Thank you for sharing this, Meg. You are entirely right about this: once a complex adaptive system tips into a series of mutually reinforcing runaway feedback loops, there is no longer any way to reverse the process, any more than it is possible to "unexplode" a bomb once the explosive reaction is triggered. But as I see it, two systems are collapsing simultaneously--Glomart and Gaia.

Glomart is my neologism for the "cancer of the Earth"--the runaway feedback system of explosive growth in population and resource consumption wrought by (1) the Agricultural Revolution; (2) the money system; and (3) the discovery and exploitation of vast fossil fuel energy reserves. The first turned complex ecosystems into monocultural crops, human beings, and arithmetic; the second--arithmetic itself (money) turned all of nature into a "resource" with no value whatsoever until it is transformed into commodities for sale; and the third dramatically accelerated the first two while simultaneously polluting our land, air, and water, annihilating ecosystems, and overheating the planet to its current tipping points.

Gaia is, of course, our biological support system, which we have been parasitizing all along, and which is now in the early stages of collapse, bringing Glomart--the cancer that parasitizes it--down with it.

Our salvation (so to speak) lies in the recognition that Glomart is NOT the same as humanity. So while the vast majority of us are as completely dependent on Glomart as we are on Gaia, we still have the choice of reducing our dependence on Glomart and restoring our relationship with Gaia--one backyard at a time--by growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness.