From a related blog post
- This time, though, I’m not so much an expert as a foil. Dan Brooks (a name long-time readers of this blog may recognize) and Sal Agosta (whose concept of “sloppy fitness” careful readers of my novelette “The Island” may recognize) have written a book called A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century. Their definition of “hope” is significantly more restrained than the tech bros and hopepunk authors would like: not once do they suggest, for example, that we could all keep our superyachts if we just put a giant translucent pie plate into space to cut incident sunlight by a few percent. Brooks & Agosta’s definition of hope is far more appropriate for a world in which leading climate scientists admit to fury and despair at political inaction, decry living in an “age of fools”, and predict by a nearly five-to-one margin that not only is 1.5ºC a pipe dream, but that we’ll be blowing past 2.5ºC by century’s end. They’ve internalized the growing number of studies which point to global societal collapse around midcentury. Their idea of hope is taken explicitly from Asimov’s Foundation series: not How do we prevent collapse, but How do we come back afterward? That’s what their book is about.
I'm looking forward to reading this book.
I'm always unconvinced by Malthusians, especially when those predictions involve the exhausting of arable land. That prediction has come and gone since before Malthus became famous for making it. The actual carrying capacity of the Earth is unknown, though obviously (1) it certainly isn't infinite, and (2) every time we expand we make less room for other species.
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if by mid century almost all species of large mammals were endangered or extinct, but that's a far stretch from societal collapse. Of course, the more we talk about this stuff, the less people are excited to breed, and the shrinking of the populations of the Western world have to be considered when trying to make bets on the future. What if the birth rates in poor countries start to approach those in rich countries? This isn't a remote possibility, and surely that would forestall a lot of the most dire predictions.
I think it's a valuable exercise to think about worst-case scenarios, but I think the risk is in putting too high of odds on worst-case as an inevitable outcome.
That was an excellent read. Thanks for sharing.