Every society we create sooner or later faces the challenge of keeping up with an escalating demand for resources. Although there is an immense drive to acquire more, there is never any strategy to conserve or manage what is already there. Degrowth may be omnipresent in nature, but it has never been accomplished in a human civilisation.
In fact, it has never even been attempted. No culture has ever come close to even consider the type of radical changes humanity needs today to avert self-destruction. Like stubborn patients refusing critical life-saving surgery, all our civilizations eventually became sitting ducks, waiting for their collapse. They gave up before even trying.
We’ve always gone to great lengths to secure water, food and other resources. But where we failed miserably was questioning, predicting, managing and ultimately maintaining demand down to a sustainable level. On every occasion we preferred to spend now and save nothing for later, leaving future generations to fend for themselves in whatever decimated world we passed down to them.
Nothing has changed since then. Humans are as self-destructive as they’ve always been, only that there is so much more at stake now: 8 billion people, 10 million life forms, and the planet’s own climate infrastructure coming under attack. Our only chance of escaping self-annihilation is if we manage to understand the pathology of civilisational expansion in much the same way that we have understood the growth of a cancer cell.
George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.
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George Tsakraklides 
In Bible times there was a Sabbath of the land to give it a rest; food such as grains were to be stored to provide 7-year supply in case of drought, etc. Now, the food supply is measured in days. Any catastrophe such as reversal of the poles will result in total devastation.