The End of More

Book excerpt: Our chances of survival are being destroyed by overconsumption. In The End of More, Josephine Smit and Norman Pagett explore the history that has brought us to this point, and give us a glimpse of the devastating consequences of our actions. Energy has become more than the driving force of modern humanity; it is now the capital by which we live. Over the past 250 years we have used that capital to supply the food that allowed the exponential growth of populations, which in turn drove the increasing complexity of our global infrastructure. This has become our normality. As a result we enjoy a level of prosperity unique in our history, but we are living on capital, not income, and that is dwindling rapidly. That capital is hydrocarbon fuel, oil coal and gas, supplemented by metals, which we form by heat into the artifacts we need for survival. Our existence depends on combining and recombining those elements into a seemingly infinite range of products that now supports our infrastructure and market economy. We have unleashed the explosive forces of nature, and most of the world's population have deluded themselves that those forces will be available forever. We are locked into a system that demands constant, fuel burning growth, while we deny that our heat processes are destroying the planet we live on. But that delusion of infinity is now driving us into a wall of finite resources, while global population numbers continue to climb. Since the Industrial Revolution and the universal use of hydrocarbon fuels, our numbers have increased seven fold in 250 years. It is that pressure of numbers that is causing us to rip the Earth apart in search of sustenance, because we know no other way. The End of More drives home the reality that we are not facing a political, economic or technological crisis, but a crisis of survival. Prosperity cannot be voted into office. It is beyond our comprehension that we live in what is little more than a global Ponzi scheme, because our brains are not developed beyond that of the stone age hunter-gatherer. We are conditioned to survive at all costs, the brutality of ceaseless conflict shows that our civilisation is a very thin veneer. It may be that the Earth has recognised a plague species, and is using climate forces to get rid of us. It may be that the Earth has recognised a plague species, and is using climate forces to get rid of us.