Below are some excerpts from a recent article by Alan Urban that discusses this. I'd be interested in your thoughts.
Also, for those who (predictably) are going to yell at me for being a 'doomer', my next couple of posts will be about solutions, changes we must make soon if we're aiming for a slightly less dire future.
If you’re collapse-aware, it means you’ve learned enough about climate change, pollution, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss to conclude that civilization is unsustainable and will eventually collapse.
Whether the collapse happens suddenly or takes several decades, and whether it happens soon or in the distant future, is up for debate. But the end result is the same: a pre-industrial world with a much smaller population.
It could be a world where nearly everyone works from sunup to sundown to put food on the table. It could be a world where people have to hunt and gather for survival, constantly moving in search of food and resources. Or it could be a world where humans, along with most other creatures, have gone extinct.
Before 2020, I was a techno-optimist. I believed advances in technology would allow us to overcome our problems and create a world where everyone was free to pursue their interests and lead a happy life. Goddamn was I naive.
In the fall of that year, I learned that the problem was much worse than I had thought. Climate change wasn’t the main problem. In fact, climate change — along with pollution, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss — were merely symptoms of a much bigger problem: overshoot.
For those who don’t know, overshoot is when a species exceeds the carrying capacity of its ecosystem. As a result, the ecosystem is unable to produce enough food for the species, and the population collapses. Once a species goes into overshoot, collapse is inevitable. There’s no way out.
According to the Global Footprint Network, humans exceeded the carrying capacity of planet Earth over 50 years ago. That means it’s only a matter of time before the human population collapses. The only question is when.
