Planning the Next Great Migration

Eliza Daley has just posted an interesting essay, reprinted on Resilience.org, that I’d like to both recommend and talk back to. Since her view of the situation in overlarge cities and the need for deurbanization is tangential to mine, I’d first like to hop back to the topic of unsustainability and post a few more sections of my general view of the problems our society is facing. Climate change is the most urgent, because in some places it’s already bad and heading rapidly towards disastrous. However, it turns out that this is just a special case of a larger phenomenon—what I call Tier 2 collapse—which says that a society built on growth, like ours, must eventually find some consequence of its way of life putting the squeeze on it. The people who have examined this most rationally believe that even if there was no such thing as climate change—or ocean acidification—decline in the relatively near future would still be unavoidable under any business-as-usual model. Here’s a brief summary of their conclusions.