How do we get out of here?

[GliderGuider]

I've posted a new web article that combines an update of my recent Thermodynamic Footprint work with an update of the "sustainable population levels" writing from the threads here and on FB. Skipping the arithmetic and the graphs, here are a couple of excerpts.

How do we get out of here?

How might we get from where we are today to a sustainable world population of 50 million or less? First of all, we should discard the notion of "managing" any population decline, let alone one this big, through education or official policies. People are not capable of taking these kinds of decisions on anything but an individual or small-group level, where they will make precious little difference to the final outcome. Politicians will by and large not even propose an idea like "managed decline" - not if they want to gain power or remain in power, anyway. China's brave experiment with one-child families notwithstanding, any global decline will be purely involuntary.

A world population decline would be triggered and fed by our civilization's encounter with limits. These limits may show up in any area: accelerating climate change, weather extremes, shrinking food supplies, fresh water depletion, shrinking energy supplies, pandemic diseases, breakdowns in the social fabric due to excessive complexity, supply chain breakdowns, electrical grid failures, a breakdown of the international financial system, international hostilities - the list of candidates is endless, and their interactions are far too complex to predict.

In 2007, a couple of years after I totally understood the concept of Peak Oil, I wrote my first and still my most popular web article on population decline: Population: The Elephant in the Room. In it I sketched out the picture of a monolithic population collapse - a straight-line decline from today's seven billion people to just one billion by the end of this century.

As time has passed I've become less confident in this particular dystopian vision. It now seems to me that human beings may be just a bit tougher than that. We would fight like demons to stop the slide, though we would potentially do a lot more damage to the environment in the process. We would try with all our might to cling to civilization and rebuild our former glory. Different physical, environmental and social situations around the world would result in a great diversity in regional outcomes. To put it plainly, a simple "slide to oblivion" is not in the cards for any species that could recover from the giant Toba volcanic eruption in just 75,000 years.

What might we do?

To be absolutely clear, after ten years of investigating what I affectionately call "The Global Clusterfuck", I do not think it can be prevented, mitigated or managed in any way. If and when it happens, it will follow its own dynamic, and the force of events could easily make the Japanese and Andaman tsunamis seem like a pleasant day at the beach. The preparations that can be made will all happen at the individual and small-group scale. It will be up to each of us to decide what our skills, resources and motivation call us to do. It will be different for each of us - even for people in the same neighborhood, let alone people on opposite sides of the world.

I've been saying for a couple of years now that we will each do whatever we think is appropriate to the circumstances, in whatever part of the world we can reach. The outcome of our actions is utterly unforeseeable, because it depends on how the efforts of all 7 billion of us converge, co-operate and compete. The end result will be different from place to place - climate change impacts will vary, resources vary, social structures vary, values and belief systems are different all over the world. The best we can do is to do our best.

Here is my advice:

• Stay awake to what's happening around us.
  
• Don't get hung up by other peoples' "shoulds and shouldn'ts".
  
• Examine our values, and if they aren't in alignment with we think the world needs, change them.
  
• Stop blaming people. Others are as much victims of the times as we are - even the CEOs and politicians.
  
• Blame, anger and outrage is pointless. It wastes precious energy that we are going to need for more useful work.
  
• Laugh a lot, at everything - including ourselves.
  
• Hold all the world's various beliefs and "isms" lightly, including our own.
  
• Forgive others. Forgive ourselves. For everything.
  
• Love everything just as deeply as you can.

That's what I think might be helpful. If we get all that personal stuff right, then doing the physical stuff about food, water, housing, transportation, energy, politics and the rest of it will come easy. Or at least easier. And we will have a lot more fun doing it.