Our planet is sick, very sick. And it is basically our fault.
A few of the major symptoms are climate change, poverty, food scarcity, wars, peak oil and peak economy. Let me dare to suggest that the planetary disease is over consumption, overpopulation. In essence, our unlimited economic growth culture. And because of this, the planet is facing a global system failure: many interrelated systems are failing at the same time with a catastrophic result for Earth. Many people say this collapse will happen in this century and it will be a very different world after that.
A fundamental concept in ecology is something called succession, that refers to more or less predictable and orderly adaptive changes in the structure of an ecological community, or an ecosystem. After several of these changes, called seres, the ecosystem reaches a steady state called climax-community. For instance, after hundreds and hundreds of years, an old growth forest reaches its climax.
Extending this succession concept to social-ecosystems, we can say our society is currently going through a very rough change and nobody really knows how fast it’ll happen, nor how long, nor what will be the end result of it. I think the timeline could be quite long and it will take a few steps to reach its climax state.
A recent case of such succession is what happened in Cuba in the past 50 years or so. They were forced to tackle a sudden succession, when oil and many goods and services stop coming to their island, and they may be close to their climax state.
For different reasons, many other countries may face similar sudden successions, while others will go through long successions to reach its own climax.
The first step we are already facing is scarcity and high prices of many goods and services, and I am afraid it will only get worse. The next step we may face is something many people are calling a salvaging phase, where we will need to relearn, reuse, reclaim, repair old stuff, as there will be very few new things to buy. We may need to use manual tools, walk a lot, use horses and sail boats, since there won’t be much oil to keep running all our machines, and more. Our resilience level will be tested.
I haven’t watched the movie The Age of Stupid, but I have read it makes you think where the world is heading. I read that one of the passages in the movie is when this historian character is checking old films and contemplates the last years in which humanity could have saved itself from global ecological collapse. And then he wonders,
“Why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance?”
"Were we just being stupid?
or was it that “on some level we weren’t sure that we were worth saving?”
I think the answer has little to do with humans being stupid or self-destructive but everything to do with our current culture of over consumerism and overpopulation. And we know that as consumption has risen, more fossil fuels, minerals, and metals have been mined from the earth, and more trees have been cut down. For instance, a new report from Wordwatch Institute says: “the world extracts the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings from the earth every single day.” ! Yikes !
It seems to me that we need a fundamental change in our culture, based on ecology, not on economics. Based on caring, not on material possessions. In other words, what we need is a basic reshuffling of global priorities.
The more people is aware of what lies ahead, and accept the need for change, the better the chances to build resilience and make it easier for future generations to face the future.
We need to tackle this together, at the global and the local level, in true community, and most importantly, with an intergenerational scope.
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