Today’s post includes a recent sobering comment on overshoot reality by un-Denial regular Hideaway that I thought deserved more visibility, and a new essay on acceptance by B, who has recently emerged as one of the best writers about human overshoot.
The ideas of Hideaway and B complement some of the recent discussions here about acceptance and the nature of our species.
P.S. I did not receive permission from B to re-post his essay but I’m hoping that since un-Denial is not monetized he will not object, and I will of course remove the essay if B expresses concern.
By Hideaway: On Radical Reality
The human enterprise of modernity and 8.1+ billion humans is going down. Reduction in available energy is the trigger and there is nothing we can do to stop it, or make it less unpleasant, or save the macrofauna from extinction.
As we build more energy machines of any type, their output increases overall energy available, and used, providing this happens faster than the retirement of old energy producing machines. Over the last few decades we, as in humanity in it’s entirety, have increased fossil fuel use developing more, tearing up the environment more, while increasing the build of renewables.
On a world wide scale, we have not replaced any fossil fuel use, we have just increased all energy use with more fossil fuels being part of that increase, and renewables being part of the increase. At some point growing energy use must stop, unless we make the planet uninhabitable for all life, which means we stop anyway.
Because of our economic system, as soon as we stop growing energy production and use, the price of energy goes up, and we go into recession/depression. It becomes impossible to build ‘new’ stuff of any kind once energy use declines, unless we take the energy from other users, for our ‘new’ builds.
Building more renewables, batteries, EVs, etc., currently means using more fossil fuels to build it all. There is no realistic attempt to build it all with electricity from renewables, nor is that possible. If we diverted existing renewable energy production to, for example, a new mine, then that renewable energy, removed from a city, would have to be made up by increasing fossil fuel generated electricity for the city.
If we ‘ran’ the new mine from new renewables, then these have to be built first, meaning we need the mine for the minerals to build the renewables, or we take minerals from existing users, elsewhere. It’s all just more, more, more and none of the proponents of renewables, including major green organizations want to acknowledge it.
The circular economy can’t work as we cannot physically recycle everything, plus we would need to build all the recycling facilities. If we were to try and do this without increasing total energy use, where does the energy come from to build these new recycling facilities? Other energy users? For the last couple of centuries it’s always come from ‘growth’, especially in energy use. None of us, nor our parents or grandparents, have known a world where the amount of energy available to humanity does anything other than grow.
Because of losses of all materials due to entropy and dissipation into the environment, we will always need mining, of ever lower ore grades, meaning an increasing energy use for mining. It is simply not possible to maintain output from mines once we go to zero energy growth, unless the energy comes from other uses, and users.
Once energy production growth stops, the price of all energy rises, because we need energy production to go up just to maintain the system, as population grows, ore grades decline, etc. If energy production was to fall, the price becomes higher, making everything else cost more. We can see this on a micro scale every time an old coal power plant is closed. On average, the wholesale price of electricity goes up, until compensated for by some newer form of electricity production (the new source taking energy to build).
Visions for the future usually include extra energy efficiency for buildings, etc. but never, ever, include the energy cost of these energy efficiency gains. For example, a simple hand wave about using double glazed or triple glazed windows. To do this, on a worldwide scale, we would need to build a lot of new glass factories, and probably window manufacturers as well. It will take more energy to do this, just like everything else ‘new’.
The phrase ‘build new’ means more energy is required for construction and mining the minerals for the new or expanded factories. The Adaro coal power plant (new) and aluminium smelter (also new) in Indonesia are perfect examples of our predicament. The world needs more aluminium for ‘new’ solar PVs, EVs, wiring, etc. which means more energy use and environmental damage, regardless of whether we use fossil fuels, solar panels, or pumped hydro backup.
Civilization is a Ponzi scheme energy trap, we either grow energy and material use, or we stagnate, and then collapse. Following feedback loops, we see there is no way out of this predicament.
People often claim the future is difficult to predict, yet it is simple, obvious, and highly predictable for humanity as a whole. We will continue to use more energy, mine more minerals, and destroy more of the environment, until we can’t. The first real limit we will experience is oil production, and we may be there already.
Once oil production starts to fall with a vengeance as it must, say 2-3 million barrels/day initially, then accelerating to 4-5 million barrels/day, it will trigger a feedback loop of making natural gas and coal production more difficult as both are totally dependent upon diesel, thus reducing the production of both, or if we prioritize diesel for natural gas and coal production, then other consumers of diesel, like tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships, must use less.
Mining and agriculture will come under pressure, sending prices for all raw materials and food through the roof. World fertilizer use is currently above 500 million tonnes annually. A lot of energy is required to make and distribute fertilizer. World grain yields are strongly correlated to fertilizer use, so less energy means less fertilizer, which means less food, unless we prioritize energy for agriculture by taking energy from and harming some other part of our economy.
If we banned discretionary energy uses to keep essential energy uses going, while overall energy continues to decline, then large numbers of people will lose their jobs and experience poverty, further compounding the problems of scarcity and rising prices.
Money for investing into anything will dry up. If governments print money to help the economy, inflation will negate the effort. If governments increase taxes to fund more assistance, then more people and businesses will be made poorer.
The ability to build anything new quickly evaporates, people everywhere struggle between loss of employment, loss of affordable goods and services, increased taxation, and will be forced to increase the well-being of their immediate ‘group’ to the detriment of ‘others’. Crime rates go through the roof, the blame game increases, with some trying to dispossess others of their resources. This will occur for individuals, groups and countries. Crime and war will further accelerate the decline in energy production, and the production and shipment of goods in our global economy. One after the other, at an accelerating rate, countries will become failed states when the many feedback loops accelerate the fossil fuel decline. Likewise for solar, wind and nuclear.
We rapidly get to a point where our population of 8.1+ billion starts to decline, with starving people everywhere searching for their next meal, spreading from city to country areas, eating everything they can find, while burning everything to stay warm in colder areas during the search for food. Every animal found will eaten. Farming of any type, once the decline accelerates, will not happen, because too many people will be eating the seed, or the farmer. Cows, sheep, horses, chooks, pigs, deer, basically all large animals will succumb because of the millions or billions of guns in existence and starving nomadic people.
Eventually after decades of decline, humans will not be able to be hunter gatherers as we will have made extinct all of megafauna. Whoever is left will be gatherers of whatever food plants have self-seeded and grown wild. Even if we were able to get some type of agriculture going again, there would be no animals to pull plows, all old ‘machinery’ from decades prior would be metal junk, so food would remain a difficult task for humans, unless we found ways to farm rabbits and rats, without metal fencing. While we will use charcoal to melt metals found in scavenged cities, it will limited to producing a few useful tools, like harnesses to put on the slaves plowing the fields, or for keeping the slaves entrapped.
Once we go down the energy decline at an accelerating rate, nothing can stop complete collapse unless we can shrink population much faster than the energy decline, which itself may very well be pointless as we have created such a globalised economy of immense complexity, where fast population decline, has it’s own huge set of problems and feedback loops.
Our complex economy requires a large scale of human enterprise. Reduce the scale, and businesses will have less sales, making everything more expensive. Rapid population decline will mean many businesses won’t just reduce production, but will often stop altogether when the business goes bust.
Because of interdependencies of our complex products, a scarcity of one seemingly uncritical component will have far reaching effects on other critical products. Maintenance parts will become difficult to obtain, causing machinery to fail, in turn causing other machines to fail that depended on the failed machines. Think of a truck delivering parts required to fix trucks. The same applies to production line machines, processing lines at mines, or simple factories making furniture, let alone anything complicated. If we only reach population decline as energy declines the problem is still the same.
By B: On Radical Acceptance
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/on-radical-acceptance
So what is radical acceptance? For me, it means: accepting that no single technological civilization based on finite resources is sustainable. Neither in the bronze age, nor in the iron age; let alone in an era of industrial revolutions. None. Why? Because all spend their nest egg — be it fertile topsoil, forests or coal, lithium and copper — a million times faster than it can be replenished. Recycling and “sustainability” practices can only slow down the process somewhat… At least in theory, but rarely in practice. The “circular economy”, together with „renewables” are nothing but fairy tales we tell ourselves to scare off the wolfs at night. Sorry to be this blunt, but the decline of this techno-industrial civilization is inevitable, and is already well underway.
The only type of civilization (if you want to use that term), which proved to be more or less sustainable so far, was a basic hunter-gatherer society; complemented perhaps with some agroforestry, pottery and some low key metallurgy. Anything beyond that inevitably destroyed the soil and the very resource base supporting the entire edifice. With that said, I’m not suggesting that we should immediately go back to the caves and mud huts… That would be impossible for 4 billion of us, entirely supported by large scale agriculture based on artificial fertilizers and a range of pesticides. However, it is important to note, that this is the direction we are headed, with the only question being how fast we will get there and how many humans can be sustained via such a lifestyle.
And this is where acceptance comes into view. Once you understand (not just “know”) that burning through a finite amount of mineral reserves at an exponential pace leads to depletion and environmental degradation at the same time, you start to see how unsustainable any human civilization is. All that technology (in its narrowest technical sense) does is turning natural resources into products and services useful for us, at the cost of polluting the environment. Technology use is thus not only the root cause of our predicament, but it can only accelerate this process. More technology — more depletion — more pollution. Stocks drawn down, sinks filling up. Simple as that. Of course you can elaborate on this matter as long as you wish, conjuring up all sorts of “game changer” and “wonder” machines from fusion to vertical gardens, the verdict remains the same. It. Is. All. Unsustainable. Period.
There are no clean technologies, and without dense energy sources like fossil fuels there wont be any technology — at least not at the scale we see today.
Many people say: Oh this is so depressing! And I ask: why? Because your grand-grand children will have to work on a field and grow their own food? Or that you might not even have grand-grand children? I don’t mean that I have no human feelings. I have two children whom I love the most. I have a good (very good) life — supported entirely by this technological society. Sure, I would love to see this last forever, and that my kin would enjoy such a comfortable life, but I came to understand that this cannot last. Perhaps not even through my lifetime. I realize that I most probably will pass away from an otherwise totally treatable disease, just because the healthcare system will be in absolute shambles by the time I will need it the most. But then what? Such is life: some generations experience the ‘rising tide lift all boats’ period in a civilization’s lifecycle, while others have to live through its multi-decade (if not centuries) long decline.
I did feel envy, shame, and anxiety over that, but as the thoughts I’ve written about above have slowly sunk in, these bad feelings all went away. It all started look perfectly normal, and dare I say: natural. No one set out to design this modern iteration of a civilization with an idea to base it entirely on finite resources; so that it will crash and burn when those inputs start to run low, and the pollution released during their use start to wreck the climate and the ecosystem as a whole. No. It all seemed like just another good idea. Why not use coal, when all the woods were burnt? Why not turn to oil then, when the easily accessible part of our coal reserves started to run out? At the time — and at the scale of that time — it all made perfect sense. And as we got more efficient, and thus it all got cheaper, more people started to hop onboard… And why not? Who wouldn’t want to live a better life through our wondrous technologies? The great sociologist C. Wright Mills summed up this process the best, when writing about the role of fate in history:
Fate is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people.
Scientifically speaking this civilization, just like the many others preceding it, is yet another self organizing complex adaptive system. It seeks out the most accessible energy source and sucks it dry, while increasing the overall entropy of the system. We as a species are obeying the laws of thermodynamics, and the rule set out in the maximum power principle. Just like galaxies, stars, a pack of wolves, fungi or yeast cells. There is nothing personal against humanity in this. We are just a bunch of apes, playing with fire.
Once I got this, I started to see this whole process, together with our written history of the past ten thousand years, as an offshoot of natural evolution. Something, which is rapidly reaching its culmination, only to be ended as a failed experiment. Or, as Ronald Wright put it brilliantly in his book A Short History of Progress:
Letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while, but in the end a bad idea.
So, no. I’m not depressed at all. It was fun to see how far a species can go, but also reassuring that it was a one off experiment. Once this high tech idiocy is over, it will be impossible to start another industrial revolution anyway. There will be no more easy to mine, close to surface ores and minerals. Everything left behind by this rapacious society will remain buried beneath a thousand feet of rocks, and will be of such a low quality that it will not worth the effort. Lacking resources to maintain them, cities, roads, bridges will rust and crumble into the rising seas, while others will be replaced by deserts, or lush forests. The reset button has been pressed already, it just takes a couple of millennia for a reboot to happen.
Contradictory as it may sound: this is what actually gives me hope. Bereft of cheap oil, and an access to Earth’s abundant mineral reserves, future generations of humans will be unable to continue the ecocide. There will be no new lithium mines, nor toxic tailings or hazardous chemicals leaching into the groundwater. Our descendants will be forced to live a more sustainable, more eco-friendly life. There will be no other way: the ecocide will end. This also means, that there will be no “solution” to climate change, nor ecological collapse. They both will run their due course, and take care of reducing our numbers to acceptable levels. Again, don’t fret too much about it: barring a nuclear conflict, this process could last well into the next century, and beyond. The collapse of modernity will take much longer than any of us could imagine, and will certainly look nothing like what we see in the movies. And no, cutting your emissions will not help. At all. Live your life to its fullest. Indulge in this civilization, or retreat to a farm. It’s all up to you, and your values. This is what I mean under the term, radical acceptance.
We are a species of this Earth, and paraphrasing Tom Murphy, we either succeed with the rest of life on this planet or go down together. Nurturing hope based technutopian “solutions”, and trying to remain optimistic does not solve anything. This whole ordeal is unsustainable. What’s more, it was from the get go… And that which is unsustainable will not be sustained. And that is fine. We, as a species are part of a much bigger whole, the web of life, and returning to our proper place as foraging humanoids will serve and fit into that whole much better than any technutopian solution could.
Until next time,
B
un-Denial 
I sure do like RFK Jr.
https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1799661474438385852
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Rachel Maddow. SMH. Cannot believe I was duped into thinking she was one of the good guys.
I first heard of her during the mid to late 2000’s on Air America Radio. Along with Sam Seder, Marc Maron, Cenk Uygur, Al Franken and others. It was like the all-stars of who you should be paying attention to. Thought I was in good hands. Cant stand those people now. And what a waste of time they all are. I never heard the word “overshoot” once from any of them.
If you are into Noam Chomsky, you will like these people. If you are into what really matters, you will hate them.
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Rachel Maddow has a head like the chewed on eraser end of a pencil.
Awful person from the get go.
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I hate cheap shots at people’s physical appearance. But you did make me chuckle, so I’ll forgive you.😊
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Lindsey Graham in a 1-minute video says the quiet bit out loud and explains the real reason the US is meddling in Ukraine (and Russia).
It’s about resources.
https://x.com/GabeZZOZZ/status/1799887947363393859
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From my comment on Mike Roberts – Humans are a Species
Ukraine infrastructure is kaput!
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When I was in university in 1979 the government tried to educate citizens on the risks of nuclear war, in part of course to secure more spending on the military.
Today they pretend there are no risks and provoke an enemy assuming it is bluffing.
See the interview above with Serbian President Vucic for a most interesting discussion on why it is unwise to assume Russia is bluffing.
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Sarah Connor with a good short article reminding us why humans have got to go.
And the Historic Accounts pdf is totally worth reading.
Alien Planet Earth (collapse2050.com)
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https://www.bizcommunity.com/article/saudi-arabias-petro-dollar-exit-a-global-finance-paradigm-shift-670911a
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What collapse looks like today in an overpopulated country dependent on food imports.
Now imagine the conditions if rich countries were unable to help Haiti.
Coming soon to many countries.
h/t Panopticon
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/haiti-food-insecurity-gang-violence-famine-hunger/
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Even if it’s exaggerated, I get some pleasure from reading that the US is being spanked.
Probably has something to do with them respecting and protecting rather than hanging Fauci, and supplying the weapons being used to genocide Gaza.
https://indi.ca/how-us-navy-defeated/
The essay also includes interesting evidence that complexity is difficult to maintain when growth stalls.
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Great essay. I get enormous pleasure from reading that the US is being spanked. Probably has something to do with every single thing they’ve ever done since coming over here from europe in the 1600’s.
Side note: A while back I sent Indi a long email regarding my crazy white skin stuff that I am so hung up on. He finally replied yesterday. Was hoping to get a nice informative email back. LOL. I get the sense that Indi wanted no part of my nonsense, and the short reply below was his polite way of saying “Chris, you are full of shit”. 😊
But Indi is so good that even with just a line or two, he can get me thinking.
I wonder about the white skin. My private theory was that the Neandertals were white and the ‘black’ African homo sapiens genocided them. But I have no idea. Skin color obviously doesn’t fossilize well.
Indi
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Australia concealing excess deaths and vaccine injuries.
https://x.com/toobaffled/status/1800865753480270041
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This is worthless opinion, whoever he is. Show me the data.
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As per usual Mike you want someone else to do the work for you. Go to the Australian Stats gov site and check it out for yourself, to vaildate the claim. Because remember what you say is just opinion and judging by past opinions you have stated you can be wrong. I imagine though that seeking out data on why the vaccines didn’t work and actually harmed people is not something you wish to prove.
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That’s not correct, Niko. I have often done the leg work and so have an opinion formed from that. When I see something posted that is a) from an unknown person, b) citing unverified claims then I discount it and am dismayed that such a thing is posted here, given all that has been said here about sources.
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By the way, niko, your comment indicates that you don’t believe the nameless person in the video clip, either, because he claimed that the Australian Stats service was hiding excess deaths. If I could go to the site and do the calculation for myself, then they can’t be hiding that information.
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They aren’t hiding, no one seems to care is the problem.
I looked at the data last year.
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Me too, though not a deep dive. I saw no evidence of significant excess deaths in my quick calculation.
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Covid incompetence and bad ethics killed 15+ million people which is 3x worse than the holocaust which means I now have zero tolerance for any defense of what happened.
There is some uncertainty in how many people were killed by withholding of effective treatments, and by mRNA, but it is a fact that every death was caused by gain of function research that our leaders are not prosecuting which makes them accomplices to murder of every person that died for any reason.
I am deleting all of your covid comments but left this one standing because nikoB responded.
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Nate Hagens interview today ties in well with what un-Denial (and Hideaway) has been focused on lately. I only made it about an hour. My MORT forced me to stop watching. Can only take so much before my head starts spinning. We are so fu#ked.
Summary: Today’s conversation with economics journalist Ed Conway focuses on the six essential resources that underpin our modern economies – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium – and dives into the (often unseen) environmental and human costs of extracting them, as well as the surprisingly fragile global supply chains they fuel. What does it take to mine, refine, and transform the materials that are foundational to the world around us – which many of us now take for granted?
The Key Resources Underpinning Modern Economies with Ed Conway | TGS 127 (youtube.com)
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Chris, you beat me to posting this one by minutes… I watched every minute and would include it as a must watch as any of Nate’s videos. At the very end it peters out a bit with the hopium of all getting together and living a simple life etc..
Why it’s important, is all about the total and utter complexity of everything in our modern world, but missing from the thinking of either Ed or Nate was the understanding of why we have the 6 continent supply chain and unbelievable specialization to the point of a single, possibly even small, factory creating whatever little widget needed throughout the world for entire industries.
It’s the scaling, that in economics is called “economies of scale” but appears to happen throughout nature as well. Basically less resources needed for each individual part of the larger organism. Once energy became scarcer, then the only way for individuals to become ‘better off’ is to scale up as part of the larger organism.
As more specialization creates efficiencies internally, Jevons paradox kicks in and more use is found for whatever resources.
Without going into too much detail, this overall video, if you combine it after watching Nate’s video with Geoffrey West on scaling, episode 117, makes me even more confident that collapse of civilization is a feature of civilization, with exactly the same type of certainty that every organism has of dying of something, or ‘old age’, but will definitely die. The death is the sudden unravelling of all internal systems that has been keeping individual cells alive.
We could have any number of actions that end civilization, sudden climate change, a super volcano eruption, nuclear war, pandemic, etc, etc, however if we just get to the point of rapid decline of energy availability, then collapse and death of civilization is assured, very quickly!
When we have a rapid decline in energy availability, especially oil, of say 2mbbls/d one year followed by a further 3-4 mbbls/d the next and another 4-5 the year after, the consequences of not just the odd factory, but hundreds of thousands around the world each with their specialization relied upon by vast tracks of the industrial system, means no possible recovery.
There is no possibility of anywhere being able to build all their own factories to supply all the specialized bits, because that takes a huge quantity of energy and materials to build, right when we will have decreasing availability of both of these because of minor breakdowns and replacement specialist ‘bits’ becoming unavailable.
What I’m trying to say with a lot of explanation that doesn’t really cover it at all, is that the situation is even worse than I thought it was. My head was exploding with links and connections when watching that video.
The feedback loops of everything in our modern world are so enormous and fragile, that when energy depletion really kicks in, will cause recession/depression closing businesses everywhere, then parts availability crashing from the complex supply chains, will guarantee a fast reduction in availability of everything all at once, including the ‘bits’ needed for normal oil rig operations, pipelines, refineries, etc, which means a faster reduction, that closes all sorts of factories due to the recession/depression that comes from high oil prices.
Different parts that come from multitudes of other factories quickly slows gas, coal, solar, wind and every other form of energy, likewise on farms, trucks, forklifts, fridges and freezers in warehouses and shops.
The feedback negative spiral has to be an accelerating one due to lack of energy, which is totally different from the great depression where we had almost unlimited nearly free oil, so we only had to add money printing to get out of the situation. Also different are such huge populations stuck in cities, compared to 90 odd years ago, with no possibility of governments getting food to them as oil availability rapidly contracts, nor any ability of farmers doing anything other than reducing overall production, due to lack of fuel, fertilizers, parts for tractors, pumps, coolrooms, irrigation fittings, etc.
Everything the modern world tries to do with renewables, nuclear, batteries, EVs, high tech everything, just makes the situation worse, as in falling from a greater dependency on technology when the collapse happens.
BTW, next time someone comes up with the green tech will save us, remind them it takes 400kg of petcoke (petroleum coke) to make 1 metric tonne of aluminium (alumina).
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I have not watched the video yet, but I did get Conway’s book and I read the reviews.
More than a dozen heavy hitters gave it a superlative review. Everyone thinks the book is important. Awards were given such as:
And yet a few days or weeks later the implications will be forgotten, and no one will be discussing overshoot.
Same phenomenon with the 2 books on Fauci that proved he is an evil monster that should be in prison. Nothing happened. No one cares.
If this is not MORT in action, what is it?
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Your comment got me thinking about the complete opposite of this phenomenon. The fact that the same dipshit experts who told us about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq are still on the Sunday morning political shows like Meet the Press 20 years later still giving us their “expert” opinions about war.
Rather than MORT, I think it’s all about the public relations/propaganda machine.
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Good point. We live in a world without consequences for bad behavior by powerful people.
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I think MORT underpins most of it, but we have also moved into a time where just too much is being thrown at us take stock so most things don’t get no absorbed into our minds.
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Hideaway, you are just full of good news aren’t you. Ya my head was exploding during this episode too. I’m vocal about wanting a near term quick collapse of civilization. This video (and of course your recent work including this comment above) is starting to cement it for me.
John Michael Greer and his 200-year (or whatever) descent into collapse always sounded like bullshit. (love Greer’s work, but not his prediction). Seems too much of a Roman Empire like comparison. And we all know this fossil energy global beast is unlike anything from the past.
This comment I found sums it up for me: “Our current likelihood of complex manufacturing and supply chain resources collapse may be due to our basic non-understanding of how complex modern industrial creation and inter-dependency actually works”
But then again, past civilizations seemed to have trouble grasping that if you chop all your trees down, there are no more trees left. We humans have never been good at understanding this stuff.
p.s. Rob, I’m sure its gone from the spam folder, but if you ever come across my super long post about evil, please dont post it. Send it back to me. I think it was from Feb or March
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I’m sorry, you comment is gone. I must have missed it before deleting the spam folder.
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I just left a long reply to this, that told me ‘comment successfully sent’, yet seems to have disappeared..
Anyway, it’s an excellent episode and my brain was exploding throughout. The situation is even worse than I previously thought.
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Dangit, I want the long version of what you said.
Dont you hate that. Has happened to me a couple of times on this site. One of my longest rants (about evil and spirituality) disappeared and I was never able to recreate it. Might have been a blessing for everyone though because in my redo attempts it was crystal clear that I did not know what I was talking about. 😊
I now always type into a draft email, then copy/paste it here, and I dont delete the draft until I see it has posted successfully.
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I fixed it. I’m not sure but it’s possible Hideaway forgot to log in which caused WordPress to spam it.
Don’t panic when a comment does not appear. I check the spam folder at least once a day.
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Vaclav Smil’s list of the the four essentials for industrial civilisation is concrete,steel, plastics and ammonia. Ammonia is certainly a much more fundamental requirement to support this population bubble than lithium. Currently manufactured from natural gas, and Smil’s analysis in “Enriching the Earth ” estimates that without it, the maximum human population that could be supported on the land area now used for food production is about three billion. I haven’t watched the video, so don’t know if he mentions this.
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One thing I can guarantee is that I won’t be watching a video or buying a book by an economist on how the physical world works. Robert Solow received a Nobel prize in economics , largely for a paper , where he concluded that “In effect, the world can get by without natural resources “. Maybe this bloke is an ecological economist or biophysical economist, who are in a different category. They have zero influence on mainstream economics, which is disconnected from physical reality.
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I just reread it, He is an economics journalist, not an economist.
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Hi Rob. Replying here to your question about our food forest. The only off farm inputs have been a few trailer loads of cow / horse manure from a neighbours farm. Mainly used during initial plantings coming up 3 years ago. Here are a few recent photos of our first plantings which cover around 200m2. https://photos.app.goo.gl/TjpPya31rCNA2NsAA
We are practicing a method called Syntropic Agroforestry we are learning from friends who are experts. In a nutshell syntropic agriculture is designed to generate the fertility you need to grow crops
internally, planting a range of support species that are pruned regularly to provide mulch and ‘pulse’
sunlight and growth hormone through your system, actually improving soil fertility
over time. You plant everything, including annuals, fruit and nut plants and support species all at once. Our main management tool is a machete for chop and drop.
Here’s a short intro to our friends and syntropy.
If you want a bit more technical info watch this one or search Permadynamics on YouTube.
While syntropy started in the subtropics you can definitely apply it to any climate once you understand the principles. We can grow subtropicals and temperate species here. I think you’re temperate where you are. I can’t see why you couldn’t convert at least part of your growing area to a food forest. Here’s an example from a temperate zone in Germany.
Happy gardening
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Thank you, Campbell, I’ll watch these.
I remember seeing a video you shared of your property and I was very impressed.
I can imagine that with your diversity of plants, and heavy mulching, that your nitrogen and carbon needs can be met without any off-farm inputs since these come from the air.
However, over time there must be a draw-down of other nutrients assuming you are not recycling all of your human waste. Perhaps because you have a forest the roots are deeper and therefore the draw-down is slower? Or maybe nutrients are being delivered from off-site by the ground water?
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We do recycle some of our human waste into the food forest and there is abundant ground water beneath our volcanic soils.
Some support plants are also selected for their ability to accumulate certain minerals too. As we have a large piece of land we can harvest these from non-food forest areas to top up. I understand your query is relating to long-term depletion. I’m not sure how that will play out. We’ve not tested our soil so far.
If you are lucky enough to live near the coast then regular collection of seaweeds is another way to get trace minerals back into your soil.
Cheers
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Thanks. You have chosen and improved a wonderful property.
I have harvested some seaweed, but it is very slow to break down, and can be heavy with salts. Seaweed might be useful for supplementing a kitchen garden for personal consumption, but not a farm exporting a lot of food.
And by the way, the abundant kelp beds of my childhood are gone and very little seaweed washes up on the shore now. I went to a talk by biologists studying the problem. They don’t know for sure what is going on but it’s probably a change in pH due to CO2 absorption, or a warmer temperature.
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Thanks Rob. It’s a great place and lifestyle to help keep my mental health in order.
Here we have many kina (sea urchin) baron reefs where the fish species that normally control the urchin population have been depleted by overfishing and so the urchins have eaten all the kelp.
I haven’t worked much with seaweed but our friends at Permadynamics use it often to replenish their food forest. They are on a hill and soak the seaweed for a few weeks in a pond near the top of the hill and then pull the plug and let it flush into the forest via basic drainage channels.
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Have not watched yet but probably good if you are interested in the latest on the nuclear war threat.
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More good tips from Curtis Stone on building a homestead.
Again, ignore the click bait title.
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Quick note. Curtis Stone is a climate change denier and that always puts me off people’s opinions, though Curtis has done some good stuff in the garden. I went to one of his talks and it was inspiring.
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Thanks for the warning. A lot of people seem to be moving in that direction, like Chris Martenson and Bret Weinstein, oddly, and consistent with MORT, just as the evidence for climate change becomes hard not to see with our own eyes.
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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/13/greece-shuts-acropolis-schools-as-it-braces-for-43c-heatwave
Greece shuts Acropolis, schools as it braces for 43°C heatwave
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