[DesuMaiden]

Our modern civilization has perpetuated unspeakable crimes against the natural world. With a die off of over 90% of the current population, this will be a good thing for all of the other species on this planet, because this will give them enough room to survive. The reason so many species of animals are endangered or becoming extinct is because there are simply too many damn humans on this planet. When over 90% of the human population perish at the end of the oil age, the planet will restore its former balance. With less than 500 million people in the post oil world, we can finally have enough room for other species on this planet.

Yes, the die off of over 90% of the human population isn't going to be pretty. But it is necessary because every species that goes into overshoot will experience a die off. It is a law. It is a law as fundamental as gravity or thermodynamics. Everything that goes straight up, has to go straight down. And most of the human population that currently exist on this planet only exist because of oil. So it is axiomatic if you take the oil away, the population must also go away also.

I just plan on being the under 10% of the people that survive the collapse of industrial civilization. I have roughly five years to prepare for the collapse. If you don't prepare right now, you are screwed. We are running out of time. If you still don't prepare for the collapse, you will run out of time to prepare. It takes at least several years to become self-sufficient and live off the grid. You need to figure out how to live without fossil fuels before fossil fuels leave you. The time to prepare is right now!

I am sick and tired of living in the cage that's modern civilization. I want to become uncivilized and wild again. I hate modern civilization. Modern civilization has brought far more bad things than good things. About the only good thing humans invented during the past couple of hundred years is personal computers and the Internet, but everything else we invented is bad (i.e. automobiles, guns, planes and factory farming).

I like Richard Manning, Daniel Quinn, and Derrick Jensen for speaking out against human civilization, and I plan on reading their books in the future. I like tribalism more than the curse known as civilization. I congratulate Michael Ruppert, Matt Savinar, Richard Heinberg, Julian Darley, Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes, Professor David Goodstein and other peak oil activists for informing me about peak oil.

[Pops]

LOL, I liked the part about how you are looking forward to reading more books about the evils and end of modern civilization.

[DesuMaiden]

LOL, I liked the part about how you are looking forward to reading more books about the evils and end of modern civilization.

I've watched many videos about Richard Manning, Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen, and the points they make make sense (for the most part). I look forward to reading their books because these people seem like pretty smart people. They understand what is actually going on, and not what people want you to think is going on.

The points they make, which are most salient, are as following:

1) Human population growth is the result of increased food production. And increased population growth leads to greater demand of increased food production. This is a viscous cycle we've been trapped in since the dawn of agriculture circa 10,000 years ago.

2) Agriculture is fundamentally unstable because it requires disturbance of the land for certain crops to grow. Permaculture is more sustainable and healthier for its practitioners, but it cannot support the huge population that agriculture supports.

3) Humanity has become so alienated and detached from nature that he doesn't even know where his food comes. Most people in industrialized countries nowadays have little idea of how reliant modern agriculture is on fossil fuels, for example. These people don't know the even fertilizers and pesticides are made of fossil fuels, let alone the fossil fuels used to construct and power tractors and other farm equipment.

Humanity is facing a catastrophic event from which it may never recover in the near future. I believe we might end up going back the stone age in another couple of hundred years if we keep on destroying the Earth like we are right now.

[KaiserJeep]

Desu, do you honestly think that YOU are going to be among the approximately 1% that survive the crash of the world ecology, and do you also believe that survival is preferable to death?

I think the survivors will be those who suffer the most, for the longest time, and then have to endure the suffering of their kids and grandkids, which is even more painful.

[DesuMaiden]

Desu, do you honestly think that YOU are going to be among the approximately 1% that survive the crash of the world ecology, and do you also believe that survival is preferable to death?

I think the survivors will be those who suffer the most, for the longest time, and then have to endure the suffering of their kids and grandkids, which is even more painful.

But there has to be survivors to any catastrophe.

[Kylon]

I agree with KaiserJeep on this one. Unless a technological solution is developed, most humans are likely toast.

Most people won't survive, and those that do will have a severely reduced standard of living.

Sure there will be a few people who have a decent standard of living, namely the ruling class of that society, but everybody else will have extreme misery.

I don't think we are going back to the stone age. Namely, there are smart, and more importantly wealthy people, who would derive a significant advantage when it comes to producing, providing, and most importantly acquiring wealth if they maintained advanced technology. This might mean that they keep all the advanced technology for themselves, and most of the wealth would be concentrated in a few hands, while keeping and developing ever better technology for oppressing their people.

Essentially I think we are going to keep advancing in technology, while the ruling classes will go back to bronze age ethics, which is to say, no ethics at all.

What I am trying to say is, you shouldn't look at it as a collapse of advanced civilization mad max type scenario. More like a really, really awful third world scenario, where instead of having sociopathic idiots and primitive technology, you'll have sociopaths with high levels of intelligence and highly advanced technology.

More Hunger Games, less Mad Max.

More Nazi Germany or North Korea, less Zimbabwe.

In short, the worst of all worlds.


On another note, don't think humans being depopulated or running out of food is going to save the biosphere.

When people run out of the good stuff, and the cheap oil, they are going to burn the ecosystems and the planet for the fuel they need to live just a little bit longer. Humans are going to destroy until they can destroy no more. Pillage the planet until it's completely depleted. Once the planet is dead, they'll turn on each other.

Maybe Hunger Games world isn't so bad after all.

[Shaved Monkey]

Aboriginals in Australia had a fairly good life without technology
Hunt, fish and dance.
No work ,no money,no farming,no need for possessions beyond a few simple tools and lots of local knowledge.
Just move from food source to food source, build a simple hut and then move on to the next place rinse and repeat.

[SILENTTODD]

But there has to be survivors to any catastrophe.

Hermann Oberth the great Austrian Physicist/Rocket Expert made the same observation, "There are always survivors".

But be careful what you wish for. Odds are even if you think you are preparing for "collapse" in the end your not. One thing that immediately comes to mind is there are over 600 commercial and research Nuclear Reactors in the world today. The vast majority in the Northern Hemisphere. It takes almost a decade to shut down one of these sites and deal with spent Nuclear Fuel Rods stored on site. This is currently going on 40 miles from where I live at the former San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant.

Without the support of modern civilization, everyone of these sites go Chernobyl/Fukushima style spreading vast amounts of Radioactive Cesium, Strontium, Plutonium all around the Northern Hemisphere. How does that figure into your survival equation? And this assumes no Nuclear exchanges between Nuclear Armed nations while the shit is hitting the fan. A most unlikely prospect.

I'm 60 years old and currently on a couple meds. With a collapse of civilization I know my goose is cooked. Which is fine with me, I've already lived a longer life than most of my heroes. But don't be wishing for a future as Nikita Khrushchev once said "The living will envy the dead".

[Paulo1]

Not me, Desu.

Obviously, you are writing this from a vantage point of having never missed a meal or gone through tough times.

Read 'Grapes of Wrath' and get back to us. That is just an inkling....but a recent and North American perspective of upheaval. Try being responsible for a family after you have lost a job. Then ask yourself if rooting for collapse is such a good idea?

[granger]

Desumaiden,
Human overpopulation will be dealt with the decline in fossil fuels, no doubt. William Canton saw it before many. I do think that perhaps you are optimistic about the benefit this will provide other wild life species during this event. Imagine if you will what 9 billion hungry humans will be capable of in their last gasp. Every remaining refuge of wildlife will be looked upon as an opportunity for a meal. With the collapse of the rule of law who will act as game wardens? Seasons, bag limits.............Ha. This will not be pretty. This current extinction event will continue unabated through the collapse. I won't live quite long enough to witness it, my children will see some of it. Evolution and the diversification of species will take a very, very, very long time, but it will happen. It may take a hundred or more years for the rubble stops bouncing. You perhaps will only see part of what unfolds, it will not be a sudden collapse, but a stair step, uneven in geographic location, timing and force.
We will eat all the birds from the trees.

[Quinny]

I'm looking for the collapse of capitalism and the rise of socialism! Hopefully before capitalism has used up most of the worlds resources!

[Withnail]

[Rod_Cloutier]

A dissenting voice here, I dread the collapse of modern civilization. Do we really want no water in the pipes, no food in the stores, no health care for the sick or the elderly.

What I hope for is RATIONAL SOCIETY. That is a lot to hope for, I know, however that would be the best outcome. Think about how much possibility, creativity, potential that there would have been if we had used our resources wisely.

The very fact that we can have massive wars, pollute and despoil the Earth, change the climate, enslave half the world with debt, and so forth and the THING STILL HAS NOT COLLAPSED. What could we have done if we were not collectively insane.

There will be a die off now. There will be a collapse now. Can we build rational society in its wake. That is something to look forward to instead.

[Timo]

Repent, it's hard to argue with your position too much. We'd all rather see the future you outline than a mass die off. However, achieving those ends requires a complete 100% 180 of human nature. In the future you describe, people would no longer maintain human instincts. As you said, it's a lot to hope for, and that is no small understatement. That's impossible to hope for. Let's all face it. In the fable of Noah and the Ark, God got so dissatisfied with his human creation that he chose a humble man and his family to carry on the human genome, and he wiped everyone else out and called his own do-over. Well, we are the result of that do-over, so saving the planet would essentially mean starting life on this planet all over again, from scratch. In a few billion years, you might have a species that resembles humanity, but then you'd have the same damned problems we all have today, and we'd have to beckon the end of times, and start creation all over again. Rinse and repeat. Two or three times of this type of do-over, and the sun will eventually become a dying star, and extinguish all life on this planet, forever. Game over. That's all, folks.

But I digress. You are right on one thing. Moving forward, we should all strive for the future you envision. Doing otherwise will hasten the end for all of us, much faster and less pleasantly than if we all give up hope and go Mad Max.

[GHung]

Humans coming out of the next population bottleneck won't be enabled by an abundance of high energy resources. Whatever fossil fuels are left will be available in severely limited quantities meaning far fewer energy slaves and dramatically reduced energy per capita. The industrial age was a one shot era. Any population rebound will be back to the pre-industrial baseline, assuming humans can survive the extreme damage we've done to our biosphere.

Those who bemoan the loss of industrial age benefits ignore that, for most of our history, rich and vibrant cultures were plentiful, as were fullfilling lives, arguably more fullfilling than lives lived during the last ~300 years. We had a deeper sense of ourselves prior to our current artificiality-of-being.

[TemplarMyst]

I definitely fall into the group of folks hoping that, somehow, we avoid, or at least significantly mitigate, any collapse.

As I ride the train each morning into downtown Chicago I pass countless suburbs and watch innumerable people going about their daily lives. A simple power outage causes significant difficulty, a sustained one more so. If I extrapolate that to no power, or very little power, the implications simply boggle my mind. The hordes that would pour out and into the countryside, be it on foot, with what little gas is left, or on horseback (yes, there are horses around, though perhaps they, and the dogs and cats, would be food before they became anything else) would make locust look tame by comparison.

And if I consider what the world would be like post collapse, I can't get out of my mind what the potential will be for climatic chaos. My current thinking is we're setting the stage for an end-Permian extinction event. If that's true, forget about bottlenecks. The bottle will be capped, and damn near nothing will be able to escape.

And if it's not that bad, and there are some people left in a pillaged and stripped natural world, I'm finding it difficult to conceive how they could find fulfilling lives. They won't have much in the way of resources, but they will still have the human tendency to amass political and military power. They will reassert our well defined tendency towards empire. The Egyptians, Chinese, Mongols, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, French, and British, not to mention the Inca, the Bantu, and the Aztec, all built vast empires without access to oil, coal, or gas. And stripped their environments bare in the process.

No, I'm not looking forward to collapse. I don't think we have much chance of avoiding it, but I'm certainly hoping that somehow, someway, we do.

[TemplarMyst]

pstarr,

Much of the area which is just outside the greater Chicago area is farmland. And to the east is Lake Michigan, a decent source for fish. As the hordes move out of the city they'll pillage those next, though I would imagine they'll be a pretty significant level of violence before, during, and after. Grain, cattle, and hogs are available. Wood and pulp for fuel. Certainly there will be significant die-off, but those that rise to the top will have very likely, at least to some degree, self-organized. There's plenty of firearms and ammunition in the area, and that will become the nucleus for the new society, such as it is.

My understanding of climate chaos is that petroleum plays but one part. Coal is the largest contributor, and coal can be dug from the ground with hand tools if needed. That's how it was initially gathered, and that's how it is still gathered in some parts of the world. (Illinois has rich coal seams, btw).

But the real issue with climate chaos is the thermal inertia of the oceans. If the linked article is correct, and it appears to me to reflect the mainstream thinking within the climate science community, we're currently feeling the effects of what we put up in the 80s, perhaps even the 70s. I can hardly wait for the 90s to arrive. We've consistently increased our CO2 and CH4 emissions over time.

So yes, I think a collapse will be beyond bleak, and no, there will be nothing fulfilling about it. If we're to avoid it, we'd have to undo many of our sins. That seems unlikely, but I'm willing to consider how it might be done. I've made my suggestions in other posts and comments.

[TemplarMyst]

pstarr,

Okay, I think I see where you are coming from. You're one step before where I'm at. In the collapse scenario I'm envisioning, the ruling elites have exhausted their fossil resources. We're beyond the stage where the police and military have any meaningful sway, other than to join in one of the emerging cells struggling for survival.

Certainly there are many potential paths for descent. I'm thinking of the final end game. Hopefully we'll figure something out well before we hit the massive police state you're envisioning. We have aspects of that state now, but it could get much worse. Probably will get much worse. But it could also get better.

For it to get better, I'm thinking, we need juice. Lots and lots of juice.