Misremembering, but there's a Soviet era quote about being 3 days away from revolt. People need to eat.
Yes, Life (sic) will find a way. But governments are far more brittle. Should we (humanity) experience food riots, things will get very bad very quickly.
Food won't vanish, like poof. It's about the disruption. That's when "normal" channels drys up and food is only available thru the black market. During a famine, there's always plenty of food. But the speculators withhold supply and the consumers don't have enough cash. (Note that I said cash, vs credit or savings.)
That's when people starve. That's when civil society (law and order) breaks down.
I'm all for fixing corruption and increasing transparency of governance worldwide, including here at home.
Perhaps. I've been accused of having a random free association narrative most of the time. :)
We seem largely on the same page about the challenges. So we're cool. I'm far more pessimistic than most people. For instance, I believe we're already way past the tipping point on climate change, per the opinions of the experts, and most people aren't there yet.
The extent and degree of risk each poses to our life are debatable.
> Do you believe our Earth is a closed system or an open system?
The sun being a source of massive amounts of ongoing energy puts it squarely into open system territory in my opinion. Also, the human brain's ability to learn and build tools to improve upon what we are given by nature, as well as the ability for society to work together for common goals also to me distinguishes us from a classic closed system.
> But don't pretend the current situation is anything but dire. A positive outcome is far from certain.
These two sentences seem contradictory to me. I don't see anything particularly dire about our current state of affairs at all. Certainly we could be far better stewards of the planet, but I see very little that indicates a "positive outcome" (depending on your definition I suppose) is unlikely. At some point we may push the earth beyond its carrying capacity in certain areas, at which point we can simply shift to something else. Where I can agree is, some things are more important than others. If we lost the means of our current mass produced agriculture for example, we'd have to make some very serious lifestyle changes very quickly. But life would go on, and it may even be more fulfilling in some ways.