The Big Picture

Two articles from the past week have helped "connect the dots" with the recent and on-going world events. Paul Krugman makes the connection between the events in Tunisia and Egypt to the ongoing world food crisis to the obvious fact that climate change is starting to shape everyday life for every person on the planet "these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning." And Krugman has the grace to think beyond the bottom line and about those who are most affected "These soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, but they’re having a brutal impact on the world’s poor, who spend much if not most of their income on basic foodstuffs.

John Michael Greer writes a superb blog called the Archdruid Report. He also makes the connection between the uprisings in the Middle East and severe weather events but also speaks about the inability of Americans to understand how an individual event fits into the context of the greater whole "The fixation on the fantasy of perpetual growth is only one of the system-related stupidities that infest contemporary American public life, though it’s arguably the most egregious." Greer's historically based vision of the next 50 years is a must read for anyone interested in pulling their head out of their ass long enough to take a look at our future.

Ultimately, the historical trends of resource depletion, climate change, environmental degradation, our culture based on exponential growth (take Chris Martenson's Crash Course to truly understand what this means) and what hardly anyone is talking about, overpopulation are all crashing into us at the same time. We must face the fundamental fact that the world as we know it is coming to an end (cue in REM). The golden age of consumption has reached its apex and like the top of the Superman ride at Six Flags, its all downhill from here. All we can hope for is to survive the descent with a modicum of grace and hope that no-one noticed that I was screaming like a 5 year old child the whole way down.