Limits to Growth, redux

I may have been in the environmental business too long.

I find it very hard to summon much concern over new reports of the planet's upcoming demise. After all, I live with this awareness on a daily level, and have done so for many years, in increasing levels of knowledge and clarity. There are few apocalyptic surprises left. I've already contemplated environmental catastrophe on a large scale, and perhaps surprisingly, come to terms with it personally and intellectually, at least as far as one might do so..

This doesn't mean to say that I don't find it infinitely sad. I am particularly saddened by two trends in particular, the increasing loss of species and biological diversity, and the inhumane way we are abandoning the agricultural and herding peoples of the developing world to climate change.

So, for instance, the emerging news of the massive drought in the Horn of Africa, with Kenyan and Ethiopian and Somali farmers and herders beginning to starve and die in their thousands.

That gets me.

Or the knowledge that there are only a few thousand mountain gorillas left in the world, and those threatened by meat hunters and forestry (de-forestry) operations.

Things like that still get me.

But the announcement, in Nature, that a group of scientists have developed a new index of the limits to change in large scale biogeochemical processes by which to better understand this collapse.

That doesn't get me.

I read the original Limits to Growth study a long time ago. Taking it further than most, I expect, I mastered the technique the authors used, of computer modeling, and learned to project out some of the same trends myself. I sought out graduate work with serious academics who could help me understand the politics and economics and ethics of it all, and received a fine education from several of the leaders in the field.

I expect I was supposed to go on and become like them, a productive researcher and thinker in the same arena, and get a serious academic job at a serious research university or think tank, where I might teach two classes a year and instead publish mountains of books and papers and so on.

More new ideas about how to think about the imminent collapse of the planet.

But instead I came to Unity College, started teaching undergraduates, some of whom are woefully dismal students, others acceptable, got married, and started a farm, and began to work in local energy and energy efficiency and also, differently enough, search and rescue training and organization.

But actually, I'm still working on the same problems. I'm just being more direct about it.

Because you can publish all the tomes you want about the limits to human growth on planet earth, and I will believe you, in most cases, if you confine yourself to the science.

But that doesn't tell me a damn think about what to do about it right now.

(I'm supposed to wait for some big new government program, I guess.)

While insulating houses, putting up solar panels and wind turbines, and growing pigs and potatoes does do something about it right now. Especially if these things are done intelligently and in a way that others can learn from them, using the Internet, for instance, as in this blog.

Even helping organize search and rescue does something about it right now.

(Because if we get in the kind of shape the Ethiopians are in any time soon, we'll need civic society organizations that take responsibility for the public safety and basic needs.)

So I guess I won't get too worked up about the new index. And I don't think I want to get back on the fast track of environmental academics either.

I'll settle for modest practical goals that will make a difference right away.

Like right now. I have to get up and go feed myself and then the sheep.

I don't think I'll read this new article. I know what it will say.