The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [55]
My estimate is that, by the 2020s, “adversity trends” will coalesce into an unyielding, world-scale systems crisis. Every major system in our lives—ecological, economic, political, cultural, psychological, and spiritual—will be in crisis as it is challenged to adapt to a dramatically changing world. This time of supreme testing will occur in a wired world that is transparent to an immensity of suffering.4 This is a recipe for anarchy and chaos as millions (perhaps billions) of people will be on the move in search of a sustainable existence. With the largest migrations of humans in history underway, the likelihood of widespread civic collapse and tremendous violence will be extremely high.
Suffering will not be shared equally. Although every aspect of our lives will be challenged, not everyone is equally vulnerable. The world’s poor will face greater hardships than ever coping with climate change and energy shortages. While energy shortages are inconvenient for the wealthy, they are catastrophic for the world’s poor. Climate disruption, crop failures, and rising food prices create extra difficulties for the wealthy but disaster for those living at the margins of existence.
We are moving into a time of steel-gripped necessity, a time of intense planetary compression. In this generation, the world will become a superheated pressure cooker; the human family will be crushed by unrelenting forces so unyielding, and the stresses they place upon our world so extreme, that human civilization will soon either descend into chaos, or ascend in a spiraling process of profound transformation. On the one hand, if humanity is unwilling to work for the advance of all, then the world will collapse into a spiral of resource wars, and misery, poverty, and calamity will descend on the planet. On the other hand, unprecedented suffering may awaken humanity by burning through the unconscious denial, greed, and fear that now divide us. In encountering ourselves so directly and powerfully, a new human alloy may emerge from the furnace of these superheated decades. Our time of fiery transition may fuse the human family together with a new sense of identity and purpose that is strong enough to support the rebuilding of our lives to create a sustainable and meaningful future.
The challenges we confront are so great that we are called to move beyond our personal awakening to our collective awakening—as communities, as nations, and as a species. I do not view the emerging world systems crisis as a problem to be fixed. It seems natural that we would attempt to grow beyond the limits of the Earth to sustain us. Because nearly every organism works to exploit the surrounding ecology to the fullest extent, overshoot and collapse are common occurrences in natural systems. Since we have never before had the ability to exploit the entire Earth so completely, we have no experience in exercising global restraint. We learn through experience and, never having encountered an endangered Earth before, we should not be surprised if a great challenge or tragedy is necessary to awaken the evolutionary intelligence of humanity. However, once we collectively recognize the extreme urgency of our situation, the human community could awaken quickly and create a future of unimagined opportunity—or we could hesitate and drift into a future of unimagined tragedy.
The suffering, distress, and anguish of these times will become a purifying fire that burns through ancient prejudices and hostilities to cleanse the soul of our species. I expect no single, golden moment of reconciliation to descend upon the planet; instead, waves of ecological calamity will reinforce periods of economic crisis, and both will be amplified