REVIEW: Y6B AND GOD’S LAST OFFER

by Kelpie Wilson

Sentient Times, Oct - Nov 1999
www.sentienttimes.com

God’s Last Offer by Ed Ayres, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1999.

We’re all aware that Y2K is coming, whether or not we know what the actual impacts of the computer bug will be. We are much less aware of the fact that Y6B is already here. Y6B is the year that the world’s population grows to 6 billion people. The best demographic projections show that the world’s 6 billionth person will be born sometime in October 1999. Yet a listing of the 20th Century’s top 100 news stories compiled by noted journalists and scholars did not include the unprecedented quadrupling of the earth’s population and its impact on global ecosystems. The big news is that not only has population quadrupled this century and doubled in the last 30 years, but that if nothing is done, another one billion people will be added by 2012. Zero Population Growth is creating a campaign to promote awareness of Y6B because otherwise it will receive little notice in the world’s media. You can find out more about the Y6B campaign at www.zpg.org.

God’s Last Offer is a new book by Ed Ayres, the editor of World Watch magazine. Ayres confirms that population growth is a threat to our survival, and in the World Watch Institute's State of the World tradition has put together the big picture in a way that is both easy to understand and very, very compelling. This may be the first truly “millennial” book of the new age. What’s different about Ayres’ book is that not only does he give us up-to-date information on what he calls the four “spikes” that are endangering us (population growth, consumption, global warming and extinction), but he also exposes the problem of synergy. When these four horsemen of the apocalypse ride together, their planetary impact is compounded by synergy. In addition, black holes in the information available to us make it difficult if not impossible for the average person to see the big picture and know what needs to be done to survive.

Ayres sees the information problem as perhaps the most critical because “most of us know what we have to do to keep our jobs, or protect our homes from fire, or treat an infection. We have elaborate mechanisms in place to address those risks. But few of us have thought about what to do if our biosphere should begin to fail.” Indeed, we don’t have a clue about what to do because most people are unaware that the biosphere is failing at all. Ayres tells us that part of the reason that we cannot imagine massive ecological collapse is because the truth about smaller ecological disasters is being kept from us. For instance, news coverage of the accelerating series of 100 year and 500 year floods in recent years has failed to make the connection between these catastrophic events and global climate change.

A synergy of corporate spin doctoring and technological optimism on the part of reporters systematically distorts the information we receive in several ways. News media ignore the connections between causes and effects, seeking “expert opinion” from narrow specialists rather than thinkers who can put things in context. Corporate PR uses Orwellian techniques that twist words to make them mean their exact opposite. Ayres relates one low down tale of media manipulation, which occurred prior to the Kyoto conference on global warming in 1997. A maverick scientist named Art Robinson (who hides out in a bunker compound near Cave Junction, Oregon), with the backing of the Global Climate Coalition (an oil industry front group), distributed copies of his article debunking global warming to thousands of journalists. The article was deceptively laid out to look like it had been published in a prestigious scientific journal when in fact it had not been published or peer reviewed by other scientists at all. The result was a Wall Street Journal article entitled: “Science has Spoken: Global Warming is a Myth.” Seeds of doubt, deliberately sown, led to a failed agreement at Kyoto.

One key to correct perception of the threats we face is to see how the four spikes are connected to one another and to realize that there will be “shocks of synergy” from their interaction. For instance, Ayres predicts unimaginable loss of life from violent tropical storms hitting increasingly populous and poverty stricken cities. According to Ayres, FEMA, the agency in charge of helping people after such disasters in the US, will need to change its orientation from treating disasters as extraordinary events to seeing them as increasingly routine and expected as global warming spins off more and more violent weather. An example of unexpected synergy not covered in the book is the recent discovery of ocean dead zones. A huge zone in the Gulf of Mexico is now devoid of all life as agricultural and industrial chemicals pouring in from the Mississippi tie up oxygen and poison the waters.

God’s last offer is the chance to recognize that the future of the planet is now in human hands and to act accordingly. Ayres makes some recommendations to those who are interested in survival. He urges us to pay as much attention to the content of the information we consume as the content of our food. The average American family has the TV on 7.5 hours a day and entertainment – sports, movies, fashion and shopping - has become the junk food of consciousness. Creating one’s reality around such trivia amounts to denial and “denial is the flipside of sentience.” Reducing our consumption and connecting to our bioregions will also be essential. Those of us who are able to create a community around a sense of place will be better able to withstand the food and water shortages, disease epidemics, floods and droughts and social disruption that are on the horizon as global ecosystems degrade exponentially. “God’s Last Offer” is not for the faint of heart. Yet heart and the courage to proceed with eyes wide open are what can finally save us.