cross-posted from: https://collapse.cat/post/770
Readers of this blog will know that I have come to some big-picture conclusions about success and failure that are unsettling. I don’t like them myself.
Not only do they create an inner sadness about where I think the human endeavor is heading, but they result in a sort of isolation that I would rather not suffer—introvert though I am.
This is the place for discussing the potential collapse of modern civilization and the environment.
Collapse, in this context, refers to the significant loss of an established level or complexity towards a much simpler state. It can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular, global event. Although, the longer the duration, the more it resembles a ‘decline’ instead of collapse.
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While I am sympathetic to this de-growth and physical limits mindset, I think it ultimately shows a lack of imagination and true understanding of physics.
What is being described as limits of physics or earth’s resources is not static, or rather we are far, far from fully exploiting them. Just take for example the solar insolation that could supply the worlds electricity demand by covering only an almost insignificantly small plot of land (even with current inefficient technology). Of course there are plenty of technical caveats and negative side effects in the long supply chain for building solar PV for example, but this example shows that we are far from reaching the planetary limits.
Or take an ecological example: it would be easy to look at the Sahara desert and conclude that the physical limits of the place for sustaining life are really limited, yet the geological record clearly shows that the very same place used to be a lush tropical rain forest to a large extend (and under not so vastly different climatic conditions). The same is somewhat true in reverse for the Amazonian (and we are currently at high risk of tipping that place over). Ecological examples of an ecosystem creating its own carefully balanced environment and vastly exceeding what would seem like a “physical” limit can be found all over the world, and the potential cascading destruction of these “terraformed” ecosystems is one of the reasons why climate change is so dangerous.
The problem is that proponents of such technological solutions live in a imaginary world of the year 2500 or so. In reality, humanity (at scale) lives of extremely simple technology that dates back at least hundreds if not thousands of years. The apparent technological advances of the last 100 years or so (and corresponding population growth) are driven by the excess of extremely inefficient and wasteful band-aids that to a large extend also only benefit a small percentage of the world’s population.
Only in very recent times (or maybe a bit earlier if you count nuclear technology) have we started developing truly efficient and sustainable technology that in theory is capable of shaping our environment in the long term to reach a different local optimum of the complex world system. But so far none of these technologies are sufficiently scalable to support the current world population, and we are likely to run into a situation where the solution is in sight, but yet so far…