Nafeez Ahmed: Our Systems Are Failing
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an award winning 15 year investigative journalist, noted international security scholar, best-selling author and film-maker. He authored The Guardian’s Earth Insight blog and has twice won the prestigious Project Censored Award for outstanding investigative journalism.
In his new book Failing States, Collapsing Systems, Nafeez points out, as we often do here at PeakProsperity.com, that everything in our modern society is connected to energy, and that our pursuit of ever more, ever higher growth is finally colliding with planetary limits. Scarcity and strife will be the dominant trends from here, unless we, as a species, start looking for different ways of living better-suited for a finite world:
The most fascinating thing for me is how so much of what we take for granted becomes questionable as a result of the breakdown we’re seeing. When we begin questioning the exponential growth model then we begin questioning the value system driving our material production/consumption. It’s not that it hasn’t produced amazing knowledge of our environment and our place in the universe. It’s not that there haven’t been a huge amount of amazing technological developments, like the internet which has enabled people to be interconnected in ways that they never were able to before. In a way has paved the way for us to be able to think globally in a way that centuries ago would have never happened.
It’s not that everything about this paradigm is bad. It’s just that it has very clearly outlasted its usefulness and is now fundamentally responsible for escalating the biophysical rupture that we see happening and manifesting in so many different ways. What that tells me is that we have to grow up as a species. It’s an evolutionary moment.
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