When Technology Fails: How to Survive the Long Emergency

By Brianne Goodspeed , Chelsea Green Publishing. Posted January 30, 2009.

If technology collapses totally, we will probably take many of the earth's ecosystems down with us in our final efforts to keep business-as-usual running, but my guess is that most humans will die off after the collapse of technology, and then nature will rebound quite well within a couple hundred years. Good news for nature -- bad news for us!

BG: OK, this is my last question and I'm sorry, but I can't not ask you. Remember Y2K? Is it possible that you're advocating preparedness for scenarios that will never happen, except in the case of localized natural disasters? Is there any part of you that thinks that, actually, for the most part things will be just fine, and mostly we'll just keep on keeping on in the future pretty much the way we've kept on keeping on until now?

MS: No. I never thought that Y2K would amount to much since it was all about a silly little computer glitch, and the private sector had too much at stake to not implement some relatively simple software fixes. This was a simple problem with a simple solution.

On the other hand, oil depletion, climate change, overpopulation and global ecological degradation are trends that have been foreseen by scientists for many years. These are real problems with difficult solutions. The implementation of these solutions will take major financial, resource and time commitments, coupled with huge shifts in public policies. Just because our scientists know this is happening does not mean we will be successful in changing our course and implementing the right solutions.

Take a look at New Orleans. For over 50 years, engineers had been warning politicians that the levies needed replacing. They warned that there was no way that the city's levies could withstand a direct hit from a storm like the hurricane that flattened the city of Galveston [Texas] in 1900, killing an estimated 8,000 people.

Some people might ask, "Mankind has been on this planet for many thousands of years, so how could things get so bad so quickly?" The answer lies with global population growth exacerbated by rapid industrialization and consumption that has effectively multiplied the effects of population growth many times over.

From the time when I was a kid in the 1960s and the Earth's population was 3 billion, it took only 40 more years for the planet to double again to reach a population of roughly 6 billion in the year 2000. It has been scientifically estimated that the global footprint of mankind exceeded the Earth's biocapacity in the mid-1980s, and that since that time we have been operating in an "overshoot" mode, meaning that we are consuming the planet's resources faster than they are regenerating.

Any scientist will agree that the continuation of this pattern is 100 percent guaranteed to result in collapse. So, if we do not change the way we do business on our planet, we will collapse and business will fail! Back in the mid 1800s, many millions of people decided that slavery was an evil whose time had passed, and they put Lincoln in power to end it. The world never would have defeated Hitler if it was No. 10 on the priority list.

"Making the Shift to Sustainability" will not be easy, but it is doable, and it is much better than the alternative. Shouldn't saving the planet be at the top of our world's priority list?

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