We're ever so impressed with ourselves as a species. We think that we are patently unique and unlike all other animal life forms. Yet we seem, by some estimations, to be inexorably headed towards executing precisely the same kind of population collapse that is the signature of any species that has overcome key controls on its numbers.
We have conquered all of our large natural predators. We are well into the process of conquering all of our small natural predators: the likes of fungal, bacterial, and viral diseases. We have unprecedented power to exploit the resources of our environment and convert other life on Earth into products for our consumption. The dominant economic system of capitalism dictates that we not hold back in harnessing this power in the pursuit of perpetual economic growth.
Is capitalism merely a more circuitous and nuanced macro level expression of the same primal animal trait that leads species to their population peak and the threshold of a mass die off? It takes a certain kind of arrogance to assume that humans are so distinctly different to other animal life forms that we would assume that we are exempt from the same kinds of macro patterns that operate in the larger biosystem.
Nowhere is this faithful adherence to fundamental patterns of macro behavior more evident than our stubborn unwillingness, as a species, to recognize and respond appropriately to the impending decline of oil - arguably the single most important engine driving our relatively recent runaway success as a species.
We seem destined, as if by some innate feature of the behavior of species, to sail on obvliviously into the calamity of peak oil production and the attendant blowback from industrialization that is Global Warming.