The whole world stinks of Donald’s trumps

I don’t know about you, but I can see the end of the world from here. Or at least, the end of the industrialised world as we know it.

It isn’t an end that leads to a sustainable paradise. There were auspicious glimmerings. Like that time when the whole Greenpeace crew got off it on mushrooms on a small island. But by about the early 2000s the whole sustainability movement had attached itself like a Remora fish to the capitalist shark.

Well, the shark is now starving. And guess what? It was fine to leave some scraps in the water before, but now they’re all being gobbled up, and the shark is eying up nearby fish…

Some of you may still doubt this. You may dismiss the idea of the imminent collapse of western civilisation as ‘alarmist’. Well, The United States of America is the richest country the world has ever known. It’s now saying it can’t possibly go on economically in the way it has been. It claims it won’t survive unless it takes possession of at least three neighbouring nations.

And your country is appeasing them.

My degree in history says the Germans embraced fascism because they were disenchanted and downtrodden after the loss of World War I. We’re now witnessing the richest nation on Earth turning to fascism. Has the US now lost so many wars that its people are finally disenchanted with the American Dream? Or has the propaganda and marketing overshot so spectacularly that people lose their shit if they can’t afford a second jetski? Either way, it would seem the American project is looking increasingly like one of those cheap Ikea knock offs with key parts missing.

That the richest people who have ever lived are so devastatingly unsatisfied does not bode wonderfully for anybody. These are people who are so heavily armed they take up playground beefs with assault rifles. If they’ve lost faith in the system then it’s not only the US project that has failed, but the project of industrial global capitalism in its entirety.

But you should know that already. Otherwise young mothers wouldn’t have pesticides and bits of plastic in their breast milk.

If Americans are now disenchanted with capitalism, who the hell is getting a good deal out of it? The answer, of course, is only very few of us in what is now the vanishingly small amount of time it has left, before it descends, shrieking, into revolution and drone warfare.

All of which was inevitable from way, way back.

Industrialisation was essentially an attempt to deny, defer, deflect and delay natural consequences, like a teenager hiding under a duvet. Pre and non-industrial communities deal with consequences in relatively timely and localised ways. And the distribution of consequences is therefore relatively fair and even. You take too many fish from the lake. Your neighbours notice. Industrialisation locks the lake behind a fence. Or it depersonalises the whole process through limited liability so that it looks like companies rather than people are stealing all the fish. Or it goes ahead and just takes the lake by force. The consequences are pushed onto other people.

Sustainability has largely been an attempt to make industrialised people take back their consequences, little by little. But we don’t want to. We don’t really care about consequences, as long as they’re happening somewhere else to someone else. Especially if that’s in a foreign country.

So sustainability has actually instead just forestalled resolving a lot of those consequences. We’re like Wayne and Waynetta Slob. A shut-in couple, chucking pizza boxes in the spare rooms of our house. Because we can hide the problem enough to ignore it, we’ve let it build from a minor inconvenience - a few cardboard boxes to dispose of - to a major eyesore and health hazard that might just kill us.

Imagine your community lived in a small bubble. Imagine it did not have the legal fiction of limited liability companies. Your neighbour sets up a coal fired generator. He wants it to power a laptop that he mostly watches pornography on. His house is festooned with junk. Because he likes fast food and fast fashion and there’s nowhere in the bubble to chuck stuff away. He’s polluting your water supply by letting his cows shit in it. There’s a pipe into your river from the lab where he likes to experiment with animals, plastics and chemicals. It’s pumping out something luminous and noxious, mixed with blood.

How likely would you say you are to pop round there and have a word? Possibly with a shotgun. How easily would he be able to pay you off to ignore it all?

In the meantime, in the real world, all our consequences are heading home to roost. What was ‘away’ in the atmosphere is now turning your main street into a shit storm. The plastics you thought you’d thrown ‘away’ are in your bloodstream and those of your children. The colonial violence your wealth is based on will very shortly blowback into World War III. Armed men will dodge drones while conducting what’s now called FISH - “Fighting In Someone’s House”. Your house. Your child’s bedroom, smashed to smithereens, the dusty toys crushed under booted feet.

And the ‘leader of the free world’ doesn’t care. He couldn’t be more of a monster if he grew horns and had a forked tongue. He’s attempting to find the needle in the haystack of a solution for all this by pushing a dumpster fire full of money towards the haystack.

Still, it’s lovely to think that soon we will all be in space. At least I imagine that’s where we go when we’re burned to a crisp by phosphorus munitions.

At this point I consider most sustainability conferences to be a bit like an exhibition on the wonders of the British Empire in about 1912.

The only real work left in sustainability is to attempt to snap as many people as possible out of the delusion of capitalist industrialist progress. It’s time to realise that it’s set to crash and then to consider how to navigate that and what comes after.