We are heading towards annihilation…  ‘We’ in this proposition mostly refers to humankind. Or, does it encompass the biosphere? All sentient beings? Flora? Fauna? Gaia (in the plural)?  Climate catastrophe is existential. No matter how long it will take the planet to become uninhabitable (for us) as we know it,  it will almost certainly happen in the present course.  To think that only the humankind is aware of this future is another kind of anthropocentrism. Entire biosphere is genetically coded for the sense of doom as evident in mass migrations of flora and fauna. Survival is essential, mass extinctions happen within a flash when deep time is considered. We can only compare the future of the thin layer on earth’s surface to that of Mars,  now that we have images. Water and air? We might as well call them something else in future terms.

For some, the judgement day does not bring up images. There is no consolation in survival of the the righteous, the body or the soul (or both) either intact or in ether.  For a non-believer who have witnessed earthquakes, infernos, the high seas or wars when alive, the forces are there to imagine the doomsday (minus the horsemen).  Post apocalypse is when these forces cease to be, as on mars, in total enthropy.  For Lovelock, this is the kernel of Gaia theory. Then, the philosophical dilemma once more: if no one will be there to witness the end of the world, shall we say it will not happen?

So, how did we end up here? Following Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, one can trace the ills back to the commodification of labour (men-women), land (nature) and money. The self-regulating market economy induced the social catastrophe, as Polanyi observed during WWII. When every actor in society acted in self interest,  the forces of the market economy would be in equilibrium for everybody’s benefit, the free market economists thought. What could not act in self interest in this complex web was the biosphere itself, as an externality.

Then, just as it is during the Covid-19 pandemic, the society is expected to take the blame: as we do not wash our hands enough, fail to wear masks and socialize with fellow humans, we consume too much and do not recycle either. The relations governing the market economy attempts at evenly distributing the blame and responsibilities among executives, shareholders, employees, workers, consumers and everybody else alive, while the increasingly powerless and corrupt governments are fixated on growth figures. As the fascists always think, there are too many people on earth to share the wealth…

September 2020