Pandemics Won’t Just Kill Humans

The Horsemen interact complexly, all throughout the food chain:

Wheat leaf rust is a fungal disease that affects wheat, barley and rye stems, leaves, and grains. This is now beginning to appear as a PANDEMIC since scientists have shown that the first appearance of wheat stem rust disease that appeared in Britain about 60 years ago and had reappeared since 2013, was caused by the same virulent fungal strain that was responsible for recent wheat stem rust outbreaks in Ethiopia, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden… The cocoa farms in southwestern Nigeria, which is the nation’s primary growing region, has been hit with the outbreak of a fungal disease identified as dieback. This disease simply kills the plant.

Our K’s will develop an incredible excess capacity for resource production. But no matter how great the excess, r-strategists will slowly proliferate to fill that void in the carrying capacity. As they reach, and exceed that carrying capacity, the onset of K will be able to be held off some through K’s diminishing consumption to avoid the chaos of Apocalypse.

The problem is, that an extended period of r naturally tends to align with environmental stability and ease, in large part because it began with a high-K-density which was produced by environmental harshness. The harshness ends, the environmental ease mixes with high K and produces the glut. The glut burns itself out as r’s multiply up, then it stagnates, until the environment shifts and upsets the system enough to crash everything and trigger the K that has built up.

Food is diminished so some have to starve, and then K’s begin to horde, violence begins, cohesion, unity, and cooperation collapse, and the glut is over. A population which was already technically over the carrying capacity suddenly sees the excess production it had evaporate, the even distribution give way to hording, the systems of cooperation in production and systems of delivery disappear, and the civility which allowed risk-taking disappear as well. And then there is pandemic, killing not only humans, but their food as well. A system that was about to fail as it benefitted from every advantage becomes burdened with every disadvantage, making the collapse even worse.

The trigger is often going to be found to be this environmental shift. We can hum along for decades at the precipice. But once the environment shifts, organisms from animals to crops suddenly are weakened and opened to disease, and once disease gets a foot in the door and can hang around, it begins to adapt and grow strong. It is almost fueled by that age-old observation that it is easier to tear down and destroy than to build. It is easy for a microbe to explode and take out an entire crop once it develops the critical mutation. But it is almost impossible for a weakened organism to keep death at bay once it is weakened enough, and forced into close quarters with a pathogen gunning for it.

All the stars are aligning for Apocalypse.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because they might be dead soon