What nobody (including me) wants to hear

This planet can not sustain current economic growth (given current population). We can’t go on as we have been. As described in many venues, including Jarad Diamond’s book, “Collapse,” the planet’s resources are finite and being used at an accelerated rate – examples – food supplies from the oceans are being depleted by over harvesting and pollution; forest and tillable land is diminishing; oil demand is making it more expensive to address.

Not much of this hits home as long as we/I can go shopping, put gas in the car, and have a day at the beach or travel. Speaking for myself living in the Hudson valley, New York State, I don’t often experience severe socioeconomic stress. Unless the stock market goes under, banks fail, businesses go bust, and jobs go out of fashion. Which they have. But that’s not the same as oceans dying, forests and food and oil scarcity, is it?

Maybe environmental collapse and bank failures are not directly connected, but there are two forces at play: globalized economies, and stretched resources.

On the one hand, advances in technology have enabled greater efficiencies (and profits) to be had, by raking the seas, using cheap labor, automation, and computerized networked banking, etc.. On the other hand, or at the same time, extended (globalized) linking of resources and banking coupled with increased demand mean that when a tanker sinks, or oil rigs are threatened by storms, or corn is used as fuel rather than food, or the U.S. housing market collapses, the world economic system is shocked into reactions that affect everyone, on a global scale.

Huge manufacturing and financial systems, increasing numbers of consumers, shrinking resources, and little or no long range planning. Stable or unstable – sustainable or unsustainable?

Little vs. big.

Compare the pre-industrialized villages of the 1700’s with those of today. In the 1700’s village you had local food and service providers, local manufacturing. Most people did not make much money, but then you didn’t need much either. And you did not HAVE much – no toasters, leaf blowers, typewriters.

One can argue that the only way to supply the masses with the range of appliances we have today is through a globalized economy. But that brings us back to the issue no one wants to talk about: global sustainability.

How to go back once you’ve been there. How do we give everyone a healthy standard of living, and sufficient material gain so we can all eat and be entertained in a manner we are accustomed? Probably we can’t. Not for everyone. And probably there are many who would say, “Why shouldn’t I get what I can, and let everyone else get for themselves – survival of the fittest.

Life is inherently unfair, it’s not my job to use my one and only life to ensure someone else halfway around the globe gets his/her fair share of goods, goods I have been clever enough, lucky enough, or worked hard enough to get on my own: “Good luck to you, good luck to me.”

Billy Joel wrote a song about soldiering in the Vietnam war, the chorus goes: “And we will all go down together…” There’s a parallel to global economic collapse, it’s global environmental collapse, in which the seas die, lands erode, oceans rise, diseases spread, air goes radioactive, and so on, and nobody can do much about it but wait a hundred or hundreds of years.

And contrary to some who predict a lack of petroleum due to something called peak oil, in this scenario, oil is cheap, but, because, you just can’t afford to buy it. Take your medicine: make a village.

Local food production makes no sense if it costs more to heat a greenhouse than it does to ship produce. But locally produced goods in many cases probably does make sense. An efficient electrical grid can mean solar-made power is transported efficiently to areas in need of power. But nuclear power to supply your electric leaf blower and hair dryer – and electric car - probably does not make sense.

Overall, what makes sense is for more people to use fewer resources so all of us can survive.

Living in a locally supplied village can mean more people make less money, but they may have more jobs, and have a better quality of life, and living standard, than those not working together.

If everyone can do it forever, it is sustainable. If not, we all go down together.