Biz as Usual vs. Reality

Koyaanisqatsi is a 1982 American experimental film focusing on the relationship between nature, humanity, and technology. It uses stunning visuals, time-lapse photography, and music to explore the idea of "life out of balance" (the meaning of the Hopi word "Koyaanisqatsi"). The film is a contemplation of the impact of human activity on the environment and the human condition. I saw it on the big screen during my first year of college. Watch the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDW-1JIa2gI

As I wrote in “Pushed Beyond Limits,” I met then-54-year-old David Suzuki in Kyoto, Japan in 1990 at the “Renewing the Earth” (Chi-kyū Sai-sō-zō) symposium, along with half a dozen other Earth-defending eco-futurists, including a then-hero, Fritjof Capra, physicist/author/systems-theorist. His book, 1982’s The Turning Point, had made a big impression (after the impression made by his first book, The Tao of Physics), which I read when I was 18, full of possibility, and about to start college and study everything about Japan, spend my third year of college there, and move there in 1988, for the next 20 years.

So, in 1990, still full of possibility and not yet realizing that the climate was doomed, I was psyched to meet Capra, Suzuki et al in 1990. Capra brought a VHS casette with a cool REM “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” video with an eco-theme, different from their official video, followed by a speech Capra had recently given, probably in Berkeley, CA where he taught. In the speech, he said words to the effect of, “The environment is going to be the issue of the 1990s because it will force itself to the front of the news,” example, example, “and humanity cannot wait any longer.” His book, The Turning Point was fronted by a graph with two sine curves—one that had started at x=0 y=0, risen, peaked and was now descending (the Cartesian-Newtonian “Old Paradigm” of reality in which Nature is a giant machine for us to pick apart); and one that had recently started rising and was about to intersect the downward sine-wave (the holistic “New Paradigm” in which we recognize our interdependence with Nature’s systems, and disrupt them at our peril)). Capra write that the change from the Old (fossil fuel) to the New (green energy, ecovillage) Paradigm was inevitable but, the longer humanity collectively waited to transition, the more violent and strife-filled the transition would be. So I was high on the idea that, you know, the green revolution would happen, by and by, life would survive and thrive.

Shortly after Capra and the other symposium guests had flown back to the US, polymath David Kubiak, a social and eco-activist and author (who lived in Kyoto and, like me, kind of volunteered his time at the Kyoto office of Capra’s Elmwood Institute, headquartered in Berkeley) said, “Yeah but, looking at the graph, there’s no reason why the still-dominant Old Paradigm power-holders won’t hang on to power beyond the point of no return, as far as the environment is conernced.”

Cut to 35 years later. Suzuki, now 89, came out and said it is "too late" to stop climate change in a July 2025 interview with iPolitics, and he meant accelerating climate change. He clarified that while the fight to reverse climate change is likely lost, he still believes it's important to adapt and find solutions to mitigate the worst impacts. 

In the interview, Suzuki cited the Potsdam Institute's research, indicating that humanity has already crossed seven out of nine critical planetary boundaries. This led him to conclude that it's too late to avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change, such as extreme weather events, floods, droughts, wildfires, and mass human migration. 

Dr. Peter Carter recently commented on Suzuki’s assertion. Carter said, in part:

“The US is the world's biggest economy, with ramifications around the world. Killing clean energy means Trump has killed any chance of a future worth living--any chance at all—so David's so right to say that Trump's 2024 victory was like a dagger in his heart. It was a dagger in the heart of all of us, because that alone makes David Suzuki right. What Trump and his administration, what the US alone is doing, makes it way, way too late, and means we've lost the fight. 

“To me, as I say, it's the fight against the fossil fuel industry, and there's no question who's winning that fight. An unprecedented evil is what I call it. The fossil fuel industry and the corporate banks fighting against the reality of climate change! and fighting against any movement on climate change mitigation. 

“The other thing David Suzuki mentioned is the United Nations' so-called COPS, The Conference of the Parties, an annual conference under the 1992 UN Climate Change Convention, and David's been pretty mild on this one. He said, "We haven't capped emissions." Well, it's actually a lot worse than that because, ever since we've been having these COPS for the last 30 years, emissions have been increasing, increasing! Not only that, the cumulative CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere has been increasing at a hugely accelerating rate. 

“So the fact about the COPS is that they were and are set up to fail. They have failed, because they were set up in an absolutely extraordinary way. They were set up by a voting system unique to the UN, in which they interpreted coming to a consensus as unanimity. In effect, this gives a veto to even just a couple of the big oil producing countries, which just want to produce more and more oil. 

“All of this is insane. The more I look at this, the more I think we live in a global insane asylum. 

“Then Suzuki makes his big point that we are entrenched in a perverse economic, legal and political system. These systems that we live under control everything, more and more. He has been saying this all of his professional life. "Maybe all that we can do is continue with incremental changes, which we haven't even been successful with thus far, but what we really need is a revolution," he says. "Is it possible to have a peaceful, global revolution?"

“The January, 2025 Planetary Solvency Report is titled ‘Finding our balance with nature’. It employed risk assessment experts, actuaries, who got together with the University of Exeter and produced the report.

“The IPCC has always stated that mitigation is a cost, but it's obviously a massive profit benefit. This idea has rendered policy makers blind to the immense risk that current policy puts the world at. Our dominant economic model doesn't recognize a dependence on the Earth system, viewing climate and nature risks as "externalities," which means they ignore them.

“Fundamentally, we have an economics of evil, based on the increasingly ruthless exploitation of nature. 

“We've come to ‘It's too late’ on climate change. Atmospheric CO₂ alone proves that we are too late on climate change. We're not too late to do everything we possibly can, individually and collectively, but science tells us that it's too late. Atmospheric CO₂ has increased 50% since 1850, and is accelerating, as are disasters all around the world. Regarding methane and nitrous oxide, they are aligning with the very worst case scenario. There are already catastrophic irreversible impacts on land and in the oceans. 

“It is inevitable that CO₂ will increase global heating and global climate disruption, and we cannot remove CO₂. There aren't even any plans to develop and scale up Carbon Dioxide Removal. 

“Another certainty that makes Suzuki right is that governments are massively subsidizing of the fossil fuel industry, now to the tune of $7 trillion per year.”

Why are governments doing the opposite of what they must do to keep the planet inhabitable? What could be the forecast for humanity here? I wonder.

Carter continues: “Since 1990, according to the 2023 GHG Index, the heat in the system has risen 51%--completely insane. NASA says there's unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Going by the IPCC assessment, 2023 and 2024 saw huge, unexpected increases in global warming. Pierce Foster from Leeds University in England is producing an annual update. For the past two years, it states that global warming is proceeding at an unprecedented rates. 

“There has been a deafening silence in response to these reports from both the governments of the world and the scientific community itself, which has claimed that science does not ‘give value judgments’, athough I’d point out that scientific modeling inevitably involves value judgments. We have a failure of response. Are people protesting about climate change? Mainly a few young people, those who are not yet burnt out, but they must stop because governments have criminalized protest. 

“As James Hansen and his colleagues have said, it is too late for 1.5 degrees C. The IPCC 6th assessment said that global emissions must be in decline by 2025 at the latest. It's too late. 

“Final point: Global warming is accelerating, as Hansen said some years ago, long-term and short-term. We're going to hit 2 degrees C soon enough.

“We have doomed the present generation. All today's children condemned to an increasingly hellish planet Earth, one that homo sapiens and the hominid pre-species on Earth has never experienced, nothing close to it. Also, the climate is changing faster than it has in tens of millions of years. But it's not too late to give it our very best, to love our children, future generations, and this wonderful planet. We can't just wait and watch as it all goes down.”

Breaking news: Australia’s top climate scientist, Australian National University emeritus professor Will Steffen, says “we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse” of civilization, which may now be inevitable because 9 of the 15 known global climate tipping points that regulate the state of the planet have been activated, and we may have already triggered a “global tipping cascade” that would take us to a less habitable “Hothouse Earth” climate, regardless of whether we reduce emissions.

Steffen says it would take 30 years at best (but up to 60) to transition to net zero emissions, but when it comes to tipping points such as Arctic sea ice we would have already run out of time. Evidence shows we will also lose control of the tipping points for the Amazon rainforest, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the Greenland ice sheet in much less time than it’s going to take us to get to net zero emissions

So, the moral seems to be “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” but also hoard cash in case you need to make a quick move or, barring that, have friends in different places who couldn’t say no if you showed up after your residence was rendered uninhabitable and society were breaking down. Community is the best thing to have as Drs. Suzuki and Carter imply when they don’t say it.

Alvin Toffler’s predictions in The Third Wave outlined the shift from centralized, industrial systems to decentralized, information-driven societies. He foresaw a decline in hierarchical control, characteristic of the "Second Wave," giving way to distributed power and decision-making. This "Third Wave" emphasizes networks, fostering collaboration and multidirectional communication. Toffler’s concept of "anticipatory democracy" envisioned greater citizen participation, enabled by technologies like the internet and blockchain, which support peer-to-peer interactions.

Toffler blended sociology, economics, and technology to explore human adaptation to change, but it seems that he didn’t anticipate cyberwarfare, with the internet being used as a disinformation machine to silo people into opposing groups and destabilize an enemy's society. For that matter, he didn’t anticipate smartphones with algorithms that degrade people’s brains.

Oh yeah, so: it behooves one to invest oneself in a community, and try to provide something that increases its cohesion, resilience and survivability, whatever that is. Timing is important, and I’m waiting for my close friends to retire, in the next few years, as at least one of them will get a great pension, and we often used to talk about establishing our own, tiny eco-farm someday. I know—location, location, locations will nearly all be dubious in a world of accelerating climate change. If the big plan happens, we’ll probably have to opt for an aqua-ponic operation, in a cave or fortified bunker, in addition to whatever food the climate might allow to grow and be harvested.

Maybe it won’t happen, because shit could go so far sideways in the next month, let alone few years, that all dreams are off the table, and it’s short-term contingency til death. So remember Viktor Frankl's assertion about the last of the human freedoms: the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, even in the face of death. This freedom, he argued, cannot be taken away, even in the most oppressive conditions like the concentration camps he survived during the Holocaust. Despite losing everything else, Frankl believed individuals retain the power to choose how they respond to their situation, which ultimately shapes their experience and defines their humanity.

My final suggestion is that one endeavor to see through the illusion of birth and death. Study the Wheel of Life and practice transcending it. Practice self-enquiry of Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta. Find them and more at holybooks.com. Find what, in you, is unborn. Practice meditation while remembering that the goal is to remain mindful in every moment, and not get lost in the fantasies of mind and appearances.