Collapse of civilizations, local and global

Although our excessive population density is the cause of resource shortages, it’s often downplayed in favor of other factors: greed, waste, and lack of development. It’s rare for solutions to include refraining from breeding. People might describe the future as a nightmare, but they still won’t conclude with, “So the last thing we want to do right now is bring another of us into the mess.”

Like Paul B. Farrell, who lists all the factors bringing on an impending collapse—including our population increase—and outlines many ways to ameliorate the situation, leaving out human breeding. A ‘no-growth’ boom will follow 2012 global crash. August 23, 2011

In The Onset of Catabolic Collapse, John Michael Greer barely refers to population density as a factor in collapse with, “As societies expand...”
“I’ve commented more than once on the gap in perception between history as it appears in textbooks and history as it’s lived by people on the spot at the time. That’s a gap worth watching, because the foreshortening of history that comes with living in the middle of it quite often gets in the way of figuring out a useful response to a time of crisis—for example, the one we’re in right now...
“Let’s start with some basics. The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain. What we are pleased to call ‘primitive societies’—that is, societies that are well enough adapted to their environments that they get by comfortably without huge masses of cumbersome and expensive infrastructure—usually do so in a fairly small way, and very often evolve traditional ways of getting rid of excess goods at regular intervals so that the cost of maintaining it doesn’t become a burden. As societies expand and start to depend on complex infrastructure to support the daily activities of their inhabitants, though, it becomes harder and less popular to do this, and so the maintenance needs of the infrastructure and the rest of the society’s stuff gradually build up until they reach a level that can’t be covered by the resources on hand.” January 27, 2011

Paul Ehrlich states that our “population surge means there is only a 10% chance of avoiding a collapse of world civilization.” 23 October 2011

George Mobus reviews William R. Catton’s Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse
“...it is already too late to mend our ways and somehow avoid the collapse of civilization. Indeed the main title refers to an impending collapse of the human population. An ecological bottleneck (also called a population bottleneck) is where radical changes in the environment of a species causes a die-off of all but the most hardy of the population; hardy, that is, in terms of the selection pressures arising from the change. Of course there may be no sufficiently hardy individuals left or the ones that manage to survive cannot reproduce sufficiently to produce a new population. In that case the species goes extinct.”

In Reality vs. Wishful Thinking Tim Murray writes, “When I first encountered Chris Clugston’s work some three years ago, it came as a lightning bolt. His analysis was unassailable. Finally an analytical tool—’Societal Overextension Analysis’—that measured overshoot in a way that ecological footprint analysis did not, rendering it almost obsolete. Now Chris has fleshed SOA out. He has inventoried 89 metals and minerals that are critical to the operation of any industrial economy, and found that 69 of them are scarce and are getting scarcer. The Green Apostles of False Hope can imagine that substitutes will be found for one or two or even a dozen of them—but not most of them, and any one shortage can bring the industrial edifice down. Industrialism is unsustainable, whether it is under capitalist or socialist management.” September 5th, 2011

Mike Seccombe reviews Michael Ruppert’s Confronting Collapse.
“Think of humanity as a herd of caribou living on an arctic island with no predators and abundant sustenance. We reproduce wildly until inevitably the sustenance, the energy source, is overtaxed and collapses.
Then we begin to die. In the case of humanity, billions of us.
The analogy and the dark prophecy are Mike Ruppert’s. And he argues it already has begun, this great dying, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
For the resource that has sustained human civilization for the past hundred or so years, which underpinned the quadrupling of global population and on which our whole industrial civilization is built, is in accelerating and irreversible decline. That resource is fossil fuel, and in particular, oil.” March 5, 2010

In The coming Population Wars: a 12-bomb equation, Paul B. Farrell asks, “Can Gates’ Billionaires Club stop these inevitable self-destruct triggers?” He speculates that WWIII could be caused by overpopulation. Sept. 29, 2009

Peter Goodchild gives a step-by-step forecast of The Imminent Collapse Of Industrial Society. May 9, 2010

Richard C. Duncan describes The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge. November 13, 2000

Collapse of Earth’s biosphere

World’s oceans in ‘shocking’ decline. Richard Black, Environment correspondent for BBC News, notes, “The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.” The report (pdf). June 20, 2011

Chris Hedges writes: This Time We’re Taking The Whole Planet With Us March 7, 2011

Ways humanity might involuntarily go extinct

Guy McPherson describes Three paths to near-term human extinction. “About a decade ago I realized we were putting the finishing touches on our own extinction party, with the shindig probably over by mid-century. During the intervening period I’ve seen nothing to sway this belief, and much evidence to reinforce it.” November 9, 2011

A slide show of 10 roads to human extinction

A large number of links about The Apocalypse.