{"id":65522,"date":"2023-07-20T04:22:39","date_gmt":"2023-07-20T09:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65522"},"modified":"2023-07-20T04:22:39","modified_gmt":"2023-07-20T09:22:39","slug":"why-we-cannot-prevent-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65522","title":{"rendered":"Why We Cannot Prevent Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why We Cannot Prevent Collapse<\/a><\/h3>\n
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\nmy own graphic; right click on image to open in a new tab and enlarge or download<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, I know \u2014 every box in the \u2018vicious cycle\u2019 graphic above is\u00a0hugely<\/em>\u00a0debatable. But you know, I\u2019m just tired of debating it. I think it describes what\u2019s going on in the world both at an\u00a0individual<\/em>\u00a0and at a\u00a0collective\u00a0<\/em>level, for just about all 8 billion of us mildly deranged apes, reflected in our public behaviours, our public discourse, and in the heads of people I\u2019ve met of every political persuasion and position of authority.<\/p>\n

Derrick Jensen famously said that if we pay attention to the natural world and \u2018listen to the land\u2019 we will\u00a0know<\/em>\u00a0just what to do. That\u2019s the \u2018know\u2019 in quotation marks in this chart, which attempts to explain why, for very human reasons, although we \u2018know\u2019, we don\u2019t, with few exceptions,\u00a0and can\u2019t collectively at any scale<\/em>, do anything about it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve used \u201cmass coherent collective action\u201d (aka \u201cthe Great Turning\u201d) as the example of salvationist thinking in the chart; it\u2019s the \u201chumanist\u201d style of salvation myth of most people I know. I could have easily used any of the other classical or current salvation myths \u2014 the rapture, nuclear fusion, carbon capture, geoengineering, \u201cgreat transition\u201d, neosurvivalism, posthumanism etc \u2014 they all serve the same useless (in practical terms) comforting function. Nothing wrong with them as long as they\u2019re seen for what they are, and are not.<\/p>\n

Thanks for the inspiration to a number of collapsnik writers who have been musing helpfully on this subject, particularly about personal and collective human agency, about our human propensity to obfuscate and put out of mind truths we don\u2019t want to deal with, and about our inclination for disingenuous wishful thinking \u2014 including\u00a0Erik Michaels<\/a>,\u00a0Indrajit Samarajiva<\/a>, and\u00a0Tim Morgan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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

Why We Cannot Prevent Collapse my own graphic; right click on image to open in a new tab and enlarge or download Yes, I know \u2014 every box in the \u2018vicious cycle\u2019 graphic above is\u00a0hugely\u00a0debatable. But you know, I\u2019m just tired of debating it. I think it describes what\u2019s going on in the world both […]<\/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":[150,32260,32259],"class_list":["post-65522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-collapse","tag-dave-pollard","tag-how-to-save-the-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65522","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=65522"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65523,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65522\/revisions\/65523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}