Bill McKibben: This is how the earth works now

[GliderGuider]

67. Call them what they are.

Assholes.

I was thinking more about this on the bus home just now, and I realized a lot of the problem here stemmed from language. Maybe a careful discussion of terminology and usage is in order. As much for my own clarity as anything, I'd like to take a stab at it.

There is a large(ish) group of people who believe that the human experience has passed some kind of bifurcation point, and that rapid, irreversible, entropic social and ecological change is underway with much more to come. There are many differing ideas about what that bifurcation point might be, the nature of the changes we are entering, how deep the decline might be, what aspects of it can be stopped or reversed, and what the appropriate responses might be. One fairly common meme in this group is that unbridled material/economic growth and a refusal to recognize limits play a large role in the unfolding events.

Of course, the ideas of slowing or stopping economic growth and respecting limits are anathema to TPTB, so they had to find a way to marginalize these people and keep such ideas out of the public square if at all possible. This was urgent, because the evidence was beginning to pile up that these people were right.

TPTB looked at this proto-movement and discovered some vulnerabilities. One was the respect we pay to the fundamentals of Malthusian theory (essentially the recognition that infinite growth in a finite environment is impossible), as well as to the Club of Rome's LtG study of 1971. Then the Peak Oil movement came along, and the combination of that stream of thought with a smattering of complex systems theory made many of us aware of the possibility that a rapid decline in oil production could be extremely damaging to a high-energy society that uses oil as a keystone resource.

A few people (I'll name Matt Savinar, Richard Duncan and Jay Hanson but there were some others - including me from about 2004 to 2008) started talking about the potential for a complete rupture of civilization due to Peak Oil, with an ensuing die-off back to a billion people or less within a short period of time. This was the extreme outer edge of the movement, but it was just visible enough that TPTB could use it as a meme. The word "Doomer" was born, usually coupled with this picture of the "End of the World" guy to drive the point home:

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This identification was used to brand everyone who subscribed to a reduced-growth paradigm - no matter how mild - as a crazy, apocalyptic doomer.

Unfortunately for TPTB, no matter how much blunt-force propaganda trauma they inflicted on the "Malthusian hippies", the evidence continued to accumulate. Eventually there was enough of it that the scientists began to speak out (they'd been silenced by the earlier onslaught of marginalization). As more scientific evidence made its way into public view, a lot of people who previously hadn't been extremist in their views began to realize that the chances the "doomers" could be right was growing every day.

At some point, the doomers themselves repatriated the word as an affectionate shibboleth - an ironic recognition sign. This has echoes of the way blacks repatriated the "N-word".

Many of us have gone through long processes of painful discovery about the real nature of the world we're living in compared to what we'd been told it was. We have endured endless derision and marginalization at the hands of those in power, as well as their minions, fellow travelers and useful idiots. All through this dark night there was the realization that the evidence was on our side. Now the evidence is beginning to pour out from every corner of the scientific world, and the badge of "Doomer" carries a lot of pride for those of us who held fast to our knowledge of the truth.

So when someone comes along and begins using "doomer" here in its old, dark, pejorative sense ... well, it's as though a clueless white man walked into a ghetto bar, went up to a group of young black men at a table and said somewhat aggressively, "Whassup, n*****s?"

When you use that word here, it's best to use it with an ironic, affectionate smile. Call those other guys "extremists" or "apocalyptics" or something, but keep in mind that the problem many of them like Malthus and Meadows and Hubbert had, was that they were right on the wrong side just a bit too early.