The depressing follow-up to “Everything is good or getting better”

Thanks, humanity!

Are you the kind of person who wants the bitter truth? The cold, traumatizing facts that keep you tossing and turning at night? Then this article is for you!

When considering the planet today, I feel the glass is half empty. A glass once filled with culture and wildlife has been drained. I see music stores, bookshops and postal services all going out of business. It makes me feel like a grumpy old man.

I used to work at McNally Robinson Booksellers, which had to shut down several locations to avoid bankruptcy. In recent years, they lost a lot of business to online stores — which can easily undercut bookstore prices. Bookstores took another blow with the advent of the Kindle and other e-book readers. One day, a co-worker told me McNally’s slogan should be “Now your biggest source of kindle.” As in, we don’t have digital books, but you can buy our paper ones and use them for fuel.

Mcnally Robinson was changing its inventory when I left. Baby toys were in and kids’ books were out. I guess that’s business though: you can’t sell books if nobody’s buying. Still, this stuff kills me. This was the place I bought my first books (The Hardy Boys series). Hell, if I grew up without bookstores, I probably wouldn’t even be writing this.

Sadly, the same story is unfolding in other industries. Nowadays, people buy their music off the Internet. Sorry, did I say buy? I meant steal. Ditto with movies. And recently, the U.S. postal service began shutting thousands of offices as demand for “snail mail” declines.

It’s a crying shame. Anyone who has ever written letters to a friend (or lover, perhaps) knows what a deep, heartfelt thing handwritten mail is. You pour your heart out, you mail it and you wait — often a very long time — to hear back from that person. But that’s so inefficient, right? I mean, I need to know “r u goin to teh kegger?” right this fucking second.

So it’s fine and dandy to say “literacy rates are higher than ever.” But what are we doing with our ability to read and write? According to a 2008 poll by International Data Corp., people spend eight times as many hours using the Internet than reading newspapers. As a result, we’re far more educated about what our friends (and frenemies) did last night than we are about, say, the current environmental crisis.

I recently read that tigers may be extinct by the end of our century. A hundred years ago, about 100,000 of these cool cats lived in the wild.Today only some 3,000 tigers remain in nature, thanks to logging and poaching industries. Depressing? I’m just getting warmed up.

About 25 per cent of the earth’s mammals are endangered. Granted, a lot of these animals are ugly and pesky. But any biologist will tell you that losing so many species would collapse our entire ecosystem.

Today Amazon.com thrives, shipping us all kinds of goodies. Meanwhile the real Amazon has never looked so rough. “Almost 60 per cent of the region’s forests could be wiped out or severely damaged by 2030,” says a recent World Wildlife Fund report.

But maybe I’m too focused on the negatives of an environmental holocaust. All I see is “conquest, war, famine and death.” But optimists, they see opportunity. When I heard the poles were melting, I panicked like a sissy girl, worrying that all the polar bears would die. But optimists were not so foolhardy. They said, “Great. Now we can send cargo ships up north!”

“But, what about the polar bears?” I asked.

“Psshhh. Fuck the polar bears!”

Indeed this is the policy of companies like Canada’s Arctic Co-operative. In 2008, they began exploiting our changing climate for monetary gain. They can now send cargo ships through waters that once were impassable.

So go ahead and cheer that “Canada’s GDP has grown 225 per cent since 1969!” Canada is only making money because it allows corporations to do whatever the hell they please. We sit by as companies take over the world.

In 2000, the World Bank reported that 51 of the world’s 100 richest economic powers were companies — not nations. This is a big deal considering companies don’t really answer to democracy. The only people who control companies are shareholders. And they only care about one thing: The Almighty Dollar.

To me, Wal-Mart is the worst of these juggernauts. As of 2009, Wal-Mart was the 22nd largest economic power in the world. They make more cash than oil-rich Saudia Arabia. Of course, Wally-World will probably never become a country or run an army. Rather, Wal-Mart will spread through society like a bad Venereal Disease, infecting more and more populations. It won’t stop till every city has Mall-Warts.

More than ever, people need to realize that “man’s reach exceeds his grasp.” Our reach is capable of creating things like Wal-Mart and the Internet. Our reach lets us hack down forests and wipe out species. But do we really grasp the impact of all this?

I guess this is why I’m such an old-timer — or “luddite” as my coworkers say. I believe the modern world only offers a brief ecstasy that we inevitably will come down from. Yep, the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. On the plus side, it’s a totally hip handbasket we bought online.

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photo: Gerard Van der Leun/Flickr