Overshoot
To quote John Michael Greer: "Plenty of books in the 1970s and early 1980s applied the lessons of ecology to the future of industrial civilization and picked up at least part of the bad news that results. Overshoot was arguably the best of the lot,....."
Stats for nerds
7recommend
15mentions
9people
2016–2024years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Two readings are relevant here:
1) Tragedy of the Commons by Harding
2) Overshoot by William Catton
There is a sliver of hope that we can successfully decommission fossil fuel energy and master climate engineering, i.e. employ technology to solve global, systemic problems created by technology. But it is hard today to distinguish optimism from delusion.
Oh well, better luck next time humans…
- As a former doomer, this post does a great job of building a flimsy strawman of doomer thinking and then tearing it down. It does not respond to any of the real concerns brought up on doomer subreddits such as r/collapse.
The fundamental stance of doomers as far as I have understood it is fundamentally Malthusianism - infinite growth cannot occur on a finite planet. The majority of people alive today are only able to eat because of synthetic fertilizers. Phosphates in particular are mined and are being lost to the ocean via soil erosion due to industrial farming practices. Freshwater is being depleted unsustainably all over the world. The EROI of oil is consistently declining. This post totally ignores the Hubbert curves that are fundamental to much of doomer thinking, and doomers only have to be right about one of them for there to be a massive population and living standards collapse.
This post also largely ignores that doomers acknowledge the mainstream climate models but believe they don't properly account for feedback loops such as the clatharate gun hypothesis. It is especially egregious that the IPCC numbers are cited, when so much of doomer discourse surrounds criticisms of the IPCC and its consensus-based methodology resulting in excessively cautious claims.
I have stopped being convinced we're doomed, but that's not because I think doomers are wrong, I just think we really might pull off the technological miracles required to kick the can down the road far enough not to worry about it. Better to look forward to space mining and virtually limitless energy than spend my days feeling angry we didn't do something sooner.
If you read Overshoot by William Catton (one of the most important doomer books), you know that there's nothing we really could have done. We will always grow into the size of container we have. So the best we can hope for is a galaxy sized container, and that's what I choose to do.
- If you really want to scare yourself, read:
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William R. Catton
- William Catton is another visonary. I consider his book, Overshoot to be better than limits to growth.
This lecture sums up his work well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8
- Read the book OVERSHOOT https://www.amazon.com/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolution...
You'll see that we can't feed 9bn people.
