Converging on collapse
May 21st, 2010 by Jim JustMatthew Stein identifies six trends which he says are “converging on collapse”.
- Climate change: Even if we implemented the most stringent greenhouse gas limits currently proposed, it is quite likely that our world’s climate will warm by 6.3F or more over the next century, leading to disastrous crop failures in most of the world’s productive farmlands and “breadbaskets”.
- Peak Oil: Our global economy and culture are built largely upon a reliance on cheap oil. Even the U.S. military now believes that by 2012 surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015 the shortfall in output could reach 10 million barrels per day.
- Collapse of the World’s Oceans: The world’s major fisheries, zooplankton, and coral reefs are all either in collapse or in danger of collapse.
- Deforestation: Over 50% of the world’s forests have already disappeared, and much of the rest is in threatened. Deforestation contributes approximately 25% of all global greenhouse gasses, nearly double the 14% that transportation and industry sectors each contribute. Additionally, the forests of the world are a critical part of the weather cycle as well as the carbon-oxygen cycle – loss of forest results in “desertification” down wind.
- The Global Food Crisis: For the first time since the “green revolution” started, our world is producing less food each year, even as population continues to rise. We’re loosing top soil and arable land, water for irrigation is becoming more and more scarce – and climate change is just beginning to kick in.
- Over Population: In the mid 1980s our world first overshot its capacity to provide for its human population, yet population continues to grow. The world’s population is projected to reach 7 billion in the year 2012, meaning that between the start of the year 2000 and the end of 2012 more people will have been added to the population of our world than lived on the entire planet just two hundred years ago.
The picture drawn by Stein is an illustration of what happens as Earth’s inherent limits to growth are approached and then exceeded. As a population grows, at some point it begins to exhaust the ecosystem’s sources of food and energy while at the same time its excretions begin to overwhelm the ecosystems sinks, its ability to absorb wastes.
Imagine a fermentation tank, flush with freshly crushed Pinot Noir. Now add yeast. The little critters feast on the abundant sugars, excreting alcohol. After a few generations of exponential growth, the yeast colony is thriving – some are undoubtedly ascribing their prosperity to a yeasty capitalism and free markets. A few more generations, and the once-cocky yeasts are now in a panic: will we run out of sugar before we succumb to alcohol poisoning?
Are we smarter than yeasts? Can we behave other than as an organism thrown blindly into the world?
As Stein implores, we have no choice but to act individually as if we can collectively change the universe.