Why the transition will take a thousand years

A thousand, five thousand, I don’t know. Nobody knows.

I sometimes say: “It took five thousand years to arrive at this point of insane-scale unsustainability; so it could take five thousand to reverse it.”

I don’t know. Nobody knows. But the comment I get most often is: “We’re in danger of collapse if we don’t make major changes by 2030.” Or by 2050. Or by 2100.

Please think about how much progress toward transition has been made since the first Earth Summit fifty years ago. Or how much in the way of major transition you see taking place around us at this moment.

On Thursday my post said The Big Question is: what to do?

The Transition Towns movement has ideas. Cooperation Humboldt has ideas. The promo for the Localization Action Guide highlights these ideas:
. Join or start a community garden
. Set up a farmers’ market
. Implement participatory budgeting where you live
. Reclaim your community’s electrical grid
. Join or start a food policy council
. Oppose “free-trade” agreements
. Set up a local investing group
. Campaign for policies that support small businesses
“. . . and much more.”

“What to do?” is overwhelming and the first thing people seem able to conceive of actually doing is along the lines of “start a community garden.”

Not to disparage that step along the road, but it obviously will get us just one one-thousandth of the way to where we ultimately need to go.

Big ideas about What To Do will come out of the COP26 summit in Scotland next month. Number 26. The world has never made major changes after the other 25.

https://www.facebook.com/JeffGibbsTC/posts/10158139833445785

I think he’s too pessimistic. I don’t think humanity will die off. I’m sure nature will recover from our “developmentalist” folly. But he does understand and well-explicate the extent of the unsustainability:

Jeff Gibbs 10/14/2021

I am going to post this answer to some questions amounting to, “how I can say that the world’s population and consumption rose like a ten-mile tall spike as fossil fuels came into intense use, and will fall just as hard and fast once they go away?” Here is my answer:

Our human ability for self-deception is unrivaled and will be the death of us. The basic reality is that our human population exploded from around 1 billion to near 8 billion once we tapped into fossil fuels. That’s not up for debate. That that might continue at all, much less without finishing the obliteration of life on earth is one of the most foolish, and I might, add selfish, beliefs possible. It requires one to actively deny the basics of population and system dynamics and doom billions to brutal deaths during the coming collapse.

But it gets worse. Our human per person consumption has also increased by on average more than ten fold since fossil fuels. TEN TIMES. That means, population times consumption, our total global economy is 100 times [80, actually, 8 x 10] times larger than before we began to burn through literally millions of years of stored fossil energy every year. THAT is why all life systems on earth are in furious collapse. And I repeat, NONE of that existed before fossil fuels. And none of the supposed replacements for fossil fuels existed before fossil fuels — it takes a giant, planet wrecking fossil fuel based industrial civilization to make them.

Even at 1% of our human presence around 150 years ago, again before fossil fuels, the forests, grasslands, whales and wildlife of the planet were being actively destroyed as “civilization” spread to every corner of the living earth. To believe that a human presence 100 [80] times larger than this already destructive baseline will remain in this stratosphere is a lie, a deception so great, it is almost unfathomable. Yet, business, industry, academia, politics, narcissism, our own comfort, civilization itself, requires this lie to keep us going down this soon to be fatal road with blinders on. A road already very fatal for most other living beings.

Oceans and mountains of fossil fuels powering machines and enabling more logging, mining, buildings, fishing, hunting, roads, agriculture and humans have enabled the vastly expanded the rape of nature, accelerating the massacre of life on earth — half of all wildlife has been obliterated in recent decades for instance. Now 90% of the fish are gone. 96% of mammals. 70% of forests cut. And growing. That is why the supposed solutions of “renewable” energy, even if it was real and it is not, and nuclear, even if it were possible to run civilization on them, are just more of the same end game.

Again, that anyone thinks that our population and economy can remain orders of magnitude above baseline PERIOD, much less after fossil fuels decline, is participating in the greatest delusion in planetary history, and will be the death of all we know and love, nature first, humans to follow. Purposely ignoring how vastly beyond overshoot we humans are, and how fast and hard we are coming down in an uncontrolled collapse of both global ecosystems and the fuels that enabled our exponential growth, is probably the most immoral thing a person can do, dooming billions of humans and trillions of non-humans to misery and death.

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