http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2013/11/do-you-want-to-avoid-the-bottleneck.htmlAllow me an indulgence. After more than a decade of searching for answers, and attending to the major trends in our world, I have come to certain conclusions about the future of humanity. I haven't made a secret of my now fairly firm belief that in the not-too-distant future humanity will suffer an evolutionary bottleneck event concurrent with a sixth major extinction. Ironically this extinction event is being brought on by humanity itself. Freed from the ordinary biological constraints that keep other species in check in normal ecological feedback loops, and bolstered by the discovery of incredible power stored in fossil fuels and nuclear fission, humans have used their cleverness to grow far beyond the natural carrying capacity afforded by real-time solar influx. And the problems caused by this fact have grown obvious to most. We are altering our climate. We are polluting our environment. We are diminishing the quality of soils and water. And we are behaving badly toward one another, as well as the rest of the biosphere.
Nor am I alone in this conclusion. In fact, increasingly, my company is becoming more respectable. For some time people like Paul Ehrlich, Dennis and Donella Meadows, and others have been warning of the dangers coming if humanity didn't take action (as far back as the 60's and 70'). Lately they are joined by William Catton, James Lovelock, and even the Astronomer Royal of England, Sir Martin Rees, in sounding alarm bells more loudly and more urgently. James Hansen (formerly of NASA), one of the most outspoken researchers on climate change, has gone radical in protesting the lack of any government action to prevent runaway warming. I suppose you could say I feel a bit vindicated, but that is not really a good feeling. I wish it were not the case.
If you want to know why I am so convinced of this outcome, I have put together a list of things that, from a systems perspective, seem to me to be necessary actions needed to minimize the negative impacts rapidly approaching. We cannot prevent all of those impacts, but in theory if these actions were taken immediately we would be able to salvage some portion of the population and preserve our species (which as long-time readers know I don't think is actually such a good idea in light of the foolishness we manifest). Note that the situation is entirely systemic. All of the items on this list interact in complex, nonlinear ways so that you can't just pick and choose the one or ones you think will do the job. All will have to be done, together, for there to be any positive effect. Once you see the list, and ponder the likelihood that our population will do any of them, let alone all, you will understand my conviction.
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More at the link, including a convincing argument as to why there is nothing we can do to save the human species.
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