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

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It discusses contemporary crises. “First, within the human family, we face a struggle for social justice in societies that currently do not operate in a manner consistent with widely held values concerning dignity, solidarity, and equality.” “Second, we face a struggle for an ecologically sustainable relationship between humans and the larger living world, the ecosphere.”

An Inconvenient Apocalypse - Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter An Inconvenient Apocalypse - Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter

My definition of an “economy” is “how and from where do you get what you need to operate your household”.

Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen's

Confronting harsh ecological realities and the multiple cascading crises facing our world today, An Inconvenient Apocalypse argues that humanity’s future will be defined not by expansion but by contraction. The nature of all living organisms, so this book argues, is to go after 'dense energy', resulting eventually in crisis. If that is so, then the human organism is facing a tough question: Can we overcome our own nature? Courageous and humble, bold and provocative, the authors of An Inconvenient Apocalypse do not settle for superficial answers."

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

Apocalypse in the present context does not mean “lakes of fire, rivers of blood, or bodies raptured up to heaven.” But it does require that we change our consciousness when hope for meaningful change within the existing political culture and economy is no longer productive and we must deal with our problems dramatically different ways: “Invoking the apocalyptic recognizes the end of something…not about rapture but a rupture severe enough to change the nature of the whole game.” It is way past time to climb out of that Overton Window and look around with eyes that see. In the words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Thus, the summation from J&J: This shouldn’t be a surprising conclusion. From our own experience, we all know that we make decisions, individually and collectively, in ways we do not and cannot fully understand. Our experience of freely choosing does not mean that all of our choices are 100 percent freely made. Without attempting to resolve the age-old debate on free will, all of us can reflect on how often we come to recognize that past choices, which we believed we made freely at one moment in time, were shaped and constrained by material conditions that we could not understand at that moment and may never fully understand. While we continue to act day to day on the assumption of free will, we also should continue to be alert for ways behavior is to some degree determined. The book reads well. It’s infused with provocative questions and existential philosophy. The authors are reasonable and highly sensitive to social justice. Take the most complex technology and move to Mars? If any survive there, many more will still perish here on Earth.In that it is an ideal human community, one that has become increasingly rare if not impossible in our modern neoliberal world. Provides a list of the main societal threats. “The decline of key natural resources and an emerging global resource crisis, especially in water.” Early in the book J&J refer to Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins ( The Dialectical Biologist: “Things are similar: this makes science possible. Things are different; this makes science necessary”). One of the most convincing arguments Friedrich Engels made in his unfinished Dialectics of Nature (pdf) is that an increase in quantity leads inexorably to a difference in quality. The quantitative-to-qualitative jump in agriculture, with its subsequent deleterious scientific, cultural, social, and economic effects, was due primarily to the industrialization of what is fundamentally a biological process. Industrial agriculture had antecedents, but it was consolidated in the US after World War II and reached its point of no return 50 years ago when Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told farmers to “get big or get out” and “plant commodity crops from fencerow to fencerow” while they were at it. All of this was “science-based,” of course, the marketed intellectual product of Land Grant universities across the US. This is covered well in Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (2002), which compares the physical, social, and biological moonscapes that are industrial “farms” with sustainable farming, which is more productive by any number of valid metrics (7). 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.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Excerpt - resilience An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Excerpt - resilience

Right now we don’t seem to have the inclination or the ability to structure our basic econ sub-systems (ag, energy, materials, mfg’g) such that they repair and replenish .vs. degrade and disperse. 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”.The potential impact of climate change. “Climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy. Climate change is already impacting or is anticipated to impact nearly every facet of the economy, including infrastructure, agriculture, residential and commercial property, as well as human health and labor productivity.” 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. The authors have coined the term “ecospheric grace” to describe their vision of an ideal orientation toward the natural world. To show ecospheric grace is to humble ourselves before the rest of nature. It is to accept that we humans aren’t at the center of everything, that we’ll never completely understand the natural world of which we’re a part and that nature doesn’t favor us over any other species. It is thus also to reject the ideal of Earth stewardship, since stewardship implies authority and control. Our goal should instead be to return the biosphere’s favor of “the gift of life with no strings attached” by treating it well.