I understand that. But since we won’t make the hard choices, we have to keep on plugging along until we are forced to meet that discontinuity head on, at some point. [/quote]
Oh, and plugging on we will do. Change will come when we hit rock bottom and are forced to by social forces not political. The feudal pecking order won’t allow it, until they are overwhelmed.
This is what happens when a species “overshoots” it’s carrying capacity. What happened, at a biological level, is they were very successful. Too successful! And did not change their behavior when their environment changed. The did not successfully adapt, so they went extinct.
[img_assist|nid=11613|title=Population|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=467|height=350]
This was the human population explosion of the 19th and 20th century. Again, a very successful species. Which also happens to be in “overshoot”. Now due to this species big brain it interacts with the environment in very unique ways. In a sense, it creates it’s own environment and I think that is pretty cool. Anyway, this particular overshoot is difficult to quantify in terms of numbers, due to this species unique interaction with the environment and, really, members of the other species. So what we have is a resource utilization overshoot or consumption overshoot. This is setting off a chain of interconnected ecological problems – that effect the bottom half of humanity the most, for now…
Now this consumption overshoot is a behavioral trajectory set and encouraged by the more affluent social strata. I’m not just talking about “standard of living” more of a resource management and industrial-practices type of thing.
Anyway, this behavioral trajectory, if replicated across most of humanity, would lead to a catastrophic population decline, mass misery and possible extinction. The good thing is there is no chance of that happening because of natural planetary limits that influence economic activity – though, that is what “plugging along” entails. Being one that roots for species survival, I can’t help to wish for this behavioral trajectory to stop. Which it’s staring to, much to our dismay.
Now, what is even more interesting is juxtaposing the peak oil chart with the human population chart. Oil has had a permissive effect on the human population explosion. What makes this time period unique is, with the advent of peak oil, coupled with population still increasing by about 80 million a year – for the first time in human history, energy per capita is going to precipitously decline, like lightening quick. This is a very distinctly different environment than we have every been in and regardless of what we want things are going to dramatically change over the next decade.
Now, juxtapose a world debt graph next to the peak oil graph and we have a situation where, essentially, the global debt bomb is going to start going off regardless of printing efforts or monetary chicanery. So, we should see countries going down like dominoes over the next few years and pushing millions to the new underclass of the west. How this effects the emerging economies I am curious to see.
So, bottom like is, we are there, buddy. Shit is going to start to blow. And that’s ok with me! But, lets not pretend it’s way off in the future. The future is now!
Essentially, it’s like a macro-socio-evolutionary event in a short period of time – or devolutionary, depending on how we handle it
