The Long Way Home

By Kenny Ausubel, AlterNet. Posted October 15, 2004.

You have to figure the Force is with you when Yoda gets on board. In this case, "Yoda" is the Pentagon's term of endearment for Andrew Marshall, a revered military oracle who heads up an elite military think tank that envisions future threats to national security. After reading a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report on global warming, the octogenarian sage decided that indeed the sky is falling. He commissioned two master futurists to produce an analysis.

Their report, titled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security," draws on recent research showing that climate change can be very sudden, occurring in a matter of a decade or two. This has actually occurred at least twice before that we know of – about 8,000 and 11,000 brief biological years ago.

The report lays out several possible scenarios, ranging from worse than we ever imagined to unthinkable. By 2020 we could face mega-droughts and floods, mass starvation in many regions, hordes of desperate ecological refugees and war over scarce resources of food, water and energy. Or, the reports says, if climate change is really abrupt, the world could melt down in three to five years, then flip the switch into an ice age. Think snow for hundreds of years on end.

Yoda concluded that the force of global warming is definitely with us. Call it actionable intelligence. So he decided to do an end-run around the political top brass by leaking the unclassified report to Fortune magazine. His hope was that the business world would get the picture and move decisively to alter the course of civilization. Pentagon spokesmen later confirmed that indeed they had not bothered to pass Marshall's report on to his higher-ups in the Defense Department or White House.

The report demurely suggests this: "Alternative fuels, greenhouse gas emissions controls and conservation efforts are worthy endeavors." It concludes by posing the alternative: "Abrupt climate change is likely to stretch [the Earth's] carrying capacity well beyond its already precarious limits. Disruption and conflict may well be endemic features of life ... Every time there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid."

Some choice.

As reporter Andrew Zaitchik summed up the Pentagon's response, "The Department of Defense and Energy have recently installed photovoltaic panels atop the enormous building's five-sided roof. And if a solar-powered Death Star isn't the perfect symbol of humanity's two possible futures, then I don't know what is."

There is indeed a clash of civilizations, but in this case it is not between Islam and the West, or tradition and modernism. It is between a disposable civilization and a sustainable civilization. We have created a civilization that is a suicide bomb. We need to start disarming it right away.

Einstein famously said that "God does not play dice with the universe," but we are. All bets are off when you're gaming the Earth. The house always wins. And the awful truth is that global warming is just the tip of the melting iceberg. We are running evolution in reverse, shattering the very mirror of nature that can show us who we are and how to be in this place in a way that lasts. The jagged shards are so dreadful to contemplate that most people don't want to go there. The problem is – we're already there. Denial and neglect are only going to seal the deal.

As painful as it is, it's imperative that we grasp what's already happening on the ground in order to shift our course immediately. Here's just a fractal of the signs of the times. I promise we won't linger.

One of the best ways to see what's happening is to watch the animals. In Scotland's northern isles, home to some of the world's richest bird life, ornithologists are calling it the "year without young." Birds by the millions have not hatched eggs, if they've laid them at all. This unprecedented nesting failure is caused by starvation from the overnight disappearance of the small silvery sand eels the birds feed on. The ocean warmed, the sand eels went north, and a massive ecosystem that has functioned for millions of years is crashing.

The oceans themselves are turning acid from absorbing all that CO2 from the bonfire of the fossil fuels. The acid environment is killing off coral reefs, shellfish and plankton, the basis for nearly all marine life.

All over England, wildlife are exhibiting a feminization process that could throttle evolution itself. An estimated third of male fish in British rivers are growing female reproductive tissues and organs. Seals, sea otters, peregrine falcons and honey bees are heading for what reporter Mark Townsend calls a "unisex" existence, which is a bee line for eventual extinction. The culprit is gender benders, endocrine-disrupting chemicals that scramble the body's subtle hormonal growth signals and that are now pervasive globally.

Pollution and ecological disruption are also triggering bizarre behavior in animals, reports the New Scientist: "Hyperactive fish, stupid frogs, fearless mice, and seagulls that fall over." Not to mention the fact that a bevy of species no longer know how to mate, parent, build nests, learn, dodge predators or forage.

Author and filmmaker Kenny Ausubel is the founder and co-executive director of Bioneers. The 15th annual Bioneers conference takes place Oct. 15-17, at Marin Center in San Rafael, Calif.

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