To be or not to be that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing them, end them. [William Shakespeare, Hamlet]
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Early 21st century humanity is beset by a "sea of troubles , or as we would call them today "crises. These crises are economic, political, environmental, and climatological. They concern energy, ecology, sociology, government, and ultimately spirit.
The root of our crises lies in most members of our species having adopted an impossible worldview. We believe that our global economy can consume all of nature s capital without limit. We believe that this will facilitate endless growth in material wealth. We believe that our supply of natural capital (nature) is not only limitless, but that it will not be significantly affected by the pollution caused by our wealth extraction. We believe that we exist independently from the natural world around us. We believe that we can have our cake and eat it too.
Unfortunately, we live in a physical universe governed by natural laws which do not accommodate themselves to our delusions. This means that endless material growth in a finite environment is impossible. It means that our pollution and our degradation of our biosphere are having significant and accelerating effects on its ability to sustain us. It means that we have overshot the Earth s carrying capacity for humans by billions of people.
Only hydrocarbon energy, particularly oil, sustains the planet s nearly seven billion humans. Oil s production is about to enter irreversible decline. Burning ever more coal might keep things going a bit longer, but only at the cost of accelerating climate change. Climate change, particularly drought and erratic weather, makes agriculture less productive. Look at India right now where the monsoon rains have failed to materialize.
Modern "scientific agriculture consists of inefficiently using about ten calories of hydrocarbon energy to produce one calorie of "food. Additionally, water tables across the planet are receding as they are drawn down much faster than they can be naturally replenished. Increasing temperatures mean diminishing snowpack s in mountains. This reduces the flow of melt water into most of the world s great rivers. This impacts humans directly as reduced availability of drinking water as well as reduced water for agriculture.
Planet-wide our political systems and our informational systems have been captured by the profit uber alles corporations which are accelerating our plunge towards utter catastrophe. People are fed an unending diet of carcinogenic McFood, cheap junk from Wall Mart, along with a media diet of scandal, misinformation, and happy talk.
Meantime, the uber rich who control it all simply get even uber richer. Wealth is now concentrated in their hands beyond the most avaricious dreams of Croesus. And this process of wealth concentration is accelerating.
Humanity has arrived at the most profound existential crisis of its 200,000, or so, year existence.
I use crisis to mean the occurrence of a set of circumstances which cannot be dealt with using existing behaviors and strategies, but which must be dealt with quickly in order to avert serious harm or death from occurring. Crisis, understood in this sense, causes behavioral adaptionor death for individuals and collapse for complex societies which fail to rise successfully to its challenges.
This presents us with the hopeful side of this dire situation: We MUST change fundamentally if we wish to survive. The societal complexity we call civilization MUST be fundamentally altered if human complexity above the tribal band is to be preserved. There is NO alternative.
Wake up from the consensus trance and get busy making this deep and fundamental transformation a reality. Don t look around for someone else to lead you. You lead yourself.
Last year I wrote an essay entitled Peak Oil and The Fermi Paradox. In it I addressed the question of why we have not detected extra-terrestrial intelligent life. I concluded that one very real possibility was because all intelligent species upon developing a technological society quickly use up all of their hydrocarbon energy supply and collapse. Hence they never get here. This appears to be humanity s fate as well. Still, there may just be time for deep and fundamental change.
Think of this as an almost impossibly difficult graduation exam. If we fail, we establish ourselves as an unsuccessful larger-brained ape species. Sooner or later, perhaps sooner, we go unlamented into the extinction to which we selfishly drove so many other species who shared this Earth with us.
If we pass this exam, we transcend our selfish ape natures and become fully human. Endless ages of spiritual and intellectual, though not necessarily material, growth lay ahead of us. Perhaps then we will get to meet other species out there somewhere who also passed this excruciatingly difficult test!
A time of unparalleled existential crisis such as we live in today is also an unprecedented opportunity for profound transformation. Let s seize the moment! There is a world, a universe, a future, to be won!
