{"id":3501177,"date":"2024-05-14T17:08:12","date_gmt":"2024-05-14T17:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3501177"},"modified":"2024-06-18T22:41:03","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T22:41:03","slug":"going-sane-in-a-crazy-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2024-05-14\/going-sane-in-a-crazy-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Going Sane in a Crazy World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly everyone occasionally describes the human world as \u201ccrazy.\u201d And, there\u2019s plenty of anecdotal evidence that, as a species, we are indeed a little batty\u2014from the often-indecipherable instructions on electronic products to the fact that you can\u2019t get a job without experience, but can\u2019t get experience without a job. However, humanity\u2019s most glaring symptom of actual collective insanity is surely its unswerving drive toward self-destruction. <\/span><\/p>

For decades we\u2019ve been overshooting sustainable levels of population, resource use, and pollution. In the 19<\/span>th<\/span> and 20<\/span>th<\/span> centuries, sources of cheap, concentrated, and storable energy\u2014fossil fuels\u2014enabled humanity to develop new technologies that, in turn, made it possible for us to travel further and faster, produce more food to feed an expanding population, and manufacture a stupefying array of new products. The rich got richer, most people got more comfortable, and the human population ballooned from 1 billion to 8 billion. The economy became a thing to be measured and studied; growth was the new goal and sign of success. <\/span><\/p>

However, Earth\u2019s supply of raw materials and ability to absorb wastes has not grown; indeed, expanding our population and economy just means depleting resources and polluting nature faster. One result seems to overshadow many others: the functioning of Earth\u2019s life-support systems is now threatened more than at any time in thousands, if not millions of years primarily due to fossil-fueled climate change. <\/span><\/p>

The consequences of our adoption of consumerist, growth-seeking industrialism will ultimately be a crash\u2014hopefully only partial and temporary\u2014of society and nature. That\u2019s not a crystal-ball prophecy; it\u2019s a mathematical near-certainty given the fundamental contradiction between the ways in which ecosystems work and the ways modern industrial societies work. In fact, the crash has already started (via climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss) and will play out over the remainder of this century and possibly longer. <\/span><\/p>

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Individual psychological resilience is valuable for its own sake. But it may also be essential to the bigger and more important project of creating a human world that\u2019s actually sane\u2014i.e., one that serves the long-term survival of our species within a healthy ecosphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128248,"featured_media":3501179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":true,"footnotes":""},"categories":[252007,79720],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3501177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-resilience-plus","category-society"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3501177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128248"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3501177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3501177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3501179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3501177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3501177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3501177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}