||| FROM ELISABETH ROBSON |||


We are told there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In my own journey coming to terms with and accepting the reality of ecological overshoot, I’ve been through all five stages, some multiple times (denial was short-lived and a one-time experience—once you see it, you can’t unsee it).

Over the years, I have learned there’s actually a sixth stage to grief: gallows humor. It’s so insane that we humans think we can keep this way of life going—the way of life we call business-as-usual—I have to laugh. That’s the humor part. And yet of course it’s not funny at all because the attempt to keep business-as-usual going is destroying the foundations of life on Earth. That’s the gallows part.

While I find myself revisiting anger, depression, and acceptance fairly frequently, I try to stay in the gallows humor phase of grief when I can, because then at least I’m laughing some of the time.

This morning I laughed when I read a news article from August 21, 2024 about a new study that found our brains now average about 0.5% plastic by weight. Previous studies on micro- and nanoplastics have found these plastics in “human lungs, placentas, reproductive organs, livers, kidneys, knee and elbow joints, blood vessels, and bone marrow.” The researcher conducting the study wrote “it is now imperative to declare a global emergency” to deal with plastic pollution.

Ya think? 

In my opinion it’s long past that time. Yet I don’t hear any world leaders declaring such an emergency. And so, this story made me laugh, because humanity will continue producing plastics; that’s business-as-usual.

I did the math: if plastics accumulate in our brains at the same rate as the plastics industry is projected to grow over the next few years (about 4.5% per year), our brains will be 5% plastic in 52 years. My guess is it’s not possible for any living organism to survive with that much plastic in the brain, but who knows (this is a one-time-only experiment!). If business-as-usual continues, I suppose we’ll find out. So will the many other beings on Earth who are also breathing and ingesting plastics and have plastics in their brains, too.

I laughed because I wondered what it will take for humanity to sit back, take stock, and change direction.

A 70% decline in wildlife populations in just the past 50 years isn’t enough. I find that non-reaction to a wildlife holocaust bizarre, but recognize that most people don’t think much about wildlife or that we can’t live without them. Industrial agriculture and human development have reduced wildlife to a mere 5% by weight of humans and our livestock, and we continue to destroy habitats the world over at unprecedented rates.

Yawn, says the public.

Species are going extinct at 1,000 to 10,000 times the normal extinction rate. Those who study extinctions say we are in the sixth mass extinction on Earth, caused by us, primarily because of industrial agriculture, deforestation, and fresh water pollution and depletion. Species extinctions are not events that impact just one species; every species fits into the web of life and when a species is low in population or goes extinct, that affects all the other species who depended on that now-gone species, and the ecosystem of which that species was a part. Biosphere integrity is declining rapidly. This too, isn’t enough to stir change, despite that we are human animals and cannot live on a planet without flourishing ecosystems. And there’s nothing funny about extinctions.

We’re bored, says the public.

I haven’t been laughing at the many stories of catastrophic flooding that have been in the news of late: Connecticut in the USA, Germany, Afghanistan, Oman, Uruguay, Argentina, Indonesia, France, Brazil, the UK, and more have all experienced devastating floods in recent weeks, with many people losing their homes and lives. But I have been laughing that hardly anyone notices that for each degree of global warming, the atmosphere can hold 7% more water, so at our current 1.65C above pre-industrial global average temperature, no wonder there is such flooding. The news dutifully reports each incident; we all ooh and ahhh over the strangely compelling videos of cars floating down main streets and people being rescued by boat, and then continue on with our day.

What’s on Netflix? says the public. (Perhaps a good disaster movie.)

What will it take? If plastic brains, a wildlife holocaust, species extinctions, and catastrophic flooding don’t wake us from our stupor, I honestly don’t know what will. I suppose I’ll have to wait to find out.

In the meantime, I’ll try to keep laughing.


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