Crossing the Threshold of the Long 21st Century

Before We Begin…

The rough draft for the decade from 2025 to 2035 ballooned to almost 6,000 words, so I concluded I would need to scrap my initial plan to tell the story of the coming century by the decade. Instead, each Friday will cover a five-year period, starting in 2025 and ending in 2125. On top of changing the chronology of the storytelling, I realized I had a second issue on my hands. I could tell the story of the coming century solely through a dry, textbook style, outlining momentous events and tracking broad trends. But to really tell that story, we need characters to follow. People who’s lives can give the imagination something more concrete to grip on to as the wild beast of history careens from one landmark event to another. So I've decided to take a page, and four characters, from the book that Dr. Mattson and I are finishing. At the start of Inequality by Design, we meet three high school graduates of the class of 1980, and follow them for 40 years, as their lives are buffeted by the corporate-approved creative destruction of the neo-liberal economic era. By the end of the opening chapter, as the main characters enter elderhood, their kids and grandkid are entering adulthood in the year 2020. So it is these four who we will follow through the first half of the unfolding Long 21st Century.

What better metaphor for the coming century, than a gate topped with barbed wire, dwarfed by an approaching storm?

Also, Oklahoma's wild weather generated this image, not AI. More on that later...

The rough draft for the decade from 2025 to 2035 ballooned to over 6,000 words, so I concluded I would need to scrap my initial plan to tell the story of the coming century by the decade. Instead, each Friday will cover a five-year period, starting in 2025 and ending in 2125. On top of changing the chronology of the storytelling, I realized I had a second issue on my hands. I could tell the story of the coming century solely through a dry, textbook style, outlining momentous events and tracking broad trends. But to really tell that story, we need characters to follow. People whose lives can give the imagination something more concrete to grip on to as the wild beast of history careens from one landmark event to another. So I've decided to take a page, and four characters, from the book that Dr. Mattson and I are finishing. At the start of Inequality by Design we meet three high school graduates of the class of 1980, and follow them for 40 years, as their lives are buffeted by the corporate-approved creative destruction of the neo-liberal economic era. By the end of the opening chapter, as the main characters enter elderhood, their kids and grandkid are entering adulthood in the year 2020. So it is these four who we will follow through the first half of the unfolding century.

A fine read, even if it was
as much a way to talk about
the USA in the 60s and 70s,
as a detailed examination
of the Long 14th Century.

    But before we meet our protagonists, I want to throw out a quick note about the title of this post. Calling an era a 'long century' is, like everything else under the sun, not new. Perhaps the most well-know example come from Barbara Tuchman's book A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous Fourteenth Century. Published in 1978, the book covers the events of the Great Famines of the early 14th century, the Black Plague, the Papal Schism, peasant revolts, and the general breakdown of Western European society as it transitions from the Medieval Period (roughly 800-1300 AD) to the Early Modern Period which began sometime around 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople, the flowering of the Italian Renaissance, and the start of the Age of Sail. Setting aside the academic criticisms, the concept that Tuchman spoke to was the idea that the events which defined a period of transition didn't conform to the neat limit of 100 years. Thus, the changes experienced by Western Culture which were amplified by the beginning of the Little Ice Age, fundamentally reformed what it meant to be a member of Western Christendom. And that era ran for nearly 150 years, aka a century and a half. A long century, if you will. And that period seems suspiciously similar in length to the philosophy underpinning the Iroquois Confederacy's Great Law of Peace, a philosophy that one should consider the impact of their actions on the next seven generations. Arabic thinker and historian Ibn Khaldun's Dynastic Change and Its Economic Consequences posits a similar length of time as the life cycle of any given dynasty.

    This is all to say that I believe we, the people of North America, have already crossed the threshold. While I don't know what event future historians will point to as 'the' triggering event: September 11th, the Great Recession, Calderon's War on the Cartels? Heck, they may even reach back to the first iteration of NAFTA, which went into effect in 1994 and ushered in a transformation of the North American economy from three big, separate entities, into functionally one, tightly interlinked mega-economy. Indeed, if the Long 21st Century began in 1994, and runs until some seminal event circa 2125, that would bracket the Long 21st Century quite nicely. 

For giggles, I played with AI image generation for the four main characters. This was a for-fun experiment and I will return to stock images. But let us return to the four characters of the narrative, shall we?

    The first is Marty Junior, first-born son, unsurprisingly, of Marty Senior. Growing up, Marty took his role as big brother seriously enough he had a few run-ins with the law, beating up anyone he perceived as picking on his little brother or sister. By 2025, Marty Junior is a 33 year old cyber security specialist who works for the State of Michigan. He lives in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan with a wife, Tina, and their (uncreatively-named) newborn son, Marty the third, aka Trey. 

    Little sister Jillian celebrates her 30th birthday in 2025. Her parents secretly joked that she got all the brains of the family. Those brains won her free rides to the University of Michigan and that to a Canadian medical school. A few years out of residency, she and her husband Chris run a health clinic in Ashtabula, Ohio, which operates at perpetual near-bankruptcy. Jillian is pregnant with the couple’s first child. 

    Our third character is the younger brother, 26 year old Bobby, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Like his father, Bobby suffers from dyslexia, which has made him a perennial temp-worker. He is a bit of a black sheep of the family, as their overworked father’s deteriorating health over the course of the 2010s left Bobby without a stable father figure. Bobby showed up quite drunk at the father’s 2020 funeral, and hasn’t spoken to Marty Junior or Jillian since then. 

    Apart from these three siblings we have 16 year old Allison, the granddaughter of Jenny, another protagonist from the first chapter of Inequality by Design. In 2020, her family left the rustbelt for the warmer climate of the Gulf Coast, but their 30 year old car only got them as far as western Tennessee before breaking down for good. In 2025, Allison is slogging through what passes for an education at a chronically underfunded high school. Unlike her mother at the same age, she is not boy-crazy. Having spent her entire childhood moving from one apartment to the next, always one step ahead of eviction, she never established close friendships, and was never quite able to pin down what she wants to do with her life. 

The Big Picture: 2025 to 2030

Is that a sunrise or a sunset?

The first few of the years are deceptively calm for both the United States, and our four main characters. International headlines periodically mention a devastating drought pushing the people of the Yucatan towards starvation. A dramatic series of financial and political crises across the northern border in Canada disrupts some cross-border trade, but most people in the U.S. are just trying to get by. Making basic ‘getting by’ harder, import tariffs cost every American roughly $2,600 each year, but US-manufactured goods to replace more expensive imports often fail to materialize. At the same time, attempts at mass deportation pursued by the Reactionary Party administration in Washington pushes more and more recent immigrants and native-born relatives into a shadow economy rife with exploitation and criminal elements. While events in the eastern hemisphere make trouble over there, North America appears a serene island of stability by comparison. But pressures in all three major countries are building. 

I don't know what this chart measures, but 
it certainly looks bad for Canada...

Three horsemen of the economic apocalypse visit Canada: first comes electoral chaos, with no obvious replacement for the Trudeau government, followed by the collapse of an inflated real estate market and declining exports to the US. These factors spark a government debt crisis. The western provinces demand grater financial accountability from Ottawa, and hold referendums to refusing to send tax monies on to the federal government. Like the independence referendum in Catalonia, the government responds with arrests and laws banning provinces from holding plebiscites. This goads Quebec into outdoing the western provinces, with the provincial parliament votes to formally ‘confederate’ with the rest of the country. The province will no longer enforce laws passed by the national parliament, and will explore creating their own currency. The move is meant to force the Canadian government to backtrack on banning plebiscites, but instead provokes the national government to send in the Mounties and dissolve Quebec's National Assembly. But the move backfires, and the western provincial parliaments side with Quebec, passing laws to explicitly ban local businesses from collecting federal taxes.  By 2028, the country is divided into two hostile camps, the confederates of the periphery, and the centralizer provinces in between. 

Mexico's drought monitor readings last year.
Yes, I know, the Yucatan looks okay for now.

If Canada suffers from a deluge of problems, to the south a lack of deluges causes a different set of problems. The failure of cool-season monsoons leads to crop failures across southern Mexico and Central America. Starvation pushes some five million desperate people to crime and lawlessness, a situation local criminal gangs are only too happy to exploit. While the government in Mexico City does attempt to ship gran to the region, most of the shipments end up looted by the starving or stolen and held for ransom by gangs. The Maya-speaking peoples of the region view the fight between the Spanish-speaking gangs and government forces as just another instance of second-class citizenship and historical brutality. The Maya break into outright rebellion, and they are quickly dubbed the Zapatistas Nuevas by the Spanish-speaking population. This Pan-Maya movement even appeals to Spanish speakers sick of being held at arm’s length by the central government in Mexico City and being forced to take in people deported from the United States. 

As the year 2028 begins, the United States appears insulated from the brushfires burning to the north and south. But that appearance is deceiving, and the US is just a much a tinderbox of economic and cultural resentments. Every conflagration requires a spark, and because history has a sense of humor, an income tax cut proves to be that spark. A law passed in 2026, supported by both political parties, goes into effect. It eliminates the higher tax rate on overtime, while simultaneously ending the requirement that employers pay overtime for any work past 40 hours a week. Most work-forces without a union contract, and even some with one, quickly find their OT disappearing from their paychecks in January. 82 million Americans work hourly-wage jobs, and many salaried employees also receive some form of overtime compensation, so the consternation and fury spreads quickly. 

If your start a republic by protesting taxation, why not end one protesting taxes?

Still believing the political process might solve the problem, Americans flood congressional offices with angry calls. But Congress fails to repeal of this despised reform, with some even responding to constituents to get different jobs. Since the right to strike was also eliminated early on in the reactionary administration, labor unions and non-unionized workers must turn to a more informal method of protest. They call for everyone in America to take a walk in the park on April Fool’s Day, and stay there until tax day on April 15th. Municipal parks across the USA fill with millions of people. The media sends the message that this April Fools joke will be a one-time event, but the next day, the parks fill up again. Then the next day. Then the next. A week into the General Strike, some 30% of the US labor force takes “walks in the park” rather than going to work. Many who do not call off work participate in slow downs and stoppages, vowing to do half the work expected. The strikes prove surprisingly successful, grinding the economy to a halt. 

The oligarchs hold the cards though, and tell every elected official in the country if they ever want to see a single cent in campaign contributions again, they will break the strikes. The majority of elected officials comply with their corporate task-masters. National Guard units are mobilized, and police officers called in for extra pay working on “park clearing” details. In some cases, local cops and national guardsmen refuse to comply with the orders. When this happens, private security companies fill in support roles, freeing up those who do obey orders to put on riot gear. 

It is NOT hard to find a real-life image of cops 
clearing protestors out of a park. Your challenge,
dear reader, is to guess which park clearing this
is a picture of...

At this point, our four characters re-enter the narrative, and we will follow them through the General Strike of 2028. So, let’s make this all personal…

Marty Junior

Marty Junior counts himself as one of the good guys. Working for the State of Michigan’s eponymously-named Office of Remote Surveillance, Marty monitors the online activity, especially financial transactions, of organized crime with a focus on human trafficking. Starting in 2025, the state received federal money and expanded definition of human trafficking, including labor organizers and charitable NGOs accused of harboring illegal immigrants or naturalized citizens targeted for deportation. Marty finds the expanded definition troubling, but a round of automation and job cuts puts to rest any doubts he may have. Junior even gets a promotion to shift supervisor, which largely insulates him from the job cuts. Plus, his superior assures him that ‘loyal men’ will be needed in the near future, rather than increased automation.

When the general strike begins Marty and his agency are more than willing to backstop National Guard and private security forces with communications and intelligence. They monitors both live feed cameras and cell phone traffic of the park walkers, turning the information suspected organizers of the strike over to local police agencies. Arrests take place overnight at suspects residences, before they can get to the protection of crowds at local parks. Marty goes home every day after work and loses no sleep about the possible fates of these political prisoners.

        In the years following the crackdown on the General Strike, Marty Junior boasts to his superiors about the vigor with which his office tracked down cell traffic and cash app transactions. He concludes the late-night arrests prevented the Detroit-area protests from getting out of hand. When speaking to people outside the office, Marty rarely mentions his work, and often draws on his experiences before the strike, if the other person asks anything like probing questions. Even with Tina, he rarely talks about the core of his work.

Like this, but with corporate sponsorship...

Jillian

Julie and her husband Chris thought they would be a power-couple; she would be the doctor providing care, while Chris the accountant would make sure they get paid. They even identified Ashtabula, Ohio as a community underserved by the health care system, thinking this would provide a stable customer base. But the joke was on them, as insurance payouts declined and patients found themselves unable to afford copays. To keep their clinic open, the pair find themselves having to hire additional staff to collect payments and manage paperwork, rather than provide direct patient care. 

While Jillian, Chris, and the fifteen clinic employees sympathize with the striker’s, they know they cannot take time off to join the strike, as the clinic would certainly lose too much revenue. The staff of the clinic demands some sort of solidarity, and a vote is taken to is taken to open the clinic to them anyone ‘walking the nearby park’ without up-front payment required. The Ohio governor declares a statewide curfew, and the State Police show up to close the clinic. Jillian and the staff leave, but show up the next day to operate as normal. Much like in Michigan, the state authorities in Ohio regard such actions as trouble making. Since he manages the clinic, state police arrest Julian's husband Chris while he is on his way back to a local park to spread word about the services the clinic might provide. This move infuriates both Jillian and the members of the staff who then vote to take half of their staff to the park to help treat any injured strikers. While Jillian stays to oversee clinic operations, half of the staff is present when the local park is surrounded by mounted riot police and the National Guard. 

Eventually, the tools of empire used abroad,
end up getting used on the people of the homeland.

When the protesters refuse to disperse, the state attacks. Hundreds, including the entirety of the staff are either injured or arrested very few escape the police cordon. The crackdown results in several deaths a number of critical injuries, and sparks general outrage across the state. The next day when protesters meet at the parks, they come heavily armed. In some places this results in tents standoffs with the police but in others, including Dayton and Toledo the strikers shoot first. Dozens are killed and hundreds injured across the state. Those currently in custody are beaten and tortured on suspicion that they are somehow coordinating the spontaneous riots on the outside. The victims of this state brutality include Juliana's husband Chris, who staggers out of the prison with broken shoulders and black eyes.

Bobby

As mentioned earlier Bobby works a series of temp jobs in Louisville Kentucky. Needing every dollar he earns, he does not participate in the first day of the general strike, referring to the people by the media moniker of April fools. As the strike enters its second week, Bobby loses his temper job unloading trucks at the Louisville train station.Most of the freight trains in the country are either halted or operating way way behind schedule. While Bobby is initially frustrated with the strike, an idle railway worker encourages him to go to one of the local parks and actually meet the people he's upset with. Bobby follows the advice and ends up befriending several strikers. With temp jobs dried up and rent due on the 15th, Bobby sews what’s left of his cash into his windbreaker, grabs his sleeping bag, and heads to the park. There, he joins hundreds of others on the path to homelessness. 

As word of the riots in Ohio filters down to Kentucky guns, improvised explosive devices, and Molotov cocktails begin showing up ay discrete locations around the park. Bobby is highly suspicious that at least some of these have been placed by agents of the state, and he and a friend actually detain someone leaving a crate of national guard issued hand grenades. 

Go south, young man!

When Bobby receives a phone call from his mother begging him not to participate in the strikes he tries to do the right thing and turn the hand grenades over to a police officer. This move predictably backfires, with Bobby arrested for possessing stolen government property. Fortunately for him, he's sitting in county jail when the crackdown begins in Louisville. The park he had been at is the scene of some of the worst fighting. Over 300 people, both strikers and security forces, losing their lives. Bobby is further fortunate that the governor of Kentucky is much more soft in his support of the corporate state and very quickly offers an amnesty to everyone arrested during the rioting if it will get the bloodshed to stop. This tactic, along with the collective horror due to the Battle of Louisville, brings the general strike to a slow-motion. Finding an eviction notice on his door, Bobby grabs his sleeping bag and jumps on an empty freight train. As the train rumbles south, Bobby calls his mom and lets her know he's leaving Kentucky.

Allison

I mentioned above Alison found everything about school boring: classes, teachers, fellow students, all of it. So she dropped out and started working full-time at a fried chicken place. At the beginning of 2028 Alison is 19 years old working as a shift manager. As the strike begins the fried chicken places teeters on the verge of bankruptcy because the franchise owner keeps demanding more and more profit from the business. The owner even visits the restaurant the day after the general strike begins, and threatens to fire anyone who participates going forward. To show he’s serious, the owner fires two line cooks who called out the day before. This action completely backfires. The entire staff walks out and heads straight to the nearest park. They make impromptu meals for fellow strikers and generally serve as a nucleus to organize everything people living in the park might need from food to clothing to shelter to sanitation facilities. Well this would mark Allison out as an organizer and someone targeted for arrest, the entire operation is done with sticky notes, pencils and absolutely no electronics. 

Allison throws herself into the organization of the strike camp with enthusiasm, finding a meaning that she never found in the mindless rigidity and conformism of high school. Allison and the other strikers are fortunate that the mayor of Memphis is one of few elected politicians in the state of Tennessee to not tow the corporate line. The Mayor argues quite publicly that the police department has better things to do than kick people out of parks that are technically owned by the public which currently is filling them up. This buys the strikers an few extra weeks until the Tennessee National Guard moves in to clear out the protest camps in early May. The Tennessee state government then dissolves the city government of Memphis, turning all its functions over to the county and declares that anyone found in the parks after the middle of the month will be arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. 

Allison and her work crew stolidly return to the restaurant. Their boss agrees to rehire them, on the condition that they pay back the franchise potential profits lost during the strike. This move has the double effect both garnishing meager wages while simultaneously showing the employees just how much profit they provide the franchise owner. The workers in public agree to this, but hold a secret meeting and decide to assassinate the franchise owner. The restaurant’s bartender has military experience and improvises an IED from household items. A week later, the franchise owner’s car blows up shortly after leaving the restaurant. Everyone in the restaurant is suspected of participating, but they all keep quiet and the police can never actually pin it on anyone. From the silence surrounding the bombing of the boss's car, emerges an unspoken consensus; "We could do that again."

"I don't know what happened, we were busy at working..."

An Empty Continent

    Today's subject will cover an unpleasant topic: extinction! That’s right, we’re going to talk about the elimination of entire species from the global ecosystem. More specifically, I intend to address the impact of human pollution beyond dumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Because in tandem with the impacts of human climate change, there's also the impact of people using the natural world as a dumping ground for everything that is inconvenient or sometimes outright dangerous to human life. This includes all varieties of pollution from sewage, untreated runoff from agriculture, plastics trash gyres in the oceans, the micro plastics that are now show up in rainwater all over the world. And to be clear and unfortunately honest, no additional natural parks or marine reserves will get humanity out of from under our own boot-heel. 

    Once again let us get an obvious caveat out of the way; human beings have always impacted the natural environment. In fact, it's likely that since modern humans evolved approximately 400,000 years ago, no place where humans lived has been a pristine natural ecosystem since. To use a local example, the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve, in my home state of Oklahoma, explicitly seeks to restore grasslands of the central plains to the way the ecosystem functioned after the arrival of Native Americans. 

We've been doing this quite a while.

    If you really want to interrogate the idea of the ’natural world’, in the Remembrance of Earths Past trilogy, author Cixin Liu debates the idea wether nature itself can even be ‘natural’. In the book Death's End, one character runs computer simulation looking at what would happen on Earth if natural life never existed. The simulation found that such a simulation cannot produce a conclusion, because simply by existing, the natural world influences even the basic laws of physics. This is a lot to wrap your head around, so I'll simply leave a link to the story and you can read it for yourself. The whole trilogy (Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End) is fantastic, and really pushes one to think about big ideas from a whole variety of perspectives. The trilogy takes place over millions of years, but focuses on the next four hundred or so.

    This blog is focused on just the next hundred right now, so let’s get back to the task at hand. The problem today isn’t that people impact the natural world. The problem is a messy trifecta of scale, pace and the feedback loop from climate change. 

    Taking these issues in order, we should first look at the scale of the problem; human beings currently dump billions of tons of CO2 into the giant areal sewer we collectivity refer to as ‘the sky’, along with millions of tons of other problematic particles and molecules from NOX, mercury sulfates, to VOCs and micro-plastics which, as mentioned earlier, can now be found in rainwater all over the world. All these molecules make their way into the water cycle. And we haven’t even gotten to the mountains of trash we dump directly into the oceans, as well as the massive amounts of waste runoff from agricultural operations, which very often includes huge amounts of pesticides and fungicides, was well as fertilizers and animal waste. All of which flows back, eventually, to us humans. 

^Carcinogens not shown

    Not only are these pollutants building up in the world’s ecosystems, the rate of the pollution buildup can only accelerate, because the economic model we operate demands perpetual growth. With limitless growth, comes limitless pollution. There is of course another factor at play beyond the rapacious growth of capital intensive industries and the byproducts that they produce. A great many people outside of the industrial world want to join in the prosperity that is modern industrial civilization. From the outside looking in, modern (industrial) life, with its easy access to clean-ish water, sanitation, cheap food, and a smorgasbord of fashionable consumer goods, looks like an endless party. And for those in the ‘developing world’ wanting to attend, that party will end sometime over the next 150 years. For a great many of them, they will never get let in the door. I don't want to use ecological consciousness as a rhetorical tool with which to bludgeon the poor peoples of the world into accepting shorter lifespans, unhealthy environments and material poverty. The fact that there are things to life other than material prosperity, isn’t much of a consolation to someone living in a shanty town in a tropical metropolis.

    This estimate, that fossil-fueled industrial civilization has about 150 or so years left, roughly mirrors the 150 years it has existed. Prior to 1870 or so, industrialization was limited to the East Coast of North America, and a corner of Northwest Europe, from the midlands of England, down to Lyon, France, then back up to roughly Hamburg, Germany. These little slivers of humanity lived on barely 5% of the world’s landmass, and constituted maybe 5% of the population. And in five to seven generations, depending on how you count, the industrial way of living spread to every major city and decent-sized population around the world. I would estimate the percentages of land and people engaged in industrial economic activity has reversed, with only 5% of land and people NOT engaged in some step in the industrial food web.

    And this scale of change is reflected in the natural world as well. This recent study found that roughly like 96% of all mammal life on earth today is made up of human beings and our livestock. That leaves 4-5% for every other form of mammalian life. While the scale of impact by agriculture is slightly better, about 37% of Earth’s surface is used for agriculture, that figure jumps to 50% when you count only ‘habitable’ land. Yes, the Sahara desert is huge, but no people want to live or farm there. On the high seas, which make up 70% of the Earth’s surface, 40% is considered effected by human activity, with much of that activity concentrated in shallow areas where marine life is most abundant. As it is on land, so it is on the seas; no one wants to live in the desert.

Except camels. They don't mind living 
in the desert.

    Compounding the scale and pace of human pollution are the impacts from climate change, which compounds other forms of pollution. As the climate destabilizes, ecosystems must shift to accommodate a hotter planet. But the problem is twofold; first, the rate of change is so much faster than natural ecosystems can handle without devastating species loss. If we could say the current warming will to happen over the next thousand years or so, then many ecosystems might (emphasis on might), be able to move north or up on their own. The natural world has done this before, after all. 

    Second, the impacts of climate change will likely force human beings to double down on the mistakes of industrial civilization. The reason is core to the predicament in which industrial civilization finds itself; almost all humans alive to today, with very few exceptions, serve the industrial machine in one way or another.. This is true from elites who operate the systems of finance all the way down to the janitors and scavengers and trash collectors who work at what might be considered the very bottom of the economic pyramid. For example, consider the ship breakers in India whose job is, as it sounds, to break up old ships for salvage. Even groups like the Amish, who live as far outside the modern system as possible, still use modern power tools (they just can’t own them) and earn incomes outside their local communities.

    Everyone’s material livelihood depends on the maintenance of industrial civilization, and as of right now industrial civilization has only one operating imperative; the conversion of raw materials into sellable products, many of which constitute one time use products which humans immediately throw away. To some extent this is avoidable, and my family and I make a point to avoid single-serving products, but in other cases, avoidance would mean going without. Who hasn’t bought a product that DIDN’T come packaged in single-use plastic? In a morbid bit of irony, even when we find a bio-degradable form of single-use plastic, customers can reject the arguably better product because it’s too noisy to open. I wish I was joking, but this actually happened with Sun Chips.

I wish this story was some lame satire...

     But someone makes money off those plastics, and the companies whose products go into those plastics make money off of selling those products. Thus the cycle perpetuates itself. This is all a roundabout way of saying that as climate change pushes industrial civilization with compounding problems such as disasters, crop failures, famines and desertification, combined with rising sea levels and increased soil erosion from a more active water cycle, humanity will have very little choice but to double down on the existing model of operating a fossil-fueled economy.

    This all paints very bleak picture, and indeed in some sense the future is bleak, but there is, I suppose, one minor silver lining. We're talking about impacts that will only last a few thousand years. That's not much consolation to anyone reading this, or i anyone multiple generations in the future, but it is a silver lining. How is it a silver lining? Thanks to radiative adaptation, new life forms will evolve to fill the gaps and niches of the ecosystems left behind by the extinction of a great many species that exist today. Ecologists posited on and off since at least the 1990s. and probably earlier. that humanity is pushing the natural ecosystems of the planet towards a sixth great extension. This is almost certainly in progress, but it doesn't have to end up with a full-blown extinction event.

    Humanity could choose to make different choices. We could reduce, reuse and recycle. Indeed, here in the US, we almost took that path in the 1970s. While I did mock National Parks and Marine Reserves earlier, such efforts are worth making. I believe nature is worth conserving for its own sake, but there's also a self interested reason for conservation. A great number of pharmaceutical products derive directly from the natural biodiversity of our planet. A poster child for this would be the horseshoe crab. The blood harvested from the horseshoe crab is key to many (human) life-saving drugs. If we wipe out the natural habitat of the horseshoe crab, it’s not an all clear that modern pharmacology could replace the compounds produced for us for free by this amazing crustacean.

Dirty hippies, being right about something!

    I do want to take a paragraph to dispel any notion you may have that discussion of mass extinction is synonymous with the end of humanity. The Chicxulub impact, which wiped out the dinosaurs except for the avian branch that gave us delicious chickens. Modern mammals arose to fill the many of the ecological gaps left by the now extinct land dinosaurs, eventually giving rise to the great apes, and, after millions of year, anatomically modern humans. So while it was a defining event in the natural history of our planet, it was nowhere near as devastating as the Permian Extinction, which resulted in the extinction of roughly 57% of all biological families on the planet. It’s ironic that the Permian extinction was responsible for a significant amount of the fossil fuel reserves that human beings are now using to push the planet towards a sixth extinction. All that weird irony aside the point is that extinction level event does not have to be in a complete ecological collapse. A few human beings would survive an extinction level event on par with the Jurrasic extinction. Humanity would most certainly not survive an event like the Permian Extinction. 

    Speaking of dying, one of the impacts of all of this pollution ending up in our natural ecosystems and water cycles is that the rates of cancer will almost certainly skyrocket for hundreds of years. While living creatures have always had to contend with malignant tumors, the degree to which cancer has become a cause of death around the world is truly out of line with previous human experience. While written historical records are incomplete, and the archaeological record can only shed so much light on the subject, in the preindustrial context most human beings died of infectious diseases in the first few years of life. A great many died of malnutrition and famine. War, that third horsemen of the apocalypse came in a distant third. And cancer itself was, we would guess, a rare problem reserved only for people who lived an extraordinarily long life by pre-industrial standards. Granted, “extraordinarily long life” by pre-industrial standards would have meant living into one’s forties, but the point remains. Today cancer is in the top five, along with heart disease, accidents, lack of health insurance, and respiratory illnesses as a top-five killer of Americans. I would imagine that by the turn of this century, cancer will be the leading cause of death across all age brackets. 

    This predicament is best exemplified by the weed killer Roundup. Because genetic modification focused on creating plants which can survive a hefty does of the stuff, Roundup is becoming inseparable from modern agriculture. Any farmer who does not want their fields overrun by weeds must apply multiple rounds of Roundup to keep down the undesirable plants. As a result, glyphosate, the cancer-causing chemical which also makes Roundup such a potent weed killer, persists in soils for weeks to months after use. In one study, 36% of 154 tested municipal water supplies in the Midwest showed detectable amounts of glyphosate. While the detectable level is not officially considered harmful to humans, I would take that as a small consolation. And as weeds develop resistance to glyphosate, every year farmers must spray more of it just to keep the 8 billion fed. Once again we can see how the modern farming, like many aspects of industrial civilization is caught in a bind. Human beings need the calories from corn and soy, the two crops on which Roundup is primarily used for, but natural methods of weed control, while viable, are not nearly as profitable nor efficient as spraying Roundup ready crops, to keep a hungry world well fed. I suppose the one upside, is that even if weeds become completely Roundup resistant, one can always go out and pull weeds by hand. And that will require a much larger agricultural workforce. 

    To avoid setting too dark of a tone for this post I would like to circle back to the notion that the natural world isn't natural or at least the natural world always seeks to find some new form of ecological balance. Yes in the centuries of head to pollution and ecological devastation that humans are visiting upon the natural world of North America and by extension upon our selves will be devastating. Great number of species will go extinct a great number of ecosystems will collapse and will never return and the world that human beings would have it in for instance 1000 years will be an ecologically impoverished landscape. What do I mean by this well for instance the recent study found that something like 96% of all mammal life on earth today is made up of human beings and our livestock. The natural world is already tragically impoverished and I don't see any reason to think that the current trajectory will not make it even more so. Also it's worth noting that as equal ecosystems encounter disequilibriums there are often massive almost tidal wave like events where a disruptive or what we might deem invasive species will invade and ravage an ecosystem but then also experience a die-back of its own as it overshoots what the ecosystem to naturally carry. Eventually, a new equilibrium is reached. Unfortunately for the natural world and for the humans dependent on it, that will involve a great deal of unpleasantness before the new equilibrium takes hold. 

    So what might an ecologically impoverish North America look like in 100 years? I think two of the best, most instructive examples, are the islands of Iceland and Rapa Nui. 

They didn't just pillage and burn Saxon towns,
they enjoyed a quiet life on the farm too!

    Iceland is a decent-sized volcanic island located between Scotland and Greenland in the North Atlantic. The first known human inhabitants, the Norse, arrived sometime in the eighth century. Based on fossil and very limited written records, the island was covered by fairly lush forests. The Norse loved keeping cattle and eating beef  (who doesn’t?) so they immediately began clearing the trees for pasture land. What the Norse did not take into account was that unlike their native Scandinavia, Iceland had very thin soils. So as they imported cattle and plows and began to practice European-style agriculture in an ecosystem that was not fit to support it, they quickly destroyed most of the topsoil of the island. The largely barren, rocky ice-covered landscape we know today did not look like it did 1,300 years ago.

    The island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island and located about 1,300 miles west of Chile in the South Pacific, suffered a similar fate. When the Polynesians arrived on Easter island approximately 1,000 years ago, they two found an island covered in trees and home to a rich marine ecosystem. And for a number of centuries they managed to live in some degree of symbiosis with the natural world. But as almost always happens, this story does not have a happy ending for the natural ecosystem of Easter island. Eventually, all the trees were cut down and in their place there was very little other than thick-stemmed grass to hold down the topsoil. But the Polynesians couldn’t eat the grasses needed to hold onto the topsoil, sot the Easter Islanders had to become very good at dry rock gardening agriculture and became even more dependent on the sea to provide them with food. By the time Europeans visited Easter island, their written records mention that Easter islanders operated canoes made of reads grasses bound together with twine, while their ancestors likely arrived piloting sturdy, large, and most importantly, wooden canoes made from trees. in the case of Rapa Nui, the worst ecological devastation took place after the arrival of Europeans. Diseases, against which the the Polynesians had no immunity, ravaged their population. In the name of ‘economic development’, the 19th century Chilean government decided that it would be a good idea to start raising sheep on Easter island. But that's a story for another time.

Seriously. Chile brought sheep here. On Purpose.

    Both the Polynesians and the Norse adapted to a more ecologically impoverished reality. Depending on how one looks at the situation, one could even argue that both peoples thrived in the face of adversity. In these two examples, I think we can glimpse the future of North America. Barring some cataclysm, the human population will survive and indeed in some places will thrive. But over the near term, they will do so on a continent with a devastated ecosystem, a host of tropical diseases and staggeringly high rates of cancer. These factors will combine with plummeting birth rates and mass migration-drive conflict, to put the human population into a steep nosedive. 

As of writing this post, the population of North America sits at 618 million people, and will grow to a projected 709 million by 2100. At this point, most projections assume the population stagnates, with the figure for 2125 being roughly the same, about 700 million people. These models rely on two variables: expected birth rates and life expectancy, and, most importantly, assume the future will look like the past. As countries urbanize and industrialize, birth rates drop, but life expectancy increases, so overall populations still grow. But as we’ve discussed over the past few posts, the future will likely not look like the past at all. Or, more accurately, the future will look like the past, only the direction of all trends, including population, will go into reverse. A modest -0.4% annual population decline gives us a 2125 population of 405 million, with populations in each sub-region coming in at 254 million for the US and Canada, 121 million for Mexico and Central America, and 29 million for the Caribbean.

While the numbers seem stark, a 0.4% increase in the death rate would only see annual deaths in the United States increase from about 3.28 million annually, to just over 3.29 million deaths annually. And this population decline rate relies solely on a slight uptick in annual deaths. I didn’t even touch expected birth rates. 

But brith and death rates do not remain static. Humans, like every other population of animals, respond to their environment. I expect the human population in North America hit a low point between 300 and 400 years from today, at between 5 to 10% of the current population, or between 31 and 62 million. Once again, it wouldn’t take a cataclysm to reach that number. If population decline accelerated from -0.4% to -0.8% annually, we would bottom out at 67 million in 2375 and 34 million by 2450. The biodiversity of the continent will be similarly impoverished, with huge tracts of land either barren desert or tropical wetlands with ecosystems dominated by the most opportunistic, aggressive forms of life. 

Just replace the column with a McDonalds sign.

    Next week, we will take a walk, as the impacts of climate change, ecosystem chaos, de-industrialization and resource scarcity push more and more people from their homes greater and greater numbers. Check back next Friday as we go on a folk-wandering.