Dorothea Lange Sons of Negro tenant farmer, Granville County, North Carolina July 1939 This is the second installment of Nicole’s series on food security. Nicole Foss: In part one of this series, we looked at finance as a major causal factor in the development of food insecurity. The boom and bust cycles that result from over-financialization are, however, only one aspect of a food crisis already present for many, and looming for many more in the years to come. Finance
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Esther Bubley Room at war duration residence halls, Arlington Farms June 1943 On a day like this, when Bloomberg runs the hilarious and preposterous headline “Euro Periphery Emerges as Haven as Bonds Rise”, and markets are up because the Chinese government announces a 7.4% GDP growth number, which might as well be 4.7% for all we know given the opaqueness and rosy bubbly with which Beijing is known to “calculate” these numbers, let’s talk about something entirely different. And what
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NYWT & Sun Newspaper Fire in oil storage tanks, Texas City, Texas April 17, 1947 The latest IPCC report is out, and as predictable as clockwork the reactions are the same old same old lip service, and only that. ‘There is no time to lose’, ‘if we don’t act now, we’re too late’, yada yada. Go do some digging and look for quotes from 10, 20, 40 years ago and you won’t be able to tell the difference. And just
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Detroit Publishing Co Galveston Flood disaster cyclorama, Coney Island 1904 If there’s one thing that defines why we, and the world we live in, are doomed, it can be found – once more – in a recent spat of (leaked) reactions to the upcoming new IPCC report. We’ve come a long way since skeptics started budging in the way creationists demand equal time on the new Cosmos series – only more successful – and now we’re way past mere skepticism.
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William Henry Jackson Washington Bridge and High Bridge over the Harlem River 1890 There are choices forced upon us by mankind’s “progress” and “development” that closely resemble such metaphorical conundrums as Scylla and Charybdis, Morton’s fork, Sophie’s choice, or in this case pretty much literally the devil and the deep blue river. We, people of the era of progress, tend to deny the existence of such choices and conundrums, because we like to think that if only we put our
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I came upon this quote a few weeks ago in an interview that Der Spiegel had with Dennis Meadows, co-author of the Limits to Growth report published by the Club of Rome 40 years ago. Yes, the report that has been much maligned and later largely rehabilitated. But that's not my topic here, and neither is Meadows himself. It's the quote, and it pretty much hasn’t left me alone since I read it. Here's the short version: [..] … we
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Noah’s Ark – A Picture of Christ As many of you already know, I have written about economic, financial and industrial/environmental collapse on The Automatic Earth for a few years now. For all human beings who are still fortunate [or unfortunate] enough to exist on this Earth, these are issues of prime and imminent importance. We are now at least four years running into the start of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, which then morphed into generalized private and public debt
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Looking around at those… around me – family, friends, acquaintances and random faces in the crowd of apathy – the level of complacency is so concentrated I can taste it, yet I can’t even describe how bad it tastes. I’m not really talking about the understanding people lack about the numerous predicaments we face as a species – that’s definitely there too… but what I’m talking about is even worse. It’s the assumption that we can just go about our
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Ilargi: What follows is an elaborate contemplation by Alexander Aston, from whom we earlier published From Crisis to Crisis: Zimbabwe to Greece to Montana, on past, present and future of mankind and civilization, on collapse and rebirth. Alexander writes: "Civilization is the adaptation of humanity to its own presence". I took the liberty to strenghten that a little, and "slightly" change it into "Collapse Is Humanity Adapting To Its Own Presence". If we can agree that all civilizations MUST collapse,
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A few days ago, I posted an article on how the Brazilian government has sacrificed the lush Amazon Rainforest for short-term economic profits over the course of a few years. Today, I’d like to share more “good news” about the global environment that probably went unnoticed by many people (h/t Jaded Prole). About two months ago, Nature published a report by a group of 21 scientists who arrived at a very startling conclusion – Earth’s ecosystems are heading for an
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