Maybe your grandkids will start to notice

A pretty gradual “collapse” . . .

Few in the next generation will consciously perceive it; probably more in the generation that comes of age in the latter part of this century.

. . . because it will most directly and significantly impact those “at the periphery.”

In the affluent countries the complexity and expense will gradually render more and more disadvantaged people dysfunctional. Social services will have to contend, and doing so will be an issue, but in mass society those people are not very visible.

Third world countries that have been “sacrifice zones” of the global capitalist-industrial system will become wholescale dysfunctional. We’ll vaguely notice more and more “failed states;” refugees wandering, diseases spreading.

There are so many human beings … billions could be afflicted and it would hardly register in the news or the governmental policies of the OK societies and populations. Global cosmopolitan culture is a world inhabited by about ten percent of humanity. That elite will be OK for generations.

What has been building up, at an accelerating rate, as socially and ecologically ruinous for so long will finally become fully apparent and critical at some point in the future. But I don’t agree with those predicting dramatic collapse in a matter of decades. The collapse will gnaw its way from the periphery to the center more gradually than that.