There’s an enormous omission being made. This week is a critical time to raise it. Human culture is part of a physical world, and the spectrum of physical causes of the collapse is being neglected. You should write about it, your way, but I can help a lot if you like too.
Despite the rather long list of directly contributing physical causes the major media and government panels are discussing ONLY the cultural causes, policy and greed, etc. That’s crazy. It looks like a matter of preferring to only talk about familiar subjects. It keeps other subjects unfamiliar, of course, amounts to disguised hand wringing to avoid learning, and causes the calmaties we then fail to see because of it.
There are several I could mention, but one large group come under the heading of “ever bigger plans” for “ever shrinking resources”. You’d think that would be a simple concept to grapple with. Once you pick the low hanging fruit it’s a stretch to get any fruit.
As any doctor learns, it always takes patience to understand the patient. If you don’t pay attention to these issues no one learns to become comfortable discussing them. For the physical causes influencing cultural events there is a deficit of neglect to overcome.
The most direct and immediate physical cause contributing to the collapse was what we saw as the global commodity price spiral that began in about 2003. It was set off by the world hitting a surprisingly inflexible physical limit, resource supplies becoming inflexible in responding to increased demand (i.e., no low hanging fruit).
The leading factor was an unexpected lack of response at the well head. The world petrol industry became unable to pump increasing amounts of oil. Emerging fields failed to materialize as fast as declining fields ran short, and “peak oil” occurred. That is actually nature’s most common way of rationing the supply of low hanging fruit, but industry and consumers were not expecting it and got caught flat footed.
Our over leveraged economy of the time, with the help of speculators, drove food and fuel prices through the roof. That price spiral, with commodity prices growing at 25%/yr, constituted a “law of unlimited price” violating all the assumptions of economics. THAT was the totally unexpected ‘black swan’ everyone casually discusses, “what went wrong with the numbers”, and it was not some sort of magical accident. That was caused by nature, not malfeasance, except for why we all got caught off guard by it.
We live in a physical world, and seem to do our best to ignore that wherever possible. For connecting the physical with the cultural I could help a great deal. There are several other major direct causes, a convergence of multiple causes really, being neglected. I think you could use me.