Executive Summary

• We are fighting (i.e. losing against) exponential functions on multiple fronts
• Social unrest (e.g. Yellow Vests) is a spreading symptom that collapse is accelerating
• Which path will collapse take?
• Preparing for the future of “Less”

If you have not yet read Part 1: Collapse Is Already Here, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Maybe I just need more sun in my life as February in cold, grey western MA unfolds, but I’m finding it difficult to see any possible way to avoid the worst aspects of the slow-motion collapse unfolding in the natural world.

Each week seems to bring some new depressing fact, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Limits to Growth people somehow managed to plot all this out more than 40 years ago.

A sobering look and it begs for us to be able to answer the following two questions; (1) when did you know and (2) what did you do about it?  Someday we’ll all have to answer those questions if or when we’re asked them by a younger person.

Even if the loss of the insects from the food web doesn’t somehow result in a terrible impact to food production, it has already resulted in a profound loss of birds that depended on those insects for food.  This is a loss of beauty and richness from our world that is a tragedy all of its own.  If the burning down of the Louvre would represent a loss, then the absence of spring warblers from the dawn chorus is a loss ten times more grievous.

Beware the Exponential Growth

The reason I write and speak and sometimes travel to talk about The Three E’s – the Economy, Energy and Environment – is because I hope to reach those who are ready to listen…and to then act.

Typically, I find that I am reaching people with a certain level of economic and professional success in their lives (many doctors, engineers, architects and lawyers in my audience) and who have the entirely too rare ability to face difficult information square on.

One of the more important principles concerns exponential growth which has a nasty habit of really speeding up towards the end.