Letter to Paul Ehrlich

10 01 13 - 12:04

This is in response to Paul and Anne Ehrlich's new paper, Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

I enjoyed your most recent paper and agree with its conclusions. However, I wanted to posit a Platonic counterpoint to it regarding its assumptions of cause and effect. You speak of humanity engaging in an act of suicide on a grand scale, using the words of Prince Charles. What causes a species to act so blatantly against its interests? I would suggest that we first and foremost have a leadership failure, and since as Spengler observes all populations receive the government that matches their own behavior, that underlying that we have a failure of human individuals and moral choices. This suggests that at some point, our society "broke." As a traditionalist conservative with conservationist leanings it seems to me that in order to fix this problem, we're going to need to change course from our focus on the individual and its absolute and universal rights, to a transfer of those rights to the earth and the proven methods of managing it, such as culture and aristocracy. I am less concerned about global warming than I am of ecosystem wrecking. As we overpopulate, the most destructive thing we do is reduce the land necessary for natural species to hunt, mate and spawn, and in doing so, we drop their numbers below safe replacement levels. This in turn smashes ecosystems, which are more necessary than most people think.

My answer is yes and no. Yes, we can avoid it at any time we try. It will take effort and sacrifice, but mostly getting organized and having some clear leaders with the power to make changes beyond a four-year election cycle. No, in that until we boot out the consumerism-popularity-democracy equation that puts the individual first and reality second, we'll never get to that stage.

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