‘We need dramatic social and technological changes’: is societal collapse inevitable? | Climate crisis

5 comments

1. No, I don’t think collapse is inevitable, but it is possible. The key to avoiding it is to build a widespread understanding of where we need to go to be sustainable for the very long term. Once enough of us understand that we are part of nature, have needs and drives shaped by evolution that must be met in appropriate ways and live on the only planet in the universe to which we are ideally suited, positive change will happen pretty quickly.

   The trick is to get people to understand where we need to go. I think the Aspen Proposal presents a pretty succinct description of the basic elements of that future, without slamming any current vested interests and with a long enough time frame to make many things possible that just aren’t possible in the short term. [www.aspenproposal.org](http://www.aspenproposal.org)

2. Yes. The virus of mistruth and misinformation is now at plague levels. Such that once reputable scientific evidence is labelled as fake news or woke.

3. No, but is extremely likely. Interesting how we see few examples of how societies can adapt to extreme change or pressures.

4. If we don’t change our approach to everything collapse is inevitable, the current level of greed is unsustainable and will bring about both societal and economic collapse. This is almost a feature of Capitalism and its requirement for continuous growth with limited resources. We need to change our root ideals, which is hard because we are inherently greedy and for some reason feel we have dominion over everything when we are just a small cog in the giant machine. The climate crisis is a crisis of greed we have known about it for over a century and chose money over sustainability; we are engineering our own collapse at breathtaking speed.

5. Probably not a ‘collapse’ so much as a regression to the mean. Golden Ages are never recognized until they’re over. The average person has access to an unimaginable level of luxury and entertainment that was the stuff of science fiction just 40 years ago.

   My grandparents born in the 1910s lived a very different lifestyle. I still use their recipes because they are cheap, vegetable forward, tasty and nutritious. I seem to be getting more ‘old fashioned’ with age at the same time as I’m getting more in step with current budgetary adaptations to changing economics.

   I just don’t get the ‘need’ for a lot of stuff. I visited my cousins recently and even the ones my age are all Temu this and Tiktok that. Then they complain about the shitty quality of it while crowing about getting a ‘great’ deal on makeup that gives them skin problems and clothes that disintegrate in the wash. Baffling.

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