tion level events are a part of nature as well. Look at the algae that bloomed out of control then killed themselves by creating too much oxygen.

Your vision of collapse is either quick, with a generation or two, death. Or severe depopulation with the remainder learning how to cope in their new environment, in which case it's our normal state of being anyway.

At least right now the excess driving these events has led us to be living in literally the happiest period of human history.

Happiest for some - just ask the billions of people living in slums around the world how they're feeling about the current state of things.

Sure, for middle class Americans things are great right now - never been better, but they're in the top 0.5% of the human population.

MOST people live in more abject poverty today than they ever did in the past - and rely more heavily upon global commerce just to survive than they ever did in human history. The natural environment is destroyed, so people live in industrialized slums where they go paycheck to paycheck as wage slaves.