This blogger is a friend of OTBKB. He’s a fiction writer and a science teacher and a very smart guy who is now writing book about die back or ecologic collapse. Join the conversation at his blog, Die Back and Collapse.
By speaking of a human dieback and of civilization’s collapse, I immediately place myself in the company of a long line of doomsayers, including the biblical prophets, Y2Kers, and the many religious and secular Millennium, 2012 and neo-apocalyptic cults. I am not informed enough to comment on my company and their beliefs.
At the moment, I am not interested in belief. My focus, instead, is in accumulating easily verifiable information from respected journals and books regarding the state of the planet, the human condition and that of other living beings and to synthesize this information into digestible bites.
From the title of this site, you may gather that I have already come to a conclusion regarding the human predicament. And yes, the data suggests very strongly that humanity has already passed through the threshold from sustainability into ecologic collapse. However, it is much more complicated than that. For as all can see, there are still birds in the air, plenty of fragrant air, and great forests through which many of us can yet tromp. With each passing day, more people are being well-fed, more jobs created, more power plants built. Civilization is not crashing yet…
To either avert a human dieback or to survive the horrors of the dieback without losing all the higher ideals of civilization will require an enormous jump in the level of our consciousness. Individually and collectively, we are not yet equal to the task nor to the name given our species – Homo sapien. We are not wise. We are intelligent, we are clever, tenacious, adaptive, and many things beautiful and perverse. Global warming more than wars, even, highlights the limits of our wisdom. For rather than follow the obvious injunction to transform our lives and consume far less, we continue our ways with some head scratching and nominal nods to carbon credits and fluorescent light bulbs and hybrid cars that burn fuel only half as fast the gas guzzlers the rest of us drive. And still the atmospheric carbon levels rise.
Being a parent has pulled me into a mindspace akin to the Iroquois’s notion of making decisions as though they affected the next seven generations. So, my focus here revolves around the consciousness –- the level of awareness –- necessary for humanity to understand what ways are sustainable and the wisdom to behave accordingly.