That’s probably the best we can do, says Joseph Tainter, in a forthcoming paper. Here’s the passage that will make environmentalists bark at their computer screens: Contrary to what is typically advocated as the route to sustainability, it is usually not possible for a society to reduce its consumption of resources voluntarily over the long…Continue Reading…
There’s a fascinating, informative discussion thread on the dynamics of societal collapse over at The Oil Drum, prompted by a very readable 10,000 word essay on the fall of the Roman empire, cleverly entitled, “Peak Civilization.” This is really complicated stuff that the news media utterly fails to convey, preferring instead to focus on single-cause…Continue Reading…
I don’t agree with some of the classic examples cited, which I’ve previously discussed here, but nevertheless, this is an interesting thought experiment posed by Nate Hagens over at The Oil Drum: By definition, all previous ecosystem and non-human collapses were not ‘understood as collapse’ by those organisms alive during the collapse. Similarly, during historical…Continue Reading…
I’ve been traveling so I missed ABC’s big show last night, but if this criticism (below) is on target, then perhaps another missed opportunity… From a columnist at the SF Examiner: The evil that ABC did in broadcasting Earth 2100 will live on long after them. By presenting a fictional account of future global warming,…Continue Reading…
A news service of the U.N. that I find useful for its dispatches from developing countries asks, in an article, if there is a danger of “information overload” with the spate of alarming reports on the consequences of climate change, such as the most recent one released last week from the Global Humanitarian Forum. What…Continue Reading…
In 2003, Bill McKibben published an essay in the literary magazine Granta ($$ Req), titled, “Worried? Us?” What he rued then still holds true today: People think about “˜global warming’ in the way they think about “˜violence on television’ or “˜growing trade deficits’, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all. Hardly…Continue Reading…
Some months ago, Joseph Tainter published a withering essay entitled, “Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed.” The title is a clever play off of Jared Diamond’s 2005 best-seller. Anyone interested in an overview of collapse literature and a counter-perspective to the current popularizing of the concept should read Tainter’s…Continue Reading…
Which crisis is more urgent: the collapsing world economy, the accelerating buildup of greenhouse gases, the growing instability of Pakistan’s governing coalition, the 29,000 children under five years old that die everyday from causes related to poverty, or the the tottering newspaper industry? Really depends where you sit, doesn’t it?
Apsmith over at Daily Kos has tried to unravel how Michael Tobis got himself top billing on a recent Glenn Beck show. Because I pop up (somewhat mysteriously–“who is Keith Kloor?”) as one of the culpable parties, I feel it’s important to correct some of his misleading inferences. I wanted to leave a comment on…Continue Reading…
For panarchy? It’s a complex theory about how complex we’ve made the world, after several long cycles of change and adaptation –and why human civilization may now be on the cusp of social and ecological collapse. Here’s the money quote, from ecologist Buzz Holling–which he said before the worldwide economic meltdown: This is a moment…Continue Reading…