As we sit here in 2010, and try to look forward over the next few years, it's a little scary. All right: it's a lot scary. All around us are forces that seem determined to do us in. You have to wonder what it's going to be like in two years - say, in 2012. Well, to understand that, we have to start by understanding those forces. It's as if there's a herd of elephants in a ring around us, all charging straight for us. This page is about what those elephants are; Gaia Spirituality offers an approach to preparing for their arrival.
The first "elephant" charging at us is the coming global climate change, resulting from industrial society's pollution of the atmosphere. You usually hear people call this "global warming," but not everything is going to be warming. Greenland? Oh yes, it's warming - to the point that its ice sheet is sliding off the island into the ocean. But when all that extra fresh water hits the north Atlantic, the resulting drop in the ocean's salt content is going to slow, or even stop, the Gulf Stream that keeps northern Europe warm.
The French Riviera is at about the same latitude as Boston; and if the Gulf Stream stops, the Riviera will probably have the kind of climate Boston does now. Oops - sorry: there may not be a Riviera; it's likely to be flooded by the extra water in the Mediterranean Sea from all that melted ice. And Houston? Well, let's just say a whole lot of Houstonians are going to be buying land around Austin in the not too distant future.
The next of those elephants is the fact that our overuse and misuse of antibiotics has driven bacteria to evolve more and more antibiotic resistance. People demand antibiotics, so doctors prescribe them - even for short-term viral infections, against which antibiotics are about as effective as water. We're to the point that there are now deadly infections that we are incapable of stopping. About 88,000 people a year die from infections they picked up in hospitals – and there's a strain of TB out there that's getting seriously close to being unkillable.
Oh, wait - look: there's an elephant running so closely behind that one, it's hard to see. The genetic modification of our food, without proper testing or controls, has produced some horrors you don't want to know about. OK; one, just for the halibut: recombinant (that is, genetically modified) Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) is given to cows to increase milk production. The rate of mastitis - infection of the udder - in rBGH-fed cows is so high that they have to be given extra doses of antibiotics, which results in even more resistant bacteria, to say nothing of the increased levels of both antibiotics and hormones excreted into our milk supply and urinated into our streams.
You say you're running low on female sex hormones this month? No problem - just drink some commercially-produced milk. What's that? You're male? Sorry about that. And if you want some sort of notice on your milk of whether or not there's any rBGH in it, sorry about that.
Another elephant is the end of cheap oil. Oil is getting more expensive (You have noticed, haven't you?), and not just because the 2006 and 2008 hurricanes damaged or destroyed a lot of our drilling and refining capabilities in the Gulf States. There's just not as much oil in the ground as there used to be: we've drained about half of it - and that's the good half (meaning it's better quality and it's easier to extract).
Every barrel of oil we bring up costs a little more than the barrels we got last year, because it's a little harder to extract them. We’re approaching the point where it'll cost more to get a barrel of oil out of the ground than the barrel can be sold for. (Think of blood and turnips.) When that happens, the flow of oil will stop. Period. Until then, though, oil - and therefore gasoline - is just going to get more and more expensive. It's going to get more and more expensive for us to drive, sure; but it's also going to get more and more expensive to ship things (like food) halfway across the country. As food becomes more and more expensive, people are going to have less and less money to spend on other things – like wholesome, organic food, instead of processed, poison- and chemical-laced ... (euphemizing here) stuff that may once have been food, but not now.
Of course, that leads us straight to the next elephant: the decreasing overall health of the people of this country. People are getting fat - no, make that huge - because of a whole variety of factors, like the decreased quality of the food products available, the fact that lots of people can only afford the processed stuff (there's that word again), the increasing stress this society puts us all under (a separate elephant all by itself), and the increasingly sedentary life-style that's permeated down to the children as they sit mesmerized by their video games and computers.
Diabetes, once a relatively rare disease, is becoming endemic - bringing with it blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage, lower limb amputations, and those obnoxious daily blood checks, restrictive diets, and of course, shots. Bad lifestyle choices contribute to all the top killers in the US today - heart disease (consumption of fatty foods), colon cancer (overconsumption of meat), diabetes (poor diet), stroke and lung cancer (smoking), and on and on. Even Alzheimer's isn't exempt: you can't tell Alzheimer's from Mad Cow Disease (consumption of contaminated beef) without autopsying the brain, so a potentially huge number of human Mad Cow deaths go undiagnosed. [And, regarding Alzheimer's, go look up aluminum.]
That's a great segue into the next elephant, the increasing cost (along with decreasing quality and availability) of health care in this country. [You saw "Sicko", I hope?] The pharmaceutical industry, the medical equipment industry, the medical supplies industry, the medical insurance industry, and the medical provider industry are all working together to make sure the profits continue to flow - no matter what the effect on our health. Consider just this: prevention of catastrophic illness is easier, cheaper, and much less painful for a person than curing such an illness once it has taken hold (assuming it can be cured at all). Why aren't we "racing" for prevention, instead of for the cure? Because the cure keeps the medical industries' profits flowing; but prevention lets people keep both their health and their money.
Let's see ... ah, yes; the next elephant: the instability of the U.S. dollar. The dollar is the "reserve standard" currency, the currency that is the standard worldwide. Why? Since oil is priced in dollars; countries need dollars to buy oil; so they keep a stash of dollars to use for that. It's to our advantage to keep that situation going. One reason for the invasion of Iraq, in fact, was that Saddam Hussein was planning to start selling Iraq's oil for Euros, rather than dollars.
So what? What does it matter whether South Kudzustan wants to sell its oil to North Mundania in dollars or Euros? Well, if North Mundaina has a bunch of dollars it's been using to buy oil, and all of a sudden they start needing Euros to do that, they're going to have to exchange the dollars for Euros - in other words, sell the dollars and buy Euros. When everybody starts selling their dollars, the price (meaning the value) of the dollar is going to plummet. The dollar will be worth a lot less on the international market, which means we'll have to use more dollars to buy imported goods, and we'll get fewer dollars for anything we sell abroad.
Now we know which elephant has won the race to hit us first - the monetary (for lack of a better word) "system". The house of cards known as the US credit system is collapsing (see below), and the dollar is getting some really bad press. Word is, the dollar won't be the world's reserve currency much longer - see this article, for example.
That leads, of course, to the next elephant, the enormous debt the United States is piling up. Right now this debt is mainly accumulating as a result of two things: our buying so much cheap stuff made in Chinese forced-labor prisons, and our funding of the Bush junta's illegal war in Iraq. (China, by the way, is loaning us a huge part of the money we're using to do that.) The result? This country has mortgaged its future - meaning our children and grandchildren - to put profits into the hands of corporations from Wal-Mart to Halliburton. The bill will come due: the Chinese aren't lending us all those billions of dollars out of the kindness of their hearts. And when it comes due, when we can't pay it, what then? How do you foreclose on a country? We're going to find out.
Aha - over there, behind that pork barrel - there's another elephant: the fact that the political process, from the level of cities up to all three branches of the Federal Government, is thoroughly corrupt. With one or two exceptions, nobody in either wing of the Republocrat Party is free enough of corporate money to tell the truth, let alone act from it. The other elephants - global climate change, the end of cheap oil, our failing health, and all the others - got so big because the people who are supposed to be "looking out for us" are really looking out only for Number One (as they see it, of course). Elections are conducted on computerized voting machines that can be hacked by anyone with a modem and a rudimentary knowledge of computers, so this elephant isn't likely to go away any time soon. In fact, the U.S. Congress has a higher recidivism rate than the old Soviet Congress of Peoples Deputies!
Wait a minute! Over there - I see the grass moving, but I don't see an elephant. Ohhh; I know: I've heard about those, but I've never seen ... or rather, not seen ... one. It's one of those stealth elephants. It's there, and it's just as dangerous as the ones we can see; we just can't see it. It's being covered up, in other words, by the corporations who'll lose big if it ever does get seen. The big secret? Cell phones cause brain cancer. Yeah, yeah; I know: they did some study in Denmark that found no link between the two. Well, the man in charge of the U.S. cell phone industry's study, Dr. George Carlo, was prevented from publishing his results (and his house was burned down); but he's now publicly saying there is a link. Is there? As I said, stealth elephant, hiding in the grass.
Speaking of the grass, I know one thing that's not in the grass these days - honeybees. There's something going on with honeybees worldwide, with the deceptively benign-sounding name of Colony Collapse Disorder. Nobody knows what causes it; just, one day, all the bees go missing from a hive - and from another hive - and from another hive - you get the point. They don't just die (there, anyway), so no little bee bodies to examine to find out what happened.
So? So an enormous number of our food crops depend on honeybees for polliation; they're necessary for the plants to create the actual food the plants produce. No bees means a lot less food, no matter how much land, or how many seeds, or how much fertilizer, or how much water you have. That one's scary.
And this just in - not only are the bees dying in record numbers, now the bats are dying, too. The bats of the northeastern United States are succumbing by the millions to a fungal infection whose main symptom is a white powdery ring around their noses. The fungus is of the genus Geomyces, which thrives in cold weather; it kills the bats while they're hibernating. For more information, see this article from the "Earthfiles" web site.
Here again, we probably need to ask, "So?" So, each bat eats its own weight in insects every night (all that flying takes a lot of energy). Millions of dead bats mean billions of non-dead insects, flying around out there just waiting to bite or sting us, eat our crops before we can, and just generally make little nuisances of themselves. Since that fungus likes cold weather, the epidemic will probably only spread westward, across the northern US and Canada - for now.
And what's that? It looks like a cute little doggie, but if you focus your eyes just so, yep - it's an elephant. It's the "subprime" mortgage debacle that seems to be bringing the entire world's financial system to its knees. Housing has gotten so expensive in this country that ordinary people can't affort a loan any more. The banks needed to keep that interest income flowing in, so they came up with a truly masterful scam: "You can get a loan for a huge amount, and you don't have to pay near as much for it as it costs!" That's not a big, bad LOAN; that's just an eensy little loan. Until next year, that is; at that point, the ceiling comes crashing down and you lose your house.
The real trouble is, they took that international. They started selling these loans to banks around the world, and the banks were greedy enough - and dumb enough - to actually buy them. Banks around the world are beginning to stagger under the weight of all this bad "paper" (ironically enough, the first one was in China). People start defaulting on those bogus loans, and the banks foreclose and repossess the houses. Now the banks are stuck with a lot of houses and no way to sell them without either (a) taking a huge loss on them or (b) giving someone a "subprime" loan for buying them. You begin to see the merry-go-round here, except there's no "merry" in this "go-round" at all. It seems we've actually caused a world-wide recession because of our greed and stupidity in this area; watch for more developments, soon to come. How many financial institutions have collapsed this year? I've lost count.
All right! Enough is too much. This isn't all of them, but I need to stop. I don’t want to leave you with the feeling that it's too overwhelming to do anything about. It's not. There are all kinds of people, touting all kinds of solutions to one, or two, or even several of these problems. But there aren't that many ways for us to face all of them, because we just can't face problems of this magnitude by ourselves. It takes a community.