Part II -- Views of Predicament Resolution

Civilization collapse is coming toward us like an accelerating train. Everyday the injury that will result increases, the time to respond gets shorter, and the behavior that would have avoided collapse yesterday will be insufficient today.

To make matters worse, the people that could implement such behavior don't see civilization collapse coming at them. They are distracted by many smaller but more prominent family and institutional matters.

Those that know that the human predicament includes civilization collapse, know we need 7 billion blind people to behave differently and they have no way to get these billions to adopt new behavior -- especially when it runs counter to their culture.

Most of the knowers' think it's a waste of time to try. Instead they want to go have a glass of wine and wait for the bang or whimper.

Some optimists hope the next generation can pick up the broken pieces and do a better than their parents. However these optimists fail to appreciate that this civilization collapse, unlike others before it, will so degrade the earth's exhaustible resources (fuels, soils, and minerals, etc) and cripple the technological machine, our kids probably will not be able to rebuild. The laissez-faire path just might result in a much smaller human population (read die off) trapped at a much lower level of wellbeing (read dark age.)

Given this gloomy view of the results of our present path, I choose, in Part II of this book, to describe the results of various behaviors assuming they could be successfully implemented. The behaviors range from those already under consideration and some which implement the extreme forms of rapid population decline which have not.

Let me forewarn you that in most of these scenarios billions of global inhabitants die from starvation and social conflict this century. The futures of our child range from the black unrecoverable dark ages to the brilliant, more peaceful communities with more art and science and technology, more opportunity for further advancement, and ever-improving individual wellbeing.

I will show that the behaviors that implement the brighter end of this range will, a) not appeal to individuals of most existing cultures, and b) lie outside of the operating doctrine of most existing institutions.

They will not be easy to implement but not impossible either.