Death Throes

Would be prophets step onto dangerous ground when they point to signs of the end. I hope I am wrong, but I see signs everywhere that our culture, our global empire is a wooly mammoth slowly drowning in the famous tar pits. 

 

Everywhere I look, I see a system designed for and predicated on the idea of limitless ongoing growth struggling to manage now that growth has slowed or stopped. A system with no wiggle room is now trying to cha-cha at the edge of a very steep cliff.

Our civilization is living beyond our means. We are spending more than our pay check brings in each month and are constantly borrowing from our children's college fund.

To break the  metaphor into real concrete data, the earth has biological capital that all of the species on the planet can use. This biological capital is composed of all the living things on the planet. The capital replenishes itself by breeding new life. We use the capital by ending life in order to turn that life into energy.

The system is okay so long as there is enough life available to replace the lost capital. When a species no longer is able to replenish itself, that species goes extinct. When an ecosystem no longer has enough species in the ecosystem to allow the other species to replenish themselves, that ecosystem collapses and all species there risk extinction.

When we use more of the biological capital in the ecosystem than the ecosystem can replace, we diminish the system. That is to say we cause whole species to disappear and we make the whole system more brittle.

We currently use roughly 150% of the available biological capital. In other words. Our biological salary is $1000 per week, but we spend $1500 per week. We are in the hole week after week, and we are increasing our spending.

I said that we are spending our children's college fund, but we are actually spending our children's water fund, and food fund, and energy fund and oxygen fund and life fund.

The inheritance that we are leaving to our children is devastation. And we are doing it so fast, that we will be there to explain to them what we left them when that devastation arrives. I hope you look forward to your child asking you this...

"Mom? Dad? Why did you destroy my future?"

And I hope you realize that they will be right to blame you.