Gore Vidal and the Fate of Fate

Julian

50 years ago Gore Vidal, whose brilliant career was celebrated in a recent documentary film, published an unlikely best seller called Julian, a novel based on the life of the 4^th century Roman emperor who attempted to revive paganism or, as he preferred to call it, Hellenism.  For those who, like Vidal, view Hellenism and the Greeks as the essential and vital strand, the core of Western Civilization, and the Judeo-Christian strand as the Johnny-come-lately interloper, the perennial thorn in the side and obstacle to cultural self-realization, Julian may only be seen as a quixotic hero.  Still, it’s hard to credit Vidal’s contention, through the character of Julian, that Hellenism was more rational than Christianity.  The latter, after all, made exhaustive attempts to render itself at least somewhat coherent, whereas Hellenism was always quite heterodox, more of a mythic atmosphere than an internally consistent belief system: different towns and different people worshipping different gods in different ways.

In rereading Vidal’s novel this time I decided to accompany it with one of his primary sources for the history of the period, Ammianus Marcellinus, the last historian of the Western Roman Empire.  The 4^th century, when Christianity was striving to gain control of men’s minds and the empire that had endured for half a millennium was coming apart at the seams, is a fascinating, pivotal era: corruption and greed were endemic, decadence rife, and the barbarians closing in on every side.  Julian was certainly the central figure of this period and his attempt to restore Hellenism might have succeeded had he not been skewered with a spear while fighting the Persians near Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia, (now Iraq, that cemetery of so many dreams).  Marcellinus is clearly a partisan of the old gods, yet takes pains to suppress this partisanship and, cognizant of the new religion’s ascendency, avoids saying anything overtly critical of Christianity.  Nevertheless, he provides a pagan perspective that is contextualized by an awareness of Christian doctrines.  Every once in a while it’s intriguing to listen to someone who’s been dead for over 1600 years tell you about the world he lived in.

Ammianus Marcellinus

What you notice reading Marcellinus is that ancient societies were saturated in fate.  The belief in fate was of a piece with the importance ancient men assigned themselves, a part of their position at the center of the universe.  The belief in destiny is another aspect of their conceit, their delusional vanity.  Greek tragedy depended on its immutability.  The arts of divination and astrology plumbed its nuances.  Much of the actual practice of paganism had to do with efforts to divine the future and virtually everything in nature, the flight of a bird, the appearance of a meteor, the shape of the entrails of a sacrificial animal, was seen as having an occult meaning.  Legions of soothsayers were employed to divine these secret meanings and reveal what everyone wanted to know, namely, what was going to happen tomorrow, next week, next year.  In this sense, the world was experienced as full of import.  Things were not merely what they appeared to be, they were also full of hidden significance.  Reality was overwhelmed by the imagination.  Compared to this all-encompassing superstition, Christianity seems relatively rational.  Marcellinus calls it “a simple religion,” and it is, compared to the diffuse, unstructured complexity of Hellenism, which was pluralistic and tolerant and had no creed to swear allegiance to.  Hellenism had an inchoate quality, like childhood.  And this, perhaps, was what made it such a fertile milieu. 

Constantine

In the period before Constantine the Great, Christianity was one of a number of competing monotheistic cults whose relative orderliness may have been called up as compensation for the chaos of the times. Mithraism, whose adherents were baptized in the blood of a bull, was popular in the army. The cult of Dionysus emphasized the imbibing of wine and the notion of a world savior. Christianity was opportunistic and syncretic, picking up elements of its doctrines and practices from these competitors. The effect of these cults was to concentrate the mystery of divinity within a set of rituals, draining it from the world at large. In paganism the natural world was permeated with meanings, chock full to overflowing with them. These meanings were all imaginary of course, completely spurious, but nevertheless subjectively the world felt numinous and full of purport, whereas in Christianity transcendent meaning was restricted to the church and its rituals and could only be experienced through the mediation of a priest while the natural world was seen as fallen and thus emptied of purpose, since the divine no longer infused it to the degree it had in pagan experience.

It took a long time for pagan numinousness to be scrubbed from the world.  In the early days of the scientific revolution science and magic, astronomy and astrology, chemistry and alchemy, were all mixed up.  People were interested in astronomy because they thought it would enable them to do astrology better; that is, enable them to predict the future, and not just the astronomical future.  But nowadays science and magic have separated into 2 distinct entities.  Science has become serious business while magic has become entertainment, and consequently the pagan notion that the natural world is full of hidden messages, occult significances, has come to seem a child’s game.  I still hear people say “it wasn’t meant to be” or “everything happens for a reason,” but such statements sound like leftovers from an archaic, pre-scientific mindset.  In the scientific universe there is no author, no plan, no destiny.  There are merely competing natural powers, like gravity and centrifugal force, working through time.  These workings may resemble fate, but they do not constitute intentionality, and they are not oriented around human desires.  Fate now appears as a shelter and refuge from this terrifying specter of randomness.  The old fated world lacked the scary freedom of our fateless one.  Now the tragedy is not, as it was in Hellenism, that you cannot escape the rule of fate, but rather that there is no fate. The world has been drained of transcendent intentionality, and thus, in Hellenic terms, rendered meaningless, and Christianity, it turns out, was just a phase and instrument of that process.  Perhaps the proto-science of Epicurus couldn’t really take hold until Christianity had purged the material world of pagan animism.

It was against the background of Hellenism that Thales of Miletus, around 600 BC, became the first human to emerge from the mists of mythological thinking and see the natural world as explicable without resorting to the supernatural.  It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this achievement.  It is monumental.  But neither the Greeks nor their heirs the Romans were able to take the next step of establishing the experimental method for determining scientific truth.  Hellenism, it would seem, lacked an essential element for that.  Perhaps because educated men were not supposed to work with their hands? 

Gore Vidal

Vidal, our American Voltaire, loved to sound the call to “Ecrasez l’infame!” His wit and irreverence are sorely missed. He suggested that we would have been better off had Julian succeeded, because his success would have precluded the darkness of the Middle Ages. But perhaps Christianity was a necessary phase, scrubbing animism from the physical world, freeing educated men to apply their hands to physical experiment and, with its concept of the equality of souls before God, undermining the ancient institution of slavery and laying the groundwork for a more compassionate civilization.

June in Oregon

Food Carts

Our initial idea to celebrate the solstice was to fly to England and join the massive gathering at Stonehenge, and then drop in on Wimbledon, but we dilly-dallied too long and our house-sitter got booked and could only give us 5 days, so we decided to fly to Portland instead. Despite decades living in northern California, neither of us had ever visited Oregon. 

Portland has a reputation as a hip city, Eugene’s big brother. At least 3 TV shows are set there: Portlandia, Leverage, and Grimm. (Disappointingly, we didn’t see any “wesen,” the creatures featured in the latter.) We stayed on the northwest side at a place that gave us free tickets for the streetcars and we took them everywhere. The 1^st afternoon we took one to Powell’s Books (the largest independent bookstore in the world) and from there circled through Chinatown and Old Town on foot but found both lacked the vibrancy of the Chinatowns in San Francisco or New York. Back in the Pearl district, kind of a mishmash area, also with little foot traffic, we split a good burger at Deschutes Brewery. Portland is much taken with the connoisseurship of beer and most of the brewpubs serve flights, as wineries do in our neck of the woods.

Pioneer Square

Next day we took the streetcar downtown, a more architecturally unified urban area, and had lunch at a pod of food carts near O’Bryant Square with every imaginable ethnicity of food.  We walked it off along the river before wandering over to Pioneer Square for lattes at the Starbuck’s on the corner.  We were waiting for an old friend of mine who recently moved to Portland.  A racket from the bandstand made conversation difficult when he arrived but it was no quieter inside so we just had to make the best of it.  We talked about the book he published a few years ago on Buddhism and Wagner for a couple hours, until we all had to go.  We had to meet another old friend I’d met years ago on my post-graduation trip through Europe.  We met him and his wife at a restaurant down by the river.  He had reserved a table outside with a view of the marina at a place called Thirst.  We chatted for a couple hours there about our adventures since we’d last seen each other, and then they went home to suburbia while we headed to Bridgeport Brewery, an important location in Leverage that was within walking distance of our hotel, to taste another flight. 

  

Oregon Coast

In the morning we taxied over to Enterprise, picked up a dark red Subaru Legacy that I ended up quite liking, and headed for Cannon Beach, the beginning of our road trip.  The annual sandcastle competition was that day (the solstice) which we thought was a lucky fluke, but it turned out to be unlucky because it generated a massive traffic jam.  We got so frustrated that we gave up on visiting Cannon Beach altogether and after we finally got free of the crush, headed south, feeling stressed and cranky.  We stopped for an overdue lunch in the next town, Manzanitas, and the food improved our moods.  Farther south we discovered that Oregonians, in addition to beer, love coffee.  Every town we went through had several drive-thru espresso stands, including many examples of a chain called Dutch Bros., an innovation Frieda greatly appreciated since she rarely gets a sufficient number of lattes.  This may have been her favorite feature of Oregon.  

Florence

We discussed whether to try the local road to see the Three Capes but decided against it when Tripadvisor advised that it was closed at about the halfway point.  Continuing south on 101 we had a bit of a scare when she began calling ahead for reservations and hit a rash of no vacancies.  It was, after all, Saturday night, and we hadn’t made one because we weren’t sure how far south we were going to get.  Finally she found a place in Florence, next to the Old Town there, and we arrived around dinnertime and went to Mo’s on the riverside for some clam chowder. 

Florence had some minor charms but overall I have to say we were disappointed in the Oregon coast. You can see more drama and beauty from the roadside in 4 miles of Big Sur than in 400 miles of the Oregon coast. And let’s not even bring up the Amalfi coast in Italy. If you have the time to pull over, take side roads, and hike, you can probably find some awesome vistas, but we didn’t have that kind of time. From 101 what you overwhelmingly see are trees, millions of trees filing past.

Redwoods

The following day we continued south toward Crescent City but before arriving turned off for Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.  First we walked the Simpson Reed and Peterson Trails, and then motored over to Stout Grove, the last 3-4 miles on an extremely dusty dirt road.  These were all recommendations of the first old friend we’d seen in Portland, who lived for a couple of years in Crescent City while writing his book.  The redwoods were awesome, of course.  Crescent City, on the other hand, was a dump.  I couldn’t believe my friend had tolerated it for 2 years.  The downtown area was a ghost town, with no one at all about.  We couldn’t find a decent restaurant anywhere and ended up at Pizza Hut for lack of a better alternative. 

In the morning we took 199 back through the redwoods and angled north to I-5.  We got into Eugene about lunchtime and stopped at Tourist Information for a walking tour which directed us to a good lunch at a place called Steelhead Brewing.  Eugene was, of course, smaller and sleepier than Portland, and it was summer so the university students weren’t around.  The residential area between downtown and the river was delightful, and the river walk more bucolic than the one in Portland.  We finished our explorations in the late afternoon and headed north to Salem where we got a room at the edge of a vast wasteland of chain stores that was like anywhere and everywhere in the USA, less than an hour from the Portland Airport.  

Drive-through Espresso in Eugene

It was fun to get a taste of Portland and Eugene, we loved the streetcars and the brewpubs, seeing old friends, and the people were friendly but, wherever you go in the States, so much is the same.  We came away feeling it’s hardly worth the cost of travelling in the States because, with a few exceptions, everyplace is so similar.  Once you get past the expensive airfare and the ordeal of the long flight (admittedly grueling, in coach from California), the costs in Europe are equivalent and there’s so much more novelty, variety, and history there.  In the States most of the beauty is natural.  If you want to see man-made beauty you have to go to Europe. That said, I still think San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but a lot of its appeal derives from its site, and the topography.  It has a unique character.  By contrast Portland has a kind of sawmill quality.  It feels more provincial, more homey

April in New York

Erhu serenade

We’re back from a long weekend in NYC for the wedding of Frieda’s oldest nephew: it turned out better than I expected.  For one thing, the weather was fabulous.  Early Friday morning we Super-Shuttled from JFK to our hotel on Grand Street, where Chinatown is slowly absorbing what’s left of Little Italy. We picked it because it was near the wedding venue.  Too early to check in, we dropped off our luggage and ventured into the teeming, grimy streets, wending our way down Mulberry through the bowels of Chinatown to Columbus Park where some guy bent our ears with an erhu.  When we’d had all we could take of that we headed back on Mott, checking out all the exotic fish the vendors were hawking.  The city seemed old and dirty, a warren hemmed in by brick, concrete, and iron.  Much of New York is downright ugly, but if you want the status of an insider you must not merely embrace this but celebrate it as part of the hard-edged, macho aesthetic of the place.  There was plenty of construction going on but it seemed less about building anything new than about staving off the processes of decay.

Erminia

After a nap to recover a bit from our red-eye flight, we dressed for the Rehearsal Dinner and took a subway uptown.  The peeling, probably lead-based paint and the accumulated ground-in dirt of decades gives these subterranean chambers a forbidding, feculent air, but the only actual problem we had was getting oriented upon exit and locating the restaurant, a little Italian place called Erminia on 83^rd.  Gavi di Gavi was flowing freely inside so we soon felt social, and the food was excellent as well.  We met the bride’s family and grew convivial with her uncle and his husband.  They were from Palm Desert and were staying at our hotel.  Afterward they offered to share a taxi for the return trip.  Back at the hotel they suggested we go out for a drink, so the 4 of us ambled up Elizabeth into Nolita to preview the wedding venue, a restaurant called Public.  It had crowded bars on both sides too noisy for easy conversation, so we moved on to a quieter place called Jacques where we sipped cocktails and chatted about their extensive travels while perusing an incessant parade of stylish revelers passing by on the sidewalk. With so many colorful, energetic people filling the streets at all hours, the excitement of the city can’t be denied. 

Columbus Circle from the Time Warner lobby

Next morning, the day of the wedding, we took a subway uptown again and got off on 72^nd, near Strawberry Fields in Central Park, which was jammed (it was Saturday and the weather was superb, sunny in the high 60s, though the trees had yet to leaf out).  Escaping the milling crowds and circling bicycle rickshaws, we strolled south along Central Park West.  David Brooks, the political commentator, passed us headed in the opposite direction.  At Columbus Circle, an awesome arc of glossy towers, we went into the Time Warner building, thinking we would pick up something to eat and take it back outside, but after sampling the view from the 2^nd floor lobby we changed our minds and instead wandered up Broadway to have panini outdoors at a little café next to the Folk Art Museum.  

From there we headed for the nephew’s apartment, behind Lincoln Center, and borrowed his X-5 to drive over to Jersey and pick up Frieda’s mother for the wedding.  We were putting her up in our suite for the night.  Our intentions had been to return to Manhattan via the Holland tunnel but traffic was horrendous so we took the Lincoln instead and then drove downtown along the West Side Highway.  The traffic was still intense, maybe on account of it being the first beautiful spring weekend.  It seemed a 10% increase in the number of cars would have been sufficient to gridlock the entire island.  Later we heard someone who had stubbornly insisted on using the Holland tunnel did not make it to the ceremony, there was a major clog on the New Jersey side.  As it was we were supposed to be at the venue by 5:30 and got there about 5:45, still prior to the 6:00 ceremony, but we had to sit at the back. 

Public

Public was composed of three rooms, a small bar on the left, a main dining room in the center, and a combo bar and dining room on the right. The street end of the room on the right had a garage door that opened to a loading dock with a chain railing and narrow stairwell. Maybe it had been a factory at one time. With the tables and chairs removed, this area became a dance floor and stayed cool if you opened the door. Traffic passing in the street could ogle the dancers and vice versa. After the ceremony the bar opened in there and ran until 8 when dinner was served. The place seemed as noisy as when we’d previewed it and I had a hard time having a conversation with the person across the table. Dinner was followed by dancing until about 1 AM.

The High Line

 

Sunday Frieda spent the morning taking her mother back to Jersey, dropping the nephew’s car off at his garage (he and his bride had spent their wedding night in the honeymoon suite of another hotel), and riding the train back to our hotel.  After a local lunch we took the subway over to W. 14^th to take a walk on the High Line, the elevated park that meanders for a mile along the west side, then ambled through the Meatpacking District, an area of gentrified former slaughterhouses laid out on cobblestone streets, and got some ice cream at Chelsea Market.  The weather was again stupendous and hordes of people were everywhere.  In the evening we had dinner at Amazing 66 in Chinatown, and when we came out around 9:30 the sidewalks, normally choked with people during the day, were strangely empty.  Threading these dark, spooky, silent streets to the edge of Little Italy we found, in front of Ferrara’s, bright lights and a lively crowd, and joined it for espressos and desserts.

The West Village

 

Monday the nephew phoned to suggest we meet for lunch at Café Cluny, on W. 12^th, so we took the subway to 4^th for a leisurely stroll north through Greenwich Village to Abingdon Square.  The weather was still good but high clouds were moving in; rain was forecast for Tuesday.  We were leaving from JFK in a few hours and the 2 of them were leaving for Madrid at about the same time from Newark.  They looked appropriately happy, the wedding having gone off well.  I had the best burger I’d had since the summer of 2011 in Clear Lake, Iowa.  Afterward we walked around the neighborhood a little with them and saw the actor Willem Dafoe on Charles Street helping a couple remove a large package from the rear of a minivan.  An odd coincidence as I saw him the last time I was in New York, only that time outside a restaurant in Soho.   He did a double-take on our double-take, realizing we had recognized him.   

Like Rome at the height of its Empire, New York is a cosmopolitan, international city filled with the babble of many different tongues: Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, and others I couldn’t recognize.  German seemed particularly prevalent in the West Village.  The Germans have a talent for sniffing out all the best places, and the money to hang out in them.   

Indian Wells 2014

South Entrance

The Masters 1000 tennis tournament at Indian Wells this year was all about Stadium 2, the new 8,000 seat concrete stadium built since the tournament was played last year and, although I was a skeptic about the project, I have to admit they did a fabulous job with it. The General Admission seats in the 2^nd tier provide an excellent view of the action, and they are real seats, with armrests and, most importantly, backs, a vast improvement over the bleacher planks of the previous Stadium 2 and the lesser courts. Not only that, but due to the cantilever construction of the upper tier, half of them are shaded during at least part of the day and, given the power of the sun in that desert environment, shade is a big plus and something none of the other stadiums offer. On top of all this, concessions and plenty of restrooms are right in the building, so everything you need is close to hand. Even when the stadium was packed it was rare to encounter the restroom lines that were once common.

Stadium 2

The downside of all this is that once you have established yourself in some excellent shady seats you are extremely hesitant to give them up.  All the incentives are to stay put, because you know there is no chance you will be as comfortable anywhere else.  Hence, you miss out on the fun of wandering the grounds and taking in the beautiful landscaping, the rugged mountain vistas, and scrambling for seats in different stadiums to see the precise matches you want to see.  This tendency was exacerbated by the fact that we came into the tournament later than usual this year.  We have been attending this 2-week tournament annually for over a decade and usually we arrive on Wednesday or Thursday of the 1^st week and fly home on Monday of the 2^nd.  (We really can’t take more than 3-4 days of this madness.)  But this year, because we made our reservations late, we were unable to get a room for Friday night, so we flew down on Saturday and started the tournament on Sunday.  Because we were deeper into the tournament at this point, there were fewer matches going on.  Out of 9 match courts, only 4 were being used on Monday and Tuesday, and the best matches, for the most part, were being played on Stadium 1 or 2, and our tickets were only good for nosebleed seats in Stadium 1.

Isner/Querrey inside Stadium 2

We were, of course, quite curious about the new stadium and so when we arrived on Sunday morning we headed directly over there to check it out.  We found wonderfully shady seats on the east side that made a dull opening match tolerable, but after a couple hours the sun found us, and the longer we sat there the hotter it got.  The night before at Ralph’s in Palm Desert I’d spotted Nikolay Davydenko in the produce section with his wife and child.  He reached #3 in the world back in 2006 but is on the downside of his career now.  He played John Isner in the 2^nd match and by the time Isner had beaten him in straight sets, we felt like we were being barbecued.  The temp was pushing 90 and the sun felt like it was going to set our clothes on fire.  We had to abandon our seats, we simply couldn’t endure it any more, and Frieda, who is an accomplished seat spotter, uncovered 2 excellent ones on the shady west side.  From there we watched 4 more matches that gradually got better as the afternoon wore into evening, leading to Grigor Dimitrov, and then, under the lights, the best match of the day, Isner/Querrey playing doubles against the French team of Chardy/Simon.  

The Concourse

We had noticed that the seats on the south side of the stadium were shady all day, so on Monday we arrived a little earlier and headed directly over there, but other folk had obviously figured this out as well and occupied them, so we returned to where we’d sat the day before and suffered through the sun for a couple of hours until the shade crept slowly over us.  1^st we saw Andy Murray; then one of Frieda’s favorites, Gael Monfils from France; then Stanislaus Wawrinka from Switzerland, who has come into his own in the past year or so, displacing Federer as the #1 Swiss player and reaching #3 in the world.  But after that we hit some dull matches and Frieda got antsy, because her favorite player, Alexandr Dolgopolov from Ukraine, was vying with Nadal in Stadium 1.  She very much wanted to see it but our tickets were only good for 1 section of the nosebleed seats, so far away that you could barely see the ball or recognize who was playing, and even those were probably full.  So she disappeared for awhile as I watched the birds flying around the stadium and then tried unsuccessfully to take a nap sitting up.  She returned all excited because she had been watching the match on a TV out in the hall and Dolgopolov had taken the 2^nd set and was up a break in the 3^rd.  She insisted I should go watch some of it, so I went out to the hallway to have a look.  At first I was disappointed because Nadal got the break back and it looked like he was going to turn it around, so I wandered out of the stadium into the concourse where all the walkways converge and soaked in the nighttime atmosphere, the people milling around, the accent lighted palm trees with their fronds standing up like punk hairdos, and then strolled over to the Tommy Bahama bar under a soaring white canopy underlit with lavender lights where the match was being shown on a jumbotron.  By the time I got there Dolgopolov had broken Nadal again and was serving for the match at 5-3.  If Dolgopolov was actually going to pull off the upset, I knew Frieda would want to see it, but I couldn’t believe he would.  Surely he would choke and Nadal would do what he always does: win.  I sat down in an aluminum chair to watch and sure enough, Nadal proceeded to win 8 straight points, breaking Dolgololov at love and then holding serve to level the set at 5 all.  Dolgopolov was choking so badly that I felt embarrassed for him and I didn’t think Frieda would want to see it.  I thought he must feel utterly humiliated in front of all those people.  Nevertheless he managed to hold it together enough to get into a tiebreak and kept it close until he got a match point, whereupon he hit an unbelievable blistering backhand down the line.  The place went crazy, everyone jumping up and down and clapping and screaming.  But then Nadal challenged the call and on the replay it was clear that the shot had gone out.  Dolgopolov served again and this time Nadal’s return went wide.  As the crowd went nuts again the camera showed Dolgopolov standing there with a dazed look, like he couldn’t believe he’d actually done it, he’d actually beaten Nadal.  I went back to Stadium 2 and Frieda was in a dark funk: the most exciting match of the tournament, involving her favorite player pulling the upset of his career, and she had missed it.  She was inconsolable.  Even the last match of the day, an excellent doubles contest between Federer/Wawrinka and Gulbis/Raonic could not lift her mood.  

Tommy Bahama

Tuesday we got to the venue even earlier, waited in line for the gates to open, ran to Stadium 2, waited in line there for the doors to open, and then split up, Frieda heading to the south side to see if she could get us seats in the perpetually shady section while I ran for the section we’d been in the day before, trying to get seats in the front row, which I did.  After a few minutes Frieda showed up saying she had found nothing but that the seats I had were perfect.  Being in the front row meant it would take longer for the shade to work its way down to us, but there was a high haze filtering the sun and moderating its effects, so it was tolerable.  The 1^st 2 matches of the day, the Canadian up-and-comer Eugenie Bouchard followed by Gasquet vs. Verdasco, went pretty fast.  By the time we got to the 3^rd match, a good one between Grigor Dimitrov and Ernests Gulbis, which Gulbis won in 3 sets, we were well in the shade.  Then we had to sit through a couple of dull matches to get to the finale, the Bryan brothers playing doubles, which was superb, but by then Frieda was too exhausted to stay for the whole thing.  After 3 days of 10-12 hours of tennis, both of us had pretty much had it.  Attendance this year reached approximately 430,000, about the same as the French Open last year, so this tournament continues to grow. 

Extinction

We’ve been having a heat wave in California, and the worst drought in recorded history. Normally around November 1 I put the hardtop on the roadster and pack it away for the winter, but not this year.  With no rain and highs in the 80s, I’m still driving it.  On TV I saw the Australian Open also had record triple digit temperatures.  Meanwhile, something dubbed the Polar Vortex, an unusual subsidence of the jet stream, brought record cold to the Midwest and Northeast.  The weather, in short, is screwed up, and we’re the reason.  By dumping increasing volumes of greenhouse gases (CO2 and methane) into the atmosphere we’re raising average global surface temperature and changing global climate dynamics.  The surface temperature of the earth has increased 1.4° over the past century.  That may not seem like much, but 2/3 of the increase occurred in the past 30 years, so the rate of increase is accelerating.  In addition, recent research on cloud formation suggests the rate of warming may be more rapid than previously estimated.  CO2 in the atmosphere recently passed 400 parts per million, a concentration not seen since 4.5 million years ago, an era long before the advent of humanity when sea levels were 50 feet higher than they are today.  Unless we put the brakes on emissions the concentration could reach 1000 ppm by 2100, and CO2 has a lifetime of a century or more.  The climate is a complicated system, too complicated for us to be able to model exactly what the detailed results of such a change will be, but that much CO2 in the atmosphere could cause global surface temperatures to surge 7° by 2050, 14° by 2100.  Warming of that magnitude will produce a catastrophic rise in sea levels, inundating coastal areas.  The increased heat energy in the climate system will produce extreme weather events of a magnitude hardly dreamed of today.  Subtropical deserts will expand and crop yields will fall substantially, bringing about widespread famine.  Ocean acidification will kill coral and shellfish.  Unmitigated climate change on this scale could exceed our capacity to adapt.  To search for more fossil fuels under these circumstances is a fool’s errand.  If the fossil fuel already available were burned the planet would be rendered unlivable.  Burning it would be suicidal, yet the energy companies are still searching for more.  

As bad as climate change is, it’s only part of the picture, one aspect of the great extinction we are engineering.  Humans have been having an impact on the ecosystem we inhabit for at least 10,000 years.  Killing off megafauna like the mammoths and mastodons was just the beginning.  Now we’re in the midst of an extinction that’s shaping up to be even larger than the one that killed off the dinosaurs, only this time the asteroid is us.  10,000 years ago humans and their domesticated animals represented .1% of the vertebrate life on earth.  Today we represent 95%.  We are displacing all other species.  As our numbers continue to explode, we move into every available nook and cranny of the world carrying species of plants and animals with us that replace the native flora and fauna.  Weed species, like rats and cockroaches, proliferate.  We plow native grasses under to plant row crops, separate what were once contiguous forests into isolated groves.  We modify or destroy vast tracts of land and river systems in order to meet human ends.  15% of the earth’s surface has been converted to industrial uses or row-crops, with another 8% being used for pasture, ruining local ecosystems.  The oceans are over-fished, millions of tons of by-catch are simply discarded.  We are depleting natural resources at a prodigious rate.  Through habitat encroachment, destruction or fragmentation, hunting, pollution, climate change, the spread of disease, and the introduction of nonnative species we are exterminating animal and plant life on earth at a rate 100 times greater than any massive extinction event of the past, and the rate is accelerating.  It’s estimated that by 2050 30% of the species currently inhabiting our planet will be extinct.  50% of current higher life forms will be extinct by 2100.  Biodiversity is declining rapidly.  Whole lines of phyla are being lost.  And we are the cause.  

The greatest extinction event we know of, dubbed “The Great Dying,” occurred 252 million years ago.  On that occasion CO2 levels got so high that the surface ocean temperature reached 104° and the ocean became anoxic, killing nearly all higher sea life.  The oxygen depletion allowed sulfate-producing bacteria to thrive, producing hydrogen sulfide that belched into the atmosphere, poisoning land animals and plants and weakening the ozone layer so that any land life that remained was exposed to fatal levels of UV radiation.  Of course, extinction, even a massive extinction like this one, is part of the evolutionary process.  Mass extinctions eliminate the dominant species to allow newcomers to proliferate and flourish.  If the dinosaurs hadn’t been eliminated, there wouldn’t have been an opportunity for mammals, for us.  But when we are the dominant species that may be eliminated it puts a different light on it.  As a human, I don’t want us replaced.  And, in the short run, the loss of all the other species that we have, as it were, grown up with, impoverishes our existence. 

 

Human population growth is the fundamental cause of the potential catastrophe we are facing.  We are overrunning the planet and destroying everything in our path, not just animals but plants as well.  The earth does not have the capacity to absorb our wastes.  If we do not reduce our population, widespread famine and starvation will do it for us.  And yet economists, bizarrely, continue to speak of growth, infinite growth. 

We are currently doing far more to endanger ourselves than we are to ensure our survival.  Sooner or later, and it’s looking more and more like sooner, we will face a global cataclysm in which our survival will be at stake.  If we want to continue as a species, we need to limit the damage we are doing as much as possible, as soon as possible, wean ourselves from finite resources, sharply limit emissions of greenhouse gases, and, most importantly, strive for Zero Population Growth or, better yet, Less Than Zero.  Nothing would do as much to heal the planet as reducing the number of humans.  If we would just stop breeding like rabbits, slow down to 1 child per woman, the planet could begin to recover.  But, of course, that’s not going to happen.