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320 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1980
"Human beings, in two million years of cultural evolution, have several times succeeded in taking over additional portions of the earth's total life-supporting capacity, at the expense of other creatures. Each time, human population has increased. But man has now learned to rely on a technology that augments human carrying capacity in a necessarily temporary way--as temporary as the extension of life by eating the seeds needed to grow next year's food. Human population, organized into industrial societies and blind to the temporariness of carrying capacity supplements based on exhaustible resource dependence, responded by increasing more exuberantly than ever, even though this meant overshooting the number our planet could permanently support. Something akin to bankruptcy was the inevitable sequel." p.5
"The paramount need of post-exuberant humanity is to remain human in the face of dehumanizing pressures. To do this we must learn somehow to base exuberance of spirit upon something more lasting than the expansive living that sustained it in the recent past. But, as if we were driving a car that has become stuck on a muddy road, we feel an urge to bear down harder than ever on the accelerator and to spin our wheels vigorously in an effort to power ourselves out of the quagmire. This reflect will only dig us in deeper. We have arrived at a point in history when counter-intuitive thoughtways are essential." p.7
"Unless we discard our belief in limitlessness, all of us are in danger of becoming its victims." p.10
"Desire changes entail unwarranted changes. Changed human activities involve changes in man's environment. Environmental change leads to succession; it can threaten human life. Non-competitive human interaction is imperiled by excess numbers and proliferating technology. Ecological antagonism begets social and emotional antagonism. These [are] the principles people [need] to learn to read between the lines of the news in post-exuberant times." p. 208
[B]elieving crash can't happen to us is one reason why it will. The principles of ecology apply to all living things. By supposing that our humanity exempts us, we delude ourselves. It is not just the yeast cells we put into wine vats that bloom. It is not just the recognized detritovores that crash. We have been backing into the future with our eyes too firmly averted from the detritivorous nature of our modern lifestyle. It is time to turn around and see what's ahead." p. 213
"If, having overshot carrying capacity, we cannot avoid crash,perhaps with ecological understanding of its real causes we can remain human in circumstances that could otherwise tempt us to turn beastly. Clear knowledge may forestall misplaced resentment, thus enabling us to refrain from inflicting futile and unpardonable suffering upon each other." p.214
"Profound as it might seem by standards from the culture of exuberance, if the debate about how to cope with the future was going to resolve itself into merely an argument over how to 'produce' our way out of trouble, the essential nature of our predicament would be overlooked. As it has been necessary to say repeatedly already, overlooking that predicament could not protect us from it. What really needed to be discussed was not only the dire need to conserve resources, but also this: What kind of role are human beings going to play in their own impending crash? How much will our efforts to avoid the unavoidable make it worse?" p.231
"We must learn to live within carrying capacity without trying to enlarge it. We must rely on renewable resources consumed no faster than at sustained yield rates. The last best hope for mankind is ecological modesty." p.260
"Mankind is condemned to bet on an uncertain future. The stakes have become phenomenally high: affluence, equity, democracy, humane tolerance, peaceful coexistence between nations, races, sects, sexes, parties, all are in jeopardy. Ironically, the less hopeful we assume human prospects to be, the more likely we are to act in ways that will minimize the hardships ahead for our species. Ecological understanding of the human predicament indicates that we live in times when the American habit of responding to a problem by asking 'All right, now what do we do about it?' must be replaced by a different query that does not assume all problems are soluble: 'What must we avoid doing to keep from making a bad situation unnecessarily worse?'" p.262
"Our best bet is to act as if we believed we have already overshot, and do our best to ensure that the inevitable crash consists as little as possible of outright die-off of Homo sapiens. Instead, it should consist as far as possible of the chosen abandonment of those seductive values characteristic of Homo colossus. Indeed, renunciation of such values may be the main alternative to renewed indulgence in cruel genocide. If crash should prove to be avoidable after all, a global strategy of trying to moderate expected crash is the strategy most likely to avert it." p.266