Dire warning that humans had 40 years to make necessary changes to avoid extinction - 28 YEARS AGO

“We cannot survive a 5 per cent or 6 per cent increase in temperature or a 20 per cent erosion of the ozone layer,and everything we are doing must inevitably lead to this result.

“Today’s economic policies, if pursued, can only lead to the annihilation of the human race.”

--- Edward Goldsmith, 1989

A man ahead of his time: an appreciation of Edward Goldsmith

My first lessons on the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet came when I encountered Paul Ehrlich and the Population Bomb when I was at school in the early 70’s.

Next came an article in the Bangkok Post in 1988 which was the first mention of what was called the Greenhouse Effect (which I was already familiar with from studies in astronomy and of Venus’ atmosphere) that I came across. This had such an effect on me that I went to the NZ Embassy to check the newspapers to find the only mention was on the possible effects on the ski industry.

Fast forward to March, 1988 and my partner Pam travelled to Auckland for a seminar while I remained home bound in the midst of a terrible storm. The only high point was hearing an interview with Edward Goldsmith on NZ’s National Radio in which I heard for the first time the stark message that humanity had only 40 years to get its act together if it was to avoid inevitable extinction.

This made such an impression on me that has stayed with me through the years that I decided to go and search for the newspaper item in the public record which I eventually found.

As it turns out it made the top of the front page of the paper – for what I suspect was the first and mostly probably the last time in New Zealand media.

Looking back at all the material about him on the Net I realised Edward Goldsmith has attracted almost as much negativity and controversy as Guy McPherson, mostly, I suspect because of his strong anti-growth position. But for me he was one of the most inspiring figures I have met.

He was the publisher of the Ecologist magazine in London and winner of the Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the alternative Nobel award. He is considered one of the fathers of the global environmental movement. 

***

Here is the item that was on the front page of the Dominion on 27 March, 1989.  Published almost 3 years before the Rio conference and before Kyoto when global warming was referred to be the mechanism, the Greenhouse Effect this was perhaps the first, and almost certainly the last time that scientific concepts such as the Gaia hypothesis were given such prominence in the mass media.

Reading this I feel a real grief,not only in terms of the 'road not taken' but for what we have lost in the last 30 years. It is a reminder that we have lost the art of journalism and proper use of language in even an ordinary newspaper article.

When was the last time you saw these concepts discussed on the front page of a national newspaper?

Mankind given 40 years

the Dominion,

27 March, 1989

Humanity has less than 40 years left unless destructive policies are halted,a leading British environmentalist said in Auckland at the weekend.

Author and lecturer Edward Goldsmith, who earlier addressed the Living Earth conference said: “In the past 40 years we have done more destruction than during the whole of man’s tenancy of this planet.

Economic and industrial policies had caused “the most terrrible” soil and erosion and deforestation and were altering the ozone layer and climates.

“We cannot survive a 5 per cent or 6 per cent increase in temperature or a 20 per cent erosion of the ozone layer,and everything we are doing must inevitably lead to this result.

“Today’s economic policies, if pursued, can only lead to the annihilation of the human race.”

He wants a global emergency declared, with energy consumption cut by 70 to 80 per cent, the world’s youth planting trees to absorb carbon dioxide and an end to development projects which destroy forests - NZPA

Scientist issue ‘last chance’ warning

Humans would have to make wide-ranging changes in attitudes and lifestyles quickly if they were to survive the changes begun by pollution and deforestation, scientists told an Auckland symposium at the weekend.

the Dominion,

27 March, 1989

Scientists and researchers said the human race might die out without a new spirit of co-operation and collectivism.

They said it was becoming increasingly likely that the planet would re-organise its systems to rid itself of pollution, the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion.

While the planet would survive, there was a fair chance the human race would not, they said.

They believe a theory known as the Gaia hypothesis may be the key to our survival.

Gaia is the classical Greek word for earth.

The hypothesis was developed by Dr. James Lovelock, who worked for the American space programme searching for signs of lie on Mars.

He suggested the earth was one complex organism, with an underlying organisation between every species ans system on the planet.

The human race was only one of that organism, scientists said, and there was a chance the planet was already organising itself to counteract the greenhouse warming, pollution, deforestation and ozone depeltion, by effectively kicking the human race out, moving into a diferent state in which humanity could not survive.

Ecologist Dr. Warwick Fox, a national research fellow at the centre for environmental studies at the University of Tasmania said the planet’s geological, chemical and biological cycles were so closely linked that scientists had to view the system as a single organism.

Professor John Morton said it looked as if humanity was likely to fail.

“We have to as ourselves if Gaia will at last become impatient and restructure itself to survive, making one of its species, humanity, redundant”, he said.

Scientists warned that when the global system was disturbed, it reached a critical threshold after a time and took on a completely different state.

Dr. Fox said people saw this every day when they heated water.

“The water in the pot quietly gets hotter and hotter, and suddenly its temperature reaches a critical threshold.

“And you’ve got turbulence and big bubbles of air and the water is boiling.

“A very different state from when you put it into the pot.”

What worried scientists so much was that the human species had introduced many disturbances in the past century and there was no way of telling when the earth would reach its critical threshold and flip into a different state which might or might not include humans.

That’s the double-edged sword. We’re playing with fire if we muck around with a highly-ordered system. And we’ve already done a great deal of mucking around with this planet in the past century or so,” Dr. Fox said.

Scientists involved in biological and microbial research said their research was starting to yield proof the Gaia hypothesis was correct.

Michael Crofoot, a researcher and writer on microbial symbiosis said scientists agreed that virtually all land plants had a symbiotic relationship with the fungi attached to their roots.

These fungi fed water and nutrients into the root and the extent of this assistance had astonished forest scientists.

“Up to four years ago, carefully controlled experiments found plant communities share nitrogen and other nutrients through the mycorrhizal fungi attached to their roots,” Mr. Crofoot said.

“Someone pointed out that in that case, you could say the tree was an appendage of the fungi.

“That means the forest is in fact one living organism. It’s the best physical evidence we’ve got of the truth of the Gaia hypothesis. We’re being taught a most amazing lesson, one we could perhaps only have learned now, when we are on our deathbed,” he said.

Here is a documentary made by Teddy Goldsmith

"Edward Goldsmith - The Green Revolutionary" 

Edward 'Teddy' Goldsmith, the grandfather of the modern environmental movement argues that the planetary crisis facing us today cannot be solved by further economic progress and technological innovation but only through the cooperative efforts of ordinary people guided by their faith in traditional wisdom

Part 1 - The Problem: industrial society

Part 2 - The Solution: people and planet

Publisher of the Ecologist Speaks About Biotechnology and Global Warming

Democracy Now!

30 April, 1999

Listen to the podcast HERE

And a discussion between Goldsmith and Jack Shallcrass. There are 

6 parts to this discussion.

Prescient words from Teddy Golsmith

Extinction within several decades – Edward Goldsmith’s 1989 prediction

Edward ('Teddy') Goldsmith, founder of the Ecologist magazine was like a grandfather to the ecological movement. 

Teddy Goldsmith was one of my greatest influences from the end of the 80's when he stated categorically that if nothing was done mankind would be extinct within a few decades.

He also accurately identified the reasons why it it was highly unlikely that anything would be done.

All this back in 1989 -90

"New Lamps for Old" - interview with Edward Goldsmith

Satish Kumar interviews Teddy Goldsmith founder of The Ecologist magazine and author of "The Way: an ecological world view"

"Edward Goldsmith - The Green Revolutionary"

Edward 'Teddy' Goldsmith, the grandfather of the modern environmental movement argues that the planetary crisis facing us today cannot be solved by further economic progress and technological innovation but only through the cooperative efforts of ordinary people guided by their faith in traditional wisdom

Part 1 - The Problem: industrial society

Part 2 - The Solution: people and planet

First aired as part of Channel 4's Fragile Earth series 1990, UK

Edward Goldsmith - Corporate Organized Crime (1992)

Edward Goldsmith describes how many multinational corporations amount to little more than vast criminal enterprises (1992).

Denial

Here are my rambling reflections on Guy McPherson's visit to Wellington and my own experiences of climate change denial and resonances with my own personal journey

Reflecting on climate change denial and a decline in personal health

Seemorerocks

The Wellington leg of Guy McPherson's visit to New Zealand is over, so it is time for me to sum up what this has meant for me

Pam and I have enjoyed having Guy and his wife Sheila to stay. Both of them have been delightful guests.  After spending several days in Guy's company I now feel I know him well enough to say a few things.  

Above all, the impression is of someone who is self-contained and undemanding. Apart from the odd ice cream Guy didn't really have many personal demands apart from the space needed to  keep up with what he does every day - to keep up with communications, with the news of the day and the continuing story of the crazy suicidal and omnicidal slide of this species towards destruction.

Above all (and I can only say this of a very small number of people I have encountered in my lifetime), the word that comes to mind is congruence.  I have seen nothing to contradict the impression of someone who wants to communicate  the truth as he sees it to those who are willing to listen and most of his waking hours, as I have seen, are dedicated to that end.

So, when I hear about the efforts of a particular individual to work behind the scenes to attempt to undermine his message and to try and warn people off,  I feel angry.

Fortunately, I am pleased to be able to say that such efforts thus far have failed completely and Guy has had an audience that was more than willing to listen with open minds and hearts and then to make up their own minds about what they have heard.  

In Wellington, at east, there has been no sign of minds already made up and in violent denial that I have encountered elsewhere.

In fact the marae experience for me was one of a group of people that were open-minded and willing to listen to each other and discuss their responses.


THE LOSS OF HOPE

There were resonances in Saturday's seminar at the marae, for one of the last times I had been there was to attend a very similar gathering 15 years ago with the renowned British ecologist Teddy Goldsmith who had a very similar message to that of Guy's.

Back in 1988, when I first heard him and was hearing about climate change for the first time Teddy Goldsmith announced that in his opinion the world had only ten years to put things right and predicted human extinction within forty years due to environmental destruction, mass extinction and - above all- climate change.  

Back in those days (unlike today) his opinion was reported and carried in an article in the local paper, the Dominion.

Here he his talking back in 1998 about globalisation and Maori.

Back then we all lived in hope that there would be a consensus amongst world leaders to actually do something about greenhouse emissions.

I can well remember the week I lost hope. 

That was at the time of the COP15 talks in Copenhagen. 

I can remember the horror watching the daily broadcasts from Democracy Now!, seeing the police pursue and beat up activists. NGO's were excluded from the main meeting. Delegates from the Third World had to queue outside for hours in the snow. The desperate pleas from leaders of the  Maldives and Pacific Island nations like Tuvalu for action fell on deaf ears as the talking heads disagreed with each other.

In fact, the only thing that they could agree on was to do nothing.

This was also the time when I watched the BBC documentary called Global Dimming which posited for the first time the possibility of runaway climate change as the result of the release of methane in the world's oceans. It also demonstrated how temperature could rise quickly in a matter of days when just the planes were taken out of the sky (after 9/11).

That was when I felt in my heart that the game was over.

I put it all aside for concerns about economic collapse and Peak Oil

When I heard Guy McPherson speak for the first time none none of what he have to say surprised me very much but immediately resonated as it had when I first heard Mike Ruppert ("the whole economy is a ponzi scheme) talk about Peak Oil and Collapse.

Guy visited New Zealand in 2012 and I organised a single lecture locally in Petone.  

He talked, as he had previously of his hope that humanity would be saved from near-term extinction by Peak Oil and the complete collapse of human industrial society.

Apart from being wrong (like everyone else) about imminent collapse the reporting of an increasing number of self-reinforcing feedback loops forced him around this time to reconsider this position and to conclude that there was now nothing that could be one to prevent the extinction of the human species (and most life on this planet) within one generation.

TALKING OF DENIAL AND ILLNESS

Now I would like to talk about the subject that means the most to me- that is myself.

How has it been for me?

I have been living this for several years now and so nothing is totally new to me.

Perhaps I can say that nothing surprises me any more but I have never lost the ability to be shocked.

I have been in some from of grief for the planet - perhaps for as long as I remember, however, not lost in depression or despair as those who talk about a 'death cult'  suggest.

The one thing, above all that raises my hackles above all else is denial and what is called in Buddhism 'sceptical doubt' - first and foremost those who seem to be immune to any from of evidence or proof.

All of this is inextricably tied up with my own personal fate and often I have been unable to distinguish the two . 

When I meet with abject denial there's a lot of resonance with my own personal situation.

I have experienced delicate health throughout much of my life, something that I can attribute in hindsight, as being due to early exposure to pesticides (specifically, paraquat). 

Never, throughout that period, from my childhood on, have medical practitioners ever been able to correctly diagnose, still less treat, any conditions, from bedwetting as a child, severe itching from adolescence to fatigue, allergies and other symptoms - as an adult.

Neither have they ever once admitted failure

In the last few years (but especially in the past four)  I have experienced a continual and rapid decline In my health.

Previously I was able to go for a 2 to 3 days tricking in the bush; now I can scarcely walk around more than a couple of blocks. Several years ago I was very good teacher (and practitioner of yoga) and was able to sit in the full lotus; now I cannot even sit on the floor. Just four years ago I was participating in competitive tail rides with Biscuit; now I go for short rides when I feel able to.

Prior to 2010 I had only been in hospital once since I was a child and very rarely consulted a medical practitioner and was almost invariably disappointed when I did, having been fobbed off with statements like "there is only anecdotal evidence that food has anything to do with allergies"  or "there is not connection [between symptoms of a frontal headache and urinary urgency]  because they are are in different parts of the body".

I am not joking! I have actually been told the above!

In the last four years I have been a regular visitor to the hospital (twice in an ambulance) and have had two operations.

I have had two diagnoses to explain symptoms that I was going through at the time - sarcoidosis (which I seem to be clear of since the blood tests have normalised themselves) and transient ischemic attacks (something that was never substantiated by tests) and a melanoma that was surgically removed and they seem confident is in abeyance.

Every time I go back for a consultation I am told (with a nice smile) that everything is back to normal - practically that there's nothing wrong.

Well, that must explain why my wellbeing continues to decline, practically without explanation.

I suppose, from their point-of-view I must epitomise what they call psycho-somatic illness.

For them environmental illness doesn't exit, still less such crippling and serious conditions such as candidiasis: and neither does any malady that can't be picked up through routine testing.

This is how they explain it:

"In people who have a somatic symptom disorder, medical test results are either normal or do not explain the person's symptoms, and history and physical examination do not indicate the presence of a medical condition that could cause them"

The fact that in their yes I am a trained quack (acupuncture and TCM) doesn't help.

Well, I am afraid I cannot make any distinction between these medical practitioners and those climate scientists who are wedded to their computer models that bear less and less relationship with observed reality as the ice melts, methane is released from the seafloor and the tundra and positive feedback after feedback is observed.

It's all denial.

Similarly, no conventional practitioner has the humility to admit they have no idea what's  going on (I know this will be familiar to many that suffer from environmental illness.

Instead they have to come up with a theoretical model to justify the gaps in their own practice. 

Simply, if it is not confirmed by their testing models it does not exist!

LIVING WITH DEATH IN MIND

Not only have I had to live with the denial of the medical Establishment but also have had to live with the everyday denial of well-meaning friends who hope that I am getting better and when I explain that I am getting worse won't have a bar of it.

I feel every time I'm asked "how are you?" that I am about to have an apoplectic fit.

I have been provided in the last day or so with the perfect response to "how are you?". The answer is "I'm fine", FINE being an acronym - "Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, Emotionally unavailable".

Not that I feel that I'm any of the above.

I'll have to find my own acronym.

What has come out in the past few days while Guy has been here, is that denial, (whether of near-term human  extinction, illness or death) is intimately connected to a death-denying culture that cannot even bear to mention Death by its name but has to say someone " passed over", "one to a better place" etc.

Well, thanks to my condition and a feeling that something is seriously remiss, I have had ample opportunities to contemplate death which, now seems much less of a threat.

We talk of Life and Death as if Death were the opposite of Life. In reality it is not so; Death is really the opposite of Birth.

I am reminded for some reason of something Woody Allen said in one of his films - "I'm not afraid of Death; it's dying I'm afraid of".

My disappointments have not really ended.

After the wonderful discussions in the weekend I decided to confide in someone who I thought might understand  where I'm coming from.  Instead of just listening - (something I consider to be the highest art of the counsellor) what I got was still more from what I always experience - yet more advice and problem solving. Had I considered hypnosis or any number of other things suggested with a very passing acquaintance with either me or what was ailing me?

Well, sorry - I've been working full-time on this for twenty years, even training full-time as a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner, as part of my quest to heal myself.

I've now passed beyond that to a state of acceptance.

This is the fate I've been handed - just as much as the legacy of the activities of civilised humans is. 

I'm more or less ready for what Fate hands me. Perhaps I'll go on like this for some considerable time, or maybe I'll die as a result of this illness.

One of this means that I will not do the things that are needed for me to maintain the greatest possible level of wellbeing.

But it also means, as sure as eggs, that I won't be looking around for yet another miracle cure - something that is offered to me with painful regularity.

I will continue to act to the extent that I can. These acts will be one of rebellion against the Empire.

But like Chris Hedges, I'm not so naive as to believe they're going to make any difference.

Op-Ed

Betrayal of Hope

Seemorerocks

As the tragic events in the Philippines unfold things are happening pretty much in line with the 'worst-case' scenarios laid out by people back in the early days of climate change awareness said predicted.

That has caused me to go back to recollecting the past.

My first awareness of global warming goes back to 1988 when I was travelling in Asia. I read an article in the Bangkok Post that made a huge impression on me. I remember going to the New Zealand embassy to check on the newspapers and looked for reference to climate change: all I could find was a small article saying that climate change may be bad for the ski fields!

Signs of the future.

My awareness was furthered by hearing talks by the great environmentalist, the late Teddy Goldsmith, who warned, back in 1988 that the world had ten years to put things right, and was predicting extinction of life on the planet.

Wind on a bit further and I remember being influenced by a 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance” by one Al Gore who went on to become vice president of the United States.

That was before he went on to push through neo-Liberal economic policies and dismantle social and economic protections and then to help to torpedo the Kyoto negotiations. It was before he went on to make money on what is essentially a ponzi scheme called carbon trading (or cap-and-trade), that has very little to do with cutting Greenhouse gasses.

In fact I remember James Hansen saying the Kyoto protocol (1997) helped to increase emissions.

Anyway, back then reading his book was the first time I saw the outlandish prediction that with climate change we are likely to see mega-storms, stronger and more frequent than any time in recorded history.

When I realised who he was, I remember thinking how fortunate we were having someone like this as vice-president of the United States.

How little I knew!

By 1997 we knew that our hopes had basically been betrayed. Things could hardly get worse.

Little did I know.

We had the stolen election of 2000, 9/11 and the 'war on terror' which continues to this day.

If we thought there might be some light with the election of Barack Hessein Obama, this was dashed with the COP-15 talks in Copenhagen.

I remember watching in-depth coverage of the events on Democracy Now! I remember watching in horror with my friends Pam and Dido as events unfolded.

I remember how environmental activists were first excluded, demonstrated and were beaten by police; how delegates from Third World countries had to queue for hours in the snow.

I remember the pleas from leaders of small island states such as Vanuatu, the Solomons and the Maldives pleaded for action

I watched how the developed countries (led by Obama and the United States) torpedoed the talks- how the world agreed not to agree.

I remember how Tim Grosser, who had just become New Zealand's Minister for Treaty Negotiations, defended COP15 and condemned Pacific Island leaders for their statements.

This was the moment when hope for any meaningful action that would halt the destruction of our beautiful planet was extinguished.

It was before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis; it was before Deepwater Horizon, before the earthquake, tsunami and catastrophic nuclear meltdown at Fukushima.

It was before we started hearing about the melting of the Arctic ice cap and the release of methane from the Arctic ocean and the melting permafrost of Siberia.

It was before the 26 (at last count) positive, self-reinforcing feedbacks.

In fact, it was at almost exactly at this time that I found a BBC documentary, Global Dimming, that had a huge effect on me.  It examined the effect of pollution on dimming sunlight and hiding the effects of global warming. It was the first source to talk about runaway climate change and posit the possibility of sudden release of methane from the sea floor, leading to runway global warming.

More or less exactly what we are witnessing today

As an aside, it was before (I think) when Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! chose corporate funding over principle for her TV show.  

In those days she was still doing good work and chronicled the betrayal of climate justice at COP15.

Here she is interviewed at the conference


 
Since then a few other people I trusted and looked up to, have proved to be disappointments, notably George Monbiot who I used to read avidly, waited for the Fukushima disaster to adopt nuclear power as a saviour in the fight against global warming.  He has also, since then, swallowed the corporate disinformation and done a mea culpa on Peak Oil.

The days in which truths were much simpler and we (the tiny minority) stood united against corporate power and for climate justice have well-and-truly passed.

It has proved too difficult a pill to swallow for many of yesterday's friends to acknowledge that the days of finding a 'solution', of moving back to 350 ppm (or in any way halting the runaway train).

Instead we see hopium served up in truckloads. If we just donate and help build up a movement, if we divest from investment in hydrocarbons (or whatever), we can save the planet.

It takes guts to recognise that (in all probability) the game's up.

It takes even more fortitude to embrace uncertainty.

I have gone through all the emotions identified by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross - anger, depression (not so much denial and bargaining), and hopefully, some acceptance. 

The past few days in the Philippines have shown us that we are not going to quietly disappear into oblivion

Things are going to become very ugly indeed.

Just to finish off where we began here is the plea from the Filippino delegate at the Doha climate change talks.

Edward Goldsmith on Globalisation

One of the great influences on my thinking was the great Teddy Goldsmith (1928-2009) who used to be a regular visitor to these shores.

This video was made back in 1998. It is interesting to compare the predictions made 14 years ago with the reality of today.

Globalisation and Maori

Edward Goldsmith explains the corporate takeover of governments and the global centralised planning being orchestrated by multinationals through the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Globalisation and Maori explores this corporate agenda through its impact upon the Maori of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and other peoples.

TKM Productions, Aotearoa 1998.

Interviews with: Edward Goldsmith, Moana Jackson, Dr Jane Kelsey, Aroha Meade, Sir Tipene ORegan, Tauni Sinclair, Moana Sinclair, Sharon Venne, Dr Huirangi Whaikerepuru

See also

“New Lamps for Old” – interview (1991)