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Endgame by John Michael Greer, The Archruid Report
China or the U.S.: Which Will Be the Last Nation Standing? by Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute
To Curb Climate Change, We Need to Protect Water by Maude Barlow, Common Dreams
Endgame by John Michael Greer, The Archruid Report
For decades now, those concerned with the future of the industrial world have warned that a point would come, sooner or later, when the consequences of all that short-term thinking would begin coming home to roost. For the United States, that point might be arriving now... What this means, if I’m right, is that we may have just moved into the endgame of America’s losing battle with the consequences of its own history. For many years now, people in the peak oil scene – and the wider community of those concerned about the future, to be sure – have had, or thought they had, the luxury of ample time to make plans and take action. Every so often books would be written and speeches made claiming that something had to be done right away, while there was still time, but most people took that as the rhetorical flourish it usually was, and went on with their lives in the confident expectation that the crisis was still a long ways off. We may no longer have that option. If I read the signs correctly, America has finally reached the point where its economy is so deep into overshoot that catabolic collapse is beginning in earnest. If so, a great many of the things most of us in this country have treated as permanent fixtures are likely to go away over the years immediately before us, as the United States transforms itself into a Third World country. The changes involved won’t be sudden, and it seems unlikely that most of them will get much play in the domestic mass media... China or the U.S.: Which Will Be the Last Nation Standing? by Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute
Silly me. Here I had thought that world leaders would want to keep their nations from collapsing. They must be working hard to prevent currency collapse, financial system collapse, food system collapse, social collapse, environmental collapse, and the onset of general, overwhelming misery—right? But no, that's not what the evidence suggests. Increasingly I am forced to conclude that the object of the game that world leaders are actually playing is not to avoid collapse; it's simply to postpone it a while so as to be the last nation to go down, so yours can have the chance to pick the others' carcasses before it meets the same fate... To Curb Climate Change, We Need to Protect Water by Maude Barlow, Common Dreams
[Comment about this article from Dave Ewoldt: "Here's an interesting article on water that falls into the connecting the dots category
amongst ecological, social justice, economic, and corporatism concerns. It also addresses comments that are too common in the Southwest desert--but I've heard them in the wet Pacific Northwest as well--from sustainability activists. This is the idea that we can just capture all the rain that falls for exclusive human use. The problem with this disconnected, selfish, short-term thinking is the destructive environmental impacts directly contribute to anthropogenic global warming.
We must get back into balance, or holistic integration, with the web of life. While rainwater harvesting can help alleviate the current overpumping of aquifers, we cannot escape the fact that a healthy and vibrant environment is the core foundation for a healthy and vibrant human economy and any hope for a meaningful quality of life."] It is widely acknowledged that greenhouse gas emission-fueled climate change is having a profound and negative impact on fresh water systems around the world. Warmer weather causes more rapid evaporation of lakes and rivers, reduced snow and ice cover on open water systems, and melting glaciers. What is less understood is that our collective abuse and displacement of fresh water is also a serious cause of climate change and global warming. If we are to successfully address climate change, it is time to include an analysis of how our abuse of water is an additional factor in the creation of global warming as well as solutions that protect water and watersheds...
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