William R. Catton - WRC - died in January of this year. His book "Overshoot", appears not to have been heeded at all in general by current political powers.   There is only one thing worse than being noticed as "Limits to Growth" was after 1972.  It is worse not to be noticed. 

The "Overshoot" warnings suffer the same fate as other ecological system warnings. They are ignored as being in the far future, or are seen as some sort of political statement by left-leaning hippy types that were in vogue from the 1960's onwards, and are thus rejected by self-described winners of the race to exploit nature. WRC predicted the difficulties of getting his ideas generally accepted and acted apon.  The principles of ecology that he enunciated, that we humans need to observe, sound very much like the Greens Parties principles.  Main stream politics seems incapable of making policies that would direct the cessation of economic growth, or slow the draw-down on the non-renewable resources of our planet, or slow the destruction of renewable resources, even though they will admit to the progression of global warming and other ecological quandraries.

"Human Society is inextricably part of a global biotic community, and in that community human dominance has had, and is having self-destructive consequences"

The "dominance" bit is the part of the cause of failure to heed. Why listen when you are king of the planet?  How could we be doing something wrong, when our flow of resources, personal wealth and power, has never been greater? WCR points out self-destruction is likely to be the result of dominance and has already been so for other species, and gives examples.

Dominance relations includes physical power, and the disinclination to give way to the needs of others, or listen to the concerns of others. Because of our dominance we are : 

Depleting resources we don't know how to do without.

Accumulation of harmful substances that are unavoidably created by our life processes. The global ecosystem is overloaded, and we are also depleting the natural reprocessing systems.

Encouraging 'developing' nations, that they should also aspire to dominance, wealth and consumption, by further depletion and waste.  The bad news is that achievement will lead to further satisfaction, as the costs exceed benefits. Increases in population with increases in social inequality and social deprivation lead to increased unhappiness.

Politicians and business continue to ask for further growth and 'progress', even in the most 'well-off' developed nations like Australia. Talk about doing the 'smart managed decline' is rare. Talking about the need to properly look after and take minimal flows from renewable resources is rare.

The most successful people, tend to be those that have benefitted most from 'economic growth and progress', therefore they do not want to consider that this progress and growth is harmful in the long run. As they have the most political power, the most social prestige, they tend to follow the same policies that led to their social and wealth success. This is a social and territorial process, and WRC advices us not to villify the happy recipients. We are not the first species to follow this path.

WRC advises that we need to recognize the deepest ecological roots of our problems. We need to relate personally to the "ecological facts of life". We need an ecological worldview. Our problems stem from our own deeply instinctive drives. The essential fact is that our own expansion only comes at the expense of other species, or by mining non-renewable resources. Results obtained by the second process cannot be permanent.

Irreversibility : The problems of not being able to go back.

Overshoot is exacerbated by destroying the fall-back possibilities.  We destroy our systems carrying capacity faster by destroying self-regenerating capacity of renewable resources, and choosing not to transfer energy infrastructure from non-renewable to renewable sources.

Sacrifice of water supply to mining

Technological evolution tends not to go back. For instance, consider the water supply of the City of Sydney.  Every human requires water every day, for many uses. Before western colonisation, Aboriginal families and tribes led a relatively dispersed low-density hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but had a more or less permanent access to water from rivers that started from wetlands in the upland plateaus that surround the Sydney basin. Water access needed very little care, apart from not being used for disposal of human waste. Water could be carried in animal skins for longer journeys between water sources. A large amount of vegetation and wildlife are supported in the basin, along its many rivers and creeks.

The arrival of a permanent european settlement, quickly outstripped local water carrying capacity. A fresh water outlets at the initial settlement had storage tanks added, hence it became known as the "Tank stream". Its capacity for fresh water and waste disposal was quickly used up. Moving inland, more creeks and rivers were accessed.  As settlement density increased, canals and pipes brought in fresh water supplies from flowing rivers and creeks. Local weirs and reservoirs were built. Later on, large dams are constructed further upstream catching the source upland swamp feeds. Population growth has continued with migration and generations over 2 centuries. Now the population is 4.5 million and still growing. The dam input flows are of the similar order to the population water consumption and evaporation losses, so the city is in a state of "base-load water stress".  Environmental flows still need to be continued as a life line to the original rivers and creeks. A Desalination plant is commissioned, to supplement city water sources, and reduce the drain on the Dam Supplies.

The Mining industry in NSW has grown politically strong. Hands on a key flows of energy and materials have given its proponents wealth and political power. It is now able to command the City Politicians to yield the sanctity of the City water catchment wetlands to long wall coal mining. Subsidence has been proven to destroy the swamp wetlands, and water flows are lost to new underground channels. As the water catchment functions are destroyed, the Dam infrastructure investment of past generations is thrown way, environmental flows are ignored, and the City of Sydney is becoming dependent on the expensive desalinization process. Electricity is supplied by 85% coal power, which is a none-renewable resource, and the state has refused to develop its renewable energy resources any faster, being dependent on old coal burning power stations, and cheap supplies of coal. These will not remain cheap for long, as Diesel Fuel for mining will become more expensive. When fossil fuel supplies decrease, and renewable electricity dies from lack of maintenance and industrial civilization collapse,  the City will have a diminished natural water supply to fall back to, in a time of increased global warming stress.

The state economy is dependent on overseas supplies of oil, and a surprising wide range of oil dependent products and supplies, necessary to maintain the technological complexity of our civilization, including components for desalination plants. As our oil supplies dry up, so will the ability to support that complexity.

The ecological jaws of the Vice, or the "crunch" are closing fast.  For water, the crunch is between dimishing supply sources, and growing demand. This is happening all around the world, and the NSW government seems very foolish to sacrifice its natural water resources, in a nation where drought is considered a frequent and natural state, even when the progress of global warming is officially denied. This is a prime example of human governance being willing to sacrifice renewable resources and ecosystems for the sake of a one time use of non-renewable resource, water being a key requirement of life.

Social collapse begins with sacrifice of renewable resources

Why should the NSW state government be so desperate as to sacrifice life critical renewable resources? It is known that state governments are already experiencing strong economic stresses, and are easily swayed by promise of limited amounts of extra mining royalties, even though most statevincome is from Federal Funding, collected from federal taxes. Complexity of human society includes investment in education, health services, and welfare, and interconnections between these expenditures. The simple prediction of EROI (Energy returned over invested), for supply of refined oil products, states that as EROI falls, more resources, including financial resources, are utilitized for maintaining the resource flow, and less are available for investment in the social investment sector.

Like the weather, the local state economy has its cycles, but the overall trends are clear. Population growth, resource depletion and dis-economies of scale result in less available state resource per person. Improvements in efficiency and reduction in waste can compensate in the economy for only so long. Since we are talking about multiple adverse and inter-dependent processes, their is a strong likelihood of rapid economic and social collapse as each moves in to collapse thresholds. The resilience of the human systems are being eroded. The human systems constitute a social organism, and it can collapse much like a bee colony can collapse, when beset with multiple stresses. The genesis of bee colony collapse disorder appears to be the point where chronic stress reduces the worker bee numbers below a threshold. A new generation of young workers must be deployed before they are mature enough. The young bees die faster on their first outings, not having the requisite maturity and learning time, and so the workers die off even faster.

In the same way the destruction of renewable resources such as water supply reduces the resilience of the human city to further stress.

Rapid global warming from fossil fuel burning

 Australia will likely get warming to the extent that recent hot summers will seem "cool". There has been no pause in the rate of global warming, which has been steady at 0.16 degrees per decade. That is about 1 degree every 60 years. There are other reasons to think that warming rates will accelarate. The most important is that global yearly carbon emissions continue to rise, and push the atmosphere carbon dioxide past 400 ppm. This turns up the "carbon thermostat" of the earths temperature further. Loss of sea ice and later land based ice sheets is reducing the reflection of energy from our Sun back into space. Aerosols from fossil fuels may be providing as much as 1 degree of protection by reflection. As fossil fuel burning decreases, this energy will reach the surface and warm us more. There is sufficient knowledge to state that 2 degrees of global warming may be reached in as much as 20 years time.

The oceans take up 90% of the additional energy of global warming. The oceans act like the earths thermometer.

Collapse is not only likely , but necessary

Because our economies destroy renewable resources, and are dependent on depleting non-renewable resources, and abandon older technologies and less energy intensive ways of living, their is a strong likelihood of rapid finanicial and economic collapse, with societies reduced to scarcity and conflict, and high death rates. This may be the only kind of event that will stop the growth in atmosphere carbon dioxide, because human societies will not self-engineer this sort of collapse.

Study shows that Climate change will hit Australia harder than rest of world.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/26/climate-change-will-hit-australia-harder-than-rest-of-world-study-shows

Two degrees of warming is closer than you may think.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/two-degrees-of-warming-closer-than-you-may-think.html

William Catton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_R._Catton,_Jr.