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The Big Picture
Jamais Cascio, Open the Future
You don’t have to believe in incipient singularities to recognize that 2028 — just twenty years from now — will bear very little resemblance to 2008.
A small cluster of rapidly-accelerating drivers promises to dominate the first quarter of this century. Each of these drivers, alone, has the potential to remake how we live; together, the likelihood of a fundamental transformation of our lives, our politics, our world, becomes over-determined. Moreover, these drivers are distinct but interdependent: each one exists and would be transformative on its own, but how it plays out — and the choices we’ll face when confronting it — will be contingent upon how the other drivers unfold. Twenty years isn’t a long time to make the needed changes to turn potential disaster into a new world; we have all of five US presidential terms — maximum — to completely transform, globally, every significant aspect of our material civilization.
These drivers will be familiar to anyone who has been reading my writing here at Open the Future, and previously at WorldChanging.
Climate Chaos: Twenty years is the outside limit of how long we have to make the global changes (in our energy grids, urban designs, transportation networks, agricultural processes, industrial processes, taxation policies, trade policies, etc.) required to avoid real disaster. It’s also probably about right for figuring out which geoengineering strategies are the least likely to make things worse. We know what we need to do — we simply need to do it.
Resource Collapse: Oil. Water. Topsoil. Fisheries. Seeds. Arable land. Copper. Food. Name a resource fundamental to the maintenance of our civilization, and it’s probably at risk of collapse in the next two decades. All of these can be mitigated, managed or replaced in time; again, it’s a matter of making the decision to do so. Some of the solutions will require transient sacrifice, but many will make our lives demonstrably better. Unfortunately, all require upsetting the status quo.
Catalytic Innovation: A number of potentially-transformative technologies have a real chance to show critical breakthroughs by the late 2020s: Molecular manufacturing; artificial general intelligence; synthetic biology; human augmentation biology. Individually and combinatorially powerful, how they emerge will depend on political, economic and cultural choices made today. As catalysts, they can reshape the tools we have to manage the other drivers, offering new pathways to succeed, and new models of risk.
… My goal is to start talking over the next few days and weeks about how these intersect.
As always, this is meant not as a prediction but as a provocation. What happens as these drivers take hold depends upon our choices and our actions, and the potential remains for us to use these forces of history as a catalyst for building the kind of world we want. The capacity to do so rests upon an ability to recognize these forces, and to act on that recognition. We must not be passive victims of the future.
(30 January 2008)
Let Her Go Down: On Collapse
Sharon Astyk, Depletion and Abundance
…I’m feeling inspired by Stuart Staniford’s potent (and I think partly justified) critique of the relocalization movement’s inspecificity about what we imagine the future to look like. Staniford points out that if we’re going to call for a relocalized society, we have to articulate why – what we imagine the future to look like, and how relocalization will improve things.
I think he’s largely right. For example, peak oil thinkers (including me) tend to take some kind of major crisis, often a large scale social collapse, as a given. Now I’m not really sure, as Staniford implies, that we can calculate the likelihood of systemic collapse out to the percentile, or that, in fact, we need to prove that a collapse is anything like inevitable – a reasonable likelihood – even 10%, is probably sufficient to justify a major precautionary shift of society (if we could arrange one – not especially likely), because the negative results of collapse are so potentially disastrous.
Personally (and for reasons I’ll write more about soon), I also believe that in fact, relocalization would be a better system for us than the present model. That is, I think that relocalization works whether or not we undergo a widespread crisis or not, whereas the growth capitalist neoliberal economic model only works when things are fairly good, and works unethically, externalizing real costs, and stealing resources from the world’s poor and from future generations. Actually, in some senses, I think the case for relocalization has been largely made by Staniford himself, who calculated that industrial agriculture and society were likely to kill an awful lot of people – up to 40% of the population in the worst case scenarios – simply by allowing markets and the growth economy to keep going. Now all relocalizers really have to prove is that if we adopted those practices, our worst case scenario is that we would kill only 39% of the world’s population or less ;-). (Just FYI, I actually think relocalization is unlikely to do any of the above).
In addition, my own case is (and has always been) that peak oil and climate change related “collapse” are somewhat fungible terms. It is true, of course, that societies as a whole can completely collapse from fuel shortages or economic crises – look at the Soviet Union. But it is also possible that a society could become wildly balkanized, with a functioning rich class, a few people in the middle, and a lot of really poor people stuck making bad choices. That is, as I’ve said for years, peak oil and climate change will hit each of us at different times.
(27 January 2008)
Sharon has been blogging a lot recently at her two sites. (The Astyk publishing empire is expanding – see Changes or “Just What the World Needed, Another Blog!”). She now has two sites: the familiar Casaubon’s Book and the new, slightly commercial Depletion and Abundance. Many posts will appear on both sites, says Sharon.
-BA
Review: The Final Empire by William Kotke
Carolyn Baker, Truth to Power
My intention in reviewing this stunning book is to share how it has illumined my understanding that collapse and vision are not separate, but that in fact, they travel together and need each other. That is to say that collapse makes vision possible, and vision makes collapse the most desirable option of all as we confront the earth community’s current dilemma.
…My intention in reviewing this stunning book is to share how it has illumined my understanding that collapse and vision are not separate, but that in fact, they travel together and need each other. That is to say that collapse makes vision possible, and vision makes collapse the most desirable option of all as we confront the earth community’s current dilemma.
For at least the past two years I have been writing and speaking about the collapse of empire/ civilization, along with a chorus of other voices such as Matt Savinar, Mike Ruppert, Dmitry Orlov, Catherine Austin Fitts, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, and Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson. I name only a few of us, mindful that ours are not the only voices speaking from the depths of exhaustive research and personal experience. And now in the first month of 2008, the world is beginning to witness a dramatic unraveling of civilization. The spectacle has begun with the convergence of what I have been naming for years as the “Terminal Triangle”: Peak Oil, climate change, and global economic meltdown. A number of related issues such as population overshoot, species extinction, and global pandemics, abide in the mix, but the “Big Three” are now juxtaposed in what appears to be the beginning of the end of life as we have known it on planet earth.
William Kotke has brilliantly articulated what I would not only describe as an “encyclopedia of collapse” but has skillfully depicted a vision of possibility imbedded within the core of apocalypse. The introduction and first chapter of this masterpiece can be read online, but they do not include what I believe are the book’s fundamental underpinnings consisting of Chapter 9, “The Cultural Dynamics Of Empire” and Chapter 10, “The Psychology Of Empire”, nor do they contain Kotke’s elaboration of the exquisite vision he holds for the earth community.
The author painstakingly describes the history of the disintegration and the collapse of the ecosystems in such a manner that the reader cannot escape the reality that all of this is inherent in the very nature of civilization itself.
…Kotke takes on the linear concept of cultural evolution which assumes that natural cultures of ancient times were “in much worse condition than we are today” and that “we are at the forefront of social evolution.” Contained within this notion is the delusion that humans invented agriculture as an escape from unsatisfactory conditions. (197) This myth presumes that “there has been a qualitative advancement with the change from forager/hunter culture to civilization.” On the contrary, Kotke notes, compared with natural culture, civilization has brought forth a lowering of living standards and a world in which starvation is increasing–where “progress” is defined primarily by the technological objects that we have invented.
But the fundamental question that must be asked is: “What is it about the culture of empire that has produced the prospect of planetary suicide for the earth community?”
…Some may object to the use of the word “surrender”, with its spiritual undertones. However, I was greatly inspired last year by Sally Erickson’s blog piece “Catastrophe As Spiritual Practice” in which she shared how surrender to collapse can be a powerful component of our personal, as well as planetary, evolution. These past two years have been for me a cellular-level experience of comprehending more deeply than ever what that actually means. The spiritual dimension for me is non-religious and non-theistic, yet informed by something greater than myself.
(1 February 2008)
I’m currently obsessed with the archetypal empire – the ancient Romans. The more I learn about Rome, the more truth I find in Carolyn and William Kotke’s suggestion that the culture of empire has something toxic about it.
It may be that barbarians, whom we were taught to fear and abhor, were the civilized ones — not the Romans. That’s the contention of former Monty Python member Terry Jones in a BBC documentary/book: Barbarians. The style is light-hearted, but the points are serious. How many of our assumptions about empire and civilization are false? (Also see Review from the left by Louis Proyect). -BA
