I absolutely hate, hate, HATE how software environments are often called "ecosystems".
An ecosystem is a living organic structure on a living planet (more specifically, Earth, since we haven't found any other living planets yet), made from all kinds of organisms -- bacteria, archaea, fungi, all kinds of arthropods from tiny mites to big beetles and bumblebees, and far too few vertebrates nowadays because of the fucking Industrial Age. We've been ruining ecosystems at high speed ever since Columbus kickstarted colonialism, but then the steam engine came, constantly accelerating the growth our cancer of an economy, and after WW2 we started the afterburner. We've been destroying ecosystems at supersonic speed for eight decades, we can see them fall apart before our eyes. People have been seing the living world around them getting killed since the dirty old mills of the Black Country, and since the 1960s, a growing green movement all over the planet has been trying to stop the madness. And we aren't really very good at it, are we? This entire mess of a civilisation is running out of control, collapse has probably already begun, we're in ecological overshoot like Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair. Capitalism won't last much longer because it becomes dysfunctional when there isn't any real growth left, and we have not only reached the global growth limits, we have exceeded them, which means that the economy will eventually shrink by more than half, which isn't a recession or even a Second Great Depression, it is an utter collapse of the economy. If those of us who survive that can somehow built a sustainable type of economy from the leftovers, this industrial civilisation might not collapse completely just yet, entering a time of slow decline instead, and an entire new civilisation might grow in some other parts of the world, maybe in Africa, maybe in Asia, and spread across the world as the European type of civilisation slowly vanishes. Who knows? Right now, we need to learn how to survive in times of collapse. And the best way to do so is to learn how to do things properly which will still be relevant when there are no more computers or big factories or giant office buildings.

I am part of an ecosystem, as I am one of many, many animals who live in this landscape. And like other animals, I need to eat some of the organisms who live here in order to survive. I'm a huge threat to every individual potato or chicken, yet my presence leads to the presence of more potatoes and chickens, which is one of all my interactions with the ecosystem. I can't do anything without my actions having consequences for the ecosystem of which I am but a tiny part. Some people today are as afraid of the ongoing global climate catastrophe as they should be, but only very few realise that the biodiversity crisis aka the Sixth Extinction is far worse and far more frightening.

And some IT guys who know fucking zilch about ecology have the bloody audacity to call some software environment an "ecosystem". I find it very annoying. Fucking techbros should think more and talk less.

#biodiversitycrisis #extinction #sixthextinction #globalwarming #climatecrisis #biospheredecline #capitalism #economicgrowth #limitstogrowth #overshoot #collapse #πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis #ecosystem

The climate goals are dead. The only way this planet stays below +2°C (or simply +2K) warming is if we can somehow artificially cool it with aerosol injection, and if we suddenly stop putting aerosols into our atmosphere, global warming will simply resume, so unless we can somehow remove a hilarious mass of carbon from our atmosphere, it will get hot no matter what.

However, that doesn't mean that we can just let reactionary politicians (including Merz and much of the current German government) decide that we can just keep going on as before, since we're not going to keep below the +2K line anyway. Every tonne of unburnt carbon matters, every tonne of carbon sequestered in the soil as biochar matters. But what also matters is that we stop looking at the #polycrisis as just a bunch of separate problems, we need to be aware of the whole shape and size of the monster instead of just looking at a single limb. If some alleged technological solution to climate change puts too much additional stress on already badly damaged natural systems (like ecosystems or biogeochemical cycles), it is not a viable solution because the climate isn't the only natural system we have been destabilising over the past few centuries since the steam engines changed everything. Every proposal for a solution to any component of the polycrisis must consider the whole picture, must take into account how it will affect the other component crises. We can't treat the economic woes caused by running into the global growth limits at full speed, the ongoing #BiodiversityCrisis aka the #SixthExtinction, the growing weather weirdness due to #GlobalWarming, the ecological troubles with #microplastics and with agricultural and industrial synthetic toxins killing all kinds of lifeforms, as separate problems that need separate solutions, but as symptoms of the sickness which is killing our entire civilisation.

We need to be prepared for things to fall apart faster than we can repair them. We need to understand that our high-tech civilisation has quite likely peaked already, and whether it slowly declines (leaving room for the birth of future civilisations that are radically sustainable right from the beginning) or whether it rapidly collapses, leaving the survivors (if any) on a planet utterly incapable of supporting complex civilisations for tens of thousands of years, maybe even a million years or more, depends on how fast we can stop this madness.

And the first thing we must stop is the global economy. It cannot grow anymore, it can only shrink, and now it needs to shrink as fast as possible until it gets small enough to be sustainable. I'm talking about the real economy, of course, not the one measured in money but the one measured in how much energy and raw materials it needs to process, and how much entropy it dumps onto the living world to swallow. It just can't stay at its current size; shrinking to a bit under half its current size won't be enough to make it sustainable, but unless it does, it simply cannot ever become sustainable. Growth is over, and the longer the economy even stays at its current size, the worse every part of the polycrisis gets. Market-based economies can't work properly unless they are growing, which means that we need a different type of economy, one that distributes resources according to the needs of the people instead of according to the numbers on their bank accounts.

Seriously, people, we need to get ready to switch to survival mode, but not like all those right-wing preppers who think that we need to fight one another for the last remaining resources, that kind of thinking leads straight into a #MadMax scenario. No, we need to switch into survival mode by helping one another so that as many as possible of us make it. If by the end of this century there are 4 billion humans left alive, it will be horrible, but it would be enough of us to build a halfway decent new world out of the rubble of the old one. If less than a billion are alive by then, there won't be enough gardeners to help all those damaged ecosystems heal. We won't need any fancy machines to fix this planet, we just need a lot of capable gardeners with rakes and shovels, we need capable foresters who can keep the forests alive by slowly replacing tree species that can't thrive under the new climate with others that can. We will most likely lose at least 50% of all the species that live today, but as highly intelligent omnivores, our chances of survival as a biological species is pretty high, even if many of us won't make it. If we let the biodiversity loss escalate any further, we will eventually hit a point where this planet loses 80% or more of its species, and in that case we'll go extinct because we're too big and heavy to survive something like that. Mammals will most likely still survive, but I don't think primates will. We need to dismantle Capitalism before it kills us all.
#πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #climatecrisis

People talk about #degrowth as if it were something that we can decide to do or not.
Bollocks!

The economy _will_ shrink no matter what we do. We have exceeded the planetary growth limits, the current size of the world economy--the real, actual existing economy of extraction, refinement, production, logistics, retail, consumption, maintenance, and eventually, waste management and recycling, of material things--is absolutely unsustainable, meaning that it won't be sustained for very much longer, and the longer we try to keep living like we do, the longer we try to maintain what counts as normality in our Industrial Age civilisation, the harder and deeper we will fall. Every day we maintain the economy at its current size (even if there is no more growth whatsoever), we are adding to the cumulative damage our global economy has been doing to the Earth's systems for hundreds of years.
Technological "progress" and economic "growth" (a malignant one, Capitalism is cancer of the economy) have been making things exponentially worse, and at some point in the 1920s or 1930s, things began to get really ugly. Environmental regulations in the richer parts of the world have kept a lot of it out of sight of all but the poor, but it is becoming harder and harder to maintain the illusion that collapse isn't happening, hasn't already begun.

Unfortunately, the collapse of systems of this size takes decades if it is extremely fast, much too slow for humans to instinctively understand. We can process it intellectually, but we cannot really feel it because it's not a predator trying to eat us, it is not an acute catastrophe triggering the survival instincts of aeons of vertebrate evolution, it is a process which is mostly very slow and gradual, until it isn't, until it erupts in a sudden catastrophe at a certain time and place.

Collapse won't happen in one single large catastrophe, it only does so in Hollywood. No, it will happen in an escalating number of smaller catastrophes, happening more often than we can manage. Collapse happens gradually if you look at it on a larger scale, but in the here and now, "normality" (or rather the simulation of it) persists until it suddenly doesn't, and then a lot of people die, a lot of infrastructure fails. Afterwards, "normality" returns for a while until the next event. Every time, there is a little more irreparable damage, and some things that used to "normal" before don't come back afterwards. Until suddenly nothing works anymore because the chaos exceeds the coping capacity of civilisation as a whole.

Degrowth is a way of dealing with a shrinking economy by making things that last "forever" (i.e., as long as possible) instead of ones that need to be replaced all the time. Degrowth could slow down our descent, but it won't stop it. Nothing and nobody will stop our descent, neither asteroid mining nor AI nor recycling. Of course degrowth also means that the demand for industrial labour will collapse, but then again, we will need entire armies of organic gardeners in order to try to slow down the #SixthExtinction. Helping the biosphere heal from all the damage caused by the age of the machines won't take much technology, mostly gardening tools we've had for thousands of years and plain manual labour, and a whole lot of knowledge about the local ecology of the place where you are, and meticulous observations to figure out how the local situation is shifting. We can't restore the old ecosystems because they're gone, the Earth that supported them doesn't exist anymore, it was a different planet before we changed it; instead we need to help the ecosystems to find a new configuration, one which works with whatever new local conditions arise. Some ecosystems are already damaged beyond repair, which means that the cultures that depend on them will end, as sad as it is. Most if not all tropical coral reefs will vanish, most if not all species of tropical corals will go extinct, and so will all the other tropical sea life that depends on them. There isn't much we can do about that anymore, the oceans are already too warm and too acidic.

Acknowledging the state of the planet isn't the same as giving up. Hope itself is a drug that keeps you calm when you should be panicking. Hope means that you nurture the illusion that somebody or something will fix everything and that it will all be fine in the end. Hope means _you_ don't need to do anything _right_now_. What we need is people who haven't got any hope left but a whole lot of anger, and who start doing what needs to be done, even if it means ending in jail or getting murdered.

#πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis

@aurochs @condret @carnage4life The problem is that we also can't increase the overall complexity of our systems any longer, and we won't even be able to sustain our current complexity much longer because of all the cumulative damage "we" (the people of the industrialised countries) have done to the Earth's systems within the last roughly 250 years, which will take at least tens of thousands of years to heal.
Don't trust economists, they don't even know about all the things the planet does for us for free, they don't live in the real world but in a ficticious universe where everything can be replaced with something else, and where the climate doesn't influence the economy very much because most of it takes place inside factory buildings. Even Marxist economists underestimate the economic impacts of the #BiodiversityCollapse aka the #SixthExtinction and the escalating #ClimateChaos all around us, and non-Marxist economists are generally lost and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Besides, economists tend to see the economy as something fundamental, while in the real world, it is a system of the highest order which only exists because of all the really fundamental systems underneath, and the fact that economists and their way of thinking about the world have gained utter control of the higher levels of politics is one of the reasons why everything is going to hell.

We are just primates like all the others, upright walking naked apes with huge swollen mutant brains that need a lot of fat and protein in order to function properly, and we should all panic because of all the primate populations that are collapsing all over the planet. This planet is rapidly becoming a much worse place for monkeys, and we're basically just mostly hairless monkeys wearing all kinds of artficial fur, it means that this planet is becoming a much worse place for US. I absolutely expect the human population to a billion or less within the next 150-200 years, we'll likely lose 2-3 billion within the coming 50 years. It might even be a billion more, that all depends on how long the rich countries can stop climate migrants from crossing their borders; the sooner nation-states just collapse and cease to exist, the more people will be able to migrate successfully, and the fewer will die.

#Capitalism won't end in a glorious proletarian revolution, it will end in its own #collapse and that of all the civilisations it has permeated, and the reason for this is that, even if Marx didn't want to hear it, the basic ideas of Malthus and Darwin weren't wrong at all. There are limits to everything, and while it is possible to overshoot them for a while, doing so for a prolonged time inevitably ends in collapse. Humankind has been in overshoot for decades, and it's getting worse. With a saner economy than the malignant growth that is Capitalism, we might be able to feed 10 billion for a while, but the damage we have already done means that we won't be able to feed those 10 billion people forever anymore, and therefore, our numbers _will_ shrink. Everything that might be done to stop this collective madness would immediately plunge the world economy into chaos and make all the rich people much poorer, which is why they will do everything they can to install some kind of fascist or neo-feudal system before that happens. They don't care if six billion people die as long as they an stay filthy rich for a little while longer, and many even think they can become the cyberlords of the neo-feudal cyberpunk nightmare world. What they don't understand is that the cyberpunk world itself is still an early stage of the ongoing collapse, and that it won't end until all that's left is a bunch of post-collapse tribes, if we don't just go extinct altogether.

tl;dr: There are hard limits. We have exceeded those limits. We have been damaging all kinds of natural systems on which we depend, like the biosphere and the climate. Chaos is escalating and will continue to escalate no matter what we do, and the behaviour of all kinds of complex systems will become much harder to predict, much less reliable.

#πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis

Some people hope that #GlobalWarming and regional cooling due to #AMOCcollapse might cancel each other out in Europe, but it is just as likely to combine into something worse, with +50°C heat waves in the hot half of the year, -50°C cold waves during the cold half of the year, and incredibly violent storms due to the enormous temperature gradients.

And we might have passed the tipping points already. We won't know until many years or even decades after the fact. Crossing the point of no return after which the system can only move in one direction doesn't come with any immediate consequences, so we don't have any way of knowing when we do.

We obviously have crossed some tipping points already, e.g., Arctic sea ice is going to vanish, the only question is how fast or slow. The world is already changing, and we have to adapt. However, in order to be even able to adapt, we need to keep the speed at which the world changes as low as possible, which means we need to stop doing what we have been doing for the past ~250 years (more or less; in many places of the world, it's been less than a hundred years) and act in a radically different manner, forming a connection to the living world of which we are an essential part instead of acting like we're something entirely different than and separate from nature.

#ClimateChange #ClimateChaos #ClimateCatastrophe #πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis

Wenn ich in den Garten gucke, sehe ich direkt live und in Farbe das #Artensterben überall um mich herum, und zwar in Form des #Biodiversitätskollaps und auch des Rückgangs der Insektenbiomasse am Beispiel der Schmetterlinge. Die Zahl der Schmetterlinge ist insgesamt in den letzten 45 Jahren (viel weiter kann ich mich nicht zurückerinnern, bin 50) deutlich zurückgegangen, und man sieht auch viel weniger unterschiedliche Spezies.

Ein Beispiel: Der Kleine Fuchs war früher häufig wie sonst irgendwas, vom Kleinen Tagpfauenauge sah man hingegen recht wenig. Heute ist der Kleine Fuchs schon am Aussterben, wenn nicht irgendwie eine drastische Trendumkehr kommt, und das Tagpfauenauge ist ein relativ häufiger Schmetterling, obwohl es auch davon nicht wirklich mehr gibt als früher, die Art scheint nur ökologisch robuster zu sein.

Ich sehe auch einen Rückgang der Fluginsekten beim Fahrradfahren: Ich verschlucke von Jahr zu Jahr immer weniger Insekten.
Früher habe ich im Sommer fast jeden Tag 2-3 Insekten verschluckt, heute verschlucke ich vielleicht 5-6 im ganzen Sommer, und das nicht, weil ich weniger mit dem Rad unterwegs wäre; das Fahrrad ist seit meiner Kindheit mein Hauptverkehrsmittel, und ich bin zudem Automobilismusverweigerer, habe keinen Führerschein, nie eine Fahrschule von innen gesehen.

Ich fürchte, daß wir sehr bald an den Punkt kommen werden, wo dieser Planet ziemlich schlagartig nur noch eine Kopfzahl von Menschen ernähren können wird, welche drastisch unter der jetzigen Weltbevölkerung liegt. Wenn wir ein massenhaftes Verhungern verhindern wollen, müssen wir zusehen, wie man aus Mikroorganismen, die sich leicht in Tanks züchten lassen, halbwegs erträgliche Menschennahrung macht.

Soylent Green spielte 2022, weil das damals 50 Jahre in der Zukunft lag, vermutlich lag der Film so etwa 10-25 Jahre zu früh, aber der ganze Scheiß mit Treibhausklima und umgekippter Biosphäre ist in dem Film schon sehr gut drin, das ist genau das, was jetzt über uns drüberrollt.

Ich mein ja echt mal, Hollywood ey, die kapitalistische Traumfabrik überhaupt, hat über das letzte halbe Jahrhundert hinweg immer wieder sehr deutliche dystopische kapitalistische Alpträume hervorgebracht, denn der Kapitalismus verkauft auch die Warnung vor sich selbst, wenn's Geld bringt. Jeder Mensch im mittleren Alter hat wenigstens durch kulturelle Osmose etwas mitbekommen von Soylent Green und Blade Runner und Mad Max und die Jugger und so weiter und so fort, der Club of Rome und die Grenzen des Wachstums. Ich habe es schon alles mitbekommen, als ich ganz klein war, und im Gegensatz zu meiner Umgebung habe ich es sofort begriffen.

Dieser verdammte toxische Optimismus! Meine Fresse, als ich klein war, hätten wir noch eine wirkliche Chance gehabt, ein halbwegs technologisch komplexes Zeitalter um etliche Jahrhunderte zu verlängern in seiner Lebensdauer, aber wir hätten unsere gesamte Weltwirtschaft radikal umstellen müssen, und das gleich zweimal, im Osten und im Westen. Jetzt sind wir an dem Punkt, wo der Niedergang der Zivilisation längst unvermeidlich ist und eine noch viel radikalere Umstellung nur noch mit sehr viel Glück ausreicht, um ein menschliches Massensterben zu verhindern und den Totalkollaps der Zivilisation zu einem langsamen Niedergang über mehrere Jahrhunderte hinweg auszudehnen.

Was wir brauchen, ist keine noch im Experimentalstadium befindliche Technologie, die dann plötzlich all unsere Probleme löst, mit noch mehr Energie und noch mehr Produktion und Konsum und mehr Geld für alle und blablabla. Was wir brauchen, ist eine völlig andere Art und Weise zu leben. Wir müssen uns wieder bewußtmachen, daß wir immer noch Tiere sind und immer sein werden, und daß das Land uns nicht gehört, sondern daß wir Teil des Landes sind, wo immer wir wohnen mögen, daß wir ebenso Teil des örtlichen Ökosystems sind wie alles, was dort sonst noch lebt, von den Bakterien und Milben und Würmern im Boden und den Käfern und Raupen auf den Pflanzen bis hin zu den Vögeln und Füchsen und Mardern und was da sonst noch so lebt. Unsere Zivilisation ist gefährlich, weil sie die Illusion schafft, irgendwie außerhalb der Natur zu stehen, und die Natur zeigt uns immer brutaler, daß dem nicht so ist.

#polykrisis #6thExtinction #SixthExtinction #CapitalismIsADeathCult