The Climate Crisis, Localization, and Collapse

Louisville, Kentucky skyline as seen from the Big Four Bridge at Waterfront Park

I want to bring attention to an article highlighting the issue surrounding the climate crisis and young people. The saddest part about this article is that it is focused on climate change and not on the predicament CAUSING it; ecological overshoot. The second-saddest part is that it lists climate change as a "problem" and not a predicament and talks about non-existent "solutions," denying the facts at the heart of the situation. The third-saddest part is that this is a microcosm of the much larger macrocosm affecting the entire globe where these predicaments are reduced and sold as "problems with solutions" instead of predicaments with outcomes.

This certainly is not to diminish or denigrate the article or its implications. I can't imagine the stress and strain of being 20, 30, or even 40 years (or more!) younger than I am, knowing these facts. This doesn't mean that I am without my own stress and strain, as I am more than well aware that my own life may also be cut short due to the predicaments we face. However, this being said, I find it difficult to ascertain how all of this might look to me in a much younger body (and mind).

In a "love letter" to doomers, Sue Coulstock expresses her appreciation to all of us who share our knowledge to the general public. It is an exceedingly great article and she also included something else I truly appreciate - lots of songs that highlight the predicaments surrounding us. I would like to add my voice to this expression of love for those who likewise point these facts out to society. Thank you ALL for this service to society. Unlike so many others who offer "solutions" after pointing out the mess we're in, I accept that global unity is not possible and that we lack agency to do much that would actually accomplish much in terms of actually reducing overshoot to the degree that would prevent the outcome traveling down the pike.

However, this does not mean that we cannot take charge to make the necessary changes to reduce overshoot. Will it be enough to eventually stop overshoot? Possibly (nature will do most of the work if we simply let it), but even if it isn't, we should try anyway. I constantly see talk of incrementalism everywhere. Incrementalism will not cut the mustard. The small changes being made on a fairly routine basis aren't enough to even keep up with the ongoing Great Acceleration. There's only one way to reduce overshoot, and that is to reduce technology use. Reducing technology use requires degrowth and an abandonment of civilization. I can see why most people might be afraid to set out on a mission such as this, but is extinction a better plan? I have no unrealistic expectations that this will ever happen until it is forced upon us by nature, unfortunately.

Recently, I posted an article which described what makes humans happy. Think about this fact for a moment - that many (probably most) humans were quite happy and felt entirely fulfilled in the early 1800s before electricity and modern technology began to control their lives. What is headed our way now is more control and it is already appearing in many locations. In this video about the revolution of localization, one can easily see the implications of allowing technology to continue controlling our daily living. Is this what we want? I sure don't. Businesses that require scan codes for entry will lose my business, plain and simple. I already leave grocery chains that don't have an actual cashier in a checkout lane when I do my shopping for more than a few items. Why should I shop somewhere that I have to actually do part of their job for them? This story about how Amazon cut off one person's account based upon an untrue allegation of racism should send chills up one's spine; especially those of us who rely on such technology. Thank goodness I have tried to keep my life rather simplified with less technology instead of more. I don't use apps for the most part, mostly because I don't have a smartphone. Which means I also don't have Alexa or Siri; nor do I have electronic devices that can be controlled from a smartphone. I think such devices add unnecessary complexity and also unnecessary control from unwanted sources as that article points out (also contained in this video derived from that story). 

I could go on and on about more control and financialization of society (since the trend is fairly obvious even to the casual bystander), but I want to go back to the video about localization. This requires restraint, and a sacrifice of convenience to allow technology to do everything for us by rejecting most advanced new and emerging technologies. In other words, it means resisting the Maximum Power Principle. While I agree with localization (it is a form of degrowth), localizing will not be enough to reduce overshoot and the symptom predicaments associated with it; primarily because not everyone will jump on board that train. I've pointed this out multiple times in my articles explaining our lack of agency due to lack of free will. Many people, sadly, are convinced by stories rather than by evidence. Unfortunately, the systems we ("we" being anyone who can read this) live by (collectively known as civilization) operate according to certain rules, not stories. Charles Hugh Smith goes on to explain the scenario here, pointing out human hubris, denial of reality, and common shortsightedness, combined with ignorance of the systems themselves and how they operate. As a result, most people will not even begin to make the changes necessary to avoid a ghastly future because of this belief in fantasies, myths, and fairy tales.

Relocalization is going to happen regardless, just not quickly enough to avoid most of the worst consequences caused by overshoot which is now more or less "baked into" the cake, so to speak. Part of the biggest issue is the fact the very few people understand the lag effect, oceanic thermal inertia, and civilizational inertia, and that these systems don't just stop on a dime. Even once the climate system reaches equilibrium after a few thousand years, it will be thousands (possibly tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) of years more before the system slowly returns to the climate of the Holocene. Due to the mass extinction and loss of biodiversity happening right now combined with the pollution loading which will happen between today and the time equilibrium is actually accomplished, it will most likely be at least 10 million years before life on this planet returns to the diversity of the Holocene. Of course, many things could happen between now and then which might change this trajectory, which is why I generally resist making predictions of timelines as to when these changes will occur. There is still much that we humans don't yet know about how these systems all work - we have a very good general idea, but we're still working on the specifics and we may never master the entire system. 

The best thing is to not get caught up in distractions being provided by society today. The government, the corporations, the non-governmental organizations, sports teams, advertising and marketing agencies, and on and on, all work to drive attention to whatever it is they are putting out on offer. How many of these distractions actually serve any real purpose to you? Do they pay your bills? Do they accomplish work for you? Most of the time, the only thing they do is take away from your life, so they should be treated as such - noise pollution. Some distractions may provide temporary relief, but these are not usually provided by any of the above examples. 

Speaking of paying bills, a question that often comes up is how money and the financial system began. This is another form of technology that developed alongside civilization back when agriculture began. Nomadic herders discovered that if times got tough for them that they could raid the homesteaders who were practicing agriculture. Eventually, these two groups discovered that each could serve the other with the herders providing protection against other potential raiders and the homesteaders providing grains to the herders. Grain became "money" and protection became "labor", in the general theme of things. This is also how governments, bureaucrats, and taxation came into being, along with towns, cities, states, and so on. All of it is, of course, unsustainable; making most ideas including Relocalization a noble start, but ultimately not enough to accomplish most of the claims made by promoters. I think it best to do what we can to lower our ecological footprint and improve conditions to the extent possible, but not to get unrealistic ideas about what doing so might accomplish. 

As another writer makes painfully clear in this article about how civilizations collapse, the unsustainable systems we exist embedded within make collapse inevitable, quote:

"We think we’re better than ants but I mean, they’ve been around longer and they eat us when we’re dead. I’m not some god to them, in fact I’m the one giving them offerings. Because we are changing the climate we think we have some great power and even control but, I mean, do you control your own life? Hell, how much do you control your own bowels? How much less does anyone control this amorphous ‘we’ that’s supposed to ‘do something’? There’s some assumption that ‘we’ will behave in our own interest, but do you behave in your own interest? It’s midnight and I’m about to eat my kids’ leftover shawarma, despite being nominally vegetarian. What makes you think an even more amorphous self called ‘we’ has any more control?

For most ‘men’, man-made climate change might as well be a river changing course way way upstream. As Billy Joel said, we didn’t start the fire. I was born into this and by the time I figured out that adults didn’t know what the they were doing it was far too late. It was far too late for those adults, who really thought they were doing their best. We’re all just creatures that live in an environment and sometimes that environment just changes and you’re in trouble. I don’t know what you do with this information. Sometimes information just gets done to you.

The paradox of free will is that enough people doing it end up producing something ‘predetermined’. I think this may just be a property of anything we observe. If you look inside an atom, particles are actually all over the place, it just gets averaged out so that we can reliably describe them as stable orbits. But they’re actually not. So it is with the composition of civilizations. A bunch of people do their own crazy stuff, but it just gets averaged out. We look at the random behavior of ants swarming around a bowl and think we’re so different, but are we? We’re really not higher beings than ants, we’re just taller."

In other words, we often think we have agency where in reality we don't; especially when it comes to what we do as a species collectively. That's it for this article; until next time, Live Now!