{"id":5279,"date":"2015-02-05T06:37:09","date_gmt":"2015-02-05T11:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5279"},"modified":"2015-02-05T06:37:09","modified_gmt":"2015-02-05T11:37:09","slug":"as-night-closes-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5279","title":{"rendered":"As Night Closes In"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"post-title entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2015\/02\/as-night-closes-in.html\" target=\"_blank\">As Night Closes In<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>I was saddened to learn a few days ago, via a phone call from a fellow author, that William R. Catton Jr. died early last month, just short of his 89th birthday. Some of my readers will have no idea who he was; others may dimly recall that I\u2019ve mentioned him and his most important book,\u00a0<em>Overshoot<\/em>, repeatedly in these essays. Those who\u2019ve taken the time to read the book just named may be wondering why none of the sites in the peak oil blogosphere has put up an obituary, or even noted the man\u2019s passing. I don\u2019t happen to know the answer to that last question, though I have my suspicions.<\/p>\n<p>I encountered\u00a0<em>Overshoot<\/em>\u00a0for the first time in a college bookstore in Bellingham, Washington in 1983. Red letters on a stark yellow spine spelled out the title, a word I already knew from my classes in ecology and systems theory; I pulled it off the shelf, and found the future staring me in the face. This is what\u2019s on the front cover below the title:<\/p>\n<p><strong>carrying capacity:\u00a0<\/strong>maximum permanently supportable load.<\/p>\n<p><strong>cornucopian myth:\u00a0<\/strong>euphoric belief in limitless resources.<\/p>\n<p><strong>drawdown:\u00a0<\/strong>stealing resources from the future.<\/p>\n<p><strong>cargoism:\u00a0<\/strong>delusion that technology will always save us from<\/p>\n<p><strong>overshoot:\u00a0<\/strong>growth beyond an area\u2019s carrying capacity, leading to<\/p>\n<p><strong>crash:\u00a0<\/strong>die-off.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to know where I got the core ideas I\u2019ve been exploring in these essays for the last eight-going-on-nine years, in other words, now you know. I still have that copy of\u00a0<em>Overshoot<\/em>; it\u2019s sitting on the desk in front of me right now, reminding me yet again just how many chances we had to turn away from the bleak future that\u2019s closing in around us now, like the night at the end of a long day.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As Night Closes In I was saddened to learn a few days ago, via a phone call from a fellow author, that William R. Catton Jr. died early last month, just short of his 89th birthday. Some of my readers will have no idea who he was; others may dimly recall that I\u2019ve mentioned him [&hellip;]<\/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":[1499,150,3199,3197,3198],"class_list":["post-5279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-carrying-capacity","tag-collapse","tag-die-off","tag-overshoot","tag-william-catton-jr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5279","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=5279"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5280,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5279\/revisions\/5280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}