Over at the Guardian, two environmental writers debate the fate of the world, which might be summed up as apocalyptic v. work like hell to prevent it. See: “Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?” Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot.
Not a pretty picture and they don’t hold a lot of hope for man’s fate, regardless of all the initiatives we tend to highlight here.
Even environmentalists would blanch at the fatalism expressed by Paul Kingsworth. He describes the increase in carbon emissions, population growth, fisheries depletion, water use, etc., as:
…a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon.
…The writing is on the wall for industrial society, and no amount of ethical shopping or determined protesting is going to change that now. Take a civilisation built on the myth of human exceptionalism and a deeply embedded cultural attitude to “nature”; add a blind belief in technological and material progress; then fuel the whole thing with a power source that is discovered to be disastrously destructive only after we have used it to inflate our numbers and appetites beyond the point of no return. What do you get? We are starting to find out.
George Monbiot, however, takes a more measured tone. Yes, things are bad. Yes, they have gotten worse. But to do nothing would be sign-on to the collapse of civilization. As Monbiot writes in reply:
Like you I have become ever gloomier about our chances of avoiding the crash you predict. For the past few years I have been almost professionally optimistic, exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so. I still have some faith in our ability to make rational decisions based on evidence. But it is waning.
… I detect in your writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I’m sure we can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement.
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