Many facts, insights, causes, outcomes, solutions, and evolved behaviors associated with human overshoot have been discussed by many people over many years.
It’s rare for a new idea to emerge in the overshoot space.
Hideaway’s CACTUS theory has some important fresh insights not previously discussed about the biophysical forces that collaborate to create brief blips of modernity in the universe.
Not every idea in CACTUS is new. But CACTUS identifies and integrates all of the important overshoot forces into a coherent unified theory that explains what’s going on better than anything I’ve seen in 20 years of study.
Inside the integrated whole of CACTUS is an important relationship I’ve not seen previously discussed that explains modernity’s dependence on growth of civilization scale for growth of resource use efficiency, and growth of resource extraction technology complexity, which creates self-reinforcing feedback loops, and vulnerabilities, that accelerate both the growth and decline of modernity.
CACTUS shows that the requirement for growth is independent of the type of economic system, or monetary system, or states thereof.
CACTUS shows that overshoot collapse can be triggered by depletion of any of many non-renewable resources, not just the master resource diesel.
CACTUS shows that steady-state and degrowth “solutions”, or any other form of “sustainable” modernity, are impossible, and therefore surviving humans will return to their hunter gatherer origins.
CACTUS shows that a gentle decline is impossible and that modernity will end rapidly.
CACTUS provides a clear prescription on what needs to be done to extend modernity as long as possible, assuming that is your goal.
CACTUS explains what not to do if the goal is to avoid triggering a premature collapse. Our leaders do not understand (or deny) CACTUS, and therefore they are making decisions that will end modernity sooner than was necessary. Citizens also do not understand (or deny) CACTUS, and therefore they are permitting their leaders to get away with the dumbfuckery.
CACTUS shows that broad awareness of overshoot and CACTUS is a good thing if you want to avoid war and violence as growth slows, and you want to avoid triggering a premature collapse.
CACTUS shows that modernity will be rare and brief when it emerges in the universe, and that modernity will never regrow on this planet, and therefore CACTUS provides deep reasons for gratitude and temperance.
These are BIG important ideas.
Elements of CACTUS have been discussed by others elsewhere, but the integrated totality of CACTUS ideas are not in wide circulation, and given their profound implications, deserve widespread debate and discussion.
Yet, what do we observe?
Silence.
Every famous overshoot intellectual, and the sites that focus on overshoot issues, are silent on CACTUS.
How is this possible? Seriously.
If I had learned about CACTUS from say Gail Tverberg, or Tim Morgan, or Tim Watkins, or Nate Hagens, or Alice Friedemann, or Chris Martenson, or Jack Alpert, or B, or Jean-Marc Jancovici, or Quark, or Simon Michaux, or David Korowicz, or Tom Murphy, or Tim Garrett, or Sam Mitchell, or Bill Rees, or Sid Smith, or Dennis Meadows, or William Catton, or Jay Hanson, or Paul Chefurka, or Richard Heinberg, or Charlie Hall, or Joseph Tainter, or James, or Jason Bradford, or xraymike79, etc., etc., instead of stumbling on Hideaway’s CACTUS theory in posts he made at the Peak Oil Barrel site that others, including the site owner, were ignoring or aggressively denying, I would have still discussed CACTUS hundreds of times, because the idea is so important to understanding our reality.
Why is the little un-Denial community the only site discussing CACTUS?
Ditto on the Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory.
After I stumbled on Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory in a 2013 CBC radio interview, I talked about nothing else for 10 years because it was such an important new idea for making sense of the existence and strange behaviors of a uniquely intelligent species, and for people, like myself, trying to find a path to reducing harms from overshoot.
For anyone trying to bring awareness and positive change to any unpleasant issue, including people still trying to find a solution for overshoot, or any of its symptoms like climate change, pollution, species extinction, ecosystem destruction, etc., etc., MORT is the MOST IMPORTANT IDEA they need to understand.
MORT explains why 99.9% of people aggressively deny everything that is unpleasant, including issues that are obvious without an advanced education, and including when denial of the issue will make things even more unpleasant.
MORT explains why famous polymaths who can and do understand many complex issues, are incapable of understand relatively simple overshoot issues, even when spoon-fed the facts.
MORT explains why only one species has evolved an extended theory of mind, despite obviously powerful fitness advantages.
MORT explains why only one species has gods.
MORT explains why behaviorally modern humans rapidly emerged from one small tribe to extinct all close cousins, and to dominate all other species.
These are BIG important ideas.
And yet all of the overshoot experts, including people who have devoted their lives to finding solutions to overshoot or its symptoms, all of whom have failed due to the genetic denial explained by MORT, have been silent on MORT for over 10 years.
Why, for example, don’t the thousands of climate scientists that have totally failed to make a difference, want to to understand why they failed? Why do climate scientists that have a sound understanding of physics still push “solutions” that are physically impossible?
How is this possible? Seriously.
If the reason everyone is silent on MORT and CACTUS is because they think the theories are wrong, then why hasn’t a single expert explained why they are wrong? Or proposed more compelling theories to explain what we observe?
No discussion. No criticism. No debate. Not even acknowledgement that the MORT and CACTUS theories exist.
Just silence.
I believe most of my overshoot colleagues have good intentions, and good integrity, and good intelligence, and so the only explanation I can think of is that ALL of the overshoot experts have normal denial genes, and un-Denial is the only place on the planet that the tiny number of mutants with defective denial genes congregate.
Is this possible?
It seems very improbable, but what other explanation is there?
Is anyone else sick of hearing about Israel?
There is something very abnormal about this tiny country with zero natural resources that has to import 80% of the food and 100% of the oil, metals, and wood it consumes.
How many countries in the world have a population greater than Israel?
How many countries have a land size greater than Israel?
There are 195 countries in the world and Israel is at the center of probably 30% of the news, most of it bad.
If you stand back and reflect on the big picture it is very strange.
From Jerusalem post: «Growing population and consumption combined with a low biocapacity makes Israel increasingly dependent on global resources.» https://www.jpost.com/opinion/israels-overshoot-of-biocapacity-the-highest-in-the-oecd-501445
Rob, I like to think in geological time scales. In 3 million years the earth doesn’t care what happened this year. We are all too short sighted.
Good point.
https://lylel.substack.com/p/the-pollution-we-breathe-without
I didn’t know that about tires. But no surprise because my default state of mind is that if it was invented by humans then it’s guaranteed to have nothing but negative effects.
Back when I was a rookie doomer, there was a stat about tires that Dowd (or maybe it was Hagens) liked to mention; every tire on your car required seven gallons of oil. One night with my normie friends I was showing off my knowledge. But instead of gallons, I said barrels. Someone fact-checked me on the spot. Instantly lost all credibility. “Chris, if you’re that wrong about this, what other things are you that wrong about?”😡
Question for AI: industrial civilization has nothing but negative effects on life & the planet. Are there any positives I’m not aware of?
LOL. What about non-humans?
Wow! Some impressive benefits there. I asked AI if I should start quoting these benefits over at un-Denial to help the audience see that IC is not all bad. It spit out this answer:
😂 😂 😂
Chris you got to say – who cares if it is 10 or a 100, the point is still the point
Headline news this morning.
Canada has shut its border to Texans and their flesh eating parasites.
Peak Oil Chat group today discussed coal to liquids (CTL) and health problems caused by wind turbines.
In case you’re wondering how much extra modernity CTL might buy the US if all its coal reserves are converted to diesel, it’s about 9 years and would produce a mountain of toxic waste in the process.
Fortunately we don’t need CTL because the US has 500 years of energy sitting in spent nuclear waste, and because geothermal is abundant and feasible. When those run out there’s enough thorium on Mars to power modernity for millions of years. 🤔
Dr. Hall, an overshoot expert, sat silently through this bullshit.
No one mentioned CACTUS.
How is this possible? Seriously.
Charlie Hall doesn’t believe any of this, but yes remained silent. Last month, Charlie gave a presentation, and in one slide towards the end, had a graph crashing down and the caption, “then we’re all dead”, which gave his real thoughts on the subject of the future. The others just laughed…
Many people view Netanyahu as the source of middle east evil.
I learned today from Alistair Crooke this is not true.
Netanyahu is likely to lose the election later this year because the majority of Israel citizens believe he is not being aggressive enough in killing the Amalek.
This is utterly terrifying considering that Israel has between 80-400 nuclear weapons.
The Zion ‘Samson’ option paraphrased is : if we go down, you ‘all’ go down with us.
Given Israel is a geographically small country, with not many places to launch ICBMs from – it is a given that many of their nukes are already staged in various cities around the world in lead-lined storage containers.
ICBM launches are also very easy to spot from satellite.
When they press the button, there will be a lot of ground-bursts with no “in coming” before hand. They are more than willing to kill their own (already proven).
My dehydrator project is complete except for assembling 2 more racks for drying pans.
One in a million!
That’s what most of us un-Denialists are with our ridiculously high reality awareness level. The main reason I’m so cocky with this stuff is because of my judgement in the sources I choose. I know how to pick em.
This good judgement probably started paying off around 2018 with C Hedges, R Sapolsky, G Maté, D Graeber, Dana Meadows (I was also into Steven Greer’s alien stuff during this time. Hey, they can’t all be winners😊). Then I discovered overshoot with Dowd & Hagens and tons of their sources. Two years later I was ready to tackle the advanced sources. The cream of the crop; un-Denial, Megacancer, T Ligotti, M Butler.
There are probably millions of people who are experts on the topic of overshoot. Being an expert is mandatory if you want to understand what’s going on in the world. But it doesn’t end there. If your views about humans/life are anything like I had in my apology letter essay… I’d qualify that as still not knowing jack shit about reality. In order to get there, you need the advanced sources. I doubt there are even 10k at my current level. Out of eight point three billion. Roughly one in a million.
Last night I watched the documentary Blind Spot (h/t Erik Michaels). It was good. Especially considering that it was made in 2008. Had a bunch of the old school overshoot experts like Catton, Tainter, Heinberg, Hansen, Bartlett (he was the highlight for me).
Afterwards I was thinking about where all of these people from the film are at today with their reality awareness. I’d bet most are still at the level of my apology letter. Without the cream of the crop, you are destined to spend eternity in the Daniel Quinn zone… but then again, who the hell wants to know this shit? There’s nothing beneficial about it, other than making a little bit of sense out of the insanity.
ps. This song has the right vibe for this post.
I have often tried to calculate just how many (or rather, how few) people are out there who can potentially see things clearly.
Some thoughts:
To understand overshoot, you need to have enough cognitive capacity to intellectually grasp the planetary system. You need to understand the basic laws of physics, how they affect chemistry and biology, how complex social structures and psychology emerge through those once they self-assemble into hyper-complex brains. You need to understand geology and how resources of higher concentrations are exploited first. You need to understand the impacts of global economic activity – climate, pollution, loss of wildlife, loss of habitat, etc.
I don’t think most humans can cognitively process that, even before any MORT mechanism kicks in. If we assume that you would need to have an IQ of 130 (just a guesstimate), then only around 1% of all humans alive can understand the problem (factor 0.01).
Now enter John von Neumann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann He may have been the smartest person ever documented, caclulated faster than the computers of his time and made Nobel laureates feel insecure. He created game theory and always emphasized that rationality must come first; he defined the minimax theorem, which says you must always minimize the maximum possible loss you can suffer in any game you play.
Now guess what. He had to buy a new car every year because of how many accidents he caused – apparently, he was prone to reading books while driving and never bothered to hire a driver due to him wanting to feel in control. He also was scared shitless of death – when a terminal disease was diagnosed, he suddenly converted to catholicism and hired a nurse to shake him awake whenver he fell asleep because he thought he may not wake up otherwise. Even with the highest IQ ever documented, he was in very deep denial of death.
If we assume that you can only deploy your IQ to understand the problem if you have very much reduced emotional affect, then we must factor in the prevalence of such conditions (schizoidia comes to mind, impaired amygdala functioning, some other neurological conditions – let’s round those up to 0.01, too).
So based on these numbers, we would expect that 0.01 * 0.01 = 0.0001 of all people can do what we do here at undenial. That’s 1 out of 10 000. And if you ask me, that is far too optimistic a number, We could tweak our factors a bit, say you actually need an IQ of 145+ and have to be on the more extreme end of untypical neuroplogical conditions that impact how you process emotions. Then it would look more like 0.001 * 0.001 = 0.000001 – or one in a million.
We of course also have to consider that not all humans on the planet have access to all the information necessary to piece everything together; even if you are a non-MORT von Neumann, if you are born into an uncontacted tribe somewhere deep in the Amazon, you won’t wind up on un-denial.
I don’t think most collapse awareness people have an IQ over 130; I think it’s unrelated to IQ. Of course, being too stupid won’t work, like having an IQ below 85.
I don’t know, I haven’t seen any studies in this regard. Just some thoughts on things we can at least put numbers on.
I have to add, I was thinking about a specific type of overshoot-awareness, which is the MORT-aware type; seeing how reality denial is what enables the species to go into overshoot in the first place and how it is directly related to breaching the psychological barrier of mortality salience.
Another unexpected side-effect of perfidy and aggression.
Barnacle-gate: The ships trapped in the Persian gulf have been growing barnacles that reduce their fuel efficiency by 50+ percent until they can get to a dry dock to have them scraped off.
The rest of the discussion is a very good recap of the coming economic storm.
Best case recovery scenario is still an economic disaster.
No one in charge understands the gravity of the situation.
It seems that PADD 5 of the US will be the first region of the US to experience “the Great Simplification”. Hopefully, the rest of the US will be able to learn from their experience.
Slight nitpick: why did Chris have to mention “critical race theory” when it is completely irrelevant to the subject at hand? That video is supposed about the oil situation in the US, not the pawns in the US culture wars.
Martenson is selling subscriptions. There are not enough people on this planet that only care enough about truth for him to make a living and so he has to pander to politics.
Dr. William Rees today on human population overshoot.
Notice that the world’s top overshoot expert laments that we’ve lost our opportunity for a steady-state sustainable modernity and that our best case now is a slow decline as we adjust to a degraded carrying capacity.
This means the world’s top overshoot expert does not understand CACTUS and is almost as clueless as the 99% that denies overshoot.
CACTUS is not complicated.
How is this possible? Seriously.
https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/the-population-conundrum
P.S. I too was clueless until a couple years ago when Hideaway forced me to think beyond energy depletion/ecosystem destruction and to consider depletion of all non-renewable resources and the growth in scale and complexity that is required to maintain flows as reserve quality declines.
My excuse is this is a part-time side gig for me in a topic I did not study at university.
Dr. Rees has no excuse except genetic denial as explained by MORT.
Rob, my excuse is that I had to work out a way to do proper EROEI calculations myself, as there is so much misinformation in the total field of energy, materials and civilization, that misleads.
I’ve also come to the conclusion that it’s not an accidental misleading either. So many people in the ‘overshoot solutions’ field know that their bread and butter comes from solutions, not the problems/predicament, so academic papers that keep people in ‘tenure’ always do have their minor caveats, which should be the highlights like the information ‘boundaries’ set. (There are no boundaries in the real world, so modelling with boundaries of what’s included and excluded has to give misleading results).
The single best current example, not of an academic paper, but a prospectus to gather money from the public, to increase their share of energy and materials, is the upcoming IPO from SpaceX. It’s full of unrealistic ‘assumptions’ about the future, along with changing the ‘rules’ (human stories we tell each other and believe in, often with no choice), for entry into indexes and ability of insiders to sell, keep control etc.
Remember all academic papers, rules and regulations, prospectuses, stock indexes, money, religion, bank accounts and statements, loan agreements, taxation laws, consumer laws, contracts, insurance, property titles, international agreements and a myriad of other things we believe in (often with zero choice!!) are all just stories we’ve (collectively or by some people in power for us collectively), made up to try and all get along co-operatively together with people we don’t personally know and trust..
I didn’t even get to the final point, in the above rant LOL.
I use to believe the 100/1 EROEI for nuclear, put out by the nuclear industry itself, but was against it on environmental grounds, until I did the calculations myself, with my method that doesn’t have boundaries of what to include and exclude.
The whole concept of indefinite continued civilization of any modernity, falls to pieces unless we lie to ourselves about high EROEI ‘alternative’ energy to fossil fuels.
We really don’t have to do the calculations about fossil fuels, to see if they can give us the prosperity or life we do have, simply because they are what provided us with what we do have.
Human ingenuity and innovation we’ve had for over a hundred thousand years, yet by themselves didn’t provide the modern world of the last 10 generations, only the addition of cheap easy to access fossil fuels did that.
The EROEI of fossil fuels was clearly enough to get us to where we are ‘technologically’, or we simply wouldn’t be where we are. The EROEI of every ‘alternative’ going forward assumes we have plenty of fossil fuels to build it all, then maintain it all and replace it all when necessary, which of course is a totally bizarre concept when it’s meant to replace fossil fuels.
Not a single study anywhere ever considers the total energy cost, without boundaries, of building the alternative fully with just the alternatives (include everything in alternatives that’s not fossil fuels, as in nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass).
When using zero boundaries, the EROEI of all the alternative doesn’t stack up when using fossil fuels to build it all, let alone when you try to incorporate using just the alternatives to build the alternatives.
Hence why I often rant on other forums about why no company anywhere ever builds an Aluminium smelter (aluminium basically being congealed electricity), based on just solar and batteries if this is meant to be the cheapest form of electricity, while we (humanity) does build Aluminium smelters based on captive (stand alone) coal power plants!! (As in Adaro in Indonesia right now).
The denial shown is usually classic about boundaries, or environment, as in away from the actual EROEI discussion they were all about, and how we need the ‘cheap’ aluminium to make cheap solar panels.
Hideaway, you’ve done much original research on EROEI however despite it being very interesting I don’t consider your EROEI conclusions to be the most important part of your CACTUS theory for 3 reasons:
1) As you have proven over and over and over, facts and science have no influence on people who believe non-fossil energy can sustain modernity. (I think MORT explains this.)
2) I don’t think accurate EROEI data is required to understand modernity’s dependence on fossil energy. It’s obvious because no renewable or nuclear energy can be manufactured, installed, or maintained without fossil energy. End of argument, regardless what EROEI number you choose to believe.
3) Electricity cannot power the most important elements of modernity: tractors, combines, trucks, ships, and mining machines, and modernity requires fossil carbon for many materials like fertilizer, plastic, and chemicals.
For me, the most important element of CACTUS is its proof that modernity requires growth, regardless of the monetary system or “ism” chosen as the economic system.
This means that a sustainable modernity is impossible regardless what assumptions your make about population, consumption, lifestyle, or politics.
They are my arguments as well!!
All the work on EROEI did was make me wake up to the reality I was still believing in some fairy tales, which made me look further into all the rest.
It’s the raw basic physics laws and geology of planet Earth, that no-one challenges, are the real nails in the coffin.
Energy and dissipation mean we cannot, recycle our way out of scarcity, while lower ore grades mean growth in energy production, has to happen just to be used in mining and processing to just stand still in production.
More energy has to be obtained, for mining, which means growth in whatever machines we use to collect energy, and more machines to do the lifting of dirt out of the ground as they are lower grades.
Just the above alone is proof to anyone, that any civilization that uses minerals and metals that have to be refined or upgraded is not sustainable in the long term.
The above is simple to understand by everyone in the overshoot space, yet we still get most claiming there is a way out. IMHO it’s because without any ‘solution’ they would lose their audience and kudos in whatever community they inhabit.
Where people deny CACTUS is usually around the more machines required for the continuation of modernity. They tend to think we can just waste ‘less’ in other areas, to make more of these machines and buy time for ‘new’ forms of energy, to be discovered, as in science fiction beliefs of things that don’t exist.
Complexity and scale are important aspects as well. I really should write up a relatively simple summary of the lot, for those that can’t be bothered going back and reading everything.
Though it’s pretty hard to top the 13 points of your summary in the previous post, maybe just a small expansion of a couple of them, so not too summarised..
Why don’t you copy/paste my summary and edit it until it is 100% accurate and complete.
I will then create a new brief post titled something like “CACTUS Essentials”.
It would be good to have an accurate summary that we can refer new truth seekers to.
I have never seen William Rees mention anything like CACTUS in his work. I wonder how he would reply if someone brought it up.
Ask and ye shall receive my child.
https://un-denial.com/2025/11/30/the-cactus-lens-a-clearer-view/comment-page-3/#comment-115487
His reply sounded exactly like someone who has only looked at the theory one time. Pretty obvious Bill doesn’t lurk here. It’s too bad cuz with his brain he’d be a rockstar with this fire/MORT/CACTUS awareness.
In this video, another I struggled to get through, as I kept thinking of the concept often mentioned, Living Systems MANAGEMENT.
All I kept thinking of was the hubris of us humans to think our concepts in managing something to our way of thinking, is going to be close to a ‘natural’ solution for life as a whole in whatever area we ‘man’ ‘age’.
You can’t make this shit up.
Why are American citizens not mortified with embarrassment?
It looks to me like mRNA transfections caused serious brain damage.
It gets even better!
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116690199079354750
This is a comment from Truth Wizard at C&E. Funny (and kinda scary) to see it laid out like that. Shoot, I feel crazy and regretful after I make 7 or 8 posts on un-Denial in one day.😂 The only other person I know that can hang with Trump with the rapid-fire postings is Crazy Eddy.
“Trump had another mental health episode on May 31st and posted over 50 times online:
All in one day. This man is not well. Impeachment and removal NOW.”
ps. If you need a stiff drink after reading all that, here’s an excellent song to drink to.
It’s beyond crazy.
Is this what democratic leaders do when they see the end of growth and know there is nothing they can do to deliver what voters want?
The European leaders have also lost their minds. Ditto on Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
Non-democratic leaders are behaving mostly normally and sanely.
P.S. There’s a new whack job on OFW that has picked up where FE left off and posts about 10 times a day. I don’t know why Tverberg tolerates it. They ruin her site.
The most efficient way to solve overshoot is to install the most deranged, institutionalized lunatics as heads of state! 🙂
It is perfectly obvious that Trump is not posting even half of these. Someone in his office is having fun.
It’s not perfectly obvious to me. Yes, 5 tweets in the same minute seems impossible but I assume he does what I do. Gets his comments ready in a draft and then copy/paste them all at once.
Just for the record, a lot of us ARE mortified and pissed off. The end of industrial civilization could have happened in many ways, but this???
It is a very undignified way to end a rare emergence of modernity.
“Undignified” – that is now.
Individually, I have experienced one kind of hell : illness terminated by death of a loved one.
The unanticipated (things they don’t teach you in school) – combines with fear and reluctance to accept what appears inevitable – which leads to inability to sleep, then fatigue, then add all the other ingredients that result in failure, panic and chaos. There are types of pain that you take to the grave.
For groups : the lowest common denominator dominates.
Most of un-denial’s readers are somewhat familiar with :
• the failings of contemporary education systems (at all ages)
• the average reading (& writing) age – 12
• the adverse impact of AI on jobs, prospects, sentiment, expectations
• the shortened attention spans
Endless irony – all of the things that would help us, are being stripped away, withering, abandoned, unloved and unmaintained.
As complexity marches on, in many more ways than just specialised minerals, our (collective) abilities to understand / contemplate / adapt – diminishes.
“Undignified” – that is now.
Lack of sleep, panic, chaos, violence and death dot the road ahead.
Undignified ending for an undignified blob. And par for the course in the peak of insanity.
Ska: the world is fucked, but I have a trumpet.
‘Papas got A Brand New Pigbag’ live street:
My first post on un-Denial was a book review of James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren in which he explained why civilization is not compatible with CO2 above 350ppm.
Prof. Eliot Jacobson today summarizes how far we’ve come since Hansen warned us.
I like his conclusion: Be kind.
https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/a-personal-history-of-co
Eliot is one of my favorite people. One of my strongest intentions these days, given all I’ve learned and continue to learn is to not add to the suffering I see increasing all around me. It’s hard. It’s often necessary to isolate myself, after repeated attempts to express my fears about what’s coming and being ignored.
in view of the idea of MORT, my resentment and depression has (mostly) subsided.
”Be kind.” …..a simple message, also directed at myself.
Thanks.
Nicole Foss today on the imminent diesel shortage in Australia and New Zealand.
I remember us discussing and worrying about this 95 days ago when the US attacked Iran but nothing bad has happened so it seems it’s all bullshit and we have plenty of diesel to operate modernity. 😜
https://www.foss.blog/2026/06/04/australia-and-new-zealand-to-face-acute-shortage-of-diesel/
Ukrainian drones strike St. Petersburg, hours before ‘Putin’s Davos’ opens
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/03/europe/ukraine-drone-attack-russia-st-petersburg-intl-hnk
I don’t know if the US and/or NATO was involved in this.
Johan Rockström should be added to the Polymaths in Denial list.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/environment_climate/597051/saturation-point-on-earth-s-resources-marks-end-of-gdp-growth-era-johan-rockstrom-says?fbclid=Iwb21leASNBrRjbGNrBI0D-WV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHofCzWb0uibAdzbkx9MWZX5fkeX7D9xA8pfxdUTiu1T0hGamjUcGxOSx9Qxk_aem_7Q4x_hV74AYdYuKcgoD26A
“Rockström said people must now achieve prosperity with innovation and more efficient use of resources within the nine planetary boundaries.
“We do have evidence that, both with regards to returning to the safe operating space on energy and returning to the safe operating space on the food system, we have solutions. We can achieve that.””
Done, thanks.
antropologist Alf Hornborg explains innovation is ecological unequal exchange. Alf Hornborg, Technology – as a transformational form of slavery
Hope not. We don’t like. We are always underestimate about food shortage. Jon Jandai has some thoughts about CACTUS.
Thanks for the video. It prompted a revisiting of Alice Friedemann’s site, and the essay, “When the Trucks Stop Running”
https://energyskeptic.com/
Food; I garden and forage. We will fight and sweat for every calorie. Fats and proteins will be a constant struggle, even without illness, constant stress and exhaustion, and the nearly inevitable injury. Proteins may come from small animal husbandry. But everything will be on a knife edge….all the time.
Beans have a good, per linear foot, yield and store well. But you need space. Potato yield can be good per foot.
Seek out “landrace” varieties of vegetables. For example; buy a commercially available 15bean assortment of dried soup beans from the market. Plant them all together. They cross pollinate. Some make it. Some don’t. I now have a third year variety with characteristics of Anasazi and Pinto beans. These cultivars are dehybridized and increasingly adapted to my specific location and soil with each successive planting.
https://lofthouse.com/landrace-gardening-MEN.pdf.
Faint indications of seasonal gardens persist near archeological sites where I live. Cholla(cylindropuntia var.) are abundant. The unopened flower buds may be picked and dehydrated. Fresh roasted buds taste somewhat like asparagus and green bean. Samaras of the local Elm(Ulmus Pumila) are mild flavored with a touch of sweetness while still green and tender. Mesquite(Prosopis Glandulosa) pods make a meal or coarse flour with about 30% sugars and a flavor suggestive of caramel, brown sugar and molasses. It’s been a great pleasure to learn these things and I continue for the joy of it.
For all that I’ve learned….Ive come to the conclusion that I will still very likely, slowly and excruciatingly starve. The social structures and specialization that allows for an efficient division of labor and organization no longer exist and are unlikely to be restored….until a whole lot of people are already dead.
I’ve had fun learning though.
Thanks for stopping by Andaréapié with the useful tips.
https://energyskeptic.com/2016/when-trucks-stop-running-so-does-civilization/
We are on our tenth year of saving bean seeds and replanting. Same with our potatoes. We are blessed with plenty of land, but still wonder if it is enough. Water is the other big issue for growing your own and overall self reliance.
You have my respect.
we just installed new gutters on the house. We’re looking at water catchment and swales on slopes as well as check dams in the arroyos. We did this on another property a long time ago. It was amazing to see erosion reversed and pioneer species appear where the water had been invited to slow down and drop finer sediments and organic matter. I’m developing small alluvial flood plains in the arroyos where the grade changes.
my garden is too small. It will supplement diet, but the calories don’t add up. The land has never been cultivated and as it is, it is unsuitable for conventional row gardening. I plant in Zuni style beds. We call them waffle beds. Each sunken cell will hold the water necessary for the plants within. Then heavy straw mulches to slow evaporation and suppress weeds. Shade cloth for heat sensitive vegetables. Our Brandywine tomatoes don’t like it when we get in the 100°f. First time planting sweet potatoes and Armenian cucumbers. I experiment a lot. Pomegranates will grow, but may take heavy frost damage
We are at a fairly capricious zone 6, at 6000ft. High desert. Too cold in the winter. Too hot in the summer. Volcanic soil. Short on organic matter. Tending to a high pH.
Water is life.
I hope you have a successful year.
now you know one of the things I obsess about. lol.
Thanks.
Wow, tough conditions for you. With the new more sinuous Rossby wave patterns from Arctic warming, everybody’s weather will get more capricious. USDA says we’ve warmed to zone 5 here in Wisconsin, but I still select trees with zone 4 hardiness. Only takes one extra cold snap.
I’m lucky to be where we have 33 in. ( 840mm) average annual rain fall, but still have to collect rainwater for those dry spells that veggies are not so tolerant of like trees.
Here is a little taste of some of things we have been up to. My occasional blog has lapsed into silence as of late, but I might start doing entries again, get my mind off the insanity at the national level.
https://viridviews.blogspot.com/2023/03/hazelnut-lessons-learned.html
Some great wee posts there Steve. A few crossovers with our efforts here in the Far North of NZ – bees, eggs, shed, nuts (currently macadamia but hazels, pecan, walnut and chestnut also planted). We’re lucky to be Zone 10b into subtropical and on volcanic soils,~1500mm average rainfall and a stream that flows all year for gravity fed water.
Our main growing focus is Syntropic Agroforestry food foresting – currently around 2 acres at varying stages of maturity. We’re still reliant on the supermarket but getting more calories from the land steadily. We have 3 young adult children still sharing the land with us and they’ve been great contributors, particularly with the various building projects we’ve undertaken.
We have been running a monthly Crop Swap in our small local town for the last 3 years. We average about 40 attendees. We’re only allowed to talk gardening and plants – no politics 😀. It’s a highlight of our month.
Go the gardeners 🙏
I have a plot with potatoes, beans, salads, fruits etc but no nearly enough. I think best hope is the neigbors sheep and cows.
Plantet some more tomatoes and sweet corn yesterday.
I had the misfortune of reading the comments on that video. About half of them are either conspiracy theories or religious claims.
I liked Tom Murphy’s new essay. As well as this comment exchange:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2026/06/cerebral-disconnect/
I like Scott’s comment for trying to explain how pointless this unprecedented awareness level is. But I also smell the Noble Blob Myth brewing. (I already know its brewing for Tom😂)
ps. Good song that fits my mood right now.
We were spittin’ venom at most everyone we know
If the damned gave us a road map then we’d know just where to go
People have known that the world is round since ancient times. It is the modern day man that is stupid enough to think the earth is flat.
we kind of went wrong with gods
Why the economic threat from the Gulf is now much worse: prepare for a recession
I am probably just preaching to the choir here, but he briefly mentions that even the loss of a small part can cause stop the production of an automobile. In my personal life, I haven’t felt that big of a change yet, to be honest.
Have you asked Sam Mitchell about CACTUS?
I’m willing to bet he’d be open to the idea, but might not have encountered it yet.
I know he’s stepped away from posting collapse content, but I’d be curious on his thoughts.
Sam was silent on the covid crimes that killed 20+ million people.
Do you understand why?
War between US/Israel and Iran has resumed.
US bombs Iranian military sites, then downs missiles Tehran fired at troops in Kuwait https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-irael-war-kuwait-strikes-88daa9f90b48baaa7beb18e35515c59d
Iran stops negotiations with U.S., vows to ‘completely’ block Strait of Hormuz: State media https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/iran-us-negotiations-strait-of-hormuz.html
“This war is all about China”
Trump wants China to buy more oil and soybeans (also energy) from the United States.
If Trump wants to cut off China’s energy supply, why bother promoting American oil?
This is to promote my friend’s new business. I met Richard in the Deep Adaptation forum and he lives off grid on a little Island, off the bigger Island of Tasmania, off the bigger Island of Australia! About as remote as you can get. He is Gaia and Rob level ready for Collapse, and a former software / IT professional of some kind.
He and his business partner have launched this business called
Duuxs.com
And it is a Host / Explorer arrangement where you set up Host experienes to offer people to learn new skills and visit off the track tourist places. You can see that he offers photos of his own place on Flinders Island (which you get to by plane from Tassie). There are not many others on there as yet, so the next phase is to promote it and get people to sign up.
I must admit to being surprised that he would have the expectation that BAU would continue long enough for such a new venture to have a chance of success, and he has put a huge amount of time/resources into it. He said that even if we end up restricted or locked down or what ever happens, he hopes it will still run for education/skills exchange.
Cudowne 💕 przedstawienie problemu
I really like this video in terms of missing the big picture. It is so involved in what is the correct economics to make the world ‘better’ for humans, while totally ignoring the natural world around us.
Meanwhile it explains the full predicament we all find ourselves in, by going into details of why one human story, is better than the other human story of economics. Every government and all business or humanitarian leaders basically pick one side of the story of economics or the other, without any realising that both stories are wrong for our future, but 100% right to get us where we are today..
[youtube
Also a second video by “startalk”, on why the billionaires believe in the science fiction future, is also interesting, in how uneducated they really are..
A third video I’ve watched, with Yuval Harari also raises a lot of interesting points. He gets that so much about our civilization is based on stories (like the economics video above and the tech bros illusions), but goes much deeper, leading into the ridiculousness of the A.I. ‘revolution’, that will just make things worse..
Regarding the Startalk pod. It is amazing to me how sanctimonious people can be. Especially smart people. Basically stating that going to the stars and the tech bros beliefs are a religion and don’t understand limits, and yet they are not able to see that their devote faith in science is also a religion with hard limits. The Nate Hagens interview with Tom and DJ was much more realistic and worldly based.
great point Niko!
What is the master resource that modernity is completely dependent upon?
Oil.
How many groups of energy experts meet regularly to discuss depletion of oil supply and its implications?
Only one. The Peak Oil Chat group.
How is this possible? Seriously.
The leader of that group, Andril Zvorygin, never discusses CACTUS. Why?
He leads a faith based group that keeps him optimistic.
He also never discusses MORT which explains the existence of his faith.
What a strange species we are.
Just a heads up that I’m leaving for my friend’s cabin tomorrow to help him with construction of an off-grid chlorination + UV + filtration water treatment system needed for a little community of cabins to comply with laws that convert a simple reliable water system into a complex high tech system dependent on many parts from China just to ensure that no one gets sick from drinking the same water that has caused no one to get sick for the last 75 years.
I won’t have internet so will be mostly silent until Tuesday.
No one has gotten sick from that water in the past 75 years? Were they using any purification systems?
Speaking of that: There are some elements of modernity that I’ll miss (assuming I survive the collapse, which is a big if). One of them will be just simply being able to get water from the tap.
The old system was a tiny concrete dam in a creek that created a pool of water about 2-3 feet deep with a screen to keep debris out covering a pipe at the bottom of the pool that ran downhill about a thousand feet providing excellent tasting water with lots of pressure.
To maintain the old system all you needed was a few spare valves and lengths of pipe.
Now we have LED UV bulbs, chlorine pumps, chlorine that needs to be refilled a few times year, solar power, propane backup generator for winter, propane that needs to be delivered a few times a year, batteries, inverters, Starlink internet to monitor the system, big complex tanks and valves to hold the water long enough for the chlorine to kill the bugs before it is distributed to the cabins, etc. etc.
Oh and now we can’t flush the system into the lake because chlorine is considered toxic pollution so we have to treat the water to remove the chlorine before we can flush the system into the lake.
Modernity has lost its mind.
LOL!! 😂
Complexity is so absurd when you break it down like that. All I see in your words are more of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs.
Have a lovely time, Rob! I hope your friend’s community will still keep the old system as a back-up. It will be nice for you to get away for a few days and digitally detox a bit. Hope the weather will be good for your new project and that you will have plenty of extra time to do some exploring in solitude.
This episode made me laugh because of a conversation Renaee and I had yesterday. She mentioned something about nonduality. I cut her off to say that after five years of hearing about nonduality and duality, I still don’t understand what the hell those words mean. Told her to treat me like an infant and give me dumbed down definitions.
So it was funny to see that Nate has been struggling with it as well. After watching his video, I still don’t understand… and I think I prefer to keep it that way.😉
I would have thought that in “The great simplification” one of the first things that we should get rid of, was jargon in which people try to find ‘meaning’.
I didn’t make it very far into that one before turning it off as a useless waste of time and effort, on both Nate’s part and mine as ‘watcher’…
So I looked it up for a definition and received this …” Non-duality…the philosophical and experiential understanding that the universe is an undivided, interconnected whole. It suggests that the boundaries we perceive—such as self versus other, mind versus body, and subject versus object—are mental constructs rather than absolute realities”
OK, that’ll do me, everything is connected, never thought otherwise.. next..
🤣 🤣 🤣
Thanks hideaway. I just got through telling Christ (our lord and saviour) on the phone yesterday how I had wasted my life!
Of course this was the first thing that appeared on my YT feed this morning….Ahh – when the algorithm knows you too well.
I thought I did a fairly good job of spelling out what it was when put on the spot! but maybe not. anyway, I must admit to small minded, judgemental and disdainful thoughts after I listened to about half of this. “Stay in your lane” 😛
And if he had any real serious interest, then he would not be making a talk like this. As topics, Non Duality, No Self and the Illusion of Free Will, was really the only reason I stuck with Dave Pollard’s blog for so long, as no other doomers gave this any in depth treatment, and I shared a lot in common with Dave for this reason. So if Nate had geniune curiosity he would have been able to read possibly hundreds of posts that were directly about this, or included the topic, on DP’s blog.
https://howtosavetheworld.ca/category/radical-non-duality/
But two videos from Martin Butler give this a good treatment, and this one below, he said pretty much the same thing as I did on the phone at first, and very similar second point as well:
1) Subject Object
2) One without a second (becuase everything is experience)
And this second one goes a bit more indepth and draws on the Tao Te Ching and Spinoza. He also mentions the movie American Beauty in this talk, which we watched last night after not seeing for many years, and thoroughly enjoyed, good friday night pic for you maybe??
Yes, you did a good job explaining it. Sorry that I didn’t clarify that. And thanks for the videos. MB nailed it why Nate and I have had a tough time grasping this term:
And I like that verse in the Tao Te Ching – Recognize beauty, and ugliness is born. Recognize good, and evil is born.
Just saw the movie reference from MB:
We have one of those highly developed people here at un-denial. This was a comment from Charles re my first guest essay a couple years ago.
Hey Charles, I might have to start calling you Ricky Fitts.😊
ps. I just read my essay again. For the newer people here, check it out. I was a religious nut & noble savage worshipper at the time, but it still holds up as a very cool essay.
https://un-denial.com/2024/02/20/by-paqnation-aka-chris-my-final-act/
Thank you Christ.
Yes, your essay was cool.
I spent several years “studying” non-duality. I don’t feel I wasted my time at all. It was a lot of fun. And I got nothing out of it. Which is the point. Ah ah ah.
And, yes, the mind will set traps all the way (but it does it with every activity). Like the trap of one. Yet, non-duality is precisely not saying one. It is saying not-two.
If the spiritual shoe fits, wear it. If not, just pick another pair.
(If you feel like it, you can listen to Paul Hedderman at Zen Bitchslap https://www.youtube.com/@zenbitchslap373. I just clicked the latest video and they exactly talk about this diluted form of non-duality going on all over the place right now:
)
“Every fucking mythical there the head uses to negate being here is a here when you get there.” (29:48)
Ah ah ah.
Another good one from zip at C&E. Hey zip, get your ass over here and start contributing. I might have to steal zip from Pan, the same way I stole Renaee from Dave Pollard.😂
The Tired River
Somewhere in my imagination, an old Sioux shaman stands on the bank of a great river. Draped over his shoulders is a half-decayed buffalo hide. Beside him there is no laptop, no satellite imagery, no climate model, and no real-time dashboard. He simply watches the water.
After a long silence, he says:
“The river is tired.”
It is a curious observation. Modern people would immediately ask for the numbers. How many cubic meters per second? How much rainfall fell upstream? What do the monitoring stations say?
But that is not what the old man means.
He is not talking about a measurement.
He is talking about a condition.
All those reports about droughts, debt crises, and other disruptions. About Cuba, where diesel tankers change course while power stations fail. About the Strait of Hormuz, where the world follows the position of tankers each day as if watching an intensive care monitor.
Every morning brings new figures. Water levels. Oil inventories. Temperatures. Freight flows. Electricity demand. Somewhere, there is always another graph pointing downward.
What strikes me more and more is not the alarm itself.
It is the silence that follows.
After the latest news about the Mississippi, the Colorado, or countless other stressed systems, there is rarely a discussion about how those systems might recover. After a report from Cuba, there is hardly any conversation about who will maintain the energy infrastructure in the years ahead. Around Hormuz, there is endless discussion of military threats, but very little about the physical world of refineries, ports, pipelines, and logistical networks.
It is as if our civilization has become increasingly capable of measuring its own wear and tear, while becoming less capable of imagining a future in which that deterioration is repaired.
In the past, stories of crisis often ended with a perspective. There would be a dam, a canal, a railway, an energy project, or a reconstruction plan. There was an assumption, however naïve, that systems could be repaired and renewed.
That perspective seems to be disappearing.
We describe the drought, but not tomorrow’s river. We describe the energy crisis, but not the energy system that is meant to replace the current one. We describe disruption, but scarcely recovery.
And so we have entered a new phase.
A phase in which antifragility is no longer described, only entropy.
The old shaman looks at the water and says that the river is tired.
Increasingly, I find myself thinking that he is not speaking only about the river. He is looking at a civilization that still measures everything, records everything, and monitors everything, yet is gradually losing the ability to tell a credible story about what comes next.
And then comes the great silence, because the perspective has vanished. The story of repair, renewal, and continuation grows quieter and quieter.
Until, in the end, only the observation remains:
The river is tired.
Agreed Christ, I wish Zip would post here too.
Could it be that advanced TOM has evolved numerous times on earth, but in each instance, the species overshot its ecological niche faster than it could move on to greener pastures?
DJ White might defend dolphins as having a TOM at least as advanced as humans. Might dolphins be constrained from overshoot by a lack of thumbs? Prior to recent human incursion, might they have enjoyed denial of their own death by living a life that is so good while it lasts that there’s no sense in dwelling on the inevitable?
No dolphin has ever seen a cactus.
Might bleached coral be their CACTUS cue?
In dolphin paradise
waters range from tropics to ice.
In death there is sorrow
but there’s always tomorrow
so despair is just naught but a vice.
In warming, acidifying seas
there is so much less to please:
CACTUS coral appears,
making dolphins shed tears,
that dissolve in the sea current breeze.
the cephalopods would tell the dolphins.
Just a reminder that many animals have TOM. It’s an extended TOM that makes humans unique.
Are there any signs that dolphins believe in life after death?
Do dolphins devote all of their surplus wealth to building underwater temples to ensure their gods are happy and deliver life after death?
Do dolphins kill each other fighting over which god is the real god that can deliver life after death?
How many people read the un-denial blog? Would you engage more attention on CACTUS if un-denial were on substack?
CACTUS has much in common with SETE from Steven J. Newbury, @theuaob on substack. CACTUS and SETE might even converge. I’d love to see a conversation between Newbury and the CACTUSians. I suspect SETE garners more interest simply by being on substack. Newbury also occasionally comments on The Honest Sorcerer. I think that’s how I found his substack.
You’re gonna get silence if nobody knows you’re there.
Just sayin’.
They’re all newbies. They are not really saying anything that hasn’t already been said by all the peakoil people from earlier. B to be honest mostly just steals all of JMG’s work from 10 years earlier. Newbury makes things too complicated in his explanation. I think the reason most of us who frequent here is because we have been distilled down to this. This is the master position and all the others are subsidiaries. Basically no one wants to engage because there doesn’t appear to be a refutation possible and the outcome is death of the system.
So long and thanks for the fish.
Whatever you think of those writers, my question remains – would un-denial get more attention if it were posted on substack?
I don’t really know, but it would be how I’d bet.
I imagine that Newbury has un-denial potential.
Probably not. If you look at B comment section it is tiny compared to say JHK or the coffee and covid blog. Just not what people want to read most likely. We are strange fish.
I tend to agree with nikoB. Participation was low here for years before Substack even existed. Plus if we switched to Substack I’d have to abandon pretty much every feature that makes this site a little different than a plain blog.
Niko I absolutely love the way you described this – it is so true. There is way too much basic bitch 101 content out their about collapse/peak oil/climate change. Very few people are talking about what it actually means and following trends to their logical conclusion
Yes, I have been distilled down to this!
It was a long way!
Just a few from 8 Mrd. humans here!
Strange, isn‘t it?
Do you think it’s possible for interested beginners to take a shortcut and come straight here?
no. It takes a long time I think to accept that there is no solution yet alone that there is a problem (for most people).
HI Robin, I’ve read Steven J. Newbury’s work before, so I went and found and read his SETE pdf.
At first my eyes glazed over as I thought just another academic type paper with a lot of big words to cater for an academic audience.
I get annoyed at academic language of trying to sound important by using highly complex language, instead of deliberately keeping it simple for people to understand.
This bit ….” If a civilisation accelerates its metabolic throughput to maintain the illusion of
infinite growth, it does not buy itself more time to invent solutions; it geometrically warps the phase-space, pulling the Entropic Event Horizon (H) closer. Every unit of exergy processed to compute and maintain the massive institutional and material inertia (M ) of the present actively and permanently deletes a volume of available future states. The political economy is, quite literally, metabolising its own future degrees of freedom to sustain the complexity of its present.”….
…could have much more understandably been stated …
“as civilization grows in use of energy, materials and complexity, in a spiral of more, it heads towards the cliff of a shortage as grades of energy and materials reduce. The complexity has to grow to continue to gain access to lower grade resources, so the continued growth just guarantees and end of civilization on a finite planet.” or something similar..
I actually was getting right into how he was correct towards the end of the article, as my mind reset to academic language. In his conclusion … “The macroscopic wave-function of the Earth-system collapses faster because of the Green Transition. Mediated through the existing financialised architecture, they invariably concentrate ownership, driving up the wealth siphon (α). The net result is a de-crease in Effective Circulating Power (Pef f ), actively accelerating the gravitational pull towards Scrit.”
That also could have been simplified to… ” The attempt at a ‘green transition’, just fucks civilization faster”
or perhaps the more nuanced
“As civilization nears it’s end, the feature of inequality increases as it raises entropy in an effort to solve the problem of entropy.”
Anyway, this bit of yours… “Would you engage more attention on CACTUS if un-denial were on substack?” …. I have to ask why bother? If more people knew and understood CACTUS, what difference would it make?
Have a look at most of us here. We are a bunch of hoarders of materials (sardines) and systems (regenerative ag, solar, etc), which if everyone tried to do would just accelerate civilizational collapse.
Hey everyone. As a person who writes for a living, here are some writing tips to avoid sounding like an annoying academic.
Fix nominalisation. Nominalisation, is when you turn verbs into nouns. It is super annoying. Eg saying decision instead of decide.
Write in active voice, not passive voice.
Find the actor and put them at the heart of the sentence. An actor, does a thing (verb), there is an outcome (noun). Not, ‘a thing happens’
Avoid adjectives (describing words). You don’t need to force adjectives into your writing. Where there is a feeling or need for them, you will naturally add one. If there are too many adjectives, it can sound disingenuous. It can also interrupt the flow of the argument, as your brain has to do more imagining.
Academics should avoid using science for metaphors. Use a simple metaphor like Hideaway’s driving off a cliff. But don’t mix academic language and scientific metaphors as that will confuse and annoy people. This is because it is hard to tell when we are switching from description to metaphor. For example, Newbury is using the “event horizon” as a metaphor.
Or even better, just explain the thing properly and then you dont even need a stupid metaphor. Respect your audience and dont assume they are dumb just cause they dont have a degree
I would also add: A good metaphor is supposed to be different enough from the original idea that the shift is obvious.
Thanks for that Monk. Very useful.
I knew this was coming. I prepared myself with vigorous training. My goal is to not let the 250th festivities make me stick a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.
Memorial Day weekend pushed me to the limits. I must’ve heard at least a hundred dipshit former vets talking about how it’s so important to honor the military because it has made USA the greatest country of all time.
But thankfully I persevered. July 4th will be the real test.
(h/t C&E)
https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/hoover-dam-american-flag-22277439.php
Btw, those proud vets… why are they so fucking stupid? They lap it up when it comes to the fake praising… yet they can’t connect simple dots on why their local VA hospital screws them over time and time again.
Dear Rob & Co,
I hope this message finds ye well.
Whilst lingering in the shadows, yours faithfully stands upon the verge of a new chapter.
At present, two paths exist:
– Bachelor’s in Business & Logistics
– Gunsmithing
All counsel would be most welcome.
Should the scholarly course be chosen, I would seek to direct it toward preparedness and the mitigation of adverse effects upon a broader scale if possible.
– Notions of MORT, CACTUS, and the like would most certainly form part thereof.
Sincerely from Finland,
ABC
Gun smithing sounds far more interesting and you get to see and feel the result.
Hi ABC, good to hear from you.
I don’t know enough about those jobs or the market you live in to offer an opinion.
I suggest you think about 2 important questions:
1) Which of the 2 careers will you love the most so that you will work hard and strive to do a good job?
2) Which job will customers or employers that are poor and struggling to make ends meet be most willing to pay you to do?
It is easy for me to nod my head to Rob and Hideaway and others in their presentations.
However, this is a deserting voice. I think there are other paths.
The behavior of 8.4 billion driven by genetics and culture increase the systems momentum. And the road on which civilization is traveling has trees on both sides. The available controls are so limited collisions are probably. When to be determined, Termination, or contraction to be determines, Tree damage to be determined.
Given Mort or Cactus there does not seem to be any behavior that alters a bleak future. However when I add a parameter like “a rate of changes of momentum” some options become available.
“Rates-of-change-in-momentum” is a force that creates injury. However, the force appears only when a mass’s momentum is changing. Unchanging momentum (embedded in moving mass) remains hidden because humans have no physiological mechanism to quantify it. A car going 30 MPH and a car going 60 MPH have different momentum but to a passenger in each car feels the same.
Rates-of-change-in-momentum” is also hidden because the forces which create it are external to the system which contains the momentum. (like trees next to a road.)
Let me extend the car driving environment to connect “doubly-hidden-variables“ to:
hidden potential injury”
and
unimagined behavior that manages it.
Consider:
Consider:
Conclude: Not including a civilization’s “rates-of change-in-momentum” in “analysis” or “choice-of-behavior” prevents discovering:
With this alternative view, I can imagine changes in behavior that get rid of momentum (all its physical, genetic, and social aspects.) I can imagine a complete restart of the human experiment on earth, while earth still has ability to support such a transition.
This is a lot to put in a comment on “ we are f—ked and there is nothing we can do about.” But I have been working on this for 50 years. I can provide a few more details for you consideration. The 5 books in the time blind books series are now available at amazon. The summaries are in videos http://www.skil.com. the latest is
Civilization’s Predicament and its Unwinding Behavior
31 minute video
https://share.evernote.com/note/ee411e1c-c69e-5e16-c340-c6d87c523fec
Here is a map of the post sterilization activities 2,3,and 4, above.
blob:https://un-denial.com/6e1b6546-ebf6-45af-ba39-8b9e577d907e
If I am being rude. I will be quiet
Jack alpert
alpert@skil.org
We can’t even get walkable cities without the woke turning them into an authoritarian hell-scape and the conspiracy theorists losing their minds about the control grid.
The people who have enough wealth to implement a plan like this, wouldn’t, because they would lose all their wealth.
A baby without a mother bond suffers severe mental damage. This is attachment theory and very well-studied and accepted in psychology. I can’t imagine a society of traumatised orphans would be a good idea.
Most of what sets a person up for success in life comes from their zero to aged 3 experiences. One of the most important parts of this is to be physically and emotionally bonded to your mother.
Just a disclaimer, I am not saying an orphan or neglected child can’t live a wonderful happy life, but often times it will take a lot of work from the individual and it will be harder for them.
Jack … “If I am being rude. I will be quiet”
You are certainly not being rude, but this bit “I have been working on this for 50 years.“ tells me how committed you are towards “the plan” you have..
Without saying a word about it, I ask if you could please read R. Cialdini.. Influence The Psychology of Persuasion, specifically chapter 3 on Consistency and Commitment, of which I’ve abbreviated part below…
“A study done by a pair of Canadian psychologists uncovered
something fascinating about people at the racetrack: Just after
placing a bet, they are much more confident of their horse’s chances of
winning than they are immediately before laying down that bet. Of
course, nothing about the horse’s chances actually shifts; it’s the same
horse, on the same track, in the same field; but in the minds of those
bettors, its prospects improve significantly once that ticket is purchased.”
The studies.. The racetrack study was done twice, with the same results, by Knox
and Inkster (1968). See Rosenfeld, Kennedy, and Giacalone (1986) for
evidence that the tendency to believe more strongly in choices, once
made, applies to guesses in a lottery game, too.
I came across this more than 20 years ago, and always refer back to how anything I’ve decided upon can just be wishful thinking, not reality and it always makes me do more work to see if my thinking is accurate in the real world around us..
Hi hideaway
I ‘ll be honest. I have been trying to open a communication channel with you for as long as you have been in un-denial.
We agree on many variables that describe portions of reality. For example
The betting or lottery choices studies are reproducible and true.
They describe how bunches of people with similar thinking tools come to similar conclusions that are not related to the constraints of a physically bounded system.
Let’s not jump from most people use information badly and their groups go to bad places to the conclusion that there are no behaviors that could lead to good outcomes.
Can’t we have images of system unfolding based on mass and energy flows. Controlled by tanks and pipes and valves.
Let me make a stepping stone into out conversation.
Civilization’s Predicament and its Unwinding Behavior
31 minute video
https://share.evernote.com/note/ee411e1c-c69e-5e16-c340-c6d87c523fec
I’ll be glad to send you the 5 time blind books. 1975 to 2025. They show how many paths I advocated that could not prevent a bad unfolding.
Those failures have no predictive utility that the path I am now proposing has no utility.
That it has to be evaluated using inference rather than data does not make it of zero value either.
Let’s zoom or better apple face time so we can share a white board and see how our best ideas help each other see reality.
It would make m happy
Jack, “They describe how bunches of people with similar thinking tools come to similar conclusions that are not related to the constraints of a physically bounded system.”
No they don’t, which is why I’d like you to read some more about it.
It’s all about how a persons perception of reality changes once a decision or plans have been made. None of us are immune to this, which is precisely why even though something can make perfect sense to an individual who has made the decision/plan, consistency gets them to support whatever decision/plan, instead of questioning it relentlessly.
Monk has given some initial reasons why that ‘plan’ has no chance of working, there are many others, that you would easily think of yourself if you could look objectively at your plan.
I use to come up with all sorts of plans for future degrowth, while keeping some modernity, until I did the simple maths on it all and worked out it wasn’t physically possible. I’ll see if I can find some of my posts from a decade ago on other sites..
BTW, I do wish that there was some way to keep modernity going in an ecological balance with the rest of the living planet, and something like your plan would work, but the physics states otherwise, entropy, dissipation, depletion, complexity and scale. All before we get to psychology, inequality, self interest and MPP.
Hideway, did you reply to my request to open a direct communication chanbel between just two people. jackalpert4@gmail.com
Excellent. After 50 years, it would be very painful to realise that one’s plan might not work for purely practical reasons.
What are your thoughts on immigration? Best to not argue? In Norway, the Green Party is very supportive of immigration. Just as an example of the strain on the healthcare system and human suffering, last weekend we had three major obstetric complications at a smal hospital in Norway. None of the couples spoke Norwegian.
It is difficult to do something about immigration without addressing the underlying causes. As Trevor Hancock has argued, “It’s the environment, stupid” .
At the same time, many immigrants and displaced persons are dissatisfied with the Norwegian healthcare system. Some expect antibiotics for common colds or referrals to specialists for relatively ordinary complaints. This has also been discussed in the research literature, for example by Aadne Aasland and Oleksandra Deineko in Why Exit?
I try to argue with greens that singel use medical equipment is dependent on nature. What to make cellulose products of when the last tree is cut down? This is denial also?
I’ve seen a lot of content on Instagram of children of immigrants in Europe who are really mad at their parents for:
We are having similar issues with our healthcare and housing in NZ. There are just too many immigrants compared to how fast we can build and grow our supporting infrastructure, so standards decline. We also experience issues that doctors educated overseas, who aren’t as capable or knowledgable as NZ-educated doctors.
I’ve tried to discuss CACTUS on a collapse discussion discord server, and I got some push back, but no actual refutation. I actually think that CACTUS will happen not due to complexity per se, but when net energy falls below the level needed to extract low-grade mineral ores.
My big project at the farm this year is to build a dehydrator that we plan to use for making black currant tea, and for drying hazelnuts and fruit. We also hope to rent it out to other local farms.
It will have a capacity of about 700 Kg of product per batch.
Yesterday a container rough finished to my specifications was delivered and today I wired in a 70A 240 AC service to power the 7500 watt ceiling heater, 2500 watt baseboard heater, 10A commercial dehumidifier, and three 20″ circulation fans I will install in a plenum I’m building to evenly direct a large air flow over 60 trays of food on 3 racks.
Wow Rob, that’s an awesome project to showcase all your skills! Seriously I don’t know how you have enough hours in the day for everything you do, you must not sleep much! You are allowed to cut back on all extraneous activity except for keeping up your presence on your site, that’s our orders!
What a lot of kerfuffling (as impressive as it is) to try to preserve some foodstuffs which if not for our modernity would have been eaten mostly fresh in season, as nature intended. I thought it a bit ironic that your photos show a brilliant blue cloudless sky and yet direct solar drying at scale remains elusive in many climes. I do appreciate your engineering challenge and look forward to photo updates. I am wondering once the process of drying is complete, will you then have to work out how to best package the goods for market?
What one wouldn’t give to be a rodent lucky enough to somehow make an incursion in your drying container–food and warmth galore!
Thank you so much for sharing, Rob, you are a marvel and wonder along with everyone else here. Even if you just keep this site afloat for us to continue our mutual admiration society it will be well worth it.
Namaste, friends.
Hi Gaia,
Large scale solar lumber drying is a thing and similar dryers will work for food.
With food, a small amount of electricity is often needed at night and during cloudy weather to keep air flowing, and for enough heat to keep bacterial action from starting.
Years ago I built a four-tray solar heater with 2′ x 3′(600mm x900mm) trays.
Electric backup was a 40 watt ceramic Hamster/Lizard heater.
For storage, glass jars, away from heat and light, work well.
Kinda heavy for shipping.
Stainless Ukonserve containers are light, sturdy and kinda pricey.
Thanks and good health, Weogo
Hello Weogo,
Hope you and your family are well. Thank you so much for your reply. I have lived in various climates and now live in the wet tropics where sun drying of food would be very challenging some months of the year. For example, we just concluded a period of 6 weeks of rain (and before that we had a few fine periods and more extended rain), it’s been the wettest wet season in some time with over 2.4m of rain so far this year! I also live in higher altitude which means it gets quite damp overnight all year round. So, simple solar drying may be tricky but I will be cheating when hopefully I will be using my solar battery system to operate my Excalibur home dehydrator, it’s still sun-powered but similar to what Rob has described with the water purification system, gone through the most complicated mess to get there! But first, the tomatoes have to grow and thankfully they know exactly what to do with sunlight, soil, and water.
I have been using vacuum seal bags to keep perishables dry but for the immediate pantry I have a wide range of glass jars (I have been saving them for some time now as one day we will be looking at a simple glass jar with a metal lid and know something of such function cannot be made so easily again). Dampness is a perennial issue here and ever since the solar panel/battery install, I have been running dehumidifiers in key areas (both sheds, caravan, house), once again proving that the more complexity we have access to, the more energy and material we consume.
Sigh.
Hideaway is right again. In a way thankfully we here who are aware of impending doom are few, for in the mad panic to prepare, even a small percentage of the masses would bring on collapse even sooner.
But, today the sun is shining and the plants are soaking in energy, life beckons despite all our efforts.
Best wishes to you. Namaste.
That is super cool rob! Putting your engineering skills to good use 🙂
For those wanting a smaller scale option for dehydrating.
https://viridviews.blogspot.com/2015/07/solar-food-dehydrating.html
Gosh, it’s been nearly 11 years since we built these. Can be scaled some, and doesn’t use electricity, but more work and have to deal with the weather variability.
Rob- Regarding the hazels- how do you monitor dryness, and what dryness level are you shooting for? Or is this just to finish drying the involucres so the nuts release?
Right now we have a very rough unscientific system that involves stacking hazelnuts in crates inside a greenhouse to keep the rain off with fans blowing across the crates. Then we transfer them to an old clothes dryer I modified by disconnecting the heater and using it to tumble the nuts so the whatchamacallets fall off. Then we move the cleaned nuts in crates into the house for final drying in the living room. No measurements are made other than to crack and eat some nuts to test doneness.
I hope to improve this process with my new dehydrator.
Hello Rob, I love your very scientific term for the husk of the hazelnut! I looked it up and technically (because I know you love to be technical) they are called the involucre. I’ll bet you’d be even more impressive on the farm by using this term next time! And the dark brown papery skin directly over the nut is called the pellicle. For those who know their Latin, all this will be elementary.
IMHO dealing with MORT or CACTUS are very similar to dealing with any stress – psychological or physical – it requires durability and adaptability.
Can you handle whatever comes your way? Oil shortages, expensive groceries, armed mauraders – and the psychological relevance of CACTUS? My take is that you should do what you can to address MORT head on. Supplies & prep as best you can, and after that are you strong enough (durable enough) to do whatever may be required?
And if you can handle the demons, what is the next best action? To what do you pivot to? Adaptability, again IMHO has durability as a prerequisite, and then the ability to plan and (often quickly) act on that plan. If you are adapting by doing anything, there needs to be an overarching WHY. If you have a big WHY (ex to feed my kids) then it comes down to logistics (who’s where when), then strategy (what are you going to do), then tactics (how exactly will you do that).
I think many in this community (though very few normies) understand MORT and CACTUS, but are unwilling to engage fully bc of what that might require of them to accept as needed actions in their future.
I saw Marandi waver in confidence for the first time last Friday night when it appeared a deal was close and I suspect he may not have agreed with compromises Iran made, but now that everything the US agreed to has been walked back, again, Marandi is back with renewed confidence and defiance.
Marandi’s core message is that Iran won an unprovoked war started by an evil empire and Iran will not compromise on demands that are necessary for its survival.
One important new insight in this interview…
Canadian Prepper asked why is Iran trying to calm (or at least not inflame) the oil market when high oil prices would benefit Iran and harm the US economy?
Marandi answered that Iran wants low oil prices so demand remains high causing the US and Europe to drain their strategic petroleum reserves fast.
Very smart. Iran is going for a kill shot against an empire that has tormented it for 75 years.
Bad for CACTUS.
CACTUS has made the Fermi Paradox very simple for me. And boring. Nothing exciting can ever happen re complex life meeting up with other complex life. The best you can hope for is something like Voyager 1 or 2 crash landing on your planet. And you still have to be incredibly lucky for it to happen at a time when your civilization is advanced enough to be able to understand that it was not sent here by the gods. Probably a very small window. Maybe a few hundred years.
But that best case scenario aint gonna happen. Per AI:
Launched 50 years ago and currently traveling at 38,000mph with the odometer already over 15 billion miles… and it’ll still take over 30k yrs just to get out of our damn solar system, jesus christ!!
Ok, so the probes won’t survive a planetary landing, but at least the golden records will.
That last note is hilarious. Classic human behavior. Even at that alien contact moment, we can’t help ourselves from sprinkling in the bullshit.
Ok, so back to our best-case scenario. A Golden Record miraculously lands on a planet where the blob has already reached full consciousness via fire/cooking. Then what? It’s just gonna be treated as a crazy divine artifact, an omen from the gods. Except for about a 100 year window when you actually have the knowledge to decode it. But what good would decoding it do anyway? Imagine if we received one of these in 1950. All it would do is make the culture extremely obsessed with space exploration (we think it’s bad now, just imagine how bad it could’ve been😊). Actually, we’d probably already be extinct from dumping all our resources into failed space expeditions.
Really enjoyed reading this! Thank you, our lord and saviour for for sharing
Christ that was good.
What tunes are on the Voyager golden record?
I’m so relieved. Thought for sure I’d see Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ on the list.
I’m actually impressed with their selections. Could’ve been better if it wasn’t for our religion of money & personal property… aka the blob:
ps. If it was up to me this song would’ve made the Voyager list. The perfect message from one fire ape to another. I like to think Carly was a hardcore doomer and she’s singing about the blob… aka the survival drive.
Yea but this is a female, so probably not a good representation of huMANity right? Even though the origin of the word man in old german is a gender neutral word to mean “people”.
I remembered we studied this at university, analysing how females were pretty neglected in the stuff that was added. Pretty wild for Americans to assume aliens will be as sexist as them right
The reason I easily agreed with Hideaway was Alice Friedemann. She has provided detailed evidence for CACTUS on her website for years. I remember asking her if, way way way in the future, people might be able to read microchips with newer technology. She explained why this would be impossible using CACTUS logic. Something about that conversation with her cemented it for me. We are living through a one-time experience.
When the trucks stop running did it for me.
Gail also did some comprehensive pieces on the complexity of the grid too and its failure many years ago which influenced my thinking.
Alice is also one of the people that IMHO will never be interviewed by Nate Hagens, as shows like TGS just don’t want to know about reality.
Alice’s work and logic is impeccable, I’ve read most of her work.
I’m a big fan of Alice. I have both her Trucks and her Life after Fossil Fuels book. I even have her book on baking crackers. I actually purchased 4 copies of Life after so I could loan them out indefinitely and give them away if anyone treasured them (well, 3 copies + my personal one). 2 of them have been returned. I lost track of the third.
I learned of Nate Hagens from her Life after bibliography.
I don’t know why Nate never has her on. She seems like a very private person. Although she’s in the Peak Oil FB group, she never appears on the Peak Oil Chat yt channel. So it might not be Nate shutting her out.
Holding all this CACTUS-related stuff in one’s head takes a lot of energy. Most people conserve brain energy by giving up sooner or later, mostly sooner, on thinking about it.
After reading Trucks I bought the book on crackers too – did you manage to get into the habbit of making your own crackers often?, it did not stick for me, some habbits don’t.
Off and on. Not entirely happy with Friedemann’s crackers. They aren’t the right texture. When I free up from current projects, I hope to experiment with approaches to lighter, flakier crackers.
I think that most humans simply equate “bleakness with weakness and therefore seek less”.
This theory of CACTUS is bleak
It’s making my knees go weak
I’ve dug a hole in the sand
And on my head I shall stand
The truth I will no longer seek.
I would have voted for this limerick niko! I think we’ve cottoned onto something, whenever one feels a bit down or frustrated, a therapeutic intervention could be trying to come up with a limerick to express ourselves. I’m certain that by the time you do, you will feel a lot better and/or at least have distracted oneself for a little while!
Let’s flip the question. How is it possible for the un-denial crowd to accept MORT? What do we have in common?
Dear Rob,
I am reading your new post. And I feel the strong urge to send you a comforting smile.
It’s OK. It’s going to be fine.
🙂
PS: don’t burden yourself with this site, if it is no more joy for you. Thank you for all the work and time you dedicated to it and to us.
The Cloud of Unknowing, an ancient book, just popped into my mind as sit to write, hoping to convey the rush of clarity I felt after reading Rob’s lead post and then dozing off into a dreamstate.
The dream theme was to solve predicaments by doing things backward, specifically, going through a gate or door where it had to open inwards towards me, not outwards like usual. Or flipperball where the flippers only opened towards the ball… or for anything that I needed to access, I needed to get out of the way first… Which leads me to beliefs, referenced by Hideaway down below (https://un-denial.com/2026/05/26/a-big-new-idea-silence-again-how-is-this-possible-seriously/#comment-120522)
There is a whole realm of knowledge about how consciousness (and hence existence) works that is socially banned, so to say, banned or denied to the 99th percentile, which is accessible through esoteric traditions like TCM, dream yoga, Tai Chi, many more. Modernity has grown tired of bashing and trashing these and they are growing back into the culture. (No relevance to MPP mind you, but, to my mind, they shift the terrain of the debate about Denial gene and CACTUS reality.} I think it is fruitful ground to imagine and be alert to the aspects of reality one is excluding from the frame of reference. eg, g-o-d, altered states, psi phenomena, and consider the consequences of those exclusions.
I have posted before about lucid dreaming. It is a state of consciousness, accessible to most, dependent on skilfulness in directing belief, expectation, focus, intent and will (all these being discrete and different), and an X factor so named to avoid sounding religious (ch 10 in Lucid Dreaming by Robert Waggoner). The rules of physics don’t apply in the dream state, but are real none the less in the waking state. Just like modern medical science can now comfortably explain Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine and measure flows and functions, without inventing/denying a substance called Chi. (See video on YT called Quantum Qi) These and other ancient wisdoms emerged through human experience without the benefit of technology, even before invention of eyeglasses or buttons or understanding of sperm, or smelting of steel.
So my point is, yes there are far too many expert and informed and powerful people who deny their denial and/or don’t see the systems implications of complexity and thermodynamics in civilization. What don’t we see also, that is sidelined or banned by the dominant cultural paradigms of life at the edge of modernity?
Yes 🙂
Sometimes babies do that: they hide their eyes with their hands so as not to see a face they love in front of them, then wait for a bit, then remove their hands to laugh joyfully. Repeat. Some kind of a roller-coaster.
Denial may be more profound than we give it credit 🙂
Best.
It’s hard to find good news these days. Even the few leaders with integrity and deep understanding are struggling to make progress against the evil growth forces of modernity.
Ive been guilty of many forms of denial at one time or another. But due to the peculiarities of my upbringing I could not invest deeply in any particular narrative or comforting anchor or belief. Consequently, none of the usual narratives, traditions, or common strategies for organizing a life in an infinite and meaningless universe have ever proven durable.
One of the last illusions to die….and this truly saddened me, was what I called the anarcho-primitivist. The noble savage. I do not use the word “savage” derisively. Maybe I should say, “Rewild”. I thought there might be a time, and culture, and a pure, original and blameless state in which we might live in some kind of balance with the Earth. Loved Derrick Jensen. Read everything. It won’t work.
It won’t work…for a ton of reasons. I’ve explored a lot of them. I continue some of the practices because I enjoy them. Best bowdrill time to an ember-35 seconds. Even now, in idle moments I am making a cordage from dogbane stems(Apocynum Cannabinum), identifying wild medicinal and edible plants, gardening. I love it…..and it’s not going to work, for a wide variety of reasons.
Several years ago it occurred to me that all these problems of global industrial civilization, including human caused climate disruption, were related, had synergistic relationships to each other that made resolving any single aspect of the whole Gordian knot of problems utterly futile. The old “Problem vs. Predicament” conundrum.
I like the CACTUS theory because it really clarifies the tangled knots and foggy ess in my own thinking on this. As well as MORT and the forms denial takes. This is part of an ongoing cthonic shift in me. I’m still struggling. I think I can grow wings, with which to travel the existential void. But, I cannot. Because it is not, itself, “Wu”, the uncarved block of potential. It is nothing….and even my constructed “I”, is nothing. A momentary spark.
Anyway, companions in thought and feeling are a real gift.
Thank you.
Chthonic (pronounced /ˈθɒnɪk/) is an adjective meaning relating to or dwelling beneath the surface of the earth. It is most commonly used in mythology and literature to describe gods, spirits, or forces that inhabit the underworld, often associated with death, the soil, and primordial nature.
Etymology
The word comes from the Ancient Greek word chthōn (χθών), which translates to “earth,” “soil,” or “ground”. It specifically refers to the earth’s interior or the unseen depths, rather than the living surface
(if anyone else had not come across this word either)
Thank you for stepping out of the shadows with wise words. Please come again.
Thanks for the new post Rob. I’d argue that some on that list do understand CACTUS but tend to keep it quiet these days, like Paul Chefurka, David Korowicz, Sid Smith and even Charlie Hall, who paints the future as ‘we all die’ in his last presentation on the monthly peak oil chat.
Others are very close like Bill Rees, though I suspect he doesn’t want to say the CACTUS part out loud as it destroys hope. People always prefer hope to reality. Look at most cancer sufferers for evidence of this, who jump on every ‘trial’ available, even though it makes them much sicker (and often for a lot longer).
Those that have worked out a CACTUS like future would also realise that if there is no saving modernity, which is what everyone wants, then the best thing to do is get on and enjoy modernity and life in general while it lasts.
I also often think and wonder if politicians, billionaires, leaders in general are correct in continuing the faster route to collapse.
Collapse is bad for humans and most life that can be caught/shot then eaten, but is the natural world as a whole better off with collapse sooner or later? I’d suggest sooner is better, but personally would prefer it later, such are our selfish genes, just like genes of every other living form on the planet.
Bill Rees sees humans as no different from other species in using up all the resources it has the capability of acquiring. So he sees collapse as inevitable. I don’t know if he thinks about the increasing complexity as playing a part but I guess the increase in complexity is needed to continue to access all those resources. This was a very good article of his: https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/why-collapse-is-inevitable
Maybe I should change it to getting closer, though I’ve heard him talk about possibly 2B humans living a much lower energy/material lifestyle than present westerners, but still in proper housing of small apartment size etc.
In the piece that Luker references, Rees has a footnote:
Hideaway sez: “I also often think and wonder if politicians, billionaires, leaders in general are correct in continuing the faster route to collapse.”
Preston MPP Howard here with a reminder: Biologically, the Maximum Power Principle embedded itself within virtually all life, from single-cell organisms on up as the “correct” choice for survival.
When circumstances change in a manner that foreclose a previously successful niche, life forms sometimes find themselves on their own version of the Titanic, with no lifeboat available. We see that today as whole species of insects, amphibians, reptiles, and birds go extinct before our very own eyes as climate change continues.
We are on our own version of the Titanic. Humanity has broken the Earth, and no one can “fix” it. So, humanity continues what it has always done: We eat, drink, and (try to) be merry, as we fight over increasingly fewer resources. As the climate warms, humanity will succumb to its own likely extinction, or near extinction if some find a lifeboat to a new niche. However, there is no lifeboat for 8 billion humans.
Were we good stewards of the paradise Earth originally provided us, perhaps today we would have the maturity to understand our situation. We could act, not in our own best interests, but in what is in the best interests of healing the Earth. Some later life form — aeons after the Earth has healed itself — might discover such efforts, allowing it to commend humanity’s effort to assist the Earth’s effort to heal itself.
Like many on today’s Titanic, I try to protect myself from expected shortages. I liken those of us on un-denial.com to Titanic passengers who are writing our story, putting it into a bottle, and casting it overboard in hopes someone in the future can avoid our mistakes.
However, few are willing to do this because… grandkids, for example.
Is the natural world as a whole better off with collapse sooner or later? The longer collapse is delayed and the longer modernity continues its rampage, the greater the damage to the Biosphere. So most likely, the Biosphere (including humanity in long term), is better off with a sooner collapse.
Will it be better for nature to collapse early? I don’ think nature gives a shit.
I see all the ways that culture and conditioning has compelled me to see the natural world as the last great pure or sacred realm. The reason I love being in nature is it enhances my survival fitness which is pleasurable. Last night in my dreams, I was sewing carrots. A part of me is desperate to survive and the subconscious thinks this might help, so it was a pleasurable dream.
An example of detaching from the survival drive: last night we flicked youtube on the telly, and a video came up that was a farting wombat. I could not stop laughing, a fit of laughing. Oh the adorable Australian cute and cuddly marsupials. If you give this one a go, you will see what I mean. It’s just pure driven wanting and it’s hilarious. This drive is in each of us, it’s what we are, but this understanding gives me the ability to see it, which is freeing, it does not make it go away, but pleasurable to just know it’s there and know I am driven by it.
Yada yada, I am now just a clone of Martin Butler, but this is the way new conditioning comes in and breaks the old, no one is doing it. It feels like a last flowering of new understanding and I am grateful for it.
Also just messaged Chris, he will be back soon – this one’s for you bro… 😉
LOL. Thanks Renaee. I love it! And so right on about “just pure driven wanting and it’s hilarious”. Life is Wetiko. Wetiko is life.
I hurt my back couple days ago and haven’t been able to get out of bed. Finally am able to walk around slowly today. So I logged in to catch up on my obsession only to see this blasphemy:
That woke us up, didn’t it? LOL. I’m with everyone on this… don’t you dare take away our ‘oasis of sanity space’. But I also know that in the long-term, Rob would be doing me a favor. If he ends up pulling the plug on my obsession… I ain’t even mad at it.
From Hideaway’s comment above:
I was surprised to see no thumbs down votes from the blob lovers? When I talk like that you guys have no problem hitting the button. Don’t be giving Hideaway special treatment. LOL!!
Life’s a bitch, and then you die. There are a few Zen master type ways to live with this knowledge. And just like any religion, it takes time and practice. My way is through dark humor. Seeing this thing for the shitshow it is, with zero denial attached… it’s hilariously diabolical. When it’s all clicking for me, things like regret & guilt become absurd. Sometimes my response to anyone I’ve hurt would sound something like, “I’m sorry I wronged you but are you still mad at it? Get over it. Just be grateful that I didn’t do something much worse.”
LOL, obviously my compassion level is nonexistent in those moments. But I’ll take the tradeoff because sitting around feeling sorry for yourself at mistakes you’ve made (especially when those mistakes are a natural part of your biological programming) is insanely ridiculous when viewed from the big picture lens.
The goal is to not give a fuck… about anything. But not in that contrived tough guy IDGAF attitude. More of a nonchalant approach with indifference being the key.
I ain’t even mad at it
Keepin’ up with all your bad habits
I ain’t even mad at it
Everybody talking like it’s so tragic
I ain’t even mad at it
I ain’t even mad at it
Coping all your bad habits
I ain’t even mad at it
Everybody talking so tragic, I ain’t fucking mad at it
Hello bro, glad you’re back on all fours again. Increasing flexibility is the way to keep from further back injury, you probably don’t need nor want big sis to tell you! I’m sure Mr Zeus was good company when you were bedbound and taught you a thing or two on how stretchable cats can be. They are so funny in all the different yoga poses they do (and where they can access whilst doing a certain pose with leg up!). Definitely a don’t try this at home thing!
Hope everyone in your household is going well. Would be good to catch up again with a chat.
Take care of yourself, cuz nobody else can (or will, IDGAF style). But Gaia will always GAF. We’re all here to see it out to the end, remember scribbling FF (Friends Forever) all over yearbooks? Well, we are reaching the forever moment, and that’s a main reason why Rob will continue to host this space until we get there, because friends don’t let friends go it alone.
Love and best to all.
This is a polycrisis and the end is not premature. We wish it were but the complexity is such that do not understand all the elements of collapse. It appears that the end is near but that is the end of modernity. We have entered the Age of Stupidity.
No collapse is premature. Perhaps you mean collapse earlier than you’d like?
MORT is an explanation for denial of humans but it isn’t the only one. Not that it matters a great deal, since humans can’t change it (partly because of their denial of denial).
CACTUS is the most important point. I’d like to see others discuss it, particularly in the consideration of a supposed energy transition.
Because of MORT, others wont discuss CACTUS, because discussing it rationally might challenge and change their internal beliefs, so best not to discuss it at all, usually with a hand wave of how the future is not yet set in stone or something similar.
yup, internal beliefs. that is a whole topic, see my other post in this thread. (i wish I could link one post to another, like a wiki hotlink!)
You can link to other comments. If you click the chain symbol at the top right corner of the comment to link to (it appears when you hover over the comment) a URL gets copied to the clipboard. You can paste the link in your new comment.