From Sycamore Trees to Human Destiny: Reading the Wild at the Crossroads of Globalization and Apocalypse

Abstract

The only way to begin this writing Is with a form of confession. The planet is In trouble. It is not a time simply to “do theory” The signals are unmistakable for anyone willing to look. An interlocking quaternary of apocalyptic forces—peak oil, climate change, species extinction, and population overshoot—ride In upon us relentlessly like horsemen from the end times. M. King Hubbard’s modeling of the peak production of modernity’s primary energy resource accurately predicted the decline of U.S. oil production in the mid-1970s and served notice that such a global peak was in the offing (no matter how ferocious the attempts to enter Faustian bargains of self-delusion with our Zooplankton and algae ancestors whose viscous bodies are the life blood of industrial civilization). There were only so many trillion trillion deaths in the planet’s oceans over the millions of years leading up to this one, and the supply of “black gold,” however tweaked by new technologies of extraction, Is limited. But, as climate change denier Richard Muller (2012) has acknowledged, even if that peak is pushed out a few decades hence by tar sands fever, it will not much matter at today’s rates of C02 emissions. Political gridlock, corporate constitution In the Imperative of growth, and all the reigning Idolatries of short-term gain interlocked with take-no-prisoners advertising and its consumer culture offspring, translate into a depressing scenario.

Thenceforth natural things arc not only themselves but ci speaking.

—Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness