Dennis Meadows: Collapse inevitable 2015-2020

[GliderGuider]

21. From where I sit, things ARE happening now.

But you have to look beyond simply politics and economics to see it clearly.

First there are the ecological factors:

» Climate disruption and the couple of dozen positive feedbacks that are already in play;
» Ocean acidification;
» Desertification and deforestation;
» Loss of fresh water aquifers;
» Loss of soil fertility;
» Loss of topsoil;
» Increasing soil and water pollution with chemicals and garbage;
» Accelerating species extinctions on land and in the oceans;
» Increasing human appropriation of the biosphere's Net Primary Productivity: ~50% at the moment;
» Human overshoot of over 50% according to the Global Footprint Network;

Then there are the social, political and economic factors:

» Increasing instability of global financial system;
» Increasingly extended and fragile supply chains;
» Rising fuel and food costs;
» Loss of economic opportunities around the world due to slowing growth;
» Increasing disparity between rich and poor;
» Increasing disenfranchisement of the poor;
» Increasing authoritarianism by governments in order to suppress growing dissent (or the potential for dissent) due to the previous four points.

There are three related reasons I think that collapse is the likely outcome, rather than just a series of isolated and correctable failures. The first is that the system of global civilization contains too many interlocking existential risks to allow us to avoid them all - or even most of them. The second is that no person or group that has the authority to change the system as a whole in order to avoid failures. The third is that there is too much opposition even to regional changes - too much of the world depends on the continuation of BAU, so any disruption of the current path represents not only a loss of profits, but a potential loss of lives in vulnerable regions.

Growth-oriented BAU is entrenched vigorously defended, and the stresses at multiple points in the system are demonstrably increasing. A failure under these circumstances has an increasing chance of producing a cascade. Any significant cascade failure that implicates multiple human systems and their underlying ecological support has a good chance of proving devastating. IMO.