Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXXXIX
Our Deep Future: Techno-Utopia Or A Return To The Distant Past?
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted a Contemplation. Not that I haven’t been reflecting on our overarching predicament of ecological overshoot and its various symptom predicaments like resource depletion, sink overloading, biodiversity destruction, etc.. I’ve simply been busy with food garden chores and the time-consuming aspects of the writing project I initiated with a number of other thinkers/writers and is getting close to being finished.
The last couple of days have been mostly spent attempting to limit the ‘crisis’ of discovering my two most mature Macintosh apple trees are experiencing a fungal infection commonly called apple scab. I must have removed 100+ infected apples and cleaned up 1000+ leaves. I’m now grappling with whether to write-off these trees (that have never produced much fruit to be honest) and take them down so that my other trees don’t become infected, or see if I can get ahead of the infection and salvage them. A much younger (planted about 3 years ago) apple tree produced more fruit last year than both my much older Macs have in the past two years so that signals to me that replacing these low-yielding and infected trees will increase my garden EROEI significantly — I would swear I’ve been in a negative energy flow situation with this garden since I started it about a decade ago…but it is improving!
Anyways, today’s Contemplation is a quick comment I shared on today’s Honest Sorcerer post that takes a look into our deep future and likely (I say ‘likely’ since making predictions is difficult, especially if they’re about the future) hits the nail on the head of where we are headed for on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero (h/t Zerohedge).
There is indeed good evidence for your argument that our future is far more likely to look like that of our distant past than the techno-utopia painted by so many snake oil salesmen seeking to profit from our one-time and temporary leveraging of dense-energy stores to create an exceedingly complex, global-industrial society, and our hopes/wishes for a ‘better’ world .
Our species so often fails to see the forest for the trees. But this, of course, is not surprising especially in an age that focusses primarily on financial/economic/geopolitical aspects of our societies while ignoring, mostly, the physical and biological components of our existence that are in the long run far more important and impactful — particularly their constraints.
I would contend that it was the shift from seeing ourselves as part and parcel of ‘Nature’ (if indeed homo sapiens ever did) to one of viewing humanity as outside of or at the apex of any ‘natural order’ that has led us to where we currently stand.
As I wrote in a post almost two years ago:
“Pre/history shows that relocalisation is going to happen eventually anyways, and in order to avert a sudden loss of important supplies that would have devastating consequences (especially food, water, and shelter), we should prepare ourselves now while we have the opportunity and resources to do so.
Instead, what I’ve observed is a doubling-down as it were of the processes that have created our predicament: pursuit of perpetual growth on a finite planet, using political/economic mechanisms along with hopes of future technologies to rationalise/justify this approach. While such a path may help to reduce the stress of growing cognitive dissonance, it does nothing to help mitigate the coming ‘storms’ that will increasingly disrupt supply chains.
The inability of our ‘leaders’ to view the world through anything but a political/economic paradigm and its built-in short-term focus has blinded them to the reality that we do not stand above and outside of nature or its biological principles and systems. We are as prone to overshoot and the consequences that come with it as any other species. And because of their blindness (and most people’s uncritical acceptance of their narratives) we are rushing towards a cliff that is directly ahead. In fact, perhaps we’ve already left solid ground but just haven’t realised it yet because, after all, denial is an extremely powerful drug.”
Ultimately, it’s the stories we tell ourselves and others that impact our beliefs, attitudes, actions, and, perhaps marginally, future — I say perhaps marginally because I do believe physics and biology play a much more important role than what we believe or do.
Right now, the dominant stories are that we can ‘science’ our way out of our predicaments not realising that predicaments have no ‘solutions’, only outcomes that we will somehow have to adapt to; if we’re able…
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.