"A new study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution,"
reports Britain's Guardian newspaper. NASA has since distanced itself from the study, and issued a statement saying, "[it] was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA." However
the Guardian questions NASA's honesty.
Either way, this study doesn't come from a fanatical right-wing preacher nor from an ideological rant. The study was done by a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, including social scientists who looked at both current data and historical data. They noted that the collapse of very advanced and powerful civilizations is not rare, but a recurring phenomena in human history including the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Mayan Empire, the Egyptian Empire.
They identified the factors leading to collapse in the past: population, climate, water, agriculture, and energy.
Certainly today all these factors threaten us. We know we are destroying the climate, and that dysfunctional unfettered capitalism stands in the way of our reversing climate trends.
Water is increasingly scarce and our pursuit of energy through fracking threatens even more of our water. Agriculture has moved from a sustainable process to an unsustainable industrial process that does not nourish the earth, but exploits the earth and its soil and water. And, of course, energy could be one of the most important factors leading to global conflicts and war from the Middle East to the conflict over Crimea and the Ukraine. Again, unfettered nihilistic capitalism prevents us from developing sustainable and plentiful energy for the sake of energy that we fight over that ruins our land and water.
The study does not say that the collapse of civilization is inevitable, "The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth."
So now we have hard scientific research from the highest levels that show inequality and rampant pollution in the acquisition of energy are not just immoral and unjust, but threaten our entire civilization.
In Pennsylvania, Liz Arnold is leading an effort to challenge gubernatorial candidates to commit to a moratorium on fracking. No amount of money is worth the destruction of our water, land, and climate. And dysfunctional capitalism run amok that has already destroyed the livelihoods of untold millions of Americans. It threatens the quality of life and perhaps life itself for even the Financial Elite who falsely believe that their wealth can protect them.
Image source: Alia Penner