A Letter from Normandy

by Glenn N. Holliman

My friend, Terry Field, fears that he is that ‘Voice Crying in the Wilderness’, largely alone trying to alert humanity that we stand in the midst of a new age, a radically  changing climate moving the planet, this good Earth, to a new and disastrous reality.  A reality he strongly argues that billions of peoples do not understand or acknowledge, and a political leadership remaining in denial of what is happening to all of us as we read these lines. 

Terry, an Englishman of considerable education and business experience and with homes in both the United States and France, writes this reflection upon his return to his restored manor house and garden in Normandy.  There he and Fina will experience another summer of French wine, calvados, multiple cheeses and tending to the roses and orchard. They will worry in frustration that their great grandchildren will face a different, much less inviting world, one with famine instead of the abundance of our generation.  And alas so should we. - GNH

A Note on Climate and Moral Blindness

by Terry Field

On returning from the warmth and comfort of Florida, to the changeable weather and quiet isolation of Normandy, life seems to be the experience of a dream. All is the same, yet nothing is the same.

The wide ocean separates worlds of different minds. I stand on the same earth of the same planet, but that is about all that is the same. Any mature reflection of the so-profound different ‘seas’ human beings swim in force one to accept that there is simply no commonality. Not of purpose, not of understanding of place, not of the deepest of desires, not even of the recognition of what it is worth living - and perhaps dying – for.

This is a dark realization, since such an awareness stops one adopting any real hope or expectation that in the face of what the most intelligent and the most sensitively aware on earth understand to be our darkest of dark predicaments, that there will or even can be a composite response to correctly perceived reality.

The depth of the difference in thinking and ‘being’ between such as France, Florida (and by extension, much of ‘rural’ America) and England – three countries I have some understanding, entirely removes any likelihood that the different minds will ever agree needs to be done, since they do not begin to agree on what matters, what is valuable, what is, to use a word not often applied, ‘sacred’.

It is a personal tragedy to properly recognize that the world as has been with human life is collapsing like a burning Chinese lantern.

And yet any sense of the dread reality is ‘internal’ to the individual, and hard to communicate to the legions of the intentionally or naively, profoundly un-aware. I used to consider that it was not just possible, but probable, that all people possessed of reasonable intellects and characters susceptible to rational discourse would immediately respond to the truth of what is happening, if only the tableau of reality were laid before them. A decade or more of observing mendacity bigotry and corruption has entirely removed any such expectation.

SO where are we now?

We are at the point where many thousands of readily observable degradation of species conditions across the entire large planet illuminates our daily observation that all is dying in front of us. All we need to do is look, and open our eyes, in order to see.

We are at the point where the air, the earth, the soil, the seas, fresh water, are all degrading, disappearing, becoming ever-so much more removed from the myriad creatures who need them for life. We are one such species.

We are at the point where the degradation of the real physical, biological, ecological global ‘stock’ is observably and rapidly declining to the point of multi-species collapse that is of itself accelerative to the point of all-species disappearance. Including Human life.

We are at the point where our civilization, having developed the employment of economic measurements that purposefully and deliberately exclude in value all that is worthwhile in the world, has resulted in the clear appearance of the comprehensive end point for the life of human beings, of our civilization, but far more importantly, the life of -literally – millions of species across the planet.

The global power-elite are advised by civil servants who, if they are not incompetent, know these realities. And yet the political class has steered us all to the point where it is impossible to see any mechanisms that can support the recovery of the stability of universal global life, without bringing in its train the inevitable loss of the great majority of human life, particularly human life compressed into high density urban centres.

Above a quiet winter evening in Florida, 2019. Terry is writing and Fina and my wife, Barb, discussing flowers and the quiet joy of sitting outside on a January evening. 

The large numbers of people now expressing an overt concern over their future and the future of their offspring are – very unfortunately – not effective nor are they helpful. Their terrors are justified. Yet none of them appear to understand that to even have a tiny chance of arresting this very-fast developing catastrophe, actions of such an extremely radical nature would be needed that the inevitable and unavoidable consequence of such actions would be the very rapid starvation of the great majority of people now living.

And we are at the point where, if this is not done, then all human and most other life on earth will be extinguished.

Within a century.  And long before that, all semblance of civilized order will have been long forgotten.

 In the context of reality, not our obsessional social fantasies, can anyone tell me why the sewage of Brexit, the squalor of Trump, the posturing of the mass-hysteria of the Ocasio-Cortezes of this world are other than trivially absurd and offensive? – Terry Field