@dredmorbius@toot.catCory Doctorow: The Swerve
People are already getting really badly hurt, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re poised to break through key planetary boundaries – loss of biosphere diversity, ocean acidification, land poisoning – whose damage will be global, profound and sustained. Once we rupture these boundaries, we have no idea how to repair them. None of our current technologies will suffice, nor will any of the technologies we think we know how to make or might know how to make.
These boundaries are the point of no return, the point at which it won’t matter if we yank the wheel, because the bus is going over the cliff, swerve or no.
Focus on the swerve.
https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31992218
@dredmorbiusAn author I discovered only in the past decade, though he's been active since the 1970s, is William Ophuls.
He was amongst the first to write of the political dimension of addressing global catastrophic risks. Initially, that was largely focused on the concept of resource limits. Global warming isn't unrelated, though it's a sink limit: boundaries on the ability of the environment to absorb the consequences of human activity without making that human activity itself untenable.
What Ophuls realised, and what I'm increasingly convinced of, is that it's not the technical element, but rather the political, social, cultural, and economic (commerce, finance, trade, power) aspects which will prove the most challenging. And he seems to have been correct.
I strongly recommend all his work, though Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (first published in 1977, revised ~1994) and Plato's Revenge (2011) are probably the best starting points.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the-age-of-ecology/oclc/8162554740
Also available via Archive Org:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=william%20ophuls
Ophuls has a website with more recent writings:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190311104851/https://ophuls.org/essays
As he's on in years, I've looked for others who are carrying on his tradition. Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon is referenced by Ophuls several times and seems closest: