Some mornings I lie in bed browsing Facebook or Twitter and thoughts put themselves together in response to something I read. Having no reputation to lose I just post them.
There are genuine conspiracies I don’t know what allegations or speculations regarding particular conspiracies are true but at its core climate change is real and environmental collapse is humanity’s greatest and most existential challenge.
The recent Moore/Gibbs film does not deny the reality of climate change it questions the singular focus when the problem is multi-faceted environmental degradation driven by population growth and massive over-consumption of the Earth’s resources.
Planet of the Humans Clip from Gavin Sealey on Vimeo.
The limits to growth and the consequences of hitting those limits have four possible resolutions:
1. We continue on the same trajectory and there is a massive environmental catastrophe in which billions die in floods, fires and famines and global civilisation, perhaps even human life, ends.
2. A globally supported green new deal, premised on clean energy technologies and implemented wisely and justly by the world’s political systems, allows us to continue expanding population and consumption. Perhaps human ingenuity will build continent spanning sustainable megacities and colonies in space mining the asteroid belt and so on.
3. A global cabal of oligarchs take control of all governments through subversion of their structures and leaderships and control of populations through control of the media narrative and suppression of contrarian voices. This is facilitated by recurring or persistent pandemics and economic shut downs that essentially warehouse non-essential humans in high value (mainly white) populations and starve off non-essential humans in low value (brown and black) populations. Surveillance technologies, vaccines that create custom vulnerabilities and media manipulation limit and control the masses everywhere under systems of governance that resemble ‘1984’ or ‘Brave New World’ or some combination of the two with shades of ‘Bladerunner’.
4. The density of human interaction and conversation at global and local levels runs counter to the fear inducing narratives of the controlled media. A building ‘noospheric’ pressure results in individual and community ‘enlightenments’. A new humanity, ‘homo gestalt’ if you will, more conscious and connected, emerges and voluntarily and justly limits their own growth and consumption, establishing harmony on personal, interpersonal and planetary levels.
I’ve not ordered these scenarios in order of probability or desirability. I will say that two of them are consistent with our current trajectories while the other two both hang on a wing and a prayer.
