SUBHEAD: What will you be doing when you cannot be where you are doing what you do now.
By Juan Wilson on 1 February 2020 for Island Breath -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2020/02/whither-do-we-go.html)
Image above: Napa Road Ends. If we could only be so lucky. From (https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/napa_road_ends_2).
If you have been paying attention it should be pretty obvious now... we are much like Wile E. Coyote, from the Warner Brothers' Luney Tunes "Roadrunner" cartoon series. The coyote would chase the roadrunner in order to kill and eat him.
The coyote wants to eat the roadrunner, but the roadrunner was to fast and agile for him. The coyote would then purchase some manufactured equipment from a company called ACME (A Company that Makes Everything). His order would often include items like catapults, anvils, dynamite, springs, bear traps or other deadly materials to capture and kill the roadrunner when he stops to eat some birdseed bait.
The traps never worked as expected and the disappointed coyote usually would then test the equipment to see why it failed. Needless to say, the coyote would set off the trigger to the trap and end up crushed by an anvil or catapulted off a cliff.
And this is where I see humanity today. We have employed technology (agriculture, industrialization, computers, etc.) to feed us, lesson our load, and solve our problems... and that is our problem.
We have been so successful in this endeavor that all that remains of nature are human settlements and what they consume. As far as humans are concerned that is all that matters.
Unfortunately that has shown itself to be a dead end road and we are at the end of it... There may be another road we can take but we will have to reduce our numbers and consumption of resources by some orders of magnitude to get there.
We have shown ourselves to be too self-absorbed and greedy to even attempt to meet the goal of sustainability even after the scientific report "A Limit to Growth" by the Club of Rome a half century ago demonstrated we were about to crash life on planet Earth.
Well we are well on the way extinguishing the forests, killing the oceans and melting the polar ice. We have exterminated all but a few wild creatures and will only permit what we eat or put in captivity to live.
We won!
Now what?
If there are any human survivors to the conflagration we are about two witness they will have to begin again as we have in the past. See "Once Through the Bottleneck" - subtitled "Almost 200,000 years ago humans faced extinction. Only a few hundred were saved along the coast of Cape Horn".
By Juan Wilson on 1 February 2020 for Island Breath -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2020/02/whither-do-we-go.html)
Image above: Napa Road Ends. If we could only be so lucky. From (https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/napa_road_ends_2).
If you have been paying attention it should be pretty obvious now... we are much like Wile E. Coyote, from the Warner Brothers' Luney Tunes "Roadrunner" cartoon series. The coyote would chase the roadrunner in order to kill and eat him.
The coyote wants to eat the roadrunner, but the roadrunner was to fast and agile for him. The coyote would then purchase some manufactured equipment from a company called ACME (A Company that Makes Everything). His order would often include items like catapults, anvils, dynamite, springs, bear traps or other deadly materials to capture and kill the roadrunner when he stops to eat some birdseed bait.
The traps never worked as expected and the disappointed coyote usually would then test the equipment to see why it failed. Needless to say, the coyote would set off the trigger to the trap and end up crushed by an anvil or catapulted off a cliff.
And this is where I see humanity today. We have employed technology (agriculture, industrialization, computers, etc.) to feed us, lesson our load, and solve our problems... and that is our problem.
We have been so successful in this endeavor that all that remains of nature are human settlements and what they consume. As far as humans are concerned that is all that matters.
Unfortunately that has shown itself to be a dead end road and we are at the end of it... There may be another road we can take but we will have to reduce our numbers and consumption of resources by some orders of magnitude to get there.
We have shown ourselves to be too self-absorbed and greedy to even attempt to meet the goal of sustainability even after the scientific report "A Limit to Growth" by the Club of Rome a half century ago demonstrated we were about to crash life on planet Earth.
Well we are well on the way extinguishing the forests, killing the oceans and melting the polar ice. We have exterminated all but a few wild creatures and will only permit what we eat or put in captivity to live.
We won!
Now what?
If there are any human survivors to the conflagration we are about two witness they will have to begin again as we have in the past. See "Once Through the Bottleneck" - subtitled "Almost 200,000 years ago humans faced extinction. Only a few hundred were saved along the coast of Cape Horn".
In my opinion we will be lucky if there are even a few settlements of humans that get through the coming bottleneck. It is hard to say what might be an oasis through the coming changes.
But be warned - it may be already past time to have any choices as to where you will be, and what you will be doing when you cannot be where you are doing what you do now.
As John Michael Greer has written:
- "The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age" (2008)
- "Not the Future we Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology and the Myth of Progress" (2013)
- "Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush: the Best of the Archdruid Report" (2015)
- "Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, the Hard Future Ahead" (2016)
- "The Retro Future: Looking to the Past to Remake the Future" (2017)
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