The Great Disruption

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08friedman.html

Begin quote from above Friedman article:


One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment — when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once — “The Great Disruption.
end quote.

I agree with Thomas Friedman that the human race has hit a resource wall. The lifestyles of the world both were and are unsustainable anymore. People want to hide their heads in the sand and live in a fantasyland of their own making. However, we are facing worldwide now some of the same problems that collapsed the Easter Island culture and drove it extinct and the Mayans and many other past cultures. The really big difference this time is that it is not a regional culture hitting a wall, it is the whole world hitting Global climate change and unsustainable consumerism.

I was looking at present day pictures of Galveston, Texas. Most of it still looks like it did when the hurricane hit last summer or fall. In its own way it is another Katrina only without as much loss of human life. Everything is still ripped up and torn down the way it was then. Fishermen and women cannot take out their fishing boats because there are sunk fishing boats in the harbor preventing them. Besides most fishing boats are wrecked or sunk there. New Orleans and Galveston, Texas are examples of severe Global Weather changes that are only just beginning worldwide. Past ways of life on earth of the last 100 or so years are just not sustainable anymore.

The real question is "What type of life is sustainable for how many people on earth?"

This is the only real question we are facing now. The infinite consumption mode is over.

begin quote from above webpage:

“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks."

endquote