The View from the End of the World

"Saudi Arabia, the world's largest producer of oil, has pumped a total of 46 billion barrels of oil in the past seventeen years, without any decrease in its stated reserve figure of about 260 billion barrels. The world is likely to get no warning before Saudi output peaks — an event that credible authorities suggest could happen soon."

"Diverse events like the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, the 2005 urban riots in France, and hurricane Katrina may be the foreshocks of a coming global breakdown."

"About 40% of the world's population now lacks sufficient water for basic sanitation and hygiene, and nearly one out of every five people does not have enough to drink."

"Nearly half of the world's major fish stocks are now fished to their maximum limit; since 1950, industrialized fishing has reduced the total mass of large predatory fish in the world's oceans by 90 percent."

"Over the past twenty years, warming of the Arctic ocean has been eight times faster than it was over the past hundred years."

"Scientists have recently found that the Greenland ice sheet's rate of ice loss has more than doubled in the past ten years, from 90 to 220 cubic kilometers annually. In 2006 the ice sheet will dump into the ocean about 225 times the amount of fresh water that Los Angeles consumes."

"In 1870 the average income in the world's richest country was about nine times greater than that in the world's poorest country. By 1990 it was forty-five times greater."

"The number of overweight people in the world — about 1.2 billion, mostly in rich countries — now roughly equals the number of underfed and undernourished, almost all in poor countries."

All of these quotes come from the fact page for "The Upside of Down."

How would you like the world to end?

You have a lot of choices today. Civilization could end because of peak oil and the resulting collapse of agriculture and transportation. Civilization could end because of resource wars resulting from the loss of arable land and the increasing acidity of oceans brought about by climate change. Civilization could end because of local wars brought on by the economic collapses of nations like the United States. Civilization could end because of civil strife brought on by the discrepancy between the lifestyles of the rich and the poor, which are at their highest ever in history.

Civilization could collapse because of any number of other problems. Climate scientists worry that climate change could potentially shut off the Gulf Stream, dropping Western Europe back into an ice age (darkly ironic). Colony Collapse Disorder is the current phrase used to describe the catastrophic die offs occurring in the honey bee industry. 75% of all plants rely on pollination and 30% of the world's crops rely on pollination. We are currently in the largest mass extinction since the Dinosaurs disappeared. And worse than this, we never know when the loss of a key species will lead to a cascade of extinctions.

The number of challenges currently facing civilization is so large as to be almost unbelievable when they are recounted. Civilizations have faced and survived challenges before, but lesser challenges have brought down longer lasting civilizations than ours. Rome looked invincible, so did The British Empire Babylon and Egypt, and Tokugawa Japan. But civilizations fall, and things change.

It would be foolish to think that our precariously balanced creation, with its myriad problems and self-inflicted challenges, would be immune to this basic fact.