Limits to growth

Thinking more about the problems of world population overshoot allowed by the burning of fossil fuels and the short term (century) excess food and abundance created.

I have no ability to NOT be a Malthusian, to NOT worry about future projections going further and further away from hope.

I agree that humans are ingenious to learn how to live, and our descendants (or future selves) will surely do whatever we can to avoid our own destruction, and perhaps succeed in re-finding by necessesity lifestyles that can sustain us. Maybe we'll "powerdown" rather than "crash" our civilization?

However I can't be hopeful by this predictable success (by some subset of our existing population). I mean even if a minority is wise and forward thinking and can design better lifestyles, how does a minority support a majority who DON'T have the basic resources for survival and WILL try away, by organizing common interest to destroy the remaining natural resources available for short term "good intentions".

Imagine living a lifestyle on a high wage job, and putting your pocket change each night into a jar. As your access to the high wages dry up, you can lean on your little savings, and that can handle little short falls, but what next? THEN you sell your possessions to make ends meet, assuming you've not already homeless against a foreclosed home. THEN you lean on government support, until there's too many in need. Then you lean on family, and neighbors to help. But where does this fall end? Every step is just delaying the reality that the old lifestyle is unsustainable. That's looking at the fall perhaps at an individual level.

I think the U.S. is prosperous enough, full of natural resources that can be drained a number of more decades, while poorer places of the world will suffer first. We can use physical distance to protect us from their suffering, and our danger against our wealth.

Optimists can deny my gloom by hoping that change is slow enough that we can adjust. But for me I still must fear that whatever solutions we find to adjust will not change our direction of failure, only slow the fall, only allow us more time to consume and destroy what's left.

What's the solution to this dark future I fear?

Probably there's no solution without our systems and institutions, since they are built on assumptions of endless growth. SO new systems and institutions must be discovered that can deal with decline.

Overall I have to imagine growth will be reversed when globalization reverses, when local needs can't be made by distant charity or profit motives, when people must face their local resources whatever they are. AND probably some locales will be destroyed, made barren, like fragile environments like the rainforests. Very sad.

I like groups like Nature Conservancy, which buys land to protect from development, or help to restore to a more sustainable mix of plants and animals. But how can "land ownership" be protected when others are in need?

I like to say I'm a pacifist, unwilling to use threats of violence to protect, but that must be a vanity of urban dwellers surrounded by common interest for law and justice. But how do you protect unlived wilderness? Policing is a delicate occupation - balancing needs for law and order and dealing with human suffering and bad decisions encouraged by poverty.

I'm sure if our future is at all bright, it will be because of good people who devote their lives to facing local poverty and need directly rather than waiting for poverty to lead to violence. I don't know if government can do this, or if much will just be small groups of people seeing a need and having enough themselves to give something back to the less fortunate.

Anyway, that's my only hope. We're all in this together, even if we don't all suffer equally. We must stay aware if we can, of the suffering of others, near and far.