The Norwegian Blue Parrot sculpture, created by sculpture artists in 2014 to commemorate the comedic troupe Monty Python’s most famous sketch. The surviving troupe members performed the sketch for the launch of a new TV station. Photo Dave Pressman, for editorial use.

This is a proposal. For most of the last six years I’ve been writing about a variety of causes and issues. Most are political and most of these are climate related. There are now a multitude of Facebook pages on the topic of climate change as it relates to human extinction. The oft-mentioned Dr. Guy McPherson started all of this several years ago when followers of his work set up a page bearing the stamp NTHE, or Near Term Human Extinction. There are now several such Facebook pages (NTHE Love, NTHE Support , NTHE Evidence, ) and matching pages on the same issues (Arctic Sea Ice, Methane News, Faster than Previously Expected and Global Collapse Cafe). They’re all different looks at the same predicament; mainly that we are facing the Sixth Mass Extinction, and its full force will be on us a lot more rapidly than we understand. If this is news to you, you can look up earlier articles I’ve written on the topic. Start here: 

If you are looking to commiserate about the likelihood of our species going extinct before ‘Game of Thrones’ reruns show up on basic cable, you don’t need my help.There are multiple internet groups and locales where you can discuss the issues. There is no reason to replicate these groups. And if you are interested in basic prepping for NTHE,  you can do that too. There are plenty of survivalists who mistakenly think (IMHO anyway) that you can prep for temperatures 4-6 C above current temperature (which is already 1.7 C above historical baseline). 

But is there something that can be done? The late Michael C. Ruppert (who also wrote about global warming leading to extinction) once threatened to strangle anyone who came up with a response that began ‘We Could.. ‘. That seems to be a sentiment that most of the NTHE crowd lean toward, with good reason. But there is action to undertake even if we come to a conclusion that it’s too late to stop runaway warming. For example: if we know that by 2026 we’ll be gone, why are we keeping this status quo game going? Will my credit rating go to crap if I tell Bank of America that I’m not paying them back for all the salad shooters I’ve bought with their card? Who cares? Unless I want to fill my last days with buying things, I don’t need my credit cards. I’m not sure they’ll represent anything of value anyway. In the last week or so, the Stock market has lost eight TRILLION dollars of value. That’s just from the Fed interest rate hikes and the damage so far from the tariff wars Trump has started. Journalist Matt Taibbi makes a case that we’re heading into unknown territory with the economy, and Trump isn’t helping. So ‘prepping’ is already covered to some degree, even though most in the NTHE community feel that individual action is a waste of time. I went without a car for almost ten years; in retrospect, that sacrifice added only a few microseconds to our collective existence. 

I offer this proposal

Several years ago, a group of NTHE believers were talking about the Inevitable and somebody said we should name ourselves the Norwegian Blues. This was an homage to the famous Monty Python bit, where a disgruntled customer returns to a pet shop to complain that the parrot he has purchased is in fact dead and was dead when he bought it. Explaining the bit won’t do it justice, so you should just hie to Youtube and watch the damn thing. The point is that a not-bright customer has purchased a dead Norwegian Blue parrot, and virtually every time he holds up a demonstrably dead animal, the clerk responds ‘Oh, Norwegian Blue. Beautiful plumage.’ Arguments about the demise of the parrot ensue, with the clerk trying in vain to pretend the parrot isn’t dead. 

The metaphor here: We are the pet shop customers. We’ve paid good money for a Norwegian blue with ‘Beautiful Plumage’. The parrot is dead. The clerk sold us damaged goods and lied to us. If we cannot get a live parrot out of the deal, we should get something else. What would that be? (in the sketch, the customer is offered a slug, which doesn’t talk).So–working back from our metaphor here–The life we thought we had worked and planned for is gone. It will never exist again. What else can we negotiate for? If the powers that be cannot fix the problem of global warming, what do we want if we can’t get a future?

sums it up nicely, I think.

Well, we can’t have a life–not the one we expected. What do we want instead? Not as individuals but as members of a society that is about to fail in ways unparalleled in human history? 

Hence the Norwegian Blue Society (‘pulchritudine vestiuntur’). A forum to discuss what table-scraps people should demand from the Powers That Be. The People who ALL KNEW we were on the road to extinction and kept it from us past the point where we could have done something. 

You can find it here: 

There’s a great Shel Silverstein song ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”, about the moment a nice suburban housewife figures out (at the age of 37) that she’ll never have her dreams. The reality of near term human extinction means there are several billion people who are waking up to the reality of Things never getting any better. If we can’t discuss the world we’d want to live in, can we discuss the world we will die in?