Choosing Our Future: Lessons from Collapse and the Path to Global Sustainability

There are many issues facing the production of food. Rising oil prices make it difficult to produce food cheaply because western agriculture depends on petroleum. The world market has to compete with China for food, fuel, and other resources as they become and economic powerhouse. We are using all high-fertile farmland and moved to marginal farmland while depleting and eroding soil at both. Over fishing is devastating the commons and ocean ecology leaving fish dependent societies without proper provisions. Biofuels are not only causing more carbon emissions than fossil fuels due to deforestation, they are also taking away from food production. Water ownership and control is increasingly becoming an issue by itself. But, water scarcity is minimizing where farms can be located. Global warming is taking its toll creating droughts that disturb and eliminate crop yields. All the while, the poor being unable to afford the high costs of food are suffering the consequences of human irresponsibility that the wealthy, still living in gluttony and luxury, have the power to change. 

The future is not all death and destruction. There are constructive ways to improve the food shortages and prepare for the agricultural collapse. Supporting regional and local farms, growing your own crops, starting or getting involved in community food production, learning how to can your own fruits and vegetables, creating an underground cellar, and learning how to compost are all ways you can become food resource independent. 

The financial collapse has already come and the solutions have not worked because they support the same failed system. Complete agricultural and resource allocation collapse is knocking at the front door. If we don’t change our ways as a country, culture, and species... collapse is inevitable. However, with knowledge, history, and imagination we can change and prepare for what is to come. 

If humanity refuses to act, an alarming picture of the consequences to come can be created through the ideas and books of Jared Diamond, Carl Sagan, and Jeffy Sachs. Jared Diamond, the professor of geography and physiology at UCLA writes Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In this volume he shows how the islands of Easter, Pitcairn, and Mangareva (among others) collapsed due to many factors including over-population, deforestation, and soil depletion. Starvation, disease, and civil war were often the result of such carelessness.

“Past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme. Population growth force people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double-cropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto more marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of hungry mouths. Unsustainable practices lead to environmental damage… resulting in agriculturally marginal lands having to be abandoned again. Consequences for society included food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting for too few resources, and overthrows of government elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or disease and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural complexity that it had developed at its peak.“ - Jared Diamond, Collapse, p. 6

One of these most idiotic things we have done as a species is to have made a naturally growing, non-toxic medicine illegal to grow, let alone distribute or sell. However we endorse synthetic manufactured drugs with adverse side effects and a globalized economic industrialization that is dependent on oil. In order to create a lasting and prosperous future and environment a more aggrigarian society that utilizes marijunana for building, textiles, oil, and cellophane should be endorsed and promoted. There is a whole untapped industry due to making a plant illegal in the global sphere.  

The late Carl Sagan was a NASA astronomer and author of the Pale Blue Dot. In this book he makes clear that humans are on a spec of dust, an island, in the great cosmos. Earth is the only home we have ever known qnd were we stand or fall, fail or succeed. Now, more than ever, in the age of globalization, the earth has become one giant world economy, society, and ecosystem. Jared Diamond’s warning of collapse applies to the earth which is an island in the vast cosmos.  

Jeffy Sachs, an economist, director of The Earth institute at Columbia University and author of the New York Times Bestseller The End of Poverty, writes Common Wealth: Economics For A Crowded Planet. In Common Wealth Sachs outlines global poverty, food & water shortages, climate change, and environmental destruction. Sachs’s ideas are ones of hope; not only does he explain these global problems with vigor and optimism he also provides viable solutions to many of these issues.

Combining the ideas of these three intelligent leaders of their field we can understand the seriousness of the situation and the potential catastrophe of inaction. Jared Diamond gives us a historical perspective on societies and islands that have collapsed, and explains why. Jeffy Sachs gives us hope and assures us that change, imagination, stability, and prosperity are possible with responsibility, science, knowledge, optimism, cooperation, and altruism. 

“As individuals, our most important responsibility is a commitment to know the truth as best we can, truth that is both technical and ethical. Our saving grace will be a broadened scientific awareness combined with an empathy that enable use to understand the plight of the poor, the dispossessed, the young people without hope, or the rural communities challenged by bewildering change. Gandhi called his life an experiment in “living in truth.” That approach will have to become the experiment of our generation as well. Without the commitment to truth, we will be blinded by false and provocative divisions across religions, regions, and countries. Without the commitment to science, we will be prey to false and messianic claims without real substance. Without a determined effort to build understanding and empathy for other societies, cultures, religions, and the voiceless poor, we will risk a downward spiral of distrust and even hate across the divides of “us versus them.” 

Each of us is, at least potentially, a node of a truly global network in which we help to weave together diverse traditions, areas of knowledge, and cultural pursuits on the global tapestry. We are each the potential shapers of a global society that can share values and address common global challenges.” -Jeffry Sachs, Common Wealth, p. 336

Carl Sagan shows us that we are on an island in the great ocean of space with the same conditions affecting our island/planet as those who chose to fail or succeed in Diamond's book Collapse. Sagan further allows us to see that we can either contribute to Jared Diamond’s history or Jeffry Sachs’s future. 

“In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.” - Carl Sagan

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