I don't mean to burst your bubble, but...
On the Youtube channel called the Slow Mo Guys, Gav and Dan produce videos with high-tech, slow-motion cameras.
Gav is the nerdy, cerebral, camera operator. Dan is a former military man, made of tough-stuff, and the subject of many of the episodes.
Some of Dan's assignments are outright brutal, like jumping on a trampoline full of mouse traps, or having a vertical wave slap him in the face: all filmed in slow-motion, of course.
In one episode, Dan squeezes himself laboriously into a rubber balloon and pumps it up with a leaf-blower. Once the balloon is inflated, Dan stands and strikes a pose. Eventually, the balloon reaches its maximum size and bursts.
In the full-speed version, the balloon bursts and Dan shows his startled reaction simultaneously. However, in the slow-motion version, the reaction times are very different.
Filmed in slow-motion, the bursting balloon and Dan's startled reaction is a good analogy to the human reaction to the collapse of the global ecosystem. Simply put, the balloon bursts faster than is able to Dan react.
Slowed-down, the first indication that the balloon has ruptured is a tear in the lower left. The tear expands, almost as if the rubber were being peeled back by invisible hands. As the balloon snaps back to its original size, Dan suddenly appears, standing defiantly with his hands on his hips, his face turned so we can see his profile, his jaw pushed proudly out.
It is not until the balloon has snapped all the way back to a flaccid sack the size of a bread bag flopped on the ground that Dan shows the first sign that anything has happened. His defiant pose is replaced with a startled jump, arms raising defensively, a stunned and panicked look as if to say, "What the hell just happened!?"
He knew it was coming, but it happened so fast, it took him by surprize. And by the time his startled response had even begun, the balloon is just a piece of junk plastic on the ground.
The commonality between the slomo version Dan in the balloon and our present predicament under the climate and ecological crisis is chilling. Even though we speak about global ecosystem collapse in a future sense, it is already happening all around us, as we speak.
Seventy percent of wildlife has been killed-off in the past fifty years, and global average temperatures are 1.3 degrees Celsius above baseline. That maybe just handful of words on a page, but it is also a deadly reality that is rolling toward us like a tsunami wave.
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1.3 degrees becomes 1.4, then 1.5 and 1.6, and we will just be standing there like Dan, dumbfounded, as food production collapses, ultra-violence breaks-out in every city, and our screens are filled with riot police, teargas, and bloodied faces.
It will continue to happen to them - the people on the screen - until one day, for all of us, individually, the shock will set in: a sudden convulsion as our central nervous system awakens to an existential threat and triggers a traumatic realization: this is not a blip. This is the new reality. Today is better than tomorrow. The tipping-point is visible in the rear vision mirror.
This realization will shudder through society like hydraulic shock, a bow-wave from a hunter’s bullet, slamming through the body of the target animal.
Social media will light-up with ‘I told you so’ and all the ‘It hasn’t happened yet people’ will actually get to watch it happen, as it unfolds live on screen.
And once the shock, the violence, and the hunger settles-in, the chaos will create the space for the real predators to stalk free. From the madness, order will become visible as the super-class elite who caused this mess in the first place, step-in and rake-in more money, jerking the Genii Coefficient closer to One, gutting the middle class; maiming and emaciating the underclass.
Of course, the fundamental difference between Slow Mo Dan and the global ecosystem is that when Dan's bubble bursts, his predicament actually improves as he is no longer stuck inside a rubber balloon.
Alternatively, when our climate and ecological bubble finally bursts, it will be like taking off a helmet in space.
What's the response to this?
One view is that we need to enroll 53 million people into a transformation of worldview that is ultimately driving the behavior of the humans on Earth.