Problems, Predicaments, and Technology

  "Civilization is the child of the Neolithic Revolution, of the widespread adoption of agriculture as a mode of production, and agriculture necessarily causes leaching and loss of topsoil, as well as many other environmental consequences, including climate change. Nor does any city live by bread alone. It needs water, so it must build dams and aqueducts. It needs wood for fuel and timber, so it must chop down forests. It needs metal for coins, swords, and ploughshares, so it must dig mines. It needs stone to erect palaces, courts, temples, and walls, so it must quarry away mountains. And it must build roads and ports needed to transport all the necessities of urban life. In short, a city lives by both consuming and damaging a wide array of ecological resources."  ~ William Ophuls - Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail See more here. "The illusion of control or agency and the attachment to it creates much suffering."                  ~ Chery Young   While I

  Pictures of wildfire damage at Glacier National Park in Montana 2016 What type of activities will help in reducing the effects of ecological overshoot? I'm often asked this question when I point out that solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear energy, hydroelectric dams, EVs, and all other technological devices will not help climate change, pollution loading, or any other predicament under the parent predicament of ecological overshoot: "Well, what are your solutions?" Sadly, this question assumes that I am pointing out a PROBLEM, not a predicament. Predicaments don't have solutions. So, I don't have a solution (and nobody else does either, despite claims to the contrary - more on that in a couple of paragraphs). But I can tell them what WON'T help. Buying more stuff, REGARDLESS of what it is, WILL NOT HELP. Because ecological overshoot is a predicament with an outcome and not a problem with a solution , people need to adjust their expectations accordingly.

 T he Hungry Horse Dam located just outside Hungry Horse, Montana Let's talk about infrastructure, shall we? Living in the human-built world day in and day out, we often forget that all these buildings, roads, buried pipes, wires, sewers, and literally everything else we build is not actually natural. We require nature - other plant and animal species - for the ecosystem services they provide, but nature does not require our infrastructure. Think about that deeply for a moment and realize that no other species requires our electrical grid - it only serves us, and even we don't truly require it for survival; we got along fine for most ALL of the last 200,000 years or so (except for the last 150 years) without electricity. We *could* get along just fine without it now too, except we went into ecological overshoot. There is now no way to keep industrial civilization humming along without it, and this brings some rather uncomfortable facts to light as shown in this study  about our

  I have a real quick message regarding our new Facebook page . I routinely find articles, tweets, and similar media which I don't have time to write up an article for and so I thought that this new page would be the ideal place to share these stories. Please take a moment to like and/or follow! At the moment, I have a lot of catching up to do with getting older articles from here posted, so I may only post a few here and there for the time being. If there's a story you think I should write about, please feel free to drop me a line!

  What is ecological overshoot and why is it important? Is it a more important predicament than climate change? What about energy and resource decline - more important than it? The answer to the latter two questions is YES  and ecological overshoot is important because it is the predicament which is causing all the other (symptom) predicaments such as climate change, pollution loading, energy and resource decline, and the list of files included in this post . While one can read this peer-reviewed paper from William Rees, I found this video quite instructive and possibly more understandable to most people. Practically every article I've written here is about ecological overshoot in one way or another. Put simply, ecological overshoot is the collection of predicaments that our unsustainable lifestyles have brought forth. Collectively, humans globally use far more energy and resources than the planet can provide in a given unit of time and we produce toxic wastes that the planet ca

One of my friends in the world of energy and resource decline is Mike Stasse. I have a considerable number of friends who have serious experience with solar PV systems, and Mike is one who has written a blog regarding his experiences. He constantly and consistently shares lots of information about ecological overshoot and the symptom predicaments which offshoot from it in the blog he writes, Damn the Matrix . Now, I have already previously shared much about the limitations, the overall environmental cost, the reasons why non-renewable "renewable" energy systems actually end up requiring MORE energy than if we simply began reducing overall energy use in the first place (civilizational inertia and Jevons Paradox), and the science proving all of this; however, Mike's information comes from personal, real world experience. Here is his latest saga regarding his (relatively) new solar system. As one can clearly see, the real world experience is a whole different scenario from