09131 Die-Off

If you were born after 1960, you will probably die of violence, starvation or contagious disease. — Jay Hanson, dieoff.com

Die-off is the ultimate boogerman of punctuated equilibriums.

The classic illustration found in ecology textbooks is St. Matthew’s Island.

In 1944, the US Coast Guard established a radio navigation station on the remote island in the Bering Sea. They landed 29 reindeer on the island as a back-up food source for the Coast Guard folks. It was wartime. Supplies for the base might be intercepted by the enemy.

A few months later, the Coast Guard closed the station, evacuated the men, and left the reindeer behind. In 1957, a research expedition landed on the island and found more than 1300 reindeer in great health. In 1963, researchers again visited the island. Now there were 6,000+ deer on the island! They were thinner than the deer found in 1957.

Three years later, in 1966, scientists returned to the island, and found it littered with the bones of reindeer. Only 42 reindeer remained on the island, 41 females and one infertile male. The deer population died off completely by the 1980s.

This is what happens in nature when usually self-regulating systems get out of whack.

It is one thing to observe this happening in nature to animals, insects, yeast, etc.

But it would be another thing to watch it happen to the human race. The impact of human systems on both the human race and the ecologies that we inhabit approaches the “wildly out of control” stage.

A primary purpose of the iPermie project is to help us avoid a catastrophic die-off of the human race. Our rescue begins with you, as an individual, when you decide to learn permaculture design and develop a permaculture design for your life. It continues as you share this with others, and they start their own designs for their own lives. As more people take actual control over their own lives, the concepts of permaculture design begin to influence the larger structures and systems of our societies. We grow our own rescue, one person, one design at a time.

The consequences of our failure will be the die-off of the human race, which will be an ecological catastrophe so great that we will take many other species down with us.

Don't go there. Instead, let’s fulfill a self-fulfilling prophecy of abundance and beauty instead of horror and death.