September 08, 2009
Staying in the Game
Posted by: Keith Kloor : Category: collapse, sustainability
That’s probably the best we can do, says Joseph Tainter, in a forthcoming paper. Here’s the passage that will make environmentalists bark at their computer screens:
Contrary to what is typically advocated as the route to sustainability, it is usually not possible for a society to reduce its consumption of resources voluntarily over the long term. To the contrary, as problems great and small inevitably arise, addressing these problems requires complexity and resource consumption to increase.
Anyone seriously engaged in sustainability can’t ignore Tainter’s scholarship on collapse.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Tainter’s research is very compelling. In the end, it basically (without saying so) hints that human civilization is in the grip of an endless complexity/collapse cycle that we can really do nothing to control. Complexity will happen whether we recognize the problem or not. And thus, collapse will also happen. How humans can remain happy under the shadow of this knowledge is the real question.