Seldon's Gate: March 2012

About this blog

Premise: Industrial civilization, as we know it, is coming to an end. Climate change, peak oil, and resource depletion represent the hard, physical limits of human activity; the stable ecology, resource base, and energy supplies that enabled the fantasy of eternal economic growth are being steadily eroded.

The new era of exhausted resources and devastated ecosystems has a name: the Anthropocene epoch. This is the age in which global ecological processes are determined primarily by the activities of human beings. The name signifies the fundamental change of the planetary biosphere that was home to human settlements in the preceding 13,000 years. The Anthropocene isn't the future. It's already here. Today.

Global capitalism, that contradictory system that on one hand increased he wealth and technology of humanity to never before seen heights, while on the other creating staggering exploitation and inequality, cannot long continue. Depending, as it does, on the perpetual availability of an ever-increasing resource base, capitalism cannot be sustained in the Anthropocene. It is, as they say, time to pay the piper.

This blog is a chronicle of one person's attempts to build community and security in a time of increasing troubles.

It's named for Hari Seldon, a fictional futorologist of the highest caliber, who built a foundation for the hard times ahead.