The Simple Story of Collapse's Inevitability
Rachel Donald, on her podcast Planet: Critical, asks every guest, “Why is the world in crisis?” Guests, in their answers, understand “world” to mean different things.
A solid appreciation for the dynamics among all six “realms” pictured below is the basis for genuine “collapse-awareness”.
Using the terms and distinctions from my previous post for greater clarity, I’ll walk through how I arrived at the realization that the Werld has a fundamentally disharmonious relationship with Earth and therefore a necessarily short tenure.
This is something I come back to, after interacting with “normies” so often that I doubt myself - Am *I* crazy? (No, they’re the cult members.)
Yes, I renamed the Spectrosphere the Noösphere! A friend clued me in that there’s already a name for the concept. Refer back to my previous post for “realm descriptions”.
The images above are stills. If we could “hit PLAY” on them, they would reveal certain physical and chemical interactions, some supportive, some hostile. We can also “play the tape forward” (a phrase from Alcoholics Anonymous, meaning anticipating where actions lead) to understand what drive these events and what kinds of results these interactions have over time.
Causes
It starts with what I’ll call Plunder.
🥊 The Werld seizes land from the Biosphere, for its Domestophere, increasing the Domestisphere’s available calories. This allows for population increase, and the Domestiphere makes manifest that possibility. This population boost inspires the Werld to claim even more planetary surface area from the Biosphere. This amounts to an amplifying feedback loop. (Counterarguments that involve technological solutions fall under the next glove-bullet.)
🥊 The Werld seizes material from the Biosphere and Lithosphere to produce (and in the modern era, power) its Technosphere.
🥊 Even the Werld’s sounds, scents, light and electromagnetic waves are a continuous, deadly disturbance.1
🥊 Later, as Werld converts the materials that it seized from Earth into more of the Domestosphere and Technosphere, some materials gets sloughed off (e.g. manufacturing byproducts, emissions from combustion). This poisons Earth’s land, water and air.
Effects
Next, Earth strikes back - but only in the sense that a rake “strikes back” if you step on it. The following phenomena are the natural consequences of the Werld’s activity.
💥 The depleted Lithosphere and Biosphere “withhold” materials that the Technosphere requires for maintenance, let alone expansion. Metals, minerals and coal/methane/oil get are no longer easily-accessible and high-grade. The Werld gradually becomes unable to produce and transport goods or provide services for its Domestosphere.
💥 The depleted Biosphere “walks out”. Without Earth’s complex cast of pollinators, prey and predators, and decomposers, the Domestisphere’s plants fail to grow and “waste” accumulates, leads to a rise in disease.
💥 The Abiosphere turns toxic and unstable. Uncooperative weather (even just slightly unusual temperatures or precipitation patterns) prevents Domestophere plants from thriving. It also expedites the breakdown of the Technosphere, which Werld-humans are already struggling to keep running. Chemicals like antibiotics, plastics and PFAs lead to a rise in superbugs, cancer, endocrine disruption and infertility.
I provide real-life evidence of these Effects here:
Because of the damage that they inflicted on the Lithosphere, Abiosphere and Biosphere, Werld-humans become unable to meet their basic survival needs: thermoregulation, water and food. They also become more exposed to toxins and pathogens.
Evidence that this is beginning is here:
Pictured below: the Werld engaging in further Plunder to “save” … Earth? the Werld?
What if the Werld suddenly stopped the Plunder?
Ground rules: Assume no further Plunder and no further activities that release pollution into the air, soil and water. (This is tricky. I’ll probably have to make some exceptions.) This includes -but isn’t limited to- a ban on seizing materials from the Lithosphere (coal, methane, oil) and burning any more of what is already in possession.
USA-Werld’s “powered-Technosphere”(the machinery that needs to be “animated” in some way to service its purpose, whereas an asphalt road doesn’t require fuel combustion or electricity to serve its purpose) would be cut to 2% functionality.2 No Werld-nation would get anywhere near even 20%.3 And without being allowed to Plunder for more metals and minerals or burn our oil inventory, no one would be able to produce more “clean” infrastructure.
Meanwhile, whereas the Biosphere is regenerative (replaces itself on its own), the Technosphere is degenerative.4 No Plunder means very limited maintenance (try restoring a city of crumbling high-rises with manpower alone), and the Technosphere will start to deteriorate. This includes the asphalt roads that were able to serve their purpose without being “animated” as well at the “clean” infrastructure that was keeping 2% of powered-Technosphere online.
Furthermore, if Werld stops occupying land, reserving it for Werld-plants and preventing most Biosphere creatures from living and eating there, its Domestiphere would have far less to eat. Or even if it simply held onto some portion of what it’s currently guarding, maintaining such a high Domestisphere population without Werld-medicine (which it wouldn’t be manufacturing or transporting…) and without functional Werld-plumbing (much of which we wouldn’t be powering) would lead to widespread disease and die-off.
Without a Technosphere and Domestisphere, there can be no Noösphere. Biosphere members have culture (taught behavior patterns, some practical and some for sheer enjoyment) but it isn’t exactly like the Noösphere.
Harmonious cells?
I recently came across the screenshot below, accompanying a substack post that conjectures:
Unlike genes, there is no objective, neutral way to observe the ideas in people’s minds & their evolution. This project is impossible to pull off without reshaping human civilization. But this is a feature, not a bug: it has the potential to steer the collectives who participate. Towards the best possible future, and away from collapse.
Who gets to steer humanity? It’s the same answer to: “which cell in the human body gets to steer it?” - it’s all of them, all of us.
The bigger issue (beyond the isolated one of inter-human cooperation) are the facts about how Werld-humans are interacting with the whole of the Lithosphere, Abiosphere and Biosphere - all of which represent cells in Earth’s body. This is the third time in Earth’s history that some organisms have kicked their collective metabolism into high gear. (The previous two instances were The Great Dying and the Late Devonian mass extinction - the subtopics of next week’s post!). The Werld-human collective (in collaboration with is Technosphere and inspired by its Sprectrasphere) is replacing everything with *itself* and refashioning the entire planet/host. That’s how cancer cells behave, hence the name of Tom Murphy’s series of 18 videos/essays, Metastatic Modernity.
Key Insights
✔️ Plunder inevitably entails Causes.
✔️ Those Causes inevitably have Effects.
✔️ An end to Plunder means an end to the Werld. The Werld, recognizing this and not wanting to bring about own end via cessation-of-action, keeps up the Plunder.
✔️ Werld is seeking loopholes: “be World without Plunder”, “Plunder without Effects”, “incur Effects but only ever for Earth and without harm to Werld”. Laws of physics, chemistry and biology dictate that none of these are possible.5 … Or we could just go with: Werld isn’t implementing these loopholes at a fast enough rate to offset rapidly mounting Effects. (Acceptance of the unbolded part makes the difference between grasping that the Werld was a dead-end endeavor all along and holding onto the conviction that it could’ve been perfected and lasted longer.)
✔️ There will come a point when the Effects prevent Plunder. An end to Plunder means an end to the Werld.
That’s how I determined that the Werld has a fundamentally disharmonious relationship with Earth and a necessarily short tenure.
Maybe those who disagree understand that the Werld wasn’t going to be permanent, and instead the disagreement is about severity and timing. In that case, I would point them to my posts linked above.
Other Noteworthy Implications
Despite the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’s spiffy report imagery, the Werld can’t “find a balance” with Earth. Matter can exist as Lithosphere/Biosphere or Technosphere/Domestosphere, and the Werld’s own “[short-term] survival imperative” dictates that it behave like a black hole, converting matter from the former to the latter.
What occurs between the Werld and Earth is the main action. It has the ultimate power to determine what occurs within the Werld, positive or negative, and it does so every day. We could solve all of the Werld’s internal problems, and the external ones would remain, irreconcilable with the Werld’s operations.
Generally, Werld-humans are raised in a (somewhat literal) bubble and fed censored messages about what the Werld is up to. Many of them inhabit spaces that already got converted from Earth to Werld, so it feels “normal”. And there’s plenty happening within the Werld to distract them. They can go their entire lives without thinking much about Earth, let alone understanding it; without realizing that the war-of-conversion is ongoing at the “frontlines”; and without understanding what it means for Werld’s fate.
Recap
Why is the Werld in crisis? Because its emergence and persistence inevitably entails crisis.
If Werld succeeds in its war against Earth, it faces oblivion. If Werld fails in its war against Earth, it faces oblivion.
Not tomorrow. But, for example, John Gowdy figures that possibly by 2100 CE and definitely by 2200 CE, large-scale grain agriculture (a prerequisite to complex civilizations) will have become impossible. Taking 10,000 BCE as the start of Werld-humans’ systematic takeover, this means that you and I are alive during the omnicidal campaign’s final 0.02%.
The Lithosphere, Abiosphere and even (somewhat later) the Biosphere existed long before the Werld showed up. They’ve undergone transformation before and will persist (definitely true of the Lithosphere and Abiosphere, and I’d bet true of the Biosphere) for a few billion more years until the Sun consumes them. It’s the Werld that showed up recently, doesn’t play nice and therefore can’t last long.
See Chapter 13 of Ed Yong’s “An Immense World”
The Honest Sorcerer blog has a whole post about this, “Musing on the Nature of Technology”
Max Wilbert touched upon this in his recent talk/post, “Technological Somnambulism and the Failure of the Scientific Imagination.” He says around the 19-minute mark,
“The idea that green technology will make industrial civilization sustainable is, as Carl Sagan would say, … an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. And that evidence does not actually exist. … The idea of a sustainable industrial civilization is theoretical... It only exists in fiction and in models on computers… In the real physical world, all the evidence shows that industrial civilization is not currently obviously sustainable and can probably never be sustainable.”
^The difference between models/fiction and the real physical world implies that the models must be omitting key details.
Tom Murphy writes at length about why it is impossible to keep the Werld running. Here’s a quote that I love from his post “The Ball Comes to Rest” -
“Given the multi-layer, parallel concerns all pointing to a temporary modernity, it would seem to put the burden of proof that ‘the unsustainable can be sustained’ squarely on the collapse-deniers. The default position is that unsustainable systems fail; that non-ecological modes lack longevity; that unprecedented and extreme departures do not become the rule; that no species is capable of going-it alone. Arguing the extraordinary obverse demands extraordinary evidence, which of course is not availing itself.”
I'm a reader of THS, Hagens, Un-denial, Catton, Dowd etc and while I agree with all of the meaning of your text and think the six-spheres model is uniquely useful, I think the description of the lithosphere and atmosphere's response as 'withholding' is a harmful misstep that can confuse newer collapse-aware people. The idea that their stocks of assets are degraded and transformed into less-ordered forms which are of a lower quality to the other spheres (including e.g. the lithosphere being less useful to the atmosphere for accomodating weathering demand, anthropocentrism is entirely optional) is a far more salient descriptor that people find easier to resonate with in what I've seen.
Do you have a gift for writing about this sort of thing or do you synthesize and articulate on all topics this well? Im always impressed by your posts. Sometimes a little depressed but mostly impressed.