Dahr Jamail on climate change and human extinction

 Grim Predictions About Climate Change And Human Extinction

Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption (The New Press, 2019), The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). 

Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Izzy Award and the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards. His third book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with William Rivers Pitt, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in Washington State.

Dahr Jamail on Mad Dog Mattis

James Mattis Is a War 

Criminal: I Experienced His 

Attack on Fallujah Firsthand

Dahr Jamail

Truth Out

6 December, 2016

Retired marine General James Mattis, who retired from being the head of CENTCOM in 2013, has become known recently for his stance against what he calls “political Islam.”

“Is political Islam in the best interest of the United States?” Mattis said at the far right-wing Heritage Foundation in 2015. “I suggest the answer is no, but we need to have the discussion. If we won’t even ask the question, how do we even recognize which is our side in a fight?”

Another controversial aspect of his selection that much of the media is focusing on is the fact that in order to get the job, Mattis would need Congress to pass new legislation to bypass a federal law stating that it has to have been seven years since defense secretaries have been on active duty. Congress has only bypassed that law once in US history, and that occurred over 50 years ago.

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More importantly, Mattis, known to some by the nickname of “Mad Dog,” has shown a callous disregard for human life, particularly civilians, as evidenced by his behavior leading marines in Iraq, comments he made about enjoying fighting in Afghanistan because “it’s fun to shoot some people. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot,” and myriad other problems.

Mattis’ Role in the Haditha Massacre

While Mattis has ample military experience — serving as NATO’s supreme allied commander and with more than 40 years in the Marine Corps, his nickname seems apt.

He also said, when speaking to a group of soldiers about how to behave in Iraq during a 2003 speech, “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

But more importantly, he is clearly responsible for carrying out and/or aiding and abetting in several war crimes.

In November 2005 US marines in Iraq committed a massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians. The slaughtering of unarmed men, women, children and elderly people, shot multiple times at close range, was retribution for a roadside bomb attack on a convoy of marines. The war crimes were extremely well documented and the atrocity garnered international attention.

When it came time to bring the marines responsible for the massacre to justice, Mattis was the convening authority over the eight charged with crimes at Haditha.

Mattis went on to dismiss all of the charges leveled against the marines who had been accused of killing the civilians and of the eight originally charged, only one still faces possible prosecution, but one can guess how that will end up.

Mattis’ Role in Fallujah

Mattis was the head of Camp Pendleton’s 1st Marine Division in Iraq and played a lead role during both of the US sieges of Fallujah in 2004.

During the April 2004 siege, more than 700 civilians were killed by the US military, according to Iraqi doctors in the city whom I interviewed in the aftermath of that attack.

While reporting from inside Fallujah during that siege, I personally witnessed women, children, elderly people and ambulances being targeted by US snipers under Mattis’ command. Needless to say, all of these are war crimes.

During the November siege of Fallujah later that same year, which I also covered first-hand, more than 5,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. Most were buried in mass graves in the aftermath of the siege.

Mosques were deliberately targeted by the US military, hospitals bombed, medical workers detained, ambulances shot at, cease-fires violated, media repressed, and the use of depleted uranium was widespread. All of these are, again, war crimes.

At that time I broke the story of the US military’s use of white phosphorous, an incendiary weapon similar to napalm in its ability to burn all the way down to the bone. The use of white phosphorus was a violation of international law, given that it was unleashed in the city during a time when the Pentagon itself admitted to at least 50,000 civilians still being present.

More than 200,000 civilians were displaced from their homes during the November siege, and over 75 percent of the city was destroyed.

The horrific legacy of depleted uranium contamination continues, with stillbirths and birth defects still occurring at astronomical rates, creating a situation so extreme that some Iraqi doctors are calling it a genocide.

Life Under Attack by Mattis-Led Forces

In this moment, as we countenance Mattis’ planned ascension as secretary of defense, I’d like to share an excerpt from my book Beyond the Green Zone. Taken from a chapter about the April 2004 US siege of Fallujah, this report offers a clear view of the war crimes over which Mattis presided, including the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians, widespread collective punishment and more:

***

We rolled toward the one small clinic where we were to deliver our medical supplies. The small clinic was managed by Maki al-Nazzal, who was hired just four days ago. He was not a doctor. The other makeshift clinic in Fallujah was in a mechanic’s garage. He had barely slept in the past week, nor had any of the doctors at the small clinic.

Originally, the clinic had just three doctors, but since the US military bombed one of the hospitals and were currently sniping at people as they attempted to enter or exit the main hospital, effectively, there were only these two small clinics treating the entire city.

The boxes of medical supplies we brought into the clinic were torn open immediately by the desperate doctors. A woman entered, slapping her chest and face, and wailing as her husband carried in the dying body of her little boy. Blood was trickling off one of his arms, which dangled out of his father’s arms. 

Thus began my witnessing of an endless stream of women and children who had been shot by the US soldiers and were now being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front, and weeping family members carrying in their wounded. One 18-year-old girl had been shot through the neck. She was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amid her muffled moaning. Flies dodged the working hands of doctors to return to the patches of her vomit that stained her black abaya.

Her younger brother, a small child of 10 with a gunshot wound in his head from a marine sniper, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life while family members cried behind me. “The Americans cut our electricity days ago, so we cannot vacuum the vomit from his throat,” a furious doctor tells me. They were both loaded into an ambulance and rushed toward Baghdad, only to die en route.

Another small child lay on a blood-spattered bed, also shot by a sniper. The boy’s grandmother lay nearby, shot as she was attempting to carry children from their home and flee the city. She lay on a bed dying, still clutching a bloodied white surrender flag. Hundreds of families were trapped in their homes, terrorized by US snipers shooting from rooftops and the minarets of mosques whenever they saw someone move past a window.

Blood bags were being kept in a food refrigerator, warmed under running water before being given to patients. There were no anesthetics. The lights went out as the generator ran dry of fuel, so the doctors, who had been working for days on end, worked by light provided by men holding up cigarette lighters or flashlights as the sun set. Needless to say, there was no air-conditioning inside the steamy “clinic.”

One victim of the US military aggression after another was brought into the clinic, nearly all of them women and children, carried by weeping family members. Those who had not been hit by bombs from warplanes had been shot by US snipers. The one functioning ambulance left at this clinic sat outside with bullet holes in the sides and a small group of shots right on the driver’s side of the windshield. The driver, his head bandaged from being grazed by the bullet of a sniper, refused to go collect any more of the dead and wounded.

Standing near the ambulance in frustration, Maki told us, “They [US soldiers] shot the ambulance and they shot the driver after they checked his car, inspected his car, and knew that he was carrying nothing. Then they shot him. And then they shot the ambulance. And now I have no ambulance to evacuate more than 20 wounded people. I don’t know who is doing this and why he is doing this. This is terrible. This has never happened before. And I don’t know who to call because it seems that nobody is listening.”

The stream of patients slowed to a sporadic influx as night fell. Maki sat with me as we shared cigarettes in a small office in the rear of the clinic. “For all my life, I believed in American democracy,” he told me with an exhausted voice. “For 47 years, I had accepted the illusion of Europe and the United States being good for the world, the carriers of democracy and freedom. Now I see that it took me 47 years to wake up to the horrible truth. They are not here to bring anything like democracy or freedom.

“Now I see it has all been lies. The Americans don’t give a damn about democracy or human rights. They are worse than even Saddam.” I asked him if he minded if I quoted him with his name. “What are they going to do to me that they haven’t already done here,” he said.

Another car skipped over the curb outside and a man who was burned from head to toe was carried in on a stretcher. He surely died shortly, as there was no way this clinic could treat massive burns. Maki, frustrated and in shock, said, “They say there is a cease-fire. They said 12 o’clock, so people went out to do some shopping. Everybody who went out was shot and this place was full, and half of them were dead.”

More than 20 dead bodies had been brought to this clinic during the last 24 hours of the “cease-fire.” Shortly after this, another car skidded to a stop, and a man hit with cluster bombs was unloaded. “The Americans have been using cluster bombs often here,” Maki tells me somberly. “And of course they love their DU [depleted uranium].”

***

It is clear that Trump’s secretary of defense selection of Mattis, an unprosecuted war criminal, is yet another egregious act against justice and the rule of international law.

Mattis was a high-level marine commander overseeing both sieges of Fallujah who then played an active role in making sure eight marines involved in a massacre walked away from any appropriate punishment.

These are just a few of his highlights from Iraq.

Imagine what he could do to the rest of the world.

Controversy in the Doomersphere

There is a backstory to the making of this video.

For several days I have been unable to get onto my own blog site across browsers to post items and I have had to resort to innovative solutions.

This morning I recorded the video on Quicktime. Instead of saving it to my desktop I played it through. Once I had done that th computer became completely unresponsive. After 10-15 minutes of this I got Pam to film the process on my iPad and – hey presto – everything worked perfectly -and I managed to get my file onto my desktop. The moment after doing that it went straight back to what what it was doing before.

So we travelled up to a friend’s place to use her wi-fi. Everything worked (almost) perfectly and I was able to upload onto You Tube and from there onto my blog.

I am back home now,and working on the #2 computer.

Dahr Jamail blocks Guy 

McPherson on social media

The End of Ice: Dahr Jamail

Mailbag: Dahr Jamail Joins the Defamation Crowd

Chris Hedges interviews Dahr Jamail on the cliamte emergency

On Contact: Climate emergency with Dahr Jamail

The glaciers in Alaska alone are losing an estimated 75 billion tons of ice every year. The oceans, which absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, are warming and acidifying, melting the polar ice caps and resulting in rising sea levels and oxygen-starved ocean dead zones. 

We await a 50-gigaton burp, or “pulse,” of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which will release about 2/3 of the total carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial era. 

Some 150 to 200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal are going extinct every 24 hours, 1000 times the “natural” or “background” rate. This pace of extinction is greater than anything the world has experienced since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. 

Chris Hedges speaks to journalist and author Dahr Jamail about his new book The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption and the climate emergency.

Dahr Jamail on the End of Ice

The End of Ice: Dahr Jamail on Climate Disruption from the Melting Himalayas to Insect Extinction

Democracy Now!

A new report finds at least a third of the Himalayan ice cap will melt by the end of the century due to climate change, even if the world’s most ambitious environmental reforms are implemented. 

The report, released by the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment earlier this month, is the culmination of half a decade’s work by over 200 scientists, with an additional 125 experts peer reviewing their work. 

It warns rising temperatures in the Himalayas could lead to mass population displacement, as well as catastrophic food and water insecurity. 

The glaciers are a vital water source for the 250 million people who live in the Hindu Kush Himalaya range, which spans from Afghanistan to Burma. 

More than 1.5 billion people depend on the rivers that flow from the Himalayan peaks. 

We speak with Dahr Jamail, independent journalist and author of the new book “The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption.”

Nature Bats Last - 02/05/2019

Dahr Jamail on Nature Bats Last

Kevin and Guy spoke with award-winning journalist Dahr Jamail regarding his recently published book, The End of Ice. The discussion, which included several callers, covered various elements of Earth's cryosphere and the human response to its near-term demise.

Dahr Jamail interviewed in Poland

We Are off the Cliff

Dahr Jamail

Zielone Wiad Mosci,

15 December, 2018

A conversation with Dahr Jamail, an American investigative journalist and author. He reported from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. Now his writings focus on issues related to the environment and climate change.

Zielone Wiadomości: What circumstances prompted you to become an independent, investigative reporter?

Dahr Jamail: I was completely flabbergasted by the US corporate media’s selling of the invasion of Iraq to the general public. Given that I became politicised rather late in life (I was around 32 when I woke up from my privilege) that outrage was acute. I’d long since been a writer, and decided one thing I could do was go to Iraq myself and start writing about how the invasion and occupation was affecting the Iraqi people. So I bought a laptop, a camera and a plane ticket, figured out how to get into the country, and went. That was November 2003. Unpaid blogging turned into doing some freelancing which turned into a full-time job.

Surely your stay in war-torn Iraq was a traumatic and transformative experience?

I ended up spending more than a year of my life in Iraq over 8 trips spanning 10 years. Most of the time was spent during the first few years of the US occupation of that country.
My time in Iraq changed me, both as a human and as a citizen of the empire. As a human, I really saw the lengths power is willing to go to maintain itself. The US empire is without a doubt the most brutal and ruthless empire in the history of the world, and I got to live on the front lines of that for a year. I watched it chew up women, children, the aged and sick, as well as men from Iraq who chose to take a stand and fight back. The imperial juggernaut crushed them all, and continues to operate within this war-torn country that has been stretched and pulled and bombed and starved and disintegrated for decades now by Washington – indirectly and directly.
As a citizen of the occupying country, needless to say, I felt shame for all of our failure to stop the invasion, along with the ongoing abject refusal of the citizenry of the US to take full responsibly for what their government is doing to the rest of the planet. I should add that I was consistently humbled by the dignity of the Iraqi people – who always were quick to make the distinction between the American people and the government and be more than forgiving to the former.

What is the main ambition of the US national security apparatus – the largest and most expensive military complex in the history of civilization? It is evident that it doesn’t defend freedom and democracy – Washington actively supports 73% of the world’s dictatorships.

Empire is the goal. And imperial expansion. Plain and simple. All one needs to do is read the government’s own unclassified documents. Global economic hegemony, by way of using the hammer that is the US military. It is readily available for anyone interested in reading the annual US Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review Report.

The streets of Tikrit, northern Iraq (photo: CC)

You followed the consequences of imperial invasions to the shores of America. In your book The Will to Resist (Haymarket Books, January 2011), you gave voice to US Army veterans whose minds and bodies were shattered in Iraq and Afghanistan. You also introduced the plight of soldiers who disobeyed orders. These women and men remain invisible. Their acts of moral courage and defiance are not celebrated by our hierarchical, violent culture which rewards for blind obedience and fluency in the language of violence.

It was deeply inspiring to me when I began meeting US soldiers who were either refusing to go to Iraq altogether, who were returning with stories of their resistance to following orders in Iraq, or who had returned and were refusing to go back.
War dehumanizes everyone it touches. Given that I’d seen first-hand atrocities carried out by US military personnel in Iraq, I too had become dehumanized along with projecting that onto them for what some of them had carried out. Meeting and interviewing and sometimes even becoming friends with many of these soldiers as I wrote my book was a deeply healing experience for me.

Which case of insubordination did you find particularly powerful?

Ehren Watada’s refusal to deploy to Iraq. At the time he took his stand, he was a Lieutenant, and the highest-ranking member of the military to refuse to go. He cited the US Constitution, alongside international law, and made himself an example of what someone acting on their morality really looks like.

What were the factors which drove your protagonists to join the army?

With most of them, it was financial – they came from poor backgrounds, and it was their only way to get out of their hometowns and perhaps have a chance at getting enough money together for university. Several of them, however, joined in the orgy of nationalism following the events of 9/11 in the US.
Only a few of them I’d spoken with joined because they truly believed in the US military, and that serving the country in that way was a highly honorable thing to do. Those who did join for that reason, quickly realized they’d made a terrible mistake, and were being taken advantage of and exploited simply for corporate gains. The military was used simply to bulldoze a path into Iraq which could be used by the Bechtel’s and Halliburton’s and hundreds (if not thousands) of other companies looking to profit off the blood of the Iraqi people (and the US soldiers themselves).

The imperial assault on humans unavoidably goes in parallel with the wholesale destruction of non-humans and the Earth’s life-supporting systems.

Yes, it does. The US military is the single largest user of fossil fuels on the planet and the number one emitter of greenhouse gasses. It’s coupled with the environmental impacts of exploding munitions, training exercises around the world, pollution emitted from all of the aforementioned, and the footprints of hundreds of bases globally.

Why did you shift your focus from wars and militarism to the environment and climate?

Human-caused climate change and the sixth mass extinction are the biggest stories for all humans, and for every species on the planet. We stand on the brink of our own possible extinction. We’ve already emitted deadly amounts of greenhouse gases. The last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, it warmed the Earth 7°C higher than today’s temperatures, and the seas were 23 meters higher. We are now in a time where the damage has been done. We are simply waiting for the Earth to fully express all of that damage.
How and if humans survive is in question, along with a myriad of other species on the planet. What could possibly be a more important story than this?

The mainstream media don’t seem to share your conclusion. They painstakingly construct a narrative which avoids shedding any light on the real dimensions and causes of wars, terrorism and ecocide. No single Western broadcaster connects the dots or even attempts to present a broader view of the planetary drama. What are the reasons for their strategy which constitutes an unmistakable betrayal of public trust?

„Follow the money”. There is no income to be made in reporting the unraveling of the biosphere. All of the mainstream media in the US (and most of it abroad) is beholden to its corporate sponsors, whose businesses are contingent upon the maintenance of business as usual and perpetual growth. They are way more concerned with ratings. The imperative is to bring enough consumers to watch their adverts. Breaking a big news story that’s going to have dramatic economic implications, as well as life implications, is not good for their business model.
Additionally, they have conditioned their readers and viewers to seek more info/etertainment instead of news. Hence, they have conditioned themselves as news networks to pursue more entertainment stories (the so-called infotainment: sports, celebrities, oddities etc.) in order to give the audience what it wants. So it’s a vicious circle. No one wants to waste time talking about the planetary emergency (e.g. the Earth quickly losing its conditioner, the Arctic sea ice). Most people don’t want to hear about it.
There’s another factor: groupthink. Practically all the media outlets are to a certain extent affected by it. As a reporter, I experienced the phenomenon firsthand. Following the editors on the news floor, we would be oftentimes waiting to report on the breaking story until another major media outlet took the lead. We were afraid to run it because we didn’t want to be wrong, the story could have ended up being overly sensational etc. It’s not really journalism anymore. Certainly not in the case of the major broadcasters.

In your monthly climate dispatches, you’ve substituted the term „climate change” with the acronym ACD. Could you explain the rationale behind its use?

It stands for Anthropogenic Climate Disruption. I chose to do this in order to be scientifically accurate, and because since most of my audience is in the US, where the fossil fuel industry continues to foment the climate change denial movement. Climate always changes – this is a fact. So calling it ACD means it is human-caused, and that the climate is disrupted. Which is more accurate, given some places actually cool, most warm, but everywhere it is without a doubt disrupted.

There is very little awareness that the planet is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event set off by the civilized humans. Our industrial behemoth has destroyed 83% of all wild mammals and half of all plants. The biomass of flying insects has shrunk 76%. The number of wild animals is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020. How does this reduction in biodiversity compare with the previous planetary die-offs discovered in the geological record?

We have, by far, injected more CO2 into the atmosphere at a far more rapid rate, than any of the previous mass extinction events – including even the Great Dying from 252 million years ago that annihilated more than 90 percent of life on the Earth. However, while that Permian-Triassic event took place over 80,000 years, it has only taken the industrial civilization roughly 200 years to get to the point we are now, where the oceans are already acidifying – most studies point to the fact that there likely won’t be any functional coral reefs left on the Earth by 2050 – forests are disappearing, major species migrations are already occurring, and the background extinction rate today is already 10,000 times higher than the natural background extinction rate.
In short, it is absolutely astounding how fast this mass extinction event is unfolding.

No wonder a growing number of scientific studies that detail the abrupt shifts in the main components of the biosphere contain the phrase „faster than expected”. Why did the earlier research assume a much lower rate of future changes? Can it be solely attributed to the habitual conservatism and caution practiced by scientists?

I see this, at least in part, as a product of the fact that it often takes years to carry out a study, then the reviewing process takes a year or more on top of that. So by the time data is published it is already out of date. For the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), even by the time one of their new reports is published, that data is often a decade old. Thus, the studies are never keeping up with what is happening on the ground.
Plus, most analyses are not accounting for the positive feedbacks that have already kicked in.

Bleached corals (photo: Wikimedia CC)

In 1990 the United Nations Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases warned about them. Its members stated that the warming of the planet – as compared to the pre-industrial baseline from 1750 – mustn’t be allowed to exceed 1°C because it would „elicit sudden, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage”. This absolute upper limit has already been crossed by a wide margin. Do the recent observations confirm the triggering of the predicted exponential and destructive effects?

Absolutely. Additionally, former NASA head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen has warned of this for years, as well as having published a study with colleagues stating precisely this.
The positive feedbacks reinforce themselves and each other. We are already off the cliff.

Could you give an example of a runaway feedback loop?

Global warming intensifies droughts and wildfires. In turn, they cause woodlands to release more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. As this trend continues, forests – such as the Amazon – become a carbon input, rather than a sink, and accelerate global warming… which intensifies droughts and wildfires.

So once such feedback is in motion, it can’t be stopped and reversed within the time frame relevant to human experience.

Unfortunately, no.

Do the projections provided by the IPCC reflect this reality? Do climatologists model the behaviour of such phenomena?

I’ve spoken with several scientists, some of them even IPCC authors themselves, who unequivocally state that the IPCC is politically influenced to always lowball their predictions and modeling. One scientist even calls them „criminally negligent” for how extreme their lowballing predictions has become, compared to how severe and rapid things are unfolding today. Besides, most (but not all) scientists, like most humans, do not grasp the concept of exponential growth. But this is something we all need to understand, given that feedback loops entail non-linear changes.

The inability to model these processes means all national climate policies have been based on the faulty assessments of the UN body. Meanwhile, the climate system is quickly moving to a new state.

Precisely.

Our ever-expanding, consumption-fuelled industrial economy was born out of hydrocarbon deposits and is entirely dependent on the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels and other resources. In order to exist, it has to accelerate. There are 10 calories of fossil fuel energy in every calorie of food consumed in the modern world. The CO2 emissions will not stop – in 2018 they will surpass last year’s record. What is the actual purpose of the UN Climate Change conferences, since their participants don’t intend to switch off the global heat engine, i.e. civilization?

I cannot say what the real aim of the IPCC is and their conferences. But now, more than ever, their reports are being used by global governments to stall, and act as though there is still time to make changes. Considering that their statistics have consistently not kept apace with reality – i.e. they grossly underestimate temperature and sea level increases – let alone not even factoring the brunt of the melting in Greenland and the Antarctic into their future projections, their reports have served more to pacify global populations rather than telling the truth of our situation. I think the same can be said of their most recent report which still tells governments there are a dozen or so years left to act.

It also assumes that by unleashing our powers of invention and adopting certain geoengineering techniques we will be able to cool the planet and save ourselves. Has there been any thorough examination of their efficacy?

The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that geoengineering is extremely dangerous, has no legitimate science to show that it can be a safe tactic to use in the long term, and most likely will make our crisis far, far worse. However, the situation is so dire now, that some scientists I know who were formerly staunchly opposed to the use of geoengineering are now advocating for it, as a last-ditch effort to at least do something.

It’s a sign of utter desperation. In discussions about hypothetical applications of technological solutions what’s rarely mentioned is the question of scale. Experts calculate that if we had a highly efficient, cheap and ready to introduce carbon capture and sequestration technique (CCS), it would have to become the basis of an industry three times bigger than the energy infrastructure of the entire planet.

There simply is no techno-fix for this predicament. I see these techno-fixes as the lefts’ version of the political right’s rapture ideas – that somehow a god will save us from ourselves. All my research has shown that, given the context of a complete absence of the political will necessary to divorce ourselves completely and immediately from all fossil fuel burning and mount a globally coordinated effort to shift the global economy into locally-oriented, small-scale, farming-based coupled with soil regeneration and tree planting initiatives to even mitigate the impacts a little bit, there is just nothing to be done other than each of us accepting the reality of where we are and choosing to live accordingly.

Both the elites and citizens of the Global North won’t take such drastic measures because they would have to give up their privilege. We prefer to believe that some technological magic will fix every single predicament.

Similarly to how we’ve given our memories over to our iPhones and gadgetry, we’ve deified technology to the point of „it” saving us. I also see all of this as symptomatic of our radical disconnection from nature, from the very planet from which we came and are completely dependent upon. Until we can each personally foster and reconnect to the Earth, we will be walking into the future of our demise asleep.

Your new book The End of Ice (The New Press, January 2019) will definitely serve as a much-needed wake-up call – it promises to be an epic, globe-spanning chronicle of the planetary drama. What premise motivated you the most to write it?

My initial motivation was to alert people of how far along we already are regarding climate disruption – essentially letting them know it’s too late to change it or stop it. The book does this, but as I delved deeper and deeper into the research while working with leading scientists, by the end of the book I realised I needed to address my own grief over the loss of so much of the biosphere, and the cataclysm that is now upon us. So I spend a lot of time in the book addressing this in the concluding chapter, because all of us already live in a new world, one that may not include a future for humans. By the time someone reads through my book, I think this will become clear.

The President of Finland Sauli Niinistö stated: „If we lose the Arctic, we lose the globe”. The End of Ice doesn’t just bid farewell to a disappearing feature of the terrestrial landscape.

The overt reason I chose this title was because, as many of us are acutely aware, nearly all of the land-based ice will be long-gone by the end of this century, and the effects of this reach far, far beyond just losing the ice itself, which I detail in the book.
Metaphorically the title also stands for the overall enormity of loss occurring across the natural world. We are losing entire ecosystems, and now even the biosphere within which we live is under existential threat. We are also facing the end of the world as we know it.
So the title holds multi-layered meaning, and I dive into all of those layers in my book.

During the research phase you have visited places that are the ground zero of ACD. Did the hundreds of scientific papers you had summarised in your articles prepare you for what you encountered? Did this direct experience revise your understanding and perception of the unfolding ecological disaster?

I knew the facts. I knew how bad things already were. But then seeing the damage first hand was an entirely different experience. Weeping in my mask as I swam amongst the bleached out coral of the Great Barrier Reef really caught me off guard. Weeping on Denali when it really hit me how fast even that area is melting, also caught me by surprise. So in these ways, and many others, the direct experience most certainly deepened my understanding of how far off the cliff we already are. Anyone not reacting and behaving accordingly simply does not see the whole picture.

You had the opportunity to interact with accomplished scientists. They don’t spend most of their time playing with computer simulations in the comfort of their laboratories and offices.

Exactly. They spend the brunt of their time out in the field, being with and studying the places that are near and dear to their hearts. These are the scientists I trust more than those who are office-bound.

What do their extensive, decades-long observations tell them?

That the changes happening across most of the planet have accelerated beyond anything they could have foreseen even just 10 years ago, and are only continuing to accelerate.

Because of their urgent and disturbing message, they must undoubtedly be perceived by their peers as „alarmists” and treated as pariahs. How do they cope with personal attacks, ubiquitous denial pervading their social and academic milieu?

Most of them simply do their best to ignore the attacks and continue forward with their work. This comes out as them keeping their heads down, keeping quiet, but more detrimentally causes many of them to self-censor their work, or downplay their worrisome predictions.
Still, I don’t think the blame for the lack of public awareness of the planetary catastrophe is to be placed upon the scientists, aside from those who have opted to allow the pressure upon them to soften their own reporting of their findings. I think the blame rests squarely upon the dominant political structures of an economic paradigm that is predicated upon the continuation of fossil fuel usage. Thus, said structure and its mainstream media will largely ignore the increasingly dramatic climate disruption impacts, let alone connecting them to ACD. Most people construct their worldview from information provided by corporate media sources…

When faced with the terrible human and environmental toll of the so-called „externalities”, the managers of almighty corporations use the same perfected methods of avoiding responsibility – approved by complicit, obedient governments – to protect their deadly practices, profits and market share.

It’s true. I covered at length, and over years, the events following the explosions and leaks at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan) and the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig (US). It is frightening to see the same misinformation and downplaying of these industrial debacles used internationally now. The meltdown of nuclear reactors in Fukushima is the worst industrial accident in human history, and it is ongoing. The entire Pacific Ocean is being irradiated, slowly, over time, but persistently. This radiation works its way up the food chain via bioaccumulation and ends with us. Not even to speak of the atmospheric impacts.
The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is also ongoing. The fishing industry there is suffering, the environmental degradation is advancing and loss of life is enormous. Again, the toxins remain in the water-column since the US Coast Guard allowed BP to sink the oil. Again, all of this bioaccumulates.
In both instances, a giant corporation has effectively told the government where they operate what to do, how to respond, and what to tell the media. And the state authorities have been utterly compliant. At of course the cost to the average citizen, and all the life forms impacted.

The chief of the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant has admitted that the technology needed to retrieve and secure melted-down cores doesn’t exist, and it may take 200 years to develop it.

The operator of the plant and the state agencies do not have a solution to this crisis. Fukushima is this massive story with global health implications and it’s been completely swept under the rag. Even more so than the climate predicament. And it’s far surpassing Chernobyl in terms of the amount of radiation that has been released and is being released.
Meanwhile, the Japanese government is busy planning for the Tokyo Olympics. I would call it criminal negligence. The officials are there to protect the mighty economy. They can’t really sound the alarm on this because then Japan might not get the Summer Olympics, the citizens would have to be relocated, and it would tip off the rest of the world to this massive, festering crisis. Supplant Fukushima with ACD and you’ll understand why it’s not discussed every day on the front pages of the world’s most prestigious newspapers.

Hurricane Harvey (photo: Wikimedia CC)

The same cover-up is happening in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey – another unprecedented extreme weather event which last year flooded the US petrochemical hub in Texas. The full picture of its terrible toxic legacy is only beginning to emerge.

Harvey dumped so much rain that according to NASA it literally pressed the Earth’s crust down 2 centimeters. The weight of the water was the equivalent of 3,800,000 litres for every Texan. The state population is more than 30 million.
As far as flooding is concerned, I spoke with Dr Harold Wanless, a sea level rise expert of decades at the University of Miami. He told me that responsible US political leaders would already be relocating everybody from South Florida which will be wiped off the map in a matter of decades. They would be buying back homes in order to prevent a mass exodus when the housing market collapses and everyone is trying to leave all at once. That intervention would also require going in and doing environmental mitigation so we don’t leave fossil fuel refineries or nuclear plants under water. No one is doing anything of that sort. No one is decommissioning these structures. On the contrary, they are building two new nuclear reactors literally right on the coast south of Miami. Insanity rules. Corporate profits are making all the decisions.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation has recently revealed that in the early ‘80s, the fossil fuel industry had their own climatologists working with the best climate models available. The executives of oil and gas companies learned the truth that carbon dioxide emissions will bring about global cataclysm in the not-so-distant future.

They responded to the information in a predictable fashion: they concealed it, started spending billions of dollars on the elaborate media campaign to disinform the public, and conducted business as usual. To respond accordingly to the evidence would have meant the end of exploration and exploitation of oil fields.

And yet, many activists and celebrities are tirelessly promoting „green growth” and convincing the rest of us that we should appeal to the corporate officers to do the right thing – stop the wanton decimation of the Earth’s ecosystem. The billionaire investors/shareholders do not earn their profits by defending justice or restoring ecological balance, do they?

This is a time-proven failure of a tactic. It’s another iteration of the entity being abused appealing to the abuser by thinking if they behave better, or appeal differently, the abuse will cease.

In the ‘70s – which were a decisive decade – a series of independent scientific papers (incl. Limits to Growth by MIT, 1972) forced their authors to draw the inescapable conclusion: the sacred, expansionist economy was incompatible with the living planet. If it were to persist for another 40 years it would seriously undermine the Earth’s ability to sustain complex life, and eventually bring about its own demise. Only a new economic model respecting the limits imposed by nature could give humanity a chance to avoid a near-term catastrophe. The only way to stop the military-industrial machine was to create an eco-pacifist movement. Western societies failed to do it. Why?

One simple component of this is that the neo-liberal hegemonic capitalist power structure consistently increases the speed of the economic treadmill. Hence, the average worker can ill-afford to take time off to educate, organize, protest and still pay their bills. This coupled with the ongoing aforementioned propaganda/dis-mis-information campaign by the corporate media.

The planet is burning. Still, the political and economic madness continues unabated. The state and private companies devour the living planet with growing ferociousness. The competition for the diminishing resources is becoming more and more fierce. The collective global debt and social inequality are exploding. Record numbers of deadly weapons are being manufactured and bought. The world powers are waging proxy wars, trade wars, and the critical battle for the high-tech industry domination. In a bid to ensure its full spectrum dominance, the American empire is expanding its nuclear arsenal and moving towards militarisation of space. That’s the reality. Let’s visit the realm of fantasy. If governments were influenced by empathy and displayed the „irrational” concern for the well-being of their citizens and natural environment, what steps would they take?

The response would look something like the dramatic mobilisation necessary if, say, the Earth was being invaded by an alien race. Governments around the world would begin enforcing the immediate phasing out of fossil fuel. They would also introduce procedures aimed at curbing the global population. (It is insane that there continues to be such relentless population growth amidst what we see staring us in the face with this convergence of crises.) Food and energy production (from alternative sources) would be localised. Simultaneously, those responsible for knowingly polluting the Earth would be brought to justice in the Hague, and made an example of.
Alas, no real change will happen. Global political leaders are all lobbyists for the corporate powers behind them. International climate and biodiversity agreements are just papier-mâché facades. Their function is to preserve the status quo.

In your work you’ve referenced the following sentence from Aldo Leopold: „One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds”. Because of your close relationship with the wilderness, you not only describe the wounds but you also witness how they worsen over time.

I relate to the quote wholeheartedly, and it really speaks deeply to me. My experiences in the mountains, and all the other places of the Earth I visited while working on my forthcoming book, were bittersweet. On the one hand, I revel in nature, I am awed by the Earth’s handiwork and beauty. Yet, at the same time, going to these places, especially those I have long-term relationships with, I can’t help but see the degradation of them. Thus, it truly wounds my heart to watch them vanishing or being destroyed.

How do you cope with the sense of loss?

Illustration by Ola Wasilewska

It is utterly overwhelming. My work has forced me to deal with the despair and grief that accompany these times. Each of us will have to cope with the unavoidable arrival of these feelings, but my work has sped this encounter for me. I practice my own spirituality, which is intensively Earth-based. For me, I take regular trips up into the mountains to go quiet, and get perspective, and do what I can to give back and commune with the Earth. It also reminds me why I do the work I do.
I’ve also found it imperative to have a strong local community: trusted friends to talk with, and share the burden, and process the latest bad news. We know what’s coming, we have our backs against the wall. Together, we are boosting our resilience. Today is better than tomorrow for the environment and the climate. The assault by the spreading fascism intensifies. It’s only going to keep getting worse. In the face of this inescapable reality, we still try to lower our carbon footprint. I produce my own energy and grow my own food. Such approach won’t change the trajectory we’re on but it’s the moral thing to do.
I do want to remind people that wherever you live there’s a part of nature not that far from you that’s still functional – a forest, a river or a mountain range. It is an urgent time to go out, and spend time with them because their days are numbered.

What are the benefits of seeing reality without the lens of wishful thinking?

Being able to make better decisions about priorities, to know what is really important, and respond accordingly. Without an accurate map, how can anyone truly hope to get where they are going? If we only have a limited amount of time left with land-based glaciers, if we only have a limited amount of time left with coral reefs and species that we are losing at a rate of 150-200 per day, I want to read and hear about it. That is going to influence how I live my life, what I choose to do. And I would hope that, for anyone with empathy, they would have a similar response.

The younger generations have been deceived and sacrificed on the altar of consumerism. What advice would you impart to the enlightened youth who had just woken up to this sad truth?

The standard western program of getting a job and making money and consuming is a dinosaur. Those days are over. The young must prepare to live on a completely changed planet, to work to care for what we have left, and form tight communities within their ranks to be prepared for what is coming.

Interviewer: MR