Going Sane in a Crazy World

Nearly everyone occasionally describes the human world as “crazy.” And, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that, as a species, we are indeed a little batty—from the often-indecipherable instructions on electronic products to the fact that you can’t get a job without experience, but can’t get experience without a job. However, humanity’s most glaring symptom of actual collective insanity is surely its unswerving drive toward self-destruction. 

For decades we’ve been overshooting sustainable levels of population, resource use, and pollution. In the 19th and 20th centuries, sources of cheap, concentrated, and storable energy—fossil fuels—enabled humanity to develop new technologies that, in turn, made it possible for us to travel further and faster, produce more food to feed an expanding population, and manufacture a stupefying array of new products. The rich got richer, most people got more comfortable, and the human population ballooned from 1 billion to 8 billion. The economy became a thing to be measured and studied; growth was the new goal and sign of success. 

However, Earth’s supply of raw materials and ability to absorb wastes has not grown; indeed, expanding our population and economy just means depleting resources and polluting nature faster. One result seems to overshadow many others: the functioning of Earth’s life-support systems is now threatened more than at any time in thousands, if not millions of years primarily due to fossil-fueled climate change. 

The consequences of our adoption of consumerist, growth-seeking industrialism will ultimately be a crash—hopefully only partial and temporary—of society and nature. That’s not a crystal-ball prophecy; it’s a mathematical near-certainty given the fundamental contradiction between the ways in which ecosystems work and the ways modern industrial societies work. In fact, the crash has already started (via climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss) and will play out over the remainder of this century and possibly longer.