I often question peoples unwarrented and neurotic tendancy to be optimisitc about the future of the world at least in the short term 5-100 years. We have an unsustainable lifestyle, not unlike how the housing bubble was unsustainable.
It’s all simple math. The 3 billion or so indian and chinese are trying to live like americans. That is a mathmatical impossibiliy. Our resouce base will not allow it.
We are currently using 30% more trees, water and fish than we can regenerate. We lose 200+ species a day to extinction.
All fossil fuels are approaching or have peaked I.e. energy is about to get really really expensive and our infastructor based on cheap, abundant energy will fail.
All problems are being ignored by the federal and local gov’ts. Last time I checked ignorance is not a good mitigation policy see Atlanta drought.
Multiple crises will soon hit this country and ignoring the issues will soon not be an option. Couple this with the reckless financial policies and a gov’t following the steps of Germany in the 30s and you have a the perfect science fiction movie.
We have reached critical mass and are still collectively saying full speed ahead. Eventually the system will come to a grinding halt. Infinate growth does not work in a finite world.
So by not adopting a crisis mindset througout our entire society, we are taking a gigantic gamble and it is a gamble that history suggests we are
going to lose. I am not aware of a single prior civilization that continued to do things the same way and which faced one or more of these kinds of problems
that did not collapse. Those civilizations cited by Tainter and Diamond that did survive serious crises, did so by changing urgently. Thus, until I see our society deliberately choosing to succeed, I must assume, based on the historical record, that we will fail (and therefore collapse). Given that many
population biologists are of the opinion that we are in serious population overshoot only enabled by our civilization’s existence (and dependence on fossil fuels), the loss of that civilization must be presumed to be accompanied by serious loss of life and disintegration of the social structure, as has
happened repeatedly throughout history.
There is about to be a battle between the “rightness” of our current economic model and geological forces. A depression is the best thing that could happen the world.
Our delusional attempts to control something as huge and complex as the world has only succeded in pissing her off.
In popular usage, it can be associated with the tendency for people to resist information that they don’t want to think about, because if they did it would create cognitive dissonance, and perhaps require them to act in ways that depart from their comfortable habits. They usually have at least partial awareness of the information, without having moved to full acceptance of it, and are thus in a state of denial about it.
