After reviewing all of the scary future consequences concerning the 12 major challenges of our future found on the Universe Spirt and Job One for Humanity websites, it is only fair to wonder if...
we are some group of survivalists or end of the world preppers, doomers, or avid supporters of the growing "near term human extinction" or post-doom movements. We are definitively not!
Our focus is education and engaged social activism. We are although, wisely helping to prepare others for the unavoidably painful road ahead created by our previous individual and collective bad decisions.
We also are not techno-optimists or techno-delusionists. We do not believe that magical carbon-sucking unicorns, desperate last chance geo-engineering, or other delusional techno-miracles will save us in time or without even worse side effects.
We do not support the growing premise that total human extinction sometime over the rest of this century is a certainty. The qualified truth is that --- only if we do not come close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets will the likelihood of total human extinction rise to the level of urgent threat. Furthermore, total extinction in this worst-case will take at least another 50-70 years to begin its final phases.
Therefore, all is not lost --- yet!
We do have some time left (to about 2025) to make the needed critical changes.
On the other hand, it is also essential to be candid that many horrendous global warming and other related consequences are already "baked into" our global systems, and many of those consequences are now unavoidable! These many "baked in" consequences will also eventually cause the inevitable die-off of much of humanity by mid-century.
Because of this cascade of unavoidable coming consequences, we also face the widespread and intensifying collapse of many of our weakest local, regional, and national social and economic systems as we approach the mid-century.
Yes, we do face yet the largest evolutionary challenge in humanity's long history of great survival challenges.
To manage our 12 worst global crises will require nothing less than radical global changes to our current lifestyles and livelihoods to make them more sustainable. At the same time, we also will have to vigorously prepare for and adapt to the catastrophic consequences we can no longer prevent.
To learn more about the radical changes in our livelihoods and lifestyles needed to survive and thrive through the coming consequences and post-collapse era, click here first and read about the principles of sustainable prosperity. Then click the following links to see Part 1 and Part 2 of the Job One for Humanity Plan, which will provide detailed emergency preparation and adaptation steps, respectively.
Please do not ever mistake us for some survivalist or apocalyptic community concerning our research on the current out-of-control global warming and the other 11 major converging global adaptive challenges facing our collective future.
Our message is simple, proactive, and not a doomer or a fatalistic message:
1. "We are a community of activists that believes in learning from our mistakes, being prepared, and that being adaptable is a wise evolutionary strategy.
2. We, as humans, are intelligent and adaptive beings, and we can solve or adapt to almost anything.
3. Life on Earth has always found a way to learn, adapt, and survive so. In the last 4.5 billion years of Earth's evolution, life has survived 5 previous mass extinctions. (See this page for more on life's evolutionary success.)
4. The future is unknown and full of unpredictable negative and positive wild cards. This means that there is still hope for some part of humanity and our civilization to survive if we quickly execute responsible, intelligent, and effective adaptive actions that will resolve our most pressing global challenges using a "first things first" strategy.
5. When we or future generations do get through our current 12 major global challenges, we will have built something new together that is far better adapted and suitable for achieving a positive and sustainable future for ALL.
6. Overcoming this emergency will help us better solve our challenges as one effective and united human family. This experience also will teach us and help us to live the Universe Principles of progressive evolution and sustainable prosperity.
7. In spite of the rough road ahead, we can still fully enjoy each day (as best as we can, even in spite of the worsening of these 12 global challenges.)
8. Working together in new sustainable communities (like our Universe Spirit or Eco-community models,) we can make our lives as happy and as good as they will get during this temporary retrogression and transition period. And finally,
9. We are not survivalists or end of the world preppers, doomers, or avid supporters of the growing "near term human extinction" or post-doom movements. If you want to call us by some new name, call us post-collapse thrivers. This name reflects our focus on doing all that is needed to get through this transition to build a more just equitable and sustainable world so we can thrive in the post-collapse future.
As Michael Dowd, the evolutionary teacher likes to say, "what really matters is coming back into the right relationship with reality." Because humanity has repeatedly failed to effectively resolve the escalating global warming emergency as well as our other 11 deteriorating global challenges, we are forced by their unthinkable and unbearable consequences to come back into the right relationship to reality and each other, or we will eventually perish.
The power of reality is the force motivating us to evolve and it is truly great news!
Have no doubt about it, humanity has reached a monumental evolutionary juncture and, we are running out of time to prevent the eventual complete extinction of humanity. Only a comprehensive mass mobilization by our governments can lessen the coming suffering and save the future.
In our organization, we see ourselves as a new evolutionary community of Evolutioneers and Planetary and Universe Citizens that value the historical wisdom of appropriate threat preparedness and living sustainably to model the new world we want to live in. We are not fear manipulated or fear dominated, but we do not ignore data that should trigger positive, protective, and appropriate evolutionary fear reactions.
We will always use the appropriate and positive evolutionary fear warning feedback contained within accurate but survival-negative information to wisely anticipate, prepare, and quickly adapt.
We know that it is better to act and save something than not to act and lose everything!
We are not doomers, post-doomers, or preppers who have given up on the future, are living in hiding or resignation. We are sustainability activists still full of hope that we can:
1. face the true urgency of all of our current global crises, resolve what we can, and adapt to what we can't.
2. create the new community model needed for the new behaviors and systems that will resolve today's biggest global problems and become a global basis of a better world for ALL.
Yes, we also are preparing new sustainable communities in advance for this human-created crisis and this temporary, and transitional "evolutionary bottleneck and retrogression." We are doing this solely because the current facts clearly shout that many of our global systems are in a severe challenge or are nearing critical tipping points with no or low remaining recovery resilience.
To the discerning evaluator and researcher, both human history and the current worsening 12 global challenges indicate that our lives will continue to get worse with little realistic hope of correction until the chain reaction of cascading multiple global catastrophes and crossed tipping points shake us awake to the need for drastic evolutionary change toward more sustainable livelihoods and lifestyles.
We hold that the main unrecognized threats for today and the future are that:
1. other than nuclear war, the main accelerator and driver of humanity's total extinction is now global warming.
2. the world still does not realize that when the climate system goes over its extinction-triggering tipping points, there is nothing you can do to stop the physics and mathematics of the consequences of those tipping points from manifesting their deadly consequences. (How soon we will cross the extinction-triggering global warming tipping points are described here.)
Once you realize the hard reality of where we are...
It is also critical to keep our dangerous global threats in an appropriate time perspective to avoid counter-productive panic. Depending on your current location, you should still have enough time to prepare for and adapt to the myriad of now unavoidable global warming consequences. It is wholly appropriate to feel fear at this dangerous juncture in the evolution of humanity because of the many known consequences of accelerating global warming and the worsening of these 11 additional global crises.
While generalized fear or panic often paralyzes, there are positive evolutionary reasons for why the emotion of fear exists. The positive use of fear exists for when there are REAL threats to your survival. Positive fear mobilizes the observant and wise to act before it is too late!
To support the positive and wise use of fear relating to global warming and other consequences (from these 11 other global crises,) here are the critical deadlines to remember:
a. The 5-year deadline: (From now until the end of 2025.) At this time, it is appropriate to admit it is all but impossible for us to reach the full 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets! But, we still do have enough time left to slow down (but not avoid,) a mid-century mass extinction event for much of humanity by getting close to them. Although we passed the point of being able to avoid the die-off of much of humanity by 2050, we still can maintain some level of control of our global warming future. Most importantly, we can still prevent total extinction by at least getting very close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets!
This total extinction danger also means we have to educate the world about the extinction-evoking global warming tipping point deadlines of this emergency after preparing our personal survive and thrive provisions and/or creating safe sustainable community cooperatives or sanctuaries.
b. The 5-10-year deadline: (This assumes we will miss the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets and did not get close to them.) From 2020 to 2027, global warming consequences will steadily worsen in a rising but steeper linear progression. More people will wisely migrate to safer areas. Millions more will die because of climate-related food shortages and other global warming-related catastrophes.
If you have prepared, adapted, and are in a global warming safer location before 2027 and have a good Plan B in place, depending upon your location, relative stability and security for family and business are probable until about 2030 to 2040. (See this Plan B page, which discusses how to prepare in the safest locations and what are the least safe places to ride out the global warming extinction emergency.)
c. The 10-15 year deadline: (This assumes we will miss the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets and we did not get close to the 2025 targets.) After 2030-2035 many other climate, human, ecological, political, and economic tipping points will be crossed due to global warming consequences and global warming amplifying the consequences of most of these 11 other critical global challenges.
The stability and security of even the safest and best prepared global warming safer locations will lessen and become increasingly challenging. Those individuals in supportive cooperatives or sustainable communities should be significantly safer and better adapted than those who are not.
d. The 15-25 year deadline: (This assumes we will miss the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets and we did not get close to meeting these targets.) Beginning around 2030, the frequency, severity, and size of 20 worst global warming consequences will move from a steeply rising linear progression into an exponential progression. Stability and security for even the best prepared, safer global warming locations, cooperatives, and sustainable communities will become far more difficult and dangerous.
e. The 25-30-year deadline: (This assumes we will miss the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets and at least, we got close to them or compensated for these targets somewhere over this time period.) By mid-century, extinction for much of humanity will be still unavoidable. From 2030-2050 will be the riskiest period to survive for much to most of society. Generally, things will be better in the safer global warming locations, and in special cooperatives, and sustainable communities. But even there, survival is far from guaranteed without the highest levels of preparation, adaptation, and cooperation.
f. The 50-year deadline: (This assumes we will miss the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets and unfortunately, we did not even get close to them.) In this case, we will face the worst consequences of runaway global warming, and we will be heading toward the beginning of the runaway greenhouse gas effect, which ripped the atmosphere off Venus. Because of this escalating runaway global warming reality and not getting close to the 2025 reduction targets, humanity will, unfortunately, finally face a total extinction event beginning as soon as 2070-2100. We call this the full Climageddon Scenario.
The good timeline news here is simple. If we at least, get close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, we can still prevent total human extinction. If we do not, we begin crossing too many additional extinction-triggering tipping points far too fast to prevent the worst consequences of runaway global warming multiplying the worsening effects of the other 11 major global crises.
In Summary
We believe that it is important not to hide these reasonable and rational facts and high probabilities.
We believe there is a real urgency to get prepared for what is soon unavoidable.
We are not detached, survivalists. We are engaged sustainability advocates, Evolutioneers, and Planetary Citizens.
We can make it through this great evolutionary transition period, capture the once-in-a-generation opportunity from the collective catharsis of the pandemic catastrophe, and then use that energy to make long-overdue and critically needed improvements to our social systems!
We can re-build our social systems based upon sustainable and limited growth for all vs. the cancer-like concepts of uncontrolled growth or unlimited growth for the few.
We believe in whole-heartedly working for the best possible future while at the same time wisely being prepared for the worst possible temporary human transition period.
We fully prepare for the worst and then "forget" about those preparations while focusing and wholeheartedly working for the best!
We hold that actively saving all we can is far better than inactively saving nothing.
We hold that some of us will prepare, adapt, survive and thrive once again if we act wisely. We should not give up the small amount of rational, appropriate hope that remains. The history of life evolving on Earth strongly supports the premise that some of us will survive. (See this page with the big picture view of evolution on Earth.)
We envision that the establishment of new sustainable communities around the world will play an essential role in securing the long-term survival of humanity and establishing the new sustainable prosperity vision for the post widespread collapse world.
We will deal with our 12 global challenges by using only peaceful and evolutionary means.
We can still find daily enjoyment and joy in our relationships and life experiences no matter how bad it gets.
We can together create a long-term future for humanity and our civilization. And, if we are wise and work together, someday we or our children will successfully evolve both here on Earth and eventually out into the stars.
We are post-collapse thrivers! There will be many surprise benefits for executing the Job One for Humanity Plan to deal with the global mess we have created for ourselves!
And finally, even if the accelerating global warming emergency and the convergence of it with humanity's 11 other key global challenges were somehow resolved in the next 30 to 50 years or turned out to be not as bad as currently is predicted by our best scientists, the new sustainable communities which we are co-creating would function even better and more joyously on their other main goals of helping to co-create the necessary restructuring and re-alignment of society to create:
a,) a sustainable prosperity for ALL of humanity,
b.) a just and equitable civilization,
c.) thriving and meaning-filled individuals and communities --- all of which align with and forward the progressive evolution of life in the universe.
For the last 11 years, our organization has been working on that plan called the Job One for Humanity Plan. It is called that because that is exactly what it is; humanity's job number one to survive and thrive.
The good news is that if we want to survive and lessen the coming suffering, we need to execute this plan NOW.
For additional support and evaluation
1. Please use the 40 plus warning signs found on this page to monitor the worsening of our 12 major global crises. Print them out. Watch for the news to see them unfold one by one until we take full responsibility for the mess we have created by our individual and collective bad decisions.
2. If you need help processing the facts on this page emotionally, we have two pages to get you through the typical reactions of anger, grief, denial, sadness, etc. The first page covers the challenging emotional process that most people will go through after realizing that we are providing an accurate, big picture view of their future risks and probabilities.
Next, see this page on the surprising benefits of accepting the challenge of fixing it. This benefits page has been viewed over a million times.
For additional support and evaluation
1. Please use the 40 plus warning signs found on this page to monitor the worsening of our 12 major global crises. Print them out. Watch for the news to see them unfold one by one until we take full responsibility for the mess we have created by our individual and collective bad decisions.
2. If you need help processing the facts on this page emotionally, we have two pages to get you through the typical reactions of anger, grief, denial, sadness, etc. The first page covers the challenging emotional process that most people will go through after realizing that we are providing an accurate, big picture view of their future risks and probabilities.
Next, see this page on the surprising benefits of accepting the challenge of fixing it. This benefits page has been viewed over a million times.
"You cannot be called an alarmist if there really is something to be alarmed about." Unknown