The Pandemic, Freedom & the Gomphothere
One thing about this pandemic — it is revealing. Extreme circumstances function as fierce winds that blow the dust off of a landscape to reveal the underlying terrain. In this case, what we are learning about the vaunted US American conception of “freedom” is quite clear and quite stark. To many US Americans, individual sacrifice for the collective good does not constitute an act of wisdom or kindness or even an act born of the long-term survival instinct. No. It is an impingement on one’s “freedom” and must be rejected at all costs.
This toddler–level conception of freedom has been the dominant idea shaping much of US history — evident in the settler colonial westward expansion project and most decisively evident now in the US approach to climate change. Astonishingly, US emissions of carbon continue to rise, even as we hit 420 ppm of the element in the Earth’s atmosphere. The last time there was this much of the heat-blocking element carbon clustered in the earth’s atmosphere was 3.5 million years ago — during the fucking PLIOCENE epoch. At that time, global mean temperature was 6 to 7° F HIGHER and sea levels were 60 FEET above what they are today.
It is all unimaginable, literally. We can try to conjure what such a world is like, but we can’t summon any direct feeling-experience to really bring the reality home. It is all too long ago. 3.5 million years precedes the emergence of our species of hominid. We were NOT YET FUCKING HERE on this planet. Who was? Who was lumbering around North America 3.5 million years ago when the atmosphere had this amount of carbon in it? Can I get a mastodon, people?! Amen! And say hello to your friendly neighborhood gomphothere. Gompho-WHAT?! Gomphothere. He’s the charming fellow pictured above. They were another species of mobile home–sized elephantine beasties, only some genus of them had three tusks and their dental structure is different than that of folks from the elephant family. They were rolling around Southern California and parts of the Southwest the last time atmospheric carbon concentration was this high.
If this is all starting to feel like a sadistic amusement park rollercoaster that you regret boarding halfway through the ride, then you are not alone. By merely 2025, we will already have projected enough carbon into the atmosphere to parallel what was up there during the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum, 15 MILLION years ago, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. Round about this time, our branch of primates was just starting to distinguish itself from orangutans. Now, as a child of the 70s, I watched those odd Clint Eastwood/Ruth Gordon/Clyde The Orangutan pictures, “Every Which Way But Loose” and “Any Which Way You Can” and I am certain that orangutans are equipped to handle a lot of shit that we simply are not. It might be time for US Americans to drop the screaming eagle, “I got mine” freedom bullshit, sacrifice a bit for the collective good and get right with the world…
The last time the sky was this carbonized, there were only giant short faced bears, sabertooth tigers, mastodons and our friend the gomphothere to contend with, while the current locations of our great coastal cities were home to all manner of daffy-looking, swimming sea beasties. I’m afraid that could all seem like a walk in the park compared to the future toward which we are currently headed. The solipsistic American version of freedom is on pace to bring us its opposite: obliteration.
(Thank you to the Attack & Dethrone GodCast, whose episode four discussion provoked some of these reflections. Also, influencing the ideas is the book “Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline” (2011) by Morris Berman).
