Collapse
ON JUNE 5, 2024 BY PHOTOMOTOMANIN IGNORANCE, PEOPLE, POLITICAL DISCOURSE, POLITICS, SURVIVAL, THE FUTURE
Global Civilization Collapse
Maintain the status quo, whatever we do. We continue to hear an ongoing diatribe about sustainability. According to the work of Dan Brooks Humans have become dependent upon technology, assuming that technology can and will save us from ourselves, from our behaviors. In reality, we should be considering how survival is to be accomplished, rather than sustainability.
In an article from Nautilus on May 31st, 2024, Peter Watts, a former marine biologist, and now science fiction writer addresses in concert with Dan Brooks, an evolutionary biologist, author of 400 papers and seven books, not to mention “too many awards, fellowships and distinctions to count on your fingers and toes” he suggests in his book, “The Darwinian Survival Guide”, that no technological solution will save us if we don’t change our behaviour.
Brooks suggests that Homo Sapiens of ”one kind or another is going to survive no matter what we do…what’s important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call technological humanity or technologically dependent humanity, to survive.
Their book suggests that because our societies are unwilling to change, a collapse is inevitable. Today, governments are committed to business as usual, and because of that, once the collapse occurs, we will lose more societally than we need to.
Paul Ehrlich, the eminent biologist agrees. “A shattering collapse of civilization is a near certainty in the next few decades due to humanity’s destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth.” His article in the Guardian on March 22nd, 2018 was written as a wakeup call for humanity, but was essentially ignored by most of the industrialized world. He stated, “Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilization over the edge. Billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.” He further suggests that ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell.”
The world’s optimum population is under two billion people, yet today we are almost at 8 billion. We do not have three more earths available. to meet our ever-increasing demands. Climate change is also affecting biodiversity. Right now, the earth is well into a 6th mass extinction, which civilization depends on for clean air, water, and food. Zoonotic viruses are showing up at an ever-increasing rate, (15,000 new viruses expected by the end of this century).
Ludicrously, some countries, like the United States, are trying to ban contraception pills and devices. Asinine, when one considers that the world’s population is already over the limit by close to 5 billion people. Economic policies and over-consumption per capita combined with overpopulation, especially by the rich countries are destroying the natural world. Demand for resources and the population need to shrink appreciably, not increase appreciably, which is where we are all headed.
As Kim Stanley Robinson stated on March 20, 2018, in the Guardian, “Emptying half. the Earth of its humans. It’s the only way to save the planet…it isn’t clear that the Earth’s biosphere can supply that many people’s needs – or absorb that many wastes and poisons – on a renewable and sustainable basis over the long haul…Right now we are not succeeding.
Corporations and globalization combined with economic policies that only understand growth, consumption, and profit are at the heart of our problem. Eo Wilson, back in April of 2016, wrote in the Guardian of a plan called ‘Half Earth’. In his book of the same name Eo states that it is necessary to “leave half the Earth’s surface free of humans, so wild plants and animals can live there unimpeded as they did for so long before humans arrived. Same with the oceans, by the way; about a third of our food comes from them. sea, so the seas have to be healthy too.”
The redistribution of wealth is something else that must occur in time. Otherwise, scarcity will lead to anger, societal unrest, and class warfare, where the increasingly poor pick up weapons and then take what they need to survive.
The future is fraught with realities that until now, we as humans refuse to address. We have likely waited too long as it is. If technology cannot save us from ourselves then all of the issues combined with climate change, sea rise, global warming, the failure of the AMOC, and the melting of the polar ice caps will.
I’m 71. I won’t likely see most of the devastation that is coming, except for the political failure of democracy, which is inevitable.
Ciao…
