William Catton In Bottleneck: Humanity On Unstoppable Course For Significant Die-Off

[hatrack]

In his documentary What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire filmmaker Tim Bennett notes that many of the book authors now writing about peak oil, climate change, species extinction and myriad other urgent environmental and resource topics usually end their otherwise grim analyses with what he calls "the happy chapter," a chapter with solutions and responses which will supposedly help us to avert catastrophe.

In a new book, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, William Catton, Jr. dispenses with "the happy chapter" altogether and simply gives us the grim prognosis. Human society is now on an unstoppable trajectory for a significant die-off. Catton, author of the well-known classic of human ecology, Overshoot, expects that by 2100 the world population will be smaller, perhaps much smaller, than it is today. We are in what he calls "the bottleneck century." He likens our situation to that of an airplane taking off at nighttime with a crew that is unaware that the runway is too short. The pilot will accelerate the plane as usual expecting a normal takeoff. Unless the pilot somehow receives and believes a warning to brake and reverse the engines quickly, by the time he or she actually sees the end of the runway, it will be too late and the plane will crash.

Well, the warnings have been issued, Catton explains. And, few people believe them. Catton spends much of the book explaining why this is so. As you read his explanation, it becomes clear why there will be no "happy chapter" at the end.

The main culprit, according to Catton, is the division of labor into ever smaller occupational niches. The marvel of such a system is that people who know nothing about one another's occupation can cooperate through the miracle of the marketplace to increase society's overall productivity and wealth. And, they can exchange every kind of good or service through the medium of money. The downside of such a complex and finely differentiated system is that no one can really understand it. That might not matter so much except that fossil fuels have enabled humans to increase both their numbers and per capita consumption enormously in the last 200 years. The impact of that vast increase on the world's renewable and nonrenewable resources has been profound. It has lead to all the effects mentioned above and many others including deforestation, heavy erosion of farmland, toxic pollution of air and water, and overharvesting of fisheries.

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http://www.energybulletin.net/51368

[aquart]

1. Oh, good grief. Industrial die off? Please.

Not a problem. The climate die off will take care of all of that. He's worried about financial and marketplace structures? LOL! Worry about wheat, idiot!

[GliderGuider]

4. Here's a thought:

Why not worry about both? I suspect they could be mutually reinforcing. A deterioration in socioeconomic structures could hamper our ability to respond to climate-driven changes in food production as well as disrupting food distribution systems, and disruptions in food supplies would definitely have negative effects on social structures.

[Dead_Parrot]

11. They aren't mutually exclusive

The UK, for instance, only produces about half it's own food: The rest is brought in. Since the bulk of the UK economy is the service sector, the financial & marketplace structures are what pays for that imported wheat.

[Bigmack]

2. Overshoot was/is a

GREAT book. Just finished it, and it reads like it was written VERY recently, rather than the 30 years ago that it actually WAS written. Bottleneck's been ordered and should arrive soon. Ms Bigmack

[tinrobot]

3. A shft in connsciousness is needed.

A shift away from materialism and towards a more wholistic view of our planet.

Not going to be easy.

[GliderGuider]

5. It's already under way.

And spreading like the Banqiao flood.

http://www.blessedunrest.com

[Speck Tater]

6. Dream on. The human race is incapable of a global "shift in consciousness."

Like we could actually nullify human nature in the decade or two we have left before it's too late.

[GliderGuider]

7. No, but individuals are.

How many individuals does it take to make a difference, in any field of endeavour? We can't all be MLK or Gandhi, but every individual who makes that shift affects from several to many more as the years go by. How long does it take for an exponential function like that to make serious inroads on the collective consciousness?

[Speck Tater]

8. That's true. And some individuals WILL survive the bottleneck. But most won't. nt

[GliderGuider]

9. As it ever was. We've been here before.

It has happened again and again in our history, up to an including species bottlenecks. The more aware individuals are, the greater the chance of something interesting and entirely unpredictable happening as we go along. I like working to promote that possibility.

[XemaSab]

15. Even people with a raised consciousness have to

eat, go to work, and live their lives.

[tinrobot]

12. Nothing like half the human race perishing to change people's consciousness.

That's may be what it takes...

[amborin]

10. +10000

[TxRider]

13. He's right, and it is inevitable.

Only a question of when, and what triggers it.

Lethal pandemic, asteroid, climate change...

Or something even smaller as population grows and grows..


Just as any organism hits a point and dies off significantly if it overpopulates enough.

[joshcryer]

14. I'm not going to disagree with this. But I would preface it with "dieoff of those who..."

"...didn't necessarily need to die."

Basically our policies are going to kill at least a billion people who otherwise would have been OK if they policies were right.