Every person in the United States produces more than twice his or her weight in waste every day. In other words a world of 6.7 billion benevolent vegans or walking Buddhas won’t be enough to save the world.

Michael Toms named our 2008 New Dimensions Radio interview, “Going Green is Not Enough.” The term was right, and it stuck. Granted, vegetarians and vegans consume far less water and agricultural land per capita than meat-eaters, but that misses the point. There are just too many of us, consuming far to much, and the techno-alternatives being offered are no solutions at all.

A population of 6.7 billion has to be and will be reduced to below pre-1900 levels of 1 billion possibly during this century. There just won’t be the fossil fuels around to support today’s population. You can’t make or even run a diesel tractor with a solar collector, let alone make all of today’s industrial agricultural inputs. You can’t even make a solar collector with a solar collector. You can try to grow ethanol, but it has a negative energy ROI. Biodiesel works, but there won’t be enough to go around.

The countdown for the end of the oil age has just run out 18, 11, 3, 3, zero. Several new large oil ?elds came online in 2005. These were the last of the 500 million barrel mega oil ?elds, since none has been discovered in the past few years. Eighteen new mega projects started producing in 2005, followed by 11 more in 2006. However, 2007 saw the opening of only three new projects, followed by three more in 2008. This will not keep up with declining production or depletion of older ?elds, much less the increase in demand. The end of the natural gas, coal, and nuclear ages will not be far behind.

Fortunately without fossil fuels, our children won’t have the cheap energy to make all of the garbage we made for ourselves. “WEEE Man” was created for the Festival of Nature 2006 in Bristol, U.K. This 21-foot-tall, three-ton sculpture is made of 198 household devices, including five refrigerators, 35 cell phones, and 23 computer mice, representing the lifetime e-waste of the average European. In the U.S. a ton of industrial solid waste is created each week for every man, woman, and child. To top it off, about 95 percent of automobile engine and electric energy production is wasted. In an ecosystem waste equals food, but in industrial society waste just equals waste. Everything we make ends up in the landfill vegan or meat-eater.

Some people hope for a technological singularity to save us. For instance, Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project will save the day. “The Venus Project presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture.” According to Jacque, it will solve, “unemployment, violent crime, replacement of humans by technology, overpopulation and a decline in the Earth’s ecosystems.”

Where is all of this cheap energy going to come from? Nature has been perfecting solar energy production for three billion years and the most efficient solution possible is photosynthesis. The neat thing about nature’s solution is that it makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, creates carbohydrates and sugars, and builds topsoil. Show me a souped-up condominium project that can do that. The future is going to look more like an updated Renaissance Festival than Star Trek. Some wealthy folks will still concentrate resources for a while, but everything wears out and eventually hits the land fill—even the last iPod.

People talk to me about how they want community, but what they imagine as community is glorified social networking. OK, having a lot of friends is fine. But as Bill Mollison says, “look for skills, not money.” What I am trying to get at is that today we need “doers” not “talkers.” We need people who start community supported agriculture coops (CSAs), plant urban food forests, educate, and motivate others. In other words, put their time where their mouth is.

We also need bold people. When your community starts to talk about food security, somebody needs to standup and say, “Hey, we will never have food security until we reverse build-out and reduce our population.” Unless you live in the California Central Valley or in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, you can’t even feed the people you have now with local agricultural resources.

We are so far in overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity we can’t even see back to former sustainable levels 10,000 years ago before the agricultural revolution. Sustainability means being able to live in an area over the long-term without degrading especially it’s biodiversity. And the only way to do that is to get back to population and consumption levels that don’t require importation of massive quantities of energy, raw materials, and food just to survive. You know you are back within carrying capacity when you are paying back our accumulated ecological debt, and have started to rebuild biodiversity and topsoil.

So, eating vegan and recycling is not going to save the world. Stroll down the isles of your local natural food store and you will find just as much packaging as in a Piggly Wiggly. I honestly don’t think we are going to get it until nature makes her “wake-up call” probably in the next 10-20 years or sooner. This will start to happen when they can no longer find security even if they follow every rule of the system, but still get laid off and lose their house. It is time to tell our children the truth that, “we screwed up and that I will teach you everything I can to do better and to develop a new mindset.”

This will be a community wide effort, even though most of the community does not know it yet. Schools should do their part as well. Instead of teaching our kids about dead presidents, they should teach children how to be more self-reliant, to think outside the box of our culture, to be “doers”, to feed themselves, and to minimize family size. These are some bold steps, but they are the beginning.

The most important point for children is thinking outside the box of our culture. Children need to learn how to do things differently than their parents did. They will need new cultures and cultural stories to replace those we lived by. For instance, encourage them find new ways doing what they love to build a community self-reliance to an extent that they can start to detach from modern Taker culture. Teach your children to work from a sense of joy and look for what they can give instead of take. Give support to get support instead of make things to get things.

Have a neighborhood potluck family friendly and see who is interested and starting a block food forest. It is time to experiment and learn while things are relatively easy. For now, your garden can fail and you can still go to the groovy natural food store.

Visit www.culturequake.org to learn more about the book Culturequake and the blog. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC

Notes:

Chuck Burr
Going Green is Not Enough

Chuck Burr
Overpopulation is a Cultural Challenge

Al Gore
Earth in the Balance, p. 146, 174

Dale Allen Pfeiffer
Current Situation & 2005 Projections

Khebab
Analysis of Decline Rates

Fritjob Capra
The Hidden Connections: Integrating The Biological, Cognitive, And Social Dimensions Of Life Into A Science Of Sustainability, p 252

Jacque Fresco
The Venus Project

Peter Salonius
Agriculture: Unsustainable Resource Depletion Began 10,000 Years Ago