This article in Scientific American: Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return? is still another warning about how bad the situation we are in is. There have been many including our book: Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World. We try to trace the origins of our present situation and liken it to an addiction of massive scope.
The situation has all the attributes of what we recognize as addiction on a scale that spans our civilization. Other authors have used the same metaphor, for example: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction. Yes oil and fossil fuels are part of the addiction but it spans the entire world system humans have created. Read on below to examine these ideas further.
The Scientific American article says this about where we are now:
In Limits to Growth, a bitterly disputed 1972 book that explicated these findings, researchers argued that the global industrial system has so much inertia that it cannot readily correct course in response to signals of planetary stress. But unless economic growth skidded to a halt before reaching the edge, they warned, society was headed for overshoot—and a splat that could kill billions.
Don't look now but we are running in midair, a new book asserts. In 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years (Chelsea Green Publishing), Jorgen Randers of the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, and one of the original World3 modelers, argues that the second half of the 21st century will bring us near apocalypse in the form of severe global warming. Dennis Meadows, professor emeritus of systems policy at the University of New Hampshire who headed the original M.I.T. team and revisited World3 in 1994 and 2004, has an even darker view. The 1970s program had yielded a variety of scenarios, in some of which humanity manages to control production and population to live within planetary limits (described as Limits to Growth). Meadows contends that the model's sustainable pathways are no longer within reach because humanity has failed to act accordingly.
Instead, the latest global data are tracking one of the most alarming scenarios, in which these variables increase steadily to reach a peak and then suddenly drop in a process called collapse. In fact, "I see collapse happening already," he says. "Food per capita is going down, energy is becoming more scarce, groundwater is being depleted." Most worrisome, Randers notes, greenhouse gases are being emitted twice as fast as oceans and forests can absorb them. Whereas in 1972 humans were using 85 percent of the regenerative capacity of the biosphere to support economic activities such as growing food, producing goods and assimilating pollutants, the figure is now at 150 percent—and growing.
Still another voice proclaiming what should by now be obvious. How can we point fingers and go on wringing our hands and do so little?
In the article about addiction to oil it says:
And wherever it is produced, there is a "socio-political toxicity" of oil, a significant distortion of economic, social, and political systems. Rather than the prosperity promised, oil discoveries around the world often become more curse than blessing, causing social dysfunction, assimilation of indigenous cultures, runaway inflation, a decline in traditional exports, overconsumption, abuse of power, overextended government spending, and unsustainable growth. Former Venezuelan oil minister Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, a founder of OPEC and once a true believer in the promise of oil, thought differently after he saw the corruption, greed, waste, and debt it caused, then calling oil "the devil's excrement."
World oil use continues to rise, last year hitting a historic high of 91 million barrels a day, and still climbing. To date, the world has pumped and burned about 1 trillion barrels of oil, and there may be another trillion barrels of recoverable "conventional" oil left, with several trillion barrels in unconventional reserves such as tar sands and oil shale, like the huge Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
But if we want anything resembling a sustainable future, we'll have to leave most of this oil buried right where it is, as the global climate cannot handle this much additional carbon. The carbon-pushers see billions of dollars just waiting to be produced, and are anxious to get to it. As with any addiction, when the easy stuff is gone and supplies tighten, addicts become desperate and willing to take more risk to secure the next fix, such as drilling in the Arctic and deep ocean basin.
They are not talking about "them". They are talking about all of us. In our book we trace the intellectual origins of our present world view because it is the basis for all the rest. Here is a very brief summary:
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix? In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct. This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
The collapse of civilization like the self destruction of an addict does not occur in an instant. It is a process. As it progresses the strength needed to break free is sapped away. As it progresses the arguments that justify the addictive behavior become more well entrenched in the addict's psyche. When the collapse finally occurs it has been inevitable for some time.
Once again we really do not need a weatherman to tell us which way the wind is blowing. We need the will to give up our habit.
5:12 PM PT: here is NASA again: http://www.filmsforaction.org/...
NASA Study Concludes When Civilization Will End, And It's Not Looking Good for Us
Sun May 18, 2014 at 8:47 AM PT: Thanks for the rec list. I hope this gets seen as widely as possible. We are in trouble.