Johnstone: Authenticity

To Be An Authentic Person Is To Stare Deeply Into The Face Of Uncomfortable Truths. Caitlin Johnstone. Sep 22, 2024.

To be an authentic person is to stare deeply into the face of uncomfortable truths.

It’s to experience all the footage of shredded bodies in Gaza with a visceral understanding that these are real things happening to real people whose lives mattered just as much as your own.

To come to terms with the reality that the power structure you were raised to trust and the political party you were raised to side with are responsible for some of the worst things that have ever happened in our world, and that their depravity must be fought tooth and claw.

To stare unblinking into the very real possibility that the madness of our rulers could cause total human extinction by nuclear war or environmental destruction within your own lifetime.

To admit that your previous understanding of an issue was a misguided perception caused by propaganda, and to be fully open to the possibility that this is also true of your current understanding of other issues as well.

To deeply recognize the ways your own delusion and dysfunction have played a role in the delusion and dysfunction of humanity as a whole, and to cease viewing yourself as separate or separable from the self-destructive patterning of our species.

To be honest with yourself about the circumstances of your birth and the ways in which you have it better than other people in different circumstances and in other parts of the world — often at the expense of those very populations.

To be honest with yourself about the ways in which your actions harm others, and take any steps necessary to rectify this wherever you can.

To be honest with yourself about the ways in which you have been harmed — your traumas and wounded self-beliefs and your maladaptive coping mechanisms ensuing therefrom — and do the work necessary to heal them.

To be honest with yourself about how little you really know about this boundless mystery called life, and to be humble in your position as a clueless member of a young species in a universe that none of us understand.

To explore with sincere curiosity the possibility that all our assumptions about the reality we are experiencing have been wrong this whole time, right down to our beliefs about things as fundamental as thought, perception, and the existence of a self or a separate outer world.

To be an authentic person is to constantly plunge headlong into the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unknown and the unpredictable, even when doing so feels like a kind of death, for no other reason than because that’s where the truth is.

It’s to always welcome the truth with open arms, even when it is unpleasant, embarrassing, inconvenient or downright terrifying, come what may.

Western "Democracy"

The Bizarre State of Western Democracy. Prabhat Patnaik, People's Democracy. Sept 8, 2024.

DURING the entire post-war period when it has been in existence in the metropolitan countries, democracy has never been in as bizarre a state as it is today. Democracy is supposed to mean the pursuit of policies that are in conformity with the wishes of the electorate. True, it is not that the governments first ascertain popular wishes, and then decide on policy; the conformity between the two is typically ensured under bourgeois rule by the government deciding on policies in accordance with ruling class interests, and then having a propaganda machinery that persuades the people about the wisdom of these policies. The conformity between public opinion and what the ruling class wants is thus achieved in a complex manner whose essence lies in the manipulation of public opinion.

What is currently happening however is altogether different: public opinion, notwithstanding all the propaganda directed at it, wants policies that are altogether different from those being systematically pursued by the ruling class. The policies favoured by the ruling class in other words are being pursued despite public opinion being palpably and systematically opposed to them. This is made possible by having most political parties line up behind these policies; that is, by getting a very large spectrum of political formations or parties backing these policies against the wishes of the majority of the electorate. The current situation is thus characterised by two distinct features: first, a broad unanimity among the bulk of political formations (parties); and second, a total lack of congruence between what these parties agree on and what the people want. Such a situation is quite unprecedented in the history of bourgeois democracy. These policies moreover relate not to minor questions concerning this or that matter, but to fundamental issues of war and peace.

Take the United States. The majority of people in that country according to all available opinion polls are appalled by Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people; they would like the US to bring the war to an end and not keep supplying arms to Israel for prolonging it. But the US government is doing precisely the opposite, even at the risk of escalating the war into one that engulfs the entire middle east. Likewise, public opinion in the US does not want a continuation of the Ukraine war. It favours an end to that conflict through a negotiated peace; but the US government (together with that of the UK) has systematically torpedoed all possibilities of peaceful settlement. Its opposition to the Minsk agreements, an opposition conveyed to Ukraine through British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s trip to Kiev, is what started the war in the first place; and even now when Putin had made certain proposals for establishing peace, it egged Ukraine on to launch its Kursk offensive which ended all hopes of peace.

What is significant is that both the Republicans and the Democrats in the US are agreed on this policy of providing arms to Netanyahu and Zelensky, despite public opinion wanting peace and despite the fact that any adventurism by Ukraine runs the risk of unleashing a nuclear conflagration.

This contrast between what the people want, despite all the propaganda they have been subjected to, and what the pollical establishment ordains, afflicts all metropolitan countries; but nowhere is it as stark as in Germany. The Ukraine war directly impinges on Germany in a manner it does not on any other metropolitan country, since Germany was entirely dependent on Russian gas for its energy needs. The sanctions on Russia have caused a shortage of gas; and the import of more expensive substitutes from the US has pushed up gas prices to levels that strongly impinge on the living standards of German workers. An end to the Ukraine war is urgently demanded by German workers; but neither the ruling coalition consisting of the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens, nor the main opposition consisting of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Socialists, is showing any interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict. On the contrary the German political establishment is trying to whip up fears of Russian troops appearing on German borders, even though, ironically, it is German troops that are stationed at present in Lithuania on the borders of Russia!

In their desperation for an end to the Ukraine war the German working people are turning to the neo-fascist AfD which professes to be against the war (though one knows it will inevitably betray this promise once it comes anywhere near power) and the new Left party of Sahra Wagenknecht that broke away from the parent Left Party, Die Linke, on this very issue of war.

Exactly the same is true of German attitudes towards the genocide in Gaza. While the bulk of the German population opposes this genocide, the German government has actually criminalised all opposition to the Israeli genocide on the grounds that it constitutes “anti-semitism”. It even broke up a convention that was being organised to protest against the genocide, to which internationally-known speakers like Yanis Varoufakis had been invited. The use of the “anti-semitism” stick to beat all opposition to Israel’s aggression is pervasive in other metropolitan countries too. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, was hounded out of that party, ostensibly on grounds of his so-called “anti-semitism” but actually because of his support for the Palestinian cause; and US campus authorities have invoked this charge against the widespread campus protests that have rocked that country.

Such riding roughshod over public opinion is typically sought to be achieved by keeping these burning issues of peace and war off political discussion altogether. In the coming US presidential elections, for instance, since both the contenders, Donald Trump and Kamla Harris, are agreed on supplying arms to Israel, this issue itself will not figure in any presidential debate or in the presidential campaign. While other topics where they differ will hold centre-stage, the crucial one that affects people and where they hold a different opinion from the contestants, will not be an issue for debate.

One reason for the support of the political establishment for Israeli actions, which is far from being a negligible one, is the generous funding that such support gets from pro-Israel donors. According to a report published in the Delphi Initiative (August 21), half the cabinet of Keir Starmer, the newly-elected Labour prime minister of Britain, had received money from pro-Israel sources to fight the elections that brought them to power. The same number of the same journal also reports that one-third of the Conservative members of the British parliament had received money from pro-Israel sources for elections. Pro-Israel money in other words is available to both the main parties of Britain; this makes support for Israeli actions a bipartisan affair.

On the other hand what happens to those who stand with Palestine is illustrated by two cases in the US Members of the Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both black progressive representatives, who were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and strong critics of Israeli genocide, were defeated by the intervention of AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which poured millions of dollars into the effort. The Delphi Initiative of August 31 reports that 17 million dollars had been spent for Bowman’s defeat and 9 million dollars for the Ad campaign against Cori Bush. Interestingly, the campaign against Cori Bush did not mention Israel’s aggression against Gaza, as AIPAC knew that on that particular issue the public would have supported Cori Bush rather than her opponent, and hence frustrated its plans for her defeat. What all this means is that a fundamental decision on war and peace that affects everybody is being taken in the metropolitan countries against the wishes of the people by a political establishment that is financed by lobbies with vested interests.

In the metropolis there has thus been a transition from “manipulation of dissent” through propaganda, to the total ignoring of dissent, even dissent by a majority, that has proved to be immune to propaganda. This represents a new stage in the attenuation of democracy, a stage characterised by an unprecedented moral bankruptcy of the political establishment. Such moral bankruptcy of the traditional political establishment also constitutes the context for the growth of fascism; but whether or not fascism actually comes to power, the attenuation of democracy in metropolitan societies has already disempowered people to an extent that is quite unprecedented.

Johnstone on Gaza apathy and what it portends for our collective future: extinction

"Why Should I Care About Gaza?" Caitlin Johnstone. Sept. 8, 2024.

The other day someone on Twitter asked me why he should care about what’s happening in Gaza, saying, “Why should I care about anyone that isn’t in a 20 mile radius of where I live?”

I was a bit taken aback by this. I must confess I live in a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to caring about the world; most people I interact with from day to day either agree with me or disagree with me about the abusive nature of the empire and what our problems are and what should be done about them, but the one thing they all have in common is that they care. Outside my little bubble I suspect this “why should I care?” sentiment is probably pretty common, though.

There’s a 2017 Huffington Post article by Kayla Chadwick titled “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” which expresses frustration at this type of attitude, because it is very difficult to argue against. If you’re not already the sort of person who would naturally care about the death and suffering in Gaza, it’s going to be hard to get you to see why you should. If you’re missing the part of yourself which hurts when it sees children ripped apart by Israeli bombs, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the value of that part.

But I like a challenge. So I’ve had a bit of a think about it, and I’ve come up with the most honest and complete answer to this question that I am able to produce right now. It might not convince anyone, but it is a well-reasoned answer.

Why should you care about Gaza? Because we can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.

For better or for worse, we now live on a planet with eight billion humans who are no longer separated by distance in the way we used to be. This species which spent so much of its development relating to itself in units of small tribes is now an intimately networked global community whose behavior is literally altering the face of this planet, and we need to start acting like it. We need to start doing what Einstein called “widening our circle of compassion” beyond our small tribal units of people we personally know and like, or we simply won’t be able to survive and thrive on this planet.

The inability of ordinary people to think globally is directly affecting our lives in the here and now.

The ability of plutocrats to exploit cheap labor overseas directly affects how much you and your neighbors can earn to provide for yourselves and your families. If we had true international class solidarity, they wouldn’t be able to get away with that anymore.

The ability of corporations to feed our biosphere into the capitalism machine and offload costs of production onto the ecosystem to maximize profits directly affects the kind of environment we’ll all be living in in the coming years. Corporate suits can only get away with this because the citizenry who vastly outnumber them have been manipulated into accepting their cancerous behavior.

The ability of war profiteers and empire managers to push for more war and militarism around the world directly affects how much of our nation’s wealth and resources are allocated to supporting the needs of ordinary people at home, and threatens us all with the looming possibility of nuclear armageddon. The imperial propaganda machine works so hard to manufacture consent for this madness because otherwise nobody would consent to it.

The oligarchs and government agencies who run the US-centralized empire are able to exploit our tendency to only care about our immediate surroundings to construct global mechanisms which affect everything — including our immediate surroundings. All it takes is a little narrative manipulation coupled with our own nearsightedness to keep us from seeing what they’re doing.

They destabilize entire regions in the global south with war and imperialist extraction, and when people start fleeing those horrible conditions they use propaganda to manipulate those in the global north into hating immigrants instead of focusing on what’s driving the mass exoduses.

They deliberately maintain a level of unemployment to artificially depress wages, and then propagandize the working poor into thinking the unemployed are parasitic welfare moochers.

They create a controlled opposition false dichotomy between two mainstream political factions who both serve the capitalist empire in every meaningful way, and then manipulate both sides into blaming all the problems this causes on the other side instead of on the architects of this whole disaster.

These manipulations would not work if our circles of compassion were sufficiently wide. The same moral myopia which causes us to fail to see a Palestinian child as worthy of our care and attention also causes us to fail to recognize the underlying causes of all the major problems we see all around us.

It’s true that caring about that Palestinian child, in and of itself, will yield you no personal material gain. But being the sort of person who would care about that Palestinian child will help pave the way from hell on earth to paradise. Enough humans having a wide enough circle of compassion to care about the suffering of other humans who they will never meet is all it will take for us to create a healthy world.

Our species can no longer existentially afford small circles of compassion. We can no longer afford ignorance and apathy. We’ve got to start learning about what’s happening in the world, thinking in terms of global community, and caring about our fellow beings on this planet in the way we care for our friends and neighbors.

Sure that’s not our tendency right now, but every species eventually hits a point where it needs to adapt or go the way of the dinosaur. That’s where we’re at right now. The days where “rugged individualism” could be defended as a rational worldview are long over, if it was ever rational to begin with.

This isn’t the twelfth century. We’re not going from birth to death in tiny communities unconnected to the rest of the world. Whatever device you’re reading this on has parts from multiple foreign countries, which passed through countless foreign hands to come into yours. We all touch one another’s lives around the world from distances which used to have no relevance to the human experience of this planet.

We need to begin thinking, feeling, and living in accordance with this new reality. We cannot continue along the ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory that our small circles of compassion have made possible, or else we will go extinct.

That’s why you should care about Gaza. Because humanity’s collective failure to care about such things is driving our species further and further into misery and dystopia, and closer and closer to the precipice of eternal oblivion.

Radagast: The Cure for Climate Anguish

The Cure for Climate Anguish. Rintrah, by Radagast. Sept. 7, 2024.

So I’ll try not to waste too many words on this, but the Dutch Extinction Rebellion protesters are blocking the entrance to the state museum in Amsterdam.

Ted Kaczynski famously warned that protesters should not create a rift between themselves and the general public. Rather, they should seek to find adherents, by attacking the excesses of the system they oppose. For his anti-tech revolution, he recommended focusing on genetic manipulation, rather than, let’s say, the electricity grid.

So if you block the entrance to the state museum, preventing people who have very little spare time from going to the museum, you’re inevitably just marginalizing yourself. You’re also marginalizing yourself of course if you start piling other leftists causes on top of your cause, like the Palestinians.

But I don’t think these people are seriously trying to save the world. I think they want to be able to say to themselves that they were “on the right side of history” and “tried everything”. Above all else, they’re trying to treat their own existential anguish.

They kind of ran out of ideas, so now they’re settling on a kind of “fifteen degrees to Hitler” leftist social shaming strategy. The fossil fuel industry is Hitler. ING, the Dutch bank, funds Hitler, so they’re nazi’s. The nazi bank also funds the museum, so the museum are nazi sympathizers.

But this is a bit of a dead-end social strategy. At this point, my honest recommendation is to just accept that the attempt to stop global warming has failed and we’re going to die.

“It was all looking pretty bleak. But then people blocked the entrance to a museum funded by a bank that also funds the fossil fuel industry and things began to get better!”

The Africans are fucked, the elephants are fucked, the orangutans are fucked.

But let’s be honest to ourselves. The African population is projected to swell to 3.5 billion by 2100. Global warming or no global warming, they were fucked to begin with. Their fertile soils are flushing down into the ocean.

Congo had 12 million people in 1950. They had 101 million in 2020. They will have 379 million by 2100. What did you think was going to happen? “Oh no, global warming caused millions of people in Congo to die of starvation in 2050 who would have otherwise died in a Malthusian catastrophe in 2080!”

Most people don’t zoom out, they live in the here and now. If you zoom out you’ll get anxious, because you will see your own ugly old mug and your death on the horizon. But if you’re going to zoom out, it would be better if you would recognize the inevitability of collapse too.

Nobody really knows exactly what’s going to happen, but you don’t have to be a genius, to recognize collapse is baked into the system by now. Forget about global warming for a moment. We don’t have the natural resources we need to keep the system going. The aquifers are depleting, our soils are flushing into the ocean, the pollinating insects are dying from our pesticides, our sperm counts are crashing and most of the population is obese.

The Koreans and Japanese are dying out, the Afghans and the Congolese are undergoing a population explosion. Call me racist if you want, but I don’t think the Amish-Afghan-Congolese coalition is going to build the same sort of society as the Japanese and the Koreans did.

If you think the temperatures we’ll get by 2050 are terrifying, wait until you see the resource depletion problem that kicks in much earlier. We don’t have the natural resources we need for the whole sustainable energy transition, there’s very little copper left in the world.

And if you think the resource depletion is scary, wait until you see the real problem, the pandemic problem. Congo has always had monkeypox. But in the old days people lived in isolated villages, so the virus would die out for lack of hosts, before finding its way into the next village.

But now people are living in giant refugee camps, in cities where children with bullet holes in their body lay in the same hospital bed as children with monkeypox. People now live in refugee camps where a hundred people have to share the same toilet. The women are forced to prostitute themselves, to feed their children. Just as nature tries to be merciful to the chickens we put in cages, nature tries to be merciful to the poor people stuck living in these refugee camps.

When you go from 12 million people to 101 million people, you make it much easier for a virus to spread to the next host, before dying out. Add some airplanes and truck drivers to that and a virus can spread to multiple other countries. That’s what happened to monkeypox. I said it before, I’ll say it again: Orthopox viruses killed 300-500 million people in the 20th century, even though smallpox was extinct by 1980. When this goes wrong, it goes very wrong.

“We’re going to save the Africans from global warming!”

Bro, you can’t save the Africans from monkeypox. The vaccines have finally arrived, but they won’t start vaccinating until they’ve trained the personnel, so the first vaccines will be administered in October at earliest. After that it’s a week or two before the vaccine is actually effective.

They will have 380,000 vaccines, on a population of 90 million in Congo alone. The capital city Kinshasa has already had its first 11 detected cases. There are 17 million people living there.

Good luck. This is going to turn into the same thing as SARS2, you’re just going to accelerate its evolution by vaccinating against it.

“I wonder what’s going to happen…”

Well, I have often released animals in Sim Life that showed this growth pattern and ate all the plants before the plants could produce seeds, so allow me to spoil the ending for you: They’re going to die. You can stabilize the ecosystem a bit, by releasing a plague virus before the animal population peaks, but otherwise they will probably just make all your plants extinct too.

But that’s just Congo. Nigeria will have 477 million by 2100, Ethiopia will be at 366 million. The EU will have 420 million by 2100, so yes, Nigeria alone would have more people than the EU. What do you think is going to happen?

By 2100 Nigeria would have the population density of the Netherlands! Forget about improving yields for a moment. In the Netherlands, we’re using 7% of our land, just for housing. Your food production is going to decline, simply because you’ll need to use your most fertile farmland to build houses and roads for your population. After all, your first cities like Lagos emerged in fertile river deltas, not in the middle of the desert up north.

We obviously won’t make it that far, collapse is baked into the system by now. But people don’t want to hear this, they want to think they can still dig their way out of this hole.

The crown of trees looks like this:
(see his post for pic)

This is how they stop pathogens from spreading. For generations, people living in the jungle did the same thing, they were highly xenophobic, they avoided other tribes.

But now countries like Congo are becoming an actual unified whole. And the number of flights worldwide exploded:
(again, see his site for pic)

So take a guess what’s going to happen.

The writing is on the wall by now.

Like the era of antibiotics, the era of controlling viruses through vaccination is of limited duration.

We’re now entering the pandemic era. Global warming will be of secondary concern.

Welsh on Collapse

Types Of Civilization Collapse. Ian Welsh. September 4, 2024.

We’ve had a couple posts recently on collapse. One, by Nate Wilcox, on the possibility of civil war and a another by commenter Grim Jim on just how many people would die in a civilization collapse.

Let’s take a look at the dimensions of collapse.

First is slow vs. fast. John Michael Greer tends to push slow, though his position is more nuanced than that. In the slow collapse things just keep getting shittier, with, perhaps, some break points. (If there’s a civil war, there’s a big jump in crap.) In this model it’s hard to say exactly when the collapse happens. When did the Western Roman Empire fall? There are easily half a dozen possible dates one could argue for, and that’s a collapse complete with a barbarian invasion.

In general expect countries which can feed and fuel themselves to be in the slow collapse bucket, though there’ll be exceptions, especially if they can’t defend themselves. Canada is one of those, if it isn’t invaded by America, which it probably will be. Russia is also in it, if they don’t wind up in a nuclear war.

Remember that modern agriculture will be effected by collapse: heavy use of fertilizer, pesticides and oils makes it vulnerable. So if a country appears to have a massive surplus, well, it may not. When AMOC ends and Europe loses ten degrees celcius overnight, they may as well.

The same here is true of water: when glaciers finish melting and most snow pack is gone, there’s going to be a lot less of it. So look at where the surplus food and water is coming from.

Second is distribution by time and place. Everyone likes to quote Gibson, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Some countries have already collapsed. Sri Lanka, for example. Others are further along the path: in the first world, Britain’s a good example. Within countries some places collapse first: Northern England is notably a hole. Catholic Belfast has never not been poor, and so on.

In the US there are places where we can be sure of regional collapse—as Sean-Paul pointed out to me, the Texas triangle is just going to run out of water in a couple decades. The American Southwest is doomed for pretty much the same reason.

As for that, the homelessness epidemic shows that for many Americans, the collapse is already here.

Internationally Bangladesh will be one of the first high-population countries to collapse. Among major countries, India will be one of the first. The Europeans can go any time when the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) ends: and that’s due sometime in the next 50 years, as a “when not if” proposition. I don’t know Africa well enough, but obviously multiple countries there are already close to collapse and the only thin which could put that off would be concerted efforts by China (financially and developmentally) and Russia (food and resource aid.)

China’s a hard one to predict: they have huge climate change vulnerabilities, especially to flooding in the North, heat in the North and water in general. On the other hand, if they play it smart they have the world’s industrial base and the best chance of adaptation and mitigation, especially due to their alliance with Russia, which will keep them in resources and food longer than otherwise. Since Russia mutually benefits, they’ll keep the Chinese topped up as a priority.

Which leads to the bigger point: when food starts getting scarce countries will stop exporting, and this is when food importing countries will start real collapse (and food riots, and civil war.)

As for water scarcity, that’s when you’ll get water wars.

And both will exacerbate any internal tensions. When there’s not enough to eat or drink, the “other” whoever that is, is likely to get it in the neck. Countries with significant internal rifts, like India between Hindus and Muslims/High and Low-Caste will see incredible violence and mass murder of minorities. Whether that also describes America is a question much debated, but at the least there will be a vast increase in discrimination and at the worst purges or even civil war.

In Europe there will be huge backlashes against visible minorities, especially Muslim ones and perhaps also Jews, as they are tarred with genocide and accusations of controlling governments.

I would suggest to expect a general pattern of slow decline punctuated by cliff-drops. Things will slowly get shittier, then suddenly get a lot shittier. To give a small example, in Ontario where I live, before Covid you could expect to be seen in an emergency department within a couple hours and to get an MRI or CT scan within a couple months, often a few weeks. Now it takes ten to twelve hours to be seen in an emergency (unless you’re obviously bleeding out or can’t breathe) and imaging tests can take six to nine months.

In collapse some foods (starting with imported ones) will go from widely available to just not on the shelf. Medicines which are imported will stop being available, again in slow decline then suddenly, almost impossible to find.

Slow, then precipitous, then slow, then precipitous.

The general prescription here, for small groups and individuals is to make yourself as independent of the grid as possible, to figure out how to grow climate controlled food, and to find a water source. Even in slow collapse models there will be large numbers of brownouts, water will be shitty if available (hello England) and so on. If you can’t handle at least a few hours or days off-grid, life will be miserable.

Collapse isn’t a disaster movie, though there are parts of it that are. (All the people made homeless by wildfires know this, and there will be coastal inundations). Rather it’s a series of long slide, punctuated by catastrophes.

Rees: On Being a Snowflake in an Avalanche

On Being a Snowflake in an Avalanche: The Catastrophe of Overshoot and How to Cope. William E. Rees, Resilience. July 11, 2024.

This article is divided into three parts. Part 1 is the scene-setter, a rundown of humanity’s overshoot predicament and how we got into it. Part 2 chronicles my career-long response to understanding overshoot from an ecological perspective. If you’re still with me for Part 3, I share a few lessons learned and offer some advice for coping with the challenges of both knowing about and experiencing the consequences of overshoot.

Part 1. Some History of Humanity’s Overshoot Predicament 

Over a decade ago, one of the most comprehensive assessments of global climate to date showed that the mean global temperature for the first decade of this century was approaching the highest levels in the past 11,000 years. A more recent article suggests that temperatures in the early 2020s are actually unprecedented in the past 24,000 years, and that the magnitude and rate of heating over the last 150 years far exceeds the magnitude and rates Earth has experienced over the entire 24-millennia period. It is no surprise, then, that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently declared 2023 to be the warmest year in the instrumental record and that Antarctic sea ice coverage had dropped to a record low. 

The beat goes on—the most recent data available show January, February and March 2024 to be the hottest January, February and March on record (just the latest in a series of ten). Looking ahead, our current policy track would result in ~2.7C mean global warming by century’s end, and one credible study argues that, with fast and slow feedbacks, even current atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are sufficient to generate 10C heating. But even 2.7 degrees warming is sufficient to flatten agriculture in many areas and render large areas of Earth uninhabitable. Analysis shows under a range of warming scenarios, that the projected geographical shift in the normal human temperature niche by 2100 would force the unprecedented migration of one to three billion people to thermally safer parts of the planet. Picture the abandonment of major cities and megacities, the invasion of rural areas by desperate millions and an ungovernable world in geopolitical turmoil. 

And that’s just global heating. Alarming as these data are, global heating is only the most palpable symptom of climate change which is, itself, only one co-symptom of a much greater meta-problem, ecological overshoot. Overshoot means that: 

Humans are consuming even self-producing resources (e.g., fish stocks, forests) and replenishable resources (e.g., fresh-water aquifers, arable soils) faster than they can regenerate and producing (often toxic) waste in excess of nature’s assimilation capacity. 

Think about that for a moment. You should soon realize that virtually all so-called “environmental” problems are actually caused by overshoot. Even anthropogenic climate change is an excess waste problem. (Carbon dioxide is the greatest waste product by weight of industrial activity.) The numerous other co-symptoms of overshoot include plunging biodiversity, fisheries collapses, tropical deforestation, land/soil degradation, groundwater depletion, rising cancer rates, falling sperm counts, contaminated food chains, the pollution of everything, etc., etc., most of which are worsening with each new assessment. 

It should be clear from this dismal accounting that, left unattended, overshoot is a terminal condition. The depletion and pollution of the ecosphere is a genuine existential threat, not only to human “civilization” but also to the existence of thousands of other species with whom we share the planet. It is therefore a supreme irony that everything the world community is doing to address global heating—switching to wind and solar electricity, promoting dubious CO2 extraction technologies, subsidizing electric vehicles, etc.—is not only not fixing the climate but is actually worsening overshoot. Fossil fuel use is still increasing, and carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions rise to new records annually. Yet we remain in effective policy paralysis.

How stupid is that?

This is not just a facetious question. Homo sapiens is actually a much duller blade that most people can imagine. The ecological crisis is hardly breaking news; the road to overshoot is potholed with cogent warnings. Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, sometimes credited with catalyzing the environmental movement and an unprecedented raft of environmental legislation, was published in 1962. A decade later (and over half a century ago) the Club of Rome’s (in)famous Limits to Growth (LtG) projected already existing trends to show that pollution and resource scarcity could lead to global economic and population collapse in the mid-21st century. William Catton’s unsurpassed classic, Overshoot, appeared in 1982. The Union of Concerned Scientists published the first of many World Scientists’ Warnings to Humanity in 1992, arguing that humans are so altering the living world that it may soon be unable to sustain life as we know it. 

Significantly, 1992 is also the year in which The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted; it came into effect two years later with 165 signatories and 198 parties. (In addition, corporate interests and environmental organizations participate as advisors and observers.) Nation-states agreed to return their GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Toward this end, the convention’s decision-making body, The Conference of the Parties (COP), has held 28 so-called COP Conferences—the most recent in Dubai, in 2023—on measures to reduce emissions and reverse climate change through decisive action. The first more or less universal “legally binding” global climate agreement was adopted at COP 21 in Paris in 2015, with the parties committing to limit global heating to 2 Celsius degrees above pre-industrial levels, while striving to keep the increase to 1.5 degrees or less. 

Simultaneously, climate concern, combined with the rising costs of fossil fuels and massive subsidies from governments, catalyzed the emergence of a whole new “clean” energy sector. In recent years, investment in wind turbines, solar panel installations, nuclear plants (clean?), grid improvements, electric vehicles and related infrastructure has been breathtaking, surpassing investment in fossil fuels and reaching $1.7 trillion in 2023. One encouraging seminal review shows that since the mid-2000s, a large and growing number of research groups have concluded that 100% renewable energy “is feasible worldwide at low cost.” The public are enthusiastic supporters, having been convinced by such studies and relentless industry promotion, that a painless and economically attractive transition from fossil fuels to “green renewable energy” is already well underway. 

What’s not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. During this 32-year period of solemn pledges, binding agreement and policy action to reduce GHGs, carbon dioxide emissions actually ballooned from 22.5 billion tonnes (Gt) in 1992 to 37.2 Gt in 2023, and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased from 360 to 420 parts per million, i.e., to 50% above pre-industrial levels. In addition, a third of carbon emissions is dissolved in the seas causing ocean acidification. Perhaps most remarkably, in 1992, fossil fuels provided about 81% of the world’s primary energy; 32 years of progress later, fossil fuels still account for 82% of consumption. It may seem beyond belief, but half the fossil fuels ever consumed by humanity have been burned since 1990! Such is the power of exponential growth.

But what about that massive investment in clean electricity? The positive effect on emissions has largely been neutered by increasing global demand for energy. Wind and solar power (W&S), where most investment is going, accounted for only 14.3% of global electricity production in 2023 (compared to ~60% by fossil fuels). In short, despite the promotional hype, billions invested, and rapid capacity growth, W&S electricity contributed only ~2.7% to the world’s final (consumer level) energy consumption last year. The global community would have to install over four times the current multi-decade cumulative global stock of wind and solar infrastructure to fully displace fossil fuels from electricity generation alone—and this assumes no increase in demand. Problem solved? Not quite—we’d still have to address the non-electric and hard-to-electrify uses of energy; as noted, fossil fuels are holding steady at over 80% of the global energy mix. 

These data from the real world suggest that the clean energy transition is actually barely underway. There is no possibility that we will achieve quantitatively equivalent “100% renewable energy” by 2050. (And if we try, note that the mining, transportation, refining, manufacturing, installation, maintenance and replacement associated with W&S is powered mainly by fossil fuels and produces major collateral ecological damage.) This is why the stricter Paris goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C is already in the rearview mirror, and Earth will likely experience 2.0C heating by 2050 well on the way to, well, who knows? 

Should we be surprised? Not really—after all, the renewable energy transition is being sold partly on grounds that it involves massive capital investment, promises excellent profit-making opportunities and creates thousands of jobs. The reality is that the much-vaunted green energy revolution is really an attempt to maintain the market-based capitalist status quo—at best it’s “business-as-usual-by-alternative-means”—when the growth-oriented status quo is the structural source of the problem. 

It is no coincidence then, that since the entire mythic “limit global warming” show debuted in 1992, the two signature drivers of overshoot, real gross world product and the human population have increased nearly four-fold and 45% respectively. We can safely conclude that the world community’s singular focus on climate change has served as a major distraction from the real existential threat—the worsening meta-problem of global overshoot. 

To repeat, “How stupid is that?” 

Part 2. My Response over a Career as an Academic Ecologist

I’ve reviewed these data because the half-century in question is the context for my entire academic career. I have spent five decades struggling to understand the human eco-predicament and the enigma of inaction with the “stupid” question never far from mind. In fact, it still lingers in the air like stale smoke. My work and that of thousands of other scientists has had little palpable impact on the state of the world—though I suppose things might have been worse without it—and left me only slightly less befuddled. 

And I am in a better position than most to confront eco-reality. 

It was my good fortune to spend much of my youth playing and working on my grandparent’s farm in southern Ontario. This was invaluable life experience, regrettably not often available to young people today. Even as a ten-year-old, my daily chores on the land and the simple act of eating food we had grown infused me with certain knowledge that humans are of the Earth, made from soil and rain. This juvenile epiphany permanently shaped my educational path, steering me toward becoming a PhD ecologist. 

By the early 1970s I was beginning my academic career, a still wet-behind-the-ears but enthusiastic assistant professor of human ecology. Inspired by the recently published Limits to Growth, I seized an opportunity to give an elaborate seminar to a committee of senior colleagues on the growing relevance of the ecological concept of carrying capacity as applied to humans. 

Big mistake? 

Among the audience was a prominent resource economist who took me aside after my presentation and opined that, while I appeared to be intelligent enough, I was apparently ignorant that economists had thoroughly trashed LtG and essentially abolished the notion of human carrying capacity. Hadn’t I heard of the law of supply and demand? Was I unaware of human ingenuity and technological prowess? Local scarcities? No problem—that’s why we have globalization and international trade in scarce resources. He explicitly warned that should I continue down the obviously sterile path to resource limits and carrying capacity, my academic career at the University of British Columbia would be “nasty, brutish and short.” To help me avoid the inevitable, he kindly provided a list of corrective readings.

These readings served only to prove that economists were utterly ecologically blind. (How stupid is that?) Contrary to received wisdom, technology doesn’t actually increase carrying capacity—it merely accelerates the rate of resource exploitation and drawdown; global trade doesn’t increase domestic carrying capacity—it merely shuffles productivity (biocapacity) around, temporarily relieving local limits while depleting distant surpluses. And how about the absurd assumption underlying economists’ basic models that the economy is essentially separate from, and independent of, “the environment?” 

These trivial—but apparently novel—insights actually reignited my interest in carrying capacity and led me (with my graduate students) to develop ecological footprint analysis (EFA) and accounts. Eco-footprinting uses quantifiable material flows to compare any human population’s demand on productive ecosystems (its eco-footprint) with nature’s supply (biocapacity). EFA confirms unambiguously that many countries are running ecological deficits (consuming more bioresources than domestic ecosystems can supply) and that the total human population even at average material standards, greatly exceeds long-term global carrying capacity—i.e., humanity is well into overshoot. 

Three decades after the first formal publication on EFA, the human eco-footprint (EF) remains one of the world’s best-known (un)sustainability indicators, has generated an industry of EF analysts and has inspired a number of spinoffs (e.g., carbon footprint, water footprint, material footprint). That’s the good news. The bad news is that its success has served also to intensify condemnation of the EF concept and methods as “so misleading as to preclude their use in any serious science or policy context.” Our point-by-point rebuttals of such critiques ricochet harmlessly off the ideological armor of neoliberal economists and techno-optimists. 

The intellectual slagging gets worse. In fact, anyone who attempts to associate the contribution of growing populations to the human eco-predicament (a major strength of EFA), will need to develop a certain intellectual insouciance to direct ad hominem attacks. For frequent repetition of this sin, I have repeatedly been characterized in social media as anti-human, eco-fascist and racist. 

“Neo-Malthusian” is perhaps the mildest of such negative epithets (though one I am happy to accept). In a recent widely read paper, my co-author and I used the context of global overshoot to critique the so-called energy transition and Green New Deal thinking. The reaction from renewable energy proponents was swift and intemperate. The journal’s editor was so cowed that he published an apology for allowing the paper through the peer review process (we were actually well-reviewed). Said editor seemed particularly exercised because we had argued that the world community should consider a controlled downsizing, and we had the temerity to suggest setting “…a limit to the world population so as to avoid overshoot… an unfortunate echo of Malthusianism that is surely not even conceivable today”. 

What I find “not conceivable today” is that any even half-informed person cannot recognize limits, the reality of overshoot and the possible implosion of the ecosphere. It should also be clear that the only effective solutions will entail planned absolute reductions in economic throughput (energy/material consumption and waste production) and smaller populations. In short, overshoot and its various symptoms cannot be resolved without major economic restructuring, significant changes to high-income lifestyles, and global population planning. 

Perhaps, for some, fear of the inevitable is negated by belief that humans are destined to abandon a shriveled Earth and populate the galaxy. Or perhaps we will upload our minds and consciousness to some universal computer, digital immortality forever freeing us from the messiness of corporeal existence. Others take comfort in—or even welcome—the prophesized biblical end times and their ascent into heaven. (Good luck with that.)

On one hand I sympathize; there is good reason to fear. The modern human enterprise is utterly dependent on abundant energy (Fig. 1) and this creates a double-barreled dilemma. Simply “stopping fossil fuel” without an adequate substitute would collapse the economy (i.e., modern civilization). On the other hand, continuing our use of fossil fuels risks the wrath of climate change, worsens overshoot, and will likely collapse both the ecosphere and the economy (i.e., modern civilization). 

click through to Rees' article at resilience+ for:

Figure 1. Chart of energy consumption vs GDP 

Sometimes when contemplating this dilemma, I see the human enterprise as a monster avalanche and each of us little more than incorporated—even willfully participating—snowflakes. We are simply swept along in the furious deluge, our best efforts useless in slowing its gathering momentum. Frankly, it is increasingly evident, to me at least, that we are innately incapable of comprehending the full scope of our predicament let alone controlling how things unravel. 

But should that stop us from developing a well-articulated “Plan B?” And how can ordinary citizens cope while contributing to a softer landing?

Part 3. Lessons Learned and Advice for Carrying On

As someone who’s been contemplating questions like these for more than fifty years, I have a few suggestions. First of all, learn not to take matters personally—neither the human dilemma nor attacks on efforts to awaken the sleepwalkers. Neither you nor the world will benefit from fits of depression or your withdrawal from the fray. Instead, revel in your knowledge and understanding even if it’s partially wrong (which it inevitably will be). There is a certain satisfaction in being able to interpret sensibly what’s going on and sharing your understanding with others. You might even learn something from the debates and likely push-back! Perhaps the most important thing is not to allow events beyond your control to prevent you from celebrating life—grab that bouquet, nettles and all! (For one thing, it’s unlikely that you’ll get a second round!) 

Of course, informed people want to “do something,” and there are dozens of books out there describing the 100 things you can do to save the world. But be cautious—offloading responsibility onto individuals and debasing the common good is part of the neoliberal agenda that has shaped public discourse and elevated corporate values, particularly in North America, since the 1970s. Drastically modifying one’s lifestyle may be a genuine response for some, but is mere virtue signaling for others. In any event, it has no detectable effect on the state of the world. Sorry.

“But wait,” you protest. “If we all just consumed less, it would make an enormous difference.” Agreed, if everyone chose poverty, for example, the environment might catch a break—but not everyone will, so the environment won’t. The simple fact is that humanity’s ecological predicament is a collective problem best addressed through collective solutions. Individuals cannot pass environmental protection legislation, implement ecological tax reform (full social cost pricing), impose resource quotas and rationing, build adequate public transit, implement population planning, replace GDP with a genuine well-being indicator, etc., etc. These are full-on, macro-level “Plan B” activities. The really heavy lifting can be done only by senior governments or other umbrella organizations in the wider public interest. Even the bottom-up activities of individuals and sustainability-oriented community groups (e.g., the degrowth, transition towns, circular economy, and similar eco-advocacy organizations) will be most effective in a supportive top-down policy environment.

But there is a catch. The political process in many countries (particularly the US) has largely been co-opted by powerful elites and the corporate sector. Those who fund politicians’ electoral campaigns expect—and receive—reciprocal favors. An ecological “Plan B” is not among them. Modern so-called democracies are plagued by regulatory capture by the corporate sector or other vested interests, which have succeeded in kneecapping the US Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and reversing many important environmental reforms passed since the 1970s. 

If we are to upend such corrosive activities and reignite democratic fervor, we may have to protest—riot even—by the thousands in the streets. In the meantime, let’s at least recognize that democracies can work only through the involvement of well-informed citizens. Write those letters criticizing government stupidity (such as subsidies to both fossil fuels and electric vehicles) and encouraging constructive policies. Repeat often. Make sure also to attend all-candidates meetings at election time armed with sharply-honed questions about proposed legislation or simply your favorite candidate’s stance on climate or biodiversity loss or gross pollution or population planning, i.e., on overshoot. In short, we have an obligation as citizens to be a public pain in the ass to errant senior politicians and wannabe leaders. 

On a more micro-“Plan B” level, citizen activists should focus attention on the necessity for relocalization in the (increasingly likely) event that “senior management” fails absolutely. Whether nation-states and the global system precipitously collapse or slowly unravel, the future of humanity will be local. As one historian astutely observed, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.” 

In this light, should not local environmental and other citizens’ groups be organizing to cope with unfolding eco-political reality (as opposed to lobbying to subsidize larger families, for example). How do we reestablish a sense of mutual dependence and community? And how can committed communities best acquire the basic skills, tools, equipment and land to ensure local food sufficiency and otherwise enhance their economic self-reliance in the event of energy shortages or the breakdown of global or national supply chains? 

Indeed, as matters unfold, those best equipped for an economically smaller future may not be wealthy elites but rather Indigenous peoples and others who have acquired the skills needed to live close to the land. In any event, forward-looking communities should be planning for the downsizing and relocalization of their economies and the reintegration of human activities as much as possible with nearby supportive ecosystems. The survival of “civilization” requires that the human enterprise be reorganized into manageable, human-scale spatial and eco-economic units consistent with the necessity of one-planet living.

Let’s be honest. Preparing the present to thrive in the future sounds like a formidable task. And it is—you will likely spend a lifetime at it. But after the daily fray, go home, open a bottle of wine and enjoy dinner. Remember, we may live in uncertainty, but the bouquet of life is by no means all barbs and nettles.

Bardi: The Day When Food Ran Out

The Day When Food Ran Out. Ugo Bardi. June 19, 2024.

This is a science fiction story. Nothing in it refers to the real world unless you want to think it does.

As a Western citizen, you never thought you could have a problem with food scarcity. Not at all; famines are things of the past; they are about medieval peasants scratching the ground with wooden plows, about farmers exterminated by communists in the Soviet Union, about religious fanatics praying for rain. Things that others have to worry about; that mass of dark-skinned people who wear kaftans and turbans, who hate Western freedom and abundance. Those wretches who refuse to accept the rules of liberal democracy. They are those likely to experience famines.

For you, instead, the preoccupation with food is that you have too much of it and you are overweight. You have to diet, even though no matter what you do, you seem to keep gaining weight. But such is the price of prosperity.

Yet, not everything is well in the best of words. You may have noticed something was wrong when the COVID scourge swept the land. At that time, all of a sudden, everything that looked normal changed into something you wouldn’t have imagined before. A new normal, where the government locked you inside your home, forced you to wear a face mask, told you where you could go and where you couldn’t, what exact distance you should maintain from your fellow human beings, and more. Fortunately, Western science found a solution with advanced vaccines, and now the COVID-19 plague is a thing of the past. At least, this is what everyone says, although sometimes, you wonder whether it is true. You tried discussing that on social media, but you were told your post went against the community rules.

Yet, the COVID-19 story tells you that crossing from complacency to panic takes very little. And something ominous is mounting. You noted that the cost of food was increasing, but so far, that was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. As a Middle-Class Westerner, food never was a large fraction of your budget. The increase in food prices just made a dent in your disposable income.

But food prices keep rising. And they are now large enough that you can’t avoid noticing the effects. It is not just your disposable income that’s being affected. You have to cut on some foods you used to be able to afford. Less meat, for instance. Then, you discover you can’t afford the fancy foods labeled “natural” and “additive-free.” The Sunday trip to the restaurant with your family suddenly seems to have become something of the past. Too expensive. You also notice that many restaurants are closing, especially those fast food joints that once offered cheap food that even the poor could afford.

Your checking account now goes into the red by the end of the month. You have to be careful while you wait for your next paycheck to come. You have to buy smaller packages; a pint of milk, rather than a quarter gallon. It is not that you go hungry during the last days of the month, but you have to be careful.

Then, your credit card won’t let you get more into the red, and during the last days of the month you just can’t buy anything. Those days, the kids are whining that they are hungry and there is nothing they like in the refrigerator. Not even anything you like. A dinner on stale bread only? It is the best you can do on some days. You try to discuss this matter on social media, but you are told that your post goes against the community rules and is erased.

Then, the switch occurs. Food scarcity ceases to be a background problem that everyone tends to ignore. It suddenly becomes the centerpiece of the daily news. Words such as “famine,” “denutrition,” and “starvation” are no longer taboo. The government spokespeople openly say that drastic measures are necessary to fight the new threat to Westerners’ well-being. It is caused by evil foreigners who hate our freedom, and so they make it difficult to supply food to our great nation. However, the government is working hard to solve the problem by increasing military spending and developing new genetically modified food. We have to trust science. A solution will be found soon.

The government enacts a series of measures that look eerily similar to the “Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions” of COVID-19. You are not forced to wear a mask this time, but you must stay home. You have to “save calories” as much as you can. Exercising by running in the streets is forbidden. Gyms are closed by government decrees. Schools are also closed — it is a way to save calories. Your office tells you that they are closing down for a while. You’ll still receive your paycheck, but you will work only by telepresence. Using your car is not forbidden, but the government forces gas stations to close. We need to save gas for our military, you are told. You can keep the gasoline you have in your gas tank, but you can use it only for emergencies.

Food stamps were once only for the poor, but now everyone has them in the form of an electronic card called a “Green Card.” It gives you a limited allowance of bread, biscuits, vegetables, fruit, and a little meat for 2000 calories per day. It is not forbidden to buy food beyond your allowance, but prices are rapidly skyrocketing, and supermarkets now store the “extra” food on partially covered shelves so high to be difficult to reach, just like once it was done for porn magazines. A black market for forbidden food appears. Shady figures appear on the streets, selling t-bone steaks and pastrami at high prices.

The government cracks down on wasteful food, mainly meat. Restaurants reduce their menus to a few items, and many simply close. It is said that fancy restaurants are still open for the rich, but they do not advertise, nor are they visible from the street. You have to ring a bell to enter. You heard that from your neighbor, with whom you can still chat over the fence. But if you try to mention that on social media, your post is blocked, and you are told it is against the community standards.

The government enforces stiff penalties on the black market of food. Eventually, a drastic decision is made: cash is abolished, and all monetary transactions are allowed only using one’s green card. The government gives 48 hours to people to convert the cash they keep at home into an allowed electronic form at a bank, with the proviso that no more than $1000 can be converted in each transaction. Long lines are seen in front of banks, with people desperately trying to save at least some of their cash. Your neighbor tells you over the fence that, while standing in line, he saw people collapsing because of exhaustion and stress. Fortunately, you didn’t have that much cash at home. But you are told by your bank that from now on, you won’t be able to spend more than 50 dollars per day. And they also tell you, confidentially, that if you do that every day for a long time, there could be consequences. These stories are not reported in the media, and if you try to discuss the matter on social media, you are told that your post goes against the community standards and it is erased.

Next, the government cracks down on food hoarding. “Prepping” becomes a bad word. The police can now enter your home anytime to check what you have in your kitchen and refrigerator. Those preppers who keep more than their allowance are designated as “enemies of the people,” punished by stiff penalties, including disabling their green card for a certain period. During that period, they can’t buy anything anywhere. It is said that many preppers die of malnutrition or kill themselves because of depression. Some are said to have exchanged their family jewels for a sandwich. If you mention that on social media, you are told it goes against the community standards.

The new-new normal is firmly in place. It is accompanied by slogans such as “don’t starve granny,” “trust science,” and “together we’ll make it.” The times are especially tough on the elderly. Your neighbor over the fence tells you that he heard from a neighbor that there was an old couple in a home not far away. They died of starvation together in their bed, and they were discovered only when the stench of their decomposing bodies became impossible to ignore. The media doesn’t mention anything like that, and it is against community standards to say that on social media.

The government announces promising new discoveries in the field of GM food. The war overseas is in full swing and surely victory is just behind the corner. More than once, you see from your window armored columns of tanks and trucks passing on the street. Where they are going, what they are doing, you cannot say.

You are still allowed a daily trip to the mall to stock up in the food you can buy with your Green Card. There, the supermarkets now act only as distribution centers for green card holders, at least those that remain open. You stop going there using your car: you have to save gas. Instead, you laboriously push a supermarket cart all the way home. Those carts have become rare. People don’t have gasoline anymore, and they use them in place of cars.

In your trips to the mall, you note that the quality and amount of food your green card can provide seems to be decreasing daily. Shops selling food have disappeared, and restaurants, too. Maybe there are still some open for the rich behind closed doors. But you cannot know, and if you try to ask the question on social media, you are told that your post goes against the community standards. Coffee shops are still open, and they sell you a black liquid that tastes like coffee but doesn’t give you any more the kick that it once did. Your green card will buy one cup, and it comes with a single sugar packet — sometimes they will give you two; a little miracle. Outside the shop, you often see young women standing. They are giving themselves to strangers for one sugar packet. Those who are especially good-looking want to have two. But you need that sugar to give you that little extra bit of energy you need to push the cart all the way home.

At home, the children are whining all the time. They don’t go to school anymore, and they seem to spend most of their time in their room, watching cartoons on TV. You do the same, slouched on the sofa in the living room. Discussions about the war and about Genetically Modified Organisms have now completely taken over the time slots on TV that once were used for advertising. The war is going well, our troops are winning. The enemy are still fighting, but victory is at hand, and then the world will be different. About GMOs, large amounts of money are given to the pharmaceutical industry to develop new methods of modification of the genome of plants in order to create more productive crops. They are said to be obtaining spectacular results that will soon be implemented in the form of food for the people. It is now called “'One Food Policy.' Doubting that goes against the community standards.

Looking out from your window, sometimes you see people running in the street, chased by policemen wearing body armor. More than once, you heard shots being fired not far away, but you understand that it would not be a good idea for you to investigate in person. In TV, you hear that any form of riot will be rapidly quelled by the army – if it ever happens. Discussing these matters goes against the community standard.

And then the day comes: the government announces on TV that the “One Food Policy' bore fruit. The GMO foods are ready. The news is all over the TV channels and the press. Images show trucks carrying boxes and boxes of the new foods, and the most exciting news is that they will be distributed for free. No need for your green card, just show up at the distribution centers, and you will have GM food for your family. GM foods are good, they are nutricious, they are what you need to return to the normal world.

People crowd again in front of the distribution centers; those who still have gas come with their cars, many come pushing old supermarket carts, others simply with empty plastic bags. The lines don’t seem as long as they could have been, since so few of these centers are left. And they move fast. People emerge from the shops with boxes labeled with the “GM” letters written in bright green characters. They load them in their cars or in the supermarket carts, or carry them home in the bags.

You push your cart all the way home and open the boxes. GM food comes in the form of solid bars, slightly sweet, with a curious aftertaste. There are also small plastic containers of a sauce that vaguely reminds the old barbecue sauce - a little of a strange aftertaste, too. There are also cans labeled as “GM cola.” Very sweet stuff, again with that weird aftertaste. But better than tap water, recently it didn’t smell so good.

The kids are happy. They had been abulic, doing nothing but watching TV, and they had become thin and even a little gaunt. Now, they can eat to their satisfaction. And they say on TV that schools will soon be reopened.

Certainly, you can’t expect from GM foods the same quality you had before the crisis. A vague sensation that what you eat is not exactly good for you. But saying that on social media would go against the community standards.

Days go by. You get more GM food from the supermarket, and you eat it with your family. You feel satiated but a a little tired. You notice that for days, you have been doing nothing but watching TV while slouched on the sofa. The office should reopen someday, just like the schools. But nothing is happening. There is nothing to do but eat those strange GM bars and watch TV.

You decide to take a walk. You know that walking is not encouraged: it wastes calories. But now that you have GM food, maybe you can try. You need to walk, you have spent too much time sitting on the sofa.

You emerge into the street. The quiet is eerie. Nobody is walking. An armored car passes by, running fast. It has darkened windows.

The silence is disquieting. Where is everybody? On the sidewalk, half hidden behind a bush, you see something. It is a body lying flat. It is your neighbor, you recognize him. He has his mouth open, his vitreous eyes looking at the sky. The body has a curious gray color and it smells of something that you can’t exactly identify. Something that’s a little like. . . a little like. . .

You turn around. You have to go home. You want to walk fast but, strangely, you feel exhausted. Every step takes an incredible effort. Strange, you are not so old to need a deambulator. And, yet, you have the sensation that walking without one is nearly impossible.

You manage to get back home. Even walking the two steps to the entrance door seems to require a superhuman effort. You get inside. Silence is total; where are the kids? Where is your wife? You don’t know, but you don’t really care. You pass in front of the mirror of the living room. You look strange, and you hadn’t noticed that your skin had taken that weird shade of gray.

You stumble onward until you fall heavily on the sofa. The TV is off—no, it is on. You push the buttons on the remote control, but nothing appears on the screen. All the channels show only noise, and the audio is just a faint hiss. What’s happening?

You suspect that asking that question would be against the community standard. But you don’t care. You lie flat on the sofa, looking at the ceiling. Your sight is blurred; a certain grayness invades your field of view. Gray, all is gray. Darker and darker. And then, black.

Dowd: Being the Calm in the Storm

Being the Calm in the Storm.  Michael Dowd, 2023.

The Collapse is Coming

The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? Peter Watts, The MIT Press Reader.
An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar... and mull over survival.


I’ve known Dan Brooks for 40 years now. Somehow we’re still talking to each other.

We’ve followed radically different trajectories since first meeting back in the ’80s. Dan built a truly impressive rap sheet of over 400 papers and book chapters, seven books, and too many awards, fellowships, and distinctions to count on your fingers and toes. I, in contrast, left academia in a huff (industry funding came with, shall we say, certain a priori preferences concerning the sort of results we’d be reporting) and became a science fiction writer. It’s a position from which, ironically, I’ve had more influence on actual scientists than I ever did as an academic — admittedly a low bar to clear.

And yet our paths continue to intersect. Dan offered me a post-doc in his lab around the turn of the century (DNA barcoding — I really, really sucked at it). A few years later I helped him relocate to Nebraska, leading to an encounter with the armed capuchins of the U.S. Border Patrol and eventual banishment from that crumbling empire. The protagonist of my novel “Echopraxia” is a parasitologist suspiciously named Daniel Brüks. And I once ended up one creepy handshake away from Viktor Orbán, when Dan finagled a speaking gig for me at Hungary’s iASK Symposium.

The dance continues. Sometimes we hug like brothers. Sometimes we feel like punching each other’s lights out (also, I suppose, like brothers). But one thing we never do is bore each other — and whenever Dan’s in town, we manage to meet up at a pub somewhere to reconnect. What follows is an edited record of one such meeting, more formal than most, which took place shortly after the publication of “A Darwinian Survival Guide.”


The following conversation was recorded in March 2024. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Peter Watts: In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas.

In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. What’s the strategy?

Daniel Brooks: Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

“Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work.”

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive? A completely dispassionate view would just say, “Well, you know, most of them won’t. Most of them are going to die.” But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine? In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?

Peter Watts: So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse —

Daniel Brooks: No.

Peter Watts: — you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”? In other words — and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy — if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?

Peter Watts: Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?

Daniel Brooks: That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

Peter Watts: Well, that said, that’s kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Daniel Brooks: Right, right. Yeah.

Peter Watts: And you take on quite explicitly the neo-protectionists, who basically want to preserve the system as it exists, or as it existed at one point in the idealized past, forever without end, as opposed to allowing the system to exercise its capacity to change in response to stress. You cite anoxic ocean blobs; you cite, quite brilliantly I thought, the devastating effect beavers have on their local habitat.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah.

Peter Watts: And you take on the sacred spirit animal of the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear. And the bottom line here is that shit happens, things change, trust life to find a way, ‘cause evolution hasn’t steered us wrong yet.

Daniel Brooks: Yeah.

Peter Watts: Now, this is an argument that some might say is invasible by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, “Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because she’s losing? I say, hard cheese!” And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?

Daniel Brooks: Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, here’s the fundamental response to any of this stuff. It’s, how’s it working out so far? OK? There’s a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. That’s what we’re saying.

One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, it’s ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation we’re in now.

“We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.”

Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what we’re saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.

Peter Watts: What you’ve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obvious — although I have to say, what you’re advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested. But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive one— the pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, you’re saying “high fitness equals low fitness” — that you need variation to cope with future change.

Daniel Brooks: Right.

Peter Watts: So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like — who was it that responded to “The Origin of Species” by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that.

Daniel Brooks: A lot of biology professors, who then wrote articles about how they actually had thought of it for themselves, but nobody paid any attention to that!

Peter Watts: And that might be one of the more essential values of this book — that it reminds us of things we should already know, but never thought about rigorously enough to actually realize.

Shifting gears to another key point in the book, democracy, which you describe as the one form of government that allows the possibility of change without violence. But you also admit — and this is a quote: “Our governance systems, long ago coopted as instruments for amplified personal power, have become nearly useless, at all levels from the United Nations to the local city council. Institutions established during 450 generations of unresolvable conflict cannot facilitate change because they are designed to be agents of social control, maintaining what philosopher John Rawls called ‘the goal of the well-ordered society.’ They were not founded with global climate change, the economics of wellbeing, or conflict resolution in mind.” So what you are essentially saying here is that anyone trying to adopt the Darwinian principles that you and Sal are advocating is going to be going up against established societal structures, which makes you, by definition, an enemy of the state.

Daniel Brooks: Yes.

Peter Watts: And we already live in a world where staging sit-down protests in favor of Native land rights or taking pictures of a factory farm is enough to get you legally defined as a terrorist.

Daniel Brooks: That’s right. Yeah.

Peter Watts: So, how are we not looking at a violent revolution here?

Daniel Brooks: That’s a really good point. I mean, that’s a really critical point. And it’s a point that was addressed in a conference a year ago that I attended, spoke in, in Stockholm, called “The Illusion of Control,” and a virtual conference two years before that called “Buying Time,” where a group of us recognized that the worst thing you could do to try to create social change for survival was to attack social institutions. That the way to cope with social institutions that were non-functional, or perhaps even antithetical to long-term survival, was to ignore them and go around them.

So let me give you an example: I was speaking with member representatives of a rural revitalization NGO in Nebraska a year ago, and they said, “OK, this rural revitalization stuff and climate migration, this sounds like a really good idea. How are we going to get the federal government to support these efforts?” And I said, “They’re not going to.” I said, “You have to understand that in the American situation, the two greatest obstacles to rural revitalization and climate migration are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a party of big cities; they don’t want to lose population. The Republican Party is the population of the rural areas; they don’t want people from the cities moving into their areas. Both parties are going to be against this. This is why Joe Biden’s, you know, ‘the climate president,’ but he’s not doing nearly enough. Not even close. Because these people are all locked into the status quo.” And so I told these people, I said, “You don’t ask for permission, and you don’t go to the federal government. You go to the local towns in these rural areas and you say, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ You then advertise for the kinds of people you want to come in. You want to have electricity self-sufficiency in your town. You need somebody who knows how to build and maintain a solar farm. Advertise for people like that in the big cities. Get them to come and live in your town. Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.”

Peter Watts: Maybe. But in cases where it’s been tried, the power utilities step in and squash such efforts as though they were bugs. Set up solar panels and the utility will charge you for “infrastructure maintenance” because by opting out of the grid, you’re not paying “your fair share.” Drive an electric vehicle and you might be subject to an additional “road tax” because, by not paying for gasoline, you’re not paying for road work. The system actively works to make these initiatives fail. And this power goes beyond just stifling progress. They have control of armed forces; they have a monopoly on state violence. We are not allowed to beat up the cops; the cops are allowed to beat us up.

Daniel Brooks: I suppose I have more faith in human nature than is warranted by the evidence. Sal and I do not think such local initiatives will be easy or that they will mostly succeed — at least not until things are so bad that they are the only workable option. What we are saying is that these local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble (move away from trouble, generalize in fitness space, and find something that works), and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now. At the same time, during climate perturbations, lots of organisms do not make it, so we need as many individual efforts as possible to increase the chances that someone will survive.

“Local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble, and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now.”

There is evidence that some people are doing this, sometimes with the blessing of local and state authorities and without arousing the interest of national authorities. What people need to do is have a commitment to survival, decide what their assets are and their local carrying capacity, and then go about doing the right thing as quietly as possible. As for your point about state violence: What happens if the cops in a small town are the people you go to church with?

Peter Watts: That’s an interesting question.

Daniel Brooks: That’s the point. I mean, what we’re trying to find out, one of the experiments that rural revitalization and, and climate migration is going to resolve for us, is, what is the largest human population that can safeguard itself against being taken over by sociopaths? Let me explain what I mean. Generally speaking, the larger the population, the smaller the number of people who actually control the social control institutions. So you have five different language groups in the city, but somehow it turns out that the people in charge of the religion, or the banks, or the governance only represent one of those language groups. They end up controlling everything. This is a breeding ground for sociopaths to take control. And sure enough, by about 9,000 years ago, when this is all in place, we begin to see religious and governance and economic institutions all support the notion of going to war to take from your neighbors what you want for yourself. And we’ve been at war with ourselves ever since then, and this was not an evolutionary imperative; this was a societal behavioral decision. It’s understandable, in retrospect, as a result of too many people, too high a population density. So you live in circumstances where people cannot identify the sociopaths before they’ve taken control. And that’s the subtext in the idea that one of the ways that we should deal with the fact that more than 50 percent of human beings now live in large cities in climate-insecure places, is for those people to redistribute themselves away from climate-insecure areas, into population centers of lower density, and cooperating networks of low-density populations, rather than big, condensed cities.

Peter Watts: Let’s follow this move back to the rural environment a bit, because it’s fundamental. I mean, you brought it up, and it is fundamental to the modular post-apocalyptic society you’re talking about.

Daniel Brooks: Sure. Not post-apocalyptic: post-collapse.

Peter Watts: Post-collapse. Fair enough. So, another quote from the book: “Neo-protectionists compliment the ever-larger city’s perspective by suggesting that the biosphere would be best served if humans were maximally separated from the wild lands.”

Daniel Brooks: Right.

Peter Watts: “This makes no sense to most humans, and that is why no post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel or film depicts large cities as places of refuge and safety during a crisis.” Just putting up my hand, I can vouch for that, having written my share of apocalyptic sci-fi.

Daniel Brooks: Nobody’s running to the cities.

Peter Watts: “Any attempt to separate humans from the rest of the biosphere would be detrimental to efforts to preserve either.” And I believe at some other point you reference neo-protectionist arguments that we should put aside half of the natural life —

Daniel Brooks: Yeah. That’s E.O. Wilson’s half —

Peter Watts: And putting aside, for the moment, my sympathies for that sentiment — in defense of the neo-protectionists, all of human history says that whenever we interact with nature, we pretty much fuck it up.

Daniel Brooks: No. It doesn’t say that. First of all, when you talk of most of human history, you’re talking about the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. What has been the actual historical record of humans for the last 3 million years?

Peter Watts: I take your point. And it’s a legitimate point when you talk about a global human population, that you mention, in the millions. But we’re at a population of 8 billion now. So accepting, wholesale, without argument, your argument that cities are basically wasteful, unsustaining, pestholes of disease and so on —

Daniel Brooks: That benefit a few people a lot, and treat the great majority as a disposable workforce.

Peter Watts: Yeah. But we still are dealing with a planet in which 94 percent of mammalian biomass on this planet is us and our livestock, so how does that kind of biomass integrate intimately with what remains of our natural environment without just crushing it — or are you anticipating, like, a massive cull of a —

Daniel Brooks: But, see, you’re repeating a bunch of truisms that are not borne out by the actual evidence. We don’t crush — Homo sapiens doesn’t crush the biosphere. Homo sapiens interacts with the biosphere in ways that alter it. See, evolutionary alteration of the environment does not mean collapse. It means change. This is the neo-protectionist language — that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit. I mean, what human beings are doing to the biosphere right now is nothing compared to what blue-green algae did to the biosphere 4 billion years ago.

“This is the neo-protectionist language — that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit.”

Peter Watts: Absolutely.

Daniel Brooks: And what happened? Us, OK? The Chicxulub asteroid: If it hadn’t killed the dinosaurs, there would be no us.

Peter Watts: I actually, personally, find comfort in the idea that there have been, what, five major extinction events? And that in every single case, there has been a beautiful, diverse —

Daniel Brooks: Because there was sufficient evolutionary potential to survive.

Peter Watts: Exactly.

Daniel Brooks: Not because a whole bunch of new magical mutations showed up.

Peter Watts: Right. But, it took anywhere from 10 to 30 million years for that to happen —

Daniel Brooks: So?

Peter Watts: — and I would argue that most people — I mean, I’m kind of on your side in this, but I’m also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement. I think most people are hoping for recovery in less geological terms, timescale-wise.

Daniel Brooks: This is a really critical point, because this, then, loops back to the whole Asimov’s Foundation thing. Do we wait 30,000 years for the empire to rebuild, or can we do it in 1,000 years? That’s what we’re talking about. We have great confidence that the biosphere is going to restore itself, within — you know, no matter what we do, unless we make the whole planet a cinder, the biosphere’s going to “restore itself” within, you know, 10 million years. Whatever. That’s fine. And we — you know, some form of humanity — may be part of that, or may not. But the reality is that what we want to do, as human beings, is we want to tip the odds in our favor a little bit. We want to increase the odds that we’re going to be one of those lucky species that survives. And we know enough to be able to do that. We know now enough about evolution to be able to alter our behavior in a way that’s going to increase the odds that we’ll survive. So the question is, are we going to do that? So this whole business of whether or not, you know, what’s going to happen in 3 million years — you’re right: That’s not important. But what happens tomorrow is not important either. What’s important is what happens in the first generation after 2050. That’s what’s important. That first generation after 2050 is going to determine whether or not technological humanity reemerges from an eclipse, or whether Homo sapiens becomes just another marginal primate species.