{"id":30146,"date":"2018-01-25T08:23:59","date_gmt":"2018-01-25T13:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30146"},"modified":"2018-01-25T08:23:59","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T13:23:59","slug":"the-collapse-of-our-civilization-is-not-a-political-issue-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30146","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe collapse of our civilization is not a political issue.\u201d\u00a0Really??"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cThe collapse of our civilization is not a political issue.\u201d\u00a0Really??<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
\n

The cover article of New Scientist<\/em> this week asks \u201cIs Western civilization on the brink of collapse?<\/a>\u201d I\u2019m glad they\u2019re raising this question, but their discussion was extremely disappointing.<\/p>\n

First, as George Monbiot points out in a follow-up article<\/a>, the article fails to distinguish between Western and global civilization, conflating two very different issues: 1.) the recent historical dominance of the West over the rest of the world, and\u00a0 2.) the unsustainable dynamics of our global civilization.<\/p>\n

Worse, in their editorial<\/a>, they argue that on the issues of climate breakdown and environmental collapse, those raising the alarm have \u201cprematurely politicised the science and hence provoked pushback from people on the other side of the fence.\u201d To me, that reads like saying that those who argue that the Earth orbits the Sun have prematurely provoked pushback from the Flat Earth Society by emphasizing the role of gravity. It\u2019s the kind of thinking that grants false equivalency to climate deniers and leads to pseudo-scientists funded by the Koch brothers getting equal television time to real scientists representing 98% of scientific opinion.<\/p>\n

\"Bill
Arguing against \u201cpoliticizing\u201d civilizational collapse is the same mindset that leads to offering equal TV time to pseudo-scientific climate deniers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As I describe in my recent article, \u201cWhat Will It Really Take to Avoid Collapse?<\/a>\u201c, the underlying drivers impelling our global civilization to the precipice are the economic structures of a global capitalist growth-based system driven by massive transnational corporations that are more powerful than individual nations. Since politics is, by definition, about the dynamics of power and governance, how is it possible either to diagnose the problem or suggest solutions without it being political?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe collapse of our civilization is not a political issue.\u201d\u00a0Really?? The cover article of New Scientist this week asks \u201cIs Western civilization on the brink of collapse?\u201d I\u2019m glad they\u2019re raising this question, but their discussion was extremely disappointing. First, as George Monbiot points out in a follow-up article, the article fails to distinguish between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[139,150,1638,6112,17059,391,18136,13248,637,6890,14039,4756],"class_list":["post-30146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-civilization","tag-collapse","tag-collapse-of-civilization","tag-george-monbiot","tag-global-civilization","tag-growth","tag-new-scientist","tag-patterns-of-meaning","tag-politics","tag-transnational-corporations","tag-unsustainability","tag-western-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30147,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30146\/revisions\/30147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}