September sunsets while Chinook and Pinks stir in the quiet waters under the golden haze. Soak it up while it lasts

H20 shortages, depleted soils , and we as a species could do ourselves in.. in a very short and brutal period of time.

I am ever the optimist, that if people get serious, we can correct this tide enough to sustain ourselves.. but we have to make sacrifices.


And everybody wants the other guy to make the sacrifice first..

cause I know what "tipping point" means.
And we have reached several.

but I need to keep my head in the game for my son, my nieces and nephews .. grand nieces and nephews.. etc.. I have to keep hoping and talking to people..hoping we can find a way back from the edge..

My sons chose not have children, years ago, and now we are all thinking it was a good idea.
They are pushing 50 ( yikes!!!!!!) and very tuned into reality.

the way we're going, probably through starvation and epidemic disease and our lifespans shortened, whether through HIV or just tough living conditions.

There have been civilization collapses before, along with planet wide disasters. We've been adaptable enough to survive, so I have a feeling we'll survive again.

We might even be able to choose which things are important to keep and which things can be discarded. The process might grow us up.

Then again, we could repeat the cycle over and over, built into our DNA.

So yay for them

Those guys are helpless by themselves.

It will be people pooling skill sets and banding together who survive, not Joe Billionaire in his mink lined bunker.

But again, yay for whoever. I don't have an illusion that I am so "special" as to be part of them.

The ability of humans to adapt doesn't make my heart flutter and make it all ok, when billions of humans and animals face a bleak existence and sure death. So fuckn what if a few live. I could give a damn. I won't be here to see that. What I get to experience won't be so savory.

Speaking of savory, what herbs and spices enhance the taste of human flesh?

...butter, Parmesan and oregano.

people who are better off around to even get things from), no "safety net" to speak of, in a country riddled with famine, 14 years old...

he built a windmill with scrap he found in a junkyard and brought electricity to his village.

50 acres in Peru will be a prison, for a time, and then the supplies will run out, and the people on it, unless they have gathered others in to help with their survival, will become food themselves.

It will be people who can cooperate with each other in groups, not wealthy survivalists who build themselves a castle or a fortress or a superbly outfitted cave. People who are used to deprivation, because for them, assuming it is only famine, the change won't be that great. The others? A fella wrote a book about this called "Who Moved My Cheese". It seems kind of silly, but the characters in it are very real, and all around us, and I recognize them every single day. The ones that fare least well are those that don't deal well with big change, and many of those are people who are dependant on the wealth (either great wealth or just a really good job and life that they never thought they might lose, so they quit struggling) they have gathered, not because they have ever accomplished anything else. And there are a lot more of them than one might think.

The ones that make it, today and tomorrow, are those that, when they see the cheese is gone start, immediately, working with others to find a replacement, something to insure their survival.

for the next couple of generations. When it reaches the point of all against all, the environmental damage will accelerate as people fight to survive. With all the easy resources gone, a 2nd act won't be easy to achieve.

Catholics? Meh.

Last edited Sat Sep 7, 2013, 08:01 PM - Edit history (1)

4* - 5* C by 2100 will prune the population by more than half. Those temps bake in 6*-10* C by 2150. At 6*C a few who go underground with some infrastructure might survive for a generation, but they will have nothing above ground to replenish their supplies and technology. At 8* - 10*, if life isn't similar to the molds that grow in geysers at Yellowstone, it will be history. Mammals sure don't have a future at those temperatures, and today's supporting eco systems will not be recognizable.

Thermal equilibrium will take some time and many more degrees before the effects of todays sequestered carbon have become a part of the upper limits of the thermal inertia, then and only then, cooling will begin. The earth might be fit for similar forms of life we experience today, in a few million years. If one is interested in this cycle, there is much to be learned from the geologic history and ice cores that have been studied in the past half century.

What can interrupt this and save us? Perhaps a limited asteroid impact or other natural episode that clouds our atmosphere such that another ice age begins very soon, and is not so severe it causes our immediate extinction. That would forcefully reduce the population until perhaps some humans could colonize the warmer areas not covered by too hostile an environment and climate. The question of our present civilization continuing on, well, I've never been able to imagine a scenario that ends well for our present dilemma.

I just don't feel scientists have what it takes to geo engineer a solution, or the sophistication in geo politics to allow peaceful attempts. Nature is too complex in the first case, humans are not socially, emotionally or spiritually evolved to the point where the second seems remotely possible.

One thing is certain to me, a democrat or republican, a capitalist, socialist or communist will not solve this problem. An anarchist would never try. That leaves the crap shoot of cause and effect, of whatever comes our way.

Find a comfortable place to watch with non attachment.

Mammals have survived perfectly well in climates 10C warmer than today; after all, mammals lived with the dinosaurs and through the Eocene Thermal Maximum, both times when the climate was 6-10C warmer than today.

We will indeed see a mass extinction event (we're already seeing it, in fact), but the surviving mammals and birds will re-speciate out once the niches open up.

one cannot make a generalization about mammal survival because of the diversity.

We tend to think of mammals as primates, our pets, hoofed animals and the like. But mammals also are represented by bats, shrews, squirrels, rodents, dolphins and other oceanic species, in many different environments. Some of these will probably survive 6-10 degree C rise in the global mean.

Though, there will be some challenges for mammals not faced in prior times. Evolution takes thousands - millions of years in normal circumstances, this time extreme temperature changes could be happening in a couple of centuries. Any mammal that can't avoid the frying pan or find new habitat rapidly will also be at risk. The ocean mammals will be seriously challenged not just by temperature but chemistry as well. That leaves nocturnal rodents, bats and shrews as possible survivors as habitat allows.

Adaption for most mammals to include primates, above the 6 - 10*C, though not totally impossible, is unlikely for any extended time. To imply absolute extinction at these temps is also probably too strong, but the numbers will be so few that the time involved for climate correction will stretch beyond capabilities of adaption.

and nutrients. Water probably will be the number one. It has already started. Water will supersede in value over money and gems. Corporations are trying to buy up all the water and reserves. The cost of water will be too expensive for many people but as selfish as many human beings are, I can see many dying from lack of water as well as food. In other words, survival of the fittest kicks in full force. Fighting among ourselves not over money but over water.

Rich against rich, leaving the 99% fighting over whatever is left, if any.

Grimm huh. The world could try and prevent it tho, but I won't hold breath because we, Homo Sapiens, are a selfish bunch who generally don't give a eff about our fellow man/women.

water will be the scarcest of resources. People can choose not to do, a lot of things, but drinking and eating are not negotiable. Both take considerable water, and where will it be tomorrow?

First, it has been shown that funding for women's education significantly (and quickly) reigns in population growth.
Second, it is the wealthy of the world that marginalize and exploit the poor, forcing the poor to destroy prescious natural resources to survive.
And finally, the extraction and consumer based economy that has been built was destined for this type of result, but it is driven by Wall St. (and similar institutions) demand for high profit and rapid growth.
A good first step would be to shut down the stock market, replace with a bond system for investment. Then strong regulatory controls, focus on education and economic development, move from war as and answer to all the worlds problems, and R&D into sustainable living and renewable energy.
Well maybe it is hopeless.

and what happens over and over again. Humans are not different. The same thing that limits yeast, limits us.

Suppose you have a magic wand that will enable you to overcome the entrenched power of the financial elite. You can shut down the stock market. You can eliminate the demand for high profit and rapid growth. You can replace the extraction and consumer based economy with whatever new economic model you choose.

If, with all these (inconceivably difficult) changes, population continues to increase, then we still reach a calamitous result. The best you could hope for is to improve the lives of billions of people for a few decades -- not too shabby a goal, but not a solution.

You're correct that women's education is one component of a sound strategy for ending the population explosion, especially in underdeveloped countries. We can't stop there, though. We need a range of measures, including those targeted at the developed countries, where the rate of increase is lower but the impact of each new birth is higher.

Human beings appear to have evolved an asymmetric decision-making ability regarding growth. Pro-growth decisions are very easy. De-growth decisions on the other hand are very hard - to the the point that in some domains they appear impossible.

It's actually easy to see why this is so, if you look at H. sap as a living organism like any other. Life has two fundamental evolutionary (genetically encoded) directives: to survive and to reproduce. Survival entails finding more energy than the organism needs at the moment, because future shortages are likely. Excess reproduction is similarly built into the genetics of all life in order to account for predation, disease and resource shortages.

All species evolve various means to facilitate both of those prime directives. The human evolutionary advantage has been the brain. Our analytical, problem-solving brain evolved as a limit-removal mechanism in service of those two fundamental goals of life. Both those goals result in growth if no external limits are encountered. For most species, the limits are inherent in the various competitions that form the basis of natural selection. Humans have been able to defeat every limit we have encountered on our climb to becoming the planet's apex predator.

Because of the requirements of evolution through natural selection, humans have not evolved any significant limit-acceptance ability. It's clear why this happened - any such ability would have worked against the evolutionary program, and would have eventually resulted in the extinction of the species.

Faced with a choice between accepting a limit to further growth or seeking to remove it, we always try to remove it. We have been supremely successful at doing that.

Unfortunately, one of the other bits of evolutionary baggage we have been dragging along is the fact that evolutionary competition is a zero-sum game. If our species is to win, our competitors must lose. That has made it very hard for us to care about the damage we are doing to other species and the planet. Our evolutionary heritage has not equipped us with the ability to care about the fate of other species, for one simple reason. Such empathy would require us to restrain our own growth and let them win. Down that path lies extinction, and the nature of life dictates that we cannot take that road.

The fact that our brains can conceive of us living in balance with other life has tricked us into believing it's possible for us to actually do so. As the planetary limits swam into clear view after 1970 or so, we decided that our collective failure to act on that realization represents a cognitive or moral shortcoming. It's nothing of the sort. It's just the way living organisms function. The same brains that make it possible for us to recognize the damage we are doing, have made the damage inevitable and have rendered us incapable of stopping it.

We are living out the climax of a planetary-scale Greek tragedy. We can see it coming, but we have neither the ability nor the time to change course.

Can't stop, can't continue.

http://www.context.org/iclib/ic07/schmoklr/

"In nature, all pursue survival for themselves and their kind. But they can do so only within biologically evolved limits. The living order of nature, though it has no ruler, is not in the least anarchic. Each pursues a kind of self- interest, each is a law unto itself, but the separate interests and laws have been formed over aeons of selection to form part of a tightly ordered harmonious system. Although the state of nature involves struggle, the struggle is part of an order. Each component of the living system has a defined place out of which no ambition can extricate it. Hunting- gathering societies were to a very great extent likewise contained by natural limits.

With the rise of civilization, the limits fall away. The natural self-interest and pursuit of survival remain, but they are no longer governed by any order. The new civilized forms of society, with more complex social and political structures, created the new possibility of indefinite social expansion: more and more people organized over more and more territory. All other forms of life had always found inevitable limits placed upon their growth by scarcity and consequent death. But civilized society was developing the unprecedented capacity for unlimited growth as an entity. (The limitlessness of this possibility does not emerge fully at the outset, but rather becomes progressively more realized over the course of history as people invent methods of transportation, communication, and governance which extend the range within which coherence and order can be maintained.) Out of the living order there emerged a living entity with no defined place.

In a finite world, societies all seeking to escape death- dealing scarcity through expansion will inevitably come to confront each other. Civilized societies, therefore, though lacking inherent limitations to their growth, do encounter new external limits – in the form of one another. Because human beings (like other living creatures) have "excess reproductive capacity," meaning that human numbers tend to increase indefinitely unless a high proportion of the population dies prematurely, each civilized society faces an unpleasant choice. If an expanding society willingly stops where its growth would infringe upon neighboring societies, it allows death to catch up and overtake its population. If it goes beyond those limits, it commits aggression. With no natural order or overarching power to prevent it, some will surely choose to take what belongs to their neighbors rather than to accept the limits that are compulsory for every other form of life.

In such circumstances, a Hobbesian struggle for power among societies becomes inevitable. We see that what is freedom from the point of view of each single unit is anarchy in an ungoverned system of those units. A freedom unknown in nature is cruelly transmuted into an equally unnatural state of anarchy, with its terrors and its destructive war of all against all."

Life is already so different from what it was in my childhood with zillions of children running around compared to the silent and grim streets now. Remember how badly the citizens of Hamlin wanted their children back? It takes a village to raise a child and maybe it takes children to make a village.

Every buck they plug into the markets is vote of confidence for more of the same.
Just one more reason why there is no such thing as a liberal investor. Just varying degrees of libertarianism in disguise.

Every new acre he clears and plants replaces other species with more humans, adds more chemicals to the water table and strips more topsoil from the land.

Between speculation-fueled land price increases and large debt piled up in the 1980's, most farms I know of became "managed" by university educated farm managers (from Monsanto U.) that are required by the banks which are needed to finance the next crop and keep the places afloat while the land debt is paid off, which it never is. That means the farmers are effectively hired hands with little control and all of the burden.

That arrangement is even more obvious in the case of chicken ranchers, who essentially become share-croppers under strict rules detailed in the sales contracts they need to make with the buyers. That system was pioneered by Tyson in Arkansas.

All of that resulted in the end of the family farm in the 1980's. It killed small towns and drove people from the Midwest into suburbs or larger towns where they learned to commute. It also helped spread the teabaggery in the plains states, as people do tend to get conservative, religious, and generally angry when that type of thing happens and they have no adequate narrative to deal with it. It's also one of the reasons I go off on the issue of debt-driven growth from time-to-time.

Before our fellow North Americans get overly outraged at the "banksters", I should point out that the reason Tyson or Cargill have such sway in the market is because of the concentration in the retail market, from McDonald's to the mega-supermarket, which in turn was driven by suburbanization and the auto. Smaller scale stores which may buy from a variety of producers don't stand a chance when people are driving five miles for a quart of milk, which they shouldn't be drinking anyway.

So there ya' have it. You can see from the narrative of my understanding why the most direct solution out of my freshly rested head is for everyone to burn their cars, fire trucks and ambulances excepted.

Did I miss anything in E/E the last month+? Seems relatively quiet.

But I hear where you are coming from. The farmers I know while being far from perfect, are at least organic & permaculture advocates.
I feel they are still doing a better service to the future than Con-Agra or Monsanto and those that join into a symbiotic relationship with them.

You're such a downer when you're right!

I think we're seeing the inception of our extinction event. Too few of us realize that photosynthesis stops at 104°F. And that we're destroying our primary pollinators. Too few of us understand exponential growth, and the grim realities of overpopulation (read Calhoun for a glimpse).

While I concede that a few may weather (pun not intended) this crisis, it seems likely that Gaia will have other plans. As she rolls over to scrape us off her backside, we'll just have to go along for the ride...