The Flood - Then & Now

 The story of the Flood is threaded through various mythical and religious texts, be it the Noah’s Ark in Abrahamic religious accounts, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha or the Hindu Manu Flood or the Mayan myth of Mesoamerican Flood; they all depict an underlying common theme:

• Excess of Sin, exceeding the limits of moderation, leads to a Divine Judgement.
• Cleansing of all that is wicked and corrupt humanity.
• Survival of a select few living beings within the creation of an Ark that protects those who abide in it/by it.
• Repopulation of the Earth on a new foundation, a new form allowing those who boarded the Ark to go forth and multiply.

Etymology of the word Sin can be traced to adoption by several languages: in old English, syn broadly referred to moral wrongdoing; Proto-Germanic, sundjo, meaning fault, crime or failing; Greek, hamartia, missing the mark, an archery term; and; Latin, peccatum, fault or error; all adopted to suit a cultural/religious/moral context, referring to following a particular principle or a code and doing something that is not appropriate or correct.

The divine judgement which cleanses through a flood, one can interpret this as a consequence, a natural response, to correct the wrongs, or in the case of Gaia (Earth), to adapt and change the environment as a consequence of the excesses that are triggered by the acts/causes preceding it.

The Ark could be considered not only in the physical sense of a protective body but also as a covenant, a new moral and ethical code, a set of new principles that humanity creates and adopts, deciding to curb the excesses, eliminate the exploitation and form a symbiotic relationship with the Earth that provides the humanity and fulfils its needs while controlling greed.

That would allow for the repopulation and survival of the species, not only individual glory and comforts but also that of mankind, and all that is is the glory of our natural world.

I think this is what the story is about. The timeline of this, in the form of the natural world and response, is long compared to that of human life and another biblical story, the interpretation of Joseph’s dream, seven healthy cows devoured by seven skeleton cows, tells us that excesses or fattening could continue to for a long time before the devouring begins. In the end, nothing of the past is left. Humanity has to rebuild its ways of life from scratch.

That is the story of the Flood, and today, the Flood is forming on several fronts – the environmental disaster that is building up, the excesses of consumerism that are devouring freedom, the ultimate greed to accumulate power and exercise control over others, the hegemony of the powerful and the exploitation of the masses.

There is no denying the climate change that is taking place, and the complete manifestation of that may be decades away, but the signs are there. The laws of nature are immutable and have existed for centuries and millions of years. If we go back hundreds of millions of years, starting from about 225 million years ago when the first mammals appeared on the Earth through to 65 million years ago, marked by the extinction of dinosaurs through a cataclysmic event, the average surface temperature ranged between 18 to 35 degrees Celsius, a mean number estimated to be about 25, as compared to about 15 degrees that has prevailed in the last few thousand years.  Suppose one looks at it from a long historical lens, considering only the latest 1% of Earth’s history. In that case, the current temperature is just bouncing off the newest ice age: Earth’s service has not been as cool as this since the appearance of first mammals.

Climate change is not an issue or a problem of Earth’s nature; it is our problem, the problem of humans and the way and the where of how they live today and how we have shaped all the species and used the resources, living and otherwise, of the Earth.

In the same way as the accident and destruction of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was nature's fault, it was ours to locate it, thinking that we could overcome and compensate for the laws of nature – we did it, not nature. The earthquakes that destroy and cause havoc in San Fransisco are not nature’s doing; it is our doing by locating and populating a region close to the Teutonic plates fault-lines. It is not the fault of nature that it is responding by trapping heat within the atmosphere; it is ours as we excessively exude greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – what nature is doing is precisely what it is supposed to do, to adapt itself to the changes in the conditions that trigger climate change – it is trying to change to respond to the conditions created by us.

Our response to the madness, I call it our response, but in fact, it is a response of the few which permeates into the response of many to the calamities that we seed, be it environmental, economic, governance or any other form of human systems, is in my view, a strange form of sheer madness. Take the example of the global financial crisis.  The cumulation of this had its foundation in easy access to money; our response to stave off the system's collapse caused by this was, wait for it, more easy money. It just pushed the problem into the future, adding to the inequity and other externalities that were, still are not even being considered or looked upon.

Our response to climate change, albeit with ‘good intentions’, is another classic case of madness in my view. So what I think we are doing is the following:

• We want to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emission sources by supplanting it with carbon-free sources of energy in the form of solar, wind and potentially geothermal.
• We want those who are dependent on these carbon-emitting sources, more than half of the population of the world, where this is a cheaper and relatively accessible source of energetics, to abandon this and not only defer and delay but make it harder for them to move up the scale from lower to lower-middle income earning, to middle to higher income earning class.
• The carbon-free sources of energy, both solar and wind, the equipment and the kit that is made to enable this, the emissions and the exploitation that it causes are ignored and pushed into countries that fall out of the middle to higher income class.
• We conveniently ignore the root cause of all this – the cause highlighted in all the religious, cultural and mythical texts: excesses.

Except for nuclear power, all alternatives to fossil fuels are low-energy-density power sources.  Yes, low density.  In the best-case scenario, the efficacy of solar panels to convert ‘luminosity and heat’ into energy, or the power of wind turbines to generate power, is less than half of that of fossil fuel-fed power plants.  Not only that, the power generation by solar or wind sources is volatile and unreliable and as such, ancillary development, including expanded capacity needed on transmission networks (some estimates indicate two and a half times that of conventional stable power generating sources), are not accounted for, in the ‘zero-carbon’ calculations. Nature’s immutable laws of conservation of mass and energy are clear: neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed; it can only change form. I wonder if there has been any research or depth of study to understand when wind farms take energy from the wind to rotate the turbine, what is the impact of loss of energy from the wind, or, for that matter when the solar panels absorb energy instead of letting to seeth into the surface of the Earth, what is the impact of that and how much of the earth surface is voided from receiving the sunlight and its impact. I wonder.

When energy is not utilized to ease the burden, human labour is consumed to compensate for that.  A villager without access to coal, gas or electricity has to spend a significant amount of time and work to find alternative fuel, and, in a lot of cases, it is cheap wood, dried cow dung and lights his abode with a high pollutive and harmful burning source for light.  These villagers use low energy density fuel, defeating the purpose of ‘saving the environment’. That villager spends at least a third of waking time efforting to gather what is essentially something that would otherwise be freed to pursue activities that would improve economic well-being or health. The excesses of those who allowed them to move out of this exacting labour burden those who can least afford to do so. And if anyone thinks that these people will not cheat, you have another thing that is blindsiding your view.

Why not improve and let them get on the higher order of economic well-being, let them have things they would care to protect and therefore be self-motivated to protect the environment?  Let them climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs before imprisoning them at the survival level.

Drawing inspiration from the stories of the Flood, one thing stands out as the key to the whole issue – the Sin of excess. Why not stop buying twenty T-shirts a year? A study indicates that an average American buys over 50 pieces of clothing annually. Fifty!  Textiles, from end to end, from farming cotton or shearing wool or synthetic material to placement in the shop or delivery to your home, are responsible for more than 10% of greenhouse gas emissions. Fifty? Really, is that needed? Why not reduce the number of times we go out to eat a week to reduce food and other waste? Why not walk instead of driving to the corner shop to get a pint of milk? Let’s not forget cryptocurrencies and the energy consumed to power the machines that mine, maintain and churn those transactions. Is crypto a real value-added for society? Does that produce goods and services that can be consumed by the masses? Do we need to replace our smartphones every year? Every two years? Seriously, regarding the new features embedded in the upgrades, I wonder how many features of the phone we bought two years ago have we fully utilized?

Excessive consumption is the most significant cause of environmental conditions that we live with.  And for this, we have the world amassed debt, borrowing from the future, that, in the wildest and the most optimistic estimates, will never be able to retire.  To truly retire debt and reduce the burden that we have placed on ourselves and our future generations, we need to produce goods and services significantly in excess of our consumption and store them for future use.  Do what Joseph’s advice to his king was, save and store in the seven years of fat cows so that when the skeletons come out, we can survive.

The same is true with the environment: reduce consumption. The idea that consuming more gives one happiness and fulfilment has to be changed to having fewer wants; less consumption frees us from labouring to consume more and more and free us.

Climate change is afoot, and the weather patterns and the storms and the freakiness that we see now, this decade is telling us that the Earth has started to respond to our excesses.  In fact, it never stopped; it is only now that we focus on seeing it.  It will do what it has always done: adapt and change – the question is, can we change our ways of living on Earth, which will be way too different from what it is now?