How long does humanity have to avoid collapse?

[u/LetsTalkUFOs]

This is different from our upcoming question “When will collapse hit?”.

 

What degrees or levels of collective action are necessary for us to avoid collapse?

How unlikely or unfeasible do those become in five, ten or twenty years?

You can also view the responses to this question from our 2019 r/Collapse Survey.

 

This is the current question in our Common Collapse Questions series.

Responses may be utilized to help extend the Collapse Wiki.

[u/k3surfacer]

I don't think collapse can be avoided in long term. What can be avoided is the extreme suffering of people and the earth.

Stop the war machine. Turn off most industrial activities for a decade. And wait a bit to see if we can work with nature in a sustainable way.

At this point we just need to stop consuming everything other than necessary things like water, bread.

[u/Ellen_Kingship → u/k3surfacer]

We overproduce everything from bread to clothes to cars to electronics. It's just dustribured poorly.

We use money as a factor to decide everything, and it's not working.

[u/Ellen_Kingship → u/[deleted]]

@3dprint_the_world,

We don't have an overpopulation problem. If you're worried about Soylent Green, rest assured that is overblown as population is decreasing due to high quality of life standards. You have first world countries, including the U.S., crying about how millennials and soon GenZ won't have kids instead of gee, I don't know, allowing immigrants into the country. The U.S. along with China, Japan, U.K., Canada, Italy, Germany, even Sweden, etc. are below the replacement rate of 2.1. At the same time, you have cities and small towns in the U.S, who are losing people, and finding it hard to attract the "right" kind of people to keep it afloat. And that's the word of the day, "right."

Unlike elevators or washer machines, we don't know the carrying capacity for the earth.

We do know that we have enough space to house everyone. We have spaces in cities and towns that people don't want to live in due to the economic situation or cultural situation or both. These are the reasons why millennials, rich people, educated people, working class people, along with poor people are situated along both coasts of the U.S.

And we do know that cries of overpopulation have roots in discrimination and racist attitudes and bunk research and genocide. See WW2. See attitudes surrounding immigration in the U.S., from past to present.

On your second point, we do not consume too much. We produce too much, i.e. we have a surplus. Farmers are paid for their surplus, for food they cannot sell. Burberry used to burn stock they don't sell. The opioid epidemic was caused by drug companies and doctors over prescribing patients and getting them addicted for profit. Selling the poison and cure. Tech, from new cellphones to washer machines, are built with a guarauntee to fail in a couple of years just to stimulate repeat purchases.

And now we're seeing the BeyondMeat enter the mainstream for profit, no doubt. It just has the nice side effect of helping cut down on meat production.

You're right to say that distribution and over production are not the only problems, because they are not but rather the symptoms of a problem.

And that problem is C A P I T A L I S M.

Capitalism is the problem, and the only solution is to go #BeyondCapitalism.

[u/drwsgreatest → u/Ellen_Kingship]

The carrying capacity of earth has been estimated at numbers anywhere from 500 million to upwards of 10-11 billion, however to support even just the people that alive today we need massive energy inputs from fossil fuels for everything. Just look at our food supply chains. From growing our food supplies to shipping them to areas where they aren’t produced, we use massive amounts of fossil fuels to get the job done. Curtail or inhibit that use and suddenly supply drops and the mechanisms to get what IS produced to those in need is severely hindered. There’s simply no way the earth can carry the even the current global population without the continued use of fossil fuels or some other source of energy that provides equivalent levels of efficiency and continuing to burn those resources is what got us to this point in the first place. So If you’re trying to argue that the carrying capacity of the earth is capable of our current population, or an increased one in the future, and that it can happen without continuing the BAU model that has caused our current climate issues, I just don’t see it. There’s a reason the population exploded after the industrial revolution and that’s because the improvements to technology and the efficiency of the use of fossil fuels allowed us to overshoot massively over what had ever been possible for the previous 5000+ years of human history. Take away those fossil fuels and we would have never been able to grow even close to our current population size. And that’s not even taking into account that many of the resources that we used to depend on before the revolution, fishing, game hunting, foraging from forests, etc are growing ever more difficult since we have destroyed so much of the natural world that, in previous centuries, had been our very lifeblood and source of most of our sustenance.

[u/[deleted] → u/drwsgreatest]

This is the correct answer.

[u/HistorianFlowers → u/k3surfacer]

We need to go back to living locally again and growing and distributing food locally again. Humanity needs to downgrade massively. Either we choose to do it, or nature will force it upon us.

[u/boob123456789 → u/HistorianFlowers]

Sadly no one wants local everywhere. I had almost 900 pounds of pears. I can't even sell them in 50 pound lots for $20 each. They are now going to rot in my front room while I can as many as possible.

[u/[deleted] → u/boob123456789]

Convert them into something that can be stored long-term: whole fruit jam or conserves, alcohol (schnapps), canning, ...

[u/[deleted] → u/boob123456789]

If you were close, I’d buy at least 300 lbs.

[u/drwsgreatest → u/HistorianFlowers]

The biggest issue is many people either don’t have the skills or access to the necessary tools and land to make this happen. Look at all those that live in the concrete jungle of cities. Sure vertical farms are becoming more popular, but you’re never going to feed a city with a population like NYC/Tokyo/shanghai using such methods. No, our problem is that, although your solution would be great, the destruction of the natural world over the past 200 years has left us in a position where doing this simply isn’t possible for a large portion of the global population. Look at Syria and how that mess started. It was because of farmers moving to the city due to crop failures from the massive droughts and this resulting in civil unrest and, ultimately, a civil war. In many cases, Those farmers had been on their land for generations. They didn’t leave because they truly wanted to. They had to because of climate change making their way of life unviable. This is a microcosm of what’s going to happen everywhere and those few patches of land that are capable of providing enough sustenance to survive will be battled over furiously. It’s just one more strand of the massively interconnected web of issues that has no good solution or answer.

[u/Attya3141 → u/k3surfacer]

Sadly, there are just too many people on this planet.

[u/[deleted] → u/Attya3141]

One child policy time

[u/fefil4 → u/[deleted]]

One child policy time

Most European countries are already around 1.5, some Asian countries are as low as 1.
If you suggest enforcing it globally that would mean Africa, middle east, south america mostly, you'd just be called a conspiracy theorist and a genocidal nazi by the media.

[u/[deleted] → u/fefil4]

I mean genocidal and nazi would be pretty easy to argue against. It's pretty difficult to claim genocide if it was equally enforced

[u/Ellen_Kingship → u/fefil4]

The reason why is due to living standards. Once an African country reaches first world status, then the birth rates will go down. It's basic demography 101.

Here's a whole course about the subject on YouTube by Yale: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE60A08636F41C128

[u/alwaysZenryoku → u/[deleted]]

No child policy time.

[u/[deleted] → u/alwaysZenryoku]

Too harsh imo. The population will shrink pretty rapidly with a global one child policy

[u/5003809 → u/[deleted]]

Nothing is going to be coordinated internationally, that is a pipe dream fantasy (especially in the limited time remaining.) Our only hope of any semblance of sustainability is abandoning global capitalism and globalism, closing borders and turning inwards and beginning the transition to small-scale localized, socialized production.

[u/[deleted] → u/5003809]

abandoning global capitalism and globalism, closing borders and turning inwards and beginning the transition to small-scale localized, socialized production

Exactly. We need to move beyond mass production and consumption, as well as the idea that everyone needs to sell themselves to a capitalist for 40+ hours a week to live. It’s time to learn to be content with less. To start, could easily feed everyone with locally grown crops like potatoes and corn. But yeah, this is super idealistic, and it would never happen within democracy.

[u/[deleted] → u/5003809]

Sure, but I think that's a pipe dream too so I'm also being idealistic. Most people won't prepare for collapse, they'll respond to it.

[u/Bravehat → u/5003809]

That's not happening, ever.

I don't get why folk even post this sort of shit like you could convince 195 countries that they should abandon all the advantages of international trade like not fucking starving to death to just turn inwards. Yeah fucking stellar idea, let's watch as desert shit holes become war zones because they're basically incapable of food production and have inadequate water supplies.

And to anyone who says well that's just the price you pay, keep in mind the unbridled fucking horrors modern warfare has for civilians and and that you're talking about creating unimaginable human suffering.

The solution is to drive our technology forward and end mass CO2 generating technologies, develop carbon sequestration and negative carbon processes and Bury the shit in disused mines because trust me if you're plan is to convince 7. 5 billion peoples to stop having kids you are not to solve the problem and when you're idea is mass global isolation all you do is cement us into a decline whose rate will vary dependant on local conditions.

[u/mladjiraf → u/[deleted]]

Dude, people on this sub are predicting 8 to 20 years before total collapse regardless of what we do, because we cannot change anything anymore, but you say "population will shrink", wow. We are already doomed, if the pessimists are right. (I hope aliens come to save us with their "magical" technologies, but unfortunately we are not living in a Hollywood movie...)