Re: SC8

Ever since the Millerites gathered on that hilltop in 1843 prophets of doom have repeatedly announced the end is nigh. They have been unfailingly wrong about their predictions. The world passes the millenial jump with nary a peep, and historians are still debating if the Y2K was for real or simply one of the largest swindles in the story of mankind. And so on and so forth.

The world keeps on spinning on its axis, babies are born, and everybody is busy with his or her own dreams, concerns, aspirations, and the myriad little personal tragedies that make life what it is. We make do, muddle through another day, kiss the kids and make quicky love to the old lady, go to sleep. Rinse, wash, and repeat.

It's very easy to ignore the signs of things going the wrong way. It's hard to focus on slow change and incremental hardship because humans adapt marvelously to difficult situations. People rapidly reestablish a new baseline for daily activities. There was lovemaking and babies born in Leningrad and Stalingrad; there were songs and poetry written in the murdering trenches of World War I.

It's inbred in our gens. Only superb adaptability allowed this species to populate and thrive in virtually every single ecosystem on the planet, a feat of adaptability only matched by a few bugs and lower order mammals.

The real questions that should be asked are not a date, or the shape of bad things to come, or who is going to end up bombing who. Important as those are, they are also incidental to the real big questions:

--Is our monetary system sustainable?

--Is our resource consumption of basic raw materials and commodities sustainable, i.e., is loss of topsoil, acquifer water, pollution rates, cultivable land, environmental destruction, sustainable?

--Is the present uneven distribution of wealth, energy, and healthcare around the world sustainable?

--Is our disproportionate tax on the rest of the planet sustainable in its many forms: resource consumption, energy consumption, monetary policy, current account deficit, etc?

Answers to those questions will not produce a date, a manner, or chain of events predicting the future. They will, however, produce the undeniable picture of long-term collapse of the system.

Ceteris paribus, the above elements spell a progressive decline of standards of living all around the world. This process is already happening. The process is uneven, of course. Standards of living in parts of China, parts of India, and parts of the FSU are rising under the impetus of globalized economies and technological wherewithal. Worldwide aggregation of data belie the appearance of rising prosperity. Africa is probably the most dramatic case, but it's far from being alone: Latin America has lost ground over the past two decades, Asia as a whole is retreating under the pressure of growing populations that new markets and jobs cannot possibly accommodate. The United States leads the post-industrial world in its economic decline but is not declining alone as falling salaries in the US and high persistent unemployment in Europe attest.

For all the appearance of wealth, individual humans are in average poorer now than they were 20 years ago. They are poorer in terms of income, poorer in terms of energy consumption available per capita (a natural function of explosive population growth versus limited growth in energy available), and poorer in terms of environmental depletion: Amazon brutal and unabated deforestation, Southeast Asia brutal and unabated deforestation, desertification in Western and Northern China, expansion of the Sahel region into larger and larger areas of sub-Saharan Africa, etc.

The prophets of doom have been wrong. No question about this. Their message has drowned the real urgent implications of long-term human and environmental degradation. This has been the case ever since the Club of Rome's original report was prostituted and defaced by freemarket acolytes. See, they scream, nothing's happened this year, or the next. Cry wolf, is what they've done, they proclaim triumphantly. And this of course resonates with the uninformed and the distracted.

It also masks the larger and broader time horizons for ecological and human collapse. Responsible and serious spokes persons have posited that this would not happen tomorrow, or the day after. They have consistently indicated that the process will happen as a natural result of pressure on the biosphere by a species requiring ever increasing amounts of energy and resources. They have also said that the path to collapse will first be marked by increased instability of all types: political, social, economic, military. They did correctly predicted decades ago the all too common spectable of displaced populations, famine affecting ever growing populations, and migratory pressures from the Third World on the First.

Look out your windows and see if this is happening or not. Look at the Southwest here in this country, and the reaction from all Latin countries to the proposed wall: the Third World is pretty much demanding its right to export its misery into this country. Ask the Moroccan soldiers who mowed down dozens of sub-Saharan migrants at the barbed-wire borders of Ceuta and Melilla if the Third World isn't demanding its right to sit at the still abundant table of riches of Europe if the poor of the Earth aren't violently asserting their right to live as human beings.

It could well be that a discontinuity erases this long-drawn, painful process: Ghawar might suddenly go into terminal downturn next year, or nuclear war could start with a bunker-busting tacnuc under an Iranian research center next month. Those discontinuities are to be expected.

But, in the long run, the writing is on the wall. Even without the discrete catastrophe or seminal event, humankind seems to be posed for disaster. We will adapt, of course: deeper artesian wells will be dug, new genetically modified seeds will come to resist drought and pests, humans in the rich world will learn to live with less, and less, and less, and new armies will be raised to kick back the hungry masses surging from the South. When? 10 years? 20 years? Enough time for me to spend my 401 (k)?