Born in Captivity

“I encourage people to pursue excellence, to pursue love, to pursue what they love to do. I don’t think these are crazy ideas, actually. And I also encourage people to remain calm, because nothing is under control, certainly not under our control.”—Guy McPherson

Going Dark

By Guy McPherson

“Action is the antidote to despair.”—Edward Abbey

SAN ANTONIO Belize—(Weekly Hubris)— December 19, 2016—This interview, by Paul Henry, of Dr. Guy McPherson, first aired on November 24, 2016, at http://www.newshub.co.nz/TVShows/PaulHenry.\

Paul Henry: We are heading for mass extinction—there you go—that’s it—end it there—as humans destroy their own habitat. That is the no-holds-barred message from climate change expert Guy McPherson from the University of Arizona. Some label him an ‘eco-terrorist.’ Others say he’s an anarchist. But could he just be a realist? Guy is now in New Zealand on a speaking tour and joins me now. Great to see you again.

Guy McPherson: Likewise, Paul.

PH: Last time I spoke to you, um, 2014, and you snatched any hope of the future for me and my family—it was doom and gloom. Has anything changed since then in your account of things?

GMcP: Oh, yes. The situation is far worse than it was then.

PH: OK. OK. OK. So essentially—to paraphrase—we’re just all wasting our time even talking about climate change and global warming and sea rising.

GMcP: Well, I’d appreciate the opportunity for people know what’s going on in the world. That’s why I do what I do. And so I don’t think we need to not talk about it. I think we need to let people know what is under way.

PH: But it’s futile.

GMcP: Well, action is futile, except with respect to our personal selves and how we feel about ourselves, yes. Action is the antidote to despair, said, Edward Abbey, the desert anarchist.

PH: Are you an anarchist?

GMcP: I am. And I know what that means.

PH: Mm.

GMcP: It’s not chaos. Anarchism is not a romantic notion, but an idea, a way of living that has been proven successful for 3 million years of the human experience.

PH: If you’re right, then you are also surely wrong. I mean, you say that it’s important to talk about it so that we know what’s going on. But I don’t think that’s why we talk about it. If you’re right, the reason we talk about it is an attempt essentially to fool ourselves into thinking that we can actually stave it off.

GMcP: Well, it depends on your perspective. Again, my perspective is that there is nothing to be done in terms of preserving the human species for more than a few more years. Other people think that actions will increase their own longevity, which might be true depending upon what they do and where they move to. But I think in terms of the human race, we’re done. It’s locked in. It’s been locked in for a long time. We’re in the middle of the sixth mass extinction.

PH: Well, we’ll talk about your time-frame in a minute. But I guess that you’ve already indicated that things change, because you indicated that things have gotten a lot worse rapidly, or more rapidly, perhaps, than you originally thought. You almost imply in some of your writing that we have the arrogance to believe that the future of the planet and the future of humankind is the same thing. In reality, you hold quite a positive outlook for the future of the planet—just not with us on it.

GMcP: Absolutely. Yes. We’ve had humans on the plant, our species, for about 200,000 years. The universe is 13.8 billion years old.

PH: We’re a moment in time.

GMcP: We really are. It’s a geological blink, and it looks like we’re beyond geological at this point, and into the real blink.

PH: With humans gone, and presumably not only humans but other life as we know it, will the planet actually heal itself, given enough millennia?

GMcP: It will take millions of years, as it has following previous mass extinction events, but I’ve no doubt there will be a thriving planet again. It’s just for a few million years there will be very small things, like microbes, and bacteria, and fungi.

PH: As I look at you now, I mean, what you say seems logical, much more logical than those who say we can stand in the way of this, we can shout at the tide not to come in. Um— But I really don’t believe it because, part of me, of course, being a human being, and a logical creature, thinks I can’t imagine that none of this will exist, so I will pretend that it doesn’t exist. Is that what you fight when you go around, when you lecture people around the world?

GMcP: Of course. And mostly it’s people who look a lot like you and me, people who are pretty privileged, and can’t imagine this amount of privilege going away. So that’s the difficulty. This is all we’ve ever known. We were born into this.

PH: Mm.

GMcP: I call it born into captivity.

PH: Mm.

GMcP: We didn’t have any choice about the matter. I mean, right, we didn’t vote on whether we got to show up at this point in history. So it’s difficult to imagine anything different than this, much less the kind of situation that is certain to arise in the not too distant future.

PH: The other thing it’s hard to imagine, even though we have absolute proof of it all around us, is that we are but a moment in time. Because we know history. We know that we will not last forever, so we potentially know some of the future. How much do we have? How much time does the human race have?

GMcP: I can’t imagine there will be a human on the planet in ten years. Umm, I suspect it’ll be—

PH: No—I’m sorry. Excuse me, did you say ten years?

GMcP: Yes. Yes. In my outloud voice, even. Yes. I can’t—you know, we’re headed for a temperature within that span that is at or near the highest temperature experienced on earth in the last two billion years. That’s at least an order of magnitude faster than occurred during The Great Dying 252 million years ago.

PH: But you are suggesting, then, that the temperature increase will be phenomenal over the next few years.

GMcP: Oh, yes. This is exponential change, and we have difficulty coming to grips with exponential change because—

PH: Now, I understand the term ‘exponential,’ and I understand the term ‘change.’ What I don’t want to understand is your time-frame. I mean, why are you even wasting time here in the studio? Why the hell are we all here? No, seriously, if it’s only ten years, what the hell are you doing here, dragging your wife around the bloody world talking about this? You’ve only got ten years. Shouldn’t you be at home with your kids?

GMcP: I don’’t have kids because I could see this coming a long time ago.

PH: Stab me in the heart now. Seriously—ten years?

GMcP: No. We don’t have ten years. And the problem is, when I give a number like that people think we have business as usual for nine years . . .

PH: You wife is in the corner of the studio taking photos! What on earth are you taking photographs for? You’re never going to look at those photos!

GMcP: Actually, that’s not my wife, that’s my partner. But it’s a minor issue.

PH: In the great scheme of things, it’s just of no interest at all.

GMcP: I encourage people to pursue excellence, to pursue love, to pursue what they love to do. I don’t think these are crazy ideas, actually. And I also encourage people to remain calm, because nothing is under control, certainly not under our control.

PH: You wouldn’t imagine, though, that things are going to get better. They could only get worse. So presumably in terms of your time-frame, given—I can’t remember what you said two years ago, how I let it slip my mind I don’t know—but it was certainly a greater time-frame than ten years.

GMcP: Oh, yes.

PH: So you, so that’s your maximum time-frame for it? Do you worry that—up until now I was prepared to go with you but now you’ve snatched all hope of the future for me and my family, my darling children. That’s my daughter over there, Bella. She hasn’t had an opportunity, she hasn’t had a chance, hasn’t had a fair crack at the whip.

GMcP: I know. I feel horrible about that, I really do. The young people on the planet have not had an opportunity to live full lives, to even come to grips with—

PH: Don’t even finish the sentence—we haven’t got time. Um. So that, I just want to . . . either, I should stop talking to you now and never talk to you again, or I may as well continue talking to you because there’s no point talking to anyone else, do you know what I mean?

GMcP: I absolutely know what you mean. Yes.

PH: How do you—

GMcP: And you’re right. There’s no point in talking to anybody else, Paul, it’s just me and you.

PH: OK, so, just, here’s the thing, Guy. God! If people believe you, and virtually no one will, especially now you’ve thrown the time-frame in, if people do believe you, how will you prevent a state of absolute hopelessness creeping in around the globe?

GMcP: I think hope is a horrible idea. Hope is wishful thinking! Hope—let me quote Nieszche on this one. Hope in reality is the worst of evils, for it extends the torment of man. Hope and fear are the twin sides of the I-don’t-know-the-future coin, but I think it’s either really good or I think it’s really horrible but I’m not going to take any action either way. Hope is a bad idea. Let’s abandon that and get on with reality instead. Let’s get on with living instead of wishing for the future that never comes.

PH: I’m glad I’m not in the business of autonomous cars because I was pretty convinced they were going to change our lives for the better within in the next ten years. More fool them. Umm. OK. Well, thanks for that, Guy. Umm— Just because— you know, I’ve got my executive producer, mic in my ear, saying we’ve gotta move on. We don’t have to do anything, Sarah, quite frankly, with this information. We don’t have to do anything. Umm—and that whole broadcasting standards book—pfff! —forget that bloody thing. Umm. So Guy, just in terms of, so we’ve got—this is what, this is what I need to know. Bella needs to know it as well. Umm. Best guess for the future of humanity is how many years?

GMcP: Oh, I’m not going to go there. I encourage people to live fully, in the time we have left to be fully present with the ones we’re with, including the rest of the living planet, but I don’t know your expiration date.

PH: Mm. OK, Guy, take care. Why? Thank you very much for joining us.

GMcP: Thank you, Paul.

PH: I appreciate— By the way, just quickly, I can’t—because this is, this has come like a boulder out of the blue for me. I should have known that, I should have . . . on the card. Ten years. Umm—

GMcP: No, no, no—we don’t have ten years.

PH: . . . experts. Because you’re an expert. What do you make of all the other experts that do seem to think we can effect change, we can survive? They are experts as well, or claim to be.

GMcP: Right, right. And, well, for one thing, they’re paid, and so they only go half-way in presenting the information. Almost nobody is willing to add up the feedbacks that we have triggered and the consequences of them. So because we are a society that is focused on specialization, the specialists are geared toward understanding one aspect or another aspect of climate change, things like global dimming, or the melting of the arctic ice and the albedo associated with that, or the methane—nobody’s putting all that . . .

PH: So in a nutshell, they’re lying, essentially, fooling themselves and everybody else.

GMcP: I would hate to use the word lying. I think it’s far worse than that.

PH: Guy, thank you very much for joining us. That is Guy McPherson, Emeritus Professor of Natural Resources and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona.

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