200 year long drought might be "normal", even without global warming.

[GliderGuider]

10. When I mention planetary decimation I'm not talking about predictions.

I'm talking about stuff we've already managed to do. The destruction of land and oceanic life, the damage to fertile soils, fresh water sources and the global climate - all of these are not predictions. They're the current state of affairs.

Where the problem arises is in my estimation that the predations that have already occurred can not be remediated to any useful extent while GlobCiv 1.0 is still rumbling across the landscape. "Taming the genie" by some amount - say by 10% in every domain of destruction - makes no difference if our aggregate demand on the planet increases by 10% in the same period.

It's important to understand that one-way functions have no dependence on the arrow of time.

In computer science, a one-way function is a function that is easy to compute on every input, but hard to invert given the image of a random input. Here, "easy" and "hard" are to be understood in the sense of computational complexity theory, specifically the theory of polynomial time problems.

In applied contexts, the terms "easy" and "hard" are usually interpreted relative to some specific computing entity; typically "cheap enough for the legitimate users".

In my opinion, reversing to totality of the damage we've caused is a "hard" problem in the sense that cryptographers use the term: a problem that is not soluble with the resources at hand in the time available.

I decided about 5 years ago that if a Solution™ to the multidimensional problem of GlobCiv is available, it will not be found within the domain of the problem as stated. That is, the Solution™ will not act to repopulate the oceans, re-fertilize the land, refill the aquifers, re-freeze the icecaps, re-stabilize the climate circa 1850 or re-manifest the species we have extirpated. Each of those alone is a "hard problem". Taken together they describe a "wicked problem", which is a hard problem on steroids.

So I started casting around for other possibilities - approaches that might be generally helpful but do not require me to believe in a definition of "solution" I feel is fundamentally unhelpful and even misguided. Not surprisingly, there aren't very many such approaches - the problem has already consumed most of the available solution space.

Most of the helpful approaches come under the rubric of "increasing resilience", and apply somewhere on a scale from individual psychology and local ecosystems to the organization of moderate-sized communities (IMO "moderate" = small multiples of Dunbar's number). Such approaches allow for the system under consideration to withstand external shocks without collapsing. I prefer to focus on the individual scale. That's where I try to foster Solutions™.

I understand how the conclusion that the definition of "solution" that most environmentalists operate under is a chimera, infuriates those who insist that is the only acceptable definition. That anger causes them to define people who choose not to work to that definition, to focus their energies on other types of responses instead, as fatalist, reactionary or obstructionist. There's not much I can say to that anger. It's not a logical argument but an emotional reaction.

I will keep on throwing out the possibility that the traditional activist approach to problem-solving will lead us down the garden path that goes over a cliff just around the bend ahead. I prefer the idea that the alternative "solutions" (which are not at all "solutions" in your terms, of course) will show us unexpected ways to build healthy human communities that are better equipped to be members of the family of life for the foreseeable future.