Large, furry canaries
Quite honestly, as I was skimming BlueSky and my eyes fell on the middle of a recent thread by Naomi Klein, before I saw the thread's start or end, I thought this was actually a thread about what people were doing now. It's not at all implausible they soon might be:
...breaking into garages and homes. Tearing doors off. Why? Because in southern BC, the salmon aren’t in the streams. Why? Because water levels are too low. Why? Weak snowpack and not enough rain. Why? We all know why.
— Naomi Klein (@naomiaklein.bsky.social) October 25, 2026 at 4:15 PM
When I ever-more-frequently speak openly of my fears about the possibility of a 2035 end to human civilization, it isn't that we'll drown or sweat to death.
It's this.
Food matters
When crops fail, and they will, many people will have no better options than the bears Naomi Klein mentions.
Crops can't hide in air conditioning like we do. Crops just die. As we do if not fed.
Anyone thinking “at least I'll be the one whose garage had food” is missing the point. It won't be pretty for any of us, those with a garage or those without.
A world full of people angry at being lied to and left behind will not act civilized.
A strong 401K is not protection.
We're totally unprepared
You may think you're smarter and have a gun, but food trucks won't have enough guns for the crowds, and roads only run if not littered with fallen food trucks.
You'll need a fully working ecosystem in that gated community of yours. Because you're not going to find one outside.
Maybe you prepped. But Climate Change is not temporary. Is your basement or cave or bunker ready for decades? Centuries?
-
Power, A/C & heat, water & sewage, hospitals, spare parts?
-
Room for kids and their kids? Will all get along in one room?
A prepped cave may be more fragile than many think.
We won't just adapt
Some think we will “just” grow crops elsewhere, a false hope sustaining our denial as Climate worsens.
Even if we did go north, people live there. And we couldn't keep doing it. There's not enough “North” for everyone who wants to go there.
Plus it's happening too fast as we prepare too little. Farms won't teleport or retool overnight.
Things can unravel fast
Three or eleven years ago, many thought the US democracy strong. Today, in 2026, it teeters, almost unrecognizable, its good name spoiled.
That good name had rested on foundations that were not as well-reinforced as many thought.
Holes poked in weak spots can topple things.
More efficiency won't save us
All this talk about improving efficiency in the markets ignores that Efficiency is not the singular god to which markets need pray, lest they feel the wrath of others not given their due.
Ruthless attention to Efficiency comes at the cost of neglecting Robustness, Sustainability, Health, Happiness—the list goes on. In sum, it begets a sociopathy.
This is the price that we paid when we quietly switched from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder capitalism in the 1970s.
(Interestingly, that story converges at the same turning point that Naomi Klein identifies in her book The Shock Doctrine.)
Nowhere to hide
We've been eroding the foundations of our ecosystem, and it's now eroding the foundations of our civilization in return.
That's because we don't live outside the ecosystem. It's not a thing to visit on weekends.
We live within it. So, as we kill it, we're killing ourselves.
We can't keep pretending the ecosystem is some infinitely resilient punching bag that, as we keep injuring it, will just bounce back for more.
It won't take this stress without breaking. Neither will we. It's all connected. We must fix it/us now, not later.
Author’s Notes:
If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.
This post began as a thread by me on BlueSky.
The image was generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT Image 2.5), with light post-processing in Gimp to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download.
No comments:
Post a Comment