Hasn’t the summer in Montreal been just wonderful? Many beautiful warm, sunny days with little rain. I love it.

However, there is such thing as too much of a good thing. Our warm days have been replicated over most of North America. With so much summer sunshine and so little rain, 61% of the lower 48 states of the USA has been declared a drought zone, the largest natural disaster by size in the history of the country.

Here’s a good dose of gloom with a bit of humor to help us come back to the reality that many of the intractable problems facing humanity, or rather our civilization, are not going away and seem to be getting worse.

Source: Dimitri Orlov

Corn prices are up over 40%. These are the only terms in which we can perceive the phenomenon of crop failure; we can’t see, touch, smell or taste the corn, it has been reduced to just a statistic. And when there isn’t enough of it, you too will be reduced to just a statistic. How do you like the sound of that?

A lot of people don’t like that at all, and react, strangely enough, by using the word “unsustainable.” You see, everything would be fine if we made it sustainable, by recycling or putting up solar panels or driving electric cars or what have you. We need to transition to a sustainable future, and for that we need a transition plan. We’ve been following the wrong plan, you see—the plan to exterminate all life on earth—but with a new plan, one that leaves out the bit about the extermination, all that would change, right? Why doesn’t it occur to anyone that the human industrial monoculture is, if anything, a little too sustainable? It may well sustain itself right up to the point where it kills everyone. A bit less sustainability might be a wise choice at this point.