Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I came back to my computer to find that many of my fellow Sciblings have recently taken up issues of resource depletion from various interesting perspectives – doing my work for me, I guess ;-). It isn’t exactly news to most of us that we’ve been using just about every resource on the planet far too casually, but it is interesting to see them tied together.
Qué tonto. Yo habia pensado que los líderes del mundo querrian evitar la caída de sus naciones. Seguro que trabajan duro para evitar la caída del sistema de finanza, del sistema alimenticio, del sistema social, ambiental, y el principio de una miseria abrumadora, verdad? Pero no, eso no es lo que demuestra la evidencia. Me inclino a pensar que el objetivo de los líderes mundiales, no es de salvar a sus naciones de la caída, sino, sencillamente ser el último en caer para poder devorar a los que cayeron antes.
The “normal” late-20th century economy of seemingly endless growth actually emerged from an aberrant set of conditions that cannot be perpetuated. That “normal” is gone. One way or another, a “new normal” will emerge to replace it. Can we build a different, more sustainable economy to replace the one now in tatters?
One of the authors of Limits to Growth, talks about growth, peak oil, and the possibility of collapse at the World Resources Forum. He says: “The current growth in population and in material use cannot continue–absolutely, with 100% probability, that it is going to stop. When? How? How seriously? We have no scientific way to make predictions. The longer we wait to do social measures, like birth control, or voluntary simplicity, the more likely it will be that physical measures will cause this decline.”
The collapse of the globalized society we now inhabit will be exceedingly uneven geographically and one that is spread over many years. And, I believe that that collapse has already started to appear.
Science has a paper on the changes to the current global food system required to support the expanded global population we’ll see in a couple of decades time, noting that radical changes to agriculture will be required to support 9 billion people.
Amid today’s varying attempts to imagine a postpetroleum America, one very likely equivalent has received little attention — the impoverished, dysfunctional nations of the contemporary Third World. Maybe it’s time to consider the possibility.
– The Making of an Elder Culture
– Slow-tech: Manifesto for an overwound world
– Stuck accelerators: Toyotas and the fossil-fuel growth economy
– Energy flow, emergent complexity, and collapse
For decades now, those concerned with the future of the industrial world have warned that a point would come, sooner or later, when the consequences of all that short-term thinking would begin coming home to roost. For the United States, that point might be arriving now.
-The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
-Who Will Build the Ark?
-Why Ecological Revolution?
-‘Population Justice’ — The Wrong Way to Go
In a new book, Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse, William Catton, Jr. says human society is now on an unstoppable trajectory for a significant die-off. Catton, author of the well-known classic of human ecology, Overshoot, expects that by 2100 the world population will be smaller, perhaps much smaller, than it is today. We are in what he calls “the bottleneck century.”
As others have pointed out, many of Haiti’s problems have been related to its population density, associated environmental degradation and its need for cheap energy. Now, with the worst earthquake shaking the Caribbean in 200 years, we must sadly add another chapter to the Haitian book chronicling the linkage between its human and ecological disasters.
