Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCXXXVII

We’re Saved! Massive Buildout of Solar Photovoltaic Energy!

I was starkly reminded of the cult-like belief in the salvation offered via solar photovoltaic energy last week when a Greenpeace International post in my Facebook feed appeared suggesting it. I agreed with the comment of another who was skeptical. That agreement and my brief supporting evidence resulted in a flood of responses by solar-energy supporters. From the typical ad hominem to the fossil fuel industry-shill accusations to the assertions that I needed to reacquaint myself with reality, the feedback from others was–not surprisingly–extremely lopsided in favour of this technology and its ability to replace hydrocarbon-based energy with nary a hiccup.

In light of this, I thought it appropriate to apply the analytical questions I developed in assessing such saviours (see: Website Medium Substack) to the global-scale solar photovoltaic (SPV) buildout proposed by many. The answers below reflect a biophysical, post-growth perspective, rather than a conventional pro-renewables framing that so many are eager to support.

Larks Green Solar Farm (sunsave.energy)

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Narrative

Does the proposal discuss the major drawbacks such as environmental and/or social costs, or only its benefits?
Typically, the narrative surrounding SPV-based energy emphasises the perceived benefits such as carbon-free electricity, falling costs, infinite clean and free energy from the sun, and a one-and-done buildout that would negate the perpetual extraction and burning of hydrocarbons–thus preventing anthropogenic climate change. It routinely omits or downplays such ‘“hurdles” as: massive ecologically-destructive mining for its mineral/material inputs; vast land-use change and habitat fragmentation caused by its buildout; significant embodied hydrocarbon inputs; water use for cleaning in arid regions; toxic chemical use in polysilicon purification; dependence upon finite resources; forced labour in Xinjiang’s polysilicon supply chain; and the challenge of managing millions of tonnes of panel waste. Social costs like displacement, impacts on pastoralists, and the sacrifice zones of quartz and silver mining are rendered invisible under a “clean and green energy” banner.

Is there irrefutable evidence that the “solution” will replace the destructive technology/system it is proposing to, or is it merely adding to total human throughput?
Historical evidence points to addition, not substitution–a fact supporters completely overlook. Data shows that global hydrocarbon-based fuel consumption has risen alongside, not fallen because of, renewable deployment–despite decades of SPV exponential growth. A massive solar buildout–barring caps on hydrocarbon extraction–would primarily add a new layer of energy infrastructure on top of the existing hydrocarbon system, increasing total material and energy throughput rather than subtracting from it.

Are the benefits of small-scale applications being honestly applied to a global, industrial scale, or are they being disingenuously applied?
Most certainly this is disingenuously applied. Rooftop and distributed solar offer some temporary “resilience” and local benefit, but the “massive buildout” proposal scales these attributes to utility-scale arrays connected via continent-spanning high-voltage lines. The qualities of a household system (low impact, consumer-producer model) do not translate to a global industrial web of mines, refineries, gigawatt factories, and long-distance transmission corridors. The narrative borrows the innocence of small-scale solar to justify a profoundly centralised, extractive mega-project.

Crucially, even if the proposal were reframed as a diffuse rollout of millions—or billions—of small-scale rooftop and community arrays, the aggregate material and ecological costs would be barely distinguishable from the centralised buildout. Even if only a fraction of the planet’s 8+ billion human inhabitants were living high-energy lifestyles, the required total tonnage of copper, silver, glass, lithium, and rare minerals is similarly staggering, and the mining sacrifice zones would be no less brutal. The toxic waste pile at end-of-life would be just as vast, merely dispersed across a billion rooftops instead of concentrated in a few solar farms. The innocence of a single household panel cannot survive multiplication by billions; small-scale hardware, deployed at global, high-energy scale, is still a planetary-scale industrial operation with planetary-scale consequences. The “small is beautiful” story collapses under the weight of the numbers it refuses to reckon with.

Biogeophysical Reality

Does the analysis of the inputs of the “solution” and any required supplementary technologies and/or systems include all lifecycle stages?
Rarely is this performed with full honesty. A comprehensive lifecycle must account for:
· Raw material extraction: quartz, copper, silver, tin, aluminium, zinc, and indium/tellurium for thin-film variants. Mining these involves open pits, tailings, and high overburden.
· Manufacturing: polysilicon reduction (energy-intensive, hydrogen chloride and silicon tetrachloride waste), ingot casting, wafer slicing (kerf loss), cell doping, glass and encapsulation production.
· Transportation: globalised logistics from mine to refinery (often China) to module assembly to installation site.
· Operation: water for cleaning panels in semi-arid regions; grid balancing equipment like synchronous condensers.
· Maintenance & bypass disposal: replacement of inverters every ~10 years, panel degradation, and handling of early-failure modules.
· Decommissioning: dismantling mounting structures, removing concrete footings, grading land.
· Reclamation: the soil ecology under utility-scale arrays may be permanently altered, with compaction and loss of cryptobiotic crusts in deserts.
· End-life disposal and waste management: currently, there is no scaled, economically viable, non-toxic recycling stream. Most panels are shredded, landfilled, or exported as e-waste to countries where informal recyclers burn, strip, and dump the toxic remains in conditions that would be illegal in the nations that shipped it.
· Associated infrastructure: new transmission lines, substations, battery storage (with its own lithium/cobalt/nickel metabolism), and natural gas peaker plants that remain necessary.

What is the net energy return over the entire lifecycle, and is it greater than 10–14:1 (societal maintenance) or 3:1 (basic survival)?
When measured at the point of use in a real grid, the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of SPV is sobering. Unbuffered EROI for the module alone is often cited at 8–12:1. However, SPV cannot firm itself. It is an inherently variable, non-dispatchable energy source, and it therefore requires a shadow system of firming infrastructure—batteries, pumped hydro, overbuild with curtailment, or natural gas peaker plants—simply to deliver reliable power. None of this is optional; the panel and its firming partner form a single technological organism, not a menu of separable add-ons. Once the full energy costs of that parasitic firming layer, along with expanded transmission, are folded into the ledger, the system-level EROI likely falls to 3–6:1. This exceeds the threshold for basic survival but may not meet the 10–14:1 range required for sustaining complex societal infrastructure like universities, hospitals, and advanced manufacturing. In high-latitude, cloudy regions, the return is even more marginal, and the firming burden grows heavier still.

An additional question I believe is quite relevant here is as follows:
Where are the materials coming from, and what does that extraction do to the living world and its inhabitants?
The answer, largely, is from sacrifice zones well away from the eyes, ears, and consciousness of the “advanced” economies that tend to “benefit” from the technology.

A solar-plus-storage buildout on the scale proposed requires an unprecedented mining expansion, and mining is not a spreadsheet entry—it is a violent act upon landscapes and communities. Copper, already facing declining ore grades, must be wrenched from ever-deeper open pits, each tonne of refined metal leaving behind hundreds of tonnes of toxic tailings and consuming millions of litres of water in already-arid regions from the Atacama to the Gobi. Lithium for the parasitic firming batteries demands the evaporation of vast quantities of freshwater from salt flat brines, collapsing aquifers that Indigenous and agrarian communities depend upon. Cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo—much of it dug by artisanal miners, including children, in conditions of abject exploitation—enters the supply chain alongside nickel from Indonesian rainforests, where smelting releases plumes of sulphur dioxide and turns once-vibrant coastal ecosystems into dead zones. Silver, indium, tellurium: these are not hauled from dedicated, abundant mines but are mostly hitchhiker byproducts of copper and zinc smelting, meaning their supply cannot be scaled independently without further enlarging the same destructive primary extraction.

The “clean” solar panel on a sunlit field has a shadow life upstream, a trail of poisoned watersheds, dispossessed peoples, and denuded landscapes that the promotional brochures never show. If we are to be honest about SPV as a supposed saviour, we must include the brutality of its mineral metabolism in the ledger. And this, I have found, tends to be one of the most significant aspects overlooked by SPV advocates. A blindness likely due to the fact that such environmental atrocities are carried out in far-off lands and well hidden behind the greenwashed curtain of “cheap, carbon-free energy.”

What finite materials/minerals are required, and are these readily available or have they already encountered supply chain bottlenecks, diminishing returns, or severe depletion?
SPV panels are not made of sand and sunshine; they depend on copper (wiring, earthing), silver (front contacts – using ~10% of global industrial silver supply), tin, indium (ITO layers), bismuth, and quartz of high purity. Copper availability alone would require mining rates that do not match known reserve grades; and ore grades continue to decline. Silver for ultra-TW-scale scenarios faces physical scarcity. Tellurium and indium are byproducts of copper and zinc smelting; their supply cannot easily scale independently. These are not merely “bottlenecks” but geological constraints governed by the best-first principle.

What are the ecological blind spots? Is it being assessed through carbon tunnel vision or is it taking in a broader consideration of the various planetary boundaries?
This technology is assessed almost entirely through carbon tunnel vision from which advocates are loath to see beyond. Without even getting into the impacts of the massive mining required for the material and mineral inputs (especially for battery backup systems), blind spots include:
· Land-system change: utility-scale solar can clear native vegetation, fragment wildlife corridors, alter albedo, and disrupt hydrological balance.
· Biodiversity loss: “greenfield” solar on undeveloped land can be an ecological desert; bird and insect mortality from collision or “lake effect” incineration.
· Freshwater use: panel cleaning in deserts, wet-chemical processing in fabrication competing with local water needs.
· Chemical pollution: silicon tetrachloride from polysilicon production; lead and cadmium from thin-film and some soldered c-Si panels; fluoropolymers in backsheets (persistent organic pollutants).
· Novel entities: the sheer mass of engineered glass, polymers, and metals constitutes a novel geochemical flow, with recycling largely a myth at scale.

Can the waste it is generating be safely managed in perpetuity, or are there long-term liabilities being created? Is the planetary sink that might help to mitigate any waste already overloaded or close to it?
Without a doubt, the waste is not being “managed”. We are creating a deferred toxic liability. Panels contain lead, cadmium, antimony, and fluorinated compounds. Landfilling leaches these into groundwater; incineration releases dioxins and furans. Recycling is currently a net-cost, low-recovery-rate process that downcycles glass into aggregate. The planetary sink for heavy metals, microplastics from backsheets, and long-lived fluorine compounds is already overloaded; adding an expected 60–80 million tonnes of panel waste by 2050 compounds a crisis we have no plan to manage. The waste is not safely manageable in perpetuity—it is a societal IOU written to future generations.

Viability

Can the “solution” survive without massive government subsidies, externalised costs, or loan guarantees?
No. The entire value chain—from mining tax breaks, feed-in tariffs, production tax credits, accelerated depreciation, mandatory renewable portfolio standards, to grid connection priority—rests on a scaffold of state intervention. Costs that are externalised include mining pollution, e-waste cleanup, grid stabilisation, and military protection of supply chains (see: Website Medium Substack). Without these, the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) would be far higher, and the business case collapses for many projects.

Does it require a new, massively complex, and resource-intensive infrastructure to bring it to fruition?
Yes. A massive buildout demands a simultaneous, resource-heavy buildout of:
· Long-distance HVDC transmission lines (requiring vast copper and steel).
· Utility-scale battery storage (lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite).
· Expanded natural gas pipelines and plants for firming.
· Smart grid electronics, new substations, and synchronous condensers.

This constitutes a whole new metabolism of the built environment, not a drop-in replacement.

Is it dependent upon “breakthrough” technology that has yet to exist or is only in the prototype stage?
Proposals are often predicated on presumed innovations, especially with respect to the storage of energy produced by SPV: solid-state batteries, perovskite tandem cells at commercial stability, green hydrogen as seasonal storage, scalable carbon capture for backup systems, and fully circular, non-toxic recycling. The “massive buildout” narrative assumes these breakthroughs will arrive on schedule, despite most being at low technology readiness levels or facing fundamental thermodynamic and material limits.

Social Aspects

Does the “solution” challenge the infinite economic growth paradigm or enable its continuation?
It definitely enables its continuation. SPV is presented as the engine for “green growth,” decoupling GDP from material impacts—a decoupling that, for absolute resource use, has never been achieved (see: Website Medium Substack). By promising abundant, clean energy, SPV-based energy justifies the continued expansion of aviation, material extraction and refining, data centres, AI, electric SUV manufacturing, and globalised just-in-time logistics. It locks in the expectation of permanent energy growth, treating the planet as an endless warehouse of raw materials rather than a living system with hard boundaries.

Who is promoting it and who profits from it?
Promoters include financial institutions (BlackRock, Goldman Sachs) seeking new asset classes, oil majors repositioning as “energy companies,” mining conglomerates eyeing critical minerals, and tech corporations building hyperscale data centres. Profits accrue to the same class of global capital that drove the hydrocarbon-based fuel expansion—centralised infrastructure funds, absentee landowners hosting solar leases, and state-owned polysilicon giants.

The flip side of this profit are the sacrifice zones detailed earlier: lithium operations draining Atacama aquifers, copper pits displacing communities in the Andes, cobalt mines in the DRC where children sift through toxic tailings. The wealth generated flows upward and northward; the poisoned watersheds, dispossessed pastoralists, and exploited labourers are treated as externalities to be managed by public relations departments rather than accounted for on the balance sheet.

Will it help to further concentrate wealth/power or help to distribute it?
It tends to concentrate wealth and power. The ownership model for utility-scale buildouts is overwhelmingly institutional and corporate. Land leases transfer rent upwards; electricity generation shifts from many small producers to a handful of mega-project owners. Grid management becomes more centralised, as balancing intermittent sources requires vertically integrated control. This reinforces a hub-and-spoke power structure rather than a distributed, democratic energy commons.

Meanwhile, the mineral supply chains that feed the buildout replicate colonial extraction patterns: raw materials are ripped from the Global South, shipped to manufacturing centres in China and elsewhere, and the finished “clean” products are consumed in wealthy nations. Value is captured at each step by capital, while environmental and social devastation remains concentrated in communities with the least power to resist. The green energy transition, as currently structured, is not dismantling extractive colonialism; it is simply rebranding it in solar glass and lithium brine.

Does it challenge or reinforce status quo wealth and power structures?
It absolutely reinforces them. It preserves the hydrocarbon-based fuel era’s logic: distant extraction, centralised conversion, and monopoly grid delivery, requiring the same legal and military apparatus to secure supply chains. The mining violence that underpins solar-plus-storage—forced displacement for open pits, water grabbing on salt flats, the use of child labour in cobalt galleries—is not an unfortunate byproduct but a feature of a system that demands low-cost material inputs to sustain high-consumption lifestyles in the minority world.

It does not question the idea of energy as a commodity nor the right of capital to govern its flow. Instead, it deepens a global apartheid where some people’s energy abundance depends on other people’s sacrifice zones, a geography of harm rendered invisible by the “clean energy” label.

Does it promote relocalisation and community resilience, or does it require globalised, centralised, and fragile supply chains?
While often marketed along the lines of relocalisation and community resilience, it requires deeply globalised, centralised, and fragile supply chains—and the human and ecological wreckage that accompanies them. Polysilicon is predominantly refined in Xinjiang, wafers in Sichuan, cells in Malaysia and Vietnam, modules assembled in China, and deployed globally. Lithium travels from Andean salt flats or Australian hard-rock mines to Chinese refineries. Cobalt passes through the hands of small-scale miners in the Congo before entering opaque trading networks.

Supply disruptions (geopolitical, pandemic, trade wars) ripple through the entire system, but even in “normal” times the chain functions only by externalising its true costs onto the most vulnerable. The “solution” does not foster local energy sovereignty but rather a new dependency on long, opaque, and exploitative commodity chains that reproduce the very dynamics of extraction, inequality, and ecological violence it pretends to solve. Community resilience cannot be built on the stolen water of Indigenous highland peoples or the labour of children in Katanga.

Does it shut down discussion of more fundamental changes (e.g., degrowth, simplification), or is it presented as the only alternative within the current system of continued growth?
It actively shuts down such discussion. The massive solar buildout is framed as the answer, rendering demand and harm reduction, sufficiency, relocalised food systems, and degrowth as unnecessary distractions. “We don’t need to change our way of life; we just need to swap out the fuel source—and in doing so we can ignore the sacrifice zones and colonial supply chains because those happen somewhere else.” This techno-optimistic monologue forecloses the deeper political and cultural transformation that biophysical reality demands. It offers a comforting story that allows affluent consumers to continue their consumption patterns while outsourcing the violence of extraction to distant lands and invisible hands. In this sense, the solar saviour narrative is not just technically flawed; it is a moral anaesthetic, numbing us to the injustice that the status quo requires and making it harder to imagine a genuinely just and ecologically-grounded future.

Another question that arises at this juncture and that serves to pre-empt the common defensive retreat that acknowledges humanity cannot continue to chase growth but could at least maintain our current complexities on the back of SPV energy is as follows:

Can the SPV buildout at least maintain our current societal complexity if we abandon the pursuit of economic growth, or is it itself dependent upon growth and continued expansion?
Some defenders of solar PV, sensing the dead end of infinite growth, retreat to a seemingly more reasonable position: the technology need not fuel expansion; it can simply preserve what we already have—a steady-state, high-energy civilisation running on sunshine. This framing seduces by appearing modest, yet it collapses under the same biophysical and structural realities that doom the growth narrative.

First, the initial extraction, manufacturing, and installation pulse required to replace the existing hydrocarbon infrastructure constitutes an unprecedented one-off surge in material throughput—a growth spike that would tear through remaining mineral reserves and planetary boundaries before the system ever reaches “steady state.” Second, even after that, the ongoing need to replace panels every 25–30 years, batteries every 10–15 years, and degraded grid components locks in a permanent, high-throughput industrial metabolism: perpetual rebuilding, not gentle maintenance. Third, the global financial system that funds these projects is structurally addicted to compound growth; a genuinely static economy would struggle to generate the credit, investment returns, and tax revenues required to sustain a continent-spanning energy rebuild. And finally, as the EROI analysis already makes clear, the energy surplus left after feeding the parasitic firming layer is too thin to support the layered complexity of modern hospitals, universities, and supply chains.

What is presented as “maintenance without growth” is, in biophysical terms, still a growth-dependent, extractive, energy-constrained trajectory dressed in the language of sustainability. The honest position is that maintaining anything close to current societal complexity on a renewable backbone would require precisely the opposite of what ecological limits demand: a massive, one-time expansion of mining, manufacturing, and energy use, followed by a permanent churn of replacement that no steady-state economy could endure. To argue for solar-as-maintenance is to smuggle growth in through the back door while pretending the door is closed.

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Given the analysis above, solar photovoltaic energy is not a saviour for humanity’s complex societies. It is, at best, a palliative that extends the metabolic pattern of the industrial age under a “green” banner, buying a few decades of buffer (at best) while entrenching the very structures that are driving societal and ecological collapse.

Here’s why that conclusion follows unavoidably from the critique:
1. It Cannot Power the Complexity We Have
Complex societies—with their hospitals, universities, overproduction of elites, megacities, global supply chains, and massive resource extraction and industrial production—require a very high energy return on investment (EROI) of roughly 10–14:1 at the point of use. SPV’s system-level EROI, when you include storage, transmission overbuild, and firming backup (aspects commonly left out of consideration by advocates and their analyses), likely falls to the 3–6:1 range.

That may be enough for a basic agrarian or early industrial society with far, far fewer people; not for sustaining the layered, energy-dense services of late Modernity and its billions of participants. Propping up complexity on a low-EROI renewable grid is a thermodynamic impossibility; it means society is running on an energy deficit that must be made up by burning through hydrocarbon-fueled capital—mines, factories, diesel ships, and coal-fired cement kilns that build the panels.

That is not “saving” complex societies; it is at best a managed descent with borrowed tools, and at worst an exacerbation of the aspects that have led humanity into ecological overshoot.

2. It Doesn’t Replace Hydrocarbon-Based Energy; It Entangles with Them
A saviour would break the addiction humanity has with hydrocarbons. Despite what “renewables” advocates believe and argue, the massive solar buildout is not subtracting coal, oil, and gas from the global energy mix—it is adding to it. Every stage of the lifecycle, from quartz mining with diesel trucks to polysilicon refining in coal-dependent grids, is hydrocarbon-fuelled.

More fundamentally, the buildout is a new high-throughput industrial system layered on top of the existing one. You don’t close the oil and gas wells by building solar farms; you just dig more copper and burn more gas for firming. And you build the parasitic battery banks and gas peaker plants that the panels cannot function without—each bearing its own hydrocarbon lifeline and its own trail of sacrifice zones. SPV has become another enabler of consumption, not a replacement for it.

3. The Material Limits Are Alchemy
A saviour technology should rest on abundant, geologically-forgiving inputs. SPV depends on finite minerals—silver, copper, tin, indium, high-purity quartz—that are already facing ore-grade decline, depletion, and geopolitical choke points. Scaling to the 30–50 TW often modelled would require physically impossible mining rates for copper alone.

The promise is alchemy: pretending that engineered glass and polymer sandwiches can substitute for the mineralogical wealth of the planet, without acknowledging that the cupboard of easy ores is emptying. A resource-constrained salvation is no salvation at all. And the attempt to conjure it anyway turns real places—the Atacama, Katanga, the Gobi—into sacrifice zones that the term “bottleneck” politely disguises.

4. It Creates a Toxic Legacy, Not a Clean Future
A saviour would not trade atmospheric carbon for a continent’s worth of heavy-metal leaching panels–although most cheerleaders of SPV conveniently overlook such impacts outside of their carbon tunnel vision.

Despite protestations by advocates that the panels and their components are fully recyclable, there is no scalable, non-toxic recycling pathway today; and the 60–80 million tonnes of panel waste expected by mid-century represent a deferred ecological debt. This is the opposite of a “clean” transition; it moves the harm from the smokestack to the landfill, the sacrifice zones in far-off mines, and the groundwater.

Complex societies cannot be saved by generating a new, long-lived toxic footprint that will poison landscapes for generations after the EROI cliff makes us unable to manage it.

5. It Reinforces the Structures That Prevent Real Change
Perhaps most critically, SPV’s “saviour” narrative is a political weapon that shuts down the degrowth, sufficiency, and relocalisation conversations that may be the only genuine pathways towards harm reduction of our overshoot predicament. By promising we can keep the lights on at growth-level consumption, it legitimises the status quo: centralised corporate ownership, globalised supply chains, financial extraction, and the infinite-growth paradigm.

It doesn’t distribute power; it concentrates it in new megaproject funds. It doesn’t build community resilience; it deepens dependency on fragile, distant supply chains. A true “rescue”–if one could exist at all–would require dismantling the industrial-growth machine, not just changing its fuel source. It would also require dismantling the colonial extraction patterns that the solar-plus-storage buildout rebrands under green glass. As long as the sacrifice zones remain offshore, invisible to the consumer of “clean” electrons, the machine remains intact—only with a new coat of paint.

The Honest Verdict
Solar photovoltaics, in the form proposed—a global-scale, industrial buildout sold as a drop-in replacement for hydrocarbons—are not a saviour and should not be advocated as such. They are a palliative extension of the hydrocarbon-energy age, providing a lower-EROI energy trickle that exacerbates overshoot while piling up toxic waste, mineral debts, and a mounting ledger of human and ecological sacrifice—poisoned watersheds, stolen aquifers, child labour, and denuded landscapes—that the ‘clean energy’ label refuses to acknowledge.

Humanity’s complex societies cannot be “saved” by this technology; they can only confront the biophysical limits and deliberately choose downscaling, equity, and simplification. The notion that a technology so materially and energetically entangled with industrial destruction can rescue us from its consequences is the most dangerous of myths.

None of the above, however, will be easy to hear for those who have placed their hopes in solar salvation. When I began by stating that I was reminded of the cult-like belief in the ability of this technology to save humanity, I was not exaggerating. Cult-like beliefs are characterised by absolute truth claims and the group possessing them having the only valid understanding of reality, labelling all counter beliefs as false or dangerous—which is exactly the tenor of the comments that assailed me when I raised the spectre that not all is as it appears with respect to solar photovoltaic energy and its ability to “save” the planet.

That defensiveness is itself understandable; if solar isn’t a saviour, then what remains? The prospect appears to be despair. But this is a false binary. The alternative to solar salvation is not despair but the clear-eyed acceptance of our overshoot predicament and the difficult, necessary turn toward harm reduction, simplification, and living within the biophysical constraints we have so long ignored.

Genuine harm reduction requires looking squarely at the biophysical ledger and planning accordingly. It should not include support for the promotional brochure of perpetual growth on a finite planet and the unwavering support of technologies exacerbating our overshoot, which is more-or-less exactly what the advocacy for solar photovoltaic-based energy as a replacement for hydrocarbon-based energy does.

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What is going to be my standard WARNING/ADVICE going forward and that I have reiterated in various ways before this:

“Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.

Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.

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