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The Inevitable Collapse
By Max | September 27, 2009
I recently finished reading “Collapse” by Jared Diamond. His book has given me some new perspective on the world and caused me to change some of my past ideas about how society should be organized.
The basic theme of the book, is that a society will exploit its environment until they are either forced to make significant changes in their lifestyles or collapse. Mr. Diamond details some past societies and their collapses. While reading the book you discover there are a lot of parallels between some of these isolated failed societies and the global population today. Our world is headed for a collapse unless we collectively change our behavior drastically.
The chief environmental cause of our decline will be running out of oil as a fuel source. Oil can be viewed as the sun’s energy stored up over millions of years. Humans are currently exploiting this resource as fast as they possibly can. While we aren’t going to run out of oil any time soon, prices are going to rise quickly as demand increases and production slows or declines. Because oil is required for so many things that our world needs on a daily basis, large price increases are going to contribute to the decline in production of almost everything we need. This production decline will mean that we’ll all have to make do with less. Maintaining our current quality of life implies a huge decrease in the size of our population.
One thing I would have liked to see from the book is how the economy and politics of the world relate to the coming collapse. I think this would be an interesting topic, but would probably double the size of the book. Mr. Diamond has presented his case studies and mostly leaves it to the reader to draw their own conclusions about the future. One thing is certain, our world in 50-100 years will look vastly different that it does now.
While Mr. Diamond sprinkles in a couple messages of hope, I personally feel that the collapse is inevitable. He details a coupe of examples where crisis was averted by society. In perhaps the most relevant case of forest depletion in feudal Japan, it took a strong central authority to save the society. I don’t see how a democratically elected government would be able to wield the same power. History is littered with examples of democracies trading long term sustainability for short term benefits. Even though most voters will agree that oil is a nonrenewable resource, they also prefer to put off conservation decisions until a future date.
The obvious solution to these (and pretty much every other) problems is to reduce the size of the global population. Of course this will never happen. There are too many entrenched interests that desire to see ever increasing populations. If we don’t manage this change ourselves, it will be forced in one way or another upon us.
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