Nuclear fusion is one example of this: Even though the technology remains decades away (if it is, indeed, feasible – there have been many false alarms), the prospect that we could master fusion and release essentially unlimited sources of energy with little ecological cost offers a powerful, addictive toke of “hopium.” This kind of news has the same numbing effect of watching a series of flashy, over-rehearsed TED talks: One gets the sense that the most intractable problems are being dealt with, and therefore one can get on with binge-watching Netflix or mining Bitcoin, or whatever distraction one finds most seductive. I am late to this great discussion (thank you, KLG!) as usual, but one observation before I move on. I few weeks ago, I was terrified when I discovered the existence of the Schelling Point. I believe it was in a link here on NC, and was in the context of an explanation of why, in so many revolutions, the military take control. Yeah. So I always start with this realization. It’s just so happens my father was born in 1927. And my father is, in his last days now. The world population when my father was born was 2 billion. And my father will probably live to see a world of 8 billion. That means in one human lifetime, the human population doubled, and doubled again. That is unprecedented, tight? That’s three generations. I use that to remind people of the, in some ways, really bizarre world in which we live. Now, all of that population growth is pretty much a direct result of fossil fuels, especially through the Haber-Bosch process, which some people will recognize as the way we manufacture synthetic fertilizer, anhydrous, ammonia fertilizer. Well, you take away the fossil fuels needed for that process and a whole lot of us wouldn’t be here. So we’re dealing with a human population that is completely anomalous in human history. And that’s important to recognize. How are we going to get from 8 billion, which I think is quite clearly an unsustainable human population pretty much at any level of consumption. How are we going to get to a sustainable level with considerably less consumption per capita? And again, I say, per capita because we all know that the distribution of the material resources in this world is not equitable. It’s morally unacceptable. But if we look at kind of aggregates, what is possible? Well, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not a scientist, I don’t pretend to have an answer. And of course, nobody has a definitive answer. But people I find reliable, like, take Bill Rees, a really first-rate ecologist who has been doing good work on these subjects for you know, 50 years now. Bill suggests that a sustainable population is probably going to be something like 2 billion, right. Dennis Meadows of the “Limits to Growth” subject group says roughly the same thing. Some people say three or 4 billion. The final number doesn’t matter. What is clear is we’re talking about reducing the human population by at least half and maybe half again. And at the same time, getting people to accept that much of what we take to be “normal.” And I put normal in quotes there. Like, for instance, being able to jump in a car and drive a couple 100 miles to see members of your family. Well, a lot of people take that for granted now. You know, we’re coming up on a holiday and people are gonna say, “Well, yeah, sure, of course, I should have a right, it’s a human right to jump in a car.” Well, that’s not going to be part of a human future that’s sustainable. So the magnitude of that necessity to reduce the human population is really quite striking. Now, you know, some people will say, well, we just have to have better birth control. And there are ways to reduce the birth rate. We know about them. The main one is educating women and girls and raising the status of women and girls in society. That tends to bring down the birth rate. But that also often comes with increasing lifestyle consumption, you know, middle class status. So we have, you know, some real tensions on the birth end of it. And if you want to go to things people really don’t like to talk about, it’s not just a question of getting better birth control, it’s probably changing the way we think about death control. So we now, through the use of high tech, high energy technology, can keep people alive much longer than in any other era. And are we willing to start talking about, you know, withdrawing that kind of end of life medical treatment that keeps people alive? Well, we know that’s hard, you know. When a family talks about when to withdraw care from, you know, a grandparent, it’s emotionally wrenching. But we’re talking about having to do that collectively. Now, personally, I’m 64 years old, and I’ve made a commitment to myself and talk to others around me that I will not use any life extending medical technology. That if my time comes, I’m going to do that. Now, of course, the rubber hits the road when you actually get the diagnosis, and you have to make good on it. So I’m not being glib about how hard that is. But that conversation I’ve had with friends and family has been very wrenching. There are people who are really angry at me for saying this. Now imagine trying to do that at a collective level where we all agree. Well, you know, these ar Few books can shake up and awaken long-time climate activists, environmental activists, and sustainability activists to expansive new levels of understanding of the big picture of our major crises, but this is one of those books." — Job One for Humanity Climate Blog The most obvious answer is that it is the result of humans living under different material conditions. Other possible explanations for variations in cultures include a supernatural force providing divine guidance or simple randomness. Theological explanations—that there is some nonmaterial force that dictated or set these patterns in motion—are based in faith claims and don’t rely on evidence. We have never identified any compelling reasons to accept supernatural accounts of natural phenomena. Nor have we ever heard a coherent argument for how cultural differences are simply random.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Excerpt - resilience An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Excerpt - resilience

Read this personal manifesto of wisdom and passion for our suffering planet, a very important, timely, and riveting book." — CounterPunch Confronting harsh ecological realities, this book explores the roots of social injustice and offers a down-powering path to “fewer and less.” Yeah, really well said. In the book, that comes across. And I think that, you know, we could go on talking about this stuff forever, but maybe to focus a little bit, there’s a chapter, I think there’s kind of a core chapter where you talk about four hard questions. Size, scale, scope, and speed. And maybe let’s go over those four hard questions? It kind of really brings home what we’re talking about, what’s missing in the conversation, especially maybe on the progressive left. And of course, a lot of conservatives ignore many of these things too. Our ultra-modern industrial society just doesn’t have a way of dealing with these questions. Eugene Odum showed that cities can be the urban repository of civilization, but only when the exist within their countryside and not something apart.Chas, I agree strongly. We need more small farms, tied to their communities. Problem right now is …. land. Thousands, if not millions, of the best farmland ‘owned’ by corporations and billionaires (looking at you, Bill Gates!). A great big enclosing of the commons has occurred in the USA. The technology has already brought us to overshoot. We are going to crash. Continuing with business as usual, especially in agriculture, only means that we will damage the Earth even further, making things harder from this point on. Relying on technology to come up with a magical solution merely delays preparing for the crash. That’s really the issue.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen

Thank you for touching on the idea of carrying capacity – I don’t know why it is so often overlooked either. And the issue is that everything seems fine until suddenly and devastatingly, it isn’t. By supporting getting rid of technology which creates food production,you and your children will starve’ b. A set of products, used by the household, that are supplied by the processes developed in step A above. Graeber and Wengrow write about how our ‘Western’ concept of land ownership derives from Roman law: ‘ownership’ of the land implies certain rights over it, including the right to extract and profit from its use, as well as the right to destroy it, which mining and fossil fuel companies, as well as corporate agriculture with its destruction of top soil, engage in with unholy joy.The next 95 yards are the most difficult, hard-fought, grueling part of the game, and we’re not really organized for, nor aware of, what it’s going to take. Well, I do worry about it. And in fact, I’ve been talking to a new friend who’s writing a book on ecofascists, and you know, hanging out in their chat rooms. And they’re pretty scary people. And he asked me, “If you sound some of the same alarms as they do, don’t you worry?” And I said, I worry about not sounding the alarm. So let me explain what I mean. If ordinary people can sense that, you know, this bright, shiny future of wind turbines, and solar energy, and electric vehicles that were being sold isn’t really honest. That is, there are problems beyond those high-tech solutions. If ordinary people sense that, and I think are starting to sense it, and will increasingly sense it in the future, and the progressive left people with concerns about inequality, injustice, which I have deeply and have always tried to act on. If people like us don’t talk about that reality, then essentially, we cede that turf to the right and to the ego fascists. But how have we dealt with this truth? Not particularly well, obviously. And this can be explained at the secular level by following the religious traditions of the Bible in identifying three different relationships among systems of political and cultural power, the royal, prophetic, and apocalyptic. The theologian Walter Brueggemann identifies the royal consciousness with the period when Solomon strayed from the wisdom of Moses, and this applies to us: “Affluence, oppressive social policy, and a static religion transformed a God of liberation into one of empire…with a corrosive consciousness (that) develops…in top leaders (and) throughout the privileged sectors (and) filtering down to a wider public that accepts a power system and its cruelty.” A lot of past talk of population control has been based in white supremacy, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the question of what’s a sustainable population. That’s the kind of thing that people have bristled against. We don’t have a solution. But the fact that there aren’t easy and obvious solutions doesn’t mean that you can ignore the issue.”

An Inconvenient Apocalypse – ROBERT JENSEN

How would stopping abusing the land and growing local sustainable food crops instead of animal feed and corn et al for processed food ‘kill people’? The point is that the carrying capacity of planet earth has been way overshot by us humans. Many deaths are coming.

So, we conclude that the type of living arrangements that groups of humans develop arise from the differences in geography, climate, and environmental conditions. Absent any other credible explanation, we assume that the different material realities under which humans have lived have shaped the variations in human culture. People make choices to build cultures in specific ways, but if all people are basically the same animal, then the differences in those choices around the world are most likely the product of those different conditions. Apocalypse in the present context does not mean “lakes of fire, rivers of blood, or bodies raptured up to heaven.” But it does require that we change our consciousness when hope for meaningful change within the existing political culture and economy is no longer productive and we must deal with our problems dramatically different ways: “Invoking the apocalyptic recognizes the end of something…not about rapture but a rupture severe enough to change the nature of the whole game.” It is way past time to climb out of that Overton Window and look around with eyes that see. In the words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Thus, the summation from J&J: