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The original was posted on /r/collapse by /u/kiwittnz on 2023-11-06 07:45:00.
I have always considered myself attuned to global trends affecting us humans. Significant events have had a big impact on me over the last few decades. However, I feel I need to clarify, why I do not care any more. You could say I have been heart-broken over the lack of any real global unified effort to address a number of issues affecting us. I will now detail them as follows;
Population
This is arguably the root cause of many of the other causes affecting and going to affect us in the coming years. I read, in the 1970s, that population growth was exponential and was going to have a major impact on many things. These include, increasingly limited resources, even limiting our ability to make enough alternative sources of energy production and storage. Other resources, like water, arable land and even fish stocks are also in reducing amounts.
With growing populations, many of our migrations can be traced to wars and civil wars, can be traced to available resources. I believe the authors of ‘Limits to Growth’ have deduced this with their computer modelling in the 1970s as well.
In the near future, many developing nations will eventually reach western levels of consumption of resources, which will compound the impact of growing populations.
Pollution
This is arguably the main impact of us on the planet as whole. We generate so much rubbish from our consumer society, despite our failing recycling attempts (much of which is sent to developing nations to process). So we have air pollution leading to climate change, land pollution leading to less arable land and ecological destruction of habitats for native animals, water pollution leading to reductions in sea life.
Climate Change
As most of us here no climate change is already here, and according to ‘Father of Global Warming Alarm’ Hansen, it is already accelerating faster than the climate models have predicted. We are going to see impacts foreseen many decades earlier than expected. While weather events have always been happening, their impacts are going much larger than before. We will have heat waves, floods, storms, etc much more severe and maximum temperature will continue to be broken each and every year.
The UN IPCC has warned of the dangers for many decades now, but despite regular COP conferences each year, the actions by governments have been little more than ‘lip service’ to addressing climate change. In the words of Greta Thunberg, too much “Blah, Blah, Blah”, and she is right!
Sustainable Development
The UN proposed Sustainable Development Goals to try to ease some problems above as part of their Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030 projects. However, many of these goals are not tracking fast enough while problems grow. So while we have development, it is not sustainable, and we would need more than two planets to sustain us into the future according to the WWF (As an aside, maybe that is why Elon Musk thinks a colony on Mars may help, whereas I think it will just spread our problems there too).
United Nations
A misnomer, if ever there was one. There has been hardly a peaceful year since its formation, and the impacts of war on millions if not billions of people has been substantial. I had hoped at the end of the Cold War (symbolised by the collapse of the Berlin Wall), we were headed in the right direction, and it brought tears of joy to my eyes. How wrong was I? We all know about the conflicts that continued in other parts of the world.
In addition, the UN Security Council has failed to address many issues, due to the power of permanent member’s veto right.
While I endorse the ideal of UN Declaration of Human Rights, much of the world are living without these in their countries. A sad life for many. Weirdly, the UN even appointed one of the least likely country (Iran), to head its UNHR forum … SMH!
Scientist Warnings
As mentioned above the Limits of Growth, authored by the Club of Rome, and Hansen, were joined in 1992 and again 25 years later by scientists giving warnings to take action to address these issues. I even signed the 2017 warning.
Sadly, again, the world did not take enough action.
So why, I don’t care any more.
Sadly, I was an optimist for the future in my younger years. I thought we would eventually work together to solve these problems. But coinciding with the growth of problems, we also had a rise in individualism as opposed to community responsibility. We can see this in rising poverty, crime rates, social division, identity, adversarial politics in individual countries.
I wanted to try to make things better, by volunteering to help people solve their problems, feed them via food banks, and budget their money. I also was a member of a political party to try to make a difference on a national level. However, all this did was show me how bad the situation is and how sloe the political systems are.
All this has led to me focusing only on things I enjoy in my personal life, in the few decades I now have left to live. I will try to ensure my immediate siblings and their children are getting prepared accordingly for the coming years.
So what now
I only wish more people are aware of what is coming, but they are more absorbed with meeting their daily lives to have the time to think about of the future. I only ask that we collapse-aware people are ready for them when they ask questions about why is ‘such-and-such’ happening, and give them a good explanation.
NOTE: I have probably failed to mention many of the other problems facing us, but it only reinforces my view.