Surviving in the Tough Times Ahead

Ian Sample’s “Billions face food shortages, study warns”, based on findings by researchers at Washington and Stanford Universities, points out some of the progressively difficult conditions that will likely lead to widespread starvation in times ahead. Its conclusions fit well with ones posed in Paul Chefurka’s “World Energy and Population Trends to 2100″ and “Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in the Room”.

Such reports, certainly, are cause for alarm and dismay. This is because, with increasing credibility, they warn that humankind is quickly approaching critical choices in terms of whether we, collectively, want to undertake the necessary modification to shape the world to reasonably serve life in the future or plan to bequeath a hell onto the generations of people and other life forms that come after ours.

Obviously, ethically prone people — ones strongly oriented towards cooperation, support of justice and altruism, as well as ones at the opposite end of the spectrum — extremely self-centered, greedy, ruthless brutes, can make out in good times, the moments of abundance and plenty. However, the lean periods, ones in which there is competition over dwindling resources (i.e., contention over a finite supply of food, territory, water, oil, etc.), all but guarantee that the individuals and groups with the most power will prevail over their weaker counterparts and there are only two main routes to escape the pending conflict.

Smirking Chimp