MeIn Inconvenient Apocalypse, authors Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen call themselves harbingers of some very bad news. The collapse of society on a global scale is inevitable, and those who managed to survive mass death and the collapse of the world as we know it will live in a dramatically changed environment. According to Jackson and Jensen, this collapse cannot be avoided. It is up to us to do so.
“This book seeks to speak frankly and honestly about the depth of crisis,” said Jensen. Jackson added: We thought we would pay for this one day.
The combination of Jackson and Jensen is interesting. The former is an agronomist who has spent his career researching soil erosion issues and developing The His Land His Institute, which aims to develop crops that can be used for sustainable agriculture. For his efforts, he earned honors such as the MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the Right Livelihood Award. Jensen is a longtime journalist who has written books on ecology, masculinity and radical feminism. He has faced backlash for advocating exclusionary and harmful views of transgender people, particularly targeting transgender women, and in response to his criticism, he has doubled down on these views. , continues to promulgate them.
In Jackson and Jensen’s view, the dawn of agriculture represents something like original sin. This is what has led mankind to the process of increasing energy use and material wealth that has brought us to our present ecological crisis. It seems to argue that humanity’s trajectory as a technological species capable of exploitation and large-scale farming is a mistake, has taken us to places we never should have gone, and ruined us. In a conversation, Jackson endorsed this point of view, saying that our way of life “is caught up in the great Ponzi scheme we’ve had for probably 10,000 years. How the Ponzi scheme will come to an end” We know that they are not good things to deal with.”
The answer to this Ponzi scheme is to shrink humanity from the current 7.7 billion to a more sustainable 2 or 3 billion people. The Inconvenient Apocalypse does not explain exactly how this population decline will occur, nor does it consider the enormous trauma that the elimination of large portions of humanity would have on humans and our society. Although the book is nominally directed at social justice, the authors argue that such depopulation could be affected by marginalized ethnicities and sexualities, the disabled and mentally ill, and the fundamentally inappropriate. No effort is made to deal with the fact that it can be an absolute disaster for those who are not. To survive in the new world. During the conversation, Jensen provided the following explanation.
“Much of the population control talk of the past was based on white supremacy, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the question of what a sustainable population is. There’s no solution, but just because there’s no easy, obvious solution doesn’t mean you can ignore the problem.”
According to Jackson and Jensen, once the collapse occurs and the planet’s population dwindles, a “low-energy” future — that is, fossil fuels will no longer be used and we will essentially become beasts of our own muscles and burdens. muscles. In terms of what its low-energy world looks like, the Apocalypse of Inconvenience might be summed up as the Paleo diet, but it has a clear ethos for society. , so the answer is to look back at the millennia of prehistory before humans developed agriculture, began writing their history, and built social hierarchies. As far as the inconvenient apocalypse explains what this future looks like, it will be the rise of merchants and farm workers to high positions in society, the wealthy being pulled down a few notches, the cosmopolitan and consumerist The secular world has been largely eliminated, and religion has a prominent role. I would like to summarize it as “Make the Earth Great Again”.
The world of the Inconvenient Apocalypse is a very bleak world, and one without compromises. The author writes, “The future of endless expansion that we have long envisioned is over, and a new future defined by contraction is upon us.” Any attempt to find some intermediate path through these two poles is simply ‘deny, minimize, ignore’, a problem we all have to face. The emphasis in this book is on being candid and stating truths that the authors believe to be self-evident. To be fair, Jackson and Jensen seem to recognize that their style puts many off, and many readers simply abandon their books. Jensen said:
For a book that predicts the mass death of most of humanity and the end of life as we know it, an inconvenient apocalypse is a chilling cerebrum. There is virtually no room for such sacrifices. That can make the book feel cold and condescending. In this reader’s opinion, passing this vulnerability more often in Inconvenient Apocalypse would have made for a more relevant and ultimately more compelling read.
“I’ve struggled with what this means in everyday life,” says Jensen. Instead of trying to avoid it, struggle with that feeling of sadness. And when you get to it, it means you don’t wake up on the sunny side of the street every day. My goal is to try to open up a space for people to say what they think. “
