The laughter about the Survival Seed Scam and the "Crisis Garden" promotions of one of Glenn Beck's advertisers -- seeds in sealed cans that can be buried so they're not confiscated by the evil government troops -- is justified.
And the fearmongering underlying Beck et al's continuous diatribes about the collapse of civilization beneath the iron fist of bipartisanship and socialism only encourages survivalists everywhere, and is worthy of condemnation.
But my concern is that the survivalists will likely be right, albeit for the wrong reasons.
I'm reasonably certain that there will be some very serious economic carnage in the next five to ten years -- certain enough to be making large life decisions around that expectation.
As I explored in my first Reclist diary in 2009, "The End of the Beginning of the Collapse," the world economy operates within a larger context: the world ecosystem. Unfortunately, economic analysts, stock markets, and fund managers are operating as if it didn't.
They aren't contending with what we call "the converging emergencies": Climate chaos, Biology breach, Species collapse, Infectious disease, and Resource depletion. These are world-changing crises any one of which could disrupt the world economy.
Further, I said then that the next three to ten years were going to be nothing like the last three to ten because these emergencies would converge in ways that would turn markets, economies, and even societies topsy-turvy.
That diary was in 2009, and not much that matters has changed, in terms of the converging emergencies -- except the speed with which they are coming upon us.
Ocean acidification continues, and the plastic gyre in the Pacific had a sibling discovered in the Atlantic. Oxygen-free zones in the oceans are wreaking havoc on sealife. We continue to pump out heavy metals and serious carbon by burning more coal than ever. Copenhagen came and went without more than a blustercloud from the deniers. We continue to fish out the ocean at four times its ability to replenish itself.
More people now think there are two sides of the "climate debate" than in 2000, even as the evidence is before us as winter pack ice disappears, Antarctica is melting from below, and weather patterns are disrupted everywhere. And even as the experts' opinions haven't changed one nanometer.
We are running hell-bent toward environmental, and therefore economic, collapse, not because of socialist government, but because of our short-sightedness, our greed, and our genes -- and a whole lot of other reasons, like having treated our ecosystem as a cost-free Dispos-All for centuries.
We sure aren't demonstrating that we've got the ability to respond, as a human population, to what's before us. We don't even want to know about it.
Like the survivalists believe, we will see food crises in the next few years. Probably not in North America right away, but surely elsewhere. We will see water wars, as the rivers run dry, and fresh water limits are reached. We will see drought and deluge, and famine and food riots, and coups and counter-coups, and poverty-driven migrations.
We'll likely see dramatic economic disruption as the stock market analysts realize that you can't do credit default swaps with Nature, and that we've hit limits that will create inevitable economic chaos in the following years. If everyone can see collapse a-coming, then the number of "buy" orders on Wall Street kinda shrivels.
So Beck and the survivalist gang are right, but for the wrong reasons -- they think it's "Them" who will bring down civilization.
I think, alas, that it will be all of us who bring it down.
And the survivalists will feel vindicated.
'Doc Michael (mwmwm) is coeditor of ApocaDocs.com, and coauthor of Converging Emergencies, 2010-2020, a free, funny, short book available on their site.