Posthuman Blues

Warming In Antarctica: serious cause for concern

"In Antarctica the ocean food chain is crashing due to the loss of ice shelves around the Antarctic peninsula caused by climate warming. The breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002 has also released several glaciers, increasing their speed eight fold, and dumping their loads into the Weddell Sea contributing to a rising sea level, according to new research."

If you're not afraid when you read bulletins about food chains crashing, you should be. Not in an abstracted, politically expedient "Terror Alert" way, but afraid nonetheless.

Did you know there are vast "dead zones" in the oceans of this presumably living planet? There are. Because the planet is losing the race to keep up with us. It's tiring; it's near-breathless. But it's not yet powerless. It still holds us in its fierce ecological grip -- a grip that, as conditions inexorably worsen, seems less and less welcome and more like a threatening imposition.

There's a mechanism nature employs when it loses a race against a particularly virulent species. It's called "dieback." It's not a word you hear a lot because, fortunately for us, dieback is a relatively rare occurrence. Typically, the Earth exists in equilibrium -- the hard-won prize of resilience.

Humanity has reached a point in its technological trajectory in which its future naggingly resists even the best efforts at extrapolation. The maps aren't large enough, the calculators too feeble. Mathematicians call this novel post-historical state "nonlinear" -- a deceptively poetic word that smoothly dispenses with entrenched notions of control and dominion. It means that we don't know what comes next, that things have escaped our control -- a position that humans will resist and cunningly refute until they find themselves jarringly translated into the new, nonlinear environment.

Crashing Antarctic food chains and rising waters are nodal points quietly heralding the emergence of a nonlinear world. Like constellations seen by primitive ocean-borne voyagers, they lead us to a new world, a world of terminal uncertainty and potentially catastrophic entropy, a world we may not like or even survive. There are no promises, no certainties. Only the nodal points, dim beneath the taut fabric of our dreams.