Um... Phil: I like that quote but I'm not sure that ancient Chinese philosophy was quite what Bill had in mind.

I think the big issue is not getting people to understand what's wrong, but the feeling that it can't be all that serious, can it? The elephant in the room thing. Apart from us misanthropic environmentalists, most people want to believe that things will slowly and inevitably get better, and so have a hard time imagining a fundamentally changed world. Personally, I grew up with the fear of nuclear holocaust, and well, we waited that one out(?) and so now it feels perfectly natural to do the same with GW.

The "Nazi Threat" analogy provides an object lesson in the dangers of complacency and the real possibility of unimaginable catastrophic events actually coming true.

Of course, it's been overused as well, but I think that in this case it's much more a propos than with po-dunk dictators like Milosovich or Saddam Hussein.

How about "Like a pelican in the food chain". The nice thing is it shows that change for the good can happen. Pelicans in my area have come back gang busters since the 1970's...

The current generation might witness the most spectacular collapse of human civilization that has ever occurred. The "canaries" started dying over a century ago and continue to drop dead left and right all around us.

Our civilization is on the verge of collapse for almost every single reason Jared Diamond describes in his book, Collapse. But we just don't get it.

We have studied the past. We have identified why our predecessors failed. There are actually records of past catastrophes. We don't even have to come up with a best guess as to what happened.

But our political leaders refuse to learn from --  or perhaps even try reading just a little bit of -- what historians, archeologist, and anthropologists have studied. Indeed, the fools laugh at academics while the entire web of life unravels and our existence seriously threatened.

Does anyone have any ideas regarding how we can open our leaders' eyes to lessons learned from history? I doubt any of them believe that the Middle East was once lush. I doubt any of them believe that the city Petra was once surrounded by oak savanna and grassland. There a re many example of humans suffering when they abuse the natural world.

Perhaps the best metaphor -- drawing on Jared Diamond again -- is Easter Island. It was covered with enormous palms suitable for building shelter and boats. The forest allowed rain water to soak into the ground and support agricultural crops. But they slowly -- very slowly -- cut down the trees in a bizarre competition to see which tribe (or family group) could build the largest stone momument . After awhile, they no longer had trees large enough for building boats, so they could no longer fish. Then the soil started washing away. Then the trees were no longer large enough for shelter. They burned the rest to keep warm. The island, stripped of vegetation, did not recover. The human population plumetted.

Sadly, the survivors, generations after the process started had no idea how their ancestors lived -- it has all been figured out via archaelogy and other fields. As far as the survivors were concerned, Easter Island was always desolate. Jared Diamond described this a "creeping normalcy". It happen so slowly, each generation was unable to recognize that anything was wrong. This is where the metaphor fails. It is clear that something is wrong... and we still can't act.

My account is rather abbreviated and from memory. I highly suggest reading a few chapters from Jared Diamond's book is you want precise details.

Peace.

Forward!

..chimp in the whitehouse?  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Hey, all:

Assuming we have to have a metaphor, which I try to resist but nevertheless succumb to, the one I have used in the past is the reference to a bird which 'fouls its nest' and therefore has to move annually to continue.  Another similar more directly human metaphor is 'spoiling the campsite', requiring that the tribe move, serially spoiling location after location, all of which initially offered food, water and protection.  In fact, archaeologists deal with middens, piles of rubble and the waste of living, left by early man all over the world.  

Extending this concept to the 'Earth as midden' for the global disposal of human refuse of all types, whether it is industrial, personal, agricultural, or the walking residue of the economic exploitation and rape of cultures, is an easy jump, when we point out such things as chemicals being found in ice cores and krill and throughout the food web thousands of miles from the point of production.   We can actually see perhaps parallels of real middens in the form of ruined inner cities, so maybe the 'midden' concept is not too far off the mark.  

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

Hey, all:

I wrote my previous message without seeing Wiscidea's message, and I agree that there really need not be a separate metaphor--they all tend to break down at some point, anyway--and we are our own metaphor.  

In fact, this is transcendently summed up by a 'possum:

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."  --  Pogo

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

show them 'before and after' pictures.

Works amazingly well.

Whiskerfish

to my mind means seeing GW as a part of a suite of existential threats.

This may be heresy to those of us who've focuused on GW as the big one for the last few decades,
but it is the reality we face -

No rational effort to address GW can ignore global water insecurity, nor peak fossil energy production, nor fertile soil depletion.

In addition to these elemental stresses, there is also a comparable organic hazard, with novel pathogens evolving/appearing as a result of our conduct
(e.g. tropical deforestation, battery chicken farming, anti-biotic broadcasting, etc)

This suite of threats could be described in an update of an old metaphor:

Four Horsemen, & a Chicken -

being:

 Earth (soil depletion)
 Air    (climate destabilization)
 Fire   (fossil fuels' depletion)
 Water  (aquifer & watercourse depletion)

and the Chicken - is about Battery Chicken Flu -
which is only one example of a potentially catastrophic modern contageon.

To get a handle on useful policy, an integrative metaphor is required.

"Four Horsemen, and a Chicken" is the best I've seen.

Regards,

Bill

I have had some success by tying discussions about the effects of climate disruption to the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Billhook's list combining the four kinds of matter according to the ancients and calling them "horsemen" doesn't work as well for me. But the real ones seem to cover all the bases nicely:

War -- a natural result of collapsing resource bases throughout our history, particularly given our overpopulated state and the reality of what happens when huge waves of refugees go seek a place of refuge today.

Famine -- a natural result of drought and weather induced crop losses and of #3

Pestilence -- the natural result of climate change allowing disease vectors and crop destroyers to range in new areas where they have no natural predators;

All of which, singly and combined naturally cause

4) Disease -- which we will be increasingly challenged to deal with as people with no resistance to tropical diseases get them (and which also contributes to #2, as people are not the only ones to suffer from new diseases made possible through climate destabilization).

"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."

...trying to use commonly understood terms:

Global warming
Peak oil (could also include other peaks, like natural gas, coal, and water)
Mass extinction -- seems to be a commonly used term, although I think ecosystem destruction might be more accurate, would include loss of soils
Globalization -- which would cover poverty but also the coming decline or even collapse of the U.S. dollar and economy because of the decline of manufacturing, could also include possible global financial meltdowns and housing bubble.

By the way, Richard Heinberg uses the metaphor of yeast in a bottle of grape juice, both eating all of their food source and emitting alcohol which eventually kills them -- although it turns into wine, so the end result is good.

That is to say, competition for land over food and fuel.

There seems to be some confusion regarding what the metaphor of the canary in the coalmine is supposed to accomplish.  As I understand it, coalminers would take a caged canary down with them into the mine, because in the event of a toxic gas leak (?; carbon monoxide?), the bird, because of its higher metabolism and greater sensitivity to poor air quality, would perish sooner than the human miners; and the latter, if they notice in time the death of the bird, would hopefully have time to escape.

When it is applied to the observed decline in certain species, taken as evidence of the effects of global warming, which is of course predicted to have a number of bad effects on human beings, then the metaphor seems fine, and is in no way exhausted, meaning-wise.  What I think John Fleck is getting at is that it is being used so often nowadays that it is becoming a cliche', too stale to be effective.

To be sure, the metaphor is far from perfect.  For one thing, the coalminers are not especially concerned for the welfare of the canary, they are just exploiting it; but we (or many of us at least) by contrast are indeed very concerned for the welfare of endangered wildlife.

Also, the nature of the warning from endangered wildlife is more complicated and indirect.  Take for example four animals of Arctic North America who are showing signs of being under unusual stress on account of global warming: the polar bear, the black guillemot, the caribou and the Arctic fox.  These animals are in fact in trouble for different GW-related reasons.  The range of the Arctic fox is shrinking, and it is being out-competed against by the red fox, which can now survive at higher latitudes.  Caribou are beset by increased numbers of biting insects; predators are expanding their ranges during the calving season and the calves' first migration; rivers are flowing more strongly earlier in the season, making it difficult for calves to swim across.  Both polar bears and guillemots are affected adversely by the increasing absence of ocean ice, but in different ways: the bears need it to bring them to the seals which are their favorite prey; the birds need it to shelter the islands on which they nest.

Moreover, the specific mechanism by which any of these animals is endangered is not a problem which will directly affect (most) human beings (though some Inuit have been complaining about weak and untrustworthy ice).  Things are different than in that coal mine, where the very same carbon monoxide which killed the canary will kill the miners too, and in the same way, if they do not escape.

So perhaps it is indeed time to retire the canary.

Now, Bill McKibben seems to be searching for a different kind of metaphor, to illustrate a different phenomenon.  It is not clear to me what he has in mind.  But by a kind of synchronicity, there seem to be a number of impatient suggestions in the air lately, to the effect that traditional environmentalism either is not doing the job it is supposed to do, or is unable to keep up with the complexity of our present difficulties.

I like very much the suggestions of Billhook and JMG, as well as WiscIdea's reference to the lessons of Jared Diamond.  And thanks to Sustainable David, for quoting the famous line from Pogo, surely one of the most creative and thought-provoking comic strips of all time.

As has been observed, no metaphor is going to be quite adequate.  But in this context we might remember a timeless theme in ancient Greek religion, encapsulated in the inscriptions on the door of Apollo's oracle at Delphi: "Know yourself" (meaning, live within your limitations), and "Nothing in excess."  One mythological figure who is a negative example, illustrating the bad things that result when we ignore that wisdom, is King Midas.  He treated hospitably a follower of Dionysus named Silenus, who had got lost; when he returned him safe and sound to Dionysus, the god granted him anything for which he might wish.  Midas foolishly wished that everything he touched should be turned to gold.  For a few minutes he had fun touching things in his house and watching them be transformed into gold.  But then he put his hand on his robe, and found himself enclosed in a heavy, stiff sheath.  His cat leaped into his arms, and became a golden statue.  His daughter ran to greet him, and the same thing happened to her.  Finally, trying to eat, he quickly realized that he would helplessly turn all his food to gold even as he was lifting it to his mouth, and so he would starve before long.  In terror, he cried out to Dionysus, and begged him to take away the gift.

In perhaps a similar way, it could be said that we are doing to ourselves what Midas did to himself: in our use of resources and quest for ever greater wealth, and by the very activities with which we have remade the world so as to enrich ourselves, we have in fact rendered the world deadly, to ourselves and to those we love.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

I'm thinking, maybe a whole caravan of Hummers (with one driver and no passengers in each, of course) picking up speed as they head down an ever steeper, narrower, canyon dirt road with no room to turn around, as they head straight for a cliff.  The longer the drivers wait to apply the brakes, the less likely it is that it will do any good.  There is some possibility that some of those in fortunate positions in the back of the pack could act to save themselves, but most people are looking at a serious accident at best if the whole mob doesn't act quickly and together.  And if they do get a clue in time to avoid going right over the cliff like a bunch of over sized lemmings in an absurd Disney film, it will mean getting out and walking because there is no way back to the same old highway they used to get to the canyon without some serious hardship and reinvestment in what will hopefully be some much more practical technology for moving some hell raisin' monkeys without tails from place to place.

The metaphor I prefer is "The Planet Earth Buffet".

The buffet best illustrates our culture with regard to exhaustive consumption and resources. People belly up to a buffet to eat as much as they possibly can whether they are hungry or not or even to the very detriment of their own health. They will often take far more than they can personally consume leaving tremendous waste.

The Planet Earth Buffet represents a long line of generations to come waiting outside to have their turn, while the current generation, inside, exhausts the bounty available.

What makes the Planet Earth Buffet truly different, though, is that the waste from our plates and the toilet is tossed back into the kitchen to be remixed and served again making many sick but, nonetheless, happy to belly up again. The kitchen ingredients are finite while our appetites are infinite. And when the kitchen runs out of resources, the entire restaurant collapses in upon itself.

What is especially intriquing is that we know that what we are doing will exhaust the resources, destroy the restaurant, and leave the next generations with lives that will be brutish and short and, yet, we really don't care. Because, you know, I paid to belly up to this buffet and I'm going to get as much as I can. Now fuck off tree hugger.

Bon appetit.

"One hand in the bush is better than no bush at all."

Trittles

Why not something involving a meteor? If global climate change continues unchecked, we're looking at an extinction-level event. We haven't had one of those since that big ol' meteor crashed into the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago...

There was nothing the dinosaurs could do about that meteor, but the one we're dealing with here is of our own design, and we are (in theory) bright enough to deal with it. Maybe we need to call in a metaphorical Bruce Willis and his team of drillers to deal with this latest "meteor."

Global warming is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

Bill is right we should scrap the canary metaphor and personalize the issue.  When someone asks me what can be done to save the planet I respond:

"Don't worry about the planet, the planet has been fine for several billion years, you should focus on saving yourself."

People need to understand that it is not only canaries at risk.

Regards, Professorlife

But who are you, after all?  Who is this fragile, ephemeral being called "yourself"?

When we cease to worry about the canaries, the polar bears, etc., we have taken a powerful step toward self-zombification.

And when we try to justify ceasing to worry about the canaries, the polar bears, etc., we have boarded the self-zombification express.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Dear Ellie,

please note, I quoted from your excellent comment in DR's "Carson nonsense" thread.

I like your point very much, and I admire you for praising Rachel Carson.

But I wonder if the image of the sentinel lion is quite right.  Here in NYC, in front of the temple-like palace, on 5th Avenue, which houses the main collection of the New York Public Library, there are two famous recumbent stone lions, on either side of the great flight of stairs leading up to the entrance.  They never move, they never budge, and we have no doubt that they would be of no use whatsoever in defending the library from an incursion of barbarians.  And indeed one of them has been given the name of "Patience," and the other has been called "Fortitude": great and important virtues indeed, but rather passive ones.

Perhaps you can clarify your image?  We certainly need our heroes, and I look to you to give us some.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

I interpreted the Professor's remark as follows:

If we focus on really saving ourselves, we cannot help but save the rest of life on Earth as well. I think the Professor was implying that we are highly dependent on the current web of life.

Certainly, the Earth can take care of itself. Life in general will prevail, and eventually fill empty niches, even if vast numbers of species go extinct. It has happened before. Unfortunately, if someone happened to be a trilobite or a dinosaur or some other organism that once lived in every body of water or on every continent, but no longer exists, such remarks would not be very comforting.

We might be trilobites -- spectacularly successful (please consider reading "Trilobite!" by Richard Fortey), but doomed to complete extinction as a result of climate change. If they were sentient, they probably would have laughed at the notion that they could all disappear in a geological wink of an eye.

So if we really want to save ourselves, we have to save everything else that exists right now. We do not know -- and probably never will know -- what can be discarded without killing our own species.

Peace.

Forward!

Thanks, WiscIdea, for that positive interpretation of the Professor's remark.  That remark still looks pretty inscrutable and indecipherable to me, but with you persuading me, I shall give the Professor the benefit of the doubt.

I do not know Richard Fortey's book, but indeed, as you say, the trilobites were a remarkably successful lineage of arthropods, lasting from the Cambrian/Silurian to the end of the Permian.  

Ditto the dinosaurs.  One must realize that the very last of the non-avian dinosaurs, who died off in the Cretaceous/Tertiary mass extinction (65 mya), such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, were closer in time to us than they were to the classic late-Jurassic dinosaurs (145 mya) such as Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus and Allosaurus.

It is a matter of controversy, of course, but it seems that both the last trilobites and the last dinosaurs were done in by some extinction event that doomed very many kinds of animals.  The terminal-Permian mass extinction was even more destructive than the terminal-Cretaceous extinction.

I am not quite sure I see how we are like trilobites.  Jamie makes much more sense to me: We seem to be like the meteoric body which produced the Chicxulub crater, and is believed by many to have caused the Cretaceous/Tertiary extinction event.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Here's one I'm looking for

Obviously there's skeptics or more derogitory deniers, or denialists.

Now what do we call ourselves?

Canary in a SUV?