By Frosty Wooldridge
America supports 330 million people who eat food, drive cars, consume everything in sight, and utilize over 80 different minerals and metals that make our civilization work. Those non-renewable natural resources allow us our extraordinarily mechanized, chemicalized and advanced society—as well as our extraordinary standard of living.
Today, 1.4 billion Chinese, 1.25 billion Indians and all total, 7.6 billion humans scour this planet for—ever decreasing amounts of non-renewable natural resources under the crust of this planet. Worse, within 30 years, 2.4 billion more humans will be added, or a total of 10 billion humans expect to scrounge this planet for any resources remaining to keep the engines of commerce operating.
In 2020, this planet holds 7.6 billion people who eat food, use water, burn fuels to keep warm, and essentially waste finite resources on a fixed planet. Humans add another 83 million, net gain, annually. Soberingly, the more people we add, the faster we exhaust those resources.
While everyone screams about “Catastrophic Climate Destabilization”, few understand the “Exponential Growth Factor” that threatens our very existence as a viable species on this planet. Fewer still realize that “The Age of Oil” that makes our societies operate—will reach exhaustion just past mid-century.
“What we do to enable our existence as an industrialized society simultaneously undermines our existence,” said Christopher Clugston, author of the blockbuster book, Blip. “Our persistent and ever-increasing extraction and utilization of non-renewable natural resources—the finite and non-replenishing fossil fuels, metals and nonmetallic minerals that enable our industrial existence—is causing increasingly pervasive global NNR scarcity, which is causing faltering global human prosperity, which is causing increasing global political instability, economic fragility and societal unrest.”
In other words, “This scenario will intensify during the coming decades and culminate in humanity’s permanent global societal collapse, almost certainly by 2050.” Give or take a few years!
In the past three weeks, I read Clugston’s book. He articulates humanity’s ever-increasing usage of resources that can never be duplicated within the context of “exponential human growth.” What is exponential growth? It’s the same as a cancer cell. It multiplies until it kills its host. Once NNR’s suffer exhausting, American society or any industrialized society cannot continue operating. Why? Because they lack the energy, metals, minerals and resources to continue.
It’s like a man who walks into the desert with two gallons of water, but given enough time in the desert, he runs out of water, however he’s 100 miles from the nearest well. He sets out toward the well. The closer he walks to the well, the faster his own supply of water runs out. When he arrives at the well, he’s out of water, but he finds the well has run dry, too. He’s out of luck.
It’s the classic Faustian Bargain, whereby he started out with ample water, so he wasted it, but he ends up with Hobson’s Choice.
America, Canada and Europe may be riding high in 2020, but in 30 short years, Hobson’s Choice cannot be avoided.
Clugston said, “Our impending collapse will result from our irreparably and irreversibly impaired global natural environment—specifically, from Earth’s extensively depleted and/or decimated finite and non-replenishing, non-renewable natural resources—a circumstance that cannot be remedied.”
Please note: no amount of “technology” will save us.
Restoration of our irreversibly depleted and irreparably impaired global natural environment will be physically impossible, as will restoration of human industrialism.
The bigger our cities around the globe, the faster and harder they will collapse as to water, energy, food and resources.
Clugston said, “While it is possible that some local and natural environments will remain favorable to support subsistence level agrarian societies comparable to those that existed prior to the inception of industrialism, the extraordinarily favorable, NNR-rich, global natural environment that enabled our 300 year industrial “blip” will be gone forever.”
After reading Clugston’s book, I am sobered as to the future of every single person living in Canada, America and Europe—and any big city country with millions of people to feed. Essentially, Clugston researched his book with the brilliance of an Einstein in the realm of resources.
If we fail to change course in this decade, we cast our fate to an inexorably bleak future. Along the way, we face more conflict over resources with China, India, Mexico, South America and across the planet.
Can we somehow mitigate our impending fate? Can we minimize the results? Can we give future generations a chance?
As a lay person in this arena, I propose a few solutions:
- We need a national-international discussion-debate on human population and how to stabilize and gracefully decline it through birth control to live within the carrying capacity of this finite planet. www.skil.org
- We MUST, and I mean, we MUST move toward alternative natural energies that don’t pollute and are renewable. We should engage every scientist to find solutions before we’re like that man wandering in the desert in search of water.
- We MUST stop trashing our oceans with chemicals and plastics. We must force Monsanto-Bayer and Dow Chemical companies to quit screwing with our Natural World. Stop all poison productions. We must engage an international 50 cent deposit law on every piece of plastic—to ensure its return for recycling.
- We must define carrying capacity in every country and move toward sustainable societies.
- We must engage world leaders, environmentalists, biologists, population specialists, climate experts, ocean experts and, most of all, religious leaders to educate their followers as to the negative impacts of humans on this planet.
- What solutions might you offer to this predicament?
Finally, do you think humans will try to save themselves? Will we make any effort to change course? As for me having observed humanity around the world for the past 50 years, my bet? We will continue the Faustian Bargain with a grand finale of Hobson’s Choice. Some call it the “Darwinian Solution”, but it’s coming.
Read this book to see for yourself: Blip by Christopher Clugston, on Amazon, ISBN#978-1-64438-068-0
His other book: Scarcity—Humanity’s Final Chapter? On Amazon.com
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E-Mail Frosty: frostyw@juno.com
