Sublime

De waarschuwingen van Tertullianus, Malthus en de onheilsprofeten uit de jaren zestig en zeventig, ze zijn bepaald niet verdwenen. Wat veranderde, is de taal waarin ze werden gegoten. Zo duiken halverwege de jaren negentig wetenschappelijk klinkende termen op als ‘ecologische voetafdruk’, ‘planetaire grenzen’ en het ‘overschrijden van het draagvlak

A large study published in 2018 suggested that the ‘alarming deterioration’ of the health of trees across Europe was caused by a disruption of their mycorrhizal relationships, brought about by nitrogen pollution.

A healthy forest must need dead trees. They’ve been around since the beginning. Birds turn them to use, and small mammals, and more forms of insects lodge and dine on them than science has ever counted. She wants to raise her hand and say, like Ovid, how all life is turning into other things. But she doesn’t have the data.

She explained that an externality was not irrelevant, but, rather, uncounted—a consequence without a cost.

There are fewer humans than before. The demographic peak is in the past, we are a little fewer than we were before, and on a trajectory for that to continue. People speak now of an optimum number of humans; some say two billion, others four; no one really knows. It will be an experiment. All of us in balance, we the people, meaning we the living

Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

Delving deeper still into this ideology, arriving at the maximum misanthropy terminus, the ‘Deep Green Resistance’ minions of Derrick Jensen meanwhile have fever dreams of a total collapse of human civilisation. Jensen would not stop at the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Like Zerzan, Jensen prefers a neo-lithic jam. For him,

Here we are on the only known living planet, born into its most hospitable era which, thanks to the odd way we happen to be circling the sun right now, is set to run and run. We would have to be crazy to kick ourselves out of the Holocene’s sweet spot, but that is, of course, exactly what we have been doing.

many who find the report useful overall argue that these ‘boundary’ points should not be written in stone, but viewed as a heuristic. “Ever since early humans discovered fire and the benefits of collaborative systems such as collective hunting and social learning, human systems, not the classic biophysical limits that still constrain other species,