Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0252009886
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Europeans, by making available for settlement and exploitation a "virgin" hemisphere. The expansion of territory available for use by Europe's already advanced means is the main reason why firearms can be said to have led to the unprecedented rate of increase in human numbers during this last portion of the agrarian period. Abundance I shall call the centuries that followed the sudden expansion of European man's habitat by voyages of discovery the Age of Exuberance, for reasons to be spelled out
Independence remember? Our scientists, we still fondly imagined, would develop the means to make America self-sufficient in energy (by — 1980!). From today's sober perspective, it may be hard to recall that the idea of unlimited resources, of "free" atomic energy that would elimi- nate resource shortages anywhere on earth by making timately to synthesize whatever gerly accepted by possible bugs Americans at was needed, was it possible ul- universally and ea- midcentury.
from a finite and depletable fund a fund that was created and buried by the that — nature, scores of millions of years before man came along. The draw31 Eventually Had Already Come Yesterday — down method portunities that we upon use call industrialism relied for of resources that are not cycle of organic growth. To expect to "do its increase of op- renewed again" in an annual expect to find other exhaustible resources each time we use up a batch of them. Only once could
come and participate in this new nation's good fortune. The more who shared in it, the greater it would become. The American dream held no premonition that someday the invitation would be withdrawn, perpetuated only as a poetic inscription on a bronze plaque on Liberty Island in New York harbor, commemorating a bygone era: "Send these, the homeless, tempest- tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the invitation for golden door." From the beginning of the nation to its bicentennial, some 47 America
to change because they do alter the characteristics of their own environments. Succession is a very common (and virtually inescapable) ecological process. It happens to human communities as well as to animal and plant communities. The Age of Exuberance in which the American dream unfolded was an early serai stage in the succession of New World community types. The post-exuberant age is a later effectively same sere. By not recognizing the stage in the our own history. 14 . ecological