Falling into Nothingness

Being is ending. Humanity and kindred species’ one shared environment is collapsing and dying. Wake up. Before you experience up close and personal the horrors of habitat collapse.

“Go back to the abyss! Fall into nothingness that awaits you and your master!” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The biosphere is collapsing… Global ecological sustainability depends critically upon a swift end to both cutting natural vegetation and all burning.” – Dr. Glen Barry

 

Falling into Nothingness

Earth Meanders – Deep Ecology Essays by Dr. Glen Barry

The environment, which provides the habitat to sustain life, has been and continues to be shredded by the consuming hordes for throw-away products. Water, food, clean air, and natural resource depletion loom as exponential growth gobbles the last bits of global greenery. Sick ecosystems, abuse of animals, and over-crowdedness threaten rolling pandemics.

Nature is our only home

Humanity is dismantling the biosphere, the shared thin mantle of life in which we live, to have ever more babies that seek more of everything. The human family has surpassed Earth's carrying capacity and unless we pursue a policy of deliberate degrowth the biosphere will collapse and die.

The state of the world is simply wretched. There has always been human environmental impact, sickness, war, and social ills. But rarely at this scale, with entire bioregions becoming uninhabitable dead zones, and the serious possibility of destruction of the global ecological system by humans. As much of humanity suffers wanton despair.

Gaia, our one shared biosphere, is analogous to a living organism. Her constituent ecosystem organs are being pillaged by war, resource thievery, a belief system based upon myths of ancient ghosts, and a thirst for ever more stuff. Millions of years old naturally evolved rainforests teaming with life, fantastical marine abundance, natural water flows and stores, fertile ancient soils, and clean fresh air have been raped and plundered for god, country, and fleeting personal wealth and soon will be gone.

We spend much of societies' resources upon war making. At the detriment of all else including education, health care, and job training. A handful of billionaires have more financial resources than billions of others. White supremacy and other intersectional forms of discrimination dehumanize all who are not white christian males. 

Disease, hunger, ignorance, and greed run roughshod upon the land. We might as well eat our children, poison the well, and burn our food crops, as our behavior towards others and the natural world is so repugnant and could not be much worse.

Such pain as together we rush towards the darkness. 

How has the global zeitgeist become so banal, trivial and evil? What has become of pondering cosmological mysteries? Advancing the rights of humanity? Crafting hand-made masterpieces? Marveling at the wonders of the human body? Growing and building with our own hands? Working for truth, justice and equity? What of community, helping your neighbor, true love, and countless other human pursuits of excellence.

No ghosts in the sky

Many now aspire for no better than D-list influencer celebrity, a virtual life of gaming in the metaverse, and over-consuming. Rather than for a just, righteous livelihood within nature and community. Pixels on a screen are a poor replica of sunning on a beach, listening in an ancient forest, or finding true love (or for that matter lust). What an empty life. How clueless to not realize the energy and resources that technology requires.

And forget about engineering a biosphere, it will never happen. Too complex, too much can go wrong. And it is unnecessary as we already have a biosphere that can be be protected and restored.

A small handful of individuals possess half of Earth’s wealth as billions face the terror of abject poverty. CEOs make hundreds of times as much as their workers, and the working poor need food assistance and live out of their cars. Feel viscerally if you can the pain of three billion human beings living on a few dollars a day as they watch the opulent elite promenade. 

How long before the have-nots come for us? And pull down civilization such as it is. Or are they already?

The brutal rape of humanity and nature is nothing less than evil thuggery. Many must sell their bodies and souls simply to survive. As kindred noble primates cling to their offspring as their rainforest home is mowed for curios and trinkets. Wildlife and domesticated animals live lives of institutional terror as our playthings and factory food. 

Our whole way of being constitutes profoundly illogical terroristic dismembering of ourselves and our habitat, in a willful death-wish.

Tin-pot dictators can blow
us up on a whim

And why have peace, justice, and international law fallen out of fashion? Because the American Empire was attacked 20 years ago, now we are going to wage global perma-war? How could such an exceptional political system have become so grotesquely debased, belligerent, and self-entitled? Petty dictators sit upon the tin-pot thrones of many rich and ancient cultures, now fading in glory, yet with buttons to at a whim unleash nuclear war.

How will this transition into depletion and collapse be managed? How do we avoid fascist, authoritarian, falsely populist responses? Will the superstitious, poorly educated, and simply deplorable low-lives ever overcome their crass, belligerent ignorance; to be made to feel their oneness with natural ecosystems and people that are different than them? To savor their rights, while realizing their duties? Or will they continue to babble nonsensical conspiracy-theories, fall prey to fascist demagoguery, pursue traitorous sedition, and terrorize those of other colors and faiths?

Such ecological and social deterioration in such a short time. It really began in earnest with Cowboy Reagan's slashing of government, and the rise to power of far-right christian white supremacy. And before that, and since, bi-partisan war-making bolstering the Congressional-Industrial-Military complex. Along with the unquestioned irrational belief that growth in population and inequitable consumption comprises development. 

America’s recent fascist sedition epitomizes the underlying anti-truth, anti-science, hateful social disease.

I have tried to live a purpose-driven life committed to ideas. Channeling my visions of ecocide into written words and activism for 35 years has come at great expense to my physical and mental wellbeing, relationships with loved ones, and material comfort. I am getting tired. Recently I had a moment of doubt on whether I could continue. Thus, I have pared back my environmental science efforts including retiring aspects of EcoInternet after 25 years of service. My focus will be continuing to research artificial intelligence technologies for sustainability under the moniker Big Earth Data ( https://bigearth-data.com/ ), and perhaps other appropriate uses of information technologies. 

And I will write as I can, even as few are listening.

While I do not want to believe it is too late, it certainly could be. Still my hope is that there is some unknown fount of global ecological resilience that will sustain us until we can marshal a great transition to renewed well-being.

It is going to take everything we have got. Every strategy: actions as diverse as Wall Street impact investing, youths organizing online, widespread social gardening, population controls, and income redistribution. Solutions for ecological sustainability include dramatic cuts in personal consumption, restoring ecosystems, end old-growth logging, demobilization of standing armies, and down-sizing of both corporate power and government bureaucracy.

Global ecological sustainability depends critically upon a swift end to both cutting natural vegetation and all burning. 

We must allow Gaia to rest.

We begin together to work in earnest on these priorities or we all face unimaginable deprivation and horrors as, with our hands on each other’s throats, together we fall into nothingness.

It is a choice. Miraculous nature and being do not have to end this way. 

Choose well.

Be the Seed

Be the seed...

Amid collapse, recall life begets life. Reject lazy thinking, reimagine everything, be the seed promoting truths that rejuvenate Earth and uplift all life.

“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Life begets life. As ecology narrates… Be the seed, and tend to your garden.”

Dr. Glen Barry

Life Begets Life 

Miraculous seeds are our future and always have and will be. Programmed in sprouting seeds and animal zygotes, deeply within their DNA, is the perpetual renewal of life. Faith can be found in a seed, as well as the willful knowledge upon which life’s promise rests.

...that begets future ancient oaks

Together organisms propagated through seeds combine to produce plant communities, wildlife populations, human habitats and livelihoods, ecosystems, landscapes and ultimately our one living biosphere. In a cosmological wonder, these habitats born from seeds are the culmination of life, even as they make life of individual organisms possible.

Life begets life. As ecology narrates.

Out of this whirlwind of billions of years of genetic combinations emerged the hairless ape with the opposable thumbs. While clearly an animal, constant self-improvement has led to self-awareness. And the will to know, be free, and create.

Sadly, the human project while promising, has a dark, self-fulfilling death wish. Human comfort has come at the cost of a separation from, and destruction of, natural ecosystems. Packed tightly together, in weakened collapsing ecosystems, with industrial livestock and threatened wildlife; the future of the cosmic homo-sapien dance with nature is in question.

Nature and her humanity are in a race between ecosystem loss and regeneration, carbon emissions and renewables, vaccines and variants, scientific truths versus anti-science conspiracy theories. Human agency is both the problem and the answer.

At stake is personal and civilization’s well-being and survival. Human liberty for which it is worth living. And the future of a habitable biosphere. Nothing less than continued being or the end of being.

Powerful new seeds are needed to sow the pathway to continued nature and humanity. One might as well be an informed, awoke, and active you.

Looming Collapse

We are really in the shit. Environmental collapse, coronavirus, fascism, and I think I heard something about fire tornadoes. We find ourselves in this position of ecological and social collapse because of abrupt climate change, ecosystem loss, and over-population.

And hubristic and inequitable human material aspirations cumulatively surpassing the biosphere’s carrying capacity.

In a geological blink of an eye there has been enormous change to the ecological systems of the planet of which humans are a part, fully enmeshed, and utterly dependent. Anyone that looks with knowing eyes can see indicators that conditions for the global biosphere’s health are worsening. And that human society has been profoundly negatively impacted by environmental decline, finding itself now perched upon an apocalyptic end.

Deforestation, atmospheric change, water and ocean degradation, soil and wetland loss, clearing of natural ecosystems, and widespread cataclysmic wildfires are completely unprecedented. As wildlife habitats shrink diseases are coming in closer proximity to humans and there are increased inter-species jumps.

The context within which we live is changing. Our shared habitat is being simplified, toxified, and is dying. Socially, economically, and ecologically things are deteriorating fast. The situation has been bad for billions of humans for awhile, but the social implication of environmental decline is now hitting the well-off too.

Social competition and stress for limited resources in increasing. Globally protests are raging and may soon converge into an ecological, demonstration, injustice maelstrom. And we are seeing authoritarian responses including a drift towards fascism.

Those impeding science (and indigenous, justice, equity) based policy responses are on the wrong side of history and will be vilified for however long we have left.

Lazy Thinkers

Nature’s last chance is threatened by conspiracy theories promulgated by lazy thinkers. You know the type. The ones that find meaning in random YouTube videos, obscure podcasts, and millennia old texts. Those with poor critical thinking skills that have not educated themselves, invested time in being well-read, and pondered cosmology amongst old trees peering at the inscrutable stars.

Personally I have been first shocked and then saddened to hear family and friends repeat to me known falsehoods for which there is no truth. Trump won, COVID vaccines change your DNA, and many more. Humanity faces a deficit in critical thinking from which we may never recover.

Yet so many objective, science-buttressed truths exist. Life needs water. Land has a finite carrying-capacity. Earth is alive. Humans are born and meant to remain radically free. No Abrahamic gods sit in judgment. Love is the answer.

Earth and her humanity are faced with looming tragedies for which we don’t have much time. Critical thinking and rejecting conspiracy theories are more important now than ever.

It is OK, indeed admirable, to seek to live a special life in service to higher ideals, that has meaning other than self-stimulating your nerve endings. 

Science does not have all the answers and is fallible. But it is method whereby data and observable, repeatable outcomes very often arrive at objective truth.

In these challenging times, little is as fulfilling as taking the time to critically identify truth required for community survival and thriving. Which must be just, equitable, and sustainable. Reading and listening to experts of many sources and types, until becoming one yourself. And making your hard earned and demonstrable truths known to others, implementing with others your action-knowledge on behalf of being.

Here are some of my truths. Community gardens. Tree planting. Birth control. Reducing emissions. Eating locally. Flying and driving less. Race does not matter. Making Love. Feeding the hungry. Absolute radical freedom and responsibility. Teaching the uneducated. Healing the sick. Resisting fascists. Loving Earth. Serving nature.

All from life-long questioning and learning. And subject to revision at any time from new data and repeatable observation.

The deplorable indoctrinated hordes; bent upon self-indulgent consumerism and indoctrinated dogma at the expense of the biosphere, will try to limit, constrain, and tell you that you are not special. Maybe suggesting you are crazy.

Your task is the hard slog of self-education, to arrive at objective truths, to imagine a better society and world, and develop a program of self-expression and action. Despite lesser evolved beings.

Become the seed from which a new world springs that is just, equitable, free, and sustainable. And lasts forever.

Reimagine Everything                

We did it! Humanity is once again surrounded by intact nature. We have successfully returned to our natural condition. Energy, water, and nutrient cycles have been restored and once again make for a living biosphere.

After the decade long battle with coronavirus in which hundreds of millions died; we – the human family and kindred species – started over. The entire manner we related to our planet habitat was dramatically changed. When nature once again surrounded human works, we began to undo and reverse other types of collapse.

Many roads and other unnecessary human works were ripped out to reconnect water and woods and wildlife. Greatly reduced violence resulted from ending spending on militarism, and reductions in human population expanded wildlife habitat and opportunities for nature-based righteous livelihoods.

A choice was made to globally demobilize nuclear weapons and dramatically shrink standing armies. The money was plowed into children, and lifelong education, art and sport, job training, and of course the environment and health care.

Reasonable population reductions over time through educating all and on demand birth control were successfully implemented, allowing all basic human needs to be met with a guaranteed basic income. Positive results flowed from restraining capitalism’s excesses with simple long-prescribed notions like pricing environmental externalities, and favoring capital investments in the environment, social good, and governance.

In Closing

This seed seeks to highlight the universality of concerns across protests roiling the Earth, and the inherent ecological nature of many of these grievances.

There will be lasting peace. All humans will be treated equally. All will have enough as some have more. The Earth’s one shared biosphere will be sustained as the murderous suffering of nature will end as ecosystems are fully protected and restored.

Beside an occasional challenging essay, day in and day out EcoInternet’s seed provides an aggregated encyclopedic tracking and archiving of environmental and social events through EcoSearch. We seek to augment ecological knowledge and action using artificial intelligence.

Be the seed, and tend to your garden.

The End of Being

Abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse are leading to plagues, famine, perma-war and tyranny and will ultimately result in biosphere collapse and the end of being

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Death, Famine, War, and Conquest — result from our everyday choices and are not preordained

“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round…”

John Lennon

“Regain a sense of wonderous awe at the miracle of creation and work tirelessly to protect and restore nature’s splendor.”

Dr. Glen Barry 

Look out the window, any window, and behold portends of the end of being. The very ecological fabric of being is unraveling. Disease, famine, false prophecy, and authoritarianism are rife.

The biosphere – the thin mantle of life upon the Earth that holds ecosystems that are the habitats for all life – is dying. And all Earth’s life is threatened with prolonged collapse followed by extermination. There can be no escape. Unless as individuals, societies, and humanity we dramatically change. And fast.

These are hard topics to talk about. Where to start? Religion and overpopulation, given the level of ignorance that exists regarding these topics, are as good as any.

Living our lives based upon millennia old myths, for which there is no evidence and the messaging is ecocidal, shackles the human family to a most ominous fate. Invisible ghosts living in the sky in constant judgment, and if we do not do as religious authorities say, we will burn forever; is a false, tawdry and dated manner to organize society. Particularly as we are told without proof that the ghosts want us to go forth and multiply and subjugate the Earth. And murder for our tribe’s rich old men.

Please, enough already.

We break free of god pollution or in a self-fulfilling prophecy all that we love will assuredly be unnecessarily destroyed.

The multiply part – from one to eight billion human beings in about 130 years – has led to exponential growth in human numbers, fueling the stripping of Earth’s life support systems. Some say the ghosts don’t want us to control our fertility, relegating humanity to the status of a disease upon the biosphere.

Grotesque inequity, a handful of super-predators possessing half of Earth’s wealth, while billions live on a few dollars a day, exacerbates the physical conundrum that Earth can not produce as much as we desire in total to consume. Vast forests, waters, oceans, and even the atmosphere have been fouled and destroyed to meet humanity’s insatiable hunger.

And then there is looming demise of nature. For millennia since humans settled, ancient naturally evolved ecosystems have been destroyed for “development”. Nature is destroyed for consumer goods, allowing human nerve endings for some to be positively stimulated for a while, as the habitats that constitute our life support systems are weakened. And eventually natural systems collapse and die. First the woodlot out back, then your city’s surroundings, next your bioregion’s ecosystems collapse, even whole countries’ and continent’s natural assets are lost, and eventually and finally Earth as a whole will follow in-kind and become a tawdry, denuded mess. And die.

The spilling forth of European ecocidal genocide into indigenous nations and their natural habitats represented an infection upon Gaia that has festered and grown. And may well prove fatal. Innumerable worldviews that understood the harmony between humans, nature, animals, and the stars have been wiped from being.

The industrial revolution, building wealth by murdering plants, wildlife, and non-white people, became a universally accepted twisted concept upon which to build society and individual aspiration. Wave upon wave of disease spilt forth from the destruction of wildlife and natural ecosystems and continues to do so. Most recently coronavirus, and any number of pathogens are yet to emerge during the collapse as nature ends.

Priceless ecological systems – that evolved novel and miraculous structures and patterns across scales from genes, to organisms, to communities, upward to ecosystems and landscapes; and together constitute our one shared biosphere – continue to be cut to wipe your ass. Nature is being liquidated for consumer throw-away crap, as basic human needs of so many go unmet.

Major ecological crises (sadly for which there are solutions) fester and grow, any one of them capable of toppling civilizations, and together capable of ending the conditions for life on Earth. Topsoil erodes. Rainforests fall. Diseases emerge. Water gone. Oceans die. Harvests fail. Toxics accumulate. Climate heats. War murders. And tyrants reign.

Granted, the momentary abundance provided for by market economies has led to the rights of man, slowly expanding (though not yet universally) to include all human beings. Democracy and liberty have made for greater well-being, remarkable liberties, unprecedented comfort, with less violence. Yet universal human rights have not been achieved and piece-meal advances have recently been shown to be weak and flaccid.

Resource scarcity and declining prospects have led to a surge in authoritarian tyranny, with petty dictators of all types in power over much of Earth’s inhabitants. One great people recently narrowly averted collapse into full-throated authoritarian fascism (for a while anyway). Other great peoples live under constant surveillance and threats of violence for thinking and acting freely.

Universal human rights are a precondition for just and equitable global ecological sustainability.

And then there is war. Huge amounts of Earth’s productive capacity continue to be siphoned off by the Congressional-Military-Industrial complex. Murdering other usually less fortunate people in the name of your god and country for the economic benefit of elite, usually white old men is good business if you can get it. Mass hysteria accepts war as patriotic. Yet free-thinkers and many vets know war is murder.

Humanity’s state of perma-war and resurgent tyranny is a direct result of environmental decline.

There can be no just, equitable, sustainable future until guns are beaten into plowshares one last time. Standing armies in times of peace are wasteful and evil. Imagine what could be done with these resources to educate, feed, clothe, house, employ, and limit the fecundity; while otherwise maximizing the shared well-being and sustainability of humanity. The obscene amount of armaments that presently exists greatly increases the potential for violence as ecosystems continue to collapse, and social strife explodes, making regeneration and reconciliation much more difficult.

The time for global demilitarization is long past due.

What philosophy remains unthought, technology un-invented, words unwritten, songs unsung, stories untold, and sport feats undone because we toil all day to destroy ecosystems and wage war? Humanity and you are capable and worthy of better.

And finally we have arrived at that painful matter of the entire biosphere collapsing and dying. Abrupt climate change and natural ecosystem loss are diseases of the Earth System that threaten an end to being for the human family and all kindred species. We immediately power down our fossil fuel use and destruction of nature or it is the end.

Failure to embrace a great transition means decades of war, pestilence, famine, and disease. Your family either starving or being raped and then murdered in front of your eyes. For the lucky, nuclear explosions to mercifully wipe the human taint. Before widespread collapse and mass die-offs, perhaps of all life.

Gaia, the Earth System, is a living organism. There are no guarantees that the tremendous destructive impacts of so many types, so quickly, upon already diminished biological systems, will not end the billions of years of conditions conducive to live, or that a re-radiation of evolutionary diversity is assured.

The biosphere too can die. Being can end. It’s happening now, creation is in its death-throes. Unless the will is found from watching and deeply understanding the multitudes of looming warnings, and necessary changes are made in how we relate and depend upon each other, kindred species, and nature.

There are things that can be done. Survival for awhile will be local, we need to grow our own food and find livelihoods that are local. Much can be done to limit consumption, but that will not be enough. Many of these problems are societal and can only be defeated through rationale thought, improved education, and global people power.

We know what must be done, all that is lacking is the will, even in the face of self-evident disease, fascism, hunger, and war caused by nature’s decline. Regenerative agriculture, population control, restoration ecology, bans on natural ecosystem clearing, universal human rights, global demilitarization, ending fossil fuels, energy conservation, and major expansion in renewable energy are all key (there are others).

The great transition will require far more than teenage girls striking. However well intentioned, if most others are self-righteously vilified, social change cannot succeed. We need allies of every type including farmers, business people, veterans, people of color, labor unions, financiers, indigenous peoples, and particularly the rich and powerful. History has shown that when the elite are made to understand it is in their interest to change, only then does social change come. Engage with efforts to reform finance in service for Earth.

Even as you grow coalitions, set your sights high, based upon what is ecologically sufficient. The business of war murders must end. Nothing short of societal transformation that eliminates the destroyers while fostering regenerative systems will suffice. Only a broad-based movement can avert being’s end.

Watch and understand the wheels going round and round. And then become a cog in the wheels of ecocide. Re-localize, grow food, make more with less, organize, convince others, take actions for Earth you deem necessary.

Understand that ecology is the meaning of life.

Regain a sense of wonderous awe at the miracle of creation and work tirelessly to protect and restore nature’s splendor. The human family must embrace the great transition – powering down, making love not war, and returning to nature – coming together to avert biosphere collapse

Starting now. Make it so. For Earth and all species. Or it is good-bye forever. 

I remain unbowed

Nearly eight years ago I reported to Madison state, local and federal authorities that then Congressional candidate Mark Pocan had made statements in my presence recounting his travel to Costa Rica to sexually assault young boys. Let me be clear. My account as communicated in an essay was 100% accurate and I stand by it completely. It is the truth exactly how it happened, and there is more to tell. I reiterate my willingness to take a polygraph test on the matter when Mr. Pocan agrees to do so as well.

Since then Congressman Pocan has waged a harassment campaign against me. He has had capitol police call my employers. An associate of his followed and threatened me outside of my New York City home. He has repeatedly lobbied to have my Twitter accounts shutdown. And he has coordinated a misinformation campaign trying to destroy my reputation with lies.

Madison Wisconsin’s response to a longtime resident coming forward to detail such troubling behavior has been particularly disappointing. It has shown the truthfulness of Madison’s reputation as a smug, elitist bastion that holds few core values other than posing as being socially concerned. And a thirst for power.

Like in 2012, my request now is that my reported allegations be fully investigated, with the same legitimacy as other reports of sexual abuse over recent years. There are half a dozen other individuals that were present as Mr. Pocan went on at length detailing his illegal conduct. One boasted repeatedly to me he “knew where the bodies were buried” and recounted other episodes of sexual abuse of boys by Mr. Pocan. This was relayed to half a dozen Madison investigative bodies and the FBI. Have Mr. Pocan and these witnesses been questioned? What were the findings?

Coming forward was the right thing to do. Someday there will be justice. My conscience is clear.

Yet it saddens me greatly that the capitol of the great state of Wisconsin is represented in Washington D.C. by a child rapist, with the full acquiescence of state political institutions and politicians. And that other children may be at risk. Not one media or political figure expressed a concern or asked for more information. That is on them. I have done what I can do.

I affirm the above and original account are fully truthful. And I remain unbowed.

Dr. Glen Barry
July 19, 2020

Scientific Truths Matter, Willful Ignorance Kills

Key bio-geochemical patterns and processes that sustain the biosphere, and thus societies and wildlife populations, are failing. Only love, science, and nature can keep us safe. Or disease, ecological collapse, and despair rage until being ends. That is the truth, like it or not.

“What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?” – Iain Banks

“Science informed and strengthened by love is our best bet to remain healthy and prosperous in these troubled times… Looming global ecological collapse including abrupt climate change is going to make the coronavirus pandemic look like a picnic in the park.” – Dr. Glen Barry

Love and Science

Anti-science sentiment and hateful rhetoric are in vogue in certain quarters. In a disturbingly relativistic age, we have lost track of profound truths upon which our shared well-being intimately depends. Many people live their lives as if scientific truths, the natural world, and empathy for those other than themselves and close loved ones, have no importance.

Much of humanity enjoys the material comforts of products and other advances derived through scientific processes. Ironically their inventors, who are experts in their fields, and have spent a lifetime mastering and contributing to all that is known about a topic, are disregarded and even vilified.

Response to the COVID-19 pandemic roiling America and the world has been profoundly disappointing. All of the above strands of thought come to mind. Yet in particular, I am horrified by the lack of focus upon the one hundred thousand Americans that have died and over a million sickened. This is more than thirty times the tragic horrific losses of 911.

Where is the empathy and outpouring of support for these equally innocent victims? America has become a hardened, soulless place where we don’t mourn our dead but instead focus upon how continuing mass death impacts our own conveniences. Even as the coronavirus is not yet contained.

It makes one wonder whether looming potentially catastrophic ecological crises can be responded to while maintaining our humanity.

Casual neglect of traditional wisdom, emerging knowledge, and traditional norms of civility threatens our very existence. We are constantly conditioned to hate all that is different or natural.

Let me share some objective, observable truths with you, that we disregard and fail to acknowledge at our own risk.

Biological life requires maintaining a narrow range of conditions. All living things require water. Economies are utterly dependent upon ecology.

Encroachment upon and destruction of natural ecosystems and wildlife result in emergent disease vectors. Stopping a pandemic requires reducing and eliminating pathways for disease transmission.

Earth is warmed as heat is trapped by atmospheric gases, an increase of which results in further warming. A given piece of land has a finite carrying capacity. Given their role in powering ecosystems, naturally evolved old-growth rainforests are worth more standing than logged.

Science Truth: Naturally evolved old-growth rainforests are worth more standing than logged

Chemistry and physics are sufficient to fully understand and explain biological processes and the cosmos (even if we do not yet know everything). Evolution explains the diversity of life. Exponential growth leads to feedback that tears apart systems.

There is no scientific evidence that an invisible Abrahamic god sits in judgment of our actions, or that we are destined for any life other than in the here and now.

And the penultimate truths of our times: Earth is alive and dying. Even as true love continues to have transformative powers to motivate you to do what is right, including making you more selfless.

Science is but one, albeit important, pathway to a love of observable truth. The scientific method of posing hypotheses and seeking repeatable methods to gather evidence for their testing has proven remarkably effective.

Other routes to know and serve truth may include carefully and reflectively listening to tribal leaders, trained naturalists, sage women, and philosophers. All who have honed their skills of observation. And seeking through reading, pedagogy, and reflection to become a student and teacher of truth yourself.

Nothing overcomes ignorance like a life-long commitment to self-education. Until such time as you become an expert yourself, act in service to the truth by critically listening to the advice of experts on important matters of life and death. And by not repeating every junky, titillating, yet unproven meme.

Science and education have allowed much of humanity to overcome superstitions that impede societal progress. Yet reactionary, revisionist ignorance continues to pose a risk of collapse back into medieval illness, servitude, and perma-war. Religious self-fulfilling prophecies of a rapture like end of the world continue to foul our thinking of what is possible with love and science.

Love and Science in the Time of Coronavirus

Now Earth and her humanity find ourselves in a time of pandemic. Scientific experts have long known that the world was vulnerable to new infectious disease. It has been firmly established and documented that microbes can evolve and emerge from animals and habitats, particularly when encroached upon.

It is truthfully self-evident that in recent decades there has been a reduction in public health expenditures. That China has a pattern of suppressing information about new disease outbreaks. And that deeply divided democratic societies are ill-equipped to mobilize quickly to organize the necessary social distancing and other requirements to stop a plague.

I remain stunned and saddened by the amount of anti-science conspiracy theories circulating that are undermining the science-based medical response to a global pandemic. One can honestly differ in opinion regarding how to balance health and economic aspects of pandemic. The required steps to stop the coronavirus pandemic are unnecessarily made so much more difficult by anti-science, hate-filled sentiment by ignorant people amplified through social networks.

Don’t let your perhaps well-intentioned but poorly informed political beliefs become a death wish for yourself and others. If you are sharing kooky conspiracy memes on the Internet you are part of the anti-science dumbing down of America that has allowed the virus to kill almost one hundred thousands Americans and a third of a million globally.

Science doesn’t care what you believe. There is nothing conservative (or liberal) about being untruthful, belligerent, and loud. Science and her truths are apolitical. If you refuse to social distance and wear a mask, and spread unfounded misinformation on Facebook during these tragic times, you may well be killing your neighbors, loved ones, or even your own parents. Do not let your beliefs make you a member of a conspiracy death cult.

Shame on you, stop it now. Or this coronavirus pandemic – which is far from done – can and will get much worse.

Loving Ecological Science

There exists a plethora of other unpleasant scientific truths that threaten mass human suffering, a rise of authoritarian fascism in response, and ultimately societal and biological collapse. And the death of billions of humans, and possibly biosphere collapse.

In past centuries, a wave of ecological imperialism spilt forth from Europe that has globally decimated indigenous cultures and ecosystems. The apocryphal worldview proliferated that natural ecosystems only existed to be destroyed for growth in economies and population. The massive illusory increase in material consumption has been inequitably distributed and is not sustainable.

Key bio-geochemical patterns and processes that sustain the biosphere, and thus societies and wildlife populations, are failing.

The list of ecological scientific risks is long and expanding, but includes: 1) soil loss and infertility, 2) ocean dead zones, 3) water scarcity, 4) abrupt climate weirding, 5) nitrogen and phosphorous inundation, 6) declines in biodiversity, particularly keystone wildlife and plant species 7) and loss and fragmentation of naturally evolved ecosystems including critical old-growth forests and wetlands.

There are science based policy prescriptions which will solve each of these ecological crises. But it requires wisdom to know and trust in the right course of action, and sacrifice and empathy based upon understanding and commitment to the scientific imperative. Yet if we don’t try, any one of these ecology truths left without a response could cause mass disruption and death. Together they may well collapse the biosphere and end being.

Looming global ecological collapse is going to make the coronavirus pandemic look like a picnic in the park.

Climate change and ecosystem collapse are the response expected by science to inequitable overpopulation that consumes nature, it could not be otherwise. These observations and others have led me to hypothesize that Ecology is the meaning of life. The test of this hypothesis is ongoing as humanity systematically murders species, dismantles ecological systems, and fouls the climate.

Love Science Truth

Scientific truths matter, willful ignorance kills. Believe in love and science as transformative forces for good.

We will only protect and change for what we love and have empathy. Shared survival depends upon each of us listening to and supporting science and other ways of knowing, or we willfully choose to lose our and our loved ones’ lives as being ends. Global ecological sustainability requires expanding the scope of your love to include others that are different than you (including both other cultures and species), natural ecosystems, and Earth as a whole. Revel in self-expression of your truths making sure they are defensible.

Though science has not always been channeled for social good, in sum it has provided amazing levels of social benefit as we better understand and adapt to observable reality. Yet even science must work to improve itself by committing to its appropriate application. We are beyond the point where we can return to a pre-science era.

Science informed and strengthened by love is our best bet to remain healthy and prosperous in these troubled times.

Reducing risk to you and your family’s well-being means, out of love for others and Earth, staying home and wearing masks when you go out. At the same time work on reducing your ecological footprint, while working to be able to meet as many of your subsistence needs as possible. Be open to and critically review information that comes your way, with a commitment to truth and self-improvement.

Only from the transformative nature of love of science and truth can we avoid a massive second wave of coronavirus in the short-term, and the next pandemic and impending ecological collapse in the mid-term.

Only love, science, and nature can keep us safe. Or disease, ecological collapse, and despair rage until being ends. That is the truth, like it or not.

Amazon Standing

Financed by the Other Amazon Paying for Its Name

The Amazon rainforest must remain standing for global ecological sustainability, and Amazon company is the best source of finance given their expropriation of the Amazon name. It should be possible to pay to fully protect the Amazon rainforest while meeting local people’s needs. The best place to start is for online Amazon Inc. to pay on a sustained basis for its long overdue unpaid use of the Amazon name. Transforming Amazon Inc. into a purpose driven venture will make it stronger and more appealing, while providing a long-term source of finance to keep Amazon Standing.

EARTH MEANDERS
By Dr. Glen Barry

“There’s nothing about our model that can’t be copied over time… A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world.” – Jeff Bezos

“The bill is due for Amazon company’s unpaid use of the mighty Amazon rainforest’s name.” – Dr. Glen Barry

The First Amazon

The Amazon rainforest is a global ecological treasure of unparalleled importance for Earth and all inhabitants. Over at least 55 million years vast evolutionary radiance has created a brilliant super-organism that powers the planet’s biosphere through the sum of the interactions of its parts.

The Amazon is rich in ecological diversity with a dizzying array of life across scales — from landscapes, downward to ecosystems, to plant communities and animal populations, including indigenous peoples, down to species and individual plants and wildlife, composed of their genetic sequences. From such complex yet decadent disorder emerges the primary bioregional ecosystem that powers the biosphere.

Though the Amazon as an ecosystem is more than the sum of these parts, all parts are required for it to remain fully intact and thus operational. The Amazon basin drains the slopes of the Andes through biodiverse mountain slopes into the vast lowland swamp forests. This vast plethora of micro-habitats contains stores of medicinal plants, cycles water and nutrients, and drives global climate.

Besides large-scale farming and logging, many
Amazonian rainforests are being slowly fragmented
for rural electrification and other activities

Loss of the Amazon as an intact whole will result in a major diminishment in climate buffering, disappearance of an unknown amount of genetic wealth potentially valuable for diseases such as coronavirus, deprive millions of indigenous peoples and settlers of their livelihoods, and may in itself crash the biosphere. Yet a variety of threats continues the European legacy of ecocide upon native nature and peoples, cruelly propagating the myth that destroying millions of year old ecosystems and their inhabitants is “development”.

Recently I wrote On Amazon fires: It’s the ecology stupid. Therein it is noted that Global Ecological Sustainability depends critically upon ending the logging and burning of old forests such as the Amazon and letting them recover, expand and reconnect. Earlier I have published peer reviewed science that is worth reading, identifying a threshold for how many ecosystems can be lost before the biosphere collapses: Barry, G. (2014), “Terrestrial ecosystem loss and biosphere collapse”, Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 25 No. 5, pp. 542-563.

I have had the privilege to spend the month of February in Brazil, mostly in the Amazonia region. There I trekked into lowland tropical rainforests and was overjoyed to see big ancient trees and wildlife including spider monkeys, pink river dolphins, and anacondas. The river boat ride down a portion of the Amazon was an adventure. By the time I reached The Amazon river’s point of entry into the Atlantic Oceans, I was struck again and again by the generosity and kindness of the region’s peoples.

Dr. Glen Barry, Amazonia, 2020

Mostly I silently rejoiced in my long-felt ecological intuition that these Amazon rainforests are the global habitat that makes my and all life possible. Often I just sat in the jungle listening for long hours, fully feeling a bond with the diverse and dependent life therein. And I also saw firsthand the senseless devastation being wrought by agri-business and rural electrification.

And I became further resolved that it must be possible to meet development needs of Amazonians while keeping Amazon Standing.

This essay represents the beginning of efforts to develop a campaign to find and implement a way to finance sufficient socio-economic activities to ensure the Amazon remains standing. This must be done in a creative, sustained manner that protects native livelihoods and means meeting all basic needs and then some. Yet forgoes all commercial exploitation that destroys or diminishes standing primary forests.

The greatest challenge of our generation is to find a viable way to fully protect the Amazon.

Time for the Other Amazon to Step Up

Imagine if you can that there was a large organization that has benefited from the unreimbursed use of the Amazon name, and could help fund keeping the Amazon rainforest standing. Surely, in such a case, there would be tremendous potential to harness sustainable funding for Amazon rainforest protection, and there would be a huge public outcry that the company pay a significant portion of their revenue for the right to use the Amazon name.

Wait, what of Jeff Bezos’ Amazon online store? He reportedly named it Amazon because it was “exotic and different”, and the Amazon River was the largest in the world, and he planned for Amazon company to be so as well. Given the tremendous corporate and personal success realized by Amazon and Jeff Bezos, it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that the company pay to protect the threatened Amazon rainforest after which it is named.

Mr. Bezos himself has expressed how critical branding is to online success, and he has certainly benefited richly from the sentiments evoked by his use of the Amazon name.

Indeed, given Mr. Bezo’s hundreds of millions of dollars spent on new homes in recent months, isn’t financing by Amazon company to protect the Amazon rainforest long overdue? It’s a justice, equity, and ecological sustainability thing Mr. Bezos. How can you have so much, benefiting from the globally recognized name of an impoverished region, for which you have never paid?

Some would say that Amazon having made so much money without paying anything to Brazil and neighboring countries is the very exemplar of white and billionaire privilege. 

Don’t get me wrong, Jeff Bezos has built Amazon (the company referred to as Amazon Inc.) into an amazing company. I spend considerable amounts of money with Amazon Inc., making purchases almost daily given the convenience, selection, and speed of delivery. And EcoInterent’s services are hosted on the Amazon cloud, which is truly amazing in its own right.

But come on, at some point growth becomes greed. Already there is a backlash against the richest man in the world, and how it has come at the expense of local merchants and the climate. And then there is the fact that Amazon Inc. simply pilfered their name from the greatest ecosystem in the world that is mortally threatened.

Bezos’ recent commitment of funding to address climate change is welcome and appropriate given Amazon’s huge carbon footprint. Yet an additional massive, sustained investment in Amazonia rainforest protection is still appropriate given the past and ongoing benefits accrued from the expropriation of the Amazon name in particular and all it connotes.

With all due respect Mr. Bezos, how much is enough? How many more lavish homes do you intend to buy this year, as our global home and your company’s namesake, the Amazon, is destroyed because of lack of conservation finance. At what point does the existential threats to global ecological sustainability become more or at least as important to you, the richest person in the world, than delivering ever more consumer goods faster?

We get it Mr. Bezos, your Amazon may not be legally required to pay for use of the Amazon name for your branding. But it is the classy, ethical, and just thing to do. And it protects your future as well.

There will be consequences of Amazon failing to act to protect its namesake. Already popular sentiment is shifting against the company given its size and extravagance of its owners. How much better to make the company a purpose driven organization rather than only a consumption growth machine.

Pressure campaigns are possible, but hopefully are not needed, assuming the goodwill of a man and company that has benefited so much from expropriating of the Amazon name. Some would say theft, like so much else that has been forcefully taken from the Brazilian people.

Big old trees in expansive primary
forests power the biosphere.
Dr. Glen Barry, Amazonia, 2020

Amazon Standing Trust Fund

It should be possible to pay to keep the Amazon rainforest fully standing. And in a manner that provides decent livelihoods for all inhabitants. Surely there is more worth to be found in a live than a dead forest. Particularly ancient naturally evolved old-growth forests. All that is required is sustained investments in Amazonian alternative development models and governance depending on protecting and not destroying old, natural forests.

What I am proposing is that Amazon Inc. and/or Jeff Bezos establish an endowed trust fund committed to full protection of the Amazon Rainforest. “Amazon Standing” would use the interest on the endowment to fund non-extractive efforts for local peoples and governments to benefit economically and culturally from permanently standing and intact primary rainforests.

Sufficiently endowed, such an approach has great potential to shift the economics against large-scale extractive industries which are only marginally profitable.

Without massive investments the Amazon rainforest will continue to fall at an unconscionable rate. Slowly yet inexorably the last remnant large natural ecosystems will be dismantled; liquidated for all the wrong reasons, sending shock waves throughout the global ecological system.

And moving us a step closer towards Biosphere Collapse and the End of Being.

It is not OK for one of the largest companies to name itself after Earth’s largest and most important ecosystem without having some stake in its protection. Imbuing Amazon Inc. with social merit beyond consuming ever more, faster, will make it a force for social good.

Transforming Amazon Inc. into a purpose driven venture will make it stronger and more appealing, while providing a long-term source of finance to keep Amazon Standing. There is tremendous reputational risk to Amazon Inc. and Jeff Bezos of not immediately beginning to pay for the use of Amazon as their brand name.

The bill is due for Amazon company’s unpaid use of the mighty Amazon rainforest’s name. Significant funding can be provided willingly to keep the Amazon rainforest standing while meeting local needs, or all sorts of campaign measures are likely.

Amazon will have earned its name based on merit and not merely size.

Expect to hear more about what it takes to keep Amazon Standing and the rainforest movements efforts to get Amazon Inc. to embrace and finance protection of its namesake.