The Science of Collapse

[David Morris]

Pynchon didn't see Climate Change coming.  AI and genetic engineering?
Fuck that!  Maybe a few relatively inhabitable, likely war-besieged
 pockets on Earth will survive such toys.  But it will become a new global
Dark Age. And you didn't hear it here first.

David Morris

On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 4:00 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> this has much resonance for Pynchon readers I think
>
> *
> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/21/collapsologie-constructing-an-idea-of-how-things-fall-apart/
> <
> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/21/collapsologie-constructing-an-idea-of-how-things-fall-apart/
> >*
>
> *Collapsologie*—or, as Servigne and Stevens define it, the “applied and
> transdisciplinary science of collapse”—proposes to free environmentalist
> thought from the linear or progressive understanding of history implicit in
> such faiths as “sustainable development,” “green growth,” or the energy
> “transition.” The story of human societies, which Servigne and Stevens
> suggest is ultimately the story of their interactions with their natural
> environments, is circular. The pendulum of human history swings between
> moments of our being harmoniously embedded within natural processes and
> periods of population concentration, political centralization, and an urge
> to transcend the earth’s resource constraints. We develop economies of
> scale, agglomerate extractive industry on a grand scale, but ultimately
> overexploit our natural foundations.
>
> “We must prepare small-scale, resilient bio-regions,” Cochet told me, on
> the scale of only a few thousand inhabitants. Economic circuits must be
> scaled to local ecosystems and resources, eschewing global supply chains.
> Visions of the good life that are predicated on unlimited mobility and
> expanding human wants must be replaced by an ethics of rootedness, the joy
> of living and working in a defined space. Our assumption of history as an
> unending process of centralization and unification—toward the universal
> state—is running up against an ecological wall
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>