The goal of my work is to encourage learning, thinking, and
discussion about how humankind has created a catastrophically unsustainable way
of life, why the process of collapse cannot be prevented, and how collapse
survivors, if any, might learn from our many mistakes and mindfully pursue a
sane way of life.
Seven-point-something billion people are sleepwalking into a
dark and furious storm because of a sequence of innovative experiments called
progress. Progress is an obsession that
continuously provides us with new tools for destroying the health of the
ecosystem more rapidly. Unintended
drawbacks routinely outweigh the benefits — one step forward, two steps
back. We celebrate the amazing benefits
and… what costs? Our loony culture
programs us to hunger for what destroys us, like the junkies of Funkytown. This is a short path.
The safe and effective antidote is, of course, clear thinking
— letting our imaginations soar away from their cages to explore new realms,
questioning every truth, swerving around the tar babies of the blind faith mobs. When clear thinking plunges into a steamy
relationship with ecological history, a new and healthy mode of perception can
be born. The offspring of this romance
will have an irresistible urge to push aside entertainments and distractions,
race out the door, and develop a reverent and respectful relationship with the
family of life that exists outside the concentration camp.
When your body becomes infected, it dispatches a SWAT team to
exterminate the pathogens. If this
fails, Plan B is a fever, which raises your body temperature in an effort to
fry the malicious intruders. Fevers are
never enjoyable, but they might save your life, and extend your existence by decades. Fever seems like an apt metaphor for the
collapse of the global civilization — a turbulent experience that, on the plus
side, has the possibility of preserving some of the ecosystem in the end.
So, we tried.
Perceptive people sounded the alarm, “The ecosystem is in great danger!” A SWAT team was dispatched, but they were
easily blown away by the pathogens — clear thinking was decisively overwhelmed
by ignorance, hysteria, and deep-rooted habits.
Thus, Plan B is now underway, fever.
Growing winds announce the approach of furious storms. No place is safe. It’s time to stand before the court of the
family of life and submit to rough justice.
We’ve broken all of nature’s laws.
There is no consensus among the prophets as to when the
misery of collapse will intensify, how long it will last, what form it will
take, or what will survive. I have no
clear vision of the future, but it’s easy to identify a number of factors that
will play a powerful role in fueling the fever.
Non-renewable resources are finite, and many are becoming
scarce and expensive. The global economy
is totally dependent on them, and the supply is shrinking every minute,
rapidly. Is it possible to feed even one
billion once petroleum becomes unavailable or unaffordable? We’re completely unprepared, in every way,
for a global transition to muscle-powered agriculture — and we’ve forgotten that
primitive agriculture wasn’t sustainable either.
The climate is becoming unstable, and there are countless
scientific predictions that this will worsen, and could persist for thousands
of years. Agriculture, as we know it, is
only possible in the stable climate patterns that began in 9600 B.C. Our major food crops will not maintain their
current productivity in an unstable climate, if they survive at all. The same is true for nut trees, fruit
orchards, forests, wildlife, marine life, livestock, and humans. Climate change seems likely to pull the
carpet out from under our traditional strategies for basic survival.
We’re approaching the end of the antibiotic era. Pathogens always develop resistance to these
wonder drugs eventually, and the pharmaceutical industry is running out of
tricks. Humankind got a temporary reduction
in the toll from infectious diseases, which contributed to several decades of
skyrocketing population growth, but the bubble will not last much longer. Crowding, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and
high mobility ensure a golden age recovery for all persecuted pathogens. Modern medicine, as we know it, does not have
a long future, no matter how hard we wish.
Crowding and scarcity are the parents of conflict, and in a
world with seven-point-something billion people, growing levels of intense conflict
are inevitable. There are many nuclear
weapons ready for use, and each of them is vastly more powerful than the bombs
dropped on Japan in 1945. There are also
chemical weapons, biological weapons, cyber weapons, explosives, old-fashioned
skull openers, and secret weapons we’ve never heard of.
There are 400+ nuclear power plants in the world, and the
worst-case scenario for even one of them could make vast regions uninhabitable
for many thousands of years. We have yet
to experience a worst-case event, but they seem certain. If reactors are not carefully decommissioned
prior to problems, worst-case events are almost guaranteed. Decommissioning is an extremely expensive
process that takes years — but instead of an aggressive global campaign to do
this as soon as possible, they’re contemplating building even more nuke plants!
There are surely a number of other loose cannons that will be
smashing into the crowd, but let’s not get gloomy here. Clearly, there is no brighter future ahead
for civilization, which is good, because it’s the opposite of sustainable. It’s terminally and incurably ill. What then?
History informs us that all civilizations die, and that their
survivors typically regroup and repeat the same mistakes, using the same skills
and tools. Today’s global civilization
is fossil-powered, and its collapse can only be replaced by societies that are
primarily muscle-powered. Climate change
seems likely to radically redesign the planet’s ecosystems. It might be impossible to repeat the same
mistakes, because they’ll no longer work.
And now, at long last, I shall get to my point. Anyone who explores an assortment of books
that discuss aspects of ecological history will soon perceive civilization as
bloody screaming insanity, because it has zero regard for ecosystem health and
stability, or for the future. It’s pure
madness.
In 1975, at the conclusion of 17 years of education, I was
absolutely clueless about the extraordinary costs of industrial civilization,
and knew nothing about lower-impact alternatives. I had never heard the words “ecology” or
“sustainable.” My brain was swollen with
enormous quantities of information that was useless for living in balance with
the family of life. It took many years
to shovel all that crap out, and acquire knowledge and understanding useful for
recognizing good paths.
So many of the huge problems we’ve created are the direct
result of our culture, which trained us to be world champion consumers, to
furiously destroy the planet to the best of our ability, so help us God — and
we did just that. Countless millions
have devoted much of their lives to acquiring and discarding enormous
quantities of stuff they had no need for.
It’s painful to contemplate what a beautiful world this could
be if we had been provided with a thorough education in ecological history — if
we had a vivid understanding of the centuries-long pileup of shortsighted blunders
that have led us to the brink of catastrophe.
If we had clearly comprehended the big picture, many, many super-nutjob
schemes would have been completely unimaginable.
If the entire global economy suddenly died today, all the
lights went out, and all money became worthless, the future would be in the
hands the survivors, most of whom are clueless about genuine
sustainability. They would likely
regroup and attempt to resume the same fatal mistakes that we excel at today.
Nothing can change until ideas change. At the moment, we have access to an amazing
global communication system, a powerful tool for sharing ideas. It’s actually useful for things beyond
bombarding us with cat videos, tweets, and pornography. How long will this system continue to
operate, as Peak Everything keeps pressing harder on the brakes? It would be wise to make good use of it,
before it slips beneath the waves forever.
It’s never too late to rip off our blinders and learn. My mission is to encourage this learning. Let’s think about it. Let’s talk about it. Let’s write about it, film it, paint it, sing
it. Let’s use our legendary intelligence
for truly intelligent purposes. Let’s
envision futures in which our fundamental boo-boos have been tossed overboard,
and our descendants are once again wild, free, and happy. Let’s do all we can before the lights go
out.
With lots and lots of luck, and lots and lots of clear
thinking, our species might still be around in 500 years, in a radically
different reality, fully obedient to the laws of life. History bets against this, but the dreamers
are giddy with hope.
