Writing notes: Let's layer this collapse cake!

This book is being written in real time, don't forget it!

As I write this book, evidence that backs (or adds to) what I’ve been writing about (and we’ve been talking about) keeps pouring in. This (collapse) is happening in very real-time. Every half-dozen chapters or so I collate the additional factlets and studies in one spot and commit to feeding them back into past chapters. It’s funny, right, how this book emulates the subject - it’s far from linear and is thoroughly emergent.

Some of the updated data and ideas below have been shared with me by the community - thank you to all of you for being so collaborative in this process. As I say, it’s all so… thoroughly emergent.

In other related news

I’ve had word that a few publishers are following the book serialisation and have noted the interest it’s attracting. I’m rather pumped about this. I’d love to see the book packaged into a bookshelf-ready book and see it reach a more mainstream audience. To this end, if you have publisher mates (anywhere in the world), please do gently alert them to this project. I’m happy to give them a free subscription if they want to catch up on the first 12 chapters.

And in totally unrelated news….

On a recent trip to London, I had lunch with Australia’s former Prime Minister Julia Gillard at Spring restaurant. As it happens, today (yesterday by the time this publishes) is (was) the anniversary of her viral misogyny speech. We talked about why we no longer live in Australia, hiking and the US election.

---

OK, but to the planetary updates…

To add to the “but this time it’s different” argument from Chapter 9

The climate writer Bill McKibben pulled out data from a “very big” new study that shows that, yes, the earth has been hotter before (and life was not wiped out). But these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced. He wrote in his newsletter:

But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving….Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years. Our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.

The new point here is that it’s different this time because we have so little time to do any kind of adaptation.

A killer quote about blame…

That I might just have to weave into Chapter 11.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A statistic that pertains to fertility collapse

A recent study by Morgan Stanley has predicted that nearly 45% of women will remain single and child-free by 2030, creating the fastest growing cohort in the US. Per the Collapse chapters, the pattern is emulated around much of the developed world.

And this addendum to the fertility collapse thesis

This issue of fertility collapse remains very much alive and in early September 2024 I interviewed a global ecologist at Flinders University Professor Corey Bradshaw to get an update.

He makes the point that the modelling I cite has not taken into consideration the compensatory effect of reproduction in developing nations. When child mortality increases, an evolutionary response kicks in that sees women have even more children. So while fertility rates were indeed declining in Africa, just recently that has stalled as child mortality rates have gone up (due to increases in civil war, food scarcity, famine, climate and other very collapse-related issues; see the Sudan update below). Corey’s work suggests that this changes the population decline picture. That is, the decline won’t be as dramatic as the current modelling. Is this a good or bad thing? Well, it’s complicated….

Tim Winton’s Time of Monsters essay

I read it this week and feel it should alert everyone to it because it speaks to moral injury, a thread in this book (a number of you raised it in the comments this week). The Australian novelist and climate activist describes a phenomenon he explores in his new novel - a child in the future is shown documentary evidence of how his ancestors (us) lived.

The images that dance before him are scenes of unimaginable luxury and plenty. He sees prodigious technical achievements and personal mobility of a kind that’s unimaginable in his own day. Everything he’s shown is so outlandish, it feels alien. The power of these images is mighty, almost occult.

He says: “I felt a wave of awe. And then a kind of weight, like shame. As if these were things I should never see. I didn’t really know what I was viewing. I only knew it was not for me. I would never have it – any of it – and I couldn’t bear to watch another moment.”

Winton reverse engineers the hypothetical and it hits hard.

Imagine discovering that the way you live now – which is in hardship, under constant duress, contending with capricious, often deadly weather, living half the year underground, in temperatures routinely in the mid 50s – is the direct result of how your ancestors lived. What they gorged on, what they dumped into the air and water. That’d be galling enough, right? But what about when you discover that they knew it would happen to you all along, that this was no accident, no case of unforeseen consequences like Frankenstein’s little fuck-up. The miserable conditions of your existence, and your low life expectancy, these weren’t unavoidable. Your ancestors foresaw them. They had the data, the modelling, the ability to know in advance – for generations.

We are all trying to hit it home hard to the humans. Tim’s tactic is haunting. The essay needs to be passed around, if only to have more of us own the moral injury ahead.

Further to the contentious “should we be putting all eggs in the renewable economy basket” debate

There’s little getting around the fact solar and wind farms have to be rebuilt According to the IEA:

“A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant. Since 2010 the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of renewables in new investment has risen.”

Rachel Donald from Planet: Critical asks:

“Can we build a renewable world without fossil fuels when we can’t ship minerals around the world for processing?”

She also adds an explainer that fleshes out how “Jevon’s Paradox” works:

“Even if we did facilitate an incredible, global rollout of renewable energy whilst somehow protecting the remaining endangered ecosystems, it would not guarantee a stable planet. Humans use available energy to transform materials to produce wealth. Until we take wealth generation out of the equation, and re-engineer our economies to facilitate human and planet wellbeing, our energy supply will be used for material transformation…The only thing that can stop us, seemingly, is the planet itself.

The world is not getting richer…

The founder of Our World in Data just wrote a guest essay about how we measure poverty that confirmed the UN international poverty line of $2.15 a day is already adjusted for countries’ differences in their cost of living. So when the United Nations says that one in 10 people live on $2.15 a day, that means hundreds of millions of people live on the equivalent of what costs $2.15 in the United States.

It also argues that a $2.15 poverty line doesn’t come close to capturing world poverty levels.

Meanwhile, a disaster expert who has modelled the Sudan crisis foresees 13 million people starving to death in Sudan by October 2025, with a margin of error of two million. Such a toll would make this one of the worst famines in world history. By way of contrast, the famous Ukraine famine of the 1930s killed perhaps four million people, although estimates vary.

An extra tech bro’ titbit pertaining to their tedious longevity obsession

PayPal founder Peter Thiel has admitted that he is “against” the idea of death and aims to fight it. According to The New Yorker, The National Academy of Medicine, heavily funded by the tech community, is currently running a “Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity” which will award $US25,000,000 to anyone who can make a major scientific breakthrough in delaying the aging process. Meanwhile, Google’s highly secretive Immortality Project aims to treat aging as a disease that can be cured. Arram Sabeti of the food tech start-up ZeroCrater once stated, “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we will achieve it.”

Earlier this week however, new research was published showing that humanity has, in fact, reached an upper limit of longevity and that life expectancy has decelerated, and started to decline in some places.

A quote from Yuval Noah Harari’s new book

“Modernity can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”

Humans: the new status symbol.

This is probably a snippet to add to a later chapter, but I’ll include it here so I don’t forget it. It’s an argument I’m increasingly hearing about the place. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, a higher price will be placed on the real human version of things, such that AI will be the poor man’s option.

Substacker Gurwinder points to the example of lab-made diamonds.

Ted Gioia writes that in the AI “race”.

“The actual winners will be holistic thinkers and empathetic individuals with human skills. The important things in life can’t be quantified and run on a computer—I’m talking about love, care, trust, friendship, compassion, responsibility, family ties, kindness, dedication, faith, hope, courage, humility, respect, and human decency. AI can’t deliver those. It merely pretends. And the pretending might fool some people, but feels like an insult to those who know better.”

Let’s backtrack: What is emergence?

I feel I should insert into the Metacrisis chapter a quick explainer of what emergence is:

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole.

The New York Times did a food collapse series...

Here are a few things I pulled from it:

• In the Collapse chapter, I cover the prospect of a food bowl collapse within three years of our overstepping the 1.5C threshold. According to the NYT article “Over a 30-year time horizon, the insurer Lloyd’s recently estimated a 50 per cent chance of what it called a “major” global food shock.”

• David Wallace Wells argues we urgently need a “food transition” plan. Crops such as avocados or cocoa, which now regularly appear on lists of climate-endangered foodstuffs, will be replaced or redesigned.

• The scale of such a task is bewildering: Currently, more than half of America’s land is used for agricultural production; more than one-third of the planet’s land is used to produce food, and 70 per cent of all freshwater is used to irrigate farmland. Globally, the equivalent of South America is now used to grow crops, and the equivalent of Africa is used to graze animals.

• According to the World Resources Institute, we may need to add almost two Indias to the world’s existing farmland to meet food needs in the second half of this century. — but adding that farmland means cutting down forests, which store carbon, in order to graze more animals, which produce carbon.

• And yet…In the US, investment in agricultural research and development has fallen by a third in the past 20 years.

  ---

That should do us for now. Also, if you missed it, this week’s Wild episode is a two-way conversation between Elizabeth Oldfield and myself. We talk about what is sacred (and how we access it), acedia ( the moral loneliness we feel in turbulent times), how we sit in the grief and despair of things, losing friends to the cause, how to be of service, how to be Fully Alive (the title of her book) and honour This One Wild and Precious Life (mine!).

Just as a wee reminder, please do subscribe to the feed. This guarantees you get each new ep as it lands and it helps Wild reach more eyeballs (alas, the algorithms work to such rhythms).

Sarah xx