Could food shortages bring down Civilisation?

SHOOT: I am increasingly convinced that what we suffer from in the modern era is a surfeit of noise pollution. Too many signals, most of them junkdata and many other distorted signals pretending (or otherwise skewed) to be facts. And in opposition to this is scary-low levels of imagination - people unable to think out of the box about what is possible.

clipped from www.theoildrum.com One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today’s economic crisis. For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire—and how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos—and Earth might collide with an asteroid, too!