As the climate and extinction crises accelerates our descent into the abyss, many of us are seeking a meaningful existence as we manage our own grief and more importantly that of our youth, which will very soon become our greatest pre-collapse challenge.Don’t get caught lying to them.
My co-host on Nature Bats Last and I are regularly accused of ‘Giving Up’ because we have synthesized and accepted the science that we are now in the non-linear stage of the Sixth Great Extinction. “Giving up” for me equates to co-hosting NBL with Guy, volunteering at the Rakino Island Nursery on a rewilding project for our “Little Slice of Paradise” Rakino Island and working with a group to create a “Marine Protection Area” in the Hauraki Gulf adjacent to my home. It’s important to carry on doing the right thing without being attached to the outcome.
Any cursory, unbiased glance at my and Guy’s actions will immediately dispell the accusation that we have ‘Given Up’.
Why do Guy and I do what we do? We believe that the youth deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There will be no ‘sugar coating’ of the sixth great extinction on our watch. The youth’s futures have been stolen from them,surely they deserve the truth at least? The cold hard truth is that the real ‘safe’ level of anthropogenic warming was probably only 0.5C, not 1, not 1.5, not 2C.
The recent discovery of enormous methane ‘Pingo’s’ in the Arctic being yet another example of the rapidity the biosphere is unraveling at. The cognitive dissonance being shown by our so called leaders, who within a capitalist paradigm have no clue what to say or do is plain to see. Effectively they are literally behaving like stunned deer in the head lights of a runaway train. Our one and only space ship is about to crash and burn and there is no pilot in the cockpit. Brace for impact.
Here’s an example from the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Watch her squirm whilst criticising XR activists for holding up the traffic. So much for her grandiose declaration that climate change is our ‘Nuclear Free’ moment. Dear Jacinda, this is a Climate Emergency
Because no one in power is prepared to accept the true severity of the unfolding collapse, and the large NGO’s are lying by omission, we are as a society and culture living a lie. Sending young people off to school or university to train as cogs in the wheel of capitalism which is just about to collapse is a dereliction of duty and in my mind equates to child abuse. Check out the work of my friends Oksana and Joey at The Deep Green Bush School for a rare dose of reality in the education sphere. Personally I would scrap the entire school curriculum and teach first aid and survival skills.
The “Extinction Rebellion” movement has successfully motivated many people onto the streets but they are simply begging those same delusional politicians to ‘Act Now on Climate Change’ and do what pray tell ?
The entire paradigm is being controlled and steered to make it look like something is happening when in reality it is deflecting the youth away from the true severity of the predicament we are confronted with. Guilt tripping the youth about their carbon footprints and pretending that activism will right this sinking ship is intellectually and morally bankrupt, much like the culture itself.
Their time would be better spent developing survival skills than painting banners. I’ll quote Jem Bendell of “Deep Adaptation” fame who interestingly turned down our invitation for him to be our guest on NBL: “Getting busy with action can be a distraction from full acceptance of our predicament”.
Guy and I have toured Aotearoa New Zealand twice discussing the severity of the crisis as we see it. Below is a discussion we had at the end of the 2016 tour;
My recent interview on Waiheke Radio discussing my activism and actions as we face collapse is embedded here
The photo above is of Rakino Island taken from the North. Photo credit Scott Peters.
Additional reading on this theme;
We’re About to Become People Fighting Desperately Fighting For Survival on a Dying Planet, and It’s Not Going to Be Pretty
Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change
Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored
If you want to go down fighting as I do, tell the truth, surely the youth deserve that and the right to decide what to do with the little time that is left for them.
I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.
Kevin Hester 
I got a letter & documents from a fracking outfit called “Antero”.
They want my approval to frack for natural gas on a patch of land I control in W.Virginia.
I’m not going to give my approval, I don’t want fracking on any land I have an interest in & I couldn’t care less about the $200. incentive + royalties from their alledged profits.
What good are royalties & profits on a dying planet? I’m lucky in that I don’t need the money, I don’t have that drive for MORE money that so many ‘mericans have, I have enough to meet my needs, I don’t need more, especially not from FRACKING!
The winter birds are arriving, not quite as many as last season & again my poor swallows could not breed, still not enough insects. They will soon be extinct along with other flying insect eating birds.
You would think our RULERS would be alarmed at this, don’t they also eat?
Can’t they understand that we are but one, small, strand in the great web of life? Destroy that & we too will die, we are NOT a “special creation” by the tribal “god” of Israel, we are an APE, a hairless ape that walks on two legs, but still a ape & a animal that depends upon a habitat to exist but we fools are destroying the very thing that keeps us alive.
Today, some of us celebrate first nation peoples day formally known as “Columbus day”.
We are finally recognising that Columbus was NOT the “discoverer” of the “new world” it was already inhabited by millions of people & some civilizations that our ansestors destroyed as quickly as possible as they set out to claim their “manifest destiny” by raping, pillaging, killing, starving out, shooting, poisoning the first nation peoples then doing their best to erase their culture & language & turn them into non people, not fit to rejoin their people & not accepted by the whites either, they were left without a place to call home.
Two weeks ago I had a small clot settled in the artery to my R. retina, now I”m blind in that eye & I need a catarack operation more than ever. How can I do that if I have to be totally BLIND for a week + I live alone & have no one to help me?
I can still feed the birds, take photographs, use the computer, remove alien plants, plant native plants, trap gophers that eat off the roots of my plants but I can’t see in three dimentions any longer so I deleted all my anagliph photos, I’ll give away all my 3D books, someone else can enjoy them.
Keep up the good work Kevin & Guy, too bad more people refuse to listen to your message & the pages of EVIDENCE you present, they will be forced too in time.
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Good luck with your eye sister, if you can get any treatment grab it while it’s still available
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DAM wordpad DELETED MY MESSAGE!
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Accelerates our descent…now that is a nice choice of words. You could have used ‘screaming madly as we plunge down the side of the rocky cliff’ but that wouldn’t be very dignified, would it? Of course there are a large number of our species that seem to refuse to even acknowledge that there is a cliff, or that we are plunging faster and faster as we fall. Nor admit that we BUILT the damned cliff. And then there is the majority that is barely surviving and is too busy to be aware of anything but trying not to starve today… We really don’t hear about those people much, do we? Unless they drown in a massive tsunami or a typhoon smashes their city of hovels flat…
Then there are those wealthy enough to be able to say ‘Screw it, I’m flying out on vacation to my condo on the Bahamas tomorrow!’
Oh wait, there ISN’T any Bahamas anymore and the condo washed away. Excuse me for using that as an example since the wealthy obviously can’t fly there. Poor things. And of course that was just a ‘weather event’ unrelated to all the other weather events going on around the world. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, go home and stayed glued to your TV and cell phone for important announcements…
Kevin, no offense meant but I’ll have to disagree with your assessment in the first sentence of paragraph two because, in a sense, yes we have ‘given up’ as far as the optimistic jesus-is-coming-to-save-us crowd wanting destruction would see it, or those that think we can ‘techno’ our way out of this dire predicament using some magic soon-to-be-invented-app technology that will allow us to continue our incredibly STUPID way of living on a finite planet. And I use the term stupid in that ‘do the same thing expecting a different outcome’ way. Now if we were in space and had the solar systems resources to use and self-supporting viable habitats and factories with all that dead rock out there so we wouldn’t have to destroy the only planet we can live on…a very different ending I would hope. You know what an optimist I am hidden under this crusty surfer exterior, don’t you?
Kevin, as far as correlating the science that is being published daily (I can’t keep up with it all), and then having to accept the conclusion (that is glaringly obvious) of the current extremely over-populated planet and disastrously degraded ecosystem. Oh, and did I forget to mention the spiraling around the toilet climate we get to live in?
Ah hell, Kevin. I don’t mean to be grouchy today. It’s gray and raining out the windows and a bit chill here in the house, and reading your words this morning that ‘nobody in power is prepared to accept the true severity’ and yeah that’s everywhere. I’m just reading too much information from too many sources (including this twenty-six year old book by W. Kotke!) and my brain continues to whirrrr madly as it correlates. Just as yours and Guy’s probably do, just as so many ‘alarmist’ scientists have been doing.
I think this concerns perception of what the words ‘given up’ means, don’t you think? The anti-science people that are accusing the both of you of the thought crime of ‘giving up’ are surely the same type of people who were part of the previous Empires of the last 9,000 years. Each of those civilizations that anthropologists have dug into showed the same pattern as we see going on around us now. Can you imagine what they were saying to the realists seeing the end of the Ethiopian Empire, Pharaoh’s Egypt, the Hittites? Off with their heads! Ozymandias’ famous words on his ruins rings a bell of warning. This is same damned pattern of our species and has been for…ummm counting average motherhood at 15 yrs old that would be…about 6.5 generations every 100 years. That’s…585 generations.
Does anybody know who their grandpa was 585 generations ago? The only one I know of is the 9,000 year old grave of Kennewick Man found on the crumbling banks of the Columbia River that is directly related by DNA to members of the Colville Tribe across the river from me but how rare is that? But we are still living the same way as all the other empires since!! It is insane! Empires always strip the limited natural resources from the conquered territories to continue being an empire. Then dies out and is covered in dirt.
Alarmists! Cynics! Heretics! Unbelievers! Enemies of the State! You’ve given up on the EMPIRE, Kevin! The greatest empire of the world ever, the most powerful, the wealthiest, the…bestest! We walked in space, walked on the moon…Well…since then, of course, we’ve used space to hang weapons pointed down at ourselves and spy satellites for the insane megalomaniacs and sociopaths that rule us can listen in to whatever we say….
AAHahahahahahaha! Those denizens of all those ancient empires never could get it. The current crop alive today can’t get it either because that would cause massive cognitive dissonance. Might drop their cell phone if they let that happen. And those things are a $1,000 now!!
These people don’t really pay attention to historical patterns of human interaction, and the rise and fall of every previous civilization certainly isn’t taught in the schools as anything close to a possibility for OUR civilization. Not with all our shiny machines and stuff, no way! Besides, the study of History is not necessary for an MBA or Attorney-at-Law degree which seem to be the only ones worth having in terms of social status in this Empire. They allow you to steal the most with the least amount of work.
Our species has never experienced what is coming at this scale before. There just wasn’t that many of us back then to do all the destructive grunt work, and no fossil fuels making all of this possible by orders of magnitude. So those civilizations were mainly limited to relatively local collapse-the distance measured in walking or horseback or slow sailing ships and not the global disaster we are watching unfold. This never had the chance to happen to the other 584 generations before us.
This is unique. Oh my holy shit yes. There were always other unspoiled areas to conquer and plunder. Now…not so much. And a million new mouths to feed every three days. Just the worldwide topsoil loss caused by humans in the last 585 generations of agriculture is staggering…How we’ve made it this far is more by chaos theory or random and blind luck. Maybe both. But there have been 22 previous major civilization collapses. At least.
Big sigh.
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And you quoted Prof. Jem Bendell: “Getting busy with action can be a distraction from full acceptance of our predicament”. Now that is an interesting reply. I wonder what he considers ‘full acceptance’ in others? What is he doing/not doing that makes him compare what others are doing as not accepting the fact of our biosphere/climate unwinding? If you ever get a chance, ask him that question.
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If the Extinction Rebellion was real every one of those people would not have children. Ever. Period. That’s the litmus test of understanding the science behind the cute slogans and marches and youtube clips. That would truly be giving up don’t you think?
Greta Thunberg comes out and says she will never have children on worldwide tv? She’s already explained why fairly well but hasn’t taken that next step.
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The Deep Green Bush School…Do you think teaching survival skills is truly an option here? Using Rapa Nui/Easter Island as an example but expanded to continent-wide disasters? Probably not so much I’m thinking. The strongest, the most vicious, the ones best at hiding and scavenging, they survive. Once the grid goes down and all the reactors blow into the northern hemisphere’s atmosphere…another Big Sigh. Wonder if the fallout will cross the Equator like Nevil Shute’s book did?
The only thing I can see to do is that can directly affect the world around us is with what we can put our hands on, or put our voices to. I continue to let this property heal as do my neighbors to the north, and I continue to talk to those that I run into that are interested. My view has shrunk, Kevin.
To effect a change that is large enough to affect the change needed is going to take…space beings with astounding technology.
Wasn’t that movie with the super-dooper vacuum cleaner Spaceballs??? I’m not sure I’d like those guys…or trust them!
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SHEILA: Sorry to hear that you are having ‘age-related’ problems, too. Time certainly catches up to all of us in one way or another. I don’t like it much, either. Getting old sucks and grandma was right about that!
But I’m glad you got to say NO to that fracker outfit. I hope it’s a big enough piece of land to make a difference! Otherwise they’ll just drill sideways under the land from other parcels and do it anyway the bastids. And yes you are lucky you don’t need the money. $200 a month can be the difference between home and homeless for far too many in this country. What’s the point of not fracking when you are starving on the street because you couldn’t make the rent or mortgage? Dilemma!
I read that down in eastern SoCal there’s a migration lake that is fed by an underground aquifer that is now poisoned, gone toxic, by the fracking companies that ‘promised’ the politicians, that they support with campaign contributions, that it couldn’t/wouldn’t ever never happen. Fish & Game are trying to figure out a way to scare off all the bird species that use that particular lake every year…I guess they will have to do this every Fall and Spring forever? The lake is permanently poisoned so yeah, I guess so.
>Birds have eaten through the two Suet birdfood squares I hung low on the apple tree. First time I’ve ever had one of those. Came out of a box at the 2nd hand with squares still in plastic wrap and I figured why not see if the birds around here like it. Three or four species of smaller birds have been clinging to it pecking away, and even noticed big Magpies underneath the tree getting at what the little birds lost in the tall grass. Don’t see that happening much with the bigger birds as they usually stay off the ground in front of the house due to the dogs that have always lived here. The ravens are aware of the dogs also but this is a ‘safe zone’, too, no domestic cats and nobody shoots at them here. The turkey families that bring their chicks to eat grasshoppers in huge numbers from late Spring through the dry time of Summer are pretty comfortable, too. I see a lot of birds here, Sheila. I have to run get the bird book out more than once every Spring to figure out what I’m looking at…
I guess now I have to go buy some of those squares since they liked them so much. Hummingbirds left a month back and the feeders are all cleaned and inside for the winter. Sure were a lot of them this year. Saw a robin a few days ago hopping around chasing worms with the rain. Surprised it hasn’t migrated yet. Haven’t noticed the big Vs of honkers going by overhead yet, either.
>Remember that the Rulers of the Empire will always have good food to eat, and lots of it. After all, they are the Rulers, yes? How can anything go wrong for them? They are so powerful and wealthy and connected! And they certainly know that they are at the top of that strand of life so let the little people eat cake…if they can.
>Ya know something? I’m sure there is some DARPA lab somewhere trying like crazy to invent Star Trek’s food materializer!
>One of the ‘eating dinner books’ recently finished was a coffee table over-sized hardbacks titled: Mysteries of the Ancient Americas pub. 1986. A Reader’s Digest picture book and they actually did a pretty good job of laying out the history known in 1986 about the civilizations on these two continents. Though it was written from the very biased Western Euro-Empire viewpoint (at least I found it biased) the book covered the last 9,000 years well enough to hopefully bring up questions in people’s minds about what they thought they knew about the ‘savages’ and ‘indians’ that were here first. Good pictures throughout, too. It was free out of another box of books donated to the 2nd hand…I like getting first dibs since the owner of the store has a completely different taste in her reading material…
>Nothing but empires ravaging the land since the dawn of agriculture. From all areas of the globe, by all invented human religions, by all skin shades and hair color and eye shape have participated. It’s like a freaking brain-eating virus or something from a grade ‘B’ Hollywood Sci-Fi thriller disaster movie.
Everywhere it has been the same. Deserts where forests used to be, land that used to be ocean before the topsoil washed off the farms feeding the armies of empires into the ocean filling the bays and extending the beaches out…by a couple of kilometers where now houses and roads are.
And the Rulers always profited, Sheila! Always. Until their guards turned on them…
>And like Kevin mentioned, try to get something going on fixing at least the cataract in the one eye any way possible. Don’t wait. You may not have anything you can do about the clot other than hoping it will break down on it’s own (they do that) but you really need to explore alternatives. I’ve got Applecare up here, What does Oregon have?
sealintheSelkirks
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I’m not sure why this post is being ignored by the comments section but I always enjoy your comments Seal, with news of your eight acres in the Selkirks
My eight acres has gone from a “slow” spring to a heatwave in the blink of an eye. Consequently I have been preoccupied with shearing my sheep, all carrying 12 months wool and some pregnant as well.
Non farmers simply do not realise how stable our climate once was. To the point where planting dates were down to the day,or the day the rams went out. Where seasons could be said to be “3days late” or ten days or whatever!
Now it’s anybody’s guess what nature will dish up.
Best of luck my friend.
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Tis spring “down under” but the time of our fall here. Poor heartland farmers, first they get rained on too long & flooded out & forced to plant late & they hoped for a good.dry, WARM fall.
No such luck, they got hit with record COLD & HARD FREEZES. They only had about 70% of their crops ready for harvest but the cold hit before they could get it all in. E. Oregon suffered a freeze that hit their winter weat crop & other farmers are planting less, too much weat on the market & prices are too low.
Where I’m at it’s still sunny & dry, too dry, fires are raging in California south of me, more people are fleeing their homes & the power companies efforts to prevent those fires by cutting off the electricity in areas subject to wildfires doesn’t seems to have worked. But I’m sure there are a lot of angry Californians who’s refrigerated & frozen food is now rotten.
Fewer bird migrants are at my feeder this year & I noticed hardly any young. Our birds are dying out thanks to us stupid, short sighted & GREEDY humans.
Further north, brown bears are entering hibernation starving, they will die this winter, the salmon # are way down, that’s what they fatten up on before winter.
I’ve read that rig counts are way down in the fracking fields, fracking equipment are being sold off, frackers are going bankrupt, output is flattening soon to fall.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Prices-Jump-As-The-Rig-Count-Collapse-Continues.html
I sure hope I can get my catarack surgery soon. I have half the visual resolution I once had & it was poor even then & I now have no depth perception & everything is even more blurry, smeared & foggy, but when they do operate on the eye, I will be totally BLIND until the bandages come off!
I will be pushing the doctor for a speed up on that surgery, I REALLY NEED IT NOW.
The retinal artery was totally occluded, the retina is DEAD, even if the clot disolved, I would still be blind in that eye forever.
Since I live alone, how will I know what day it is? I can[‘t use the phone, how will I return to the doctors office, I can’t drive? will I be able to see after the bandages are off & how well? What a mess!
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Shelia, it’s the perfect storm. Thanks for your anecdotal observations about the climate. I hope you get your surgery soon and make a speedy recovery.
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Thank you Kevin, I’m hoping for a operation SOON as well.
We’re having another lovely. sunny, warm day on the Oregon coast today.
I would enjoy it more if I didn’t realize what this portends.
It should be RAINING here, but it’s not, it’s dry. No fires so far except house fires & a business.
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44 south: thanks for the compliment. I know I write too many words most of the time, mainly because my brain goes too fast and words flow out. I know I’m especially overwhelming for the ‘twitter/text crowd’ who, bluntly, aren’t all that literate as far as I’m concerned.
So I appreciate having a positive response now and again… My stepkids always did call me their noisy dad and nothing has changed much the last 25 years.
You switched from slow Spring to heatwave? And I am under The Blob heat dome again this year, just like in 2014 when it didn’t snow in these mountains, so this area near the Canadian Border is under…not winter. And yesterday a ‘Hazardous Weather Alert’ has been posted for ‘Stagnant Air Quality’ which of course means don’t breathe for a few days because it’s bad for you.
Yeah, right.
The Blob is freaking huge so all I’m getting is sub-zero C every night and 5-10’C during the day. Unlike Sheila to the south of me I should be seeing snow. Even though it snowed here in September, a freak occurrence which hasn’t happened since the 1920s! Next week daytime highs are expected to be in the upper teen C’/60sF. A very deformed Northern Jet Stream I am under.
And I completely agree with your non-farmer comment, and I’d expand that to all urban enclaves. People don’t realize just how much the climate has already shifted away from the stability of the past because…they can’t as they are surrounded by dead concrete and asphalt and stucco that reflects nothing of a real biosphere. A couple of parks with a few trees does not a biosphere make! Their lives aren’t constantly touched by the living world. Hell, they never even see the sky full of star fields that all of our ancestors used to watch every night whirl above their heads. Too much light pollution on top of the ever-present smog and haze.
The separation of our species from being part of the evolution of life on the planet by the human-invented religions and empire building of the last 9,000 years is nearly complete. The children are growing up existing in screens not soil. ‘Virtual + reality’ is a contradiction that nobody seems to notice.
Big sigh. You’re shearing sheep, I’m hauling in firewood. Do something fun at the end of the day, 44 south!
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Sheila: Horribly cold October here, too, records broken again. Seems like a lot of records falling the last few years around the world, yes? And seeing snow falling from the sky out my window on September 28th was quite a shocker!
The bears here are starting hibernation but there’s no snow yet so they are still out eating. From what I’ve been told from the local bear hunters they are pretty healthy and fat up here so they’ll make it through the winter.
As for fracking rigs closing, it’s all about raising the price of oil so they make more profit. It isn’t like consumption is going down any because it’s only going up! So they squeeze more cash from the ones that are still pumping. This Empire we live in runs on oil, without it we collapse and starve. Talk about living between a rock and a hard place….
Get that surgery! Who knows how long the grid will stay up…and you need to be able to see!
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Here’s one that I found rather…ironic. Not that the government is saying this out loud or anything you understand!
A US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 500 page report released this summer. This info was buried in it. Personally I think the report is extremely optimistic…
Trump Administration Agency Predicts 7 Degree F (4’C) Rise in Global Temperatures by 2100.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ev7bwp/trump-administration-agency-predicts-7-degree-f-rise-in-global-temperatures-by-2100
Personally I think that this is far too optimistic!!
Nothing else for now. Do something fun.
sealintheSelkirks
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Another excellent discussion on this subject
https://www.outsideonline.com/2404887/climate-grief-action?fbclid=IwAR092iMs99H3S8i1K1ZLZgxqxlwo_QzWo6WVplSJpg3KXHFtB7dRee-DGso#close
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I thought that this article fits in your meme here. It’s an interesting way to look at it…
From Caesar’s Last Breath to Ours
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/06/from-caesars-last-breath-to-ours/
Human Life is a sexually transmitted planetary disease, Climate Change is the disinfectant that will cure it. (I’ll explain myself on this later.)
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