What Dan Allen writes below is what many scientists and ecological activists are thinking and saying privately. Read his entire post at resilience.org for context, since this slice of the article seems rather harsh and cruel. But all the other species will be grateful since the faster we crash the more of them will survive. And we ourselves risk extinction by driving so many others into extinction, since we have no way to know how dependent we are on them.  Collapse sooner also means less pollution, climate change — you name it!  A shame that it won’t be done with family planning, birth control, and abortion but capitalism depends on endless growth.  Articles on population are about how we need more people!  Oh the horror of the demographic transition as it’s called, mainly because it ends the Ponzi Scheme, including SSN, Medicare and other benefits for the elderly.

Alice Friedemann

Dan Allen. 11 Dec 2012. Extirpation Nation: How much of the US will be habitable in 50 years?  Resilience.org

…the global industrial economy needs to rapidly and deeply reduce the burning of fossil fuels, starting RIGHT NOW.  And not just you or me or our communities or our regions, but the WHOLE DAMN GLOBAL INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY.  And …this requires a rapid collapse of the global economy beginning NOW.

..While neither you nor I can initiate such a collapse, as the collapse gets rolling, there may be important emergent roles for some ‘lucky’ individuals in making sure the collapse proceeds rapidly enough.  Namely, there may be crucial points in time and crucial human players and crucial bits of infrastructure within the maelstrom of scrambling cities, towns, citizens, politicians, economists, farmers, engineers, manufacturers, military conquistadors, etc. who can keep the collapse collapsing on pace.  Maybe you or I will be one of those players.

And yes, I know this is contentious philosophical terrain here.  There will be human suffering during rapid collapse – but, I argue, orders of magnitude less suffering than if we don’t collapse rapidly enough.  And I do realize this is a controversial topic among even those valuing the future integrity of the ecosphere, so I’ll just direct people to Derrick Jensen’s Endgame for the philosophical underpinnings here.  God speed.