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Bargaining to Maintain Civilization

December 30, 2022

Bargaining to Maintain Civilization

Happy Winter/Summer Solstice!!As anyone reading my articles often already knows, ecological overshoot is the master predicament causing many different symptom predicaments. I constantly see many people blaming emissions or greed or capitalism or governments or oil companies or fossil fuels (and on and on…) for causing climate change (or their favorite symptom predicament). Playing the blame game gets us nowhere though, and unfortunately, it is also far more complicated than that. Reducing emissions is a great idea (NOT a solution as noted below in the new paper from James Hansen), but it cannot be accomplished without reducing ecological overshoot because ecological overshoot is precisely what is CAUSING emissions. Ecological overshoot is caused by technology use, which means that it is being caused by our behavior. In order to reduce emissions, there is no other choice than to reduce technology use. This requires changing our behaviors. Most emissions historically have been produced by Western Society, so Western Society must change the most in how we behave. This is not optional. If we don’t change our behavior, nature will solve the predicament for us by removing habitat that we require in order to continue surviving. This is the outcome for that scenario – extinction. Of course, inherent here is that infamous “we” which brings the good ole’ lack of agency into the mix.

Now, this is the background to what I am writing about. While my articles here have just been recently introduced to society at large, I’ve actually been conversing about this and writing about it far longer in several different groups, many of which I’m no longer a member of. Why am I no longer a member in these groups one may ask. Because those groups feature and promote a mental defect known as wetiko, and they refuse to accept the truth that ecological overshoot and its symptom predicaments are not problems with solutions…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Simple Story of Civilization

December 20, 2022

The Simple Story of Civilization

The stories we fashion about ourselves are heavily influenced by our short life spans during an age of unprecedented complexity. We humans, it would seem, are unfathomably complicated creatures who defy simple “just-so” characterizations. Animals, or humans tens of thousands of years ago are fair game for simple stories, but not so for transcendent modern humans.

Two major problems I have with this attitude are that 1) we are animals, and 2) we have exactly the same hardware (albeit with slightly smaller brains) as we had 100,000 years ago.

So allow me to pull back from our present age of baffling complexity to outline a simple story covering the broad sweep of the human saga. The result may be a little startling, and, for a number of readers, sure to be rejected by cultural antibodies as “not applicable” (see also my views of our civilization as a cult).

Story Timeline

In order to make comprehensible the vast tract of human time on this planet—itself 5,000 times shorter than the age of the universe—I will compare the 2.5–3 million year presence of humans (genus Homo) on Earth to a 75 year human lifespan: a span that we can grasp intuitively. On this scale, we get the following analogous periods:

  1. First 70 years: various species of humans evolve and coexist (sustainably) on the planet;
  2. Last 5 years: the age of Homo Sapiens (about 200,000 yr; mostly sustainably);
  3. Last 15 weeks: the age of civilization (agriculture; then cities) (10,000 yr);
  4. Last 4 days: the age of science (400 yr);
  5. Last 36 hours: the age of fossil fuels (150 yr of increasingly significant use);
  6. Last 12 hours: the age of rapid global ecological devastation (50 yr).

On this lifetime scale, agriculture is a recent, unexpected hobby we picked up, and one that is still pretty new to us in the scheme of things…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Overpopulation and the Collapse of Civilization

October 17, 2022

A major shared goal of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) and Sustainability Central  is reducing the odds that the “perfect storm” of environmental problems that threaten humanity will lead to a collapse of civilization.  Those threats include  climate disruption, loss of biodiversity (and thus ecosystem services), land-use change and resulting degradation, global toxification, ocean acidification, decay of the epidemiological environment, increasing depletion of important resources, and resource wars (which could go nuclear).  This is not just a list of problems, it is an interconnected complex resulting from interactions within and between what can be thought of as two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system.  The manifestations of this interaction are often referred to as “the human predicament.”   That predicament is getting continually and rapidly worse, driven by overpopulation, overconsumption among the rich, and the use of environmentally malign technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service the consumption.

All of the interconnected problems are caused in part by overpopulation, in part by overconsumption by the already rich.  One would think that most educated people now understand that the larger the size of a human population, ceteris paribus, the more destructive its impact on the environment.  The degree of overpopulation is best indicated (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis, which shows that to support today’s population sustainably at current patterns of consumption would require roughly another half a planet, and to do so at the U.S. level would take four to five more Earths.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Alarm Bells of Civilizational Collapse Are Ringing — But Are We Listening?

October 4, 2022

If Our Civilization Is Going to Survive, It’s Going to Have to Change Like This — Fast

Image Credit: TRT News

Right about now, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed. With all the chaos out there. This is the Age of Too Much Chaos. Every day brings a new catastrophe, it seems, and with it, an ever-mounting sense of dread, urgency, anger, and helplessness — the weird, upsetting feelings of now. End Times Vibes.

How to make sense of all this? I bet you’re struggling, and that’s OK, because me and a friend are here to help.

My friend? He just gave the most important speech of the 21st century, containing the most crucial idea of the 21st century — only nobody was listening.

I know, I know. You doubt me. Don’t worry, by the end of this, I guarantee — you won’t. Instead, your mind will be blown.

Here’s what he has to say.

We have a duty to act. And yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.

The international community is not ready or willing to tackle the big dramatic challenges of our age. These crises threaten the very future of humanity and the fate of our planet.

Got that? Let’s keep going.

Let’s have no illusions. We are in rough seas. A winter of global discontent is on the horizon. A cost-of-living crisis is raging. Trust is crumbling. Inequalities are exploding. Our planet is burning. People are hurting — with the most vulnerable suffering the most.

Hey, he sounds like a lot like…you, Umair, I bet you’re thinking. So who is my friend? Well, he’s not really my friend. He’s the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. Those are his opening remarks to the General Assembly, this year. Lol, and you think you have bad mornings.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Are Not the First Civilization to Collapse, But We Will Probably Be the Last

August 14, 2022

We Are Not the First Civilization to Collapse, But We Will Probably Be the Last

The archeological remains of past civilizations, including those of the prehistoric Cahokia temple mound complex in Missouri, are sobering reminders of our fate.

Doomsday Selfie – by Mr. Fish

CAHOKIA MOUNDS, Missouri: I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat.

I look out from the structure—-known as Monks Mound — at the flatlands below, with smaller mounds dotting the distance. These earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1,400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people.

This great city, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.

“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in The Collapse of Complex Societies. “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Anthropocene is a Joke

July 22, 2022

Crumbling ruins in a desert
Stuart Gleave / Getty

THE ANTHROPOCENE IS A JOKE

On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.

Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told. Whereas some epochs in Earth history stretch more than 40 million years, this new chapter started maybe 400 years ago, when carbon dioxide dipped by a few parts per million in the atmosphere. Or perhaps, as a panel of scientists voted earlier this year, the epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons began to dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes.

These are unusual claims about geology, a field that typically deals with mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of years, wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to nothing within a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock dates—single-frame snapshots from deep time—can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene.

So what to make of this new “epoch” of geological time? Do we deserve it? Sure, humans move around an unbelievable amount of rock every year, profoundly reshaping the world in our own image. And, yes, we’re currently warping the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans violently, and in ways that have analogues in only a few terrifying chapters buried deep in Earth’s history. Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Failure of Imagination — Part 1

May 31, 2022

Image credit: Gerd Altmann via Pixabay

Up until a warm sunny afternoon in May 2019 I had what I would call a rather ordinary concept of the future. I was 37 back then with two little devils — masquerading as my sons — a wife and decent job. I didn’t give too much thought to the fate of this civilization, but when I did, I thought that by the time I grow old I would still be living under the same government structure, behind the same borders, would have a car (most probably with a petrol engine), and the usual digital gimmickry— all under the same climate, or maximum a couple of tenths of centigrade warmer than today. In other words: everything would be just like it were in 2019.

Knowing what I know today about this civilization’s trajectory, its resources, overshoot, the climate, the state of our ecosystem and the many other predicaments, I had to realize that the future will be a whole lot different than the present or the recent past.

I had to realize that I was a victim of a failed collective imagination.

The current state of affairs starts to remind more and more scholars to the terminal stage of empires long lost. One of the recurring themes in such ages is the ‘failure of imagination’, not only on the side of the elites, but in the case of commoners too. This civilization too, just like the ones preceding it, seems to have lost the capability to imagine any other future for itself other than the continuation of the present, only ‘greener’. The future we are sold would be only slightly different, but certainly better and a whole lot more sustainable than the past (sic!). The alternatives vary around ‘much more’ and ‘helluva lot more’ technology, capitalism and growth.

Less is not an option.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How I Came To Believe That Civilization Is Unsustainable

January 27, 2022

Part 2: A Practical Guide To Collapse Awareness

Image credit: Jean Wimmerlin via Unsplash

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why is Civilization Unsustainable?

December 12, 2021

Why is Civilization Unsustainable?

Top picture: Civilization; Pikeville, Kentucky
Bottom picture: Nature; Birch Knob, Virginia

So, what is it about civilization being unsustainable that people do not understand? I often wonder why this is and have come up with the idea that it is mostly cultural programming and indoctrination by industry that technology is good and more of it is better. Perhaps a lack of critical thought by most of society as to what is required for technology to exist and what is required in order for technology to continue to be used is to blame for the reasons as to why people simply most often do not realize that civilization is unsustainable. Another distinct possibility is the power of the denial of reality that humans frequently use when faced with uncomfortable truths which don’t fit into a person’s worldview.

Before I continue, I want to make mention that I was rather surprised by some of the comments on my last article which I published on Wednesday. My first recommendation is to visit the very first article I posted here a year ago and read this part, quote:

“We often see people bring out certain ideas that they claim are some sort of “solution” or that “they work” and I want to try to explain why (once again) these ideas are nothing more than ideas and not “solutions” of any sort. One of the things I most would like to get others to see is the bigger picture. Many people focus on reductionist ideas such as non-renewable “renewable” energy, or alternative energy ideas such as hydrogen, or technological ideas; but fail to see how those ideas don’t really change anything and only allow for continued environmental destruction (and consolidate capital in the hands of the elite) instead.“

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Let’s Talk About Agriculture

December 8, 2021

Let’s Talk About Agriculture

An agricultural barn of the 1800’s located at Falls Mill, Belvidere, Tennessee
Agriculture is a technology (like fire and the wheel) and a system of extracting minerals and nutrients from the soil through photosynthesis. The industrial method of agriculture adds the use of fossil fuels through the Haber-Bosch process for fertilizer, many different chemicals such as herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and other toxic chemical treatments (including GMO seeds), and of course diesel-powered equipment such as tractors and all the equipment to plow, plant, spray, water, harvest, and transport crops today. The technology of agriculture is what allowed for today’s cities to exist, and it became possible only with the stable climate of the Holocene, which is now disappearing rather quickly. The recent events over the past 6 months in British Columbia, Canada (first the wildfires [especially around Lytton] and now the floods), should be more than enough to convince anyone of this; although plenty of events throughout the rest of the world are also proof.
The one thing which is rarely mentioned about agriculture or the Green Revolution is that it is all entirely unsustainable. Every civilization (which is based upon the bedrock technology of agriculture) which has existed has also collapsed and this current set of living conditions is in the process of collapsing as well, all due to the unsustainable practices upon which civilization is founded. These unsustainable practices eventually lead to overshoot and eventually the landbase surrounding said civilization is unable to support those living upon it. This causes collapse which results in those living there to scatter. Some people may remain in the general vicinity, but a large portion of the population must find new locations for habitat in order to continue to exist.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Joseph Tainter on the Dynamics of the Collapse of Civilization

December 5, 2021

Joseph Tainter on the Dynamics of the Collapse of Civilization

5 Signs a Civilization is About to Fail

October 11, 2021

5 Signs a Civilization is About to Fail

 

To Save Ourselves, We’ll Need This Very Different Economy

August 12, 2021

To Save Ourselves, We’ll Need This Very Different Economy

What would ‘getting serious’ about the survival of civilization look like?

CleanAirProtestHands.jpeg
‘Ecological overshoot’ is causing climate change, the pandemic and more. Is our political system capable of doing what’s needed? Photo by Paddy O Sullivan.

The pandemic is a big problem. Climate change is an even bigger problem. But the meta-problem is ecological overshoot.

Plagues and heat waves — along with plunging biodiversity; fishery collapses; soil and land degradation; land, water and sea pollution; resource shortages, etc. — are mere symptoms of a much greater planetary malaise. Ecological overshoot means there are way too many people using vastly too much energy and material resources and dumping too much waste.

In more technical terms, humanity’s consumption of even renewable resources and our production of wastes exceeds the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the ecosphere. This is the biophysical definition of “unsustainable,” and a harbinger of pending systems collapse.

Avoiding the collapse of one’s civilization would seem to be job one for political leaders. And yesterday they received yet another “code red” reminder of what is at stake from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Yet few politicians have even heard of overshoot. Concern about its implications has yet to penetrate economic and developmental policy circles.

It therefore seems fair to ask: What accounts for such political deafness? One obvious earplug is the neoliberal economics dominant in the world today. Its adherents assume that:

    • The economy is separate from, and can function independently of, the biophysical “environment.”
    • Important relationships between variables change predictably and if they deviate from desirable comfort zones, can be reversed.
    • The “factors of production” (finance capital, natural capital, manufactured capital, human capital) are near-perfect substitutes. For example, human ingenuity — technology — can make up for any potentially limiting natural resource.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s a Trap, Don’t Do It

August 5, 2021

It’s a Trap, Don’t Do It

My last article focused on mindsets and how they can lead us into traps. One of the most pervasive of these traps is the energy trap. People are constantly searching for new types of energy, new energy generation, and/or ways to improve energy efficiency, ALL of which unfortunately are ultimately dead ends. The search for this energy is often with the idea to reduce emissions in an effort to reduce the effects of climate change. The trouble is in the fact that this ignores the root predicament of ecological overshoot and that producing more energy requires destruction of our planet resulting in MORE ecological overshoot, not less. Ultimately, the only way to reduce emissions is to consume less globally, period. I pointed this out in my article, What Would it Take for Humanity to Experience Radical Transformation? and added that continuing civilization is a non-starter. Yet, practically every single idea we see to “solve” climate change consists of ideas to ramp up energy production in one way or another or to continue civilization, the very continuation of which is driving us to the edge of extinction. Why do we still fail to see that what most all of our ideas attempt is impossible and only leads to ruination? Why can we not see that degrowth and contraction are the only options? Why not instead focus on ideas which help and support the only two options that are actually possible, feasible, and practical? Politically speaking, mentioning ideas that would conform to this trajectory would be a death sentence for the politician, and so we continue on unsustainable paths and continue kicking the can down the road.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Rise & Fall of Empires, Nations, & City States has been Going on for Thousands of Years – It’s Just Our Turn!

March 24, 2021

The Rise & Fall of Empires, Nations, & City States has been Going on for Thousands of Years – It’s Just Our Turn!

COMMENT: Marty: I was re-reading Herodotus and saw early in his book a reference to the rise and fall of civilizations pertinent to the concept of capital flows:

Herodotus, Histories 1:5

“For many states that were once great have now become small; and those that were great in my time were small before. Knowing therefore that human prosperity never continues in the same place, I shall mention both alike.”

Here is the source for the above translation:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0126%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D5

I studied Ancient Greek in college.  “Prosperity” is the proper translation of  “Eudaimonia” (Greek: εὐδαιμονία) in this context.  See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia

I thought you may find this of interest in case you hadn’t noticed this before in your readings.

Be well and thank you for your work and your continuous improvements of Socrates.

DP
NYC

Winged human-headed bulls, the powerful guardians of ancient Assyrian gateways, serving such a purpose for the royal palace of Nimrud.

REPLY: Yes, great to point that out. To put this in context for the non-Ancient historian, when Herodotus had written that, it was about 2,000 years after the rise and fall of the Sumer Empire, which is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia. There were the Minoans, Troy, Greek Heroic Age, Babylon, and Cyrus the Great who conquered Lydia, the Hittites, and the Assyrians.

Civilization in its primeval state was already at least 6,000 years before Herodotus. It was ancient history to them of the Greek Heroic Age when Evander entertained the stranger of Troy…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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