"Cynicism is merely realism with a smile" --me
Serious MeThoughts on Collapse and Limits to the World as We Know It Cynical, Fatalist, Satirist MePeak Oil Monthly - The Magazine in Review - 2013 |
Glossary DefinitionsBiological Overshoot http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/glossary/ Peak Oil The peaking of any non-renewable resource occurs when about half of it has been used, and it becomes increasingly more expensive and difficult to exploit. Peak Oil is particularly worrisome, since petroleum is used not only to fuel our modern society (transportation) but also to grow food, manufacture goods, and essentially provide us with the lifestyle we have all grown up with and expect to continue. Due to the inherent finite limits of our world, though, it is not likely to continue. Further links: http://www.sfbayoil.org/links.html Species Extinction Modern humans tend to view themselves separate from other animals, and in control of their ecosystems. A direct result of our controlling environments and destroying the planet wherever we settle is that other species are going extinct at a record rate. It is estimated several hundred disappear from the face of the earth daily. Further reading and links: http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html Human Nature Animal species, which humans are, all are part of a greater scheme of things we often call "mother nature." The eventual goal of all life is to create more of itself and thus guarantee that it will continue. Additionally we've inherited a need to feel that we as individuals will continue on in some form (as unexistence seems so permanent, I suppose). As thinking sentient humans, we've generally convinced ourselves that we are at the top of the heap of animal evolution, we are special, and we don't really operate on larger biological natural laws. Indeed, we have managed to control our environments enough that it seems that way. But this control is very likely a short-term result of our cleverness (short term not when relative to a single individual's lifespan, but relative to a species' existence). It seems evident that the very parts of our nature that served us well in getting to the point we now are at, do not serve us well when the planet becomes stressed by our activities. However, it is in our nature to deny that any other options are really good, or even if we intellectually accept them, to act upon them in any numbers large enough to make a dent in our running roughshod over that which was. We are not more adaptable than many other species in this situation. EROEI EROEI is an acronym for "energy returned on energy invested." It is an important concept to understand fully, if you can, in order to understand why new and alternative forms of energy to that we get from fossil fuels, and specifically petroleum, cannot provide the same level of energy and comfort for our society that we have grown accustomed to using petroleum. Further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI Climate Change (Global Warming) Global warming is a prime example of a catastrophe taking place in front of our eyes that we cannot and will not do anything significant to mitigate, because we really can't. The increasing load of carbon in the atmosphere is the result of human activity (within an overpopulated context). To stop it, we have few alternatives except to change the entire system of production and agriculture and lifestyle modern life has constructed. We simply will not do that. Macro/Micro and Scale Any individual can rationalize almost any behavior he or she acts out as not so detrimental to the planet that it matters. And indeed, that is pretty much true on an individual basis. The earth is large enough that no single being or family really can do much permanent damage to it. This ability to change the earth and make it more comfortable, along with our natural tendencies to explain away things using magic and myth, probably made us feel happy as we developed the planet into the present caldron of ecocide that we constructed. As our numbers increase, if you look at the MACRO scale of human numbers, even averaging an individual small exploitation of the planet and multiplying it up to the nearly 7 billion persons who live here, one gets a very major effect. A related topic is scale. Often when I have been at peak oil presentations, the scientists who have done the math on any number of alternatives we'd like to believe could help us have brought up the idea that these "solutions" will not scale up. Due to the EROEI or resources needed for solar panels, wind turbines, hydrogen or electric cars, or other modern green messianic fantasy, they just cannot physical ever be produced in quantities or amounts needed to continue our life as we presently know it. No Solutions One of the more difficult ideas for me to accept, even after I grasped it, is some of these difficulties just do not have any solutions that could be instituted in a time frame soon enough to do enough good that one could say the problem had been solved. This is difficult for humans to believe, because for most of the recent past, any problem defined is thought to be awaiting the inevitable solution. But I sense that within a highly complex, technological society, if you have a number of very dramatic problems all occurring at once, most all of which are related to too much exploitation of the planet and too many humans trying to live here, along with our human nature that encourages us to deny that we are the root cause, there probably is no available answers for that which faces us. The problem will solve itself, likely through very large food shortages when industrial agriculture fails due to fossil fuel inputs or perhaps due to the warming of the planet. Or perhaps we will simply annihilate one another as we have historically done when stretched for resources. Neither is a pretty scenario. |
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