Green Thing

Every time we go to the grocery store we're reminded about saving the environment. Before we had this "green thing" everyone returned their milk bottles, soda bottles, and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed, sterilized, and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over: They really were recycled. Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things like household garbage bags. Even better we used the brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks to ensure that public property (the books were provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling. We were also able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.

Yes, we were already working "green": We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a powerful machine every time we had to go two blocks. We washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in a machine gobbling up energy: Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not something brand-new.

Yes, we were already living "green": We had one TV or radio in the house; not a TV in every room, and that TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief, not a huge screen the size of a garage door. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do it for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we  used a recycled box and wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam peanuts or plastic bubble wrap. We didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn; we used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working and we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

Yes, we were already thinking "green": We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole thing just because the blade got dull. We had one electrical outlet in a room, or if we were lucky one electrical outlet on each wall, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen gadgets.

No, the problem isn't that older generations "did not care enough to save our environment for future generations". They took streetcars or busses, and their kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service in the family's SUV, which costs what a whole house used to. So the next time you use that computerized screen in your all electric vehicle to receive a signal beamed from a satellite 23,000 miles out in space in order to find your local grocery store, think about what you're doing.

Choose Hope

Mark Your Calendars

Ensuring the Continuity of our Species: It doesn’t look good for the home team. (Part 4 of 4)

The balance of nature

The egalitarian (1) and equitable (2) societies could produce sustainable civilizations and avoid collapse, even with a high ratio of non-workers. Social collapse was more likely after people overreached and depleted natural resources. Importantly, even without any social stratification, collapse can occur if a society exhausts its natural resources.

In the unequal (3) society, however, collapse is almost unavoidable. This is the scenario that mirrors our current globalized societies, even here in the United States.

The income gap

The researchers wrote, "The scenarios most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments, where we introduced economic stratification. Under such conditions, referring to uneven wealth distribution, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid."

Other recent research backs up the authors' claims: A 2012 study from the journal American Sociological Review shows that the income share of the top 1 percent of Americans grew rapidly after 1980. We often hear that the top 1 percent now hold more wealth than the other 99 percent combined.

Meanwhile, the bottom three-quarters of the U.S. population has seen slow economic growth, with predictable results. A 2011 study published in the journal Psychological Science found that happiness, trust in others, and life satisfaction plummet when income inequality is high.

Technology won't save you

For those who believe that there must be a technological fix to all this despair and destruction, the researchers found that the historical record provides "testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.

The authors wrote that “It may be reasonable to believe that modern civilization, armed with its greater technological capacity, scientific knowledge, and energy resources, will be able to survive and endure whatever crises historical societies succumbed to.

But [our] brief overview of collapses demonstrates not only the ubiquity of the phenomenon, but also the extent to which advanced, complex and powerful societies are susceptible to collapse."

All is not lost

The authors suggest that, “If societies can moderate the two factors that contribute most to social meltdown, 1) the exploitation of natural resources, and 2) the uneven distribution of wealth, collapse can be avoided and the society can reach equilibrium.

To accomplish this, the per-capita rate of depletion of nature must be reduced to a sustainable level, and resources must be distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.

Given the above suggestion things are not looking good … you’d better repack that Bug Out Bag!

Psych Ward

A Handy Tool

Ensuring the Continuity of our Species: It doesn’t look good for the home team. (Part 3 of 4)

As you can see, there's never been a shortage of doomsday scenarios. From the dreaded Mayan Apocalypse of 2012 to the havoc wreaked in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," people have been predicting the end of civilization for as long as there has been a civilization.

The trouble is … sometimes they're correct: The Roman Empire fell spectacularly, as did the Mayan civilization, the Han Dynasty of China, India's Gupta Empire, and dozens of other once-mighty kingdoms.

So then how, exactly, do powerful empires collapse and why? Researchers now believe they've found an answer, one that has troubling implications for today; because this country is clearly on the road to ruin.

To begin with, societal collapse is actually more common than you think. The researchers' first task was overturning "the common impression that societal collapse is rare, or even largely fictional," as they wrote in their report published in the journal Ecological Economics.

In fact, they argue the rise and fall of great social structures is so common a theme in human civilization, recurrent throughout history and worldwide in scope, that it's more the rule than the exception.

Most studies of a society's collapse have looked at the specifics of how one civilization declined, citing individual causes such as a disaster (earthquake, flood), loss of resources (soil erosion, deforestation) or human conflict (war, uprising) that led to the particular society's downfall.

But the researchers, funded in part by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, College Park, cast a wider net. They aimed to create a useful mathematical model that could help analyze how any society might fall, including our current global, technically advanced, interconnected societies.

The model they arrived at takes inspiration from the classic notion of predator vs. prey, sometimes referred to as the "balance of nature." You know how it works: When a deer population grows the wolves that feed on those deer reproduce more successfully, too, and so the wolf population grows.

Everything is fine until the wolves become too numerous, eating so many deer that there isn't enough venison to go around. Then, as the number of deer plunges the wolf population drops due to famine, until equilibrium is reestablished and the cycle begins anew.

A handy tool

Informed by this paradigm, the researchers developed a relatively simple formula with four factors influencing social collapse: 1) nature and natural resources, 2) the accumulation of wealth, 3) the elite, and 4) the commoners. The team calls their model Human and Nature Dynamics, or HANDY.

The researchers used the HANDY model to analyze three different social scenarios: 1) an egalitarian society with no elite class; 2) an equitable society with workers and non-workers (students, retirees, disabled persons); and 3) an unequal society with a robust class of elites.

Control Your Fears

Doomsday Revisited

Ensuring the Continuity of our Species: It doesn’t look good for the home team. (Part 2 of 4)

Nostradamus, 1999

The heavily obfuscated and metaphorical writings of Michel de Nostrdame have intrigued people for over 400 years. His writings, the accuracy of which relies heavily upon very flexible interpretations, have been translated and re-translated in dozens of different versions.

One of the most famous quatrains read, "The year 1999, seventh month / From the sky will come great king of terror." Many Nostradamus devotees grew concerned that this was the famed prognosticator's vision of Armageddon.

Y2K, 2000

As the last century drew to a close, many people grew concerned that computers might bring about doomsday. The problem, first noted in the early 1970s, was that many computers would not be able to tell the difference between 2000 and 1900 dates.

No one was really sure what that would do, but many suggested catastrophic problems ranging from vast blackouts to nuclear holocaust. Gun sales jumped and survivalists prepared to live in bunkers, but the new millennium began with only a few glitches.

Antarctic, 2000

In case the Y2K bug didn't do us in, global catastrophe was assured by Richard Noone, author of the 1997 book "5/5/2000 Ice: the Ultimate Disaster" (Three Rivers Press). According to Noone, the Antarctic ice mass would be three miles thick by May 5, 2000, a date in which the planets would be aligned in the heavens, somehow resulting in a global icy death

While it may have been responsible for a lot of book sales, global warming must have kept the ice age at bay.

God's Church, 2008

According to God's Church minister Ronald Weinland, the end times were upon us, again. His 2006 book "2008: God's Final Witness" (The-End.Com, 2006) states that hundreds of millions of people will die, and by the end of 2006 "there will be a maximum time of two years remaining before the world will be plunged into the worst time of all human history.

By the fall of 2008, the United States was supposed to have collapsed as a world power, and no longer exist as an independent nation. As the book notes, Ronald Weinland placed his reputation on the line as the end-time prophet of God.

Harold Camping, 2011

In May 2011, radio preacher Harold Camping drew international media attention with his predictions that Judgment Day would come on May 21, kicked off by earthquakes around the globe and a rapture of the faithful. According to Camping, this dreadful day would be followed by months of torment and the end of the world on Oct. 21.

When May 21 passed quietly, Camping retreated from the limelight for a brief time before announcing that Judgment Day had, in fact, come and gone on that date. Instead of physical earthquakes, Camping wrote on the website of his radio station, Family Radio, May 21 brought spiritual earthquakes as God completed His judgment of souls.

Camping continued to contend that the end of the world would indeed come on Oct. 21, albeit quietly and without fire and brimstone.