diebackandcollapse.com

31 July 2008

Introduction: Waking from Humanity’s Sleepwalk, p. 3-4

Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback .

Excerpt from Chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 3-4.

And on and on we could describe the suffering of our kith and kin and the destruction of our lovely, nurturing, and simultaneously hostile planetary home. Later in this book I will draw a picture of an ideal that we now have the resources, technology, and know-how to create, but probably neither the will nor the wisdom to realize. Instead, the likely outcome of humanity’s experiment with civilization will be some approximation of the above. It may not happen in 2030—that date was picked was for dramatic effect, of course—or by 2050 or 2075, even. However, the younger your age, the more assured you are of witnessing these horrors. I have a daughter, and the long-term prospects of the world our generation will bequeath to her bring me great sorrow. The dieback of human population and the collapse of societies may well be precipitated by a decade of unusually severe weather, or, perhaps less likely, it may involve a global crop failure following the super explosion of a massive volcano that kills a billion people and darkens our summer skies . And, yet, as much as there is evidence in the geological and archeological record for these sorts of devastating phenomena, they will not be required for our demise. We have assured it ourselves. Like a pestilence, we have multiplied and fed upon all the earth until it can no longer sustain us, and ironically, we have done so in a time when it has been most hospitable to our kind.

If this comes off full of “sound and fury” and reminiscent of the dark minds of science fiction and horror writers or of the biblical doomsday prophets, not the stuff of reasonable and modern minds, then you are likely a reasonable, modern person. You are not easily swayed by provocative, stirring prognostications. You are circumspect. You want to see the evidence, and even when presented with persuasive data you’re skeptical, because you know numbers and logical argument can be twisted for one’s ends and, indeed, you know this is done daily.

This introduction was written for you. It describes the methodology of our undertaking and it acknowledges the problems of epistemology (which just means how we come to know what we know) and it suggests how—in the maze of competing ideas and information—we can yet come to an agreement about many of the issues most important to us. You will find criticism of the dominant ideologies of our times—free market economics, Marxism, environmentalism, Christianity, science, materialism, “Spiritualism,” and the New Age. No ideology comes out unscathed, and, at the same time, in the way of our Postmodern times, we will borrow from them all.

One Comment so far...

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website