{"id":55755,"date":"2020-11-26T08:23:43","date_gmt":"2020-11-26T13:23:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55755"},"modified":"2020-11-26T08:23:43","modified_gmt":"2020-11-26T13:23:43","slug":"covid-19-is-a-symptom-of-a-planet-thats-been-pushed-past-a-tipping-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55755","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 Is a Symptom of a Planet That’s Been Pushed Past a Tipping Point"},"content":{"rendered":"
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COVID-19 Is a Symptom of a Planet That’s Been Pushed Past a Tipping Point<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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The pandemic could signal that we’ve passed a series of civilizational tipping points that will usher in a new era of ecological emergencies.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The COVID-19 pandemic signals that civilization has breached a major \u2018tipping point\u2019 that could pave the way for a dangerous new era of interacting ecological emergencies.<\/p>\n

Scientific evidence accumulated over the last five years suggests that the pandemic didn’t come out of the blue, but is a direct consequence of industrial civilization’s breaching of key \u2018planetary boundaries\u2019\u2014these are important natural ecosystems needed to maintain what scientists describe as the \u2018safe operating space\u2019 for human survival on the planet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The more we destabilize those boundaries, the more this safe space for human habitation shrinks\u2014and COVID-19 suggests that the world economy is now entering a volatile new phase of chronic instability due to not just one crisis, but the interaction of many crises including climate change, resource bottlenecks, food system failures and civil unrest. It is the escalating synergy between these crises, each of which is experiencing its own tipping points, which points to the risk we are crossing a planetary threshold in the global system.<\/p>\n

This verdict doesn\u2019t come from new data, but from applying a systems lens to understand the massive amount of data we already have. I assessed the evidence in a\u00a0major report<\/a>\u00a0for the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, a British think-tank which has led on the European Commission\u2019s\u00a0CONVERGE<\/a>\u00a0project, among other things.<\/p>\n

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Pandemic: a symptom of civilization itself<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Prior to 2020, warnings from public health experts of an incoming global pandemic had accumulated over the last few decades. All of them have based their diagnosis on examining the risks posed by the relentless expansion of industrial civilization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

COVID-19 Is a Symptom of a Planet That’s Been Pushed Past a Tipping Point The pandemic could signal that we’ve passed a series of civilizational tipping points that will usher in a new era of ecological emergencies. The COVID-19 pandemic signals that civilization has breached a major \u2018tipping point\u2019 that could pave the way for […]<\/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":[4,7],"tags":[2090,150,29011,11654,2092,607,30621,5010],"class_list":["post-55755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-civilization-collapse","tag-collapse","tag-covid-19","tag-motherboard","tag-nafeez-ahmed","tag-pandemic","tag-planetary-threshold","tag-tipping-point"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55755","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=55755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55756,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55755\/revisions\/55756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}