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

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The point is that the carrying capacity of planet earth has been way overshot by us humans. Many deaths are coming. 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. Discusses the heart at the ecological crises. “At the material level, we face a crisis of consumption. In aggregate terms, the human population has too much stuff. That stuff is not equally or equitably distributed among the population, of course. But no matter the level of fairness and justice in societies, the ecological costs of the extraction, processing, and waste disposal required to produce all that stuff is at the core of our ecological crises.” The task before us. “But the task before us today is far more daunting: a down-powering on a global level with the goal of fewer people living on less energy, achieved by means of democratically managed planning to minimize suffering. Daunting, indeed.” Here’s suggesting that “royal” psychology is just a fancy way of saying power corrupts. And that by saying “corrupt” we mean that the rational, practical basis of behavior has been replaced by one that is irrational and instinctive–i.e.the competitive drive for dominance. Surely the above is correct in saying that we need to face reality but by putting that facing up into moral terms it is itself not facing the reality that humans, like all our ecosystem companions, commit behaviors that are only “sins” when they violate the prime directive of social and therefore species survival.

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

Discusses the four hard questions that are essential to confront now. “What is the sustainable size of the human population?” 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. Although there can be many routes to reaching this social and community stability, “No matter how difficult the transition may be, in the not-too-distant future we will have to live in far smaller and more flexible social organization than today’s nation states and cities.”

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If that migration is to occur, it’ll happen because enough people decide it’s worth it to suffer the cost, inconvenience, and dislocation of the initial phases of E2.0. 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. 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. Global warming is headed in a calamitous direction. Even if humans can limit the increase in the Earth’s temperature, other factors are pushing us to an apocalypse. . . . This a sobering examination of current trends in human behavior and likely existential consequences." — Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies The nature of all living organisms, so this book argues, is to go after 'dense energy,' resulting eventually in crisis. If that is so, then the human organism is facing a tough question: Can we overcome our own nature? Courageous and humble, bold and provocative, the authors of An Inconvenient Apocalypse do not settle for superficial answers." —Donald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth

An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen

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. 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

If you are looking to know what causes climate change, there are far better books out there. This book has a more philosophical bend. I would argue for stewardship. I would argue for looking at the Flowers of Saint Francis instead of the Book of Revelations. And there’s always Buddhism and the prayers for *all* sentient beings.

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

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. 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. 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. 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. An Inconvenient Apocalypse excels at making difficult concepts easily understandable through skillful use of thought experiments. In one, we’re asked to imagine how history might have unfolded differently had the contiguous United States, rather than western Europe, been blessed with the conditions that first paved the way for the industrial revolution. In another, we’re given a scenario in which socialism, instead of capitalism, established itself as the dominant economic system of the industrial world. Both of these thought experiments make crucial points about the reality of geographic determinism in history and humanity’s susceptibility to “the temptations of dense energy,” and they do so in a simple, accessible manner.Describes the concept of the saving remnant. “The term is used in various ways, but at the core is a faith that even in the face of an overwhelming catastrophe, a saving remnant will survive and become the basis for renewed community life.”

Review: An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson and Robert

List the characteristics of a collapsing society. “In short: “A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.”” Climate disasters may render hope for the future tenuous, but the philosophical book An Inconvenient Apocalypse asserts that working toward social justice is still purpose-giving." c. A set of migration pathways to gradually, inexorably move each household away from products produced by Economy 1.0 (degrade the planet as we make our living) to Economy 2.0 (fix the planet as we make our living). The book outlines why the authors think there is no solution. The planet has to drastically reduce in population and man has to stop reliance on high energy resources to survive. However there is no description how this change would be managed or any idea at all on mitigation for the problems. You're left to assume that various disasters will devastate the planet and the survivors will get by as best they can.

Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen's

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.”