this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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We're terraforming our entire biosphere so that the only thing it supports are domesticated animals and crops. Even if you ignore all the unintended consequences of that, the intended consequences are: we are destroying almost all the food and shelter required for wild creatures to survive on earth. Wild bugs, animals, and plants literally only survive because there still exist small random patches of land that were not economical to develop, and they cling to life on them. Everywhere else on earth is a wasteland, re-shaped by these unfathomable beings that taken over and imposed their will on the very land and air.
I remember one day passing by a group of geese wandering through a walmart parking lot. Me and them just stood there and looked at each other, and I imagined that we had swapped places. What if we were just people living in the world, and these absolutely unfathomable advanced alien entities came to earth and just started reshaping everything, leaving us wild humans to live on the fringes of still unchanged land that the aliens had for some unknown reason not converted yet to their own environment? Imagine being a human wandering through the landscape of the Changed Zone, reshaped into forms that you can't even understand, but with are anathema to human existence. And then imagine that you stumble upon one of these alien entities, and are trying to understand it, to communicate with it... but receiving no answer, not because they couldn't, but because they just don't care about you at all. The goose doesn't have that level of understanding, of course, but that's the experience they were going through. Nature is cruel, but what people are doing to it is one of the most evil crimes in history.
That's what The Labyrinth by Simon Stalenhag is about. Black orbs just show up on Earth one day and start pumping the atmosphere full of ammonia gas. Humanity has mere decades before the air becomes completely unbreathable and nothing we fire at the orbs has any effect on them.
Reminds me of the core themes of A Roadside Picnic, which draws a parallel between the horrifying causality-breaking bullshit in The Zone and the aftermath of a family stopping for a picnic on the side of the road and leaving trash and leftover food everywhere, which must seem similarly alien to the wildlife.
I understand that part in a general sense, though it is overwhelming to think of the scale of all the processes you described, and makes them in a sense invisible to many people. I guess seeing a symptom of it right in front of me makes it a more real to me.
It's tough to internalize these things, even if intellectually you might be aware of them. One shocking moment might put everything you knew into perspective... but there's no guarantee that you'll have that moment.
I think a similar thing happens with liberal's support of the genocide in Gaza: if they saw it with their own eyes, there's a good chance that they might do a 180 and stop supporting Israel. They maybe already had all the information, but having it rubbed in your face is what it takes to really internalize it.
Another example: it's well known among even most of the general public that Miami is going to be underwater eventually. But some of those people, the young ones, are going to have this experience decades from now, where they're standing on the shoreline looking at the ruins of a submerged city, and think "goddamn, I knew it was going to happen, but it hits different when you're standing here looking at this city that's juat gone". It's something that doesn't seem real... until it seems very real, and you're surprised by how it snuck up on you.
I guess that on reflection, a good part of the shock comes from realizing only a year ago that these processes are happening right now on a accelerated time table. What people had been told over the last fifteen years was that this was a process that would unfold over the course of the 21st century, of which I could expect to see half of it over my lifetime. What is sinkIng in is that these processes will occur rapidly over my lifetime and the world will be a profoundly different place than when I was growing up at the start of this century.
It brings about a fear of the uncertain which at times I find myself comparing to the fear felt by those generations that lived through the last great crisis of capitalism in the 20th century. I suppose that is what it is at the end of the day, and if I were a historian of any kind, I might consider with appropriate foresight naming this period the Crisis of the 21st Century.