Chris Korda's booklist for black-pilled environmentalists
The Church of Euthanasia founder offers 8 books that prove human civilization is already doomed
Text by Chris Korda
Posted March 1, 2021
When the Church of Euthanasia was founded in 1992, its mission
was to restore balance between humans and non-humans through voluntary
population reduction. In other words, the goal was to persuade people to
not have children. Since 1992 the Earth’s human population has
increased by a third, from nearly six billion to nearly eight billion,
so it’s fair to say that we haven’t won yet, but the battle is by no
means over.
Humanity currently consumes about one and a half Earth’s worth of
resources every year. Obviously that can’t last, and the only reason
we’re getting away with it is because there’s a delay between our
profligacy and the disastrous impacts it causes. Biologists call this
situation “overshoot.” Put simply, there are too many of us, consuming
too much, too quickly. Earth’s biosphere can’t restock itself fast
enough to keep up with our ever-increasing appetites, nor can it
neutralize our ever-accelerating excretions, particularly our CO2, which
is now drastically altering the climate, just as scientists predicted
it would as far back as 1896.
Much like yeast in a bottle of beer, we’re exhibiting something
biologists call “irrational exuberance.” The yeast starts out with
plenty of food, so it throws an awesome party, reproducing and consuming
and excreting like crazy, and pretty soon it runs out of food and
chokes to death on its own waste. We don’t care, because we like
drinking yeast excrement, but we definitely should care about our own
overshoot, because we’re creating a hellish future for our own
descendants, and if we keep it up, we’ll be extinct, as in erased from
Earth’s hard drive, like the dinosaurs.
The Church of Euthanasia’s infamous slogan “Save the Planet, Kill
Yourself” is wry humor. The planet doesn’t need saving, on the contrary
it will be fine no matter what we do, until it’s destroyed by the sun in
about a billion years. We’re not a long-term threat to the biosphere,
because we need it more than it needs us. No one is coming to rescue us,
and we have nowhere viable to escape to. Making Earth hotter is stupid
because very hot climates favor reptiles, not mammals. Despite its
misanthropy, the Church was always directed towards saving us from our
own selfishness and myopia, and especially saving our fascinating but
exceedingly fragile civilization. Human civilization is the most
endangered species on Earth.
Our alleged intelligence notwithstanding, we’re one of the least
likely species to survive our self-inflicted “bottleneck.” We’re apex
predators—meaning we eat at the top of Earth’s buffet—and apex predators
die off early in mass extinctions, because their elaborate behavior
depends on specialized conditions. Much more likely to survive are
humble opportunists, which biologists charmingly refer to as “weeds,”
for example roaches. We could detonate all of our weapons at once in a
blaze of apocalyptic glory, and bacteria and many insects would easily
survive.
Earth’s human population was always going to be reduced, the only
question was how humanely. Thirty years ago, a soft landing was already
doubtful, but today it’s inconceivable. Our civilization is like the
Titanic in the sense that any change of course requires considerable
advance notice. We could have slowed down and turned around, but we
didn’t. Impact is ongoing, and further shaming seems pointless. It’s
time to work through the stages of grief. We’re stuck at denial, and we
need to arrive at acceptance. We did a terrible thing, and it’s going to
hurt, a lot. The worst pain will be inflicted on future generations,
after we’re smugly dead. If you have children, you could start by
apologizing to them.
The human drama is unfolding in a universe that’s utterly indifferent
to our fate. Our extinction would be a tragedy for us, but only for us.
We’re hairless apes on a ball of rock hurtling through the void. As
John Gielgud’s character says in the 1977 film Providence, “Out
there in the icy universe, there’s nothing.” How will future
generations regard us, assuming they’re lucky—or unlucky—enough to
exist? Are we heroes, or villains? In theory, we’re capable of listening
to the better angels of our nature, because we’re smarter than yeast,
but we’d better wise up fast.
Six Degrees by Mark Lynas
Why aren’t we responding to climate change quickly enough? Evolution
optimized us for threats that are visible, familiar, and immediate, with
direct impacts and simple causes easily blamed on others. Climate
change, on the other hand, is invisible, unprecedented, and drawn-out,
with indirect impacts and complex causes that are our fault. This
mismatch between our previously adaptive biases and the perfect storm of
climate change makes Mark Lynas essential reading because he
methodically explains the consequences of each additional 1°C rise in
Earth’s average global temperature in excruciatingly vivid and
meticulously researched detail. Lynas only considers up to 6° but he
could’ve easily have stopped at 4°, since beyond that it’s game over for
civilization. Since the book’s publication in 2007, we’ve continued to
race towards earth’s tipping points, provoking Lynas to release an
updated version in 2020 aptly titled Our Final Warning.
Overshoot by William R. Catton
We owe a great debt to Catton for popularizing the term “overshoot”
which was previously little known outside of biology. He was one of the
first to apply ecological overshoot to humanity, and he did so with
astonishing foresight at a time when environmentalism was still in its
infancy and our population was half of what it is today. He unmasks our
explosive progress as irrational exuberance and challengingly portrays us as detritivores—animals
that feed on dead organic material—who succeeded by consuming the
compacted remnants of our predecessors in the Jurassic. In other words,
we’re dancing around a bonfire of dinosaur corpses, ecstatically
oblivious to the lethality of the climatological forces we’ve unleashed.
Like yeast turning sugar into alcohol, we’re gradually choking
ourselves to death on our own waste, but unlike the yeast, we’re aware
of it and theoretically capable of changing course. Let’s drink a toast
to that.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
If you tire of tiptoeing around people’s religious and spiritual
beliefs, this is the book for you. Dawkins doesn’t mince words:
mystification is the opposite of explanation and debases the word
“truth” to the point of meaninglessness. Firmly situated in the real
universe of provable facts, he ridicules nonsense unsparingly, and his
outrage is contagious. Fundamentalism gets the most attention, rightly
as it causes the most harm, but the rot of superstition is everywhere,
embedded in the soothing lies of astrology, wellness quackery, Waldorf
schools, and fatalistic platitudes like “everything happens for a
reason.” The stubborn persistence of magical thinking suggests that it
was adaptive in our original evolutionary environment; perhaps it
softened the blows of an unpredictable and often brutally violent
existence. I’m with the cybernetic matriarch of Raised By Wolves: “Belief in the unreal can comfort the human mind, but it also weakens it.”
Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
In this breathless young adult novel, the burning of fossil carbon is
unthinkable and coastal cities are mostly submerged, their ruins jutting
out of filthy bayous to create habitat for pirates. The protagonist
belongs to a gang of child slaves that break apart ships to reclaim the
steel, risking their lives daily for mere sustenance. The descriptions
of ship demolition are detailed and terrifying. Perhaps the author saw
Michael Glawogger’s bleak documentary Workingman’s Death, one
segment of which features ship breakers in Pakistan. The characters
regard the “accelerated age”—meaning present generations—with disdain
and incredulity, and their bitterness influenced my album Apologize to the Future.
The dichotomy of the barbarous south plundered by the affluent north is
all too familiar. The book is the first of a trilogy and taken
together, they help us foresee the horrors that will surely result if
our carbon-fueled psychosis proves incurable.
O-Zone by Paul Theroux
Industrial society concentrates its power in cities, but only by ceding
control over outlying areas, as Hakim Bey and others have observed.
Already the elite submit to ubiquitous surveillance and willingly trade
freedom of movement for increased security. Today’s “knowledge workers”
telecommute, and rarely leave their gated communities, complete with
exclusive shopping malls, recreation facilities, and private police. How
much longer will it be before cities become walled cities, luxurious
bastions patrolled by bloodthirsty militias and surrounded by anarchic
wastelands? Are we returning to a feudal world? Theroux’s answer is yes,
and his eerily prophetic novel searches for life outside the walls. His
cast of jaded billionaires is woefully unprepared for what they find,
but the best of them are humbled and humanized by it. “I’m an Owner… get
out of my way and let me through!”
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
I often claim that the planet doesn’t need saving, and if you wonder how
I arrived at that conclusion, look no further. Weisman posits the
instantaneous total disappearance of humanity and rigorously describes
the aftermath. It’s an epic fail for cows, corn, cats, roaches, and our
other livestock, crops, pets and pests, but for most species, it’s a
huge win. Without regular maintenance, water penetrates our buildings
and rapidly turns them into debris fields. After a few thousand years,
evidence of humanity’s existence is hard to find, notwithstanding weird
exceptions like Mount Rushmore. Eventually the wreckage of civilization
is compressed into a thin layer of oily rock, similar to the hapless
victims of the Permian Triassic extinction. The book is enriched by many
experts including one of my heroes, biologist Edward O. Wilson. Weisman
also references the Church of Euthanasia, surely a selling point for
me.
The Flooded Earth by Peter D. Ward
I’m a problematic guest at dinner parties, as I’m easily drawn into
fiery debates with climate change deniers, like a sharpshooter obliged
to duel every new gunslinger in town. One of my trustiest ripostes is
from Ward: we needn’t worry about escaping to other planets, because
we’ll be much too busy moving our airports. Why are most airports at sea
level? Because cities tended to develop along coasts due to the need
for harbors. Ward’s book is full of similarly trenchant insights that
seem obvious only in retrospect. Even in the preposterous fantasy where
we eliminate all CO2 emissions today, the sea will still rise three
meters due to thermal inertia. Hence the line in Changing Climate: “From
the coast we must retreat.” The Keeling curve—the canonical measurement
of accumulating atmospheric CO2—continues to accelerate in the wrong
direction. Wake me up when it reverses itself, or even stabilizes.
Earth in Human Hands by David Grinspoon
Grinspoon specializes in life on other planets, which might seem odd
given that we’ve yet to encounter any, but the sliver of tax revenue
that subsidizes astronomy is well-spent: by comparing distant planets,
experts have approximated the prevalence of intelligent life in the
universe. Intelligence evolves surprisingly often, but we’re unlikely to
hear from it, because by the time it’s sufficiently advanced to send
signals, much like us, it’s at the threshold of self-annihilation, and
the odds of its brief blaze of glory lining up with ours approach zero.
Edward O. Wilson put it more succinctly in his book Consilience:
“Intelligence tends to snuff itself out.” The good news is that a small
percentage of time, instead of throwing an epic party and flaming out,
intelligent life shows restraint, prioritizes sustainability above all
else, and becomes long-lived. Let’s do that! We could start by reducing
our population.
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