climate change and pollution are legitimately unfixable problems in my opinion
The Late Devonian mass extinction was likely caused by the evolution of oxygen producing plants. This fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and kicked off the Hangenberg event which is estimated to have killed half of all life in the world’s oceans and around a quarter of all life on dry land.
Incidentally, the sudden and massive spread of plant-life during this period is responsible for the rapid accrual of fossilized carbon that has become the fuel we’re currently killing one another to secure.
Everything else could hypothetically be fixed
We can’t ever really go back. We can update our social responses to climate-wide events. But industrialization isn’t just going to stop happening even if we check our fossil fuel consumption habit. Humanity’s propensity for engineering our surroundings to meet our comfort needs is an unstoppable evolutionary tendency. That’s not something we can ever “fix”. Pandora’s Box was opened millions of years ago. We’re going to have to play this hand out until we hit another ecological balancing point.
There is no “end” to live to see.
I get this line every fucking day on here. It really seems to deny the reality of the post-industrial era. One of shrinking poverty, enormous surpluses, and a backbone of infrastructure that benefits the entire planet.
Like Kromptkin recognized over a century ago, we have already won as a society and a species. We just need to recognize it and dole out the winnings equitably. What Westerners see as a terrifying decline arrives just as much of the Eastern Bloc and the Global South are finally cashing in. And much of what Westerners dread is this equanimity - this international muscle enjoyed by nations not in the privileged Early Adopter group taking a slice of the pie they thought was always going to be theirs.
And even then it isn’t really bad news for Westerners in the aggregate, because so much of that pie was going to an elite plutocracy in their own backyards.
What people in the US and the UK and Germany and Japan are coming to terms with is the dead-weight loss of their own monarchies. Whether they choose to carry this baggage into the 22nd century will determine how they end up living. But the days of colonial extraction are closing. The Free Lunches paid for with the surplus labor of East Asia and West Africa are coming to an end.