There are a lot of books and articles coming out that foresee the end in one way or another.  The end of what?  Why, the end of the world as we know it.

Doom-Sayers vs. Truth-Tellers

Every generation has its doom-mongers predicting the apocalypse.  But the contemporary worriers I have in mind aren’t that.  They’re concerned; but they aren’t crazy prophets or fundamentalist awaiting “the Rapture.” They’re level-headed scientists, journalists, economists, philosophers, holding responsible positions and backing up what they say with all the research skills, critical thinking, and scholarship that they developed in their professional lives. The crazies who are always with us are more than a joke: They make it too easy for too many people to dismiss the real thing.

At the risk of giving too much information (if you want, feel free to just skip on down the page), let me mention just a sample of some well-informed worriers who come to mind.

Some Truth-Tellers You May Have Heard Of.

On Collapse.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse looks at the failure of past cultures and civilizations with clear implications for ours today. Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, is a little earlier but more scholarly, sounder, and far-ranging exploration along the same lines. More recently, Tainter, an archeologist, joined with T.W. Patzek to write Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma.  It explores the same themes in relation to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, which some call the United States’ worst environmental disaster so far.

On Decline & Crisis.

Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead  underlines the concerning decline of what she calls “five pillars” of modern Western society.  The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon examines a series of different crises and stresses that converge in our present time, making a huge system-wide collapse increasingly likely.  On his “upside,” Homer-Dixon, a Canadian political scientist and author, says we know and understand much more now about history, complex systems, ecology, and the effects we’re having on the Earth’s natural systems that support us.  The World Wildlife Fund’s 2016 Living Planet Report  gives one sobering up-to-date accounting of the declining health of our planet in almost every area, as evidenced by declining trend lines of one crucial resource or species after another.

We know what we’re doing to the living systems of the Earth, in which we live and of which we are part. We know enough to avoid the otherwise inevitable collapse of civilization. (But do we know how to use what we know? Can we in fact turn things around? In time?)

 

The Environment. Journalist Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, and author Bill McKibben’s Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, among many other books by many other notables, explore the impacts  of climate change on increasingly vulnerable economies and cultures, and on the world system that has become dependent on unending growth.  The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, looks at the on-going human-caused mass extinction of species.  All the authors I’m mentioning remind us that we humans are part of and dependent on the very environment we are disrupting and destroying.

On The Economy.

Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism, from a different angle, says that we are on the cusp of the final breakdown of the industrial capitalist model within which the developed countries, and increasingly the world, have functioned over the past centuries. Mason argues convincingly that the capitalist “market” cannot resolve the problems of the globalized, information age that it itself has created.

Finally, I’ll end with mention of David Korten’s The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.  I include this work primarily because it identifies our most fundamental problem—what we really must grapple with and master—as not just capitalism, nor modern technology, but rather the 5,000-year old dynamics of civilization (what he calls “empire”) itself.  This is a central theme in my own work. Both authors, in different ways and with different emphases, see the present global systemic crisis as bringing both the necessity, and opportunity, for something much better to emerge.

The above is just a sampling—there’s no way to catch up or keep up with all the books and articles on those and related topics that are pouring out into the public sphere. I could quibble with aspects of what these authors say or how they say it; but it’s better just to recognize that their core points are sound, beyond important, and point directly to problems that we must attend to.

 

No Reasonable Doubt

Among all the far-ranging thoughts in such books, two key themes—two aspects of our current reality—stand out. Their authors understand that we have moved beyond reasonable doubt about these two things.

(So do a lot of other people, by the way. We just got back from a concert in which a local youth choir sang to a largely aging audience about the imminent need to “save the planet,” and a young woman from Vancouver Island University presented a song-poem she wrote about climate change and species extinction. Both hopeful and deeply saddening, young people’s awareness of our situation also illustrates the same following two themes.)

 

First, we (the generations of humans now alive and in the immediate future) face an imminent and unprecedented civilizational collapse—if we keep on as we are now.  Such concerns can be hard to take seriously, partly, as I said, because people have “cried wolf” in the past. But even more, they revolve around things that are very large, and that may seem remote. We’re getting warning signals, but don’t see what they mean, don’t “connect the dots.” Our selective blindness is understandable, but no less dangerous for that.

It’s hard to see or experience such things as the cataclysmic extinction event that is ongoing as you read this, or global climate change. It’s hard to grasp the impending end of cheap oil, on which our civilization currently runs, while there’s still a subsidized glut on the market.  Day-by-day everything on the surface seems normal.  Ordinary citizens later reported much the same thing in Germany leading up to the Holocaust. They didn’t see what was happening under the surface of their day-to-day lives until it was too late.

For us today, all the familiar dynamics of past collapses are present. Basically, we’re overrunning our ecology at the same time as the economy that defines modern civilization becomes ever more volatile and wobbly. Both trends are unsustainable.

The specter of unsustainability already has moved from the realms of speculation, science fiction, or worrying concern, to widely accepted multidimensional fact. We’re on a hurtling train with the end of the tracks in sight.

But if all this has happened before, what’s different now? Well, for starters, it involves us. That’s obvious, you say. Yes. But we still collectively struggle to assimilate the implications of living unsustainably on a finite planet.  Now, it’s our immediate problem, not that of some distant past culture or hypothetical future. We’re still working to fully grasp the reality that we’re the passengers on the hurtling train we’re driving.

Beyond that, the scale, complexity, and global interconnectedness of the cultural/economic and ecological systems that are involved are all unprecedented. We’re not talking here about just one localized culture, nor even an empire, but the whole world.

Even in the rush of economic globalization, the crash of 2008 and other events and trends signal growing instabilities in the increasingly global economy. Similarly, our ecological problems now involve far more than the localized deforestation, soil depletion, salination, or local prolonged drought that brought down past cultures or empires. Today’s problems involve the entire planet. We face catastrophic planetary climate change, species extinction, general environmental degradation, and who knows what total damage to ocean ecologies.

 

Second, at the same time as we face graver and more complex problems, we also have more knowledge and understanding about ourselves and our environment than any previous generation anywhere, any time—as well as vastly improved means to develop yet more knowledge and to share it more widely. This leads recent writers—especially including, among those I just mentioned, Mason, Homer-Dixon and Korten—to think that we may be on or near the cusp of a momentous paradigm shift.  The Turning Point, by physicist Fritjof Capra (1982), captured the same insight decades earlier.

These authors all see, or realistically hope for, a change of consciousness born out of crisis, nurtured by new knowledge, and embodied in new social and economic forms emerging from possibilities that are inherent in advancing information technology.  The social changes ushered in by crisis, new technologies, and most importantly new understanding, will be, in Mason’s term, “postcapitalist.” Or, as Korten says, they will or can nurture “earth community” rather than “empire.” In a word, they will nurture the good things of human life for everyone rather than the accumulation of wealth for a few. If that seems utopian, well, maybe it is. But read Mason’s book. It’s also doable, grounded in the realities of our time—and necessary.