This week, as most people in the country were caught up in a debate that at best could be described as bazaar and at worst classifies as devastatingly out of touch with reality, the biggest story in the history of our species' existence hit exactly zero front pages, interrupted no regularly scheduled programs and went completely ignore by both of the major candidates vying for the most powerful political position in the world. In fact, based on my research, the only news outlet with any kind of name recognition to cover this story was The Huffington Post (albeit it was safely tucked away in their, "Green" section in order to avoid the sort of uproar it should have caused had it been more properly covered).
Events of nearly equal importance similarly went essentially unnoticed by the corporate media in 2013 and again last March. On those two occasions, our atmosphere saw phenomenons never before seen in the history of humanity. In 2013, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 reached a daily average of 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in 3 million years. It only got worse last March however, as those levels were seen for an entire month for the first time in human history. As bad as those two milestones were, both of those events fail to cause nearly the concern of what was announced this past week: we have now reached a place where we will almost certainly never see an atmosphere under that 400 ppm benchmark ever again.
The implications of this cannot be understated or ignored. For years, climate scientists have been warning us that this is the point of no return with climate change. We have no surpassed it and are officially locked in to unsafe levels of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere. If you thought things were bad now, they will almost certainly be getting much, much worse as climate change is now widely believed to be irreversible.
Many suggest that it is time - and has been for a while now - to switch from fossil fuels to "renewable" sources of energy. While that sounds less destructive, I would argue that that solution does not go nearly far enough to address just how grave of an issue this is.
You see, we currently live in an economy that is driven by and exists solely due to consumption. The more we destroy the planet, the better the economy does. This would work fine, except that we have to still live on and rely on the planet we're destroying for our very existence.
Switching to "renewable" energy may cut down on the destruction, but even if this culture were run completely on "renewables," it would still most likely commit destructive practices such as deforestation, killing off entire ecosystems to cultivate monocrops, and continuing to believe that we can grow our population and economy infinitely on a planet that has finite space and resources.
In other words, we need a completely different economy. I'm not talking about socialism or communism, although aspects of those two systems may appear in this new economy, I'm talking more about a complete shift in how we view our relationship with the planet. Instead of trying to subdue the earth and force it to look the way we want it to, we need to learn to work with the planet and understand that if we continue to kill it, we will continue to cause harm to ourselves as well.
The good thing though, is that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We actually have numerous examples of previous human societies to go by. It may be hard to believe this, but for 95% of our history, people didn't live at odds with the planet. They lived in sustainable, self-sufficient communities and lived in harmony with their surroundings for the most part.
And that, my friends, is what I believe we need to strive for: sustainable, self-sufficient, communities. But don't get me wrong, this is much easier said then done. This is not something we're going to just fall into on accident. Quite the opposite really. In order to achieve this goal, we all need to give it everything we've got.
We don't have the time to be chasing frivolous careers that only benefit us with a handsome paycheck, exhausting the movie section on Netflix or chasing all the newest trends, we need to be working towards that goal in some way every single day. We need to be learning how to grow and preserve our own food, giving back to our communities and being as politically involved as possible, despite the system clearly being rigged. Can we do it? I honestly don't know. But I do know that the path we're on now leads to a frightening future and we need a radical new way of living to start taking place right now. It's going to be a challenge, but it's the only way I see us possibly giving ourselves a chance.
