Glomos
- Book: Glomos. By Mark Whitaker.
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Upcomning book.
Excerpt
A Green History of Humanity
Mark Whitaker:
"To bring all three renewals together, the Glomos is a development ‘patch’ that can update nations to hold together better into the digital future while they improve their national survival, their citizen’s higher quality of life, and their ecolgoical environments combined, even despite conditions of increasing global competition economically and culturally. This development ‘patch’ of the Glomos encourages all states to be more representative and sustainable, region by region, to build their developmental footing on truly permanent bases of a higher material quality of life that is ecologically sound.
By doing this, the Glomos gives current wayward national leaderships an option of ‘re‐alliance’ with their own people’s desires for a better future on all three of these levels, instead of how many national leaderships now are just choosing a path of least resistence to a global technocracy that is undermining their nation’s capacities. That is a non‐developmental path leading to their own nation’s death by allying with a digital global technocracy, allying with ecological destruction, and allying with regional cultural destruction.
Before and Across the Holocene: A ‘Wider Green Theory of History’ of Four Phases of Organizational Change in Human‐Environmental System Dynamics
In this book deep modern problems are framed in comparative history as scaled crescendos of the same problems that we have been having unsolved at smaller scales for thousands of years. As already mentioned, the Glomos thus helps solve the common triple problems of an unrepresentative and degradative state’s systemic dynamics in the past that have become the four existential reckonings of our present, due to our nemesis now being a private global technocracy and its even larger unrepresentative and asymmetric powers instead of only an unrepresentative and degradative regional state process.
One of these four existential reckonings is of course the current systemic global mass extinction. As the below discussion explains, this is caused by the long‐term influence of this global trading system undermining the ‘dual heritage’ of humanity that has always protected us in the past, and equally caused now by this global trading system’s result becoming a global technocracy of privatization, consolidation, and enclosure that is actively trying to suppress our dual heritage as well now. This ‘dual heritage’ already was defined earlier in Appendix 1 and in Ecological Revolution (2010) as the open‐ended forces of environmental degradation versus the equally powerful forces of environmental restoration and sustainability, instead of all humanity having only one kind of negative environmental influence toward degradation.
However, ancillary to that point is that if we are to judge whether we are truly in a systemic mass extinction, meaning a modern mass extinction at the same scale of natural mass extinctions of the past, we have to go beyond the past mere 5,000 years in Ecological Revolution (2010) to understand older mass extinctions’ comparative scales and causes as we explore how different is the current generative logic of a systemic mass extinction as a social phenomenon compared to the generative logics of past mass extinctions as natural phenomena. Along the way, in the process of these massive comparisons of geological time with the modern social existential reckonings in this book, useful patterns were found in the causes of natural mass extinctions that are useful to know.
Some of these factors are unpredictable and some are predictable, yet all of the factors regularly occur in all natural mass extinctions.
Thus consider this book as a combined warning to us all. Yes, the book is warning about long‐term repeatedly chosen social problems of political economic decay and ongoing systemic environmental degradation, and ex‐ plains how the Glomos plan solves this for how to make truly long‐lived, representative, and sustainable polities with a higher quality of life for all that everyone always has wanted. However, the book is equally a stark warning about a few repeatingly predictable natural disasters—that we equally have to prepare for, in essence, by ending our ignorance about them. So, to become a truly aware species capable of not only making though keeping a long‐lived, representative, and sustainable civilization, we have to do more than solve the aforementioned repeatedly‐chosen social ‘triple problem’ mentioned earlier around unrepresentative and degradative state‐based political economies. Equally, we have to avoid all our better creations being wiped off the map by our ignorance of other predictable natural catastrophes as well that repeatedly have wreaked havoc across our civilizations for millennia long before current written memory. To institute the Glomos plan means having an awareness of certain predictable natural catastrophes that can strike us blindsides, instead of being ignorant of these.
Remaining ignorant about what may occur soon would likely leave an impoverished rump of us so clueless about what just happened that we would likely tragically suffer through the same ignorance as before, again and again into the future. So for the Glomos plan truly to help us survive and thrive we should understand both the repeatingly chosen social problems that are being fixed in the Glomos, and the repeated external natural disasters that we have to guard against to preserve this higher quality of life desired. So we have to deal with major repeatingly chosen social problems that the Glomos plan directly addresses, as well as prepare for one particularly repeating natural disaster in order to keep what the Glomos plan entails, in order to avoid being blindsided by a particular external natural force that may return us to ignorance and thus in that way encourage us to choose badly once more toward the same tragically repeating social problems. So without this natural disaster knowledge of protection, the whole Glomos plan is for naught as it may be wiped clean off the Earth if not associated with this other knowledge of what is to come. This is dealing with magnetic reversals. In past books like Ecological Revolution (2010), a single common model of world history of the past 5,000 years was suggested. It came from deep analysis of at least the most recent 3,000 years of that 5,000 years using data from China, Japan, and Europe. (This is described below as ‘phase 3.3’ of the whole Holocene period, and there is more on that later.) [xxxx] In that book, states and human‐environmental conditions were selected for analysis in such a way as to show state cases at different times in history that modern Eurocentric scholars would try to call clearly as existing in ‘different epochs’, that in turn, those Eurocentric scholars would then try to classify as states involved in different historical processes of “ancient, feudal, or modern” systems. However, the findings of that book showed that regardless of those Eurocentric‐assumed different epochs and their presumed different dy‐ namics, instead, each case of state showed the same historical dynamics of unrepresentative and degradative political economies developing toward the same kinds of problems of privatization, consolidation, enclosure, and degradation—and then each case equally develops the same kinds of combined ecological renewal and ethical community cultural renewal against the former, from a hydra‐headed ‘ecological revolutionary’ opposition of decentralization. Therefore, first, in that book, categories of history like “ancient, feudal, and modern” were falsified since regardless of era, region, or cultural differences the same processes of interaction occurred over time across all three state cases, instead of there being ‘different epochs based on different principles’ since the generative logic was the same whether past and present and in any region. Thus, Ecological Revolution found that human impact on the environment is a choice of two directions all the time, giving us a ‘dual heritage’ contributing simultaneously to unrepresentative pressures for environmental degradation as well as equally more representatively organized pressures for social and environmental improvement in the same open‐ended cases of history. Therefore, people have never ‘only’ had negative influences on the environment as terms like the ‘Anthropocene’ as‐sume. Instead, humanity always has open options of environmental impact in its chosen dual heritage. All of this was called the ‘green theory of history.’
However, in this book, eventually and even somewhat unwillingly, other kinds of generative logics came under analysis. So, instead of only focusing on the past 5,000 years like that other book, this book’s research began to require a ‘wider green theory of history.’ This means an analysis of the pre‐Holocene for millions of years and the whole Holocene for its wider environmental degradation across Earth’s multiple mass extinctions to understand whether the current global mass extinction is up to par with what has historically occurred in the deep geological past. In other words, this is an analysis of what came long before 11,700 BCE, and then what has fully occurred throughout this full period of the Holocene to the present. Particularly the expansion of the temporal span of analysis to all geological time brought up the fact of completely different pre‐social natural generative logics of mass extinctions in the past, and that became a question how in the first place the later socially‐generative logic of systemic environmental degradation arose two‐thirds of the way through the Holocene only.
So, particularly the analysis of the full Holocene started to pose wider questions around the historical arising or even the ending of the generative logic discussed in Ecological Revolution, instead of only carrying on another analysis of it like before in this book. This means questions range across wider spans of time that frame that 5,000 year period—for what came before it as well as how that state‐based generative logic has been adapted now to more globalized conditions that have changed the dual heritage somewhat in its expression, as well as other important tweaks of this generative logic along the way from 3500 BCE to the present. This led to an argument about the same generative logic as Ecological Revolution and how it is now better conceived as operating in three phases over time from 3500 BCE to the present—as well as the earlier two phases of a non‐systemic generative logic of human‐environmental impact and an entirely natural generative logic of environmental degradation and mass extinction beforehand.
This made a total of four phases of history about human‐environmental impacts:
- with the first entirely natural generative logic of mass extinctions when they occur,
- then a second more ‘hybrid’ generative logic of still‐dominating natural generative logics with some non‐systemic social contributions to only environmental degradation,
- and then a third generative logic of unrepresentative and degradative systemic regional environmental degradation around pristine states as entirely a systemic social phenomenon of degradation
and its systemic opposition (that went through three phases),
- and then a fourth generative logic of what happens
to that unrepresentative state‐centric model when such states have wider global trade systems in which they operate, that damages the past systemic dual heritage per se, and stresses far more systemic environmental degradation so much that it becomes global mass extinction driven forward by the organizational logics involved under conditions of open global hinterlands and a divided and conquered anti‐systemic opposition to it still operating at only regional scale.
However, we now live in a period where that dual heritage is being returned by the closure of
the global hinterlands and by finding ways to get over that divided and conquered anti‐systemic opposition—
mostly starting from the widely shared deliberations possible in our current media regime of digitally decentralized global telecommunications.
This span of time of analysis helps to understand:
(1) whether what is interpreted now as a global systemic ‘mass extinction’ is truly on the scale of past natural mass extinctions,
(2) and helps to judge better the causes of each,
(3) while in the process helping to judge better the debate about whether the term ‘Anthropocene,’ a term in‐vented in the late 1990s only, does a good job or a bad job in describing the whole Holocene period of human impact in the past 12,000 years.
Since the first two were already explained above, now the third point about criticisms of this the ‘Anthropocene’ hypothesis is described.
Comparative analysis of mass extinctions, natural caused versus socially caused, led to thinking about the debate around the term ‘Anthropocene’ defined as the period of the entire Holocene in which humans, it is said, became the dominant influence on other species’ extinctions during the entire Holocene as one piece. Typically, the Anthropocene hypothesis comes with an attempt to frame humans only as causing the “megafaunal” extinctions ofthe Holocene. However, broad‐brush statements, whether about humans or the ‘whole Holocene,’ are both based only on deductive assumptions more than empirical proof or nuance. To elaborate, what was found from this comparative analysis of mass extinctions, natural or social, is that there is more empirically wrong with this “Anthropocene” hypothesis than there is something right about it. Four different rationales were found why the “Anthropocene” hypothesis is doubtful and is easily falsified. All four rationales are based on existing empirical data. So in what follows in the rest of this introductory section are points summarizing much of what is said in Appendix 6 or only tacitly said later throughout the book.
The first rationale is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ is just a cloaked term entirely built from a previous assumption (not demonstrated) that Malthusian population scale is the direct driving force of human environmental degradation. Instead, what drives human environmental degradation is left up to us as people, capable of making good or bad ecological choices, case by case in materials and organizations. So, thus “Anthropocene” is a deductive term that propagandizes Malthusian policy solutions, which is a shame because such 240‐year‐old Malthusian models are pre‐scientific models and thus keep ignoring the empirical proof of the ‘dual heritage’ that we have as people to choose our future relationships with the environment for ill or for good. Since our ‘dual heritage’ gives us both degradative and sustainable impacts by choice, any claim of a ‘one‐way degradative Anthropocene’ empirically is wrong.
The second rationale is understanding what is causing the modern global mass extinction instead. Given the ‘dual heritage’ of our humanity in the past, the uniqueness of the current global mass extinction is thus hardly about human population though would be caused by choices of organizations and materials that are causing environmental degradation. This means the only cause of the modern global mass extinction drive has to be systemic.
This brings up the question why there are or would be more prominent unrepresentative and degradative choices in recent centuries compared to the past, obviously since systemic mass extinctions failed to happen in the past, so there is something unbalanced and unique about the modern world, that when were at smaller scales, we were more balanced in the past with presumably stronger representative and sustainable choices keeping it that way from our ‘dual heritage’ operating in our past more strongly compared to the present.
This brings up the question, from what would that modern imbalance in our ‘dual heritage’ derive? From comparative analysis of the rise of modern global mass extinctions compared to smaller mere regional environmental degradation, two other systemic factors were found as to blame for our current systemic mass extinction beyond the generative logic of unrepresentative states per se:
(1) the rise of a global trading system and the greater power in scale and in geographic dynamics of a global hinterland that it gave greater power to more unrepresentative and degradative decision‐making, compared to a more regional past with less scale and less‐wide geographic dynamics that still had anti‐systemic opposition yet it now remained merely regional and thus divided and conquered by such global operations, and
(2) now its current result in a private global technocracy.
These are two chosen factors involved in this modern systemic mass extinction, which respectively undermine or increasingly directly try to suppress our dual heritage. In comparison, to be clear, this means that our dual heritage was more historically prominent before in its stronger regional ecological protection when we lived within only a process of systemic regional environmental degradation—where unrepresentative and degradative forces still only had regional boundaries that made them easier to challenge on their own terms of scale or geographical dynamics by other regionally representative and sustainable forces generally at the same scale and geographical dynamics. However, a growing global trading system and the first global‐oriented unrepresentative and degradative states involved in it, and now a global technocracy involved in it, have been undermining and now suppressing our more representative and sustainable feedback from our dual heritage. It is argued that this growth of
scale and geographical dynamics of a global trading system created growing asymmetric power relation in the
‘dual heritage,’ and it is estimated that this slow expansion of a global trading system and various globally‐powerful states’ global degradative impacts versus a still regional ecological renewal and ethical community protection has been occurring for about 1,500 years, since the 500s/600 CE, as outlined below.
So this second rationale why the “Anthropocene” is a bad term is that it is clear that human social impact changes over this period of the Holocene instead of ever remains a social constant like the term “Anthropocene” assumes.
This is expanded into an outline of four changing phases of human‐environmental impact across the Holocene, in a moment.
Thus, to stop this modern systemic mass extinction requires us to work against the global technocracy causing this and to change the choices of materials and organizations in a global trading system to less degradative ones, as well as to facilitate a means in which different regional ecological and ethical communities can nest and magnify their power with each other in confederation to reach that global scale as well, to check and balance against the unrepresentative and degradative trends already at that global level that are unchecked. That is the Glomos plan. Therefore, in summary, a global technocracy is causing this mass extinction by blocking our greater attempts to slow it down or to end it entirely, by blocking our available better choices of materials and organizations that we have available already. This is discussed in Chapter 2. The result of this is to explain logically how a global technocracy, by blocking the sustainable and representative side of our dual heritage, is the cause of the current mass extinction, as well as why the Glomos plan is required to bring back that dual heritage that has been slowly undermined by a global trading regime over the past 1,500 years and/or been repressed by an increasingly more powerful systemic degradative force that is now the global technocracy. This is explained below as well.
The third rationale why Anthropocene is a bad term is that the entire Holocene is hardly one common stable climatic period either, though has many different climatic periods within it, bringing up the fact of ongoing naturally changing factors in mass extinction instead of only social ones.
The fourth rationale is a larger point of the same: that the Holocene itself is just part of an “odd” nearly 2 million year period within the Quaternary into the Holocene, odd because there have been in the past 2 million years only these regularly climatic periods of whiplashing and switching that are like ongoing syncopated ‘hot and cold’ periods. This has even occurred within Holocene itself. So, the point here is that one of many ongoing natural causes of the Holocene “megafaunal mass extinctions” can be from that ongoing syncopated short natural rhythm of climate that has continued throughout the Quaternary into the Holocene for at least 2 million years. (As said, the details of this appear later in Appendix 6). It is odd because that kind of rapid climate whiplashing in the past 2 million years has never happened before in the past 500 million years of global climate or even longer, so we should expect fresh odd natural patterns of mass extinctions in the Holocene, when they occur, to look differently than the geological past, and they do.
So the term “Anthropocene” is really bad because it ignores the Holocene itself is hardly one stable unit of climate and natural influences. If the past 2 million years have been climactically variable, and if the Holocene itself is climactically variable, that voids the argument that all mass extinction in the Holocene have to be socially caused only, because there are other concomitant variations here at play, and so, no one can block out natural climate variability itself as another source of Holocene variation in causes of mass extinctions, if they are honest.
Such arguments of the “Anthropocene” as well ignore that there is nothing special about the Holocene at all though it should only be analyzed as part of an ongoing odd 2‐million‐year period of strange climatic influence from odd syncopated natural climatic changes back and forth, between rapid hot and cold, geologically speaking, that are capable alone of causing unique kinds of mass extinctions focused only upon megafaunal extinctions.
Plus, as some suggest now, there could have been a major unpredictable asteroid impact smashing into the ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere in the Younger Dryas (12,900 ‐ 11,700 BP; 10,874 BCE – 9,674 BCE] creating a global winter, or even sudden volcanism with its similar global cooling effects as now argued, or even both simultaneously should be entertained as other natural factors influencing megafaunal mass extinctions before in the late Pleistocene and into the Holocene. [Lucien Nana Yobo et al. 2026. Volcanic forcing of global climate cooling at the Younger Dryas onset preserved in North American sediments.
Regardless of cause(s), the Younger Dryas was a period when the Earth entered a strange, sudden, relatively short, and even deeper cold shock for only 1,200 years that was far colder than the interstitial ice age within which it was occurring, and then, as the Earth went quite immediately thrown into where we are now in the warm interglacial of the Holocene (11,700 BP to present). Both of these factors would have contributed to wrecking ice sheets, and both would have likely set up the warming Holocene interstitial. Therefore, both combined would be an equal cause of megafaunal mass extinctions at generally at the same time more abruptly instead of only from longer‐term climate whiplashing itself. There is more detail below on this.
To address this fourth rationale, our modern and recent Quaternary‐Holocene‐to‐present periods of ‘exclusively megafaunal’ extinctions are a very different pattern of extinction compared to the past, and this pattern of intermittent syncopated short ice ages and interstitial warm periods is itself a very different climatic regime compared to the past. This is compared to the past ‘full clade mass extinctions’ in which far more than megafaunal groups died and in which ice or warm periods instead lasted sometimes hundreds of millions of years at a time without interstitial periods.
Therefore, in trying to model the cause of these megafaunal extinctions in the Holocene, shallow people jump to an inference of simple causality that only one factor of human population scale is inferred to cause all examples of megafaunal extinctions. As noted in Appendix 6, no, much of the megafaunal extinctions occur even in places with the most minimal human populations, and they happen generally at the same scales in all regions simultaneously. The data of slightly higher percentages of megafaunal extinction in North America is not proof that people were involved, though could equally be proof of asteroid impact in this general zone of North American yielding the highest extinctions there, with equally high and yet slightly lesser scales of megafaunal extinctions splayed out in lesser percentages elsewhere as equally predictable. This is what is seen. Therefore, no, there are other causal factors of modern megafaunal extinctions that get politically ignored in the biased and ignorant rush to frame all people only as causing these modern megafaunal extinctions.
The related point here regularly ignored in its implications is how odd it is to have Earth’s climate in the past few millions of years to be a mix of syncopated hot and cold periods of very short duration, geologically speaking, sometimes barely over 100,000 years. This is bound to create very different natural climatic effects on both evolution as well as extinction. The species that innately would be most at risk of such a gyrating ‘striped’ climate regime for the past few millions of years would be megafauna, by simply natural causes alone, due to them being the apex predators that are ones most reliant upon a wide stable ecological food base. Therefore, when that stable ecological food base is lost in a rapidly whiplashing climate, expect a pattern of repeated mostly megafaunal extinctions to occur repeatedly in a gyrating short‐term climate of hot and cold periods, by natural factors only.
Add an asteroid impact into this as a secondary variable, and the data makes sense.
So on the one hand, to jump ahead, yes, data was found that the scale of the modern global systemic mass ex‐ tinctions do reach already the scales of past natural mass extinctions, showing its seriousness as a problem to address. However, equally, no, it is very wrong and shallow to simply blame it on “the Anthropocene” if human impact is only one‐sided and even throughout the whole Holocene. This is because the rise of a global trading system and then a global technocracy have only been happening for about 1,500 years, instead of the whole Holocene, and because the Holocene itself (and as far back as the Quaternary) has had natural syncopated rapid climate changes that can lead to unique kinds of natural megafaunal extinctions with or without human impact (or asteroid impact) involved in them.
So, the term Anthropocene is not based on empirical data at all “about the Holocene” itself or about people as a common factor, though it is a term popularized more by corporate media framing from the late 1990s, for brain‐washing people into believing an abstract and overly simplified story “about the [falsely unified] Holocene” instead of a story “from the data of the changing Holocene”, and “about all people treated as a timeless negative effect on the environment” falsely, instead of a more historical question about the various different social phases of human‐environmental impact in the Holocene that are as different as the changing Holocene climate. Thus, employing the term “Anthropocene” is only a mental projection and a badly oversimplified interpretive banner that people cling to, in essence, despite that projection unable to make good policy for sustainability because the four rationales above are far more important in understanding the recent Holocene, ourselves, and our choices of impact. In terms of the Glomos plan, the result of this was instead to frame the Holocene as having four different additive phases of different and overlapping systemic dynamics of human‐environmental interactions.
These are described below and throughout the book.
Now let us summarize these overlapping phases of human‐environmental impact from the later Quaternary into the Holocene. These overlapping phases of different generative logics become themes throughout the book be‐ cause the Glomos plan is formulated to solve problems created by the specific generative logics of the current period of a global trading system and a global technocracy causing modern global systemic mass extinction.
Four consecutive, separate, and yet increasingly overlapping and additive system dynamics of human‐environmental impact seem a sound basis for this book’s discussion of the origins of this modern global systemic mass extinction.
Remember, these are hardly thought of as separate replaceable or consecutive ‘stages’ in history, though as increasingly additive overlapping ‘phases’ and as increasing multiple factors of cause. These four stages of human‐environmental impact cover the more recent edge of the full Quaternary period (2.588 MYA to present), particularly meaning the Late Pleistocene (c. 129,000 BP ‐ 11,700 BP) to the present Ho‐locene (11,700 BP to present). This Late Pleistocene is measured roughly as starting at the warmer Last Intergla‐cial period (130,000 BP – 115,000 BP) that soon went back into the Last Glacial period (115,000 BP ‐ 11,700 BP), and then near its end, it went into a period of ice sheet collapse known as the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial (Late Glacial Interstadial (LGI); 14,690 BP ‐ 12,890 BP), with a sudden warming Northern Hemisphere and a sudden cooling Southern Hemisphere within this final period of the Last Glacial Period. Then, the Last Glacial period (115,000 BP ‐ 11,700 BP) concluded with a sudden and relatively short and even colder shock called the Younger Dryas (12,900 ‐ 11,700 BP; 10,874 BCE – 9,674 BCE), which then went into where we are now: the warm interglacial of the Holocene (11,700 BP to present).
In other words, we are still in the Quaternary ice age, because there is ice at the poles. However, we live in the Holocene, an interglacial warm period like many others in the past 2 million years of the Quaternary, shuffled between short hot and cold periods. So, we live in one of the many short warm periods over the past 2 million years.
This makes the Quaternary an odd period overall in geological history since there has been a relatively odd syncopated instance of relatively cold or warm periods happing relatively quickly in geological time throughout most of the past 2 million years. This is an odd climactic whiplashing regime when compared to past long glacial periods or long warm periods that lasted tens to hundreds of millions of years at a time.
So, you should expect odd patterns of natural extinction to happen throughout the climate whiplashing of the Late Pleistocene as well, and they are. During this topsy‐turvy period of climate whiplash across the Late Pleistocene (c. 129,000 BP ‐ 11,700 BP), nearly 65% of all worldwide “megafaunal” species (defined as having at least 45 kg of weight (around 100 pounds) became extinct. It was higher in North America (72%), South America (83%), and Australia (88%). Plus 100% of mammals over 1,000 kg (2,200 pounds) went extinct in Australia and the Americas, and approximately 80% globally. As said earlier, the additional variable of an asteroid hit in the Younger Dryas might have accelerated these megafaunal extinctions with a ‘global winter’ phenomena as its aftermath, or the recent discovery of the signature of a volcanic surge during this period could have the same effect, with massive volcanic aerosol injections into the atmosphere. However, keep in mind it could be both variables instead of has to be only one."
Historical-Ecological Phases
See: Mark Whitaker on the Four Ecological-Historical Phases for a Green World History