Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXLIV
Enough Already You Malthusian Doomer!
Today’s Contemplation is my comment on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest article that highlights the finiteness of our world, diminishing returns upon our extraction of the minerals most necessary to support our current exceedingly complex global-industrialised world, and how this is playing out in the financial/economic and geopolitical realms.
Another great summary of our predicament.
Amazing to me how many folks continue to employ boatloads of the magical thinking necessary to deny/bargain with/rationalise away the biogeophysical realities showing that the utopian future they believe in and are fiercely advocating for cannot come to fruition; and it doesn’t matter how innovative and ingenious our species might be.
In fact, what they are promoting is an array of industrial processes and activities that are simply making our ecological overshoot predicament worse — much worse. It isn’t a stretch to argue that our ‘success’ is contributing to our demise, and that of most other species, in an increasingly dangerous and exponential fashion.
I have little doubt (given past precedents) that worsening consequences (particularly environmental degradation) will be ignored, attributed to some other non-consequential cause, and/or countered with arguments along the lines of “we can do this [i.e., destroy the planet’s biosphere] in a much ‘cleaner’ way…here’s another ‘breakthrough’ experiment/prototype/small-scale example to prove it” and the destructive practices will continue/expand — and I’m confident it has little to nothing to do with the fact that the world’s profit-takers are enriching themselves through this (#sarcasm).
As various people have been credited with stating: “There is no difference between theory and practice in theory, but there is often a great deal of difference between theory and practice in practice.”
It doesn’t seem to matter one iota about the signals the planet and its quickly disappearing other species are sending us. We will continue our harmful actions until Nature forces our hand…and then we will continue them further because ‘human ingenuity’ and ‘progress’; in fact, there’s a very good argument that this is exactly what we’ve been doing for some time (perhaps since the first complex societies arose).
Those who monitor our predicament and sound alarm bells — and challenge the stories weaved by our governments and the industrial/financial complex — will likely be increasingly ostracised and or silenced through burgeoning narrative management processes (e.g., disparagement, deplatforming, censorship, financial isolation, arrest). The masses likely will be forced to abandon recent historical ‘benefits’ (e.g., relatively inexpensive food, shelter, personal transportation, leisure activities, etc.) for the ‘collective good’ (e.g., the ‘war’ against climate) whilst the ruling caste witnesses increasing wealth accumulation and buffers itself (temporarily) against the headwinds of overshoot.
Perhaps most immediately ‘problematic’ will be the increasing geopolitical stress as ‘resource wars’ intensify. That all players are being conditioned to view global competition over resources as simply some evil other and their nefarious aspirations is not novel since it’s a strategy long-employed by a region’s ‘leadership’ to ‘rally the troops’ and justify/rationalise a host of draconian policies — particularly increased siphoning of ‘wealth’ from the masses via price inflation and tax increases. And it’s certainly not hyperbole to suggest that the current situation (that’s been brewing since the close of World War Two at least) could at any moment go thermonuclear; which, if nothing else, will put an end to the arguments about all this.
Overall, though, I continue to be baffled by the apparent fact that our species, for the most part, currently interprets virtually everything through the lens of socio-economics and -politics while ignoring/denying/rationalising away the physics, chemistry, and biology that has the ultimate say in how this all plays out. Perhaps it’s because the human-contrived narratives about the power of economics and politics has been around much longer than the physical sciences and the laws and principles we’ve discovered from them, and are thus not easily overcome — to say little about the fact that humans desperately want to believe they have agency in their lives and it comes via our sociocultural institutions, not Nature.
Raise these red flags about the dangers of perpetual growth and our complex technologies, and the significant negative consequences of them, and the hounds of the ruling caste and their hangers-on pounce and claw your eyes out shouting about ‘progress’ and ‘human ingenuity’ you Malthusian doomer!
But seriously, what could possibly go wrong with infinite growth on a finite planet?
For those that have followed my writing, the following is a link to a downloadable PDF file compilation of my first 25 essays. I have put this together to serve as a test for the distribution of a writing project, It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 1, that attempts to provide an ‘overview of/introduction to/update on’ the variety of issues that encompass the nexus of limits to growth, ecological overshoot, and energy, and that should be available in the next week or two.
While offering a single document with some of my essays, the aim is to be able to determine the number of ‘views’ to the page that provides the link and serve as a proxy for the number of downloads of the document and thereby get a sense of the ‘success’ of the writing project and whether a second volume might be a worthwhile pursuit.
Click on the following link to access the document as a PDF file, free to download: Today’s 1–25
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Encouraging others to read my work is also much appreciated.