Are you supposed to be OK right now?- Part 1

Understanding our place on the curve of global overshoot --- [Estimated reading time: 10 min.]

“How are you doing?”

This question has become harder and harder to answer over the course of the last three months.

I am fine, I’m fed, I’m comfortable, I’m in a good and stable relationship, I and everyone I care about is healthy.

However the world around me is not fine.

It all has to with this graph I first saw in animal physiology when studying population overshoot.

This graph looks confusing because of all the numbers, but it’s actually a very simple and intuitive parable.

In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt decided he wanted to protect the "finest deer herd in America." and created the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve.

The preserve banned hunting, while the forest service decimated the deer’s local predators.

So the population of deer exploded right? Well that depends on your timeline.

In the short term, yes absolutely, deer populations grew exponentially. But they also collapsed suddenly even faster than their growth trajectory. Why?

Again, it’s a very intuitive and obvious answer - infinite growth cannot happen in a finite space. Eventually the deer ran out of local resources (food) and their population had to scale back to be in balance with what their resources at hand could sustain (most of them starved).

But there’s something not intuitive here too - there are consequences for the hubris of organisms that outgrow the ecological system, shown by the dashed line in the center of the graph.

The upper limit for how much of any species can thrive in a certain area is called the carrying capacity. When a species overshoots it’s local carrying capacity it begins to irrevocably damage the area’s total carrying capacity by consuming the lands resources faster than the ecosystem can replenish them. The delta between the 10,000 deer that remained in 1940 versus the 30,000 that could have remained if the herds consumption was managed properly is a conservative metric for the damage caused by overshoot.

So by now you’re groaning right? We all know where this is going.

We’re clearly the fucking deer.

Do I have to say more? I don’t think so. Look at the exponential growth in our population, look at the growth in the deer’s population.

”But Jordan”, you might say, “everyone is freaking out about depopulation and degrowth right now. Our population is supposed to level out.”

Yeah, look at the second half of the deer’s graph.

I think we’re coming back down the curve, and everything is not going to be ok

Like David Lauterwasser in his piece “We are living in the Good Old Days of tomorrow” I am sensing another shift change in our history.

I would argue the first in my lifetime was 2008, it would be where I would place an x in our graph that marks a warning something was wrong with the overall health of the population. I would say that 2008 was the first time that the real economy being in a state of decline since the 1970s began impacting the financial economy we actually pay attention to and report on the news.

The next x is in 2019 with Covid. Up until this point collapse awareness is still a distant reality to the majority of the first world because everyone born after World War 2 hadn’t experience the symptoms of collapse that affect your everyday life. We had an inkling then that the next generation wouldn’t be as well off as their parents, but discussing the possibility for a total collapse of the global order by 2050 was still seen as alarmist.

Then COVID and the past four years gave everyone a collective experience of an actual, life-threatening, collapse and how our institutions would deal with it.

If COVID was the plot of a hollywood movie the nations best experts would have come together to eradicate the virus, save millions of lives and show that human ingenuity, grit and righteousness can overcome even the worst that mother nature throws at us.

Instead they handled the problem just like the 2008 financial crash. Large government subsidies to the rich in order to stabilize their lifestyles even though it meant a lower quality of life for the rest of the populace.

Don’t own a house? Too bad, now people that have houses are set for life and you’ll never afford one.

Don’t have a serious foothold in the equities markets? The price is already inflated and returns will now begin to diminish for the foreseeable future.

Still building your nest egg? Tough, AI is gobbling up the service jobs that sustained the upper middle-class so meritocratic mobility has just gotten even harder.

Retired without much wiggle room? Nope, the total net worth required to retire just changed because the federal government used it’s power to prop up the assets of the rich at the cost of causing inflation for everyone.

And the best part of all this is that the government didn’t actually fix the problem. Despite the efforts of our best technocrats - Millions died, COVID continued (and continues) unabated. It’s not clear our governments efforts actually saved enough lives to offset the economic cost, and the economic fallout has caused a complete pendulum swing back to fascism in the western world - just ask New Zealanders, the French or American Democrats who are in a full panic as I write this.

It’s easy to explain collapse by just referencing the collective experience we all went through now. We disagree on why and who is to blame, but now instead of being told I’m “unrealistic and alarmist” when I contemplate collapse with a “normal” person, I’m more shoved aside.

It’s like we’ve all been diagnosed with cancer and many of us have decided it’s not worth using our last days to fight it or contemplate it. That, really, ignorance is bliss. That’s very different than when my friends and family were just telling me I’m wrong about imminent socio-economic global collapse.

Say, do you see how many X’s are at the very top of the overshoot curve?

Before this week I still imagined the next “x” in our graph to be at least in the next decade assuming that the United States could avoid electing Trump for a second term. Yes, people’s quality of life has decreased but that is an inevitable symptom of resource depletion and overconsumption. However, the actual day to day fixings of life have rebounded - no more empty shelves, normal healthcare is accessible again, people have complete freedom of movement and Western governments are at least pretending to care about the wants and needs of the middle class again.

Now I’m pretty sure that 2024 is going to be another “x”.

For one, it’s clear to me that the United States is going to elect Trump for a second term. I just seriously cannot imagine a scenario where either:

1) An 82 year old man with the level of cognitive decline we’ve been seeing with our own eyes for the past year wins the electoral college.

or

2) Joe Biden, his campaign and members of the Democratic party at large work against their own self-interest with deft creativity to find a solution to beat Donald Trump in five months.

Thus it’s inevitable Trump will be handed the reigns to the US again. His presidency alone will be an X in our overshoot trajectory and a deathblow to the liberal western world order that’s needed to facilitate globalism.

Second, even if Trump is somehow prevents from taking office the Supreme Court of the United States has already irrevocably transitioned the US from a liberal to an illiberal democracy this week.

The overturning of Chevron will decimate federal regulation across the board. The root of our predicament is not over-population, it’s over-consumption. We need the populace at large (and the rich in particular) to learn to be content with less so we can preserve the biosphere that makes our existence possible and the Supreme Court has taken us backwards in our regulatory power. This means your drinking water can now be polluted, your food can be more toxic, companies have more leeway to falsify the financial reports we use to guide our investments and drugs don’t have to have their approval hinge on the determinations experts but instead judges.

Oh and they also legalized bribery.

Oh and they also gave the Presidency broad immunity without any serious constitutional citation.

It’s not just that the ramifications of these decisions are awful - it’s that they actually break the rule of law as we knew it before this week. Most legal scholars did not think the Supreme Court would actually entertain, nevertheless agree with, Trump’s ridiculous immunity arguments six months ago. People still held out hope that the court may act in ways that weren’t nakedly partisan. Now, that’s just baked into the system - and it’s a deathblow for a liberal representative democracy.

The court has shown it can and will shape the nation in it’s image despite that not being their function and despite them not having any sort of public mandate.

Third, the planet is continuing to give us clear evidence we don’t really understand the climate system.

If you’re collapse aware you’ve likely seen this graph.

It shows global sea surface temperatures and, as you can see via the yellow line, last year was a huge hot outlier.

And as you can see via the redline, this year is another outlier. We’re seeing this across the board in the other metrics that scientists use to quantify the severity of climate change and it’s baffling them. Say it with me now:

Everything we anticipated happening due to climate change is happening faster than expected.

And I don’t need to cite more scientific papers or make more arguments - we all feel it. It’s not supposed to be this warm in the summer wherever you are, and somewhere in your heart you know its bad. I’ll put it in concrete words for you.

It’s bad because the effects of climate change are beginning to me that we’ve reach a point of diminishing returns for our food production. There is no longer a linear relationship between the amount of labor and energy we put into growing food and how much food we produce.

It’s bad because places with large populations are reaching wet-bulb temperatures more frequently. The amount of habitable land in the world is shrinking faster than we expected and will cause more and more migration and less productivity in the summer months.

It’s bad because heat like this causes mass die offs of wild animals, and we’ve already decimated more than 2/3rds of global wildlife in the past 50 years.

“The Wild” (as in, the world outside of human daily life) is changing and now even people inside cities and suburban gated communities can feel it. That wasn’t supposed to happen this fast but it is and that suggests we have seriously underestimated our impact on the climate system.

This quote from Lauterwasser’s latest article sums up my feelings this past week perfectly.

"For each of the past years I could say with relative confidence that the current year is probably not the one in which “society collapses” (by any meaningful definition of the term) – but right now, I’m not so sure anymore. Each of the following few years might be the one. Year Zero, if we’re being dramatic. Every day I expect to see breaking news of a major economic crash, yet another military coup, or some other calamity that pushes the already strained system over the edge and into disarray.”

So let’s get back to how I’m doing

Like I said, I’m fine. But the system I rely upon to be fine is not fine, and that worries me deeply. Every couple months I “check in” with the world, and each time it isn’t doing better. This has profound effects on how I live my life.

It decides whether or not I want to have kids

It decides whether or not I invest in a long term career in the hopes I can one day “retire”

It decides where I live.

It decides how well and how much I can sleep at night.

And it makes long term life planning and envisioning stability difficult.

I would love to be more ignorant, to “live like everything is fine until it’s not” as Bill Burr says. But I am struggling to do that right now.

And the worst part of this problem is that I don’t know if my anxiety is a mental illness (that can be assuaged with medication and lifestyle changes) or just a rational reaction to the ecological equivalent of being given a sort of terminal illness.

Should you (or can you?) be ok right now?

That’s what will be the subject of the second part of this essay series. That’s what I really want to explore and write about.

In general this substack is my open journal. This is my way of honestly answering “how are you doing right now” as we live through the next “shift change”. The primary purpose is to:

1. Help my mental health by getting my ideas out of my head and into another medium.

2. Find people I can have honest conversations with as the planet goes to shit.

Because most people really don’t want to talk about this. Most people ignore problems until they fester and aren’t willing to do the thinking or hard work to confront and make it to the other side of hardship - especially today. But there are some people, like me, that are the opposite. We run towards problems, we watch them closely and are very willing to suffer some now if it means we will avoid suffering a lot later.

Unfortunately, we are the outliers - because if we were the majority our global civilization wouldn’t be on the precipice of ruin right now.

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