22 August 2008
Introduction: Waking Up From Humanity’s Sleepwalk, p. 5
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback .
Excerpt from Chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 5
.Yes, this may all be true, the skeptics say. Societies have come and gone, populations in specific places have boomed and busted. But, curiously, despite this, the number of people who call this planet home has actually increased. Steadily, inexorably. And Civilization (which excludes only those few people living as foragers at the margins of the earth) is arguably now global in extent, encompassing six-and-a-half billion people, and includes a complexity of niches and specializations second only to mother nature, herself. So, even if one were to accept as reality that all that lives must one day die and that even the United States and the European Union cannot escape that logic of mortality, aren’t we now so robust, so powerful, complex and successful, that we will surely be around for many centuries to come? After all, by the standards of civilizations, our modern society has been around only a very short time and has been the most successful society by near every measurement imaginable. Carroll Quigley, a big-picture historian, suggested that, like all our predecessors, our civilization too will “surely pass out of existence” by 2500, but that’s not for another four hundred years yet.
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We’re growing more food than ever before; wars and genocides are generally smaller in scale than in the previous century; there are no barbarians at the gates because there are no gates—we’re global now . Worldwide, people are living longer, making more money, consuming more products . Poverty rates are going down; the very rate of population growth is decreasing for the first time in millennia . There’s more education, less slavery, more democracy . Even the warnings of global warming predict a rise of only a few degrees Fahrenheit by this century’s end . Hardly the stuff of collapses.
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Introduction: Waking Up From Humanity’s Sleepwalk, p. 5 Says:
22 August 2008 at 3:04 am.
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