This is a special opportunity to hear this author speak. His first book, "Overshoot," came out in the early eighties, brilliantly explaining how economy and ecology are ultimately linked and cannot be perceived separately. It will be very worthwhile joining the Transition Town Salon on this particular evening.
(Please forward to people interested in ecology, peak oil or
local food.)
--- Anna in Olympia
TRANSITION OLYMPIA: Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse. A conversation with William Catton
Date: Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Time: 7:00PM - 9:00PM PST
Location: Mixx 96 Meeting Room
Corner of State & Washington
Olympia, WA
A Transtion Olympia salon
Presentation and discussion
Transition Olympia welcomes Dr. William R. Catton Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Washington State University and author of:
Overshoot: Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change:
Published in 1980, Overshoot analyzed humankind's ecological predicament with extraordinary courage and insight. Years ahead of its time, it continues to be a source of inspiration to those aware of the massive threat posed by peak oil, climate change and other ecological pressures. It applies the following ecological and sociological concepts to human population: carrying capacity - the maximum permanently supportable load, cornucopian myth - the belief in limitless resources, drawdown- stealing resources from the future, cargoism – the belief that technology will always save us and overshoot – growth beyond an area’s (and planet’s) carrying capacity which leads to crash and die-off.
Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse:
Ecological roots of our troubled time are deeper than its economic manifestations. Anguished posterity will look back on this 21st century as “the bottleneck century.” Three converging trends have put humankind in much deeper peril than is generally acknowledged. First, there are many more of us inhabiting this planet than it can sustain. Second, technological advances of recent centuries have made gigantic our per capita resource appetites and our per capita environmental impacts. Third, our evolutionary heritage together with unanticipated dysfunctions caused by the modern division of labor has kept us too preoccupied with short-term concerns to see the long-term consequences of our actions. Human societies (even our own) are almost certainly going to act in ways that will make an inevitably difficult future unnecessarily worse. People are seriously averse to the kind and extent of cooperation our difficult future will require. Together the basic trio of disturbing trends—humans having become so numerous, so ravenous, and so short-sighted has made the nature of today’s human prospect far more dire than most policymakers dare admit.
