An Inconvenient Apocalypse.

This book is written by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, an agronomist, and a journalist respectively, and predicts that there will be a collapse on a global scale and that for humanity to continue the world’s population must reduce from its current 7.8 billion to a 3 billion manageable size. The book does not say how this reduction in population will be achieved but with today’s scenario with countries threatening to use nuclear weapons it is not difficult to imagine. Needless to say, it won’t be pleasant.
Our genus, “Homo “has been around for 2.5 million years and our species “Homo sapiens “ has existed for about 200,000-300,000 years. This is but a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. Only in the last 12000 years has man made its way of living with agriculture and then living in towns. Even more recently humans are living in the industrial world that uses fossil fuels to consume at levels previously unimaginable. Now we live in an age where humans believe that our own cleverness and knack for invention can keep our eco-system- destroying activity going indefinitely. Humanity is on a whole different journey than a gathering-hunting society
Capitalism’s demand for endless growth is incompatible with a livable human future. First world levels of consumption are unsustainable and have generated expectations that cannot be met. . The Industrial and Digital Revolutions have not only changed our relationships with each other and created unrealistic material expectations; they have fundamentally changed the way most people interact with the non-human world. We think that our clever selves will come up with something to overcome the current problems but electric cars will not save us and neither are global climate accords.
The dawn of agriculture got humanity on the course of increasing energy use and material wealth that has brought us to the current ecological crisis.
Once the collapse occurs and the Earth’s population declines it is up to humans to figure out how to live in a low energy future, I e one where fossil fuels are no longer used and we are back to using our own muscles. The future will be fewer people consuming less.
For me coming to the end of my life, I probably won’t see this come to pass, unless there is a nuclear war in the next few months or years. Since I was born the world, particularly in the developed West has seen a growth and an improvement in the standard of living like never seen before unless you were unfortunate enough to be born in one of the world’s poorer third world countries. My parents and grandparents would be amazed to see how we live today. But it’s not sustainable and the future is bleak. I was born with a world population of approx. 2 billion and I’ve seen this more than triple in my life time. But my children and grandchildren will have to contend with a future very different from my life.