Our Apollo Moment
Restating what our Apollo 13 moment is may be to do before asking, ‘Okay, so we seem to have a problem…, and then what?’
Before there can be a ‘Huston, we have a problem’ recognition, something happened our brains perceived or imagined, and in complex systems that something plays out over what we time-blind apes view as too long a period to consider (e.g. the last 50k years of human expansionism).
As for a proximal cause that could get our attention (such that someone could write a book about it that enough others might buy to maybe get it published) I would go with 1948 [William Vogt, Road to Survival;
Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet] as a proximal beginning of our ‘Huston, we have a problematique’ message followed by A Sand County Almanac in 1949, and the warnings since have grown exponentially as the years of the Great Acceleration (aka Anthropocene) have passed.
But few were listening when a few branches fell in the forest, and collectively no one noticed anything until Rachel Carson in 1962 and the Ehrlich’s in 1968 got some attention. The collective duck felt a couple of drops fall on its back, but sloughed them off as ducks do (some of the crew liked the sound of the drops, had concerns about getting wet, and started an environmental movement, but the duck kept on keeping on, and meanwhile, despite protests, fine words and letters to editors, the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed).
The warning messages climaxed in 1972, which included Catton’s Overshoot message which he wrote the first draft of in 1972 and published in 1980, which was something of a zeitgeist offering of consensus thinking among those usually clothed apes who maybe knew enough to have an opinion.
The outcome (including the World Scientists’ Warning 1992 and since) was a deafening silence as humanity’s public (and self) serving intelligentsia agreed to stop listening to Nature (easy with practice) or to those who were not so tone deaf (e.g. Hubbert, Brown, Boulding, Rickover, Huxley, Carson, Hardin, Ehrliches, Forester, Odum, Meadows, Calhoun, Catton, Hall) as to not be able to hear a few notes of Nature’s still small voice.
The only thing that has changed is that thought leaders have gotten better at pretending to listen to Nature (who has all the answers) or to those who persist in trying to listen to Nature. It is no matter and less mind for wordsmiths to learn new words and use them correctly in sentences provided no one’s reality (worldview) is threatened.
We have collectively achieved a condition of listening only to our own prattle, a condition that selects for what we humans can Like and Share, which excludes even the idea of ‘real solutions’ as there are none we humancentric political animals can Like.
There is no viable collective solution to our overshoot debt other than paying it. The ghastly future posterity (anyone younger than me/thee) faces is likely to come, but we cannot collectively act on the possibility that 10–13 billion humans (including those billions yet to be born this century) may not die of old age in the next 80–100 years. It is easier to believe what we want to, we the 99.99% to 99.99999%
A question of possible concern to those who would rather know than believe is whether any form of viable human will pass through the foreseeable (if not to the decade) bottleneck, or will the dynamics of the remnant population select for extinction? [Note: Largest scale expansion/climax/collapse/bottleneck event was in the Indus Valley where climax was followed by rapid descent (about 100 years) followed by 500 years on the downslope to regional extinction of those within the dynamic, though there were outliers to move into the abandoned zone (as happened on Malta) after some environmental recovery, a condition that will not result post our global collapse unless you believe Elon Musk actually will retire on Mars, his stated intent.]
The present problematique is that if, post climax, all humans become part of the downslope dynamic (no choice involved/implied as those not joining become booty for the taking by those who do, for whatever or no reason), extinction is likely (>80%). The only viable solution, this late in our endgame, would be a managed rapid depopulation and per capita contraction of consumption/production ‘event’ (over a 50 year period) as the alternative to a managed rapid depopulation is an unmanaged (chaotic) one that will come anyway.
In a managed rapid descent (if all humans agreed to as prosperous a way down as possible), no one dies a Malthusian death such that the remaining population is not fatally denormalized on the downslope. As there would be no marauding horde culture to join, one that could persist for 8–20 generations (200–500 years) with little possibility of renormalizing/recovering even when the population is well below carrying capacity (e.g. Malta et al. on a smaller scale), humans who made renormalizing their focus (as distinct from being the one with the most ammo) could transition to a viable form of civilization having a viable future. Those who end up on the downslope are likely to leave non-viable progeny who will be driven to extinction, an outcome that is not merely possible, but likely.
But all humans will not agree to any viable solutions now or ever (‘agree’ implies choice). There is no evidence that 0.000001% of people could consider being part of a viable solution that involves changing the trajectory of life as they know it (some can imagine tweaking it by joining a transition town with a small 1500 sq ft (400 sq m) home with solar panels to charge their electric car…).
Could 0.0000001% agree to a new social contract? Maybe. Is <0.000001% enough? No. Could the number rapidly change in the near future? Yes. Could there be enough, soon enough? Maybe (i.e. I don’t know and you don’t either).
This is now and 1972 was then. We knew enough 50 years ago to act (and didn’t). We still know enough (our ignorance is vast but not so vast) and options for a potentially viable outcome (i.e. ‘real solutions’) are fewer. A continued inability to think well, or even to endeavor to, makes for a more foreseeable future.
Unfortunately for posterity’s (and the biosphere’s) sake, Bill Rees’ conjecture that we are too clever by half and not nearly smart enough is evidence based. Recognition of our cognitive deficits would be our deliverance (slowly) from them.
The ‘would’ is an evidence based claim as the evidence of ‘recognition’ is a choiceless ending of error (all presumed knowledge) and hubris (you cannot choose ‘humilitus’ any more than you can choose to forego or embrace hubris, as to think so is hubris and to understand that you cannot is humilitus.
Freedom may be the recognition of necessity, choiceless obedience to the nature of things (Nature). Recognition that you have no choice is the ending of hubris, of our hubris ways one mind at a time, of our form of human and civilization).
