After a string of “helpfully pessimistic” articles explaining why all attempts to sustain industrial civilization violate the laws of physics—and therefore are in vain—I believe it’s time to give some thought to the other effects of leaving industrialism behind.
Hungary has good potent poppy seeds also Slovakia. I try to stockpile good pharma seeds but the costs and quality here in Austria are a pain in the ass. Post Peak medicine is a taboo for 99% of all MDs but I try my best to educate at least my spouse.
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
I don’t really think this scenario of cooperative villages is likely until the absolute chaos of collapse for 8+ billion people has run its course. I do hope for some survivors to carry on, but I doubt I’ll survive beyond the chaos. Nevertheless, I am planning for the beginnings of supply chain disorder and adapting to the less severe consequences of collapse. I think you definitely describe a vey possible future, Fast Eddy. It’s the starving hoards that frighten me most. 😳
Comments are missing the point that this is in the context of the de-industrialization that we expect.
I think we need to revisit what's happening in rural communities. Commercial farming practices have caused major pollution of soil and water, and therefore of our food supply. People are developing cancers and other chronic diseases due to exposure. We need to see if we can find statistics over time for rural/outdoor occupations' lifespans. I expect they have gone down in the past 10 years.
It's interesting, previous rural generations who didn't have problems from chemical exposure usually ended up with musculoskeletal issues due to the heavy lifting and repetitive stress. People might be mostly healthy, but physically crippled. Labor saving devices have helped some, but is still see a lot of musculoskeletal issues and toxic chemical exposures chronic illnesses.
Also, rural people, even farmers, often have little access to healthy (non-chemically contaminated) local food due to cost and lack of convenient availability. Indeed in Iowa farming country, a common source of "food" (if you can call the processed garbage food) is local Dollar Stores.
Raising your own healthy food is very hard work and eats up lots of time. It's not easy for the elderly or unhealthy, although for sure outdoor activity will keep us healthier - IF we're not contaminated by toxic chemicals from nearby factory farms.
The impact of healthy food, healthy lifestyle and healthy work on lifespan and quality of life is a complicated web. Americans are suffering a death of 1000 cuts from all the exposure to toxic chemicals, over processed food and toxic, stressful workplaces.
While I agree with many of the commenters that there will most likely be a painful mass die-off, and that the end of global industrial civilization has to wind up with far less than a billion humans, I do imagine there will be a remnant of survivors. My interest is in paving the way for those survivors to have the best chance of creating a genuinely sustainable, regenerative society - rather, a lot of societies as they won't be globally connected - as citizens of the web of life. In that, I include non-human survivors as well as human.
The best bet for whatever survives is to use what fossil energy we have left to detoxify, to entomb the radioactive waste and heavy metal residuals, clean up our plastics mess, etc. Unfortunately, that doesn't look even plausible.
I once remarked to an MD that "lifespan" is grossly over-rated. He nearly had a conniption fit.
As I approach my 69th birthday, I plan to draw up a DNR document to become active upon my 70th birthday. My 70th birthday present to myself will be a tatoo across my chest and neck. DNR in huge letters. "do not resuscitate" in smaller letters. "I wish to only die once" woven through the theme.
One of the greatest tragedies of the modern era is the terror of death. Simpler societies lived with death all the time, and developed strategies for coping with it. In the future, there will be no choice but to cope with it.
I agree with you about our society’s fear of death. A current trend is for the deceased to forego any occasion set for loved ones to gather and mourn. Or the family decides not to have a ceremony to mark the passing of a loved one. There seems to be no rituals around death anymore. I find it very disorienting.
Surprised not to see any mention of water sanitation: safe drinking water and sewage/waste removal. These were far more important than vaccines for improving public health and lifespans. Without these, waterborne illnesses return and devastate the population. This is one one area that absolutely must be preserved or transitioned to a low-tech form to maintain average lifespan/general quality of life.
Small communities can probably keep a safe water supply and I doubt things will get so bad that people forget basic knowledge like washing your hands, but giant cities are impossible without industrial water and waste management, amongst other things.
It's much worse than that. Surface & groundwater are now polluted, not only with bacteria that could be sterilized with heat, but also with road chemicals, crumb from tire wear, backyard pesticides & fertilizers as well as farm chemicals, micro & nanoplastics, PFAS, and heaven knows what else. It's not even clear how much of this toxic stew is removed by modern water treatment plants. Oh, and you can't even drink rainwater if you collect it in rainbarrels from roof run-off because almost all modern roofing materials contain toxins. Oh yeah, and there are PFAS and nano-plastics in the hydrological cycle, such that they precipitate onto the most remote places on earth. There is no longer any such thing as clean freshwater or even snow.
I know it's only anecdotal, but my family's water supply was unfiltered and untreated mountain stream water in the mid-70s and early 80s and thereafter it has been untreated rainwater (up until a few years ago when we installed filters to keep out rat lungworm larvae). We may have an advantage of being in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for the rainwater. Everyone's just fine.
Would love to work toward this future, and do so by gardening for some of my produce. “Victory Gardens” during World War II were an important part of supplementing food supplies and a great portion of American households did this. We could start with this simple and yet revolutionary act to eat some better food.
Leaving all the tech behind is far from what the young will be doing anytime soon. That will take reaching rock bottom unfortunately. But for now, grow some food and buy less on Amazon…maybe even walk to the store. We underestimate the impact if even one million Americans started doing this (I live in the US).
How do you propose to manufacture clothing, cookware, transportation, construction materials? How is drinking water gonna get to consumers? How are the materials for machines gonna be made & transported?
Always same question: WHO IS GONNA DO THE DIRTY, BORING, EXHAUSTING WORK ?
Re-inventing a society with less useless goods & consumption, fine, but your back to nature single recipe is so...childish.
In a non-industrial world the work is allocated by the need for maximum power (rate of energy use). Men have the most capacity for power and children the least, with women in the middle. Tasks tend to be taken on accordingly.
Virtually all work in a world powered by human and animal muscle is dirty, boring and exhausting. It's no more thrilling looking at the ass-end of a draft animal all day while wrestling with the plow than it is endlessly spinning and weaving.
Yet somehow the work will get done... as it has for hundreds of thousands of years.
"WHO IS GONNA DO THE DIRTY, BORING, EXHAUSTING WORK?"
I think there is plenty of dirty, boring, and exhausting work today, in our industrial society! It's just that "other people" do it, right?
In fact, I think a sustainable rural life-style probably has a lot less of that!
For example, I don't flush my toilet. The urine is separated and goes into a barrel, to be mixed with stove ash slurry and applied to the garden.
Once a month I change the bucket with the non-urine wastes, dumping the full one into a special compost spot made of pallets, spreading it out, and covering it with green stuff pulled out of the forest. We have two of these; when this one is full, we spread the other one, which has been "cooking" for a year, under our fruit trees. At that point, it smells like soil.
In exchange for doing this minor bit of "dirty work", I don't have to pay either a sewer fee or a septic-tank pumping fee. Seems like a win to me!
But on a larger scale, this means that there is LESS "work" for people who "shovel shît" for eight hours a day! I'm delighted to contribute to their loss of such demeaning work! This means that less shît has to be treated, with occasional "accidents" and "mistakes" that cause it to enter the environment. This means fewer people die from cantaloupes that were "fertilized" with under-treated septage.
I think such a life style is more "adultish" than childish. What is more childish than expecting "other people" to do your dirty work?
Do you use leaves as plates? What do you cook your (veggies) stews in? Did you extract the ore to make the pot? Did you get the clay for the plates? How about the kiln? How did you make the bricks? Pick the wood?
There is SO MUCH that can be done to reduce consumption of resources & pollution on a large scale without detailing how to dispose of your urine...
You are not serious people. You cannot draw in large audiences with ridiculously minute hacks, totally undoable for families & skirting the main sources of overconsumption in areas people could be persuaded to come along.
"There is SO MUCH that can be done to reduce consumption of resources & pollution on a large scale"
Yes, but not enough to transition industrial civilization to anywhere near sustainability. People in cities could live in their apartments without heat and electricity, buy nothing and subsist on a bag of grain dropped on the sidewalk for them as rationed subsistence food, but that food still has to be raised on a commercial farm, harvested with a combine, trucked into the city and delivered to the doorstep. People in modern cities will always be dependent on industrial agriculture for their very lives and industrial agriculture is not sustainable. And toilet wastes can only pile up in the streets for so long.
People like Jan Steinman and my family are not simply virtue signaling by separating our urine (which is high in nitrogen), we are trying to avoid being dependent on industrial systems for our food and that requires nutrient cycling. Growing your own food using shipped-in industrial nutrients is a little better than not growing any food, but not much.
Just because we use the products of industrial civilization without going all the way to stone-age foraging doesn't make us just as vulnerable as city dwellers. We are simply trying to get ready for the great simplification and population-dieoff transition. That means being able to produce our own food, supply our own water, and have our own fuel for heat and cooking, all without industrial inputs. If we can do that, there is time to adapt to the gradual loss of stainless cooking pots and chainsaws.
The day will surely come when everything built by modern industrial methods is gone, including our off-grid electrical systems, metal tools and industrial fabrics and footwear, but you still have to live to see that day happen if you want a chance at life without them. That's what we're trying to be ready for. I don't see it as something to sneer at as being "unserious".
Sorry, but I'm not into this "absolutist" crap. Go criticize someone else.
I will continue to do what I can personally do. I'm not into the impossible mission of "drawing in large audiences". Not in the post "Citizens United" time, when a single corporation can spend more money fighting anti-overconsumption than I've earned my entire life.
You are the one who is not serious here. Don't use the tools of your oppressor.
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." — Mahatma Ghandi
Correct. Anyone who sings Koombaya and believes all will be well when 8B+ humans have ZERO food (99.9999% of food is produced using petro chemicals... and the soil has been ruined by them)...
I'm not going to read your "collapse and cannibalism" post. It might happen, but so might any number of things, including Koombaya choral societies.
Collapse will probably be very chaotic and dangerous. It may be preceded by events, like a nuclear war or very fatal pandemic, that will make it very sudden and much harder to survive. It could be sudden and terrible, or, less likely, gradual and not quite as terrible.
We can speculate whether it will be like "The Road" or "RetroSuburbia" all we want, but we really can't know. Still, we do know that anyone still alive will need food and water and a dry place to sleep. I figure if I have those things covered, I'll deal with whatever comes later for as long as I can.
And if bandits shoot me dead in the field and eat my body for lunch, the gardens, fruit and nut trees, lush pastures and water catchments will still be there for someone else to use. That's a good legacy to leave behind. I can die with no regrets.
R U nuts? Every square inch of agricultural land in the US is "owned" and you'll be at risk of being shot, if you dare step foot on it. We are 3,000 times more numerous worldwide than were our self-sustaining ecologically balanced migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestors. The ONLY possible way out/back is through massive birth control and our corporate overlords are doing everything in their power to prevent population decline, lest they lose cheap labor and abundant consumers. Have a blessed day, but cross me off of your subscriber list.
What is it about "We are 3,000 times more numerous worldwide than were our self-sustaining ecologically balanced migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestors" that you don't understand?
A sustainable future can only be enjoyed by a human population only a tiny fraction of today's. The difference between industrial civilization and sustainability is a nearly total dieoff. And it's going to happen no matter what is done, including "massive birth control".
Starting the process of de-industrialization and massive birth control many generations ago might have worked, but it's far too late now. Collapse will happen during the lifetime of most people alive right now and world population is still growing (albeit at declining percentage rates). Over 8 billion people are doomed to a premature death. This is what we should be preparing for. It can't be helped, but it might be slightly minimized.
Minimizing the trauma for the survivors should start with reducing as much as possible the dangerous legacies of industrialism, toxic waste, nuclear waste, sterile soil, plastics, toxic chemicals in storage, etc. Almost all of us are going to die prematurely, but we should at least clean up our industrial deathbed before we go.
William Catton wrote a book about this in 1982. A glance at the cover of the book is all you need to do to understand. The book is "Overshoot".
Peak population will be reached much sooner than the official UN estimates because they don't take full account of the precipitous declines in Total Fertility Rates, which could lead to a peak within the next ten years, regardless of any pro-natalist government policy.
Then there is the resource issue: we're running out of fresh water & soil and fossil fuel derived fertilisers are essential to industrial food production so it does look like the death of billions of people from starvation is a real possibility.
I don't blame you for burying your head back in the sand...
I strongly disagree with the claim that "interactions with other people" will make your life longer. Especially in the workplace where toxic relationships are pretty much certain to develop, which is what I hear from pretty much everybody who "interacts with other people". That dovetails with stress, which is a major factor (as mentioned above), because people "interacting with others" are premanently stressed out (about what some asshole will do next).
I'd tend to agree with you. But most ppl are just social animals 'willing' to cope with any kind of abuse for fear of staying alone. Idiocy is rather comfortable, and not straining your 'mind' helps prolong your 'life'.
Yes, the "at birth" qualifier is always missing when the term "life expectancy" is used, so we end up with a completely false picture of life in earlier times. "Average lifespan" would be a better term.
Not only would a healthy 19th C 45 year old Frenchman have a good chance of reaching 70, he'd also have a fair chance of reaching 80, with 90 not being a very rare occurrence, since 70 is the "average" life expectancy.
I don't get the idea that a post collapse world will be a nice peaceful society where everyone is doing regenerative farming or repurposing old equipment from civilisation.
Firstly, there is no such thing as a sustainable society that uses non-renewables (regenerative farming isn't done with sticks, and operating repurposed machinery will need non-renewable fuels and resources). It might be possible, for a while, to run a society on the scavenging of the old civilisation, for those humans that remain. But it won't be sustainable. Eventually, you won't be able to repair the machines without mining and refining more resources, which won't be available anyway without the complex machines that were needed prior to collapse.
Not only that, climate is becoming less stable. There's a reason humans didn't take up farming for 300,000 years.
You hinted at hunting and gathering. In reality, I can't see how any other way of life could be described as sustainable.
You're right. But small scale agrarianism can work for a while, especially on the downslope. It's going to be difficult enough to grow food in gardens and orchards, going right to foraging is almost impossible in developed countries.
I don't think you understand "regenerative farming".
I farmed for fifteen years in a nearly diesel-free manner, free of single-use plastic. When you're that far along, going the rest of the way seems more possible. The only reason to not go "all the way" was that we had to compete with fully-dieseled farms that stuffed their products into single-use bags.
I suggest reading Mark Shepard's "Restoration Agriculture". It stresses perennial polyculture. Yes, you use some diesel for terraforming to start, but it could be done with shovels, too. Really, Permaculture uses limited amounts of diesel as a capital investment, not as an ongoing operating expense.
And when the diesel is gone, you're going to have a much easier time moving to the next step than someone who has been dependent on diesel for continuing operations.
Well, yes, a stepped approach may give you a head start when there is no diesel, no worked metals and an unstable climate, but whether you'd be successful or not, post-collapse, is a very questionable proposition. Sustainable doesn't have degrees, something is either sustainable or it isn't. If you can do agriculture of any sort with sticks and extremes of weather, you'll be lucky.
Still, it may not be an issue for those living today. Fingers crossed.
I just don't think the TINA approach (There Is No Alternative) is very useful.
You're effectively excluding anyone who could possibly be reading this. ("What? You use electricity? THAT's not sustainable!")
If you don't allow a *path* as an alternative to living in a cave and covering your body in animal hides — that you personally killed using a flint-tipped spear that you made yourself — you're not going to inspire anyone to get closer to a sustainable life-style.
On the contrary, I think the approach that you term TINA is very useful. Because it is based in reality. What is the point of inspiring people to do unsustainable things? Getting closer to a sustainable lifestyle is pointless unless the next step can be taken. But no-one wants to live a sustainable life.
It's not I who won't allow a path to unsustainable living, it's physics. If it's unsustainable, it will end. Eventually, humans are going to have to live in a manner closer to other animals. If we keep promising people a wonderful future, instead of telling them the truth, there will be no move to making the descent as painless as possible. Consequently, the descent will be very painful.
There is something being left out here - I have watched parents and relatives fade into dementia and suffer long painful exits . For me , I would rather go quickly and relatively pain free ( palliative care) than exist in a vegetative state . Long term "pain management" often is less effective due to tolerance levels rising steadily. Some people live into old age with all their faculties , but the nursing homes are still full. On the subject of "life expectancy" we no longer have the evolutionary filter taking out the unhealthy and defective - this used to happen most often when young .
Thank you, B, for your Substack. I enjoy your articles because you usually ground your conclusions on evidence and logic.
While I think your recommendations for lifestyles are good, I don't think they all follow necessarily from the paper you discuss. The authors of that paper did not consider, from my quick scan, that the longevity advantage for those in farming, fishing, and forestry occupations could be a cohort effect. As Barbara noted, manual farming is hard work. The musculoskeletal effects of a life of labor even show up in human skeletal remains from centuries ago. Mechanization has reduced or even eliminated these effects.
Moreover, these occupations are among the most deadly, if not the deadliest, _on the job_. Logging and fishing were much more dangerous in the past than they are now, but they still are more dangerous than other occupations. I suspect that most of the deaths in the outdoor occupations occurred in persons who had long since retired. They likely represent survivors of an even deadlier era, when a much larger proportion of the population worked in those occupations. The high death rates in that period for these occupations cannot be detected by studying only very recent deaths. The outdoor occupations are by far the smallest category of deaths in this study.
Humans have been cutting trees and taking fish, other animals, and plants for many thousands of years all over the world. We are animals -- we eat plants and other animals. Virtually everyone today relies on the products of industrial logging. These are the kinds of dependencies that B highlights, no matter how much we might not like them.
Of course, like all animals, humans need to eat. They did so for millions of years without destroying their habitat. Industrial logging, industrial fishing, manufacturing, mining, the 'economy' etc etc ad nauseam - these are all consequences of 'civilization'. It was never sustainable, and the sooner it ends, the better for the planet and any surviving humans.
Fine. We eventually settle down to a simple, quiet life, albeit with fewer people.
Question: Can we get there from here?
Recently, you wrote that the human population might drop to 2 billion people in the next 100 years due to "wars, heat waves, and famines" and a "lack of births." ( https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-next-ten-thousand-years?) How much of that decrease is caused by painful early deaths, and how much is caused by voluntary decisions to have fewer children?
Elsewhere, I show a chart by Christopher Tucker showing that, even if we got the birth rate down to 1.5, we still end up with about 3.5 billion people a century from now. ( https://medium.com/@Merle2/are-there-too-many-people-33aca7076fe9 ) Do you expect the birth rate to be that low, or even lower? And what about the rest of the cuts needed to reach 2 billion?
Let's certainly hope that humanity is able to reach whatever limited population level we need to reach by voluntary birth reduction and a minimum of violent deaths. And then let's hope that we all get through it and unite in socially advanced systems in a wealth-deprived world.
And, hopefully, we do not end up like the old joke, where the old man, scratching his head when asked to give directions to a nearby destination, concluded, "Come to think of it, I don't think you can get there from here."
You actually can't get there from here. Industrial modernity has trapped billions of people in a system from which there is no way out but an early grave.
Two billion people is still way too many. It would require significant industrialization to support that number, which was the world population in 1927. Even one billion (in 1800) requires industrial production of iron and steel. It's possible that if we had attempted to reverse the industrial revolution and reduce population in 1800 we could have built a sustainable society, but that's not what happened.
Humanity moved from being mostly agrarian peasants to mostly urban service workers by investing huge amouts of energy and other resources over centuries to build cities and the machines that took over farming, food transportation and processing from human workers.
That massive amount of physical capital will take all the energy we can scrounge just to maintain it. We will have nothing left over to deconstruct cities and move everyone back to the land where they can be agrarian peasants once again. The time to start that was long ago. Now, it's far too late.
Virtually all the people living in cities are stuck their human feedlots. They can't leave and once the energy runs out they won't be able to be fed.
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
Indeed, but Merle's desire was that "humanity is able to reach whatever limited population level we need to reach by voluntary birth reduction and a minimum of violent deaths". That path is not available now.
On the "Interactions with people" front, massive overpopulation and interaction with both farm animals as well as wild animals (as we decimate their habitat) led to an explosion in "crowding diseases" like measles, flu, covid, cholera, etc. There is a huge tradeoff in "interacting with people": one is exposed far more often to crowding diseases which surely shorten life. Given what we've learned about the devastating impacts of many viruses, especially over the past few years, in terms of leading to dementia, cancer, heart attacks and strokes, etc. I'd be curious to know if researchers have studied the tradeoffs in more interaction vs. less from a public health standpoint.
Also, not just autistic people love being alone. Being "alone" from humans is not the same as being alone. I find the many other species we share this world with are often far better company than humans. As we exterminate more and more species with industrial civilization and particularly agriculture, I would expect the decline in biodiversity and overall wildlife numbers to have a massive impact on human well-being and longevity as well.
The article explores how moving away from industrialism could impact longevity, arguing that while modern healthcare and conveniences have extended life, they are unsustainable. It suggests that a focus on active, outdoor lifestyles and nature-based medicine in a post-industrial world could lead to healthier, longer lives, despite the challenges posed by economic collapse and changing societal structures.
Hungary has good potent poppy seeds also Slovakia. I try to stockpile good pharma seeds but the costs and quality here in Austria are a pain in the ass. Post Peak medicine is a taboo for 99% of all MDs but I try my best to educate at least my spouse.
So we all plant marijuana, and all will be well?
Yes!
Collapse and Cannibalism
8+ billion vicious starving humans and the orgy of violence that will ensue
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/collapse-and-cannibalism
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
Thanks for the cheer-up Eddy.
Most people don't want the truth... for obvious reasons
I don’t really think this scenario of cooperative villages is likely until the absolute chaos of collapse for 8+ billion people has run its course. I do hope for some survivors to carry on, but I doubt I’ll survive beyond the chaos. Nevertheless, I am planning for the beginnings of supply chain disorder and adapting to the less severe consequences of collapse. I think you definitely describe a vey possible future, Fast Eddy. It’s the starving hoards that frighten me most. 😳
Haven't we murdered enough species...and destroyed enough of the planet? I am thinking it's our time...to exit
The thought of the loss and destruction ahead is absolutely soul crushing.
I'm actually quite pleased that we are going extinct... it is for the greater good (if you exclude humans)
Think of the billions of animals that we lock into the nightmare gulags that we call farms... the horror in those places is beyond horror...
That stops.. when we are gone.
As does the animal testing torture
And what is the use of bringing this up without some hint of what readers can do about it?
The purpose is to pop their delusional predictions of what the future looks like. THIS IS AN EXTINCTION EVENT.🤣
That's the best thing about this - there is NOTHING anyone can do.
We are done innovating... and inventing... we are outta bullets.
Fortunately it happened before we paved over the entire planet.
So I suppose the point of this -- after further consideration -- is to celebrate the extinction of humans.
We should have an extinction party :)
One other reason for bringing this up -- anyone who is wasting money doomsday prepping... can stop ... and bucket list instead
Comments are missing the point that this is in the context of the de-industrialization that we expect.
I think we need to revisit what's happening in rural communities. Commercial farming practices have caused major pollution of soil and water, and therefore of our food supply. People are developing cancers and other chronic diseases due to exposure. We need to see if we can find statistics over time for rural/outdoor occupations' lifespans. I expect they have gone down in the past 10 years.
It's interesting, previous rural generations who didn't have problems from chemical exposure usually ended up with musculoskeletal issues due to the heavy lifting and repetitive stress. People might be mostly healthy, but physically crippled. Labor saving devices have helped some, but is still see a lot of musculoskeletal issues and toxic chemical exposures chronic illnesses.
Also, rural people, even farmers, often have little access to healthy (non-chemically contaminated) local food due to cost and lack of convenient availability. Indeed in Iowa farming country, a common source of "food" (if you can call the processed garbage food) is local Dollar Stores.
Raising your own healthy food is very hard work and eats up lots of time. It's not easy for the elderly or unhealthy, although for sure outdoor activity will keep us healthier - IF we're not contaminated by toxic chemicals from nearby factory farms.
The impact of healthy food, healthy lifestyle and healthy work on lifespan and quality of life is a complicated web. Americans are suffering a death of 1000 cuts from all the exposure to toxic chemicals, over processed food and toxic, stressful workplaces.
While I agree with many of the commenters that there will most likely be a painful mass die-off, and that the end of global industrial civilization has to wind up with far less than a billion humans, I do imagine there will be a remnant of survivors. My interest is in paving the way for those survivors to have the best chance of creating a genuinely sustainable, regenerative society - rather, a lot of societies as they won't be globally connected - as citizens of the web of life. In that, I include non-human survivors as well as human.
The best bet for whatever survives is to use what fossil energy we have left to detoxify, to entomb the radioactive waste and heavy metal residuals, clean up our plastics mess, etc. Unfortunately, that doesn't look even plausible.
I once remarked to an MD that "lifespan" is grossly over-rated. He nearly had a conniption fit.
As I approach my 69th birthday, I plan to draw up a DNR document to become active upon my 70th birthday. My 70th birthday present to myself will be a tatoo across my chest and neck. DNR in huge letters. "do not resuscitate" in smaller letters. "I wish to only die once" woven through the theme.
One of the greatest tragedies of the modern era is the terror of death. Simpler societies lived with death all the time, and developed strategies for coping with it. In the future, there will be no choice but to cope with it.
Never forget that death is your lifetime achievement !
“Lifespan is grossly over-rated.” 😂 Love this.
I agree with you about our society’s fear of death. A current trend is for the deceased to forego any occasion set for loved ones to gather and mourn. Or the family decides not to have a ceremony to mark the passing of a loved one. There seems to be no rituals around death anymore. I find it very disorienting.
Rituals have been discarded willy nilly to our collective detriment.
Surprised not to see any mention of water sanitation: safe drinking water and sewage/waste removal. These were far more important than vaccines for improving public health and lifespans. Without these, waterborne illnesses return and devastate the population. This is one one area that absolutely must be preserved or transitioned to a low-tech form to maintain average lifespan/general quality of life.
Small communities can probably keep a safe water supply and I doubt things will get so bad that people forget basic knowledge like washing your hands, but giant cities are impossible without industrial water and waste management, amongst other things.
It's much worse than that. Surface & groundwater are now polluted, not only with bacteria that could be sterilized with heat, but also with road chemicals, crumb from tire wear, backyard pesticides & fertilizers as well as farm chemicals, micro & nanoplastics, PFAS, and heaven knows what else. It's not even clear how much of this toxic stew is removed by modern water treatment plants. Oh, and you can't even drink rainwater if you collect it in rainbarrels from roof run-off because almost all modern roofing materials contain toxins. Oh yeah, and there are PFAS and nano-plastics in the hydrological cycle, such that they precipitate onto the most remote places on earth. There is no longer any such thing as clean freshwater or even snow.
I know it's only anecdotal, but my family's water supply was unfiltered and untreated mountain stream water in the mid-70s and early 80s and thereafter it has been untreated rainwater (up until a few years ago when we installed filters to keep out rat lungworm larvae). We may have an advantage of being in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for the rainwater. Everyone's just fine.
Would love to work toward this future, and do so by gardening for some of my produce. “Victory Gardens” during World War II were an important part of supplementing food supplies and a great portion of American households did this. We could start with this simple and yet revolutionary act to eat some better food.
Leaving all the tech behind is far from what the young will be doing anytime soon. That will take reaching rock bottom unfortunately. But for now, grow some food and buy less on Amazon…maybe even walk to the store. We underestimate the impact if even one million Americans started doing this (I live in the US).
Great food for thought B!
Delustional Instanity...
Reality https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/collapse-and-cannibalism
Women will spun wool, etc?
How do you propose to manufacture clothing, cookware, transportation, construction materials? How is drinking water gonna get to consumers? How are the materials for machines gonna be made & transported?
Always same question: WHO IS GONNA DO THE DIRTY, BORING, EXHAUSTING WORK ?
Re-inventing a society with less useless goods & consumption, fine, but your back to nature single recipe is so...childish.
In a non-industrial world the work is allocated by the need for maximum power (rate of energy use). Men have the most capacity for power and children the least, with women in the middle. Tasks tend to be taken on accordingly.
Virtually all work in a world powered by human and animal muscle is dirty, boring and exhausting. It's no more thrilling looking at the ass-end of a draft animal all day while wrestling with the plow than it is endlessly spinning and weaving.
Yet somehow the work will get done... as it has for hundreds of thousands of years.
"WHO IS GONNA DO THE DIRTY, BORING, EXHAUSTING WORK?"
I think there is plenty of dirty, boring, and exhausting work today, in our industrial society! It's just that "other people" do it, right?
In fact, I think a sustainable rural life-style probably has a lot less of that!
For example, I don't flush my toilet. The urine is separated and goes into a barrel, to be mixed with stove ash slurry and applied to the garden.
Once a month I change the bucket with the non-urine wastes, dumping the full one into a special compost spot made of pallets, spreading it out, and covering it with green stuff pulled out of the forest. We have two of these; when this one is full, we spread the other one, which has been "cooking" for a year, under our fruit trees. At that point, it smells like soil.
In exchange for doing this minor bit of "dirty work", I don't have to pay either a sewer fee or a septic-tank pumping fee. Seems like a win to me!
But on a larger scale, this means that there is LESS "work" for people who "shovel shît" for eight hours a day! I'm delighted to contribute to their loss of such demeaning work! This means that less shît has to be treated, with occasional "accidents" and "mistakes" that cause it to enter the environment. This means fewer people die from cantaloupes that were "fertilized" with under-treated septage.
I think such a life style is more "adultish" than childish. What is more childish than expecting "other people" to do your dirty work?
Do you use leaves as plates? What do you cook your (veggies) stews in? Did you extract the ore to make the pot? Did you get the clay for the plates? How about the kiln? How did you make the bricks? Pick the wood?
There is SO MUCH that can be done to reduce consumption of resources & pollution on a large scale without detailing how to dispose of your urine...
You are not serious people. You cannot draw in large audiences with ridiculously minute hacks, totally undoable for families & skirting the main sources of overconsumption in areas people could be persuaded to come along.
"There is SO MUCH that can be done to reduce consumption of resources & pollution on a large scale"
Yes, but not enough to transition industrial civilization to anywhere near sustainability. People in cities could live in their apartments without heat and electricity, buy nothing and subsist on a bag of grain dropped on the sidewalk for them as rationed subsistence food, but that food still has to be raised on a commercial farm, harvested with a combine, trucked into the city and delivered to the doorstep. People in modern cities will always be dependent on industrial agriculture for their very lives and industrial agriculture is not sustainable. And toilet wastes can only pile up in the streets for so long.
People like Jan Steinman and my family are not simply virtue signaling by separating our urine (which is high in nitrogen), we are trying to avoid being dependent on industrial systems for our food and that requires nutrient cycling. Growing your own food using shipped-in industrial nutrients is a little better than not growing any food, but not much.
Just because we use the products of industrial civilization without going all the way to stone-age foraging doesn't make us just as vulnerable as city dwellers. We are simply trying to get ready for the great simplification and population-dieoff transition. That means being able to produce our own food, supply our own water, and have our own fuel for heat and cooking, all without industrial inputs. If we can do that, there is time to adapt to the gradual loss of stainless cooking pots and chainsaws.
The day will surely come when everything built by modern industrial methods is gone, including our off-grid electrical systems, metal tools and industrial fabrics and footwear, but you still have to live to see that day happen if you want a chance at life without them. That's what we're trying to be ready for. I don't see it as something to sneer at as being "unserious".
Sorry, but I'm not into this "absolutist" crap. Go criticize someone else.
I will continue to do what I can personally do. I'm not into the impossible mission of "drawing in large audiences". Not in the post "Citizens United" time, when a single corporation can spend more money fighting anti-overconsumption than I've earned my entire life.
You are the one who is not serious here. Don't use the tools of your oppressor.
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." — Mahatma Ghandi
Correct. Anyone who sings Koombaya and believes all will be well when 8B+ humans have ZERO food (99.9999% of food is produced using petro chemicals... and the soil has been ruined by them)...
Is living in a dream world.
THIS is what happens https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/collapse-and-cannibalism
I'm not going to read your "collapse and cannibalism" post. It might happen, but so might any number of things, including Koombaya choral societies.
Collapse will probably be very chaotic and dangerous. It may be preceded by events, like a nuclear war or very fatal pandemic, that will make it very sudden and much harder to survive. It could be sudden and terrible, or, less likely, gradual and not quite as terrible.
We can speculate whether it will be like "The Road" or "RetroSuburbia" all we want, but we really can't know. Still, we do know that anyone still alive will need food and water and a dry place to sleep. I figure if I have those things covered, I'll deal with whatever comes later for as long as I can.
And if bandits shoot me dead in the field and eat my body for lunch, the gardens, fruit and nut trees, lush pastures and water catchments will still be there for someone else to use. That's a good legacy to leave behind. I can die with no regrets.
Wrong. We can know.
Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion
A study in global systemic collapse
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/financial-system-supply-chain-cross
When that happens - there will be no food.
8B+ starving vicious animals.
They will most definitely eat each other https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/collapse-and-cannibalism
Then the strongest, meanest, toughest... will eat each other ... and the king of the mountain - the last man standing... will starve
I might add that the reason the Men Who Run the World will not allow this to happen - see https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
Is because they are aware of people like you - who will not quit... who will kill and eat other humans if it comes down to that...
This is what they seek to prevent https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
R U nuts? Every square inch of agricultural land in the US is "owned" and you'll be at risk of being shot, if you dare step foot on it. We are 3,000 times more numerous worldwide than were our self-sustaining ecologically balanced migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestors. The ONLY possible way out/back is through massive birth control and our corporate overlords are doing everything in their power to prevent population decline, lest they lose cheap labor and abundant consumers. Have a blessed day, but cross me off of your subscriber list.
Just to reiterate Matthew's point:
What is it about "We are 3,000 times more numerous worldwide than were our self-sustaining ecologically balanced migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestors" that you don't understand?
A sustainable future can only be enjoyed by a human population only a tiny fraction of today's. The difference between industrial civilization and sustainability is a nearly total dieoff. And it's going to happen no matter what is done, including "massive birth control".
Starting the process of de-industrialization and massive birth control many generations ago might have worked, but it's far too late now. Collapse will happen during the lifetime of most people alive right now and world population is still growing (albeit at declining percentage rates). Over 8 billion people are doomed to a premature death. This is what we should be preparing for. It can't be helped, but it might be slightly minimized.
Minimizing the trauma for the survivors should start with reducing as much as possible the dangerous legacies of industrialism, toxic waste, nuclear waste, sterile soil, plastics, toxic chemicals in storage, etc. Almost all of us are going to die prematurely, but we should at least clean up our industrial deathbed before we go.
William Catton wrote a book about this in 1982. A glance at the cover of the book is all you need to do to understand. The book is "Overshoot".
Peak population will be reached much sooner than the official UN estimates because they don't take full account of the precipitous declines in Total Fertility Rates, which could lead to a peak within the next ten years, regardless of any pro-natalist government policy.
Then there is the resource issue: we're running out of fresh water & soil and fossil fuel derived fertilisers are essential to industrial food production so it does look like the death of billions of people from starvation is a real possibility.
I don't blame you for burying your head back in the sand...
Wars, famine, greed, and disease is doing the job of population reduction quite nicely, no need to run away.
I strongly disagree with the claim that "interactions with other people" will make your life longer. Especially in the workplace where toxic relationships are pretty much certain to develop, which is what I hear from pretty much everybody who "interacts with other people". That dovetails with stress, which is a major factor (as mentioned above), because people "interacting with others" are premanently stressed out (about what some asshole will do next).
I'd tend to agree with you. But most ppl are just social animals 'willing' to cope with any kind of abuse for fear of staying alone. Idiocy is rather comfortable, and not straining your 'mind' helps prolong your 'life'.
Yes, the "at birth" qualifier is always missing when the term "life expectancy" is used, so we end up with a completely false picture of life in earlier times. "Average lifespan" would be a better term.
Not only would a healthy 19th C 45 year old Frenchman have a good chance of reaching 70, he'd also have a fair chance of reaching 80, with 90 not being a very rare occurrence, since 70 is the "average" life expectancy.
I don't get the idea that a post collapse world will be a nice peaceful society where everyone is doing regenerative farming or repurposing old equipment from civilisation.
Firstly, there is no such thing as a sustainable society that uses non-renewables (regenerative farming isn't done with sticks, and operating repurposed machinery will need non-renewable fuels and resources). It might be possible, for a while, to run a society on the scavenging of the old civilisation, for those humans that remain. But it won't be sustainable. Eventually, you won't be able to repair the machines without mining and refining more resources, which won't be available anyway without the complex machines that were needed prior to collapse.
Not only that, climate is becoming less stable. There's a reason humans didn't take up farming for 300,000 years.
You hinted at hunting and gathering. In reality, I can't see how any other way of life could be described as sustainable.
You're right. But small scale agrarianism can work for a while, especially on the downslope. It's going to be difficult enough to grow food in gardens and orchards, going right to foraging is almost impossible in developed countries.
"regenerative farming isn't done with sticks"
I don't think you understand "regenerative farming".
I farmed for fifteen years in a nearly diesel-free manner, free of single-use plastic. When you're that far along, going the rest of the way seems more possible. The only reason to not go "all the way" was that we had to compete with fully-dieseled farms that stuffed their products into single-use bags.
I suggest reading Mark Shepard's "Restoration Agriculture". It stresses perennial polyculture. Yes, you use some diesel for terraforming to start, but it could be done with shovels, too. Really, Permaculture uses limited amounts of diesel as a capital investment, not as an ongoing operating expense.
And when the diesel is gone, you're going to have a much easier time moving to the next step than someone who has been dependent on diesel for continuing operations.
Well, yes, a stepped approach may give you a head start when there is no diesel, no worked metals and an unstable climate, but whether you'd be successful or not, post-collapse, is a very questionable proposition. Sustainable doesn't have degrees, something is either sustainable or it isn't. If you can do agriculture of any sort with sticks and extremes of weather, you'll be lucky.
Still, it may not be an issue for those living today. Fingers crossed.
I just don't think the TINA approach (There Is No Alternative) is very useful.
You're effectively excluding anyone who could possibly be reading this. ("What? You use electricity? THAT's not sustainable!")
If you don't allow a *path* as an alternative to living in a cave and covering your body in animal hides — that you personally killed using a flint-tipped spear that you made yourself — you're not going to inspire anyone to get closer to a sustainable life-style.
On the contrary, I think the approach that you term TINA is very useful. Because it is based in reality. What is the point of inspiring people to do unsustainable things? Getting closer to a sustainable lifestyle is pointless unless the next step can be taken. But no-one wants to live a sustainable life.
https://mikerobertsblog.wordpress.com/2026/01/25/would-anyone-want-to-live-sustainably/
It's not I who won't allow a path to unsustainable living, it's physics. If it's unsustainable, it will end. Eventually, humans are going to have to live in a manner closer to other animals. If we keep promising people a wonderful future, instead of telling them the truth, there will be no move to making the descent as painless as possible. Consequently, the descent will be very painful.
There is something being left out here - I have watched parents and relatives fade into dementia and suffer long painful exits . For me , I would rather go quickly and relatively pain free ( palliative care) than exist in a vegetative state . Long term "pain management" often is less effective due to tolerance levels rising steadily. Some people live into old age with all their faculties , but the nursing homes are still full. On the subject of "life expectancy" we no longer have the evolutionary filter taking out the unhealthy and defective - this used to happen most often when young .
Thank you, B, for your Substack. I enjoy your articles because you usually ground your conclusions on evidence and logic.
While I think your recommendations for lifestyles are good, I don't think they all follow necessarily from the paper you discuss. The authors of that paper did not consider, from my quick scan, that the longevity advantage for those in farming, fishing, and forestry occupations could be a cohort effect. As Barbara noted, manual farming is hard work. The musculoskeletal effects of a life of labor even show up in human skeletal remains from centuries ago. Mechanization has reduced or even eliminated these effects.
Moreover, these occupations are among the most deadly, if not the deadliest, _on the job_. Logging and fishing were much more dangerous in the past than they are now, but they still are more dangerous than other occupations. I suspect that most of the deaths in the outdoor occupations occurred in persons who had long since retired. They likely represent survivors of an even deadlier era, when a much larger proportion of the population worked in those occupations. The high death rates in that period for these occupations cannot be detected by studying only very recent deaths. The outdoor occupations are by far the smallest category of deaths in this study.
In addition, your assertions in footnotes 1 and 3 lack supporting evidence and seem to reflect assumptions or ideology. I recommend the solid empirical summaries in Dissolving Illusions (https://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions/dp/B095L17H5S) and Turtles All the Way Down (https://www.amazon.com/Turtles-All-Way-Down-Vaccine/dp/9655981045).
Regardless of these points, I appreciate your work and look forward to your future articles.
"Logging and fishing [are] more dangerous than other occupations."
Yes, especially to trees and forests (and all the animals and plants that live in them), and to fish.
Substack misplaced my reply. Here it is:
Humans have been cutting trees and taking fish, other animals, and plants for many thousands of years all over the world. We are animals -- we eat plants and other animals. Virtually everyone today relies on the products of industrial logging. These are the kinds of dependencies that B highlights, no matter how much we might not like them.
Of course, like all animals, humans need to eat. They did so for millions of years without destroying their habitat. Industrial logging, industrial fishing, manufacturing, mining, the 'economy' etc etc ad nauseam - these are all consequences of 'civilization'. It was never sustainable, and the sooner it ends, the better for the planet and any surviving humans.
Fine. We eventually settle down to a simple, quiet life, albeit with fewer people.
Question: Can we get there from here?
Recently, you wrote that the human population might drop to 2 billion people in the next 100 years due to "wars, heat waves, and famines" and a "lack of births." ( https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-next-ten-thousand-years?) How much of that decrease is caused by painful early deaths, and how much is caused by voluntary decisions to have fewer children?
Elsewhere, I show a chart by Christopher Tucker showing that, even if we got the birth rate down to 1.5, we still end up with about 3.5 billion people a century from now. ( https://medium.com/@Merle2/are-there-too-many-people-33aca7076fe9 ) Do you expect the birth rate to be that low, or even lower? And what about the rest of the cuts needed to reach 2 billion?
Let's certainly hope that humanity is able to reach whatever limited population level we need to reach by voluntary birth reduction and a minimum of violent deaths. And then let's hope that we all get through it and unite in socially advanced systems in a wealth-deprived world.
And, hopefully, we do not end up like the old joke, where the old man, scratching his head when asked to give directions to a nearby destination, concluded, "Come to think of it, I don't think you can get there from here."
You actually can't get there from here. Industrial modernity has trapped billions of people in a system from which there is no way out but an early grave.
Two billion people is still way too many. It would require significant industrialization to support that number, which was the world population in 1927. Even one billion (in 1800) requires industrial production of iron and steel. It's possible that if we had attempted to reverse the industrial revolution and reduce population in 1800 we could have built a sustainable society, but that's not what happened.
Humanity moved from being mostly agrarian peasants to mostly urban service workers by investing huge amouts of energy and other resources over centuries to build cities and the machines that took over farming, food transportation and processing from human workers.
That massive amount of physical capital will take all the energy we can scrounge just to maintain it. We will have nothing left over to deconstruct cities and move everyone back to the land where they can be agrarian peasants once again. The time to start that was long ago. Now, it's far too late.
Virtually all the people living in cities are stuck their human feedlots. They can't leave and once the energy runs out they won't be able to be fed.
Industrial modernism is a literal dead end.
Idiots seem to believe everyone will still have a car and iphone... just fewer of them
hahaha wtf is wrong with these idiots?
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/collapse-and-cannibalism
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
Cancer.
We WILL get there from here, no matter what we do.
Indeed, but Merle's desire was that "humanity is able to reach whatever limited population level we need to reach by voluntary birth reduction and a minimum of violent deaths". That path is not available now.
On the "Interactions with people" front, massive overpopulation and interaction with both farm animals as well as wild animals (as we decimate their habitat) led to an explosion in "crowding diseases" like measles, flu, covid, cholera, etc. There is a huge tradeoff in "interacting with people": one is exposed far more often to crowding diseases which surely shorten life. Given what we've learned about the devastating impacts of many viruses, especially over the past few years, in terms of leading to dementia, cancer, heart attacks and strokes, etc. I'd be curious to know if researchers have studied the tradeoffs in more interaction vs. less from a public health standpoint.
Also, not just autistic people love being alone. Being "alone" from humans is not the same as being alone. I find the many other species we share this world with are often far better company than humans. As we exterminate more and more species with industrial civilization and particularly agriculture, I would expect the decline in biodiversity and overall wildlife numbers to have a massive impact on human well-being and longevity as well.
Beautiful. Thank you for envisioning a better way.
There won't be a better way there will be this https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/collapse-and-cannibalism
The article explores how moving away from industrialism could impact longevity, arguing that while modern healthcare and conveniences have extended life, they are unsustainable. It suggests that a focus on active, outdoor lifestyles and nature-based medicine in a post-industrial world could lead to healthier, longer lives, despite the challenges posed by economic collapse and changing societal structures.