THE TIPPING POINT
THE TIPPING POINT
Published in The East Hampton Star
The Tipping Point
Amagansett
October 6, 2014
To the Editor:
What have we learned after the climate march? Half of all nonhuman life, its wildlife, has been lost in the last 40 years!
We indulge in the beauty and cosmology of the Higgs Boson particle, while countries antagonize each other and continue to build nuclear warheads. The cold war has been renewed, while the ice cap melts. Tens of thousands of walruses have just accumulated on the north slope of Alaska with nowhere to go. As individuals, we may have desires and inspirations, but what society and so-called civilization dictates is increasingly costing us the lifeline to existence.
We cannot outsmart evolution, however hard we try. We cannot adapt to the mayhem of a deforested earth by becoming a new species, however hard we try to meld with the machine or find other planets to colonize. Bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, educators, planners, scientists, and especially the businessmen, the financial sector, need to understand this now. Our species has reached the tipping point of what the earth will tolerate.
As an Inuit elder once told Jean Malaurie when he was in the Arctic 60 years ago, “Earth will avenge herself. Already there are portents. Earth has had enough of man’s arrogance, greed, sophistry, and madness.” The Inuit, whom our son Lysander has visited twice in Greenland, know we are the people who change nature, as was prophesied a century ago. The time of purification, as the Hopi predicted, is upon us. How much purification will ensue depends on us. Nobody listens to the native people of the planet because they speak the language of the telluric realities, of the elemental forces, and they know we have sold the clouds. Metaphor is becoming mayhem.
We can no longer act immorally toward the next generation, and we have five years to turn things around. The native elders that surround us here in New Mexico have a clairvoyance that the sorcerers of Wall Street do not possess. History, as it has operated in the 20th century, and the strictures of biology are now on a collision course! Decisions for all life must be based not on expediency and profiteering but on our relationship to the earth, its soil, and its countless other species, for they are our true and only real life-support system.
The most paralyzing drought in California’s history challenges the ballast of the American empire. The tenure of our species and all life now depends on our ability to return to a measure of sanity and respect based on the biological parameters of Nature’s grace and ability to renew itself, and not on the dictates of our mechanical pride! The drought in California is symbolic of the entire empire. In the next decade, people could start to demand utter and complete change. How will 400 million people feed themselves? How will the planet?
The carbon economy has to give way to an algae and solar and tidal and geothermic power economy. Perhaps able minds will be able to use the earth’s own orbit to power civilization as Tesla once envisioned. The undermining of earth as William Blake saw the “satanic mills” has had its day.
The Hopi elders foresaw two world-shattering events, World War I and World War II, signified by two circles on their prophecy rock. The third world-shattering event is our separation from the organic and Nature. But it is a circle that has a slash through it. It is not a complete separation. Renewal is possible, but we have turn the ship around as if our lives depended on it!
CYRIL CHRISTO
