Why The Popular Focus is on Race Instead of The Future of Humanity?
A World Without Butterflies
Kingdom Animalia,
Order Lepidoptera
Class Insecta
Status: declining due to habitat loss, climate change, insecticides
I do not want to live
in a world without butterflies.
Without the intricate eyes on velvety wings,
graceful splashes of color dancing on the breeze.
Airy, delicate keepers of hope
Metamorphic symbols of change, growth, maturation.
I do not want to live
in a world without butterflies.
A place where they only exist
in oil on canvas or silver trinkets on a chain,
in language, legends we pass to the next
generation of memory-keepers,
a place where tiny ghosts have painted wings.
I do not want this world
without the butterflies.
I could not bear the wailing
of flowers.
Kingdom Animalia,
Order Lepidoptera
Class Insecta
Butterflies and moths
to the flame
— and we are the flame
Author’s note: This poem is featured in my first book entitled “organic” which is Fiddleheads & Floss vol 1. You can also view a reading from the book at A reading from organic.
Climate change and racism are two of the biggest challenges of the 21st Century. They are also strongly intertwined. There is a stark divide between who has caused climate change and who is suffering its effects. People of colour across the Global South are those who will be most affected by the climate crisis, even though their carbon footprints are generally very low. Similar racial divides exist within nations too, due to profound structural inequalities laid down by a long legacy of unequal power relationships.
For some, it can be disconcerting to hear terms such as "racism" and "white supremacy" used in discussions about climate change. Climate change is often understood as an environmental issue, one that we are all in together, and therefore not something that could be in any way construed as racist. But it is it is about a depraved culture that would let the earth itself die before losing any of its comforts supplied by the oppression of the majority of the planet.
Climate denial was never about science but always about maintaining white supremacy if you allow people access to free energy free water affordable housing and healthcare than you cant expect them to go to war so you can have an extra yacht or millions in the bank. So poor whites must be made to feel threatened by the changes a climate focused economy would bring that ultimately cuts out the billions made from fossil fuels and war for fossil fuel access and minerals from third world countries. Thus we find this has been going out of vogue on the right for years now, giving way to the more “rational” climate delay or dismissal. Under this school of thought, right-wing pundits admitted that if climate change were real, it wasn’t that big of a deal.
Taken from a white supremacist lens, climate change can actually be seen as a boon because it gets rid of all those “undesirable” non-white people. It creates an almost legitimate rationale to close the borders: sorry, there’s limited resources, and we have to keep them for ourselves. This isn’t theoretical. This is an active school of thought, and it’s called eco-fascism. The Buffalo, Christchurch, and El Paso shooters are just the teacher’s pets, but they are far from the only adherents.
I would say eco-fascism is the next logical step from climate denial except they’re both just different incarnations of white supremacy. For Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, a planet free of people of color is preferable to one with a stable climate. These folks aren’t stupid enough to think that they will be untouched by climate change; they just think it will be survivable—for them. Jury’s out on what they think will be in store for their children. What they didn't consider is what a warmed climate would mean for the birth rates of people without the protection of Eumelanin if we make the whole world like equatorial Africa where people had to evolve dark skin to survive what does that tell you about the future of white supremacy? We know that increased sunlight causes a decline in white births and a decline in white life expectancy as proven by multiple research the first of note being a 100 year study in Norway showing by researcher Skjaervo how hot summers caused up to a ten year decline in life expectancy for Norwegian children born in those years!
The study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology shows that increased UV radiation can have an effect on European fertility over generations! The study by Gine Roll Skjærvø at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Biology has studied church records from 1750-1900 and looked at life history variables: how old were women when they had their first child, and their last? On average, the lifespan of children born in years that had a great deal of solar activity was 5.2 years shorter than other children.
The largest difference was in the probability of dying during the first two years of life. Children who were born in years with lots of sunshine and who survived were also more likely to have fewer children, who in turn gave birth to fewer children than others. This finding shows that increased UV radiation during years of high solar activity had an effect across generations.
Skjærvø used information on the number of sunspots as an indication of the amount of UV radiation in a given year.
The number of sunspots reaches a maximum every 11 years on average, which results in more UV radiation on Earth during years with high sunspot and solar activity. UV radiation can have positive effects on human vitamin D levels, but it can also result in a reduction of vitamin B9 (folate). It is known that low folate levels during pregnancy are linked to higher child (death) mortality. of these countries the birth rate needed is far below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.
The total fertility rate (TFR) as of 2021-2023 is below the 2.1 “replacement level” in every European country and falling except for the immigrant and migrant worker populations the majority of which come from Africa, after a sustained fall in two-thirds of them between 2009 and 2018 that has continued to the present day (Eurostat 2021-2023), and it is common to see commentary on population trends along the lines of “to sustain population levels the (national) fertility rate needs to be about 2.1 births per woman” (e.g. BBC 2020, Economist 2023).The native population of Europe is expected to drop from the 27 per cent of the world total in 1900 to less than 8 per cent by 2050.
Because of Climate change specifically global warming specific traits derived for survival in cold climes are also becoming less common. Such is the case with blue eye color and blond hair. In less than 75 years, only 1 in 1000,000 people will have these traits expressed. Therefore it is essentially extinct for the common person. Recessive genes existing behind the science will remain however this completely irrelevant if never or rarely expressed to be visible. This can only be halted by stopping the global usage of fossil fuels causing climate change. Because the focus has been on immigration as the demographic villain thus bolstering racism the fact remains that with or without immigration, the White share of the population will decline in the coming decades because of lack of births not immigration, census projections show.
In the final assessment White nationalists are not just using divisive language, but they're also using incorrect terms. The latest one is "alt-right" leader Richard Spencer's use of "European" as a substitute for white. Richard Spencer, leads a movement that mixes racism, white nationalism and populism but he is not the brightest candle in the room. Most of these white nationalist types do not understand that race is a fluid, permeable category that is made through political and social processes. Spencer has attached himself to an outmoded concept of racial identity that sees it as fixed and immutable and possessing hard boundaries. This is why the US Government can change the racial designations of certain groups for political expediency or through court judicial rule of law. This occurred with Armenians, Irish, Italian, North Africans, Arabs, Greeks, Mexicans, and others who traded their fertility for whiter skin.
The amount of melanin is mostly genetically determined, and having more melanin (darker skin) is always dominant over less melanin (lighter skin). UV rays react with a chemical called melanin (MEL-eh-nun) in the skin. The lighter a child's natural skin color, the less melanin it has to absorb UV rays. New research by Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin has led to the discovery that women generally produce 3-4% less melanin in their skin than do men in all races. Melanin helps to prevent sunburn damage that could result in DNA changes and, subsequently, several kinds of malignant skin cancers. The skin's ability to tan in summertime is an acclimatization to this seasonal change. Climate change extends this warming season and intensifies the radiation and amount.
The majority of people descended from Northwest Europeans have substantially lost the ability to tan as a result of natural selection. Their skin burns and peels rather than tans. This is due to the fact that they produce a defective form of a skin protein Mc1r (melanocortin-1 receptor) this receptor in a healthy form is necessary for the production of eumelanin (brown or black pigment). They are at a distinct disadvantage in the tropical and subtropical environments increasingly being created by global warming and extreme weather events. Not only do they suffer the discomfort of readily burning, but they are at a much higher risk for DNA damage, photolysis, and skin cancer. The same is true of albinos.
The future holds that certain peoples will become more rare like the Monarch butterfly but not extinct. Currently, the monarch is scheduled to be federally listed in 2024. Monarchs are not listed as threatened or endangered under the California Endangered Species Act (CESA). As for humanity Let's take a simplified example. Imagine a population with 90% people with dark hair, and they all have two "dark hair" alleles. The other 10% all have light hair, with 2 "light hair" alleles. Now, those people start having children with each others, without any preference for a specific light color. What's going to happen a few (or many) generation later? The alleles for each type are completely spread at random in the population. That means for each allele in a random person, you have 10% chance of it being a "light hair" version.
For someone to have light hair, they need to have both alleles. So it's a 1% chance. But it's not going down at each generation, it's already spread evenly. So we have a stable population with 1% people with blond hair, and 99% people with dark hair (18% of them having on allele of each type). The real world is not quite like that. There is more than one gene at play, and blond people are more likely to pair with other blond people in restricting diversity so more genetic recessive traits that are unhealthy appear such as hemophilia, blue skin and cognitive disorders damages the gene pool by populations that are homogeneous of course preference can also play a part. But the general mechanism is the same. As the population mixes, the recessive trait just goes hidden, being spread in a larger part of the population without being seen, and from time to time, someone is "lucky" enough to have both of those alleles. You get parents who both have dark hair, but their child is blond.
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