by Chris Martenson, Peak Prosperity:

Will you be an agent of depletion or regeneration?

There’s a vast revolution underway. And it’s time to pick sides.

Your choice couldn’t be more critically important. Quite possibly, the entire fate of the human species hangs in the balance.

It’s time to decide: Will you be an agent of depletion or regeneration?

Bad Choices = Bad Outcomes
For many centuries, humans have consumed the natural resources around them at a rate far faster than the planet can replenish. Until recently this didn’t pose an existential problem, as fresh deposits could be tapped through the discovery of new continents or development of new technologies.

But those days of living beyond our means are now over. No sizeable unexplored territories remain on the globe. Technology is only helping us burn faster through the increasingly dilute deposits that are left. The planet’s population and its demand on key resources is ballooning, causing the natural systems we depend on for life to falter.

Yes, the situation is dire. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

A better future is possible. It’s up to us to make it happen.

There’s plenty of evidence of working real-world models that show exactly how we can improve the planet for future generations. I’ll focus on a few in a moment.

But first, it’s critical to understand that working against adoption of these better practices is our society’s entrenched system of extraction, otherwise known as the Business As Usual (BAU) crowd. This includes every person and entity busy protecting or promoting (usually from a position of profound ignorance) the concept of exponential economic growth as a necessary and good thing.

Complicit are all major parties of our political systems, the mainstream media (MSM), and of course the entire financial system — especially all the world’s central banks and their main clients.

This isn’t even a David vs. Goliath story; it’s more like a krill vs. blue whale story. Trillions of dollars are spent advancing BAU while small, usually independent operations lean against that hurricane-force headwind.

The good news? We have data and logic on our side. As well as something more important: The chance to create a life worth living and a world worth inheriting.

Ideas are very powerful things indeed. They are force maximizers, and we have the ideas on our side – mainly because the ‘ideas’ of the BAU crowd are not ideas at all, but relics of a bygone era rooted in a sloppy mix of false beliefs.

For ten years now, I’ve been busy sharing with anybody who will listen the stark data that shows our current approaches are utterly, completely, provably unsustainable.

By “approaches” I mean:

Depending on an economic system that requires permanent exponential growth — forever
Growing our national debts at a far faster pace than our income
Depleting our fresh water aquifers at rates 1,000x to 10,000x faster than they are recharging
Using farming practices that are turning our fertile soils into sterile dirt
Mismanaging/underfunding our pension & entitlement programs, dooming them to insolvency
Neglecting the role of net energy in shaping the world we see today, and squandering precious BTUs today
Risking destructive wars we can’t rebuild from, both due to our debts and a lack sufficient net energy

These are very odd choices for a supposedly “rational” species to make.

However, humans are rationalizers, not rational, especially when organized in large, political groupings. Which is how we’ve ended up with the above list.

Now, onto the main point of this piece: The questionis not Will the system collapse?, but When will it?

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