After heart-breaking research, I offer these four ideas:
1. Verify the accuracy of the information in this commentary.
2. If you decide it is valid, share it as widely and as quickly as possible. (If you can help with translating it into other languages, please write to: ideas@just-stop.org.)
3. Choose which of the four personal strategies you will use (listed below).
4. If you elect to Just Stop, then begin a Just Stop Team, because we cannot Just Stop alone. (The details and implications of "Just Stop" are explained below, and at: www.just-stop.org.)
NOT ABOUT SAVING THE EARTH
This writing is not about saving the Earth. The Earth will go on with or without human beings. This writing is about saving you. It invites you to shift your lifestyle so you might live a little longer, and so your descendents might live at all. How can six and a half billion people reorient themselves all at once to quickly take the needed steps to head off a potential disaster? They can do it by clearly understanding that there is no alternative, and by following the examples of those who go first -- perhaps you. By now it is certain that a total reorientation of lifestyles will happen on earth whether it is deliberately chosen or not. This is because rapidly spreading Western-style consumerism is not a sustainable pattern in the long term. There are already too many people using too many resources and making too much toxic waste. Indeed, our population has increased far beyond the carrying capacity of this planet. Therefore, the choice that awaits each of us has to do with the decision to adopt a new lifestyle proactively, or reactively. If we wait and react as separate governments, races and creeds, we will bring upon ourselves the worst kind of horror imaginable. This writing suggests that we do have an alternative.
WAKING FROM THE DREAM
Discovering that whatever we fondly thought of as “the success of modern technology and a gradual long-term climate change” instead threatens human existence on planet Earth now, is like discovering that Santa Claus is, in actuality, our parents. Nothing can prepare us for the dismay of waking from a great dream. The only compensation is the value of entering reality. After reading this letter, one might feel shock, fear, rage, shame, dismay, confusion, grief or depression. Having such feelings is actually a good sign. It means you are still "human." On this account, I encourage people to give themselves permission to have these sorts of feelings, and to share the feelings with others, as well as the reasons behind those feelings. Sharing the impact of waking from the dream is an essential part of one's Just Stop Team meetings.
WE HAVE ALREADY PASSED THE KILLER TIPPING POINT THAT MAKES ALL OTHER CLIMATE CHANGE DISCUSSIONS IRRELEVANT
High in the Antarctic Troll research station in January 2008, Norwegian scientists measured earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration at 394 ppm (parts per million). CO2 is the main greenhouse gas produced by burning coal, oil and natural gas, for example, in power plants, automobiles, trucks, jets, and heating furnaces. The present 394 ppm is far above the average 280 ppm that has supported life as we know it on earth. We continue increasing our CO2 emissions as if they have no consequence – but they do.
CO2 TRIGGERS METHANE HYDRATES TIPPING POINT
Man-made CO2 now traps so much solar heat that Arctic tundra, which was frozen for tens of thousands of years, is melting. Tundra covers about 20% of the earth’s land surface. A few years ago, it was discovered that, beneath the Siberian Arctic tundra permafrost, lies 400 billion tons (gigatons) of frozen methane locked in methane hydrates. Last year, scientists detected Arctic methane bubbling out from the tundra five times faster than previously measured. For the past 420,000 years, Earth’s atmospheric methane has remained between 450-750 ppb (parts per billion). Methane now exceeds 1750 ppb, more than double the previous maximum. Here is the danger: methane has 21 times more heat-trapping effect than carbon dioxide. Freshly released methane traps more of the sun’s heat, that melts more tundra, that releases more methane, that traps more heat in runaway global warming. Releasing only 9 of the Arctic’s 400 gigatons of frozen methane would exceed a hidden tipping point that starts a heating avalanche. Once started, it cannot be reversed! The most conservative strategy, in the United Nation’s IPCC AR4 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report) last November, proposes a greenhouse gas emissions reduction that would stabilize Earth’s temperature rise at 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels. The lifestyle changes needed to stabilize at 2 degrees are widely regarded as politically and economically unfeasible, and yet, a 2 degrees rise already guarantees that the 9 gigatons of Arctic methane will be released. This is because 2 degrees is a global average, but that 2 degrees is not evenly distributed. Temperatures over the cool oceans won’t rise much at all, whereas temperatures over the land will get hot enough to stop crop pollination and force trees to change from CO2 absorbers to CO2 emitters! An increased global average temperature of 2 degrees means an 8 – 10 degrees rise exactly where the frozen methane waits in the arctic regions. As reflective snow melts it exposes heat-absorbing land or water to collect much more of the sun’s warmth. As a result, civilization as we know it will vanish under an onslaught of storms, famine, drought, disease and conflict. Likely two thirds or more of humankind will be dead in our lifetimes! National governments and economies will end and life as we know it will, abruptly, halt. This is not written to scare people, although it will, but to call people to action on behalf of everything that they love on the Earth, for their children and grandchildren. How many will find life blighted? How will they be affected personally if this scenario comes to pass? If there was ever a time to take personal actions, that time is now.
WE HAVE NO TIME
It is not generally admitted that a level of greenhouse gases to trigger a heating avalanche has already been exceeded. Threshold tipping points were not included in the UN’s original climate change models. Official conclusions had to be approved by all signatories, and that included the US. Original reports indicated that we had centuries to evolve out of a carbon based economy. But we were wrong. We have no time. Although lethal effects of passing the tipping point are already recognized, for example by insurance statistics, global warming will probably not be regarded as catastrophic for another 5 to 8 years. One could use this time to prepare. Geological records show that the last time runaway heating happened (the PETM of 55 million years ago), it was triggered by erupting volcanoes pouring out greenhouse gases. Today, as China and India use coal to power up their mega-populations, and as CO2-absorbing tropical forests are burned to grow high priced bio-fuels and soybeans for cattle feed, we pump out greenhouse gases 30 times faster than the volcanoes did! Last time it took 100,000 years for life to recover on Earth.
ONE SMALL WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
We have one ridiculously small chance to avoid self-extermination from runaway climate change. The chance is to suddenly cease 90% of worldwide carbon emissions now. Just stop. This involves not only 90% of personal and corporate emissions, but also 90% of the oft forgotten other half of greenhouse gas emitters: government and military operations. Although 90% reductions by 2015 far exceeds the cuts proposed by California, Europe, and the UN’s IPCC meeting in Bali, 90% is urgently endorsed by many researchers including George Monbiot, James Lovelock and John James. (Source references for all the information in this letter are available through www.just-stop.org and many other web sites. For a sampling, just google the two words: melting permafrost, and start reading.)
POPPING THE EVERYTHING IS FINE BUBBLE
Thousands of the world’s smartest scientists have been tracking the earth’s biosphere for decades. I, too, was trained as a scientist. I know and trust the methods used to make measurements. Nevertheless, the results that scientists are finding are almost too shocking for me to accept. I wake up in the morning and look at the trees, the sky, and ordinary people going about their daily lives in the village where I live in southern Germany, and I shake my head. The looming climate disaster feels like science fiction. It is like a doctor telling you that he found high cholesterol in your blood even though you don't feel anything related to it. Suddenly the everything is fine bubble pops; the whole world looks different. The whole world has just been told to go on the equivalent of a permanent low cholesterol diet. Ignoring such a warning is perilous. Not taking immediate decisive action during our tiny window of opportunity guarantees that everything that we know, everything that we have taken for granted, everything of which we are proud teeters over the edge into extinction.
MOST PEOPLE EXPECT THE GOVERNMENT TO SOMEHOW SAVE US ALL
We assume that our elected officials are intelligent enough to avoid letting us die in such a well predicted and easily avoidable Malthusian collapse. But look at the jets streaking across the sky, the cars and trucks roaring down the highways, the smokestacks pouring out gases, and the brand new homes leaking heat like a sieve. Look at the daily pile of garbage each household throws away, and the army of advertisements imploring everyone to consume more. Then shift your view to governmental and business leaders wantonly wringing the last drops of profit out of the earth rather than the last drops of carbon out of their lifestyle. Do you really think governments in America, Asia and Europe will end the competition for who can consume remaining resources the quickest? Do you really think that governments or other groups, in countries with rapidly increasing populations, will prevent two or three billion more babies being born? No. They won't. None of them. Don't be stupid. Do overweight people stop eating? ...almost never.
GOVERNMENT OF CHILDREN
When children make a mess, who cleans it up? Not the children! 192 nations are making huge messes with no intention of cleaning them up. We are 192 nations operating at child-level responsibility. There are no adults in charge, not even at the highest levels of government. We don't even know what adult level responsibility is. We have arranged no global Mom or Dad to say “Stop now! Don't touch that, ever! Put that back! It is not yours! Share that equally with the others! No fighting!” There is no organization taking consequent global-level responsibility. Nobody out there will save us. Therefore, it remains up to us, individually and collectively, to act.
FOUR STRATEGIES FROM WHICH TO CHOOSE
There are four basic strategies for dealing with climate change: Wait for a Miracle, Last Man Standing, Change the System, or Just Stop. Which do you choose? (The idea of four strategies and a few of these phrases come from Richard Weinberg’s book Powerdown.)
1) Wait for a Miracle: This is the strategy of the ~ 90% of humanity who either never heard of global warming, or who approach climate catastrophe through philosophizing, theorizing, or proselytizing, or by fantasizing that someone will discover a technological breakthrough to save us all. These people choose to do nothing.
2) Last Man Standing: This is the strategy favored by the elite, wealthy, power holders in the corporocracy. The plan is already being implemented: business as usual while ruthlessly competing for dwindling resources as the world "goes down." Survivor takes all. However, no amount of money, nor guns, assures survival from ecological collapse.
3) Change the System: This is the strategy favored by intelligent, compassionate, political activists in NGO's lobbying for regulations to change the socio-economic system. Workable scenarios for international cooperation, conservation, and resource sharing might indeed be developed, but implementation fails in practice due to too much compromise. When the cat has no claws, rats rule the world.
4) Just Stop, Build an Ark: This is the strategy of a small minority, relying on alternative sources of information, who realize that the entire system of industrial civilization is inherently unsustainable. Of these people, most will simply watch helplessly and cynically as the world disintegrates. Only a small subset of this already marginal group will take total personal responsibility for having caused the present conditions in the first place, and will then Just Stop creating them. Out of the ashes of their lives, they will gather in small sustainable social systems beyond the reach of globalization and create parallel culture "lifeboats," the "arks."
Without realizing it, we already participate in one of the above strategies. Through seeing the options more distinctly, we gain an opportunity to make a more conscious choice. Which do you choose?
FOUR ACTIONS THAT YOU CAN TAKE TO SUSTAIN HUMAN LIFE
1. The first thing you can do is assess the information in this letter through researching websites, reading articles, studying books, and connecting with a wide assortment of people. Seek independent sources. Decide whether or not this information is accurate.
2. If you conclude that this information is not valid, then do nothing. If you conclude that this information is valid, then send this essay to every person whom you wish could have a chance to live. Tell especially the people who least expect you to tell them. Tell truck drivers, petrochemical engineers, soldiers, bureaucrats, American coal diggers, Australian uranium miners, Siberian gas workers, farmers in Borneo and Brazil. Tell talk-show hosts, movie producers, network leaders, periodical and web site editors, and your neighbors. If people trust their information source, they can completely change their viewpoint and their lifestyle. I know this is so because I changed mine.
3. The third thing you can do is figure out which of the above four strategies you will use.
4. If you decide on strategy four, to Just Stop, then the fourth thing you can do is begin your Just Stop Team. We cannot Just Stop as isolated individuals. We need to rely on each other while we exit Western consumerism and create sustainable-culture arks. You can download the Just Stop Team Meeting Guidelines from www.just-stop.org.
RADICAL RESPONSIBILITY
Many recognized authorities agree: W e must change, we must act, we must stop. But such sure-sounding proclamations only guarantee that nothing changes, no one acts, and nobody stops.
Why? Because THERE IS NO WE WHEN IT COMES TO RESPONSIBILITY.
Only one person in the world can stop. That person is me. I can stop. At first it seems too radical to take responsibility for creating global warming, myself. Yet if I take full responsibility for creating global warming, without excuses, without avoiding the shame, without being a victim, then I can stop creating it. Through radical responsibility, I gain the capacity to Just Stop.
JUST STOP UNSUSTAINABILITY
If I worked in certain countries' governments, I would be too embarrassed to continue promoting denial and hypocrisy. I would Just Stop showing up for work ever again. My quitting would be non-negotiable. There are plenty of other things to do with my life than to protect an organization that has been hijacked to serve reprehensible purposes.
If my job supported the nuclear power industry or involved Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) or weaponry with Depleted Uranium (DU), I could no longer contribute to world contamination and would suddenly cease working there.
If my job was in the oil, coal or gas mining, refining or power industries or involved building or driving petroleum-fueled cars, trucks, ships or planes, I could no longer endure promoting greenhouse gas emissions in this way. I would Just Stop.
If my work supported a military that was directed to stockpile armaments and strangle other nations so my own nation could keep its petrodollars in circulation while selfishly sucking down the last drops of the world’s oil, I would find it beneath my dignity to continue and I would immediately change careers.
Almost every aspect of modern capitalist consumerism is unsustainable, so almost everything that I do in modern daily life leads to planetary suicide. If I walk away from a ridiculous carbon economy job now, I am like the police who opened the gates and walked away from the ridiculous Berlin Wall in 1989. Those police are heroes now.
JUST STOP GLOBAL WARMING
Trying to find compromises and being satisfied with halfway solutions is a typical human tendency. That is strategy three, Change the System. If I choose strategy three, then I do strategy three.
Just Stop is strategy four, and it is uncompromising: Just Stop.
Doing my own research about what to stop makes my decision to stop more reliable. It is simple: Find sources of greenhouse gases and stop sponsoring them. The economics is simple too: if fewer people buy products that emit greenhouse gases during their manufacture, delivery, use or recycling, then fewer products will be produced! Just Stop is such an obvious solution to global warming, yet such a difficult choice to consider. Prepare to be shocked when reading these sample ideas for what to Just Stop. Try to avoid pre-deciding that Just Stopping is impossible. Awareness takes time to grow. Give these ideas time to sink in.
Embracing the Just Stop strategy would look like this:
- Stop buying things that are made of or packaged in plastic. Most plastics come from petroleum. Bring a backpack or a basket to the store, and buy items that are not prepackaged. Start noticing how much plastic is in your car, your kitchen, your office, your yard.
- Stop all mail order catalogs. Colored inks can contain heavy metals and are buried in the ground after you toss them in the garbage. You poison the earth and cause whole forests to be chopped down each day to make catalogs. Living trees absorb CO2. Dead trees made into paper give off CO2.
- Stop accepting the free grocery and hardware store ads that get shoved into your mailbox. Bring them to governmental meetings and demand that your city or town revoke permission to distribute promotional circulars because they increase greenhouse gases.
- Stop buying newspapers and magazines. Go online for news and e-zines. Do not put newspaper compost or ash on your garden as the colored inks can be poisonous and will be absorbed by your vegetables, and then by you.
- Stop accepting a paper telephone directory. Go online to get phone numbers. We need more trees, not less! Spend your holidays planting trees!
- Stop making garbage altogether. Compost your own bio-waste and recycle everything else. If it cannot be recycled, don’t buy it.
- Stop buying furniture or household items made of tropical hardwoods. That wood was once a tropical forest and you paid them to chop it down! Use local wood from sustainable forests.
- Stop buying products transported by jets, ships or long distance trucks. Adjust your diet towards unprocessed foods grown within 200 miles of your house. Unless you live in the tropics, adjust to life without bananas or pineapples.
- Stop eating beef and pork, especially in fast food restaurants. Better yet, go vegetarian. The cattle and pig industries produce huge amounts of greenhouse gases. And the paper and plastic packaging of fast foods is unconscionable.
- Stop installing compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) to replace incandescents. The mercury in fluorescent lamps is a poisonous heavy metal and is not recyclable. Mountains of dead poisonous CFLs does not equate to sustainability! Instead, unscrew half of your incandescent bulbs and get in the habit of only turning on one light when you absolutely need to. Unplug all appliances when not in use.
- Stop owning stocks in any company having anything to do with the consumer economy, mining, petroleum, lumber, uranium or weaponry. Each stock owner is personally responsible for every misconduct of the company that he owns and could eventually be sued accordingly. Irresponsibility is an illusion.
- Stop using electricity that is generated from coal, gas, oil or nuclear power. Get off the public energy grid! Decrease your electric power consumption by 95% and figure out feasible ways to generate whatever electricity you need by researching about alternatives.
- Stop driving a car. Allow much more time for travel. Walk. Attach a cart to the back of your bicycle for carrying small children and loads. Use the bus or train and carpool in large groups.
- Stop flying in jets or airplanes. The jet age is over.
- Stop traveling in ships. Ocean liners produce even more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than jets. Go overseas by sailboat.
- Stop living in a house heated by electricity, oil, gas or wood. Live in a super-insulated passive-solar poured-earth home that requires no added heating. Stop owning any other kinds of buildings.
- Stop going to work anymore, if your work has anything to do with mining, coal, oil, harvesting wood, electric power, air or ship transportation, cement, or the military. Just stop. Find another vocation.
- Stop sending your kids to public school. What they learn in today’s public school won't help them live in the near future. Teach them the practical skills they will need to know. You probably need to learn them, yourself. With your kids at home, you can learn them together. The goal is self-sustainability whether in small family units or small communities.
See what I mean? This is shocking. Please remember that these are not rules. They are some of the lifestyle choices that will come to a stop either accidentally or intentionally, because they simply are not sustainable in the long run. The suggestion is to experiment with stopping now, while you have time to adjust to the coming circumstances.
IF...
If the corporocracy had redirected its trillion dollar war budget to developing and implementing renewable energy 15 years ago, we would be oil free by now. Instead the ruling regime implemented "Last Man Standing," so far contaminating 8% of the earth’s surface with permanently radioactive Depleted Uranium (DU) and assuring that millions of people or more will die over the next decades from increased global warming. How could it possibly be worse than this to Just Stop and let non-sustainable culture collapse so that sustainable alternatives could emerge? If I Just Stop supporting the carbon economy, and many others joined this action, the whole carbon economy would vanish in a week.
As Eddie Izzard so succinctly asks, “Cake or death?” Stupid question, or…?
AFTER I STOP, THEN WHAT?
If I Just Stop, my natural entrepreneurship and new actions can create a wide variety of sustainable cultures. Since almost all of modern Western-style culture is unsustainable, the actions of any sustainable culture will seem unconventional. Therefore, it is okay to have little idea about how to implement sustainable culture. It is okay to feel completely lost at first. I have felt lost at other times, afraid that I would never find my way home. Yet here I am. I may be having that “lost” feeling now, asking myself: If I Just Stop, what will I be doing? Where will I get money and food? Where will I live? Who will be my friends? New and workable answers will come as I let the questions, themselves, propel me into taking appropriate actions.
One appropriate action could be to invite the people with whom I would like to talk about these things to a weekly Just Stop Team meeting. Each Just Stop Team is a small social system beyond the reach of globalization. Each Team is the seed for a sustainable "culture lifeboat" or an "ark." In the least, such an approach seems worth exploring, it would seem. Guidelines for a Just Stop Team can be found at www.just-stop.org.
This has been a difficult and painful text for me to write; it has taken me weeks. It may also have been horrible for you to read. If so, I am sorry. A version of this letter with reference links is posted at the website for further reading.
Clinton Callahan, affiliated with www.callahan-academy.com, originator of Possibility Management, author of the book Radiant Joy Brilliant Love, trainer, naturalist and activist currently living in Germany, can be reached at clinton@just-stop.org.
