Michael Dowd presents the best explanation of the current existential predicament facing the world. He discusses the physical realities created by the use of fossil fuels and the exponential growth in their use. He also understands the reasons for the inability of most people, including world leaders, to act on the impending collapse of civilization as we know it. Dowd has created a series of videos in which he presents his thoughts as they have developed over the last couple of decades. His video interviews with leading experts and activists concerning collapse are extraordinary as is his reading aloud on videos of many of the major written works of the most important environmental literature. I urge you to go to the web site: “Post-doom (Collapse & Adaptation ) Primer” where you can access Dowd’s YouTube videos.
Copy of my letter of Dec. 30, 2020, to Michael Dowd
Dear Michael Dowd: I thank you for your latest video: Irreversible Collapse. Once again you have organized your thoughts in a very succinct and comprehensible way. It has made me think of why I felt bothered even as you offer significant concluding remarks. I am still emotionally disturbed by the thought of the pain and suffering of the people who are or will be caught up in the agonies of collapse. So I wrote these few comments about my ideas at this moment.
I have been giving the lecture I attach in a pdf in one form or another for several years. [See my environmental presentations in this blog.] It has grown over the last 70 years since I was stimulated by the ecological wisdom of Carl Sauer and his colleagues at the University of California. I saw the glories of old growth forests as I drove from Berkeley to my home in Portland. The forests could be seen in an unbroken mantel as far as the eye could see. But I could also see the stump farms in the areas just east of the Willamette Valley and in the Coast Range. And I remember the smoke from the Tillamook burn. When I returned to Oregon in 1960, I could see the patchwork of cut over timber lands mixed with decreasing amounts of old growth forests. After reading H. Hugh Bennett’s book on soils in the United States I became aware of the lighter, eroded soils of the Palouse Country of eastern Washington and Oregon. And working with a student in the Great Valley of California I became alert to the problems of the over exploitation of water and soils of the best agricultural land in the country. And they have only gotten worse in the 45 years since my visits there. The economic and political geography I was taught was of the old ways of thinking. I saw the results of colonial exploitation in my field work and teaching in Nigeria and Angola. (I will always remember photos of long piles of dead ‘wild’ animals that were eradicated, supposedly to make way for introduced cattle. Although I lived in a tent in the bush for most of several months I never saw large wild mammals.)
In my classes from the 1970s until I retired in 1994, among other courses, each year I taught three classes that were the bases of my thinking. The first, called Cultural Landscapes, described the ways land was humanized to the desired ways of its occupants. (of course it recognized the rise and fall of cultures) It illustrated the overlapping flow of peoples and ideas as they spread across the earth, remaking the world to their likings and abilities. The second course, Environmental Alterations, described some of the ways humans had altered the natural world and the humanly made physical world that they created–especially as it increased entropy. The third course, Environmental thought, was an attempt to give an historical perspective on the ways people thought about the relation between people and the natural world–usually ending with ideas of Odum, the Meadows, and Aldo Leopold.
Since that time I have given several lectures that more or less update those ideas, especially about environmental alterations–this paper one of its more recent iteration. But I got little reaction from but a few students; and now from larger audiences I get some form of denial or technological optimism.
After listening to your great summary today, I felt that you well said most of the ideas I have been trying to express over the years. For many years I have said that I am deeply religious in my thoughts about ecology and evolution. ( I can’t go deeper into the Universe, however interesting it is.) Nevertheless the ideas of collapse are intellectually, religiously, and emotionally nearly overwhelming. Never an optimist or pessimist, instead a realist, I find my personal life satisfying; but to accept the future pain and suffering (not that there isn’t much now) of a collapsing society is hard to take.
[My major support for preservation of wilder lands, for reclamation, and political liberals who want to relieve suffering of homeless, hungry, and ill people is still not satisfying in the light of collapse.]
I have come to think that two pathways are open to me–beyond my attempts to recognize my part in the collapse—I have indeed lived through the greatest exponential growth and destruction of environmental change in the lifetime of humans. The first set of ideas is to use words–maybe the first major cultural evolution of humans–to try to teach about the Five Es : Ecology, Evolution, Entropy, Environment, and Exponential change. I think they should be the primary curriculum of every American fifth grader, the age at which they may be best incorporated into life without great conflict of what our culture teaches us or the hormones of puberty.
The second set of ideas is that we should emphasize how to live in a much reduced material world. We should emphasize how to converse with each other–It is a lost art in the age of print and digital communication. We need to learn how to play, to dance, to sing, to engage directly in sports, to create art, sculpture, to meditate, to care for each other on an ongoing basis. And we must learn to do these things without major technological assist. I am deeply impressed by cloggers, choristers, runners, quilters, painters, readers, and on and on. I am not impressed with internet gamers, football stadiums, rock concerts, etc.
These ideas are what humans can do without the elaborate material goods that have come to dominate our lives in recent years. They can offer sustenance as societies go into decline.
What started out as a response to your extraordinary video presentations has led me into these thoughts of a man in his 90th year who has, throughout his adult lifetime, been concerned with the many ideas you offer in your amazing presentations. Thanks.
Al