Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Environment Page 5 of 16

So Much Plastic Chemical Contamination in Rainwater It’s Unsafe to Drink

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On August 12, 2022

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Sigh.

Remember when you were a kid, and it was fun to tip your head back during a rainstorm and open your mouth to drink the drops? You shouldn’t do that anymore. That’s because you’ll be ingesting too many particles of Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), the hazardous chemicals that leach from the ultra-durable plastics we’ve created for about the past 120 years.

Earth is officially past its safe zone for plastic contamination. The PFAS “boundary has been exceeded,” according to a study published August 2 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. PFAS are known to be hazardous to both the environment and human health. At this point, these “forever chemicals” are all over the globe and have seeded the atmosphere. Most importantly, they don’t break down in the environment.

This stuff can be removed from drinking water in various ways, but that doesn’t remove it from the environment. This also implies that drinking water from most, perhaps all, freshwater sources, is no longer safe. As a child in British Columbia and the Yukon in Canada, I often drank water from snow- and glacier-driven streams and rivers, but no longer.

Health Effects:

The health effects of PFAS vary, but include reproductive, developmental, and immunological problems. Since PFAS don’t easily break down and can accumulate in the human body overtime, the more exposure a person has, the greater the chance of negative health effects. The EPA has cited evidence linking PFAS exposure to the following:

    • increased cholesterol levels
    • suppressed immune system
    • thyroid hormone disruption
    • liver and kidney damage
    • low infant birth weight
    • cancer

… PFAS can be removed from water through reverse osmosis, activated carbon filtration, and ion exchange.

Ah, joy.

This is separate from the issue of microplastics, which are now commonly found in blood and organs of humans and animals, and which some bacteria do feed on, though not enough to have a significant effect yet. (We can hope that evolution, natural or human-induced, will create more bacteria which eats plastic.)

Based on these type of studies, researchers have hypothesized that human exposure to microplastics could lead to oxidative stress, DNA damage, and inflammation — among other health problems. Particularly, when inflammation becomes chronic, this can pave the way to very serious health problems. However, it’s not only the plastic particles themselves that are potentially harmful: The microplastic surfaces in the environment are colonised by micro-organisms, some of which have been identified as human pathogens.

Human pathogens have a particularly strong bind to plastic waste, more so than to natural surfaces. Research published in 2016 identified the human pathogen Vibrio cholera, which causes cholera in humans, attached to microplastics sampled from the North and Baltic Seas.

Wonderful. I can’t find the original source, but I remember someone quipping:

“Born too late to explore the world, and too soon to roam the stars, but just in time to have microplastics in our blood.

Of course in many areas, rainwater is still too acidic to drink, so there’s that — though at least the horrible acid rain of my youth no longer plagues most of North America. We exported the industry which produces it to south-east China and various other manufacturing domiciles.

The fact of the matter is that human society is simply incapable of handling the power we’ve gained since the industrial revolution. Even when we know we’re doing massive harm, we don’t stop, or clean up, and we lie about it. In my youth, we moved from glass bottles for almost everything (including pop, as they were massively heavy) to plastic, and said “plastic can be recycled.” But most plastic isn’t recycled; only about eight percent ever has been and it’s not easy to recycle plastic because it has to be separated into different types first, since each type requires a different heat to be melted and reformed.

What’s happening, with climate, pathogens, plastic, and far more is classic “sorcerer’s apprentice” stuff: We have power we can’t control, and when we use it, we do harm.

This is why even if all the “best time ever to be alive” books and articles were right (a questionable assertion, but it is true for many people), they’re wrong in a larger sense — it’s like saying, “Man, I’m staying warm!” as you burn down your house. Once you’re finished burning your house, you’re screwed. Except what we’re burning down is the environment which keeps us healthy, fed, watered, and protected from temperatures too cold or hot to survive, as with the infamous point where it’s so hot the human body can’t cool itself.

People often point to a study published in 2010 that estimated that a wet-bulb temperature of 35 C – equal to 95 F at 100 percent humidity, or 115 F at 50 percent humidity – would be the upper limit of safety, beyond which the human body can no longer cool itself by evaporating sweat from the surface of the body to maintain a stable body core temperature…

…Our studies on young, healthy men and women show that this upper environmental limit is even lower than the theorized 35 C. It’s more like a wet-bulb temperature of 31 C (88 F). That would equal 31 C at 100 percent humidity, or 38 C (100 F) at 60 percent humidity.

This temperature has been hit over the last couple years in India.

It’s a brave new world, and our descendants, and, indeed, many people alive today are or will be cursing us — and with good reason.

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Now That We’re At Peak, How Fast Will Civilization Collapse Be?

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On July 5, 2022

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Last week I wrote an article about the future of civilization, collapse centered around a graph from “Limits To Growth.”

I spent a fair bit of time staring at this graph yesterday, and I want to return to it, because it says some very important things about what’s coming up over the next decades.

The first thing to understand is that the future is, as William Gibson has noted, unevenly distributed. Sri Lanka is currently all-out collapse, for example.

The chart above is GLOBAL. Regional charts will be similar, but not identical and the time axis will differ. Some regions will collapse slower, peak later and so on.

The first thing I want you do is find the population line. Notice that it peaks in 2050.

Now, find the services per capita line. Peaks about 2020.

Now, the industrial output per capita. Also peaks about 2020.

And now look at the food per capita line, same thing.

But it’s not the peak that matters, go back and look at what happens after the peak.

Now, go back to those three lines and see what they do after 2020.

Not quite vertical declines, but very very steep.

Look at the food per capita line now. Go to the very right of the chart, then to the very left.

Somewhat under half the food per capita in 1900 will be produced in 2100. Move back a little and you’ll see it actually bottoms around 2060, then slowly recovers.

All three of the production lines have precipitous declines. The industrial production line manages best, winding up around a 1950 number, but remember that most of the world was not industrialized back then, just Europe, Japan, and North America. This is a world number. Next, consider the primary industrial nation today is China: don’t assume that it’s Europe and North America who will necessarily be the one with the big chunk of the remains: it isn’t going to be just a reversion to 1950 (especially considering the food collapse.)

Services come off the worst: services are, in most cases, luxuries. If we want to keep the important services like health care and education we’re going to have to prioritize them and be ruthless about cutting service crap we don’t actually need.

As for the good stuff, pollution peaks around 2035 in this model. Sounds promising and it is, but the problem is that we will be past self-reinforcing cycles at that point: methane release from permafrost for example, so climate change will continue. And as people become desperate for food, and they will, every wild animal, including the fish, and anything else edible will be plundered, so ecological collapse will continue and even accelerate.

Population doesn’t peak till 2050 in this model. Look down to the food line and you’ll see that food per capita recovers when population declines. In part this indicates a semi-permanent change in the Earth’s carrying capacity: some will recover, over time, but for a long time it just won’t be able to produce as much food for us.

Now, flip over to the death line. It goes vertical in the 2040s. Of course, the Club of Rome couldn’t model Covid, so I suspect we may get there earlier and the plague may help a number of these lines be somewhat better, ironically.

But do notice that when the death line goes vertical, it’s damn near at 90 degrees. A LOT of people are going die.

The population, death and birth lines indicate that deaths are driving the population decrease. I’m hoping that the births line is wrong, it goes vertical not long after the deaths line and that’s why the food per capita numbers remain abysmal. If we want to have even semi-decent conditions for most people we’re going to need decreasing population for quite some time. I’ve seen estimates that the world carrying capacity may crash as much as 80%. Hopefully it won’t be that bad, but if most of the tropics are uninhabitable we’re in a world of hurt and every estimate I’ve seen is that climate change takes away far more agricultural land than it creates farther north.

All of that before we get to the permanent damage done to our supplies of fresh water, which is a definite limiting factor. Even if we make desalinization work, well, there’s a lot of land that’s nowhere near the sea.

This is a chart you should spend time with, till it soaks into your emotional bones. Look at the shape of those curves.

This is civilization collapse. It is going to be very bad, much worse than most people expect.

The collapse has begun, worldwide. It’s not evenly distributed, but it’s here.

We are post peak. Plan accordingly.

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We Are Going To Go Thru Hell, So What Now?

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On May 25, 2022

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I was born in 1968, the year Wallerstein calls one of “world revolution”. It was a revolution that both failed and succeeded: women and minorities got more rights, often a lot more, but the end result was an oligarchy, where most people were equal in their lack of power, and where every year saw ordinary people becoming poorer, no matter what the official statistics claimed.

The 70s were the heyday of environmental possibility: everyone understood the stakes, and it seemed for a time that we would act.

President Carter famously put solar panels on the White House, and President Reagan famously had them removed.

And really, that was that. A lot of people fought, and fought hard, to stop environmental collapse and climate change, but really it was all over when Reagan and Thatcher took power and neoliberalism came to the fore. The ideology simply did not, could not and would not care about something so far in the future when there were rich people to make richer.

The larger point is that climate change is baked in. It’s going to happen, it’s going to be very bad. Numbers are hard, but I expect billions of climate refugees over the next 60 years, at least a billion dead, and probably more, and the collapse of multiple countries into anarchy and warlordism while most of the rest become poorer.

There are those who call this “doomerism”, but it’s simply a matter of facing the facts as they are. We are increasing drilling for oil and gas, not decreasing it. Animals and plants are still dying off; the Amazon is almost certainly past the tipping point for viability and is now producing more CO2 than it stores, while everyone know the Great Barrier Reef is doomed. In India we have ground temperatures in the 50s and 60s in May and the government has made it illegal to export grain.

There’s no stopping this. We will only act decisively when it is far too late. The glaciers will be doomed, etc, etc.

So, the question is what to do?

The answer is to stop pretending it isn’t going to happen and to prepare for it. We know there will be less water. We know there will be more heat. We know that weather will be more extreme, with more and more powerful storms and more rain in many places. We know that there will be marine inundations in low lying coastal cities. We know that we will lose our commercial fisheries. We know that far fewer areas will be suitable for agriculture and that most of those will be less fertile than they are today.

And so on.

We need to prepare for this. Start building the seawalls and the desalinization plants and so on.

Those who are concerned with the political future should understand that what will matter is who survives and how well. If a group you approve of survives disproportionately well, in both numbers and quality, they will have power in the world to come.

It’s no longer about some version of “save everyone”, it’s about “who will be saved, and how well will they be saved.”

You are going to have to make decisions: you are going to have to choose who you want to help live and maybe even prosper, and who you’re washing your hands of; who you’re going to let die, or maybe even give a shove. (I’m in favor of giving our elites a shove when the time comes, we don’t need the psychopath faction around.)

For a long time we’ve lived in a world where if we gave a damn we could have easily fed and housed everyone and given them healthcare. We didn’t, since psychopaths run our societies, but we could have and it would have cost nothing noticeable except to people who want others scared.

Soon this will no longer be true globally, and then it will be true in almost all countries, even ones considered rich today.

We talk a lot about what individuals can do, and what groups can do, but we rarely talk about groups. It is at the group level that most individuals can have the most influence: perhaps by creating communes or agrarian societies, perhaps thru churches, perhaps through other organizations like monasteries. Individuals, really, are always weak, but groups can be strong.

Look for those groups to join, or consider joining with others to create them. This is where your greatest point of leverage can be found and it’s where you can contribute most to changing the shape of the future to a better one.

We’re going to go thru hell, that’s now a given. But how will we treat each other while in Hell? And what societies will come into being at the other end?

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Refreshing Honesty About Bank Loans & Environmental Destruction

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On May 23, 2022

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I actually appreciate this, from the HSBC AM Global Head of Responsible Investing, Stuart Kirk:

“At a big bank like ours, what do people think the average loan length is?” he asked. “It is six years. What happens to the planet in year seven is actually irrelevant to our loan book. For coal, what happens in year seven is actually irrelevant.”

That’s honesty. People in the financial industry are trained to follow the incentives. Their bonuses (most of their income for seniors) are based on financial results and internal power in the company. The more they make, the more they can give themselves.

To expect people whose entire careers are based on following financial incentives to not follow financial incentives is insane. While I’m generally down on incentives for control of behaviour, these are folks who are hyper-optimized for them. They don’t know any other way to operate, and if individuals were to try they would be replaced by people who do follow them.

This is why I’m a radical: I believe we need change from the roots. You can’t get a man or woman trained like Kirk to act any other way than he is acting.

Oh sure, you can try and change the incentives, and you should, but better is to create a system; a society, where financial return isn’t the most important thing. If it isn’t environmentally appropriate there should be a hard stop, an absolute ban. It should be unthinkable and anyone who does it should never be allowed to have any power ever again.

A capitalist system can’t do this. It simply cannot. It cannot “think” far enough ahead, because people are mortal, and they figure they can avoid the damage. In the run up to 2008 there was a saying on wall street, IBG, YBG—”I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.” In other words “we’ll both get the rewards and we won’t be here when the shit hits the fan.” (And if we are, well, we’ll still keep most of the money we made with this shitty fraudulent deal.)

Kirk’s a product of very close to a pure Skinner-box environment, trained to obey his conditioning till there’s little left but that conditioning. Oh, he has rationalizations, you can and should read them, but at the end of the day, he’s following the rewards.

People tend to do the right thing if they are mostly disinterested better than if you’re manipulating them with rewards and punishments. We don’t believe that, because we’re all warped. The warping started in school with grades, or perhaps with our parents and it continues till many of us know no other way of living.

But if we continue like this, we’ll burn the planet down. Oh, humanity will probably survive, but at the end, we’ll have genocided half the species on earth and reduced Earth’s carrying capacity massively. There’ll be less good agricultural land, few rivers with less water, most aquifers will be drained and poisoned, and large parts of the world where humans live now will be effectively uninhabitable for months every year.

That’s insanity, but it happens after six years and hey, if you’ve made enough money, you figure you and your kids will be able to live in one of the remaining good places.

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Personal Resilience, Gardens, Water And Heat

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On May 20, 2022

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Generally about the second thing people do when they start getting worried about supply chains and the effects of climate change and economic issues, is start a garden, if they can.

This is good, but…

For a long time my primary concern has been water, though there are places, like India right now, where you’ll simply drop from the heat. Rainfall is becoming intermittent, perhaps even heavier but less reliable. Glaciers are getting smaller, but increased melt will increase river flows at times, and again, on average there’ll be more water, until the flow starts falling off a cliff. In the Western Rockies that’ll apparently start in about 20 years.

Heat itself is a problem for gardening: too hot or too cold are both bad.

Rainwater reservoirs used to be common in houses. They were dug out, and underground, which had the advantage of keeping the water cool. These days they’re above ground. In some places they are illegal. I’m going to strongly suggest that if you can, you should get one (or more of the modern ones), and spread your water collection as wide as you can. You’ll need a filtration system so you can use it personally as well as for gardening.

As for the gardens, for those who can figure out how, something that has some measure of climate control seems necessary, or heat waves or even cold snaps can wreck you. While the main concern in heat waves, climate change has lead to more wild and variable weather, including cold weather at times. Doing this in a way that also gets sunlight is the trick, of course, and the rain collection system you set up for the reservoir(s) should help you keep using rainwater.

For temperature control, if you’re building something new, build into hills or dig into the ground. The earth moderates both hot and cold temperatures. Many years ago I looked into “earthships” but there are many models, including traditional ones, and ones that go deeper, including natural and artificial cave homes.

Obviously this may be beyond many people’s means, though there may be low-tech, low-cost, labor intensive solutions as well as more expensive ones.

For people, like myself, for whom this is all pie-in-the-sky, well, just bear in the mind that climate change means old patterns don’t hold and variability increases. Try and stock up enough food to last months and do what you can about water and staying cool. That may mean figuring out some sort of communal solution with other people, or just doing what little you can.

Updated to include earthships and dug in homes.

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Civilization Ending Long Covid Levels?

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On May 2, 2022

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So, via everyone’s favorite homnicidal Dalek, a study which finds that 51 percent to 80 percent of people who get Covid (pdf) get Long Covid. Often it’s asymptomatic, but asymptomatic cases still do damage to the body, just like you can have high blood pressure for a long time without knowing it or feeling anything. As the Dalek notes, this is potentially civilization ending now that we’ve decided to let everyone get Covid eventually.

The extra sauce on this idiot doomburger, is that each time you get Covid, you can get Long Covid and there is NO lasting natural or vaccine immunity to Covid. None. And each time you get Covid, any Long Covid you have can make it harder to resist Covid and can make your Long Covid worse.

The old figures for Long Covid ranged from 20 to 30 percent. Even those numbers, given repeated infections and compounding damage, were disastrous. These new numbers are catastrophic. Eventually, if we don’t control Covid (and remember, there have been multiple new variants since BA2) we may literally have billions of disabled people unable to work and needing care.

Probably you’ll know one of them, or be one of them. Probably someone you care about will have Long Covid. Then your government, which after all couldn’t be bothered to control Covid, will decide it costs too much to support them, will cut health care and disability care, and they’ll die. Probably miserably.

Welcome to the future.

Either replace your leaders, at any cost, or you and people you care about (I know most people don’t give a damn about strangers) will get sick, suffer immensely, wind up homeless in many cases, then die miserably.

Also India is having a heat wave in April/May which has spiked over 60 celcius (140f) in some locations, and where 40-50- celcius (104-122F) is routine. We’ll never know how many people it kills (India’s very bad at counting and doesn’t much want to), and on top of that, it’s causing crop failures. Given that we’re already in for a year with less food and higher prices than usual (thanks to the Ukraine war, Western sanctions related to the war, and various problems in China (and certainly other extreme weather events)), a lot of people are going to die from famine in the next year and a half, and there will then be massive political instability, probably including some revolutions and war.

We’ll talk more about this soon.

Your leaders are culling you. Deliberately. They know what they’re doing and they’re okay with it. Are you okay with it? You may not be able to do anything yet, but the first step is to understand, in your gut, that they are a threat to you; enemies of yours.

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The Petrochemical Age In Context

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On April 19, 2022

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If you want to do super big picture macrohistory, humans have really had three eras:

1) Hunting/gathering

2) Agriculture

3) Industrial.

To over-summarize, hunter-gatherers, with some exceptions in nutritionally dense areas were generally egalitarian. They had high childhood mortality and a fair bit of violence, but they lived longer lives than any time period before the Industrial era, and were health. In some cases we still haven’t caught up (for example, the width of hips of their women was wider than ours, and that correlates to health and easier childbith.)

Agriculture started out OK-ish for about 2,000 years, but the nature of agriculture creates private surpluses and allows for large elites. It’s easy to appropriate food and service from farmers, because they can’t move away and they can’t hide their take well (crops are harvested at known times, and about how much land produces is also known.) For the vast majority of the population, living in an agricultural civilization sucked. Yes, there were more of us, but we were sicker, died younger and more likely to have a nasty overlord. Violence decreased (though these figures are controversial), but that’s because the lords and masters don’t want other people killing.

Humans in this period were essentially domesticated, and there’s some reason to believe the process weeded out most people who naturally rebel against control. This is little different from how wolves became dogs, and just as degrading.

We know the industrial era, because we live in it, but I want to invite you take the long view: imagine it’s a 1,000 years from now. Or 5,000.

What the industrial age looks like when you zoom out is “the petrochemical age”. We figured out how to harness coal, gas and oil, added in a few other sources of energy, and became clever at hooking machines up to our power sources.

The problem is that in a period of less than 300 years we’ve burned up so many petrochems that we’re overheating the planet thru the mechanism of climate changes gases, and our population is well over the planet’s carrying capacity, leading to a crush in ecosystem diversity and the absolute number of animals, plants and insects.

Since ecosystems + climate are what make the planet habitable for humans, from the long point of view, all the industrial/petrochem era looks like is a massive orgy: a predator species which has overshot the world’s carrying capacity.

If we can’t transition to a technological way of supporting ourselves which doesn’t destroy the world’s carrying capacity, then all this period will be looked back on as is a blip: a brief period of species-wide stupidity, where we exploited technologies and powers we were too foolish and stupid to control the consequences of.

Progress isn’t automatic, and it isn’t one way. When you look at charts of health characteristics in the western world from the stone age, on, one culture stands out: Greek City States. They live longer than anyone else, they are healthier on multiple metrics, and their civilization is destroyed by the Romans, who don’t have nearly as good lives.

The same thing can happen to us. We are not sustainably transitioning to a new way of living. Even when we do some right things like electrification, we don’t build items to endure. We’re dumping valuable minerals into phones and cars and consumer goods we’ll throw out in 5 years or so, and we don’t have the resources to waste. We’ve done nothing to stop climate change. We’re over-fishing. Over 90% of the insects in multiple areas (perhaps world wide) are gone, as anyone over 50 or so can tell you. The birds are gone, too. The big animals. The wild areas. The coral reefs are dying. The Amazon is dying and now a net-emitter of carbon, not a sink.

In theory we could probably still fix this. The technology either exists or is with in sprint to do so, but it’s about more than technology: we’d have to change how we live. Give up our consumption based society; get rid of planned obsolesence and use the same items for decades. Ditch exurbs and suburbs almost entirely, and re-wild or make it so that people who want land have to live by the rule that their presence must increase biodiversity.

The changes are radical, and there is no sign of anyone in power taking them seriously. Instead we build more and more crap, pollute more and more, spew more and more gases into the atmosphere, and salivate over drilling for gas and oil in the arctic, even as we run down or pollute our aquifers.

Our technology was a test: we were given (or gave ourselves) great power, and our task was to use it to benefit ourselves in a way which was beneficial, or at least not catastrophic, for the rest of life on Earth (our ecosystem) and to not destroy a climate which is the only one human civilization has ever known.

We failed in this task, and so the Petrochemical Age is likely to just look like a blip. Perhaps a new technological civilization will arise from our ashes: but if it is to survive and prosper it will  have to do what we didn’t and give at least as much back to nature as it takes out (and rather more, to fix the damage.)

As for us, it seems unlikely most of our civilization will make it. Doubtless hi-tech enclaves will continue to exist, but ecosystem collapse, water shortages and climate change make it unlikely our civilization as a whole will survive another century. It may not even make it 50 years.

And looked at from afar, it’ll be a 4 century mistake, in which some people lived very well, but the near permanent ability of Earth to support life was damaged, making every future human poorer in a very real sense.

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That Poisoned Land

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On November 30, 2021

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Mary Stewart was a best-selling author for much of the 20th century. I first stumbled across her as a child, reading the “The Hollow Hills” and the “Crystal Cave,” two of her books about Merlin, but most of what she wrote were adventurous romances, often described as “Nancy Drew for adults.” Recently I read her book “Airs Above The Ground,” written in 1965. She was a master at landscape description, and I felt this scene of a meadow in the Alps was worth sharing:

The grass was thick with familiar meadow flowers – harebells, thyme, eyebright, and, where the scythe had not yet passed, the foaming white and yellow of parley and buttercups. What was not so familiar was the fluttering, rustling life of the meadow: the whole surface of the field seemed moving with butterflies – meadow browns, blues, sulphurs, fritillaries, and a few of my own Vanessas, the red admirals and tortoiseshells. Their colours flickered among the flowers, each vanishing momentarily as it clung and folded, then opening to its own bright colour as it fluttered on. Even the green roots of the grass were alive, as countless grasshoppers hopped and fiddled there. The air droned with bees, all zooming past me, I noticed, on the same purposeful track, as if on some apian Autobahn of their own. They were all making for a little hut, the size of a small summer-house, chalet-style and beautifully built of pine, and as full of tiny windows as a dovecot. It was, in fact, a bee-house, a sort of collective hive for several swarms, each one with its own tiny bee-door, behind which it made its honey in candle-shaped combs. Amused and interested, I watched the laden bees aiming like bullets, each for its own door, remembering how, even a few years ago, in my own childhood, the English meadows, too, had been alive with wings, and how quiet now was the poisioned countryside. .

I think it would be hard for most moderns to write such a passage, even if they had Stewart’s eye and skill; we’re almost all from the city, and we just don’t know birds and the flowers and the insects the way her generation did.

But, of course, it’s that last line that caught my eye -— such a beautiful paragraph, ends with “the poisoned countryside.”

And it has become worse. Many have noted that “bug splat,” where driving through the countryside would leave windshields absolutely plastered with dead insects, is a thing of the past.

It’s harder and harder to remember just how alive the world once was, with plants, insects, birds and animals. We can only wonder at, say, stories of the old Grand Banks off the east coast of Canada, where you had only to dip a bucket into the water and it would come up with fish. In my childhood, almost any beach in British Columbia had enough clams for a meal, but now they’re gone. Vietnamese immigrants took too many to sell commercially, and destroyed the beds.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

The long, lost passenger pigeons used to fly in flocks so large they genuinely did blot out the sun, and it was unimaginable to early settlers that one day they would be no more; and many are the accounts of how the Bison flocked in their millions, filling the prairies to the horizon. The prairies themselves were entirely different from what we now know; they had a covering which protected the soil which Europeans removed so they could farm, and thus the soil blew away and lost its fertility.

As a child in the 30s, my (honorary) Uncle Jack would take a hook and line, walk ten minutes out of town on the British Columbia coast, and have a fresh salmon in ten minutes.

All of this we have denuded, poisoned, destroyed. In exchange, we have food that has less nutrients every generation, that you can eat and still feel hungry, and we have a lot of sugar, corn-syrup, salt, and foods made to purposely addict us, so various folks could be rich.

I remember a fantasy book where the hero had traveled to another world at the end of WWII, then returned around 1970, and his description of eating some beef, “it tasted like something had been removed, and something had been added.”

In so many ways, we live in a marvelous cornucopia. I can go to the supermarket and buy a wild variety of food, unavailable to prior generations, but it is a hollow bounty, built on destruction, a heating of the house, by burning it down.

We might as well enjoy it, but the price is being paid already and will be paid even more in the future. We have traded a world that was alive and bounteous, for an artificial cornucopia, and for many of us, that cornucopia will come to an end before we die.

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