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."

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

Yes, we’ll need technology and more importantly, a vastly different economic and political system which is more likely now to arise from the partial ashes of our current society. But the overriding goal of our society–economic growth with the benefits flowing almost entirely to the billionaires–must end be dropped now. 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.This essay is adapted from An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity.] This shouldn’t be a surprising conclusion. From our own experience, we all know that we make decisions, individually and collectively, in ways we do not and cannot fully understand. Our experience of freely choosing does not mean that all of our choices are 100 percent freely made. Without attempting to resolve the age-old debate on free will, all of us can reflect on how often we come to recognize that past choices, which we believed we made freely at one moment in time, were shaped and constrained by material conditions that we could not understand at that moment and may never fully understand. While we continue to act day to day on the assumption of free will, we also should continue to be alert for ways behavior is to some degree determined. How would slowing down and spending more time with family, friends and taking care of our planet and our own health ‘kill people? 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 And that by saying “corrupt” we mean that the rational, practical basis of behavior has been replaced by one that is irrational and instinctive–i.e.the competitive drive for dominance.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. We humans have made a mess of things, which is readily evident if we face the avalanche of studies and statistics describing the contemporary ecological crises we face. But even with the mounting evidence of the consequences for people and the ecosphere, we have not committed to a serious project to slow the damage that we do. Those who have little or no access to wealth and power would be within their rights to object, on the grounds that the “we” diffuses responsibility. Who has made a mess of things and who has failed to act? Who’s to blame for the problems and who’s responsible for the costs? Put more bluntly, borrowing from the imagined exchange between the Lone Ranger and Tonto when they were in a tough fight with Indians, “What do you mean, we, white man?”

An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate

Ed. note: This excerpt was previously published at Counterpunch. Reprinted here by permission of the author. We are one speciesProcessed foods have been proven over and over again to CAUSE poor health outcomes. Those are truly killing people. 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. The most obvious answer is that it is the result of humans living under different material conditions. Other possible explanations for variations in cultures include a supernatural force providing divine guidance or simple randomness. Theological explanations—that there is some nonmaterial force that dictated or set these patterns in motion—are based in faith claims and don’t rely on evidence. We have never identified any compelling reasons to accept supernatural accounts of natural phenomena. Nor have we ever heard a coherent argument for how cultural differences are simply random. 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. There is nothing surprising in this list, and the implications of each are clear. If we are to deal with these problems, we must transcend the “growth economy” that seems essential but is just another fateful category mistake in a finite world with a finite ecosphere. This is nothing new. Herman Daly (1938-2022) wrote about this for more than 50 years but was ignored by the establishment for virtually all of that time (3). His Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (1996) and For the Common Good written with John B. Cobb, Jr. are indispensable for an understanding of “sustainability,” what it is and more importantly what it is not (virtue signaling, for example).

An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen

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). In that it is an ideal human community, one that has become increasingly rare if not impossible in our modern neoliberal world. As to science – ag science can assist us in going local, learning how to preserve and strengthen our soils using local or near local things. How will that ‘kill people’? 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 lived insuch a place for about ten years (age 24 to 34). Experimental and quite imperfect, but at least we were (and others still are) trying to figure it out. Dealing with thw many various issues. Thank you for touching on the idea of carrying capacity – I don’t know why it is so often overlooked either. And the issue is that everything seems fine until suddenly and devastatingly, it isn’t. 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. 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.

‘We’re going to pay in a big way’: a shocking new book on the

https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/nature-and-environment/a-guide-for-the-perplexed-zmaz78jazbur/ Yeah. So I always start with this realization. It’s just so happens my father was born in 1927. And my father is, in his last days now. The world population when my father was born was 2 billion. And my father will probably live to see a world of 8 billion. That means in one human lifetime, the human population doubled, and doubled again. That is unprecedented, tight? That’s three generations. I use that to remind people of the, in some ways, really bizarre world in which we live. Now, all of that population growth is pretty much a direct result of fossil fuels, especially through the Haber-Bosch process, which some people will recognize as the way we manufacture synthetic fertilizer, anhydrous, ammonia fertilizer. Well, you take away the fossil fuels needed for that process and a whole lot of us wouldn’t be here. So we’re dealing with a human population that is completely anomalous in human history. And that’s important to recognize. How are we going to get from 8 billion, which I think is quite clearly an unsustainable human population pretty much at any level of consumption. How are we going to get to a sustainable level with considerably less consumption per capita? And again, I say, per capita because we all know that the distribution of the material resources in this world is not equitable. It’s morally unacceptable. But if we look at kind of aggregates, what is possible? Well, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not a scientist, I don’t pretend to have an answer. And of course, nobody has a definitive answer. But people I find reliable, like, take Bill Rees, a really first-rate ecologist who has been doing good work on these subjects for you know, 50 years now. Bill suggests that a sustainable population is probably going to be something like 2 billion, right. Dennis Meadows of the “Limits to Growth” subject group says roughly the same thing. Some people say three or 4 billion. The final number doesn’t matter. What is clear is we’re talking about reducing the human population by at least half and maybe half again. And at the same time, getting people to accept that much of what we take to be “normal.” And I put normal in quotes there. Like, for instance, being able to jump in a car and drive a couple 100 miles to see members of your family. Well, a lot of people take that for granted now. You know, we’re coming up on a holiday and people are gonna say, “Well, yeah, sure, of course, I should have a right, it’s a human right to jump in a car.” Well, that’s not going to be part of a human future that’s sustainable. So the magnitude of that necessity to reduce the human population is really quite striking. Now, you know, some people will say, well, we just have to have better birth control. And there are ways to reduce the birth rate. We know about them. The main one is educating women and girls and raising the status of women and girls in society. That tends to bring down the birth rate. But that also often comes with increasing lifestyle consumption, you know, middle class status. So we have, you know, some real tensions on the birth end of it. And if you want to go to things people really don’t like to talk about, it’s not just a question of getting better birth control, it’s probably changing the way we think about death control. So we now, through the use of high tech, high energy technology, can keep people alive much longer than in any other era. And are we willing to start talking about, you know, withdrawing that kind of end of life medical treatment that keeps people alive? Well, we know that’s hard, you know. When a family talks about when to withdraw care from, you know, a grandparent, it’s emotionally wrenching. But we’re talking about having to do that collectively. Now, personally, I’m 64 years old, and I’ve made a commitment to myself and talk to others around me that I will not use any life extending medical technology. That if my time comes, I’m going to do that. Now, of course, the rubber hits the road when you actually get the diagnosis, and you have to make good on it. So I’m not being glib about how hard that is. But that conversation I’ve had with friends and family has been very wrenching. There are people who are really angry at me for saying this. Now imagine trying to do that at a collective level where we all agree. Well, you know, these ar

This cautious approach is a way of extending the adage “There but for the grace of God go I” beyond individuals to cultures. That phrase emerged from a Christian assertion of humility in the face of God’s mercy, but we use it here in a secular fashion. If one has lived an exemplary life, that’s great, but be aware that life might have been very different if some of the material conditions in which one lived were different. Those who believe they have accomplished something and made a positive contribution to the world should remember that a change in any one of the conditions in our lives, especially in our formative years, may have meant failing instead of succeeding. We are not suggesting that we have no control over our lives but simply that we likely don’t have as much control as many people would like to believe. 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. 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.