Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?→

Nafeez Ahmed, writing for the Guardian:

“A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common.””

Societies come and go. Ignoring the environment means they come and go faster.

Human population density drives extinctions→

Tim De Chant, reporting for Per Square Mile: 

“Sometimes there are scientific studies that seem to confirm the obvious. To wit: The more people that live in an area, the more species that go extinct.

No matter how superfluous it seems, it’s good that scientists undertake these studies, if only to confirm our suspicions, rule out potential confounding variables, or simply make the phenomenon feel more real. All three are the case with the recent paper on population density and animal extinctions. Jeffrey McKee, an anthropologist at the Ohio State University, first published on the relationship back in the early 2000s, and his latest confirms some of his earlier results and predictions.”

To have a meaningful discussion about improving our quality of living we must first talk about stabilizing our population.  Action may follow.