Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

late-night thoughts about democracy S 55
of severity as changes grow more pronounced. Survivors of collapsed
societies could migrate elsewhere—an option less available
to those in the long emergency. Moreover, because they were relatively
isolated, the collapse of any one did not necessarily affect
others. But in a highly connected, interdependent, and tightly
coupled global society, small disturbances in one place can ripple
throughout the world. Even in good times, errant fi nancial decisions
in Hong Kong can bring down long-established banks in
London. Further, the levels of complexity characteristic of global
society are orders of magnitude larger than those of earlier societies,
as complex as they undoubtedly were. The conditions leading
to the collapse of earlier societies, whether environmental or social,
were in varying degrees temporary. But climate change and other
aspects of the long emergency are virtually permanent as we measure
time. Sea levels, for example, are expected to continue rising
for the next thousand years and beyond. Finally, climate change
is only one element of what futurist John Platt once described as
a “crisis of crises.” In short, in terms of duration, complexity, and
scale, no historical precedent exists for what lies ahead.
ALTERNATIVES TO DEMOCRACY: DOWNSIZE,
DESIGN, AND MARKETS (AGAIN)
There is no escaping the fact that we are entering the opening
years of diffi cult times with no adequate political framework or
philosophy. As Amory Lovins, quoted above, puts it, “We lack a
theory of governance . . . We need to invent whole new institutions,
new ways of doing business, and new ways of governing”
(Gould and Hosey, 2007, p. 32). What is to be done?
One possible answer is that given by libertarians and thinktank
conservatives who say that we do not need much governance
in the fi rst place and should therefore happily dispense with
most of it. They propose to replace parasitical governments with
“free” markets and privatize public services. Like many ideologies,