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An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity

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The unsustainable reality discussed. “At the heart of the unsustainable nature of human economic activity is the carbon imperative, the drive to obtain the benefits that come from using dense energy. The dominant vehicle for that destructive extraction today is a rapacious transnational corporate capitalism and that system’s requirement of unlimited growth in the pursuit of profit.” Graeber and Wengrow write about how our ‘Western’ concept of land ownership derives from Roman law: ‘ownership’ of the land implies certain rights over it, including the right to extract and profit from its use, as well as the right to destroy it, which mining and fossil fuel companies, as well as corporate agriculture with its destruction of top soil, engage in with unholy joy.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate

The development of those technologies was not the product of inherently superior intelligence of people in particular regions of the world—remember, we are committed to an antiracist principle that flows from basic biology. That means the forces that led to the creation of those technologies must have been generated by the specific environmental conditions under which that culture developed over time. Likewise, the lower rate of carbon depletion that results from the absence of those technologies cannot be a marker of inherently superior intelligence of people in particular regions but is instead the product of environmental conditions. In a significant sense, the trajectory of people and their cultures is the product of the continent and specific region in which they have lived. We’re spending a lot of effort to re-state and amplify the symptoms (environmental degradation), and I think most NC readers already understand that part of the problem-space.Right now we don’t seem to have the inclination or the ability to structure our basic econ sub-systems (ag, energy, materials, mfg’g) such that they repair and replenish .vs. degrade and disperse. Describes what it means to be apocalyptic now. “First, while the end of the world is likely not at hand (at least not until the sun burns out in several billion years), some things will end, such as the unsustainable and unjust economic, political, and cultural systems that currently dominate human societies.” Yeah, I think about the thought experiment. Let’s say you’re a driver who honks and yells and flips off people who cut you off in traffic, and that’s your modus operandi. And you get away with that because you live in LA, and there’s 10 million people. And what are the odds you’re actually going to see that person again? I’ll bet you take that same person, and you put them in a small tow Yeah. And of course, keeping people alive requires resources. It requires incredible amounts of energy and technology. And what happens when that energy and technology is no longer available, or available only to the most wealthy? You know, these are not only difficult personal questions, or incredibly difficult social questions. Yet, I think they’re questions we’re going to have to face. You know, one way you can think about this is that the future of all of us is going to be a kind of triage. So most people know that when doctors are working on a battlefield or come into a natural disaster, or if the emergency room is full of patients after a crisis, doctors have to make some pretty hard decisions about how to prioritize care. And it means often letting the most ill, the most injured die because the resources are better spent trying to keep a lot of people who are not quite as ill, or quite as injured. Well, that’s, you know, doctors are trained to do this. We allow doctors to do that, because we trust that training. But there’s going to be a time when we’re going to be engaged in a kind of cultural triage. How do we take limited resources and try to use them for the collective good? And how do we accept these limits, including limits on the length of our lives? Well, you might remember when the Republican Party accused the Democrats of wanting to create death panels. You know, to kill grandma and grandpa early, you know, to save money. And the culture went bananas over that. Now, of course, the Democrats hadn’t proposed death panels, but that’s where we’re heading. And at this point, nobody in the mainstream political arena is willing to even talk about it. And of course, you can’t solve problems if you can’t talk about them.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental [PDF] [EPUB] An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental

The question is how can we deal with this most humanly (and that should include the rest of life’s creation)? Read this personal manifesto of wisdom and passion for our suffering planet, a very important, timely, and riveting book." — CounterPunch So what is in the book? They discuss the importance of environmental and geographic factors in history, the need for anticapitalist perspectives and for social justice. Then the overall problems of “size, scale, scope, and speed.” One useful concept was the “Overton window,” which postulates that political leaders only consider policies which already have wide public support — which explains much of the environmental crisis.

Provides a list of the main societal threats. “The decline of key natural resources and an emerging global resource crisis, especially in water.” Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, and individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. Scope: Our magical thinking about the relationship of the growth economy and the ecosphere in a finite world allows us to believe that an economics of endless growth will not end badly. This bleak future is “not pleasant…to ponder and prepare for, so it’s not surprising that many people, especially those in societies where affluence is based on dense energy and advanced technology, clamor for solutions to be able to keep the energy flowing and the technology advancing.” Thus, our civil religion tainted by technological fundamentalism becomes necessary [(5); the term is originally from David W. Orr]. Regarding fundamentalism of any kind – scientistic instead of scientific, religious, political, economic – I follow Janisse Ray who wrote that “ fundamentalism thrives only where imagination has died” (paraphrase from Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, 2004). Along with fundamentalism comes the naked hubris leading us to believe that humans understand complex questions definitively. No, we never do. Describes echospheric grace in a secular way. “We like the idea of ecospheric grace because it doesn’t depend on the ecosphere loving us or bestowing on us special favor or giving us dominion over anything else. That’s important because, as far as we can tell, the ecosphere does not love us. The ecosphere does not care that we exist. We are, in ecospheric terms, just another species in a long list of species that usually end up going extinct at some point.”

An Inconvenient Apocalypse - Notre Dame University Press

In the early 1970's I'd started reading about sustainability and population problems specifically in the writings of Paul Ehrlich. At the time the perceived problem was global cooling but never the less the key problem of over population and limited supplies of fuel and ores was seen as an urgent problem. The potential impact of climate change. “Climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy. Climate change is already impacting or is anticipated to impact nearly every facet of the economy, including infrastructure, agriculture, residential and commercial property, as well as human health and labor productivity.”

Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity

A lot of past talk of population control has been based in white supremacy, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the question of what’s a sustainable population. That’s the kind of thing that people have bristled against. We don’t have a solution. But the fact that there aren’t easy and obvious solutions doesn’t mean that you can ignore the issue.” Full Book Name: An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity Discusses the four hard questions that are essential to confront now. “What is the sustainable size of the human population?” The authors have coined the term “ecospheric grace” to describe their vision of an ideal orientation toward the natural world. To show ecospheric grace is to humble ourselves before the rest of nature. It is to accept that we humans aren’t at the center of everything, that we’ll never completely understand the natural world of which we’re a part and that nature doesn’t favor us over any other species. It is thus also to reject the ideal of Earth stewardship, since stewardship implies authority and control. Our goal should instead be to return the biosphere’s favor of “the gift of life with no strings attached” by treating it well.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Excerpt - resilience An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Excerpt - resilience

Well, I do worry about it. And in fact, I’ve been talking to a new friend who’s writing a book on ecofascists, and you know, hanging out in their chat rooms. And they’re pretty scary people. And he asked me, “If you sound some of the same alarms as they do, don’t you worry?” And I said, I worry about not sounding the alarm. So let me explain what I mean. If ordinary people can sense that, you know, this bright, shiny future of wind turbines, and solar energy, and electric vehicles that were being sold isn’t really honest. That is, there are problems beyond those high-tech solutions. If ordinary people sense that, and I think are starting to sense it, and will increasingly sense it in the future, and the progressive left people with concerns about inequality, injustice, which I have deeply and have always tried to act on. If people like us don’t talk about that reality, then essentially, we cede that turf to the right and to the ego fascists. Scale, scope and speed refer, respectively, to the natural size limit of human social groups, the maximum technological level of a sustainable industrial infrastructure and the speed with which humanity must undergo its transition toward a sustainable society. The authors cite 150 people as the natural size limit of a human community, a figure rooted in human cognitive capacity and known as "Dunbar's number." They argue compellingly for an industrial infrastructure that is technologically simpler and far less energy-intensive than today's. As for the speed with which we must shift our society onto a sustainable path, they say we need to do so "faster than we have been and faster than it appears we are capable of." The migration isn’t going to happen because “it’s cheaper”. It won’t be cheaper to run E2.0 until it has enough time to optimize itself. E1.0 has had all of human history to become “efficient” (price efficient, so long as costs are externalized). Expecting E2.0 to be price competitive with E1.0 is unrealistic for a few decades to come. three different relationships among systems of political and cultural power, the royal, prophetic, and apocalyptic

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

Some of the suggestions and/or conclusions will be very difficult to impossible to implement. “But it’s safe to say that if our goal is long-term sustainability, the number is well below eight billion people. A lot fewer people, consuming a lot less.” Scale: What is the appropriate scale of the human community? While evolutionary psychology consists mostly of just-so stories, convincing research by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar has demonstrated that the size of a truly human community has definite limits: Social group: 150; Close friends: 50; Very close friends: 15; Inner circle: 5. This seems exactly right, despite the number of Facebook “friends” in the world. Port William (2) and Yoknapatawpha of William Faulkner both fit into this schema, for example, though as exemplars of a different quality. Harrowing and accessible, this is just the thing for readers interested in a sociological or philosophical examination of the climate crisis." First, it should be uncontroversial to assert the antiracist principle, anchored in basic biology, that we are one species. There are observable differences in such things as skin color and hair texture, as well as some patterns in predisposition to disease based on ancestors’ geographic origins, but the idea of separate races was created by humans and is not found in nature. I find it useful to be reminded there are no solutions to the current ecological crisis except a radical downscaling of human activity and resource-use. This will either come from a consciously and humanely planned “degrowth” or it will happen through a chaotic process of destruction. Or perhaps we will see some combination of the two. But generally, a chaotic process of uncontrolled destruction seems to be what we are opting for, as we cling to the hope that some technological miracle will save us from ourselves.

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