Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse

About this book

Ecological roots of our toubled time are deeper than its economic manifestations. This book shows how and why three converging trends have put humankind in much deeper peril than is generally acknowledged.

Firstly, there are many more of us inhabiting this planet than it can sustain. Second, technological advances of recent centuries have made gigantic and prodigal our per capita resource appetites and our per capita environmental impacts. Third, even though, as the symbol-using species, we humans conceivably could do better at anticipating future circumstances and planning ahead, our evolutionary heritage together with unanticipated dysfunctions of modern division of labor have kept us too preoccupied with short-term concerns.

Human societies are almost certainly going to act in ways that will make an inevitably difficult future unnecessarily worse. Factors analyzed in this book have made people seriously averse to the kind and extent of cooperation our difficult future will require.

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