The Science of Collapse

[ish mailian]

Easy target of a P satire, they are Romantics who insist that they
have a Spiritual relationship to Earth even as they are excited by its
collapse.  P might make them sexual deviants too. Like the Empty One
of GR, or addicts, hooked on game shows,  green tea and avocados.

On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 5:00 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