Looking for a way to perk up your work week? Why not update yourself on the impending enviropocalypse?
According to an exhaustive study by the Global Footprint Network, September 25th was the day that the planet used all of the available planetary resources that it could replenish in a year (otherwise known as Earth Overshoot Day). For the rest of the year, we’ll be culling, reaping, and utilizing that which won’t grow back.
Ever the optimist, I like to look at the impending death of our home planet as an opportunity to try out other levels of existence. Farming, fishing, manufacturing, and reproducing can get quite monotonous after a few hundred generations. So, as I see it, here are our options:
The first option is to figure out a way to exist in bio-friendly hibernation pods, as the new movie Surrogates seems to suggest. Now, this may be with the help of Matrix-like robotic overlords, or it may be as autonomous dwellers in an expanded Internet or Multiverse. Incidentally, Surrogates seems to pull heavily from Snow Crash, a novel whose characters spend most of their free time on a fully-immersive giant virtual reality internet. The environmental benefits to this type of lifestyle are clear, with the added bonus of living life in a giant video game. I have high hopes for this potential reality.
Our second option is to dispose of our planet like a used diaper and seek out life on another potential dumping ground elsewhere in the galaxy. For those ingrained into the deficit spending culture, this may be the only satisfying solution. Many sci-fi tales, including Robert Heinlein’s, Farmer in the Sky set the scene for human colonization of other worlds. These are tales of future explorers homesteading on nearby habitable planets. While playing Galactic Oregon Trail sounds like a real hoot, it doesn’t come without its own share of problems. Firstly, this reality sticks us with the farming, fishing, and reproduction toils that we were trying to get out of. And secondly, this future path assumes that humans will have the smarts to build things, grow things, and live without electricity while we break in our new environment. Not bloody likely.
The third option is much less fun, as it involves heeding the constant whinings of our scientific community. Cutting down on global consumption just feels wrong. It would be the equivalent of declaring defeat in the War Against Nature, which we know our political leaders could never bear. And I for one, don’t like losing to an unconscious pile of dirt and brine. Doesn’t sentience count for anything anymore? So, no, I refuse to lay out the potential of slowly weening ourselves off of our highly consumptive habits. It’s just wrong. Surely there must be a more extravagant, American way to go about doing this. Perhaps we can keep our day-to-day abuses intact and simply jettison some of our more extravagant behaviors.
I bet that putting an end to NASCAR and Entourage would roll us back to a level of existence short of Earth Overshoot. And if that doesn’t work, we can always choose some toothless, symbolic action that represents our commitment to fixing our leaky planet when we decide to get around to it. In that vein, I propose that we recycle Tyra Banks into organic mulch. At least this would make our dying planet an infinitely more palatable place to live.
