[From the Preface]
SOMETIMES IT SEEMS that there are three kinds of people in the modern world. The first, the techno-industrial optimists, believe technical innovation and the invention of new materials can and will fix anything and everything that poses a problem. The second, the modern doomsayers, the perpetual pessimists, remain convinced that no matter what we do, it will all come to nothing as the whole world implodes. The third group expresses quite explicitly that they do not care about the future of the planet or its people. These folks live for the moment and don’t want to think about the future. I have met some of them and heard about others. They are the nihilists of modernity who refuse to take any responsibility for the human predicament to which they have contributed like the rest of us. They are not inclined to change their behavior. Each of these types has its theory of change—and they are all wrong.
But there is a fourth choice. Some of us recognize that we do have agency, yet at the same time cannot control everything—or even just what we want to change. I call that hopeful realism, the idea that to make any sense of it all we must be realistic and accept the best evidence available, no matter how disturbing, and work in that context until a better (more accurate) framing of reality comes along. Because we do have agency (we can make choices and act), we are at least capable of making some change in the world if not all that we would like—or all that we need.
When combining a realistic assessment of the world as it is, with the knowledge that we can act on that basis and possibly even make a difference, we have an honest foundation for hope. We cannot control everything, but we can (if we will) control ourselves and how we act in the world. By framing the world in that way, we establish a level and kind of hope grounded in reality—hopeful realism. However bad or good things appear, that approach is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. (Both are variants of fatalism, a futile and perhaps infantile perspective on life that is, which is actually kind of boring.)
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It will seem a wild radical viewpoint to some—well, maybe to many—when I argue that we are rapidly approaching the end of industrial civilization. The idea is entirely outside the dominant worldview of techno-industrial modernity. The modernist worldview holds “progress” to be inevitable and permanent, due mostly to technological innovation and unending economic growth. The consumerist propaganda is so intense and pervasive that hardly anyone considers an alternative view.
But the real-world trends that scientists and others have documented for decades tell a very different story. The basic science is clear. We live on a finite planet and we, the rapidly growing human population, have overshot the capacity of the Earth System to carry the load of our extraction, production, consumption, and waste. Most of the responsibility rests with the former colonial nations of the Global North that plundered the world’s resources and people, especially in the Global South, since the earliest adventurers of the “Age of Exploration”—and continue to do so.
Donella Meadows and her MIT colleagues accurately predicted in 1972—over four decades ago—that Nature’s materials and systems, which feed the industrial machine, would begin depleting right about now. (They were widely ridiculed, and their research was dismissed by all of the “most important” economists at the time.) We now know not only that their report, “The Limits to Growth,” was right on target. We also know that there is much more involved than that.
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This book explores how we got into this global predicament, the key elements involved in where we stand now, and what looks like the best way out of this mess. Can we hold it together enough to step outside our long-held illusions and take radical new actions to address our radical new world?
[From Chapter One]
When identity vests with ideas from consumer culture rather than natural social institutions like family and community, the individual tends to become alienated from the underlying social order—such as it is. The institutional milieu we all must engage in at some level tends to force the social self into rational-legal categorizations that isolate self-image from membership in family, community, or social group. Core human values not part of that larger techno-industrial matrix that Dmitri Orlov (2017) calls the technosphere fade into the background for many. Modern life in “advanced” societies reminds me of the science fiction movie The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, moves between illusions of both power and disaster while trying to distinguish between reality and the surreal matrix into which he resists seduction.
Unfortunately, we may know less about the future we face with a shrunken technosphere at the end of the Industrial Era than we imagine about the world Neo faced beyond The Matrix. Just beyond the tenuous social order is the looming prospect of chaos and collapse. The question of the century is if we can shape a new societal order in harmony with the laws of Nature and the principles of human evolution that carried us through most of the human journey.
The power of science, technology, and social hierarchy in the Industrial Era has sent us down what is now recognizable as a terminal path. The following chapters explore the obstacles and opportunities inherent in humanity’s greatest predicament ever: our present condition and trajectory. It is extremely difficult to forge an entirely different path in this context.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 