by Thought-provoking article in the Sunday NY Times: Is a Climate Disaster Inevitable?
The article introduces Fermi’s Paradox, which suggests that given that there are hundreds of billions of planets, where are the people? Why hasn’t intelligent life emerged somewhere? An interesting potential answer: perhaps the climb up the ladder of development inevitably despoils the ecosphere of planets? Hmmm. So, humanity is now wrestling with potential limits to growth; some say a global emergency; the article calls it a “sustainability crisis,” in that we may overshoot our carrying capacity and potentially ruin the planet for humanity.
In other words, maybe intelligent life has emerged on other planets, but it has run into the “overshoot” problem and has collapsed. The article says “from the vantage point of the relatively new field of astrobiology, our current sustainability crisis may be neither politically contingent nor unique, but a natural consequence of laws governing how planets and life of any kind, anywhere, must interact.” In other words, the development process, which requires harvesting energy, inevitably leads to alteration of the biosphere. And maybe there isn’t a way to make it through?
It reminds me of Stapledon’s Starmaker and Last and First Man. A key theme in those works tracking human evolution over eons and across the universe is that humanity (and all its myriad evolved forms) evolve to quite sophisticated levels, but inevitably crash and burn and have to start over again.
Of course, as believers in the power of foresight, we must consider this negative alternative future and assess what we can do to avoid it by taking action in the present. That is clear for us. For me, the idea that this process could be inevitable is in a strange way comforting – it’s not that we’re flawed or stupid, but dealing with a really wicked problem, and we need all the tools and foresight that we have available to address it. Andy Hines
Man defines disaster as the consequences of natural and technological hazards(agents) acting on people and the built environment. Remove the assets…people and products of development… and there are no disasters. The question might be the relationship between the growth of the assets and the frequency and impact of disasters. When they reach a tipping point, man refers to them as “catastrophic” incidents of events. The central premise, at least in my mind, is that there is no return to normalcy after a catastrophic event. Following catastrophe..there is a new normal which may and may not include people and development, at least not the way we have known it. (The planet earth might be OK though without us driving it.)
The productive work for foresight is at the margins between disaster and catastrophe.