Collapse of the First Global Civilization — — Part 2

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27 min readOct 28, 2015

WHY the Collapse? Population and Resource Limits

In Part 1, I introduced the two major reasons for the collapse of human society: 1. over population vs. limited resources, and 2. technological complexity vs. limited human brain ability. In this part, Part 2, I’m going to expand on the population vs. resource problem. While the whole issue is very complex, there are a few basic PRINCIPLES that can help sort it out.

Principle One

The basic principles of life are usually pretty simple to summarize.

But it is not simple to be confident we really understand them.

It is important to understand that the tradeoff between population and natural resources, in its basic form, is not complicated! It’s just a simple accounting problem (admittedly with a lot of numbers to add up). If human activities, like living, eating, drinking, housing, clothing, transportation etc. require the consumption of natural resources, and those resources are limited, then there must be a limit to how many people can survive on the planet. Once we know that number, society must set up social structures to prevent going over the limit or great harm will result for all. This should be a pretty simple concept to understand. Many people do understand it and believe in it. In this part of the series, I’m going to present the key details that should convince rational people that the collapse is coming and, in fact, has already started.

But it is often difficult to know if something we are told is true. This is a complex issue that I’ll cover in a later post.

Principle Two

The majority of the people on earth, however, either can’t understand or don’t agree with the example of limited resources presented with principle one! Unfortunately, they are not able to understand it, or never want to understand a more complex analysis of the issue.

Principle two is why the FIRST truly global civilization on this planet is now beginning a major collapse. Again, the majority of people on earth don’t believe the collapse is starting, nor do they believe such a collapse is even possible. But why? What my research discovered was that most of these people can’t understand principle one because they are being blocked by normal human brain limitations. Others don’t agree with principle one because they are blocked by serious belief issues. I’ll discuss these problems in detail in a later post in this series.

Principle Three

To understand the key sustainability problems, we can organize resources into just four categories: land, water, air, and minerals. All four categories have become critical. Clearly, each of these terms represents a whole category of resources and has a lot of sub categories as well. Notice, climate change is not listed. While climate change plays a part in each of these, the collapse would have come even if the climate had not changed. All that climate change does is accelerate the problem. Unfortunately, it has the ability to greatly accelerate the problem. Let’s consider each of these categories separately.

LAND

Land is used to put things on or grow things in. It includes activities like: housing, transportation, agriculture, industry, garbage disposal, and recreation.

When the question of housing comes up, many people think about forests and conclude we have a great surplus of land for housing. What they can’t understand is the social complexity of land. Land has value. The old real estate joke explains this well. What are the three most important characteristics of property? Location, location, location! If forests are so “available” for housing, then why do parcels in cities sell for millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars an acre, while forest land is priced in the hundreds or thousands? Why do houses along the ocean or lake front or river front sell for such high prices? With all the millions of square miles of “available” land in Alaska, or Death Valley, why do so few people live there? No one is stopping them? Property like city land, water front land, land on hillsides, and land in comfortable environmental locations is valued highly because of inherent psychological drives in humans for convenience, benign contact with nature, and with each other. So, rural forest land, or land subject to harsh climates, though there may be a lot of it, is not highly valued.

This leads to the “low hanging fruit” factor. Over the past history of humanity, people have looked for natural resources across the entire face of the earth. They, obviously, focused on the easiest to extract and the most desirable locations.

That means, as we continue to look for more, they are harder to get, and what we find is less desirable to use. The “low hanging fruit” phrase refers to high quality food that can be easily picked. After that, only lower quality products are available , or additional equipment and extra time is required. New members of the human race, unless born to privileged families, will be forced to accept lower and lower standards of living due to the lack of the most desirable housing. They are not going to be happy.

Worded differently, the natural resource we call land for habitation, has been depleted. How far has this gone? Anyone who has tried to buy property along a coastline knows that answer? EVERY reasonable piece of land has already been TAKEN! Worded another way, the existing population has already reached a hard LIMIT on available coastline land. Every new purchase will cost substantially more than when the land was in its natural state. Can the general public still get access to the coast? Yes, in some locations. But usually at high cost, only at limited times, and under very crowded conditions with long walks to parking lots. Consider how different this is compared to the first people who got that land, who can just walk out a back door across their private beach.

The point of this example is, MOST of our natural resources are now in the hard to get category. Using land as an example, a high proportion of the world population now commutes an hour or more to work from homes very far from their workplaces. This is a far cry from people owning their own farms, which was the predominant situation when the U.S. was founded. To get to work, we commute on highways that are grid-locked with cars.

Grid lock is a KEY OMEN for the collapse. It demonstrates the inability of human society to manage complex situations. Grid lock is a crisis in EVERY large city in the world! It eats up productive efficiency. People lose significant parts of their day, develop medical and psychological complications from the stress, incur wear, tear and crashes to vehicles, and add huge amounts of pollution to the climate from it. It delays shipments of all kinds of products. Yet, even with the best existing planning methods, it just keeps getting worse. The collapse will be driven by the same kind of thinking, growing worse and worse, for almost all of our social institutions. Einstein understood this. Remember his famous quote, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” These include our broken: medical system, education, jobs, politics, wealth equity, news media and family life.

The best agricultural land has long been claimed. Both China and Russia are now buying extensive areas of land in Africa and South America for farming — hardly convenient places for their countries to grow food. In most of the world, the natural soils have been completely depleted. Chemically made fertilizers are mandatory. They are energy intensive to make. And, the “green revolution” that saved India from starvation in the ’60s quickly ran its course. Nothing was done to limit population growth, so the population quickly caught up to the “green revolution” gains and again exceeded the ability even of best practices to feed the country. As countries rely more and more on consolidated agribusiness, the transportation expenses of shipping, storing and distributing food increase, especially when the gridlock of roads interferes.

The industry-land issue is primarily due to the combination of globalization of users and depletion of local resources. As products become more complex, components and materials must be brought together from farther away. In many cases, complex products like autos now use components and materials from around the world. High amounts of energy must be brought in from far away.

And, after an auto is built, it must not only be shipped to a far off place, but all the waste products of production must be sent to the quickly diminishing acceptable disposal areas. Eventually, the autos themselves become disposal problems because the manufacturing process aggregates such a large variety of materials into each vehicle. Autos are considered low-grade “ore” for any individual material.

Waste disposal is a huge problem. Like the grid-lock problem, society’s approach to waste disposal management is a massive failure. It is another DENIAL. For example, many nuclear power facilities do not have permanent places to send nuclear waste fuel. It will stay lethally radio active for thousands of years. As a default, the power plants store the waste fuel in large water tanks like swimming pools on the facility site. What happens when the site is closed? What happens if the company files for bankruptcy? Who gets stuck with the bill?

Many readers are already aware of the large number of “man made” hills on the outskirts of most cities made from waste piles. A recent Sierra Club article reported that New York City’s sanitation department alone removes 12,000 TONS of waste every DAY! (*1) The total NYC waste load, including construction debris is around 36,000 tons per day. Since the city no longer has a local way to deal with it (the Fresh Kills Dump on Staten Island filled and closed in 2001; ocean dumping was stopped by federal law in 1992 (*2)) the waste is shipped elsewhere — including locations as far off as Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. (*3) Electronic scrap is sent to China! Higher population means higher quantities of waste. And while U.S. states can eventually ship waste to places like Nevada and Mongolia, think of the increased transportation cost! And think of the increased air pollution from all the trucks and ships.

WATER

Just like land, the amount of water available for human use has limitations. Just consider its use for things like: human consumption, domestic use, irrigation, transportation, industrial production, fishing, and recreation. Up until recently, the U.S. supply of good water, in amounts far above sustainable levels, continued to flow. There are two reasons. First, the U.S., and particularly California, were in an unusually wet period in their geological history. (*4) Second, there was an adequate supply of ancient water in underground aquifers. These sources have both been drawn beyond their sustainable limits for over 80 years. Both will quickly run out. Let’s look at the California situation in particular.

California is a critical issue for the whole world because California supplies a majority of American fruits, vegetables and nuts: 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, 69 percent of carrots etc.. (*5) (*6) (*7) When the aquifer dries up, these quantities will fall by 66%, bringing the harvest in line with California’s sustainable water limit. The impact on the country and the world will be devastating.

Many are asking, “If the current drought continues, can’t we just keep pumping water from the ground?” The answer is no. Even when California was flush with surface water in the 1930–1965 time frame, that surface water still wasn’t enough for California’s needs. The calculated reserves of California’s underground water were already down to 60% of maximum due to pumping by 1966!. The surface of the California central valley had sunk over 7 feet by that time, due to the removal of that water. (*8) Most of California is now declared in severe drought.

The lack of appropriate water supplies will be the key factor in the collapse. It will run out for drinking. It will run out for food production.

AIR

The third major category of natural resources is the air. We use it for things like: breathing, agriculture, transportation, industry, and recreation. The problem with the availability of air is not its total amount. We have plenty of that. The problem is the amount of HEALTHY air available. That has become a major problem. And, unfortunately, it is not an easily observable problem, just like the amount of underground water left. People are not able to easily judge air quality just by looking at it, except for the air pollution that is visible.

In those cases, like Peking, people have to wear face coverings whenever they go outside to avoid instant throat burning. But larger problems go beyond just what is visible.

All populations of U.S. cities that are down-wind from coal fired power plants suffer higher rates of medical problems from the hidden contaminants that the power plants put in the air. Workers on farms that use pesticides suffer increased illness. People in cities near chemical plants suffer serious medical problems. Even the temperature of the air is now causing fatalities. This year, a day time temperature above 120 degrees ( 122 F Baghdad July 30, 2015) was recorded.(*9) (*10) This is for a city with very little air conditioning. And we now know that global warming exists and has been undeniably linked to the carbon energy industry.

What people are in DENIAL about, and climate activists are negligent for not repeatedly telling us, is that a “worst” case impact is already locked in. Global CO2 has now reached 397 ppm. The level below which we were supposed to be able to avoid the “worst” effects was 350ppm. The planet screamed through that level in 1988. The rate that the CO2 level is going up is even faster now than it was then. (*11) Until the world reduces fossil fuel use by 90% of its current level, the level of CO2 will keep rising. And even when the world does stop pouring CO2 into the atmosphere, the “excess” amount humans have already put into the atmosphere will not be reabsorbed by the planet for time scales like 500 hundred years! (*12) But, even if CO2 is stopped immediately, we can’t be sure atmospheric reduction would happen. Many scientists believe the Arctic warming we already caused will release a bubble of trapped methane, which will be worse than all the CO2 released so far. (*13) This can occur very quickly and push us over the “tipping point”.

MINERALS

The fourth critical category of natural resources is minerals. We use them in every facet of our lives, including things like: food and vitamins, building materials, agriculture fertilizers, transportation, industry and recreation. Like air, the question is not, “is the planet going to run out of these minerals”, but “is the planet going to run out of reasonably ACCESSIBLE concentrations of the minerals?” The answer to this is ALREADY YES! In 2010, the New York Times ran an article titled, “Europe Sounds Alarm on Minerals Shortage”. (*14) The article lists 14 minerals considered to have critical shortages for high tech products like solar panels and synthetic fuels. That is, the world has already depleted the readily available natural resources needed to build the products which “green” activists tell us will bail the planet out from global warming!

The 14 minerals with critical shortages are needed to obtain the following elements: antimony, beryllium, cobalt, fluorine, gallium, germanium, graphite (a form of carbon), indium, magnesium, niobium, tantalum, tungsten and the whole groups of 6 platinum and 17 rare earth elements (*15) That means, 35 of the 91 naturally occurring chemical elements are already considered to have critical shortages! RIGHT! More than 1/3 of the earth’s elements have critical shortages!

But, these shortages now have to face the “low hanging fruit” problem as well. Remember the California gold rush of 1849? It was easy to get. It was near the surface and highly concentrated. Those deposits are long gone. The same applies for the “Aztec” gold of South America and the Alaskan gold rush. Sure, we now have heavy machinery that can dig much deeper. But, it takes a lot of energy to run the machines, a long distance to transport them and maintain them, and a much greater effort to refine the low grade ore that is found. So, when you read, for example, that the ‘earth has enough XYZ to last X years’, you are not getting the whole story. The problems of mining and processing the minerals are probably left out.

Consider phosphorus for example, which is vital for fertilizer because all plants need it and deplete it from the soil as they grow. (*16). The USGS estimates the global reserves at 71B tons. The amount mined in 2011 was 0.19B tons. Doing simple math would suggest the supply would last 374 years at the current mining rate (71 divided by 0.19). BUT, the problems of extraction are so harsh that scientists expect the production of phosphorous to “peak” in 30 years and then fall off rapidly over the following 20 years. One investment advisor has told his clients that if an alternative for phosphorus is not found in the next 20–40 years, we (meaning the people of the earth) will begin to starve!

Principle four

Impending catastrophes are often difficult to foresee because human psychology is still dominated by brain structures that evolved for survival during the Stone Age.

Our thinking is fine tuned to observed the world we can directly observe around us. While this was fine for the Stone Age, it is terrible guiding us through our modern, complex, high technical environment.

If a collapse is really coming, how come WE don’t see clear and obvious signs of it? Principle four gives us a key clue. Humans have brains that are fine tuned for quick responses to dangers immediately at hand. If your house catches fire, and you see the flames, your brain will instantly think of many ways to get out. When the problem is very complex, and the details can’t be directly observed, we don’t do so well. Here’s an example of this related to water. Look at the following graphics.

Figure A is a tank of water with an open top. Rain coming in is balanced by the overflow coming out, so the water level stays pretty much the same. It can get lower during droughts. But, it can never get higher because it will just run out.

In figure B, a small amount of water is being used. But the water level still stays full, at the top, because the overflow just decreases to compensate for the water used. This can go on as long as the rain holds out.

In figure C, the amount of water being used is greater and exceeds the rate rain can replenish the water. So the water level starts to drop. If the rate of use is all the water normally coming in plus 1% of the tank capacity a year, the water can last 100 years. The rate the level drops appears slow.

But what if, every year, we keep adding more faucets?

In figure D, there are 20 faucets! ( You can only see 10 of them ;-)) Now what? The water is pouring out 20 times faster than in figure C. Those 20 faucets would drain the whole tank in 5 years! (For the math geeks reading this, assume the rain has stopped and each faucet is drawing 1% a year.) But, if you looked in the tank over the last two years, you’d still see water every time.

So? What happens when the water level hits the bottom????
Scroll up and take a look at Lake Oroville again.

Right! It STOPS! All of a sudden!

But how does the average person perceive this? All they see is what comes out of their faucets. In fact, every year they see more and more water being used by more and more people. And the water will keep coming at full speed right up until the end when the tank goes dry. This, of course, creates the psychological conflict. Their immediate experience tells them nothing has changed. So, they can’t visualize the larger issue. They can’t believe the pictures in the media that show lakes going dry because the water in their house just keeps coming at the same rate. That is what is in store for California.

Will the available amount of water actually go to ZERO? No. It will immediately drop to the natural sustainable amount — the rainfall coming down minus what goes into the ground and the air. Unfortunately, in a drought, that will be ALMOST ZERO.

Another important factor related to water is how global warming contributes to it. When the Club of Rome study, which I discussed in Part 1, was done, global warming was not well understood. So the study did not include it’s effects. What we know now tells us that global warming will make the water crisis much more severe than the Club of Rome took into account. This has been factored into the latest Limits to Growth update bringing the collapse dates closer.

What can we do?

How can people act more rationally? Learn to trust their INSTRUMENTS! If a plane flies into a fog bank, the passengers have no perception how fast they are moving or if they are turning, climbing or descending. The pilot can tell instantly by looking at the instrument panel. We have such instruments for the planet. People just need to trust them.

A key indicator which sums up the overall problem is called the Human Footprint. The Human Footprint is a world resource usage analysis done by the Footprint Network. (*17) The analysis compares the rate that humanity uses many types of natural resources to the ability of the earth to replenish them. A graph taken from their website is shown here.

The graph shows that, based on the world’s current economy (2015), humanity is using up its critical natural resources at 1.75 times the rate that the earth can sustain them. It also shows that humanity first exceeded the earth’s ability to sustain itself around 1970. Since that time, we have been drawing down nature’s critical supplies following the water tank example I showed above. It also predicts that, if humanity continues its current consumption track record, we will be depleting natural resources at three times the sustainable rate by 2050.

For the modern generation, maybe a different graphic will mean more to you.

Principle five

To simplify complex problems, society has developed a number of specialized tools. One of these useful to analyze sustainability is the concept of COST.

The cost of a mineral is based on the effort it takes to gather it and then prepare it for use. For food, we need to add in the cost to grow it. The importance of the concept of cost in this case is that a full accounting of the cost tells us what impact growing, harvesting and preparing a material places on the world. If a mineral was only found at the bottom of the ocean, for example, then the cost of the effort to harvest it would be the cost of all the people involved in supplying it and the cost to build the ships, drill rigs, and special equipment to go down and get it. All of that cost would not be available to do other things for society. The magic of using the concept of cost for materials and products is that it allows economists to analyze how human effort is used in a society. A society cannot survive if the labor cost needed to meet its critical needs exceeds 100% of the labor available to address those needs. This was already well understood by the Egyptians to budget labor to build the pyramids.

In modern times, economic concerns about resource depletion and over population started to be publically discussed by Adam Smith in 1776. But with the founding of the U.S. that year, and the “apparently” endless American continent to the west, governments around the world didn’t give resource problems much priority. It wasn’t until two centuries later, in 1968, with the publication of the book The Population Bomb, that the Club of Rome and many scientists began to see that our world had fundamentally and radically changed. This concern could no longer be overlooked.

The Club of Rome economists came to some startling conclusions in 1970. Let me briefly expand on their thinking to give you a more complete framework to sort out the extensive misinformation you are hearing and seeing in the media. All of this information is shown in detail in their 1972 book Limits to Growth and its four 10 year updates. Because initial test runs indicated that limits would be encountered, there were two primary issues they initially focused on: when would a collapse start; and what could be done to stop or delay it?

1. World population at the end of WWII was about 2B. The earth could support 2 to 2.5B population at that time with the extraction capability of industry at the time. If the population grew beyond the natural sustainability level, resources would be depleted and hardship would bring the population level back down to the sustainable level.

The world did not want to hear this in the 40’s. Even though many couples adopted a two child family, “end of war” politics actually encouraged a baby boom. The population shot up. The reason human civilization was able to exceed the 2B sustainable level was because the earth still had easily accessible natural resource reserves. Over millions of years, nature had essentially created a stockpile of supplies for us. Of course, that supply was limited. The Limits to Growth study projected that a global collapse could be avoided if nations took immediate action to slow population growth after 1972, bring growth to a stop in 1984 at 5B, and then continue to bring the population down again and achieve a global population of 2 billion people around 2024. That didn’t happen. In fact, the population problem was completely ignored and “population limitation” made an international “taboo” topic. Ironically, one nation did listen! CHINA! They adopted a one-child per family program. As of 1984, world population was approaching the 5B limit. But growth wasn’t coming to a stop. It was still growing fast. The world now exceeds 7B!

This is called an “overshoot” condition by system analysts. That means the level exceeds the earth’s carrying capacity. In systems theory, unless radical changes to the underlying system are made, overshoots are always followed by collapses. Society has not made any appropriate changes that would qualify as “radical” to deal with the world shortages. So, the collapse is coming. And the Limits to Growth analysis updates give a good projection of when that will be. The current best estimates say the collapse has already started! It is underway NOW! What does it look like? It is starting with famines around the world. We are already seeing that. We can expect significant increases in famine over the 2016–2020 time period because, according to their projections, things will get A LOT WORSE.

2. The approach being used for the study was a world computer model. A group of wealthy industrialists who called themselves the Club of Rome had commissioned MIT to create the model in 1968. They were worried about the resource depletions they already saw unfolding around the world. The model was extensive for its time and allowed the researchers to vary a lot of conditions. They didn’t just enter the best data they had at the time and let the model run. They tested out wide ranges of conditions and assumptions about what society might do and how the world would respond. This included radical ideas like assuming perfect birth control, and breakthroughs like infinite free energy production. Without stopping population growth, NOTHING would stop the collapse. The plan of stopping world population at 5B by1984 was the MID RANGE result. This, however, required many other actions like recycling and limits on industrial growth to happen at the same time.

World governments refused to listen. People refused to listen. Industrialists and politicians, with vested interests that following the needed actions would hurt, created a wall of misinformation to discredit the study, just like they are doing today. Every 10 years, an update of the analysis has been published. Every update, which incorporated 10 more years of actual data, showed the same general planetary trajectory. However, the new starting conditions for each update had repeatedly become WORSE than the WORST CASE model for the prior analysis! Read that again. The world was not just doing worse than the MID RANGE result. We were doing worse than the worst case path they were willing to put in the prior report.

Why was this happening? Simple. The population was much higher. We didn’t stop at 5B. Also, new technology, rather than helping, allowed much faster depletion of resources. Governments were not taking action to control it.

Principle six

There are things people, we should be able to trust, aren’t telling us.

There is another important reason people find it hard to see the collapse coming: LACK of VISION in the ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT ITSELF. This leads to the second big lie of modern activists, environmentalists and politicians. After telling us the first lie: “it’s not too late! But we have to act FAST”, they provide a reason that we have to act fast: “To avoid the WORST!” OK. But WHAT is the worst? And why do we need to be afraid of it? They never tell us. Why? Because they don’t have a clear understanding of what is going to happen. What they don’t understand, they can’t envision. And since they can’t envision what the worst really looks like, they can’t construct a comprehensive solution to stop it. The result is, each of them pushes their own agenda. Ironically, this will just push the world further over the edge. While they each believe their ideas and approach are helpful, this is only a small step better than the special interests, who also believe their ideas and approach are helpful.

Furthermore, when the activists do get glimpses of what the worst might look like, they realize, if they told the public, some people would revolt on the spot! They would DEMAND that “someone” provide a quick SOLUTION! When no one can step forward with a comprehensive solution, ironically, the blame will be placed back on the activists for not making clear earlier how REALLY bad this was going to be!

Many academics will also jump into this revolt. They will also demand a solution be described. But, by “solution”, in this case, I’m talking about a comprehensive solution. They would not accept just a collection of disjointed “green” ideas, as well meaning as those individual ideas are. The activists would all get caught because none of them understand the whole story. The academic world would judge them as incompetent, but then collapse themselves into endless studies and infighting for the same reason. The academic world has lost the ability to lead.

What I’m hoping to do in this series is give you a brief LOOK at the Whole Story, and describe the basics of what it all means.

The most important foundation for the story is the Club of Rome study, as described in the book Limits to Growth with its four 10 year updates. But that study only looks at the physical and economic factors. What the study lacked was an understanding of the fundamental flaws in human nature and human institutions. The study did not know about, or have the foundation to incorporate how the flaws would prevent the world from listening to what the study discovered. And that’s why the authors of Limits to Growth, and the current members of the Club of Rome have not been able to get either the people of the world or the leaders of the world to take action. I hope everyone reading this series uses what they learn to help get the needed changes started.

According to ALL the variations and solutions the Club of Rome computer models tried based on current conditions, world population will crash back below the 2B number. The models now project that the crash will be COMPLETE BEFORE 2050. And it will come because the world will not be able to feed, clothe and house everyone safely. And note well, the projections do NOT even consider climate change problems. Sea level rise, floods, wild fires and storms will only make the crash come sooner and be deeper.

How bad can it really be?

When the activists tell us we have to prevent the WORST, what could that really look like? All we need to do is look back into the past of human history for a preview. Resource depletion, particularly water, has been shown to be the major cause of the COLLAPSE of major past empires. In his 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter (*18) shows that resource depletion was a key driver of the collapse of Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome. These were huge, wealthy, powerful nations. What happened to them can happen to us. So, consider the following examples.

Wood is a critical resource for all economies. Did you know that the forests of the Middle East were already stripped of strategic lumber before 3,000 BC! (*19) That’s the reason we see so many temples in Greece and Rome built of stone. Stone is much harder and more costly in labor to work with than wood. They only used stone because they didn’t have wood available for building. War ships, however, couldn’t be built of stone! To get an idea how significant a wood shortage was, consider its effect on Rome. Roman legions, before 50 AD, were sent to WAR to conquer nations and control land as far north as Germany, and northwest to England, largely for their wood! By 1620, England had to seek foreign wood to support its war with Spain, as well as switching to coal for heating which crates much more air pollution and is less efficient than wood. The stove had not been invented yet. (*20)

The problem for our current global society is that there are no more great stands of forest that humanity can plunder without doing major damage to the environment. For example, about 40% of Central America’s and 23% of Africa’s forests were destroyed between 1950 and 1980. It is also estimated that over 50% of the earth’s mature tropical forests are gone. Some notable statistics, the following countries have less than 10% of their forests left: Philippines, South America’s Atlantic forests, the mountains of southwest China, Africa’s eastern coastal forests. The U.S. has less than 5% of its original forests. That means, the U.S. production of wood has already fallen to the natural replacement rate. There is no longer any natural reserve to draw on. A recent report from NASA estimated that between 2000 and 2012, the earth lost an area of forest equal to the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi. But, when looking at percent numbers for remaining land area with trees, remember, not all of the forest trees are useable. U.S. evaluations done in the 1940s showed that, even then, less than 15% of the forest was commercially harvestable due to soil depletion and fire damage. The bottom line for wood is that, continuing current practices, the entire world will be stripped of usable forest in less than 50 years!

If we don’t have wood, can’t society build with stone, the way the Romans did? Not and maintain our current standard of living. Most houses in the U.S. are framed and covered with wood. Even brick homes use wood on their interior. So much effort would be shifted to stone work that other factors of the economy would suffer. Stone is harder to obtain, ship, and build with.

The other critical resource was always water. Drought has now been determined to be a major contributor to the fall of Egypt, Rome, the Anasazi Indian nation in early America, Mayan culture, and the Khmer in Cambodia. (*21) The World Economic Forum already predicts that the world will be 40% short of fresh water by 2030 and 2/3 of world population will live in HIGH water stress countries. (*22)

So, how bad can the collapse really be? What does such a collapse look like? The Club of Rome projections set out a very clear picture. The population will crash after quickly reaching the 8–10 billion level back to less than 2 billion people in less than 2 generations! This can’t happen while maintaining the western culture we have all come to know even if birth rates go to zero. That means the death rate due to what would be called in-humane circumstances, like starvation, will somehow become very high. Assuming it takes a full 2 generations to occur, a world now growing at 3.5 billion people in 40 years will turn around and lose 6B people in 40 years. Using rate numbers, the population change rate will drop from growing at +1.25% a year to falling at around -1.8% a year.

As I said for principle two, most people can’t easily relate to numbers like this. They can’t visualize what this means. In more easily visualizable terms, it means that the world death rate will increase by the equivalent of more than half the population of the entire U.S. every year! The world will watch this unfold on TV and see reports of almost a million people dying EVERY DAY from starvation, disease and war, with NO hope in sight of stopping it. The lives of everyone on the planet will be in free-fall as the normal daily life structures of every nation on earth turn to daily survival.

In summary, despite all the hype in the media about our fantastic future, the future is actually pretty bleak. The human race has ALREADY gone OVER its limits! This is no longer making speculative predictions for some far off time in the future. It is already TOO LATE to stop the part of the collapse related to the limits we have already exceeded.

In the next part of this series, Part 3, I will dig into some of the A3 Discoveries. I will describe a part of the story that the world doesn’t understand: the flaws in human thinking and social structure that have led us to this collapse. I’ll explain the real reasons the human race refused to listen to all the warnings. The things I will share with you are things you haven’t heard before.

Back to Part 1 : Introduction, and summary of the A3 Discoveries