By William Thomas

WHO NEEDS A TIMELINE OF EARTH’S SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION?

Enraptured and enslaved by blinking, beeping, twittering gadgets; increasingly lobotomized by microwaves, toxic chemicals and manufactured “foods”, we are sleep-walking beyond the brink of an unimaginable abyss. As reams of expensive computer projections continue to lag behind daily events, attempting to inhabit no-longer habitable regions is already disrupting human and wild lives.

Hysteria? Hype? Exaggeration? Must be, because if you search “Sixth Mass Extinction” you will be stampeded by reputable scientists freaking out over what is going down. Scientists with hard-earned credentials are not professionally accustomed to writing “scary,” “frightening” and “terrifying”. But they’re using these words now. We need to listen up.

“JUST THE FACTS MA’AM”

Why a timeline? When breaking the stories of Gulf War Illness, 9/11, and the ongoing aerosol geoengineering program (which I first described as “chemtrails”), I found that arranging historically-corroborated facts in a simple date-driven listing accomplishes two good things:

1: Avoids the bias of a predetermined agenda the book then “proves”.

2: Confers the bonus of startling and insightful juxtapositions between seemingly unrelated events.

In this life on this planet, nothing is unrelated. Everyone and everything is interwoven. Ignoring the spreading and intersecting ripples of our daily choices means we can avoid looking at the ecological context of lives lost in electrosmog, noise and concrete. Onboard a planet, context is everything.

So is situational awareness. As a former pilot and bluewater sailor, my location, air/sea state, trending weather, approaching hazards, and airworthiness/seaworthiness of my craft held my complete attention for hours, days, even weeks at a stretch. Lives depended on it.

So go figure, Trekkies. Rushing though the silent, cold, irradiated vacuum of deep space, the thin-skinned ship we share with myriad other life forms is visibly shedding parts. Weather everywhere is becoming more frequently freakish. With no lifeboats to hand and the nearest inhabitable planet unknown out to 10,000 light years, you’d think everyone onboard would be obsessed by the rapidly deteriorating condition of their space colony.

Yet, the ongoing extinction of most life on Earth remains a non-story to a corporate media dedicated to serving up endless monsters and titillation, along with nonstop imprecations to assure our individual identity by keeping our interrupting devices turned on and our brains turned off as we rush to Buy Still More Stuff. Species-wise, this strategy is not working out too well.

Though intended as a source-book for activists (which ought to include all of us), this timeline does not attempt to deal with denialists. Implacable facts only drive true believers deeper into their beliefs. If you are looking for insight into the Really Big Question, “What The Hell Is Going On?” – welcome aboard. Almost every word in this timeline is a verbatim quote [sources provided]. I’ve worked hard editing hundreds of news stories into basic bullet points, so please put this aside until you can spend some time with it. The best way to read this litany of (mostly) unsettling events is to scroll through it quickly, glancing at the bolded headings to get a sense of converging trend lines. Then go back and read the sections that most interest, intrigue or freak you out.

The notion behind this much bad news is that it’s always better to know the state of your ship.

Scrolling down…

FOUR BIG THINGS IMMEDIATELY BECOME CLEAR

1. The 3-4C additional Earth warming our fossil fuel use is locking in later in this Last Chance Century, an increasingly acidic and barren world ocean, global proliferation of brain-wiping and sterilizing wireless radiation, worldwide food contamination through GMOs and radionuclides, and the growing threat of massive methane releases in the thawing Arctic are each a civilization show-stopper. All of these processes are cumulative in their effects, synergistic in their interactions… and accelerating.

2. Hope is not a plan. Denial is not an appropriate response. The only possibility of species survival (including humans), is to keep fossil fuels in the ground and fossil fools away from the controls. All-out global response demands full mobilization now.

3. No such course change can be made while megacorporations and the banks that own them control governments through campaign bribes and job-loss threats. In Canada and the USA, rigged voting for media-manicured political puppets has become a bread-snd-circuses distraction. The only possibility of dealing with this deepening planetary emergency is to immediate revoke the corporate charters of every injurious corporation, end financial speculation, and transfer the printing of national currencies by private banks misleadingly labelled “Federal Reserve” back to civilian control.

4. “All Hands On Deck!” means everybody. It means paying close attention to every choice we make, whether a frustrated retort to another zombie screenhead, more junk picked up at Wal-Mart, or that thing we just “threw away”. Onboard a spacecraft, where everything recirculates, there is no “away”. Everything tossed into a waterway, roadway, skyway or field will come back to whap some critters (maybe your own kids) upside the head. Guaranteed.

Solutions to this converging crisis require not to more tech with its built-in consequences, but more restraint. Now might be an excellent time to disempower faceless bankers and currency manipulators – and prepare for dislocations to precariously-maintained lifestyles – by stepping back from money-as-debt toward more local trade and food growing. And away from petroleum addiction into off-grid living and human-powered, electric and wind-driven transportation. We can either adopt lives of voluntary simplicity now. Or involuntary simplicity soon.

Our personal response also calls for supporting smaller conscious companies, while joining grassroots groups like 350.org and geoengineeringwatch.org with a broad enough network to disrupt and reverse ecocide by the military-industrial-entertainment nexus. And as I found during BC’s logging wars, depending on your courage and circumstances, choosing to be a protector rather than a predator might also mean engaging in the hallowed American tradition of civil disobedience in the legally justified cause of civil defense.

Only when we confront the lessons we’ve arranged for ourselves – or look in a child’s eyes – can we “get the lessons” and stop killing the world.

William Thomas
Hornby Island, Canada
January 18, 2015

READ COMPLETE TIMELINE HERE