@Malaysia41 I haven't read Overshoot! I looked at a review just now as well as the synopsis. It doesn't seem particularly focused on climate change, but if I'm understanding correctly, the idea is that human beings are inevitably going to ruin themselves with exhausting our resources in general. I'd love to hear more about why you recommend this as reading material, since you obviously are making very thoughtful lifestyle changes and advocating in many ways!
@wordnerd It is pretty dismal feeling! A 10 year timeline feels so so so short, even if that's "optimistic" by some standards. I guess we can't do anything but keep doing our best. Can't wait to get baby outside in the real world so I can feel more like a normal person and can get back to trying to be more involved locally.
I see it like this. We are a species on this earth who is well into ecological overshoot. Like other species, it's inevitable.
But - we have these marvelous brains and gumption and reason and skill .... we could use these assets to you know, dampen the overshoot and soften the landing and maybe just maybe, preserve our environment just enough to at least let humanity through the bottleneck, and hopefully, at most, make it less painful for the generations of humans who will experience the collapse.
Like Catton describes in the book, we can be like an algae bloom, that grows and dies off but comes back again. Or, we can be like bacteria in a cask full of crushed grapes, eating through all the sugars and generating poisonous alcohol that, in the end, kills all the bacteria. They don't get out of that cask alive. Right now we are behaving like bacteria, and I think we could at least try to behave like the algae. ( I may not have the biology here 100% nailed, but you get the picture).
I mean, we can do this. Obviously we are neither algae nor bacteria. We are capable of working together for common purpose and fighting for our survival. Our brains are our strength and we should use them. But our brains are also our weakness. Our brains can be hijacked. Like my parent's and brothers's brains have been. They've been so thoroughly duped into ideological inflexibility, they are unwilling to consider evidence that would have them doubting their ideologies.
The hyper-libertarian capitalistic orthodoxy that so many subscribe to, is making us behave like the bacteria, when we could instead behave more like the algae.
Note that in both analogies we're in overshoot, and will collapse. At this point it's a matter of when exactly. I'm guessing it's coming in my lifetime. I'm gen X. But it's not just about when collapse comes, it's about how painful that collapse will be, and whether humanity will survive it.
Will we collapse to rise again, or collapse into extinction? Am I really generation eXtinction? The more I study what's going on, the more this is what I'm coming to believe. At the very least, I'm in for the rapid collapse. We're already in collapse, but we haven't hit the steep ramp down yet. I think I'll be here for it.
And then there is my precious boy. Last night, I baked a birthday cake for his 13th birthday party, which is today. I'm am sad and scared for his future. At least I've lived 40+ years. His life is only beginning. We should be at a point where we are finalizing the transition to clean energy and hyper-optimized energy efficient living, and creating a promising future for our children. We could have followed the advice of wise, well-researched scientists, but instead we followed the greed of capitalists. I'm still receiving emails from my dad quoting op-eds telling him he can 'safely ignore climate alarmists'. Even so, even if we'd embraced clean energy in the 70s and stopped burning coal in the 80s, of course, that would only encourage our species to grow and eventually there'd be some other resource constraint causing collapse. It is all ecology. I just think that, given that we can understand the underlying science, and given that we can be ingenious when we need to, we could at least try to manage our predicaments.
At this point, it's not a choice between deciding whether to focus on clean energy, or atmospheric interventions, or controlling population growth, it's ALL OF THE ABOVE. You needn't choose 1 thing.
Yes - we should pursue technological solutions to get carbon out of the air - but in the meantime, stop eating beef and dairy. And spread the word and get others to adopt a whole food plant based diet*.
Yes, we should make contraception freely available to all people on the planet, and make sure everyone has decent healthcare and fewer babies - and in the meantime bike rather than drive, take public transport rather than fly.
So I'm fighting. And I'm trying to widen my circle of control. For my son. What else can I do?
*WFPB diet:Seriously I've never loved food so much. Since adopting a WFPB diet, I feel zero shame around eating, and I'm at my ideal weight without even trying. My blood work is stellar. But these are side benefits. All I'm saying is adopting a WFPB diet has side benefits. it's great for the planet, great for your health, and way better for the animals. We breed these poor babies into a tortuous existence all so we can harden our arteries after digesting their flesh. Maybe that sounds like crazy vegan talk but well, it's truth. If you want 22 days of support transitioning to a WFPB diet, check out challenge22.com. And join us in the WFPB diet thread over in the throw down the gauntlet section.