Makes one wonder what will happen in 20-30 years and if they should have children...
Learning about that stuff is a pet project of mine, and the main reason I bought a farm and started converting it. I'm hoping that it will prove possible to make economically viable replacements for a lot of the more damaging parts of our civilization. The parts I'm working on are food production and energy use. Whether these things will work is an open question so far, but I do think there's reason for hope.
As far as humanity waking up, I think it's more productive to think in terms of how much of humanity is awake since that gives us a measurable quantity that we can actually influence. Hopefully, we'll be able to present people with a solution that actually works and doesn't require big action from on-high. If it doesn't screw up their quality of life, and it's good for the future of humanity, I think there are a lot of people who would make some changes.
Likewise with climate change. I can avoid flying, but if the flight still goes and the airline reduces the ticket price, someone else will likely take my place. Meanwhile our government proposes building another airport. I am sacrificing my own convenience, but making no difference to the bigger picture.
On a smaller scale, you can change eating habits so that your food comes from sustainable sources (or even grow a lot of it yourself if you have space for something like an aquaponics setup). Learning to repair things rather than replace them is another small thing that has a large impact over time, keeping stuff out of landfills and reducing the impact of planned obsolescence.
If you want to have a larger impact than those things (which I understand may feel like insignificant posing), look to your local economic networks. Things like getting zoning laws changed to allow for integrated living and small business areas, with walkable streets, can have a huge impact on peoples habits in terms of driving and buying things from far away. That's getting into government territory, but it's local government so you have a much better chance of success.
If you're interested in tinkering, there are a bunch of things that can be done in the home energy arena that make a big difference. Start with improving efficiency (insulation, draft elimination, passive solar retrofits). After that, you can consider things like solar water heating, or high-efficiency wood heat for the dwelling itself. There are wood heater designs that you can build with minimal skill that are very close to as good as you can possibly get in terms of efficiency (look into rocket mass heaters or masonry heaters). If you make a job out of it, you can have a large impact over a few years doing these things for other people who want to do something meaningful but don't have the time/knowledge/resources to make it happen.
If you like biology/ecology, I think there is tremendous potential in the creation of passive productive ecosystems. The basic idea here is that we take space that is currently under-utilized (mowed medians, frontages, hillsides, unused lawns etc.) and plant them up with productive perennial species like fruit and nut trees, herbs, and various vine crops. Combined with minimal support from municipalities for allowing safe access, these kinds of areas can have a big impact on a lot of positive things - building connections in a community, providing a significant source of otherwise hard-to-get fresh fruit and nuts that's free for the taking, and at the same time providing habitat for wild animals to recolonize places we've been keeping functionally sterile at great expense. This is the other thing I'm doing on my property - creating a permanent productive forest environment (the cattle are part of the preparatory steps, and will gradually be phased out in favor of a tree-based ecosystem). It's easier to do than it sounds, if you just work on it a bit at a time. If you don't have land available, you can often find someone who does.
A business model I'm exploring in this space is the "urban farmer" or "urban forest farmer," who basically leases unused lawn spaces in cities and turns them into productive systems. The farmer would then harvest and sell the produce locally to make the profit - possible through a CSA arrangement. If you have the people skills, you can potentially get a large percentage of suburban or low-density urban properties involved for a given area, and you end up having "farm land" to use for local food systems and ecological remediation. It eliminates the need for mowing and other busy work for the owners, and they get a cut of the produce as a side benefit. It would also hopefully get neighbors talking to each other as they see the neighborhood transform, which combined with better zoning laws would probably lead to some local businesses springing up to support either your farming activities or things that follow from there (local restaurants, food preservation shop, etc).
There are a lot of options for improvement when you start looking at how things are being done today. Some of these things probably won't pan out, but others will, and the fact that we're starting now rather than waiting for somebody else means we're leading by example. Others will follow as they are able when they see what's possible.
I think the biggest thing is to change your mindset to think in terms of snowballing passive systems. Every time you make a wood heater for someone that uses half (or less) of the firewood to cleanly heat a space, you potentially save that quantity of energy every year after for the life of the home. Each productive tree you plant provides 500-2000 lbs of food every year for generations if it's maintained, and the maintenance is minimal. Half an acre of coppiced firewood species like Black Locust can provide the majority of the annual heating needs for a modest, well-insulated home forever. That's how you can maximize the impact of your labor - build things that keep on giving after you stop working on them.
There are loads of people out there right now who can't find a decent job. If we can make a viable business models for doing this kind of work, we'd have a huge force multiplier there as well by inspiring them to take on similar jobs, or even doing work that complements our own work.
I'd say that it's an issue of humans wielding industrial strength tools without proper technology for monitoring and constraining resource consumption.
Effectively the planet is populated by autonomous agents focusing on locally optimizing their short-term finances, using capital* to convert landmass and biomass to marketable commodities. The side-effects are as we see.
Now that we have stated the problem, we can actually start figuring out how to limit this. But as economic system design and political action goes I'm all thumbs.
There is a slight reason for optimism. If governments recognize that there is a general action that can be taken then usually a way can be found for global action - and with proper response this actually works. See what happened to the usages CFC:s in refrigerators after it was proven they lay waste to the ozone layer.
Unfortunately the damage to biomass is already extensive. When one kind of food source becomes scarce we can just move to another, without reflecting why did that particular fishery dry up.
With ozone layer the problem was a bit more urgent - "OMFG we are all gonna fry up!".
* ie. machines, labor etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedy_of_the_commons
Look up the Darwin-Lotka Energy law, a/k/a the Maximum Power Principle.
Also recent work by Jeremy England, UK physicist, now at MIT.
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=e91D5UAz-f4
http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/3/7803054/2013jcpsre...
Specifically of interest:
Winning Darwin's game happens to be about dissipating more heat than your competition.
That is almost precisely the statement of the Darwin-Lotka Energy Law (also "the maximum power principle") coined by ecologist Howard T. Odum, based on the work of Charles Darwin and A.J. Lotka:
In its brief form: the maximization of power for useful purposes is the criterion for natural selection.*
Darwin's theory of evolution then becomes a general energy law.
See:
Lotka, AJ (1922a). "Contribution to the energetics of evolution". Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 8: 147–51. doi:10.1073/pnas.8.6.147. PMC 1085052. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1085052
Lotka, AJ (1922b). "Natural selection as a physical principle]". Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 8: 151–4. doi:10.1073/pnas.8.6.151. PMC 1085053. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1085053
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle
I've compiled my own set of references and reflections here: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2hz2lk/darwinlo...
I first ran across a reference in Odum's 1971 book _Environment, Power, and Society_.
I have wondered if losing iconic animals familiar to children (lions, tigers, elephants) might jolt people but I doubt that. How often do you read about endangered white rhinos? I can just imagine the consensus thought being "Well, what can I do? Plus, we have the regular rhinos" then when they go, "Well, we have hippos, they're big and grey too."
When you buy sustainable or ethical produce, you feel so ineffective against a tide of cheap or efficient.
Also, things like aquaculture and the like can help us to sustain things, just like we've helped rebuild populations of some animals.
It's extremely important we continue bringing up the destruction we bring to the environment, but there's some good forces at work to at least slow the collapse (and hopefully rebuild)
We have done that for rivers (which had gone dry) in the US already, but selling property rights (or exploitation rights instead of property) for water zones could help prevent the overexploitation of sea resources. Once you own the zone or the exploitation rights, it's all in your interest to actively limit fishing in order to keep the value of your property over the long term. Trusting fishermen to limit themselves is a nice idea, but incredibly naive. In the mediterranean, there are strict limits for tuna exploitation and they are violated every single year by these fishermen, and not enforced properly.
Well it's happened before. Fishermen associations getting together and being like "we will not have anything left to fish if we don't stop fishing so much" and they agreed. Basically ends up working.
Effect? A regular customer has absolutely no idea that this is happening. Zero. And I imagine we will keep doing that with everything else, working around the issues for as long as we can. It won't be 30 years before we realize how fucked we are.
You're far better off using normal advocacy to try to change people's minds than anything else. If that seems like it's slow and taking time, well, first of all, world-sized chaotic system, remember? They do not generally turn on a dime (and even though they "can", it is still a rare event, and uncontrollable when it happens). But second of all, look back over the past 50 years and consider what motion there has been. There's been a lot. It is well known we are prone to overestimate the short-term impact of things, and underestimate the long-term impact. People have changed, people will change, and as the entire system evolves it's a perfectly viable outcome that, yes, things get worse for a while but people actually respond to that and make things better. This theory is bolstered by the fact that you can look back over the past 50 years and see concrete examples of this happening.
As much as some people would love to tell you otherwise, no, massive chaos and death as a result of ecosystem "collapse" (itself a rather deceptive term, there is no such atomic event) are not inevitable, and making decisions based on that assumption carry the grave risk of being totally wrong.
I'm talking about direct action in the face of intractable individuals who deny climate change or any sort of anthropomorphic effect.
Now, am I also alluding to the fact that there are elements among humanity that will look at this news and take actions against the industrial infrastructure enabling anthropomorphic global warming. Just like I predicted that people would start shooting cops for being cops a few months ago, this is what I do: suss out the threads of the future in the present.
Humans are so scared of ideas that they automatically conflate "idea" with "action."
That statement alone is enough to discount you completely.
Did you just threaten terrorist action?
Direct action also involves political change, for instance prohibiting or limiting carbon extraction.
So don't piss your pants just yet.
That's when widespread civil unrest and wars will ramp up. And based on recent history, governments don't make the mouse sound decisions when wars are taking place.