Free Report: How Sustainable Is Our Way of Life?
Soon we’ll publish another in our continuing series of free reports in which we aspire to provide an understanding of the most important trends that face civilization today. Based on a survey conducted in January 2012, we attempt to answer the question: How sustainable is our way of life? As always, I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to each of the participants.
As I go about my work in preparing the report, it’s obvious that we really DO live in interesting times. At the risk of oversimplifying: What a horserace this is: ignorance and greed vs. enlightenment and technology — and they’re neck-and-neck. Personally, I’m betting that we phase out fossil fuels entirely by 2050. Ironically, however, it won’t happen for what I would call the “right reasons,” i.e., collective action in which we agree to make certain sacrifices to avert catastrophe, but because of pure market economics: peak oil, better and cheaper renewable energy technologies, and the incredible return on investment associated with energy efficiency.
And the main question is this: How much damage will have been done in the process? We’d like to think that most of Earth’s life forms (including mankind) will be spared from extinction, but in truth, there is no way to predict with any accuracy the consequences of what we’re doing here regarding greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification, climate change and extreme weather events, etc.
I hope you’ll check out the report when it’s available – as soon as I can get our graphic artist to doll it up a bit.
I look forward to seeing this – whatever the rationale that finally triggers the change from sucking and burning filthy ancient sunlight residue to harvesting modern sunlight, it most assuredly needs to be made.
Wow! What a succinct encapsulation of the diagnosis and prognosis. I completely agree with your framing. Your reference to these decades as an indeterminate “race” the planet and it’s arch species finds itself in, spot on. A bottleneck several times over. Are you also alluding to E. O. Wilson’s prologue to The Future of Life?
“The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.”
Interesting times indeed. The carbon record says we’ve not been here for around 800,000 years, and perhaps never as abruptly. That’s a tad novel. As an observer curious about environmental history, I’ve worked to build literacy in energy. I feel I have a rudimentary ability to apprehend the vast sweep and, to significant degree, the inexorability of what’s happening. The amazing predicament we’ve blundered into! Will it be a catabolic transition? A collapse? Some variation, to say nothing of climate change? It’s exhilarating to confront on the one hand. But, as a parent of two young kids, it’s just terrifying. When I soberly consider the odds and the risk assessment. The observations of earth scientists from across disciplines, they can read like dispatches along a front of a far distant war, one that we are losing, with all that that implies.
Sorry to ramble. Again, I applaud your inspiring insight and prose!