I guess I’ve been waiting for apocalypse since before Y2K. This is why being a history buff is dangerous: you look down through the ages and all you see are societies rising and falling again. Sheep grazing in the Roman Forum. The sun setting all over the British Empire.  The steady decline of hip-hop. And so on.

What I’m starting to realize is that things are both better and worse than I used to think in my Mad Max nightmare fantasies. I’m not expecting a collapse in my own lifetime, really. But the game is changing, slowly, in such a way that we probably wouldn’t recognize the world we’re leaving to babies now being born. And it’s not going to be al-Qa’ida or the Chinese or even global climate change that will do us in, but simple mathematics:

Economies can’t grow forever. Cancers eventually kill their hosts.

This is as close to heresy as it gets in our modern age. The idea of constant growth is at the heart of mainstream economic theory: the worst thing imaginable to an economist is a halt – a “recession” – in growth. But it stands to reason (or it should, at least) that you just can’t keep growing on a finite planet with finite reserves.

Richard Heinberg, in his excellent upcoming book The End of Growth (which is already available on Kindle, so I’m not using a crystal ball here) points out three dynamics that mainstream economists completely ignore:

• we’re blowing through our supply of resources like fossil fuels and minerals;
• we’re going to spend more and more every year on the consequences of our environmental rampage: cleaning up oil spills and toxic runoff, as well as dealing with depleted soils and climate change
• because of #1 and #2, paying the massive financial debts we’ve built up will get harder and harder.

These things are both a consequence of our heedless growth and a major roadblock to the ongoing metastasis of industrial civilization. Now, a wise and enlightened society would see the inherent contradiction between what we believe and what is actually happening and begin the process of transition to a more sustainable way of living. But obviously, we’re not wise or enlightened, so what seems more and more likely is that simple mathematics will hit us upside the head with a cluestick. Unfortunately, though, the harshest consequences will fall on those people least able to cope: the poor, the sick, and the very young and old.

There has been a lot written down through the years – especially since the 1970s, when people like Donella Meadows began pointing out the limits to growth – about the nature of the problem and how to go about solving it. I haven’t found a better framework for thinking about the subject than the “Buddhist economics” proposed by E.F Schumacher. In a collection of essays called Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, Schumacher talked about the aim of Buddhist economics being  “to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.”

There are examples large and small of alternative economic structures that work, provide quality of life, and are sustainable. We may not be able to avoid the crash, but we can find a way to pick up the pieces afterward.