An Alchemy of Suicide

by H. Bruce Rinker, PhD

The suicide began 300 to 400 million years ago as ancient trees fell into a noxious swamp, tumbling over the roots and branches of their crowded neighbors and splashing into stagnant water.  It began even before the perpetrator was born.  It began as these dying primal plants lifted their leafy fronds heavenward to capture the energy of sunlight in a long-ago world.

There was little thought of suicide as the perpetrator lived through its first 100 thousand years or so, always with a population under a half-billion and always living within its means, but its suicidal behaviors were already present.

The suicide picked up its pace in the early 1800’s as factories in England and the United States belched out black fumes across an ever-darkening landscape, releasing the stored energy in coal, the fossils of those antediluvian trees, along with the smog of a cavalier industry without controls.  Instead of living on the energy of a single solar year, now the perpetrator could be fruitful and multiply with a plethora of kilocalories locked up since before the Age of Dinosaurs.  Under one billion individuals since its African origins, now the perpetrator’s numbers exploded – one billion in 1804, the next billion by 1930, its third by 1960, its fourth by 1975, its fifth by 1985, its sixth by 1999, and its seventh by 2011.  Scientists and mathematicians call that exponential growth.  Some churches call it a blessing, at once censuring any type of population control.  I call it unruly hedonism with only one likely outcome.

In the 21st century, the suicide quickened like a hunter with his prey in the crosshair.  Fossil carbon released its ancient energy reservoirs as the perpetrator learned new techniques for converting coal, natural gas, and petroleum into more of its own biomass.  Supermarkets and transportation were two instruments of convenience for this biomass conversion.  Externalities such as childhood asthma, acid rain, global warming, and the discomfiting deaths of soldiers in the Middle East were all ignored as the perpetrator gobbled up Earth’s nonrenewable natural resources like a glutton escaped from Dante’s Third Circle of Hell.  Profit and growth were stressed over quality of life, a perverse mix-up of means and ends.  The suicide was assured when the perpetrator declared itself apart from nature and divinely ordained to dominate and exploit its surroundings.  Rather than seeing itself as part of a community of living things across Earth’s landscape, the perpetrator saw all things – even, at times, its own children – as commodities.  Icing on the cake, so to speak, came when unwise and entrenched politicians among the perpetrator’s population ignored the evidence of planetary demise, declaring, “I do not believe it to be so,” as if human-accelerated climate change and extinction rates were simply parts of a creed of liberal thought.

An era of political cooperation in the 1960’s and 1970’s yielded some of the nation’s most notable, most emulated pieces of environmental legislation: among them, the National Parks Bill in 1962, the Wilderness Act of 1966, the Clean Water Act of 1970, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973.  Democrats and Republicans alike worked together on these with a common vision of precious natural resources safeguarded for generations to come.  Ironically, that spirit of cooperation seemed to vanish a generation later in a blind fit of ultra-conservatism just as the evidence mounted and converged, proving the planet’s ecosystems were stressed to a splintering point.

As a precursor to modern science, alchemy was an influential occult practice that centered on the four ancient elements of fire, water, earth, and air.  Best known for its goal of turning lead into gold, the practice often proclaimed paradoxical results or the combination of incompatible elements with no rational explanation.

In this story, of course, the perpetrator is the human animal and alchemy is the nature of its augured suicide.  Daily juxtaposed on the political landscape are seemingly incompatible (or illegal) elements: self-serving officials with industry bedfellows, all proclaiming that human-accelerated climate change and extinction are hoaxes.  The non-scientist speaks against the findings of science with a decidedly pseudo-science bent … and with his hands in an ever-burgeoning mountain of profits from fossilized carbon.  Coal, oil and natural gas are the bases with which we subsidize our lives and maintain the complexities of our society with catastrophe on the horizon for our political and economic myopia.  Katrina was prologue.

To sidestep the suicide, the remedy is simple: rid ourselves of carbon-based energy dependency.  Now.  One solution is to reduce personal income taxes but impose a burdensome tax on the use of any fossil fuels and on industries that insist on such reliance, thereby keeping the same level of revenues pouring into the state and federal coffers.  Another solution is to invest heavily in alternative energy sources.  During World War II, with the leadership of President Roosevelt and other international representatives, we consolidated our industrial focus to build a war machine that defeated imperial Japan, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany and then disassembled to post-war production in less than four years.  We can do that again, this time with a focus on alternative energies and infrastructure.  It’s not all about profit and growth – and self-serving Wall Street and its bankers, antiquated industries, and entrenched politicians be damned.  It’s about our quality of life in the context of a strikingly beautiful natural world.

Let’s turn the alchemy of a species’ suicide into sustainable approaches to our place in the economy of nature.  With the energy of elemental fire, let’s take a stand for Earth, including its physical and biological treasures, and send the gluttons back to the Third Circle of Hell.

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  1. The Sociology Department at Va Tech tried to teach me this drivel in the sixties. The left then said that the Earth would be overburdened by the mid seventies . It did not happen then, or in the 80s, 90s, or 00s as each predicted cataclysm never happened.

    Technology continues to help us each decade to use less of every resource per capita and per unit of GDP. Be thankful!

  2. This is the most stirring, well-written and just plain marvelous article I have read in many years. If anyone reading this can still promote the myth that climate change is not accelerated tremendously by humans, then their minds are not just closed, they are empty.
    Thank you, Dr. Rinker. I am copying this article to distribute to all my friends.

  3. I really enjoyed the article and believe it said what has needed to be said for a long time. The social and political system that has evolved limits our ability to enact change at a large scale. It seems that the days of progress are long gone due to the difficulties caused by politicians, and then to top that, when new technologies and ideas are formed companies patent them so only one group works on developing the advancement instead of allowing for healthy competition. Change on such a large scale is not acceptable in today’s political discourse, and this will stop most politicians from having a strong environmentally minded platform. Then I see the day to day reality of a nation and a people that say “Go green”, but then does the bare minimum when it comes to action. For example, UVa continues to produce its energy from an on grounds coal power plant. How can a progressive University continue to use coal when what is known about the use of fossil fuels? It is frustrating, but at the same time I love a challenge. I believe we can make the positive changes that are necessary to make this world a better place.

    Thanks for the article

  4. Another well spoken article with a powerful message beautifully written. If only we could all see the world through Dr. Rinker’s eyes …. The never ending suicide would soon enough have people brainstorming to come up with a solution to end it. Getting people to care about this beautiful natural world is a hard task, but definitely a step in the right direction!

    Thank you for your articles that are always so well written and always so informative~!

  5. Gosh!!what a wonderful article…I have been sitting here reading it over and over..couldn’t make up my mind what to write,,,,decided to just let Dr Rinker speak for me.. He does a better job than I could ever do..

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