"It's worse than we thought." Sound familiar?

[GliderGuider]

96. Trade in hemp won't make the global situation better

and the land you describe as "places where normal food crops would have a hard time" is called "agricultural land". While there is three or four times more agricultural land than arable land, there still isn't enough of it. Land other than that has ha multitude of problems from the agricultural point of view - soil composition, water supply, accessibility etc. Those are the reasons we don't use it now. In many palaces we would use it if it was at all suitable.

Here is a page that talks about powerdown and degrowth in context:

http://prosperouswaydown.com/contact-and-information/

Understanding the nature of our energy basis is critical to understanding where we are headed as a civilization. In this period of global resource transition, peoples’ beliefs are separating into a growth continuum of three general belief systems or world views about the trajectory for our future.

1. We will continue to grow, and we can support Business as Usual (BAU) into the foreseeable future either because resources are infinite, or by leveraging technology. This group consists of consumers, capitalists, neo-liberal economists, resource extractors, and other believers in the status quo.

2. We must stop growing, but we can keep what we’ve got now by making some Green changes in how we live, again using technology. Steady Staters, Zero growth proponents, sustainable development proponents, environmentalists, and climate change advocates live here in the idea of reform. The Resilience Alliance, with its emphasis on “retaining the same controls and function” in reaction to systemic change, is probably also in this category? But if we try to keep what we’ve got, is there room for the basic structural and cultural changes that need to be made to adapt?

3. Our economies will contract to match declines in resources, and we must adapt proactively if that decline is to be orderly. Descent, Degrowth, Transition, and PWD groups have this world view of transformation. Most in this category also believe that orderly descent will require relative socioeconomic equality. Perspectives on economic collapse vary, with “doomers” as the most extreme.

The doomers he talks about (of which I am one) generally think that society at large will try to keep operating from belief systems 1 and 2 well past the point when they should have been abandoned in favour of number 3. By doing so, we will enter a regime of accelerating, unmitigatable calamities, and will lose the opportunity to control our descent. This puts us squarely at the mercy of events, resulting in an uncontrolled collapse.

Keep in mind that this is a globally aggregated view, and different regions will take different paths. In the end, though, the entire global system is interconnected to such a degree that even those regions that do take proactive measures will be impacted by the failure of regions that do not, and so run a high risk of collapsing in turn. They may not end up collapsing of course, and may become "pocket universes" of civilization. The problem is that no place on the planet can be considered a closed system any more - every place is at risk from incursions by those with less than altruistic motives.