How come that we always end up discussing how to do what we do differently — like how to become sustainable, or how fast should we “transition” to “renewables” etc. — and never ever if we should abandon this model of a civilization altogether? What would it take to leave behind the concept of an industrial society and start with a clean slate…? I get that we need continuity. I also get, that abandoning what has “worked” so far is risky, and will inevitably lead to losses (and often to quite significant ones). I also get, that there is a certain sense of nostalgia, driven by the notion that if we could somehow go back to the consumption levels of the 1950’s, everything would be fine again. But would that really help, or just prolong decline somewhat?

Deep inside, most of us know already that there is no going back. In order to forge a realistic vision of the future we cannot rely on nostalgia. We need to better understand reality, and know what is possible and what is not — even if it leads us to conclude that this civilization cannot go on for much too long. I know that this is a bitter pill to swallow… Imagining a future which sounds nice and acceptable, but that which is physically unattainable in the end, might ease the anxiety for a while, but it will also prevent us from working towards a realistic vision.

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

This Is What Collapse Looks Like

June 21, 2024

This Is What Collapse Looks Like

Every day now, the news is replete with evidence that, everywhere, things are falling apart faster and faster, and nothing of consequence is being, or can be, done about it. Every civilization collapses, but the collapse of our current global industrial civilization is occurring at a breathtaking and accelerating pace.

Today, the city of Philadelphia announced that it has given up trying to deal with its share of the US’s epidemic of mass shootings, and has instead outsourced its handling of the horrific trauma these mass murders create to a private consulting firm. Sure to fix the problem, no? The country’s ‘supreme’ court helped out by ruling that the banning of ‘bump stocks’, devices that turn ordinary guns into rapid-fire machine guns, was unconstitutional. When a hastily-prepared new law was proposed outlawing them, Congress blocked it.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, arguably the country’s most horrifically polluted and dysfunctional state, has its priorities straight: It’s mandating that the Christian “ten commandments” be posted in every schoolroom in the state. Nothing in those rules about mega-pollution, so why not? Honour thy father and mother, ’cause they’re the ones who bought you the guns with the bump stocks. It’ll surely make God real happy to see when the Rapture comes.

And in Europe, the bumbling governments of both the UK and France have called snap elections they’re bound to lose, so out of touch are they with the electorate that they think all they have to do is convince voters that the current economic collapse in their countries isn’t their fault.

And so it goes. I could respond to most of each day’s top news items these days (including the celebrity gossip) by just reciting the title of this post.

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

Could We Do Civilization Better?

June 13, 2024

Could We Do Civilization Better?

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash

There seems to be a persistent mental bug preventing us from building a sustainable civilization. So far I have been focusing on the cultural, technological and political aspects of how and why each and every technological civilization ended up in ruins, and why ours is no different. A recent revelation made me think, however, that behind all these issues there might be a major hardware failure… In our brains. Is there a way around that bug? Is it possible to prevent it from recurring?

Last week I ended my post calling for a psychological transition versus a material one. Little did I know back then, that I would be writing about the same topic from a psychiatric viewpoint one week later. Such is life though: you never know what comes next. Before we delve into how our brains hijack societies (and vice verse), first let’s review the civilizational predicament we are in on the software level; i.e.: what’s apparently going wrong in our societies time after time when it comes to cajoling a bunch of apes into pulling in one direction.

The problem description goes something like this: As the civilizations we build mature, they increasingly become more rigid; not only when it comes to how they do things, but more importantly: how they think. They gradually lose their ability to recognize — let alone solve — problems, and become increasingly sclerotic and calcified. Problems initially resolvable by an adept leadership grow larger and larger until they become intractable, and burgeoning bureaucracies make even the simplest of adjustments mission impossible.

While enacting new institutions are often done to solve rational problems (like the need to collect taxes in an organized way), they almost invariably end up becoming the most irrational things humans have ever created…

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

The Destiny of Civilization

May 29, 2024

The Destiny of Civilization

From the cave to the stars…?

We live in dangerous times. Everything seems to be out of normal: stagnating economies, inflation, wars and an unfolding ecological and climate disaster. This is clearly not how things ought to be… While many just wave a hand and say, we will get over it, an increasing number of people feel — almost instinctively — that there is something terribly amiss with the stories we tell ourselves about where we are headed as a society. By now we should be already on track to “decarbonize” the economy and green technologies should’ve brought about a new bout of prosperity… What we have instead is rising emissions, a fracturing world order, and a rapid decline of living standards, especially in the most prosperous parts of the globe… What’s wrong with you, world…? Isn’t there a better story out there to help us through this perilous period?

I ended my previous essay about the decline of science and progress on a rather philosophical note — calling for a new eschatology enabling us to move past this civilization and to let go what cannot be hold onto. Eschatology, a word of Greek origin, is a set of beliefs concerning the end — be it the end of a human life, or the end of times itself. While the expression is used to discuss religious matters, this time I will focus on a much wider set of beliefs, concerning not only a certain faith, but civilization itself. Although this might sound a little abstract, what we — and most importantly our politicians — believe what our ultimate destiny is as a society, however, has an outsized impact on our future…

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

How Might We Undermine the PMC?

May 23, 2024

How Might We Undermine the PMC?

Fourteen years ago, I wrote a very long article that became the lion’s share of Chapter Two of Keith Farnish’s book Underminers. My article was about the Tools of Disconnection — the cultural mechanisms by which we became disconnected from each other and the more-than-human world, and hence willing and able to endure civilization and all the atrocities that it has perpetrated. The image from the article is reproduced above.

I think the article still holds up, though if I were to rewrite it today it would be a lot less strident and blame-y. We have conditioned each other, the only way we could have, and with the best of intentions, to live in a way that no wild creature would ever tolerate. In so doing, we have created, with civilization, a pressure cooker culture that, tragically, seems to bring out the worst in us.

The tools of our disconnection — our education system, the media, propaganda, marketing, political indoctrination, and just our well-intended conditioning of each other from childhood and throughout our lives (“If you want to succeed in this world, you have to do this“) — have, I would assert, led to behaviours that have made us physically unhealthy, chronically frightened, angry, distrustful, dissatisfied, and traumatized, so that we have been cowed into accepting a culture that has, in just a few millennia, horrifically overpopulated and desolated the planet.

The “management” of this utterly unsustainable culture, which is now rapidly falling apart, has required the evolution of a caste system, much like the horrific system that arises in groups of rats in similar conditions of ghastly overcrowding and scarcity. The top caste has been labeled (by Barbara Ehrenreich in the 1970s) the Professional Managerial Caste, or PMC.

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

A Concise History of the Global Empire

May 20, 2024

A Concise History of the Global Empire

Like all past empires, the Global Empire has gone through its parable of growth and glory and is now starting to decline. There is not much we can do about it; we must accept that this is how the universe works.

For everything that exists, there is a reason, and that’s true also for that gigantic thing that we sometimes call “The West” or perhaps “The Global Empire.” To find that reason, we may examine its origins in an older but similar empire: the Roman one.

As someone might have said (and maybe someone did), “Geography is the mother of Empires.” So, the Romans exploited the geography of the Mediterranean basin to build an empire based on maritime transportation. Rome was the center of a hub of commerce that outcompeted every other state in the Western region of Eurasia and North Africa. It was kept together by a “Lingua Franca,” Latin, and by a financial system based on coinage, in turn based on the availability of gold and silver mined from the Empire’s mines in Spain. More than all, it was based on a powerful military system created by the Roman wealth.

Like all empires, the Roman one carried inside the seeds of its own destruction: the limited amount of its mineral resources. Roman gold and silver were used to pay not just for the legions but also for expensive commodities coming from China that the Empire couldn’t produce in its territory. As long as the Romans could keep producing precious metals, the amounts lost to China to pay for silk and spices didn’t matter so much…

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

Collapse & Camping Skills?

March 27, 2024

Collapse & Camping Skills?

Why I Talk About Operational Capabilities of Our Communities

Imagine a world where the grating buzz of civilization has quieted, where the conveniences we once took for granted—clean running water at the turn of a handle, shelves stocked with food at every corner, the comforting glow of streetlights guiding our way home—have faded into memory. In this world, the fabric of society has frayed under the weight of its own unsustainable practices, leaving communities to navigate the remnants of a system that can no longer support the basic needs of its populace. As essential infrastructure crumbles, the void it leaves behind becomes a breeding ground for uncertainty and danger.

In the absence of the societal order we’ve grown accustomed to, securing the necessities of life becomes a daily challenge. Imagine venturing out to tend to your garden, now a vital source of sustenance, with the constant vigilance that someone might lay claim to your hard-earned produce. Water sources become fiercely guarded treasures, as purity and access can no longer be taken for granted. The roads and paths we traverse in search of trade of resources and information, once safe and mundane, are now pathways rife with unpredictability, where encounters with those driven to desperation or opportunism could turn perilous.

This scenario is not spun from the threads of dystopian fiction but are indeed a reality in places around the world already, and these conditions are poised to become more widespread under the business-as-usual governance our societies face. It underscores the pressing need for skills and knowledge that our ancestors wielded with adeptness—skills that empower us to reclaim autonomy over our lives, ensure our security, and foster communities resilient enough to withstand the storms of change…

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

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXIV–Will Another Civilisation Rise From Our Ashes?

January 29, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXIV

August 15, 2022 (original posting date)

Will Another Civilisation Rise From Our Ashes?

Today’s contemplation has been generated in response to some comments on a Chris Hedges’ article I shared in the Peak Oil Facebook group I am a member of. Hedges’ article suggests our civilisation has not been the first to collapse but it will be the last. Two members suggested this is likely not to be the case and that another will arise — I have my doubts.

Will another civilisation rise after ours collapses?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Circumstances are always different and most certainly are today with our globalised, industrial civilisation that is, for all intents and purposes, completely reliant upon the dense and highly-transportable energy of fossil fuels — a finite resource that has encountered significant diminishing returns.

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three significant impediments to a global, complex society again rising from the ashes of our destined-to-collapse one.

First, our environment (globally) has been degraded to a significant degree. Little fertile soil remains with most of the arable lands having to depend upon fossil fuel supplements to boost food production to feed all of us[1]. Toxic chemicals have spread across the planet, some of which have had devastating impacts upon ecological systems and other species (especially very important pollinators)[2]. It will take significant time, perhaps millennia, for our planet to recover and allow the over-exploitation that is necessary for a widespread, complex society to once again flourish[3]. And then there are those who contend that our burning of fossil fuels have created an irreversible greenhouse effect that is leading to feedback loops that will ensure inhospitable environmental conditions and precluding many, if any, species to survive long on this planet[4].

Second, today’s complex societies (but especially so-called ‘advanced’ economies) have resulted in a situation — because of our leveraging of fossil fuels — where almost no one has the skills/knowledge to be self-sufficient. In the past, most of a population was still heavily involved in food production and fundamental self-sufficiency skills, and so when a society ‘collapsed’ most people dispersed into the countryside and were able to fend for themselves[5]. That is certainly not the case today. The ability to procure potable water, grow one’s own food and/or hunt and gather, and construct shelter needs for the regional climate has been mostly lost. Few of an advanced economy’s populace would survive for much more than a few weeks/months without the ‘conveniences’ of our many energy slaves due to this loss of knowledge/skills — to say little of the chaos that would ensue and probably wipeout many of those who might possess the wherewithal to get to the other side of the ecological bottleneck we seem to be in[6].

Finally, there are those very dangerous complexities that we have created that could put an exclamation mark upon our industrialised society’s impending collapse, any peoples remaining, and the ability to establish a future complex society. Nuclear power plants. Biosafety labs. Chemical production/storage facilities. We have a potpourri of potential environmental catastrophes once the ability to contain/manage these facilities and their waste products disappears — to say little of the damage that has already been done to our ecological systems from them. 437+ nuclear power reactors[7]. 59 biosafety labs[8]. Countless chemical production and storage facilities[9]. I can only imagine the local/regional/global impact of a loss of ‘containment’.

I’d argue the chips are stacked firmly against another complex society, certainly global-spanning one, developing again in the future. Of course, as several notable personalities have been credited with stating: It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future[10].

Only time will tell…

To help support my internet presence, please consider visiting my website and purchasing my ‘fictional’ collapse novel trilogy — Olduvai.

[1] I won’t even touch upon the overshoot predicament here. See: Catton, Jr., W.R.. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois Press, 1980. (ISBN 978–0–252–00988–4).

[2] Biosphere integrity and biogeochemical flows have been suggested to be the most severe planetary limits we have surpassed: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html.

[3] Yes, every one overexploits its environment; a contributing factor to its eventual demise.

[4] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

[5] See: Tainter, J.. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988. (ISBN 978–0–521–38673–9).

[6] See: Catton, Jr., W.R.. Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse. Xlibris, 2009. (ISBN 978–1441522412).

[7] For those who cheerlead nuclear as the only ‘safe’ and ‘green’ option (they are not), these 437 reactors only account for 10% of current electricity generation. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figures/reactor-database.aspx

[8] ‘Safety’ is relative here given the number of ‘accidents/leaks’ that have occurred. https://theconversation.com/fifty-nine-labs-around-world-handle-the-deadliest-pathogens-only-a-quarter-score-high-on-safety-161777

[9] https://www.statista.com/topics/6213/chemical-industry-worldwide/#topicHeader__wrapper; https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Chemicals_production_and_consumption_statistics; https://cen.acs.org/business/World-Chemical-Outlook-2019-Around-the-globe/97/i2; https://archive.epa.gov/sectors/web/html/chemical.html.

[10] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/

Collapse Is An Outcome, Not A Problem To Be Solved

October 23, 2023

Collapse Is An Outcome, Not A Problem To Be Solved

Technology as dinosaur. Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

There is a rule in ecology called the maximum power principle formulated by Lokta in 1925. It can be summarized as follows: “The systems that survive in competition are those that develop more power inflow and use it best to meet the needs of survival.” If one wanted to describe the animating force behind the rise and fall of civilizations, they would be hard pressed to come up with a better one. Complex systems — such as our modern industrial world economy — appear to be ruled by the same ecological principles to which all other complex organisms obey. These rules are so universal, independent from size and scale from microbes to galaxies, that one would do better to call them natural laws. Join me on a wild ride from bacteria to petroleum extraction to see how these rules govern our daily life and how they could eventually lead to the decline of what we call modernity.

Imagine a clean Petri-dish chuck full of yummy Agar Agar, a medium utilized to grow fungi and bacteria on. Now place a range of microorganisms on it and see what happens: those bacteria which use up the most food energy to multiply will simply outcompete almost any other life form in the dish. Those who use energy sparingly, and live a slow but long life with relatively few offspring, will be simply outcrowded and completely overwhelmed. Now, let’s take our thought experiment to the next level: take a clean Petri-dish, but this time fill half of it with tasty bacteria food and the another half with a not-so-yummy medium with a much lower energy content. Next, add some bacteria which double their numbers every hour. What you can expect to see here is exponential growth at its best — and something unexpected.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Feedback Loops and Unsustainable Systems

June 1, 2023

Feedback Loops and Unsustainable Systems

Mountains as seen from Tennessee Welcome Center

I have brought up feedback loops (both positive and negative) many times in this space. I’ve also brought up unsustainable systems in one way or another in practically every article, since they are endemic in human society and at the root of every predicament. It would be very simple for me to tell you that if we just eliminated every unsustainable system and replaced them with sustainable ones that most all our troubles would be resolved. Aaahhh, if only it were that simple. While there is much truth to that statement, the physical realities of replacing these systems would be a massive transformation that is prevented by the Limits to Growth – not enough energy and resources to accomplish the job due to self-reinforcing positive feedback loops which would only add fuel to the fire of the existing ecological overshoot that we are already in. Understanding how we got to this point is key in comprehending why
options on dealing with overshoot are so limited. Several different ideas revolve around the same concept of creating a “new civilization” that humans could embark on to reduce overshoot and live happily ever after. I’ve pointed out one concept known as The Venus Project which is really nothing more than pure hopium. I’ve spent the last several articles detailing the Degrowth Movement and why degrowth in and of itself isn’t enough to actually accomplish much, mainly due to a lack of acceptance from corporations and governments, which would suffer greatly as a result. Of course, we’re all going to suffer from the implications of overshoot anyway, which makes that fact more or less irrelevant in the first place. I’ve pointed out why the MEER concept is unrealistic and more fantasy than reality…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

When Nature Gazes Back

May 17, 2023

When Nature Gazes Back

It’s been a month since I last posted on the theme of disenchantment, and a lively month at that. The cracks in America’s global empire have become increasingly visible around the world. Here at home the mentally challenged resident of the White House continues to blunder through a vague approximation of his constitutional duties while the coterie of neoconservative zealots that hand him his talking (or rather mumbling) points is busy trying to start more wars the United States no longer has the resources or the national unity to win. Donald Trump is basking in the success of his recent CNN town hall, Robert Kennedy Jr. is rising steadily in the polls as he campaigns to unseat Biden for the Democratic nomination—well, let’s just sum things up by saying that it’s a good time to go long on popcorn futures.

With all this and more happening, it may not seem timely to return to so apparently abstract a point as the historical alternation between eras of enchantment and disenchantment. Here as so often, however, appearances deceive. What Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world” is a massive political fact, but it’s by no means as cut and dried as Weber apparently thought—and it’s also not a one-way process. Grasp the way that the modern experience of disenchantment unfolded across historical time, and where it can be expected to lead next, and you understand much that is otherwise obscure about how we got into our present predicament and what we can expect in the years ahead. This is the theme I plan on developing in this and a sequence of future posts.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Is There an Off-Ramp for Civilization?

February 10, 2023

Is There an Off-Ramp for Civilization?

Our high-tech civilization is like an ageing man in full denial of his mortality. It is eating his children just to live a day longer, rather than admitting that its craving for immortality is founded on nothing more than magical thinking. In its firm belief that technology can save it, it is constantly looking for “solutions” on the predicament of its death, actively poisoning its kin with chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive waste from mining and production. Is there a last chance for it change course?

Every civilization is built around a set of unquestionable beliefs, with a considerable number of them dealing with death itself. Although many devout followers of modernity claim that they are fully aware of their mortality, deep inside they are still in denial. There is no end to the row of books, articles and publications on how singularity will come, how we will upload our consciousness into the cloud, how AI will take care of us and ultimately: how our digital technology will eventually make our souls immortal (1) once our bodies are gone.

According to this belief system, we will eventually free ourselves from the muddy reality of our biological origin, full of bacteria, viruses, illness and misery. The road to this modernist Nirvana starts with growing food in sterile steel and glass halls under artificial LED light, and elongating our lifespans with gene therapy — and if death does come for one before we get there, then there are plenty of options for a cryogenic afterlife in a nice and shiny metal tube.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

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