An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity

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Discusses the heart at the ecological crises. “At the material level, we face a crisis of consumption. In aggregate terms, the human population has too much stuff. That stuff is not equally or equitably distributed among the population, of course. But no matter the level of fairness and justice in societies, the ecological costs of the extraction, processing, and waste disposal required to produce all that stuff is at the core of our ecological crises.” There is no sugar coating the threats, they are real and forthcoming. “We conclude that there are no workable solutions to the most pressing problems of our historical moment. The best we can do is minimize the suffering and destruction.” A lot of past talk of population control has been based in white supremacy, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the question of what’s a sustainable population. That’s the kind of thing that people have bristled against. We don’t have a solution. But the fact that there aren’t easy and obvious solutions doesn’t mean that you can ignore the issue.” I read this book for my class Psychology of the Anthropocene and learned a lot from it. Basically, we are f***ed as a society. Is there hope? Maybe. It's unclear. Read this book and then read more of the books I'm reading for this class which I will continue to log here. I think it is important for everyone to understand the " inconvenient apocalypse" that our world has come to. I especially liked the last line in the book (don't read further if you're planning on reading it):

An Inconvenient Apocalypse – ROBERT JENSEN

I lived insuch a place for about ten years (age 24 to 34). Experimental and quite imperfect, but at least we were (and others still are) trying to figure it out. Dealing with thw many various issues. So, we conclude that the type of living arrangements that groups of humans develop arise from the differences in geography, climate, and environmental conditions. Absent any other credible explanation, we assume that the different material realities under which humans have lived have shaped the variations in human culture. People make choices to build cultures in specific ways, but if all people are basically the same animal, then the differences in those choices around the world are most likely the product of those different conditions.b. the ability, or not, to return materials to the place they originated. Does nature do “transport”? Geology does transport, the water cycle and rivers do transport, and that’s about it. Everything else is returned to almost the same place it was sourced. Nature recycles, re-uses, wrings every last bit of energy and nutrition from what it sources, and all of the materials are replenished via energy harvested from the sun, via plants, to feed the cycle anew. Local can recycle, but once and done linear global/national supply chains cannot do this. Confronting harsh ecological realities, this book explores the roots of social injustice and offers a down-powering path to “fewer and less.” I believe “we” all will suffer in the coming Apocalypse — but who is this “we” that has the agency to “transcend”? I have no say in dealing with any of the “multiple cascading crises” or transcending the “growth economy”.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse - Foreword Reviews Review of An Inconvenient Apocalypse - Foreword Reviews

This perspective is mirrored in Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth , yet another new book on the crisis. McGuire writes: The development of those technologies was not the product of inherently superior intelligence of people in particular regions of the world—remember, we are committed to an antiracist principle that flows from basic biology. That means the forces that led to the creation of those technologies must have been generated by the specific environmental conditions under which that culture developed over time. Likewise, the lower rate of carbon depletion that results from the absence of those technologies cannot be a marker of inherently superior intelligence of people in particular regions but is instead the product of environmental conditions. In a significant sense, the trajectory of people and their cultures is the product of the continent and specific region in which they have lived.And this could be done if we attend to what J&J call Ecospheric Grace. The Earth and its ecosphere have provided a home for all of Creation. We have not taken good care of our home. If we recognize this, from whatever perspective makes us comfortable – secular, religious, spiritual – the reset will be less onerous if no less difficult. And the quibble, “justice” and “sustainable” as concepts are not in need of modifiers, “social” and “ecological” included. Graeber and Wengrow write about how our ‘Western’ concept of land ownership derives from Roman law: ‘ownership’ of the land implies certain rights over it, including the right to extract and profit from its use, as well as the right to destroy it, which mining and fossil fuel companies, as well as corporate agriculture with its destruction of top soil, engage in with unholy joy.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen

How would slowing down and spending more time with family, friends and taking care of our planet and our own health ‘kill people? https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/nature-and-environment/a-guide-for-the-perplexed-zmaz78jazbur/

Scope: Our magical thinking about the relationship of the growth economy and the ecosphere in a finite world allows us to believe that an economics of endless growth will not end badly. This bleak future is “not pleasant…to ponder and prepare for, so it’s not surprising that many people, especially those in societies where affluence is based on dense energy and advanced technology, clamor for solutions to be able to keep the energy flowing and the technology advancing.” Thus, our civil religion tainted by technological fundamentalism becomes necessary [(5); the term is originally from David W. Orr]. Regarding fundamentalism of any kind – scientistic instead of scientific, religious, political, economic – I follow Janisse Ray who wrote that “ fundamentalism thrives only where imagination has died” (paraphrase from Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, 2004). Along with fundamentalism comes the naked hubris leading us to believe that humans understand complex questions definitively. No, we never do. By supporting getting rid of technology which creates food production,.you and your children will starve Maybe we start by banning land ‘ownership’ by corporations? Nationalize agricultural land (National Farms?) and institute a program of long-term leases (100 years?) to small farmers? Ban the practice of separating the top layers of land and the ‘rights’ to the minerals beneath it?

An Inconvenient Apocalypse | naked capitalism An Inconvenient Apocalypse | naked capitalism

What are the implications of all this? Before we condemn the unsustainable and unjust actions of others, we should be critically self-reflective about our own contributions to the current degraded state of the ecosphere and the inequality around us. That’s the first step. The second step is to go beyond the failures of individuals to assess the political and economic systems that reward pathological behavior and impede virtuous behavior, especially the systems we live in and tend to take for granted. The third step is to think historically, recognizing that any group of humans living under the same material conditions would most likely have developed in roughly the same way. There is nothing intrinsically special about any one of us or any one group of people.Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, and individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. An Inconvenient Apocalypse is one powerful book. It will move many of its readers out of the past and into a reasonable, informed, and passionate space for assessing a difficult future." — Ecological Economics Inconvenient for the PMC of the Global North, or so they believe in their eternal but blinkered, optimism. Devastating at the same time for much of the Global South. I find it useful to be reminded there are no solutions to the current ecological crisis except a radical downscaling of human activity and resource-use. This will either come from a consciously and humanely planned “degrowth” or it will happen through a chaotic process of destruction. Or perhaps we will see some combination of the two. But generally, a chaotic process of uncontrolled destruction seems to be what we are opting for, as we cling to the hope that some technological miracle will save us from ourselves. Processed foods have been proven over and over again to CAUSE poor health outcomes. Those are truly killing people.