Damn

Sometime in the distant past life was much better than now. Just ask anyone. My problem is that I know things are pretty good now, especially, if you live in a western democracy. I guess that things are also looking up for a large percentage people living in other regimes. The obvious disclaimer is that a lot of people live in fairly crap conditions. This story is not about them. If you are hooked into a broad band internet connection at the moment the chances are that you have never had it so good.

So why are we feeling so bad about the current situation? Sure personal freedom is a bit more restricted but we have so many more things. Spare time is less abundant but the car is newer and the TV is wider. Interest groups run our governments but that hasn’t changed at all and, as always, our future is being directed by the anonymous “THEM”.

Threats to our future have changed from fascists to communists to nuclear holocaust to ozone depletion and currently with the current threat of global climate change. So what? (Terrorism is just a tool use for crowd control so doesn’t count as a threat, unless those wielding the politics of fear stay in power for to long).

The real fear for me is living through the peak of our society, whatever it’s cause. I don’t know what the end will be but I don’t want to be there. History shows that each civilisation reaches some peaked and falls by the way side (that’s why they are in the past). Our present society started its run some time in the 16th century. I guess the birth of Galileo would be a good place to mark the starting line of our technologically driven society. Each decade some improvement occurred. There were some real losers along the way but, on average, the alliance of technology and greed has improved the lot of us westerners.

My problem is that I have a good imagination and so I can see a dozen causes for such a peak.

Now please think about what the peak of our society means. Things run down, shortages appear and anarchy increases. It’s not a pleasant roll down of the way things are now. It will not be some nice bell curve ride of prosperity that will take years to have any impact on you. When it happens you will not get much notice and things will turn to crap very quickly. Imagine the great depression of the 1930’s but without recovery. The difference will be that it will be a global thing where all the players with power have an arsenal of nasty stuff.

So the peak will come and it wont be nice. The question each of us must ask is what can we do to delay it (at least until its not our problem)? The answer is quite simple. Look for the cause and avoid it. Global climate is obvious, just stop our excess production of CO2. Peak oil – simple refer to climate change, slow down in technological progress, see point one.

The hard one and, one that is scary, is habitat loss. I’m not talking about nature reserves I mean the destruction the means of food production – the human habitat. With our burgeoning population and many farming areas becoming uneconomic this is a serious threat. Fisheries are also collapsing at a frightening rate. Clean water is also becoming a constraint in many places. The obvious solution is to keep the earths population at a sustainable level.

I read an estimate somewhere that stated the earth could sustainable support about 200M people in first world conditions at current levels of consumption. The same report also said that 6B people can live on this planet if we all became vegetarians and stopped burning fossil fuel.

So the ultimate conclusion is we are screwed.