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

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Our climate is being destroyed by unadulterated, free-market capitalism – an ideology that simply cannot be sustained on a small planet with limited resources. It is a system that has no interest in the greater good and that rewards inordinate capital and the few that have it, rather than the majority who don’t. It cares nothing for the environment or biodiversity and doesn’t give a fig about the fate of future generations. In fact, it is exactly the wrong economic system to have in place at a time of global crisis. The bankruptcy of the system is especially well upheld in the grossly asymmetric partitioning of carbon emissions between the rich elite and everyone else.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse – ROBERT JENSEN

Since ” America” is still “Conquered and Occupied Indian Country” . . . maybe the people to seek spiritual and perceptual guidance from would be the Indigenous Tribes and Nations here. In that it is an ideal human community, one that has become increasingly rare if not impossible in our modern neoliberal world. Some of the most vibrant times in my life have involved living communally and working co-operatively. The technology has already brought us to overshoot. We are going to crash. Continuing with business as usual, especially in agriculture, only means that we will damage the Earth even further, making things harder from this point on. Relying on technology to come up with a magical solution merely delays preparing for the crash. That’s really the issue. Confronting harsh ecological realities and the multiple cascading crises facing our world today, An Inconvenient Apocalypse argues that humanity's future will be defined not by expansion but by contraction.Resilience is a program of Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities. This shouldn’t be a surprising claim. All organisms adapt to, and are shaped by, their places. There is no reason that humans should be exempt from that observation. While it’s true that humans’ physiology and cognitive capacity allow us to live almost anywhere on land on Earth, that doesn’t mean that geography has no relevance in how we have organized societies and developed new technologies. Read this personal manifesto of wisdom and passion for our suffering planet, a very important, timely, and riveting book." — CounterPunch In short, we need to use whatever free will we have to understand the determinism that is at work to shape our choices. This is of course a logical conundrum, but it is an apt description of the human condition. Centuries of philosophical and scientific inquiry haven’t done much to change this. We try to deepen our understanding of deterministic forces while living as if we have expansive free will. That doesn’t end the debates about free will and determinism, but it captures our experience. Inconvenient for the PMC of the Global North, or so they believe in their eternal but blinkered, optimism. Devastating at the same time for much of the Global South.

Review: An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson and Robert

Confronting harsh ecological realities and the multiple cascading crises facing our world today, An Inconvenient Apocalypse argues that humanity’s future will be defined not by expansion but by contraction. Early in the book J&J refer to Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins ( The Dialectical Biologist: “Things are similar: this makes science possible. Things are different; this makes science necessary”). One of the most convincing arguments Friedrich Engels made in his unfinished Dialectics of Nature (pdf) is that an increase in quantity leads inexorably to a difference in quality. The quantitative-to-qualitative jump in agriculture, with its subsequent deleterious scientific, cultural, social, and economic effects, was due primarily to the industrialization of what is fundamentally a biological process. Industrial agriculture had antecedents, but it was consolidated in the US after World War II and reached its point of no return 50 years ago when Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told farmers to “get big or get out” and “plant commodity crops from fencerow to fencerow” while they were at it. All of this was “science-based,” of course, the marketed intellectual product of Land Grant universities across the US. This is covered well in Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (2002), which compares the physical, social, and biological moonscapes that are industrial “farms” with sustainable farming, which is more productive by any number of valid metrics (7).I don’t know if a discourse like this is going to move much of the common man— maybe not even the intellectuals amongst us—into the change we need as much as straight talk about many of the nuts and bolts the Author pulls in. Many who consider themselves antiracist might bristle at this analysis. So, we want to be clear about how we understand racial and ethnic differences in the context of political and economic history. Europe is not rich because Europeans are racially superior. Europe is rich because it developed on a different trajectory from that of the Americas, Africa, and Asia as a result of geographic and environmental differences. That trajectory made it possible for Europeans to conquer and exploit the people and resources of those other continents. At one point, Europeans believed themselves intellectually and morally superior because of racial differences that were assumed to be immutable. We know that to be false. But if that’s false, then so is any other claim by any other group to be intellectually or morally superior on any criteria by virtue of a racial or ethnic identity. The economy has become an outsized growth within the ecosphere in industrial production, agriculture, and public health, only because fossil fuels in the form of Fossil Capital have allowed us to mistake basic biological needs (food, water, shelter) and social needs (art, science, humanities, sports, and other enrichment activities that require sustained attention) for luxuries such as private air travel and the 2+ cars per family that we really do not need but are required because we have destroyed any and all alternatives. For example, 100 years ago my smallish Southern hometown had streetcars that regularly traversed the primary east-west and north-south arteries in the well-designed grid with park squares from the 18 th century that made up our streets. The earliest “suburb” on the marsh was less than a half-mile from trolley lines in each direction. This devolution has led to the required, thoroughgoing techno-optimism that could be the biggest impediment to change. All sides are waiting for the breakthrough that will allow us to continue on our present course with marginal changes such as the false dawn of electric cars. However, following J&J and Herman Daly, the only way forward to a human future comes with markedly decreased material throughput and energy consumption in our political economy. Neither our sources of energy and material nor our sinks for waste are unbounded. Too much blame on Borlaug and globalization, the problems stem from too much success in the last few 100 years. Local sourced is not always the best use of energy or the cheapest. And if plant breeders are maximizing the gene base, then adapting to limitations can happen. https://www.farminguk.com/news/flour-from-new-gene-edited-wheat-produces-less-potential-carcinogen_62063.html How did humans manage to spike the chart? Energy density for sure. We’ve been pushed by necessity to innovate for thousands of years, to think we can redirect our epigenetics to a Herman Daly steady state without transformation in the most biological sense is naïve. Great update to Limits to Growth by Gaya Herrington called 5 Insights for Avoiding Collapse, What a 50 Year Old Model of the World Taught Me About a Way Forward for Us Today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by5L8iFN70Q She argues Doughnut Economics is necessary among other observations and the most emphasized is systems thinking, placing human activity into the larger context and subsuming economics into ecology. https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA16H7Kl.img?w=1920&h=1080&q=60&m=2&f=jpg The question is how can we deal with this most humanly (and that should include the rest of life’s creation)?

An Inconvenient Apocalypse | NHBS Good Reads An Inconvenient Apocalypse | NHBS Good Reads

David: That was a great comment; scale is vital to efficiency, and unless you want to work 24×7 to meet basic needs, you’re going to need some efficiency. Yeah, really well said. In the book, that comes across. And I think that, you know, we could go on talking about this stuff forever, but maybe to focus a little bit, there’s a chapter, I think there’s kind of a core chapter where you talk about four hard questions. Size, scale, scope, and speed. And maybe let’s go over those four hard questions? It kind of really brings home what we’re talking about, what’s missing in the conversation, especially maybe on the progressive left. And of course, a lot of conservatives ignore many of these things too. Our ultra-modern industrial society just doesn’t have a way of dealing with these questions. Processed foods have been proven over and over again to CAUSE poor health outcomes. Those are truly killing people.I’ve sorta learned this lesson, but it took a lot of decades to choke down the pill. And it makes a huge positive difference every time I remember to do it.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse | naked capitalism An Inconvenient Apocalypse | naked capitalism

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. 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…” This may sound harsh in a world with so much human suffering, so unequally distributed. So, let us be clear: This analysis does not minimize or trivialize that suffering. Nor does this analysis ignore or minimize the moral and political failures that exacerbate it. We will say this over and over, so there can be no misunderstanding: Strategies for a sustainable human presence must involve holding the wealthy and powerful accountable for damage done, and moving toward a more equitable distribution of wealth and power. Those goals are desirable independent of ecological realities. Those realities also mean, as a starting point, a commitment to a downpowering and an acceptance of limits, which is necessary for a withering away of the growth economy, which is necessary for long-term survival. Call it “degrowth” or “steady state economics” or “doughnut economics.” Advocates for different approaches will disagree about specifics of policy proposals, but there is a growing awareness of the need to talk about limits. That starts with recognizing the need to transcend capitalism and the current politics designed to serve capitalists, in pursuit of an equitable distribution of wealth within planetary boundaries. Those of us living in the more affluent sectors of the world should not try to evade these moral assessments and political obligations. So, we conclude that the type of living arrangements that groups of humans develop arise from the differences in geography, climate, and environmental conditions. Absent any other credible explanation, we assume that the different material realities under which humans have lived have shaped the variations in human culture. People make choices to build cultures in specific ways, but if all people are basically the same animal, then the differences in those choices around the world are most likely the product of those different conditions.

Although we are one species, there are obvious cultural differences among human populations around the world. Those cultural differences aren’t a product of human biology; that is, they aren’t the product of any one group being significantly different genetically from another, especially in ways that could be labeled cognitively superior or inferior. So why have different cultures developed in different places? On handling it: It’s easy for people—ourselves included—to project our own fears onto others, to cover up our own inability to face difficult realities by suggesting the deficiency is in others. Both of us have given lectures or presented this perspective to friends and been told, “I agree with your assessment, but you shouldn’t say it publicly because people can’t handle it.” It’s never entirely clear who is in the category of “people.” Who are these people who are either cognitively or emotionally incapable of engaging these issues? These allegedly deficient folks are sometimes called “the masses,” implying a category of people not as smart as the people who are labeling them as such. We assume that whenever someone asserts that “people can’t handle it,” the person speaking really is confessing “I can’t handle it.” Rather than confront their own limitations, many find it easier to displace their fears onto others. Herman Daly’s work was actually recognized and then promptly dismissed by one Lawrence Summers of the World Bank, who maintained that placing the “economy” within the ecosphere was “not the way to think about it.” No surprise there from the John Bates Clark Medal awardee of 1993. John Bates Clark was a teacher of Thorstein Veblenat Carleton College in the 1870s. This little fact makes me smile. Eugene Odum showed that cities can be the urban repository of civilization, but only when the exist within their countryside and not something apart. Time for a summary of our assessment: The human species faces multiple cascading social and ecological crises that will not be solved by virtuous individuals making moral judgments of others’ failures or by frugal people exhorting the profligate to lower their consumption. Things are bad, getting worse, and getting worse faster than we expected. This is happening not just because of a few bad people or bad systems, though there are plenty of people doing bad things in bad systems that reward people for doing those bad things. At the core of the problem is our human-carbon nature, the scramble for energy-rich carbon that defines life. Technological innovations can help us cope, but that will not indefinitely forestall the dramatic changes that will test our ability to hold onto our humanity in the face of dislocation and deprivation. Although the worst effects of the crises are being experienced today in developing societies, more affluent societies aren’t exempt indefinitely. Ironically, in those more developed societies with greater dependency on high-energy/high-technology, the eventual crash might be the most unpredictable and disruptive. Affluent people tend to know the least about how to get by on less.

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