{"id":61635,"date":"2022-01-25T16:15:03","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T21:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61635"},"modified":"2022-01-25T16:15:03","modified_gmt":"2022-01-25T21:15:03","slug":"todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-xxxviii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61635","title":{"rendered":"Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXVIII"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXVIII<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Tulum, Mexico (1986) Photo by author<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The following contemplation has been prompted by some commentary regarding a recent\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0by Megan Seibert of the\u00a0Real Green New Deal Project<\/a>. It pulls together a couple of threads that I\u2019ve been discussing the past few months\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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There is no \u2018remedy\u2019 for our predicament of ecological overshoot, at least not one that most of us would like to implement. While it would be nice to have a \u2018solution\u2019, we\u2019ve painted ourselves into a corner from which there appears to be no \u2018escape\u2019 \u2014 for a variety of reasons.<\/p>\n

Most people\u00a0<\/span>don\u2019t want to contemplate such an inevitability but the writing seems to be pretty clearly on the wall: we have \u2018blossomed\u2019 as a species in both numbers and living standards almost exclusively because of the exploitation of a one-time, finite cache of an energy-rich resource that has encountered significant diminishing returns but whose extraction and secondary impacts have led to pronounced and irreversible (at least in human lifespan terms) environmental\/ecological destruction; \u00a0this expansion of homo sapiens has blown well past the natural carrying capacity of our planetary environment and like any other species that experiences this the future can only be one of a massive \u2018collapse\u2019\u2014both in population numbers and sociocultural complexities.<\/p>\n

Also like every other animal on this planet, we are hard-wired to avoid pain and seek out pleasure. But unlike other species we have a unique tool-making ability that we can use to help us address this genetic predisposition. So instead of accepting our painful plight and because of our complex cognitive abilities we have crafted a variety of pleasurable narratives to help us deny the impending reality \u2014 few of us \u2018enjoy\u2019 contemplating our mortality, so we avoid it or create comforting stories to soothe our anxieties and reduce our cognitive dissonance (an afterlife of some kind being one of the most common).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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

Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXVIII Tulum, Mexico (1986) Photo by author The following contemplation has been prompted by some commentary regarding a recent\u00a0article\u00a0by Megan Seibert of the\u00a0Real Green New Deal Project. It pulls together a couple of threads that I\u2019ve been discussing the past few months\u2026 * * * * * There is no \u2018remedy\u2019 […]<\/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":[3,4,7],"tags":[150,30371,1330,22093,32572,5833,30370],"class_list":["post-61635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-collapse","tag-collapse-cometh","tag-denial","tag-ecological-overshoot","tag-grief","tag-steve-bull","tag-todays-contemplation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61635","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=61635"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61639,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61635\/revisions\/61639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}