"Normal" Is The Problem: So Is Its Bastard Spawn "The New Normal"

[hatrack]

EDIT

Since 1970, an outpouring of normality has just about destroyed the Earth: It has created an abnormal economic machine, blind to energy spending, that doubled the global population and boosted per capita consumption by 45 per cent. At the same time the so-called value of global economic activity grew by 300 per cent. Meanwhile global trade has exploded like a coronavirus by 900 per cent. To support all this consumption and trade, the extraction of “living materials” from nature has jumped by 200 per cent.

Now here’s just a partial list of the cost of all this exponential normality: Humans have appropriated or altered 70 per cent of the world’s lands with mines, roads, industrial farms, cities and airports. We have engineered more than 75 per cent of the world’s longest rivers. We have filled the ocean with plastics and slaughtered coral reefs. Anyone who calls that kind of behaviour normal is crackers. It’s ecological imperialism, and nothing more than a full-scale assault on the dignity of local life.

The list goes on, and scientists now think it’s normal to publish papers on “the pervasive human decline of life.” Humans, for example, have destroyed 85 per cent of the wetlands. That’s like eating your kidneys for dinner, and I can’t think of anybody who would consider that normal except Hannibal Lecter. We have eliminated 40 per cent of the world’s original forests. We have extirpated (and there’s a word for these normal times) most of the world’s large mammals. An estimated one million species of animals and plants stand on the brink of extinction.

Homo sapiens, another mammal, are on that list, and we pretend that’s normal. As these species disappear, our ever-expanding artificial intelligence probably won’t wave goodbye because replacing the natural with artificial is what normal is all about.

EDIT

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2020/05/30/New-Normal-Problem/

[MLAA]

1. Yep. We aren't long for this planet. We've really screwed it up.

One thing that will help (if we aren’t too late) is to all go to a plant based diet.

[appalachiablue]

2. Give the man an award, righteous! (& expect flak)

..."So I don’t want to go back to normal.

I don’t want to go back to a world where it’s okay to industrialize and then globalize the care of old people as though they are just another resource to be mined before they die.

I don’t want to go back to the digital contagion uprooting our minds and souls where authoritarian males justify the mining of our computers for data to improve their ability to engineer our behaviours.

That’s just predation.

I don’t want to go back to a world where lawyers and judges don’t understand the difference between a legal system and a justice system. I don’t want to go back to a world where governments think it is okay to sacrifice agricultural communities with disruptive fracking technologies that cause earthquakes, pollute groundwater and consistently lose money.

That’s just white-collar crime with a high-pressure water pump.

I don’t want to go back to a world where a few foreign-owned meat-packing corporations control the slaughter and distribution of so-called "cheap meat."...

[progree]

3. That's quite a trifecta or quadfecta

I don’t want to go back to a world where governments think it is okay to sacrifice agricultural communities with disruptive fracking technologies that cause earthquakes, pollute groundwater and consistently lose money.

* sacrifice agricultural communities

* cause earthquakes

* pollute groundwater, and

* consistently lose money