A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center
has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse
in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly
unequal wealth distribution.
By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past
cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors
which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of
collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.
These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to
generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to
the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the
economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or
"Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a
central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all
such cases over "the last five thousand years."
Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked
directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely
in industrialised countries responsible for both:
"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed
throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the
population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it
by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."
The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so
as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce
resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and
reducing population growth:
"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach
equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a
sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable
fashion."
- Why do the researchers fear that modern industrial society could be heading for a collapse?
- What would Thomas Malthus or Karl Marx say about this article? Would they agree or disagree? Why? Would solutions would they propose?
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