I'm having a hard time determining whether the environment has been on the decline since then and social media was jut less ubiquitous or if things have actually gotten worse. I guess I'm just having trouble gauging the state of things and wondering if everything has been amplified by the internet and is still somewhat the same as it was 10 or so years ago. But what do you think
It was more optimistic in 2011. There were stories about loss of permafrost, oceans rising faster than expected, deepwater horizon, etc. But it was always bookended with "if we act now we can stop this." There was also a lot of optimism around Tesla (I know lol) and the Obama admin's investments in solar and organic agriculture. We thought that it was plausible that by now we'd all be driving solar cars.
Now it's more of a "bad things are happening. No one's doing anything. How do we live in the ruins?"
Imo Desert, Staying with the Trouble and The Mushroom at the End of the World are all required reading now.
I guess that makes me wonder how far they can keep pushing the "point of no return"
It seems like they've said that we can still prevent utter catastrophe if we act now for like 5-6 years...
They used to use the doomer estimates to convince people it was urgent, now they use the conservative estimates to convince people there's still time.
That said, 6 years with Biden at the helm is as good as 2 years. I think our only chance is a mass movement forcing a constitutional convention like in Chile, or a catastrophic market failure.
The "doomer" estimates they used to use still ended up not as bad as the reality tbh. We're on the very high end of the curve
One of my favorite anthropology texts I've read in a while. Tsing has an incredibly refreshing way of looking at capitalism where ecological processes are a necessary part of the picture, including the processes that change with environmental destruction.
It's a good way of thinking about the world when trying to organize against capitalism or understand what's happening, but it doesn't offer anything very actionable.
No, they were not common, outside of far-right 4chan circles. And even then they were based on some fictional anti-semitic government takeover, not global warming (which most denied)
https://i.imgur.com/2qR8PCM.png
I started getting into r/collapse around 2017 or 18, which has a measurable uptick compared to the 2016 days. By 2019 I was browsing it a lot, and of course COVID made it go mainstream.
So the answer is no, the collapse stuff started around 2016 for the extremely early adopters, then gradually grew through 2019, then exploded post-COVID
Interestingly, the subreddit only exploded after April of this year, it was mostly cool during 2020.
What astonishes me is that people will still vehemently defend capitalism even as they see it render the earth uninhabitable in real time.
No. I haven’t seen this level before. Other than just periodically after weather events
I lived in CA at the time, which burned frequently, but the "whole bay area air being completely unbreathable and the sky glowing an angry red for days at a time" hadn't occurred before. We knew the ozone was weak and ice was melting, but we didn't have any symptoms that we felt, we just knew things were getting worse. Now it's not theoretical
I feel like I was the only one posting doom shit back in '11. Or at least amongst my group of friends. God, I wonder why no one invited me to parties :curious-marx:
