Mankind’s #1 Priority Today – Stop Destroying The Planet Before We Destroy Ourselves
First of all, what needs to be understood in the conversation about climate destruction is that this has the more grievous consequences for the survival of the human race itself. It’s not just the polar bears. It’s not just the ice caps. It’s the future of the human race.
Now whatever happens, nature will survive. In the Earth’s 4.5 billion years of existence, nature has endured 5 major mass extinctions that destroyed most of the life on the planet (at least 60%), and nature will survive humanity, even if it takes a couple hundred thousand or million years for nature to get back on track. However, it is not certain that humanity itself will survive.
Today, mankind is presiding over what scientists are unanimously describing as a sixth major mass extinction event.
According to the Living Planet Report put out in 2014 by the World Wildlife Fund, humans have killed up to half of the wildlife on the planet in the last 40 years (World Wildlife Fund). And according to the Living Planet Report put out in 2016, this level of decline could increase to two-thirds by 2020. And now a recent study 2018 has said that humans have killed off 83% of wild mammals.
What is also terrifying is that the Permian Extinction (the most deadly extinction event on Earth) may have been caused by circumstances similar to the causes of global warming today. A team of researchers from Canada, Italy, Germany and the US say they have discovered what caused the Permian Extinction. According to a paper published in the journal Palaeoworld, volcanic eruptions pumped large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, causing average temperatures to rise by eight to 11°C. This melted vast amounts of methane that had been trapped in the permafrost and sea floor, causing temperatures to soar even further to levels lethal to most life on land and in the oceans.
Professor Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, has said, “If there were a large methane release, which is now possible because of the instability of the methane hydrates underneath the Arctic continental shelves, the off-shore waters, that could quite easily give rise to a very large [methane] pulse.” He was one of the authors of a paper in the journal Nature, which suggested it was possible for a truly vast amount of frozen methane to be released over just 10 years – a blink of an eye in geological terms, which could theoretically lead to similar events that caused the Permian Extinction (Independent).
So this is the key issue we face today. This should be a political focus, a spiritual focus, and a psychological focus of all our current endeavors. Doing what we can to stop this destruction before it is too late.
METAL GAIA ARTICLES
Earth Day Realities and Environ-metal – Change is Needed Before We Reach The Point of No Return
The Era of Fake Reform. When Will We Actually Fight for the Planet?
RESOURCES
Humans Are Paving the Way for a Sixth Major Mass Extinction (World Future Fund)
Neil deGrasse Tyson scolds cherry picking climate science (CNN YouTube)
Sixth mass extinction: The era of ‘biological annihilation’ (CNN, 7-11-17)
Earth’s worst-ever mass extinction of life holds ‘apocalyptic’ warning about climate change, say scientists (Independent, 3-24-17)
Study: We’ve wiped out half the world’s wildlife since 1970 (VOX, 9-30-14)
Are We in the Midst Of a Sixth Mass Extinction? (New York Times, 6-1-12)
Extinction Threat, A Call to World Leaders at Rio Earth Summit: (CNN World News, 6-20-12)
According to the article above: 41% of amphibians, 25% of mammals, 13% of birds, 30% of conifers and 20% of all plants are all threatened with extinction.
One in Five Mammals Threatened With Extinction (Common Dreams, 11-3-09)
The survival of 17,921 species is in jeopardy.
Almost 50% Of The World’s Primates Are In Danger Of Extinction (CNN, 8-5-08)
Habitat destruction as well as hunting are the greatest threats to primates today.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Friedrich Nietzsche is probably one of the most influential and misunderstood philosophers in history. And sadly, he didn’t even attract much fame until the part of his life where he started to lose his mental faculties and go insane.
In this post I will not cover the entire history of Nietzche or his writings. But I would like to explain one of his most famous concepts, a conception that revolutionized thought on philosophy, religion and politics — his “will to power.”
The will to power describes what Nietzche believed was the main driving force of human life. He did not believe it was a struggle for survival, as philosophers posited in the past. He believed it was the struggle for power — achievement, ambition, and the striving to reach the highest possible position in life. It can be argued that human beings do not wage war or create art or write books merely so they can survive, but the greater reason, is so they can gain and enforce their own power. And this is not only just a struggle in human life, but it is the perennial struggle of nature itself.
Part of the reason why Nietzche is so important, when it comes to the history of thought in Western civilization, is because his works urge people to question what was the accepted morality of the time. Of what actually is morally true, and of what actually is a good pursuit in life.
Master Morality vs. Slave Morality: A key concept in the works of Nietzche is slave morality and master morality (On the Genealogy of Morality). Master morality values pride and power, while slave morality values things like meekness and humility. Master morality weighs actions on good or bad consequences (i. e., classical virtues and vices, consequentialism), unlike slave morality, which weighs actions on a scale of good or evil intentions (e. g, Christian virtues and vices, Kantian deontology).
Controversy: Friedrich Nietzsche is controversial because the Nazis were great fans of his work. But would he actually have supported them if he was alive in the 1930s?
The exact ideology of Friedrich Nietzsche is difficult at times to pin down. But in the context of the time he was alive, Nietzsche was not an anti-semite. According to Robert Holub, in Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem, Nietzsche recoiled from the crude excesses of Richard Wagner’s antisemitism and even had extremely positive remarks about the Jewish community that would probably be characterized as a form of racism in modern times (for the use of stereotyping), but would have been considered pro-Jewish at the time.
When Nietzsche referred to the “blond beast at the core of all noble races,” many people believe he was actually talking about lions rather than fair-haired Europeans. After all, check out this quote:
“One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness: the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings–they all shared this need.”
There’s not many blond Arab or Japanese folk — so I think it’s pretty evident he was talking about lions.
One of the reasons why Nietzsche came to be associated with Nazis is because his sister, unlike him, was a protonazi. They even grew apart when she married a former high school teacher who had become a prominent German nationalist and antisemite. Yet in the years when Friedrich Nietzsche started to lose his sanity, his sister became his caretaker, curator and the editor of his manuscripts. She reworked his unpublished writings to fit her own ideology, often in ways contrary to her brother’s stated opinions. And when she died in 1935, Adolf Hitler attended her funeral.
Nietzsche and Black Power? While many people associate Nietzsche with Hitler, there are very few who would associate him with the Black Power movement in America. Yet Huey P. Newton, one of the key founders of the Black Panther Party, was an avid fan of Nietzsche. He found his writings, The Will to Power and Beyond Good and Evil, especially influential.
Elaine Brown writes that, at Huey’s behest, the Party established a school for party leadership to attempt to acquaint them with broad philosophical ideas:
Now they were wondering about his ideological institute. I saw the questions as the local leadership cadres came trooping to Oakland from as far away as Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago for bi-monthly, two-day learning sessions led by Huey. Where was the stuff about the pigs, they seemed to ask, as we studied with not only Mao and Marx but Aristotle and Plato. Where was the stuff about urban guerrilla warfare? Their expressions conveyed, as Huey led us in discussions of the philosophies of Rousseau and Kant, [sic] Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, about existentialism and determinism and free will. I saw their faces when we examined and questioned the theories of capitalism and socialism and communism. Huey asking whether our systematic use of the tests of dialectical materialism meant anything. If, under a dialectical materialist analysis, nothing “stood outside” of the process, did that negate the process itself, he asked? (Brown 255-56)
The idea of the Will to Power is evident in the Newton’s article “Black capitalist”
When we coined the expression “All power to the people”, we had in mind emphasizing the word “power” for we recognize that the will to power is the basic drive of man. But it is incorrect to seek power over people. We have been subjected to the dehumanizing power of exploitation and racism for hundreds of years; and the Black community has its will to power also. What we seek, however, is not power over people, but the power of control of our own destiny. (Newton 227)
As a Nietzschean, Newton knew that only power could influence change, and direct it along its desired course.
Nietzsche also played a critical role in getting people to question the established norms and morality of their time. In America, when Africans were brought here and enslaved, they were taught Christian morality, and taught to embrace the meekness, humility and pacifism encouraged by what Nietzsche saw as a “slave morality.” Via the Black Power movement, many African Americans started to question those values, and see the pursuit of power as a road to real change.
Importance in the Pagan Community: The ideas of Nietzsche are obviously of great import to the modern pagan community. He questioned the Judeo-Christian morals of good versus evil that came to define the West. Paganism — in my opinion — is a religion and set of values less concerned with good and evil, and more concerned with virtues like courage, honesty, integrity and the ability to hone one’s inner power though magic or ritual.
Nietzsche is a fascinating character supported by movements on both the left and the right. You can love him or hate him, but you cannot deny the importance of his writings and their effect on history.
QUOTES
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
Without music, life would be a mistake.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
LINKS
An Introduction to Midsummer for Heathens
The Summer Solstice will be upon us soon. June 21st (in the Northern hemisphere). Midsummer is one of the most important holy days in Heathenry. The time of year when the great sun goddess, Sunna, rides her great chariot to the highest she can manage. When the sun shines upon the Earth like no other time.
During this time, many people from all over the world would celebrate the summer solstice, being the longest day of the year. This was a time of merriment, celebration, trade, prosperity, and for Vikings, a time for raiding.
Metal Gaia 