Firstly, this is a GREAT piece. Just fantastic.
It doesn't feel like a 27 minute read. It's well reasoned, engaging, and compelling. I found myself agreeing with Steve on almost every point.
I would recommend this article to anyone as a solid outline of "Collapse Studies" thinking. It spells out a lot of the points you find in the 2009 documentary, "Earth 2100".
If you haven’t seen it here’s a link to it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDqRpM72Odg
Hosted by ABC journalist Bob Woodruff, the two-hour special explored what “a worst-case” future might look like as climate change plays out over the 21st century.
The show documents the life of a fictitious storyteller, “Lucy” born in 2009 as she describes her life through the 21st century. The program presents snapshots of the Earth in the years 2015, 2030, 2050, 2085, and 2100 with analysis by scientists, historians, social anthropologists, and economists.
A lot of heavyweight thinkers including Jared Diamond, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Peter Gleick, James Howard Kunstler, Heidi Cullen, Alex Steffen and Joseph Tainter contributed to it.
It is a bit dated but its strength is that it shows how climate change is going to play out over the lifetime of a person born in 2009. It gives you a sense of how this is going to be a "process" and not an "event" like a nuclear war or a zombie plague.
Steve's process is pretty much what happens in the documentary. Steve is on really solid ground in terms of the academic thinking about COLLAPSE.
The system we live in has an immense amount of "social inertia". It's a paradigm we have internalized so completely that we imagine it to be "reality". The way the world "just is" and "always will be".
Rome didn't vanish overnight. It "fell" gradually and parts of it persisted for another 1,000 years. "Collapse", as viewed in academic circles, is seen as a "process".
That idea may be an illusion. EVERYTHING in our world is a "social construct", and as such, can be changed.
Empires and ways of life are "paradigms" as much as anything. Everyone BELIEVES in them, and that belief makes them the "law of the land". Until there's a PARADIGM SHIFT.
The first "Termination Shock" of the Climate Crisis is about to happen. The global food supply is about to shrink -20% over the next 5 years.
That's 1.5 billion people starving to death by 2030.
I consider that a “paradigm shift” event.
In Pakistan, the people "on the chopping block first" have nuclear weapons. Does anyone think they are just going to quietly starve?
The questions we should be confronting are:
1. Can the existing world governance structures withstand a crisis of this magnitude?
2. What actions are immediately necessary to make #1 possible?
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I want to end with a rebuttal to Steve about "Radical Acceptance".
It's NOT about "giving up".
It's about accepting that Collapse is happening.
So that we can stop holding on "to the world that was" AND start the "Manged Retreat" to the "world that will be".
Ultimately Steve and I agree. What we DO during this time can make differences in what kind of legacy we leave behind for the survivors.
It's our FUCKING RESPONSIBILITY to TRY.
