Overshoot

Humanity’s Choice: A Series of Exits—Not a Fork in the Road

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The ecological and economic prognosticators who warn of a potentially unpleasant future for the human enterprise typically portray humanity as being at a fork in the road on our evolutionary journey. They contend that we are at a pivotal decision point at which we must make an “either/or” choice between a positive future outcome and a negative future outcome.

The fifth problem: peak capital

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Much of what we are seeing now may be a symptom of peak capital approaching: airports, roads, bridges, dikes, dams, and about everything that goes under the name of “infrastructure” are decaying everywhere in the world. The whole economic system is becoming unable to maintain the level of complexity it had reached just a few decades ago.

A Struggle of Paradigms

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The failures of understanding that so often stymie communication in discussions of the future of industrial society unfold from the most basic models we use to make sense of our experience. Maybe it’s time to address those models and their implications directly, instead of assuming — incorrectly — that those who talk about the future are all talking about the same thing.

Blessing or a burden: population, reproduction and the demographic imagination

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Whatever methods of restraint we eventually enact – and I think we will enact them, so let them be good ones, that lead to a justice and honorable society – we must begin from this – every child that we have, every birth is a gift, and if our gifts are fewer than in past years, we must only treasure them the more.