As long as you're curious and read somewhat widely, if you're one of those readers who digs a bit further now and then, it's pretty much impossible to avoid the conclusion that humans are living unsustainably.
We're using up energy sources that took approximately 350 million years to accrete in a single 350-year-long orgy of consumption.
We are putting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere so quickly that the world's oceans are acidifying at a faster rate than at any time in the past 300 million years.
We're drawing down aquifers and surface water faster than they can be replenished, without any meaningful clue as to how we should respond meaningfully to that situation as illustrated in my recent report on Las Vegas and Lake Mead.
And all of this is happening globally. So this is not an indictment of any one particular culture, region, political system or market approach. It is an indictment of all of them; or more precisely, of human nature.
This is why I have a garden.
Let me explain.
The Next Twenty Years
One of the key sayings of the Crash Course is The next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years. We say this to convey two ideas.
The first is that humans are great at extrapolating the future based on the past. This approach usually works very well, but betrays you if there's a humongous plot twist dead ahead. Bluntly: in times of great change, the recent past may not be your best guide.
The second is more subtle. We cannot know exactly what is going to happen, or when, because the various changes we're referring to span multiple intertwined complex systems, any one of which will defy our very best predictive abilities. But in combination? No way. There's just no chance of predicting exactly correctly the what or the when.
But the other part embedded within that 'twenty year' statement is the certainty that things are going to change. No question about that. Many of them not for the better, either.
How can we reconcile the twin ideas of being certain of large possibly disruptive changes while not being able to predict what will happen and when?
by sdmptww-2-2 
