I want a clean execution, today. Any questions?

[UPDATE: As of late May, Youtube has taken down Moore and Gibb's film citing copyright infringment. Granted, the film has flaws, but its over-arching message remains.]