Saving Everything Else

For about the last two years I have been making daily posts on social media that include a daily “moment of doom” and a daily “doom quote.” The moment of doom usually comes from Google’s news feed, after I do a search on a variety of word combinations, beginning with “climate doom,” followed by “climate ocean,” “climate atmosphere,” “climate extinction” and so on. After deciding on the day’s moment of doom, I then look over my climate change library (53 books and growing) and consider which book might contain a quote relevant to the moment of doom.

For the last few months, I have found myself stumbling over the same two titles as I scanned the books, and being simultaneously aggravated and motivated. And yes, I often judge these two books in their entirety by their titles. And let me tell you, their titles deserve both this judgment and my aggravation. But today, at long last, I am letting motivation win and am writing this short essay.

What are those two books?

The first one is “Saving Us” by Katharine Hayhoe, published in 2021. I bought a used hardcover copy while volunteering for the Planned Parenthood book sale. I paid $4. Maybe my copy should have been re-titled “Saving Us from the Landfill,” as that’s where it was headed when I picked it out from the day’s discard pile.

The other book is “Saving Ourselves” by Dana Fisher, published in 2024. I paid full price for this book — which is 143 pages of expository writing followed by 54 pages of notes. Note to self: the page of notes I just flipped to in order to find something interesting to quote here is no different from any other of the 53 pages of notes and contains nothing quotable.

So, what’s the aggravation? The central theme of these two books is identical. They both focus on saving us, ourselves … humans. To both of them, we live on The Planet of the F&%king Bloody Ignorant Apes, and hells bells, we’re going to save it for those bloody apes, be it simply by talking to the apes real nice-like, or by a planetary shift in bloody ape consciousness as the furnace of doom descends.

Here’s a quote from Hayhoe:

“Because it’s so scary and so contentious, we don’t talk about it. And if we don’t talk about it, why would we care? In this book, I want to give people the tools to have constructive conversations about why these issues are relevant to all of us, and how we can work together for change.”

There’s nothing wrong with talking to other people about climate change.  But humans are a cancer, “homo ecophagus” and no amount of talking is going to shut down this disease before it ravages every corner of every ecosystem that contains some mineral resource, energy resource or fertile land that can be exploited to propel further growth.

And Hayhoe’s solution of talking is beyond hypocritical. Hayhoe is a Christian climate scientist preaching the gospel of talking to others while blocking nearly everyone on social media who dares to disagree with her message of hope and optimism by discussing worse-case scenarios. When Hayhoe blocks those who bring up the scary parts, she is perpetuating the very silence she claims to be fighting against.

And it’s worth remembering that there are individual, institutional and governmental actors whose primary goal is nothing more than to talk — to mock, obfuscate, troll, harrass and create doubt. We live in an age of massive information overload, where knowledge has become spam and opinions have become facts. Experts are competing against frauds, shills and trolls to sway policy. Talking? That era is over.

Next comes Fisher, with her apocolyptic optimsm and “AnthroShift” idealism, that at some point things will get sufficiently f&%ked up that humans will wake up and take collective action. She focuses her optimism on the societal changes that took place during the early days of COVID-19, when global action was taken to slow the spread and safeguard us all. That’s AnthroShift.

In her own words:

“The AnthroShift is like other perspectives that consider risk as a social pivot — when the sense of risk is strong enough, people change their behaviors and push social actors to respond to remediate the risk.”

But what I recall from the early days of COVID-19 were mask protests, illegal gatherings, people ignoring social distancing, infection parties, and people dying in the name of personal freedom, as I expressed in my poem, The Asshole’s Final Love Song.

Maybe Fisher forgot about China welding people shut inside their apartments. Maybe she forgot about the rise of anti-vaxxers. Maybe she forgot about Trump acting out against his own COVID policies. Maybe she forgot about the Wuhan lab conspiracy theories. Maybe she forgot about the demonization of Anthony Faucci.  Maybe she forgot that the 7% decline in CO2 during the first COVID year of 2020 is less than the decline that we need every year going forward, and yet CO2 emissions will be at a new all-time high in 2024.

Maybe she forgot about the famine, drought, disease and war in Africa and elsewhere in the third world; massive emergencies and political upheaval that have been going on for decades, yet no AnthroShift in sight.

Maybe she forgot about the backfire effect, which is a cognitive bias where beliefs are strengthened in the presence of evidence that contradicts or debunks them. For example, Trump 2.0.

Fisher’s anthroshiftic optimism is about as grounded in reality as using a spoon to bail water from the Titanic.

I’m aggravated that these two authors would have the vanity and arrogance to write about saving humanity as if this polycrisis were resolvable with a cookbook method for how to clean a burned pan and a few phone calls to friends and relatives.

The book that needs to be written, and I am not the one to write it, has the title “Saving Everything Else.” The main thesis of the book comes from Derrick Jensen, that:

“Committed activists have brought the emergency of climate change into broad consciousness, and that’s a huge win as the glaciers melt and the tundra burns. But they are solving for the wrong variable. Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life”

In our global collective effort to save something, we are solving for the wrong variable. The wrong variable is “humanity.” The right variable is “everything else.”

If by chance humans manage to still have a place on this planet after the dust settles from the implosion of modern industrial civilization, so be it. But up first will be the melting of the ice sheets, the death of coral reefs, the tipping of the Amazon to savannah, massive permafrost and ESAS methane releases, the AMOC collapse, sea level rise, lethal wet-bulb temperatures, acidification of the oceans, novel viruses, superstorms and the sixth great extinction. And in perfect concert with these accelerating environmental catastrophes will be accelerating human catastrophes, including fascism, civil war and revolution, as countries and individuals move to protect themselves from the rising tide of collapse.

It’s not about saving us. It’s not about saving ourselves. It’s not about saving our ability to eat whatever we want, to buy more crap, to travel to distant places, to have a good job, to send our kids to college, to pollute, to consume, or even to survive.

It’s not about saving modern industrial civilization.

It’s not about saving humans as a species.

Our moral obligation to this beautiful living planet is to do what we can to save what we can for whatever comes after us. It’s about saving everything else.