Global Economic Collapse is good for the Earth

Even though the media (and almost everyone we come in contact with) would believe that "global economic depression" is a terrible crisis, from a different perspective, this collapse could be what is best for the non-human world, and even for those of us who may survive the crises our species faces. Global Economic Collapse will reduce the amount of weapons being manufactored; it will reduce the amount of cars manufactured; it will slow down industry and "expansion."

The present global world power system is a in a terminal phase in a process that began 500 years ago with the emerging Age of Reason and its founders, Niccolo Machiavelli and Ignatius Loyola; and which has reached its zenith in the twentieth century, powered by the global arms trade and war and enabled by a soulless, greed-based economics backed by a hastily developed and uniquely dangerous technology (Saul 1992).

David Ehrenfeld wrote:
This power system, with its transnational corporations, its giant military machines, its globalized financial system and world trade, its agribusiness used to build up industrial infrastructures at the expense of the world's farmers -- with its growing numbers of jobless people and people in bad jobs, with its endless refugees, with its trail of damaged cultures and damaged ecosystems, and with its fatal internal flaws, is now coming apart. As the great British philosopher Mary Midgley has said, "The house is on fire; we must wake up from this dream and do something about it."

There is a larger lesson to learn. Both George Orwell and Wendell Berry have said that we are going to have to learn how to live a little poorer. Not poorer in spirit, not poorer in happiness, just poorer in the material things we don't need. If we can learn this lesson, maybe the best parts of civilization and nature will survive after all. We shouldn't ask for more than that.

Diogenes II has been telling us this for a long time.

See The Coming Collapse of the Age of Technology

Of course, the transition will get a little ugly:

Ehrenfeld wrote:Moving forward requires that we provide satisfying alternatives to those who have been most seriously injured by the present technology and economics. They include farmers, blue-collar workers suddenly jobless because of unfair competition from foreign slave labor or American "workfare," and countless souls whose lives and work have been made redundant by the megastores in the shopping malls. If good alternatives are not found soon, the coming collapse will inevitably provoke a terrible wave of violence born of desperation.

Later. :?