There’s an enormous omission being made. This week is a critical time to raise it.
Human culture is part of a physical world, and we are neglecting discussion of the entire spectrum of physical causes of the collapse.Despite the rather long list of direct physical causes we are all discussing ONLY the cultural causes. That’s crazy.
we are neglecting discussion of the entire spectrum of physical causes of the collapse
It looks like a matter of preferring to only talk about familiar subjects. It keeps those subjects unfamiliar, of course, amounts to disguised hand wringing to avoid learning, causing the calamities we then fail to see because of it.
There are several I could mention, but one large group come under the heading of “ever bigger plans” for “ever shrinking resources”. You’d think that would be a simple concept to grapple with. Once you pick the low hanging fruit it’s a stretch to get any fruit.
As any doctor learns, it always takes patience to understand the patient. If you don’t pay attention to these issues no one learns to become comfortable discussing them. For the physical causes influencing cultural events there is a deficit of neglect to overcome.
The most direct and immediate physical cause contributing to the collapse was what we saw as the global commodity price spiral that began in about 2003. It was set off by the world hitting a surprisingly inflexible physical limit, resource supply becoming inflexible in responding to demand.
The leading factor was an unexpected lack of response at the well head. The world petrol industry became unable to pump increasing amounts of oil. Emerging fields failed to materialize as fast as declining fields ran short, and “peak oil” occurred. Nature started rationing the supply of low hanging fruit in a way the industry was not expecting and we got caught flat footed.
Our over leveraged economy, with the help of speculators, drove prices through the roof. That price spiral, with commodity prices growing at 25%/yr, constituted a “law of unlimited price” violating all the assumptions of economics. THAT was the ‘black swan’ everyone casually discusses, and “what went wrong with the numbers”. That was caused by nature, not malfeasance, except for why we all got caught off guard by it.
We live in a physical world, and seem to do our best to ignore that wherever possible. For connecting the physical with the cultural I could help a great deal. You should use me.