Collapse and After

We were chatting the other night about possible future scenarios. There's four main ones that people talk about on sites like Future Scenarios:
  • Techno Solutions - where all our problems are solved by technological solutions, as yet undeveloped, like giant mirrors in space helping to cool the Earth down - i.e. Fantasy
  • Business Pretty Much As Usual - where we tinker with things, a bit more recycling here, more efficient cars and insulation, but we basically carry on increasing the carbon in the atmosphere - this scenario ends in mass extinction - i.e. Game Over
  • Controlled Sensible Transition - where everyone from the most stupid world leaders to you and me in the street or field makes the change to a radically different way of life in a few years time - i.e. Highly Unlikely
  • Collapse - one disaster starts to pile on top of another until there is a cascade of even more disaster and the complete loss of whole systems - environmental, social, climate, financial - an everything collapse - i.e. All Too Likely
My intuition is that the future will be a mixture of all the move with a major collapse quite soon, maybe just in a few years, which will stop the industrial way of life in its tracks. I hope there will be some sort of future for small groups of humans in pockets of surviving habitat. Many areas will be able to regenerate naturally if given half a chance and may even start to re-balance the atmosphere.
If we're preparing for the likely scenarios, what are we going to need to develop? All the skills and features of our One World Future Farm...

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