Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXXXVIII
We’re In A Predicament But Insist On Making It Worse
Today’s Contemplation is a brief comment I made on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest post that is the first part of a series on Peak Oil.
Well laid out! Despite this, it is fascinating to me how many people either ignore/deny these self-evident aspects of our predicament, or delve into magical thinking to bargain with or rationalise them away.
It also seems to me that resource depletion, especially of one of our most significantly important resources such as fossil fuels, is, as Erik Michaels argues, a symptom predicament of our overarching predicament of ecological overshoot.
And it is a lack of fully understanding this and appreciating what this overshoot entails and means, that has humanity in the crosshairs of the inevitable ‘collapse’ that accompanies it. No amount of denial, anger, and/or bargaining can change this. But homo sapiens being who they are will try.
I think that the ‘best’ we might accomplish is to create some mitigations that ‘soften’ the consequences for some.
Instead, however, we have a sociopathic elite (and a lot of snake oil salesmen) who are doubling/tripling down on the very processes that have put us in this bind: pursuit of the infinite growth chalice (i.e., economic and population growth) and encouraging widespread adoption of complex technologies (i.e., non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies).
And rather than safely decommissioning some of our most lethal and dangerous complexities (such as nuclear power plants and their radioactive wastes, chemical production and storage facilities, biosafety labs and their dangerous pathogens), whose control of we will lose as net surplus energy dwindles and eventually reaches zero, we are seeing a push to expand these. Rather than stop the degradation of our biosphere (particularly through our mineral extraction and production processes), and whose integrity is perhaps THE most important aspect of all species’ survival, we are witnessing a HUGE push to expand these in an attempt to ‘replace’ fossil fuels.
The vast majority of us just can’t seem to face up to the inconvenient idea that we are in it waist deep and sinking rather quickly. And instead of considering the notion that we stop digging out the bottom out of the hole we have fallen into, we flail and thrash against the inevitability of it all chasing processes that are making the predicament even worse and guaranteeing a future that is the opposite of the growth and expansion we have experienced the past number of centuries/millennia — that’s if any of us survive at all given the destruction we have wrought upon our world because of our overshoot.
It’s a mad, mad, mad world!
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.