Living with Collapse
Coming to terms with the reality that collapse is a condition of the present, not just the future.
Earlier this month, our Gaian Book Club gathered to discuss two books on collapse, How Everything Can Collapse, and Another End of the World is Possible. That’s unremarkable in its own right, considering the depth of literature and the increasing obsession with this topic many people have. Several of the participants even noted just how much they’ve read on the subject — often much to the frustration of less concerned or less interested spouses, parents, and children!
But there’s one point that particularly stuck with me from our conversation. Several referenced the seminal work of William Catton’s Overshoot. In it Catton notes the important point that ecological stresses are signs of overshoot (living beyond a system’s carrying capacity). Funnily, at least to me, Catton starts his book with a quotation by Lester Brown (who founded the sustainability think tank I worked with for 16 years). Brown notes:
“Signs of stress on the world’s principal biological systems — forests, fisheries, grasslands, and croplands — indicate that in many places these systems have already reached the breaking point. Expecting these systems to withstand a tripling or quadrupling of population pressures defies ecological reality.”*
