This Is Extinction — And Now You’re Living IT
I have an admission to make. I was wrong.
I thought — and I wrote — that it would take probably until 2030 or so. To get here.
But let me let the people on the front lines of this calamity speak to you directly themselves.
““There’s nothing left to eat,’ one farmer, Laurent Roux, told the local radio station France Bleu. ‘The terrain is so dry that in places, it looks like ash. It’s dust.’
“‘Our vines are suffering,’ said vintner Xavier Collart Dutilleul, who, with his wife Pascale, runs Château Mazeris Bellevue near Saint-Emilion in southwestern France. Lacking rain, the organic vineyard’s parched clay-rich soil is ‘almost as hard as cement,’ he told Yahoo News, and he predicted that his harvest, which typically yields enough for 35,000 bottles, will be down by 30% this year.”
“We have no water,” said Fabrizio Rizzotti, a seventh-generation rice farmer. ‘The plants are curling up and dying in the fields.’ This year, he expects his harvest of carnaroli rice, favored for risotto, to be 30% of what it was last year.”
“In Spain, which provides nearly half the world’s olive oil, Agricultural Minister Luis Planas last week warned that ‘this year’s olive harvest could be notably lower than previous ones.’ Spain’s Association of Young Farmers and Ranchers (Asaja) predicts that olive yields will drop by a third.”
“‘What’s happening this year is very scary,’ enologist Ton Mata, third-generation owner and CEO of the Recaredo vineyard in Spain’s cava region, Alt Penedès, told Yahoo News. ‘We have little rain and a very long, dry, hot period with three heat waves. We are seeing that the grapes are very small and weigh less.’ Although the harvest is just beginning, he’s sure that the yield will be down by 20% to 40%.”
“…The corn harvest is expected to be 18.5% lower this year and farmers said other cereal and fruit and vegetable crops were suffering.”
“Some of the crops hit by the drought include:
- Onions and carrots. U.K. growers expect losses of 30 to 40 percent for carrots and at least 25 percent for onions.
- Potatoes. At least 25 percent of Germany’s harvest is likely to be affected.
- Corn. Around 60 percent has been destroyed in the Netherlands.
- Cereals like wheat, barley and oats. At least 35 percent of the harvest has been lost in Sweden.”
“The drought has hit Denmark particularly hard, with the spring harvest of grains and vegetables down 40 to 50 percent, according to Troels Toft, an official with the Danish Agriculture and Food Council. He estimates that the losses will cost the country’s farming industry around $944 million.”
Meanwhile, India stopped exporting wheat because “extremely hot weather” (LOL, aka climate catastrophe) caused such a drop in wheat production, the country needed to save the harvest for itself.
Did you get all that? I’m not trying to overwhelm you, but if you feel overwhelmed, you should be.
The planet is sending us a message, and it’s terrifying.
But are we listening?
Let me start over with what I was wrong about, exactly. I said — thought, forecast, predicted, whatever you’d like to call it — that it would take us getting to the end of this decade or so for this to happen. What is “this”? For “climate change” — Extinction — to cause genuine and immediate catastrophic system failures to our civilization.
But, like I said, I was wrong. It didn’t take until the end of this decade. It is happening now. And it’s just 2022. That is flat-out terrifying.
Why? Am I just fear-mongering? Just trying to scare you?
My friends, when Europe’s crops are beginning to fall by 30%, in some cases 50%, that is about as grave a calamity as a society can begin to experience. It is a really big deal.
But you know what the irony is? Most people don’t think so. They see these desperate farmers, going bankrupt, absolutely shocked at the way the planet’s changed before their very eyes — and they ignore them. I’ve been talking with people about this. Just average people. At my little European dog park. And you know what? Nobody cares. The general attitude is blasé. Shrug — so what? We’ll get by. Ah, but will we?
Let me say. We are now beginning to experience widespread, massive crop failures as a result of “climate change.” Get that far, and at least you begin to understand something. But even that’s a poor, limited way to think of it. A better way? Extinction is coming. For our water and our crops. They are dying too.
So what about us?
The reason that most people don’t think any of this matters is sadly, very simple. My little dog park is in an affluent neighborhood, in a rich city. It’s full of city people, who are my friends and neighbors. But the last thing they are is farmers. To them, the production of basics — water, food, energy, medicine — is an abstraction. They can feel the heat in the park itself, and see the dogs panting, and even coo over them. But they are unable to really make the link between Extinction and Catastrophe — between climate change and the crop failure and what happens as a result of it.
Cities are concentrations of power and wealth. In our societies, money and authority reside there. And cities, throughout history, make the same mistake. They ignore the signals coming from the edges. The places which produce things. Cities don’t produce much — they never have. Whether it’s agriculture or manufacturing, things have been produced outside the avenues of power and fortune. And so just as Rome ignored the barbarians, so too, we’re ignoring the signals coming from the edges of our industrial-carbon empire.
But listen. Listen to the farmers. The way they are speaking about what is happening to the planet is absolutely shocking and terrifying. The despair and sorrow in their words points to something almost inexpressible. They speak of death, my friends. Of soil turned to ashes, of livestock dying, of crops withering. Our farmers are now speaking the language of Extinction.
But we are not listening, and by not listening, we’re making just the same mistake so, so many civilizations have — from Rome to Athens and beyond. In comfortable air-conditioned bubbles in great cities, the rest of us assume, blithely, that things will just…go on. Hey! I do my job, right! That’s their job! The farmer’s job is to farm! They’ll figure it out. And then, having gotten angry about things they know nothing about, city dwellers add insult to ignorance — and tell farmers to “just grow something else” or “just move north” or what have you. We’re not listening.
So let me say it again.
We are now in an era where some of climate change’s most dramatic and shocking impacts are already beginning to be felt. Our crops are failing and our water supplies are drying up. Extinction is coming for our water and food, and there’s nothing more basic than that.
And more than that, it wasn’t supposed to happen for another decade. Why does that matter? It matters intensely. For the following reason. You see, the world, such as it is, the political world, has a loose agreement to reach “net zero” by 2050. And for the last decade or so, it’s been thought, by politicians, leaders, pundits, that that would be OK. We’d have some brushes with disaster, but get things right by 2050, and the worst impacts of climate change would have been averted.
We’d be living on a hotter planet — but not that much hotter, one just a degree or a half warmer. There’d be a few hot days every now and then — but we’d get by. Without systemic transformation, meaning that our systems for water and agriculture and manufacturing could go on much as they were. Geographically, financially, temporally, spatially, energetically — they could use the same resources, and produce the same yields, and therefore, us city dwellers, who have all the money and power, would go on living our comfortable, cosseted lives, and through all that, democracy would be just fine in the end.
But all of that is being unravelled at the most fundamental level now. Because if we’re beginning to face dramatic, shocking impacts of climate change like mass droughts and crop failures now, in 2022 — when they weren’t supposed to happen for another decade or so — then what hope do we really have of making it to 2050?
Let me put that more concretely. Take any of the statistics about crop failures above — which come again, straight from the sources themselves. Olives, down 30%, corn, 20%, carrots and onions 25%, grapes, 30% — doesn’t matter which one. You don’t have to think very hard to understand the terrifying conclusion. This is just 2022. What happens by 2030? What happens when an entire country — or continent’s — yield of basic crops is down by 50%?
The answer is frightening, and I’m sure I don’t have to spell it out for you. Inflation sets in, prices skyrocket, people panic, shortages ensue, food has to be rationed, everything comes apart. Democracy begins to fail, people turn on each other, demagogues find convenient scapegoats for these woes — just as they’ve done for everything else recently — and there’s a Big Bang of authoritarian fascism, as societies plunge into poverty, instability, and chaos.
We are in an incredibly serious situation. We don’t understand that we’re in one, because nobody’s listening to the people on the Front Lines of Extinction. Farmers. Hydrologists. Climate scientists. We’re all ignoring them, in increasingly shamefully idiotic ways. Hey — what’s Captain America wearing now!? OMG!! Look, it’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe!!
(My God, the stupidity actually hurts. These days, the planet’s literally dying before our eyes, and the average person cares more about superheroes, like a goddamned four year old. And then they get mad at me when I point it out. Farmers and hydrologist and scientists are out there begging, pleading to be heard, but no. We’ve regressed into infantile narcissism, and nothing can tear us puerile city dwellers away from our new creature comforts — superhero movies, instaculture, plastic surgery, fake friends on apps, making fools’ games of what could have been lives. But I digress, I just find it unbelievably idiotic that people are like this.)
What would you call it if you were running out of food and water? Sorry — not the city dweller’s way, as in the easy, baffled answer of “But I’ll just…go to the store!” I mean: what if you were really running out of food and water? Imagine yourself hiking and lost, or camping and you fell and injured yourself, or trapped in some infernal maze — doesn’t matter. Just: what would you call it?
You’d call it an emergency.
That is what we’re in now. Not the way we were before — the abstract, “long” emergency, in which one distant day, something bad would, might, could, happen, far in the future, according to some nerd, with some math, and some facts. Yawn. Who cares? Not that kind of emergency. We’re in a real one. An immediate one. An existential emergency.
It is no joke when crop failure and droughts this severe afflict a planet from Europe to America to India and beyond. We city dwellers have to wake up. We are making the same mistake civilizations have made before us. We ignore the signals from the regions, hinterlands, fields, at our peril. Our ignorance goes on to cost everyone their futures, because power and money reside with us, but we are too lazy and indolent to lift much of a finger fast enough.
When I talk to my city dwelling friends about all this, their mental model of what climate change does is totally inadequate. They rationalize it, amazingly enough, by saying to me, in short, “Yeah, it’s getting hotter. But a few hot days? So what! I’ll survive…and so will everything else!”
But everything else is not a city dweller. My friends make the mistake of applying their experience to everything, instead of trying to widen their experience.
What do “a few hot days” really do? They kill. They kill crops. They dry up water sources. They turn the fields to ash.
My city dwelling friends don’t appear to understand this simple fact at all. They appear to think that because they can survive “a few hot days,” so can everything else. But that is eminently not the case. The ‘few hot days’ are, in actuality, peaks of extreme heat, in a rapidly warming climate — and those peaks of extreme heat, coupled with rapid warming, are absolute killers. For what? For the basics of our civilization. Food, water, medicine, energy, yes even energy — think of how Britain’s energy supplies are now threatened, and it’s planning for blackouts, because droughts in Norway have reduced what it can power Britain with.
We are in an existential emergency. It will last decades. The serious “impacts of climate change” are now arriving. They are crossing the threshold from theory to reality, and we are beginning now to experience them, in terrifying ways. First we had megafires and megafloods. Now we have mass crop failures and megadroughts. See the acceleration?
It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. But it is. And we aren’t listening. To the message the planet is sending us. To the message all those on the Front Lines of Extinction have for the rest of us.
This isn’t a Marvel Movie you’re watching, it’s not the goddamned Avengers Versus Octo-Spider-Bat-Super-Man, this isn’t a comic book your glazed eyes are reading, this isn’t a theory you’re debating, this isn’t an app to swipe right on and giggle. And you’re not a goddamned four year old. You’re an adult. This is something we need to face, head on.
This is Extinction. And you’re living it.
