{"id":66821,"date":"2024-02-13T13:00:55","date_gmt":"2024-02-13T18:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66821"},"modified":"2024-02-13T08:55:41","modified_gmt":"2024-02-13T13:55:41","slug":"todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-clxxvii-despite-warnings-we-have-continued-business-as-usual-and-doubled-down-on-our-avoidance-behaviours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66821","title":{"rendered":"Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh\u00a0CLXXVII–Despite Warnings We Have Continued Business-As-Usual and Doubled-Down On Our Avoidance Behaviours"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh\u00a0CLXXVII<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Rome, Italy (1984). Photo by\u00a0author.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Despite Warnings We Have Continued Business-As-Usual and Doubled-Down On Our Avoidance Behaviours<\/strong><\/p>\n

The following is my comment on The Honest Sorcerer\u2019s latest piece<\/a> that highlights the impossibility of bypassing thermodynamic laws (especially Entropy) in our quest for the Holy Grail of a sustainable civilisation; in this instance via a \u2018circular\u2019 economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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While what you argue appears self-evident for the increasingly unlikely prospects of the \u2018green\/clean\u2019 utopian future a lot of \u2018futurists\u2019 predict will unfold as the seemingly endless stream of technological \u2018breakthroughs\u2019 come to fruition, it seems that the vast majority of people who even show some awareness of our predicament will ignore\/deny\/rationalise away the evidence (universal thermodynamic laws or not) in order to cling to their dreams of infinite growth and \u2018progress\u2019 upon a finite planet. I even find the argument about physical, material limits is denied by many\/most of these people.<\/p>\n

This notion that limits are meaningless appears to have got its legs from economists and business \u2018leaders\u2019 who have argued that technological progress and human ingenuity trump material limits, particularly due to the idea of infinite substitutability and recycling. History has apparently demonstrated again and again that humans adapt their technology and resource use by finding alternative and\/or new sources for their material wants.<\/p>\n

What this approach does, however, is not only focus upon a relatively small slice of human pre\/history where the leveraging of a number of catalysts to technological change have occurred (especially the creation of debt-\/credit-based fiat currency and hydrocarbon use that both allow the pulling of finite resources from the future into the present), but cherry picks behaviours and events.<\/p>\n

The processes that contribute to the recurrent collapse of complex societies are minimised\/ignored, with a lot of rationalising that \u2018this time is different\u2019. We can recycle. We can elect \u2018wise\u2019 leaders\u2019. We can work together. We can avoid past mistakes. We can mine passing asteroids. We can innovate. We can migrate to other planets. We can overcome limits. We can adapt. We can slow\/control\/halt the growth imperative. We can find a means of creating limitless \u2018clean\u2019 energy. We can do anything we imagine and set our minds to.<\/p>\n

And while these assertions can make us feel better by avoiding the anxieties that arise when we frame things from a perspective where these \u2018hopes\u2019 are viewed as magical thinking that avoids reality, they are leading us to pursue the \u2018business-as-usual\u2019 scenario (of the 13 possible) painted by the original Limits to Growth study. A scenario where human ecological overshoot and the consequential collapse of population and industrial society were imminent during our current century.<\/p>\n

The Limits to Growth researchers proposed that it was possible to avoid this scenario and achieve a sustainable lifestyle but required significant changes be made as soon as possible. In the intervening years, however, our species seems to have ignored the warnings and \u2018motored\u2019 ahead with \u2018business-as-usual\u2019. And rather than heed the signals our planet and its other species have been sending us (and increasingly so over the past handful of decades), we\u2019ve doubled down on our avoidance behaviours\u200a\u2014\u200aespecially the stories we share about all this and how everything will be alright\u2026somehow but mostly because of human ingenuity and technology, those god-like qualities we storytelling apes possess.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh\u00a0CLXXVII Rome, Italy (1984). Photo by\u00a0author. Despite Warnings We Have Continued Business-As-Usual and Doubled-Down On Our Avoidance Behaviours The following is my comment on The Honest Sorcerer\u2019s latest piece that highlights the impossibility of bypassing thermodynamic laws (especially Entropy) in our quest for the Holy Grail of a sustainable civilisation; in this […]<\/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":[2,3,4,5,6,7],"tags":[34119,2791,5330,34116,5833,769,32578,30370,33947],"class_list":["post-66821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","category-survival-2","tag-avoidance-behaviours","tag-circular-economy","tag-entropy","tag-laws-of-thermodynamics","tag-steve-bull","tag-sustainability","tag-the-honest-sorcerer","tag-todays-contemplation","tag-todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66821","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=66821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66822,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66821\/revisions\/66822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}