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Originally posted by Dan:
Short answer to your question piqué: no I don't think so.

I'll use me as a case in point.
First, the essay is LONG. When the scroll bar is tiny, it has to be a topic I'm interested in to put the time towards reading it.
Second, did I mention it's really long? tldr
Third, I got plenty of doom-and-gloom I could focus on. Species extinction is on that list somewhere, but it's not the top. Guess that's a bit crazy in many respects, but there it is.
Forth, Amazon has a rainforest? I thought they just sold books! Is that maybe where all their smiley boxes come from?

Sorry I couldn't come through for you with anything serious. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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The arctic and antarctic icecaps are melting at rates far faster than even the most alarming predictions, and methane is pouring out of these regions, bubbling out of arctic lakes, and hissing out of seas and soils worldwide. Some scientists fear a methane “burp” of billions of tons when a full melt of the summer arctic ice occurs; a full melt has not happened for the past four million years. Should such a sudden large release of methane occur, the earth’s warming would rapidly accelerate within months. This alone could be the extinction event.

The arctic summer ice is currently two thirds less than it was as recently as the 1970s, and the arctic is warming so fast that a full summer melt is likely within the next few years. During the month of June 2020, the Arctic Circle had the highest temperatures ever recorded in the region, with one Siberian town hitting 38C (100 F). The wildfires that raged for months in the Arctic have now set a pollution record by emitting 244 megatons of carbon dioxide during the summer season of 2020, thirty-five percent more than in 2019, which also set a record. This is more than the annual carbon output of numerous countries. The Arctic ice is not only threatened by a warming atmosphere but, according to a study published in the Journal of Climate, “deep heat in the Arctic Ocean has risen and is now melting the ice from below”. The continent of Antarctica is also rapidly melting at an acceleration of 280% in the last forty years. The massive ice melts that are happening there, such as the breaking off the Larsen B ice shelf defied scientific predictions; the ice shelf known as Larsen C, which broke off in July of 2017, was 2,200 square miles in size. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, a mass of ice the size of Florida, is becoming increasingly unstable, now losing more than 100 billion tons of ice each year. Scientists fear that its collapse would cause much of the West Antarctic ice sheet to fall into the sea, since Thwaites currently acts “like a cork in a wine bottle.”

The arctic ice has been the coolant for the northern part of the planet and it impacts worldwide climate as well. Its white surface also reflects back into space much of the heat from the sun, as does the antarctic ice. As the ice melts, the dark ocean absorbs the heat and the warming ocean more quickly melts the remaining ice. Over the past four decades, the proportion of the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic’s winter ice pack has dropped from more than 33 percent to barely 1 percent today, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2019 annual Arctic report.

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It seems that even our genes favor short-term gain over long-term trouble. The twentieth century biologist George Williams recognized that, due to our genes having multiple functions, some genes have opposing functions. That is, for example, a gene can have great benefits for early life and at the same time cause great harm in later life, a process known as biological senescence. Evolution naturally selects for those genes since the organism doesn’t always make it to later life, so the early benefit has been accrued while the later harm has less chance of being activated.

Weinstein sees a cultural analog to this process, “Culture is biology, downstream of genes.” As he explains, “Ideas that work in the short term but fail and cause vulnerability in the long term tend to survive in our system because they often produce economic benefit. So if you produce a technology that has benefits for humanity over the course of several decades but the harm of that technology comes only in later decades, you will have become wealthy in the short term and that wealth will have resulted in an increase in your political influence, which will reinforce the belief structures that made it seem like a good idea in the first place. The market tends to see short-term gains and discount long-term effects until the political structure has been modified by that success. Just as in biological senescence, cultural senescence manifests in a system that is incapable of going in reverse and would drive itself off a cliff rather than recognize that something at its core was leading us into danger. We now have a cultural system that is making us very comfortable in the short term, but it is liquidating the wellbeing of the planet at an incredible rate.”

Evolution also didn’t select for us to be overly conscious of personal death itself. It would otherwise be emotionally paralyzing. Ernest Becker’s seminal book The Denial of Death, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, examined the awareness of death on human behavior and the strategies that developed in humans to mitigate their fear of it. “This is the terror:” Becker wrote, “to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression—and with all this yet to die.”

Sheldon Solomon, author and legendary professor of psychology at Skidmore College, spent thirty-five years conducting experiments based on Becker’s ideas. This body of work culminated in what Solomon and his colleagues call Terror Management Theory and relies on proving a central thesis of Becker’s work: that it is through cultural worldviews and through self-esteem that humans ward off the terror of death. As Sheldon told me in an interview in 2015, “What Becker proposes is that human beings manage terror of death by subscribing to culturally constructed beliefs about the nature of reality that gives them a sense that they’re valuable people in a meaningful universe…And so for Becker, whether we’re aware of it or not, and most often we’re not, we are highly motivated to maintain confidence in the veracity of our cultural worldview and faith in the proposition that we’re valuable people, that is, that we have self esteem. And whenever either of those, what we call ‘twin pillars of terror management” –culture or self-esteem– is threatened, we respond in a variety of defensive ways in order to bolster our faith in our culture and ourselves.” Listen to the full interview here.

Becker’s work relied on examining defense strategies for denial of personal death. We are now faced with the death of all. Therefore denial and defense of denial are accordingly amplified and dangerous. Our world is awash in belief systems; everyone gets to pick their own. There is also now a desperate rise of religious fundamentalism, superstition, and new age magical thinking, as predicted in 1996 by astronomer Carl Sagan in his final book, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. To an increasingly anxious species, cultural and religious belief systems offer the promise of eternal life. And people will literally fight to the death for them.

Or they will offer up their children. From the Mayan priests who threw children from cliffs to the families of suicide bombers in present time who joyously celebrate the martyrdom of their son or daughter in the streets with their friends, people would rather see their children die than forego the preservation and defense of their culture or religion. In places where climate chaos is already underway, we are seeing a solidification of tribalism and battle lines drawn between communities who had formerly lived together in relative harmony. These pressures are bound to increase.

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As you begin to awaken to the specter of extinction, you will likely feel the powerful lure of your usual distractions. You may want to go back to sleep. But denial will become harder and harder to maintain because once your attention has turned to this subject, you will see the evidence of it everywhere, both locally and globally.

And you will find yourself among the throngs of humanity who are easily distracted and amused, playing with their toys as the house burns, “tranquilized by the trivial,” as Kierkegaard said, and speaking of the future as though it was going to go on as it has. After all, we made it this far. We have proven our superiority at figuring things out and removing obstacles to our desires. We killed off most of the large wild mammals and most of the indigenous peoples in order to take their lands. We bent nature to our will, paved over its forests and grasslands, rerouted and dammed its rivers, dug up what journalist Thom Hartman calls its “ancient sunlight,” and burned that dead creature goo into the atmosphere so that our vehicles could motor us around on land, sea, and air and our weapons could keep our enemies in check. And now we have given its atmosphere a high fever. But, as the old adage has it, (a phrase I first heard in the 1980s, which has informed my view ever since), “nature bats last.”

You may find yourself in the company of people who seem to have no awareness of the consequences we face or who don’t want to know or who might have a momentary inkling but cannot bear to face it. You may find people who have all the data in hand but cannot see the implications, as though staring at Magellan’s ships on the horizon. You may experience people becoming angry if you steer the conversation in the direction of the planetary crisis. You may sense that you are becoming a social pariah due to what you see, even when you don’t mention it, and you may feel lonely in the company of most people you know. For you, it’s not just the elephant in the room; it’s the elephant on fire in the room, and yet you feel you can rarely mention it. But, as Gandhi said, “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.”

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Originally posted by wtg:
I gave the essay my best shot but I couldn't make it through. What I did read just didn't resonate with me.

And stupid as it sounds, I had a hard time with the text. It's super fine, small, and there wasn't enough contrast with the background.

I had never heard of Catherine Ingram, so I checked her bio information on her site. I was surprised to see her say that she was a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society of Barre, MA. I've never seen her name mentioned with the IMS founders I'm familiar with (Kornfield, Salzberg, and Goldstein).

I've got a bunch of books by folks from the IMS crowd (Kabat-Zinn plus the three I mentioned above) that I've found most enlightening. Given her background, I'm doubly surprised the essay didn't speak to me.

Sorry....

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Start small...Like my compost service at home, driving less, growing a garden.