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The Great Disruption — Paul Gilding, 2011
In The Great Disruption author Paul Gilding proposes that humanity will not be able to stop the occurrence of climate change, which is the consequence of global warming caused by increasing anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is partly so because climate change is already underway, but also because the rising denial of climate change means that we won't really respond to it until it inflicts itself upon to such an extent that we can no longer ignore it.
Gilding establishes that, in association with our economic activity that produces the carbon dioxide that is driving global warming, we are also using the resources and services of the Earth at a rate that is beyond sustainable. As a consequence of the ongoing growth of our economic activity, caused partly by the massive growth in human population, the limitations of this resource use are already constraining the exponential economic growth that our economies have evolved to be fundamentally dependent on.
Gilding proposes that the great disruption will occur when these and other contingent issues converge in the near future, severely damaging our economy, the availability of the resources that support it, and the biosphere that we are part of. When this great disruption occurs it will bring a period of social turbulence that will involve the loss of billions of human lives. As this occurs, we will either shift to a higher order of existence or break down to a lower-order system. In other words, we will either evolve to a more intelligent, conscious, and stable civilization or we will enter our terminal decline, to collapse.
Gilding examines the causes of the great disruption, our possible responses to it, and the likely consequent outcomes. Gilding expects that we will rise to the occasion, and goes on to outline processes by which we could limit and eventually stabilise and reverse climate change, and design a new economic system that doesn't need to continually grow in size. After the terrible time of the great disruption these processes will allow us to arrive at a stable and sustainable society that can exist within the limits of the resources and services that the Earth's biosphere gives to us.
Gilding's great disruption is almost synonymous with James Howard Kunstler's long emergency, which Kunstler examines, in perhaps more detail than Gilding, in his book The Long Emergency. Kunstler, however, gives little detailed consideration of what humanity may come to after the great disruption/long emergency.
The themes of The Great Disruption are closely aligned with the themes of choose the future! If you find the content of choose the future! valuable and significant, then you will find an alternative and expanded outlook of these ideas when reading The Great Disruption.