Steve takes a local perspective and discusses what a wise community and individual might do to become more self-reliant and resilient, and to prepare for the collapse of our high tech, energy intensive society.
My premise is that at the global, nation-state, or even state level, the current hierarchical system is not capable of climbing down from overshoot, or anticipating and preparing for a lower energy, lower consumption future. Any efforts to prepare must be done at the personal, and then small, local level, where like minded people can coalesce and work as a cooperative community to make the needed transition in lifestyle.
Local self-reliance is foremost about the basics: food, water and shelter. There are abundant resources online and printed that range from the Foxfire Book series, which captured lore from Appalachian settlers, to the most up to date beans and bullets prepper website. Local self-reliance is not about saving the knowledge we humans have accumulated, or western culture (god forbid), and it is not even a solution. It is simply a greater than zero chance to get some humans through the bottleneck.
Collecting books is NOT enough. Sure, learn from others, to avoid newbie mistakes, but actual hands on doing is needed, even if the first step is just growing a tomato plant on your balcony or patio. Don’t be afraid of small failures. More is learned from mistakes than successes.
A short time frame response to collapse is the solitary prepper, for those with the means to do so. But a longer term and more resilient response to collapse and the coming new arrangement is a collective effort. Our forebearers survived the African veldt, and then went on to overrun the world, because of group cooperation. Any success at surviving the coming bottleneck will be a small, local, group effort. Think Dunbar’s number or smaller.
Cooperation is not an easy thing to accomplish, humans being a fractious, conniving species, with a hard-wired dark side permanently bound to our empathetic, benevolent side. Recall the back to the land hippie commune movement of the 60’s and 70’s, when environmental awareness and cultural turmoil drove many to try intentional communities. Virtually every one failed. In part due to ignorance of the earthly details of self-reliance and provisioning through human labor, but also due to governance and group cooperation dysfunction. Most intentional communities were ideology driven (Vietnam, civil rights, etc.), but few had long-term sustainability as their central purpose. And it’s damn hard work.
Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 communes existed in the U.S. in the 1960s and ‘70s with about 75 in the small state of Vermont, making it one of the epicenters of the experiment.
Describing what a sustainable small community would look like is fairly straightforward for the physical needs dimensions of food, water, and shelter, however the social dimensions of hierarchy, communal agreements, security, and governance are the difficult puzzles to solve.
The Amish are an example of a culture that has chosen to be very intentional about what technology they adopt. In general, farming and practical avocations that provide the essentials for rural life are the center of their economy. The size of Amish communities is constrained by a reasonable trip by horse to conduct business and socializing. There is, however, a tradeoff. Their rigid social structure is paternal and religion based, but has shown staying power, with many examples of effective cooperation, such as barn raising. Full religious commitment, and submitting to rigid community rules, will not be acceptable to many modern humans.
That said, even Amish are not long term sustainable, but a model to consider as a step down from where we are, and a kind of “training wheels” for adjusting to the next step down towards living within the local carrying capacity.
Being set in their ways, Amish will likely suffer like everyone else when flexibility in fast changing conditions is required, but they will at least already have strong social connections and a tradition of group effort.
Before cooperating at the level of a barn raising or similar large group efforts, and after simply being a good neighbor, is the level where barter and more involved trading favors need to be navigated.
I am still trying to figure out barter, and trading more substantial favors with neighbors takes time to develop trust and some sort of shared value system that is not denominated in dollars.
How many eggs is a bale of hay worth? What if you have too many eggs right now, but will need the hay next winter. Maybe eggs are free in the spring, but quite dear in winter, when hens have stopped laying. This is just one example of the myriad components of a truly local economy.
How does one remember all these transactions to make sure you are being a fair trading partner? Money turns out to be real handy unless it gets too concentrated and unleashes the dysfunctional side of capitalism or is welded by the more sociopathic among us.
The point is, it will take time to achieve a sophisticated level of cooperation, and is not something that will go smoothly if it has to happen immediately after a crisis ends BAU.
All future self-reliant communities will consist of collections of self-reliant households. Therefore developing self-reliant skills is important for all possible futures. It is time to simplify, reduce consumption, and prioritize. As John Michael Greer has said for years, “collapse now and avoid the rush.” Work on becoming a potential positive contributor to a “collapse community” should one emerge.
Here is a little on my background and personal journey towards self-reliance.
I was raised on a farm in Indiana, and left the farm as many did during the Earl Butz era, to work as an engineer for the same company my entire career. I was a small cog in the industry that builds extractive infrastructure for oil companies. Sigh.
After becoming aware it took me a long time to get off the treadmill. I was very lucky to have a wife who shares my world view.
I am now doing what little I can to pay restitution for my past. We are transitioning 40 acres (17 hectares) to a permaculture based system with food plants that are native or fill the same ecological role. I am learning skills and taking incremental steps to becoming more self-reliant.
We have quite a large garden and grow about 30 types of vegetables. We dehydrate, can, freeze, and ferment, including hard cider! We seed save many vegetables, and are working on saving more.
We have planted a dozen apple trees, ten cherry trees, eight pear trees, six mulberry, and hundreds of hazelnut and chestnut trees. The hazels are now 11 years old and in full production, the chestnuts are slower and are just coming on.
Our wooded areas were pasture until about 30 years ago, so are in transition, mostly brush and brambles. We have cut in trails, and have planted oak and hard maple to speed succession a bit.
We heat with wood in a Russian furnace, which is a type of masonry stove. We are not yet off grid, and it will be a huge lifestyle change when that happens, but we have two PV arrays, and capture rain water off the pole barn for watering trees and the garden. A cistern for water storage is in the works. Many more projects are planned to increase self-reliance, and to be contributors to whatever local community emerges.
We are slowly engaging neighbors in joint efforts. We share the cost and upkeep of a small tractor with two neighbors. I own a cider press that I share with the neighbors. A neighbor had some logging done, but the tops and branches left by the loggers were more than he could ever get to, so he let me harvest firewood.
Here are some tips for increasing self-reliance that I have learned, in no particular order of importance:
Eat the elephant one bite at a time – it’s overwhelming to think about doing all the things needed to be maximally self-reliant, or to create a local community. Just do one small thing, then another, rinse and repeat. (Although a bit of urgency is warranted given world affairs.)
If at all possible, move to a place with access to land to grow food. However you slice it, getting out of urban centers and figuring out how to be part of growing food, or learning a craft, or both, will be better than collapsing in place.
Grow food with priority to calories like potatoes and beans, not lettuce; perennials like fruit trees; and chickens- just a couple layers will help with kitchen scraps and learning husbandry.
Preserve food- can it, dehydrate it, ferment it, and freeze it while you can.
Reduce energy use- by whatever means you can afford/accomplish.
Build redundancy- more than one way to get water, more than one way to heat the house, etc.
Learn to repair things- house, car, clothes, appliances, etc.
Make things- clothes, chicken coops, root cellar, flour, beer, etc.
Security- think about how you might protect yourself, or be part of a collective security arrangement. Depending on location and how things play out, increased violence is very likely.
I have scores of bookmarked sites about homesteading, gardening and permaculture, and three book shelves full in our library, but these tend to focus on improving the skills of an individual.
Here are a few resources relevent to building community strategies and skills that I have found useful:
I volunteer at a local folk school. It’s a good way to acquire skills, and maybe link up with like minded people.
A book I found helpful for imagining a transition path to self-reliance is Sharon Astyk’s Depletion and Abundance.
Chris Smaje has written extensively about what a small farm economy might look like, and his book A Small Farm Future argues for a reversal of urbanization back to individual farms, and identifies local governance issues that need to be worked out.
The Living Energy Farm has ideas for small scale community energy systems.
I do not follow the transition towns movement, as I hear little about them any more. They had quite the buzz for a while, but perhaps tried to do too much? Maybe someone here knows if transition towns offer any useful resources?
I hope others add to this list of resources in the comments.
Rob here: If a substantial list of resources emerges I will copy and organize them somewhere for easy reference.
Today’s guest essay by paqnation (aka Chris) tackles a challenging topic with deep ties to Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory which inspires un-Denial.com.
Chris discusses yet another strange behavior that is unique to our species.
And how hard it is to do the right thing in our modern world.
I have been fixating on evil lately (on an individual level). And by evil I am just limiting it to anything that degrades ecological integrity. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that 100% of my everyday actions are steeped in evil. There is nothing I do that does not involve evil towards the planet. Just typing this essay on my internet computer in my house powered by electricity with the heater on. Everything in my home used up resources and fossil fuels to get to me. And I pay for it by working at a corporation that only creates more evil in the world. Jeez! Too much evil within evil within evil, to even comprehend. Driving my car is the same story. Ditto for eating my grocery store bought food. Every action a person takes in this civilization already has loads of evil baked into it. So what is the opposite of this. Planting trees, gardening, rewilding land, composting my toilet waste? Yes, but I’m sure there is lots of evil within that, just to get to the non-evil deed. Besides, I don’t do any of those things. And even if I did, ok fine, maybe I get my 100% evil actions down to 99%.
It’s obvious that there is a threshold for an acceptable amount of evil that Mother Earth can tolerate and would even expect. Heck, just picking up a piece of deadwood and using it to make a fire is evil. So there is no way to avoid it. The ecological overshoot graphs we’ve all seen time and time again explain what this “threshold” limit looks like. Just another thing that comes down to balance, harmony, and equilibrium. Which, of course, human civilization, by default, cannot achieve.
That got me focusing on my greatest act of evil. It feels like something related to my eating habits would be the winner. The wasting of all the food throughout my lifetime. Or just the day-by-day participation in this horrendous cycle of how we eat in today’s world. But this is more about the accumulation that makes it so evil. I’m looking for a single act that can be labeled “most evil thing I’ve ever done”. Flying on a plane maybe? Prior to my awakening to reality, I was guilty of some horrible acts. On multiple occasions I have dumped trash/junk out in the desert to avoid landfill fees. When I was a teenager, I once changed my car oil and dumped the old oil on the side of the road. At least I’ve never started a forest fire, which has to take the cake for the most evil one person can do (or maybe I’m not thinking hard enough). But I believe I have a clear-cut winner that most of us will be guilty of and does not happen until we are dead.
A lot of people write about nature’s contract or the social contract. Here is a great link on the topic by Tom Murphy: In Breach of Contract.
The core of these “contracts” seems to me is the create/sustain/end part. The “end” portion is where I think our biggest act of evil may rest. We are the only species in which the dead do not return naturally to the eco-system.
Long-life coffins, clothes & decor, deep burial and embalming (which contaminates the soil and groundwater) result in the dead remaining intact for a very long time. Overall, embalming for burial uses over 800,000 gallons of toxic chemicals every year. As well as the costs thru time of mowing around your grave and re-erecting your crumbling gravestone. Not knowing much about this topic, I found out that we put coffins (wooden and metal) inside bigger cement coffins. Our fear of critters eating our corpse is laughably insane. This type of burial practice is just over a hundred years old, which makes perfect sense considering the insanity of modernity and being alive in the most abnormal moment in human history.
Cremation (which I have always preferred) is even worse and turns your body into air pollution and barren ash. Studies of emissions reveal that cremation turns people into at least 46 different pollutants. Some of these, like nitrous oxides and heavy metals, remain in the atmosphere for up to 100 years causing ozone depletion and acid rain. Cremation emits mercury, sulfur dioxide, and, in the US, about 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions into our air every year. Our bodies, on average, take three hours to burn in a crematorium, using up large quantities of fuels like electricity and natural gas. Once again, our fear of critters eating our corpse is laughably insane.
I was bouncing around the internet to get this info. And maybe my stats and figures can be debated, but I think everyone who is this far along into their collapse journey can easily understand how giving my 220 pounds of resources back to Mother Earth is much more beneficial than disintegrating my resources into ashes or keeping them preserved in a metal box inside of a concrete box. (and this is why it feels like my final act will be my most evil)
I can almost hear the absurd conversation with our “Creator/Sustainer/End” in my head. It goes something like:
Mother Earth: Ok, here’s the contract. I am going to create you using my resources, then sustain you with my resources, and when you die I will end you by consuming your resources so that I can keep creating and sustaining in this beautiful cycle of life. Deal?
Modern Humans: Ok, I’ll take you up on your offer for creating and sustaining me, but when it comes time for the end portion, I will renege on our deal and not allow you to use my resources for your benefit. In fact, I’m gonna go out with one last bang and continue harming you even though I’m dead. Deal?
Take, take, take. Never give. Just follows the normal human civilization theme of “everything we do and how we do it is wrong (evil)”.
Natural burials and green burials seem like a better way to go. A quick definition in case you’ve never heard of green burial: designed to have a minimal environmental impact and conserve natural resources. It emphasizes simplicity and sustainability. In a typical green burial, the body is not cremated, prepared with chemicals, or buried in a concrete vault. And some of the green burial sites sell it with options where you are buried with no casket and then a tree is planted on top of you. Having a tree sprout above my corpse is a beautiful idea that I would have mocked (or been grossed out by) prior to my “awakening”.
Unfortunately, the cost is high and availability is low. Average pricing (for my state) is $5,000. And for comparison, traditional burial is $8,000 and cremation is $1,500 (although, when my Dad passed away a few years ago, the cremation cost $2,500. No service or fancy urn. Just the bare minimum). And it looks like there is an even better way called human composting. Which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. But this is only available in a handful of states (mine is not one of them). And cost is $5,000 – $7,000.
I will definitely be looking into these alternatives more because I prefer my final act to not be evil if I can help it (and afford it). Might be my one and only good deed towards ecological integrity. There should be a legal, easy & inexpensive way to put our dead naked bodies into the soil for two obvious reasons. First and foremost, so that Mother Earth gets full maximum benefit. And second so that modern humans can at least honor a portion of our contract.
One last note. I came up with this topic by staring at the table below. Sounds weird, I know. I created this simple table a while back (which I’m sure can be nitpicked to death) for the sole purpose of keeping me on track. My bargaining phase gets me to waste time chasing magical solutions. Looking at this chart helps bring me back down to reality. Another positive outcome is that it gets me thinking about stuff I that I’ve never thought about.
Thanks for listening, Chris
Rob here, I can confirm Chris’ research because one of my university summer jobs was making precast concrete coffin liners.
Chris’ essay reminded me of a comedy skit on peak oil from the 2005 play by Robert Newman titled Apocalypso Now.
It’s a fun reminder of how many of us doomers thought 20 years ago.
If you’re in a hurry, skip ahead to the 6 minute mark for the relevant joke.
Today’s guest post by Hideaway reviews our ‘plan’ to transition off fossil energy, and shows it is in fact a mirage.
Hideaway is a new force active at un-Denial and other sites that discuss energy and overshoot. He focusses on the feasibility of transitioning our energy system, and brings a data-backed, reality-based, adult conversation into a space that is more often than not filled with ignorance, hope, and denial.
As I was writing a post about EROEI, I came across data for energy production and consumption from Our World in Data. It’s all very professionally made and ‘free’ for anyone to use in their energy discussions.
I spotted one problem though, the data presented has a caveat, they use the substitution method for non-fossil fuel generated electricity, and in the fine print this is explained as… “ Substituted primary energy, which converts non-fossil electricity into their ‘input equivalents’: The amount of primary energy that would be needed if they had the same inefficiencies as fossil fuels. This ‘substitution method’ is adopted by the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, when all data is compared in exajoules.”
OK, how do they convert non-fossil energy into fossil fuel equivalents??
An efficiency factor of 0.4 means that nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, biofuels and other renewables are made to look much larger than they really are by a factor of 2.5 in the following chart.
It suggests we are making good progress at replacing fossil with renewable energy, and that with a bit more effort we can convert all fossil energy to renewable electricity.
As is common in energy discussions today, reality differs from what is presented. The following chart shows electricity production by source.
Notice that total world electricity consumption for 2022, which of course must equal production, is 28,660Twh. Yet the above chart for energy consumption by source shows that nuclear, hydro, solar, wind and other renewables are by themselves 11,100Twh.
If we divide non-fossil electricity consumed by the 2.5 efficiency factor we get 11,740Twh which is close to the correct amount of non-fossil electricity produced. I say close because the energy from non-fossil sources adds up to 641Twh more than that shown on the electricity production chart, so this extra energy must be used for some other purpose, but has still been treated as 2.5 times more efficient.
From the above chart we see 10,212Twh of electricity from coal and 6,443Twh of electricity from gas, and we can calculate how much of the total oil and gas production was used for electricity by multiplying by 2.5.
From the 44,854Twh of total world coal consumption we used 25,525Twh for electricity, and 19,329Twh for other purposes. Likewise for the 39,412Twh of total world gas consumption we used 16,107Twh for electricity and 23,305Twh for other purposes.
With oil we only produced 904Twh of electricity. Assuming the same 40% efficiency for oil as coal and gas, then only 2,260Twh of oil was used for electricty and 50,710Twh was used for other purposes.
We can now complete the following table and use it for assessing how our energy transition is going.
Total primary energy production is 134,313Twh of which wind and solar contribute 3,408Twh or 2.5%.
Electricity is 21.3% of total energy, and fossil fuels produces 61.3% of electricity.
Only 8.2% of total energy comes from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and other renewables, and the remaining 91.8% comes from fossil fuels and traditional biomass.
The following chart illustrates this graphically. Blue is all non-electricity energy, orange is electricity from fossil fuels, and grey is electricity from all other sources.
The world is currently trying to replace fossil fuel produced electricity (orange) with electricity from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind and other ‘sustainable’ methods (grey). It is not possible to manufacture, install, or maintain more ‘sustainable’ energy (grey) without fossil fuels. Even the newest mines and factories require fossil fuels in many forms.
There is no plan for the non-electricity portion of energy (blue).
Let’s now consider how fossil fuel and traditional biomass use has changed over time. Are we getting anywhere?
Traditional Biomass was 100% of energy used, according to Our World in Data (OWiD), until coal started to be used in the year 1800 at 1.7% of total energy. Interestingly, they attribute no energy to water power, wind (sails), or animals, perhaps because they were too small or hard to measure.
Fossil Fuels (FF) and Traditional Biomass (TB) contributed 100% of total energy until 1920 when Hydro contributed 1%.
The contribution of FF and TB to total energy changed as follows:
<1920 100%
1920 99%
1940 99.2%
1960 98.4%
1980 97.6%
1990 95.2%
2000 94.4%
2010 94.3%
2020 92.1%
2022 91.8%
Most energy analyses lump TB in the mix without paying much attention to the size of its contribution. At 11,111Twh, as measured by OWiD, TB is a larger source of energy than nuclear, hydro, wind, solar and biofuels combined! TB is not going to be replaced by any other type of energy. Most energy analyses place TB on the other side of the ledger from FF, when in fact TB should be added to the FF side, as it is burnt and adds to greenhouse gasses.
The following chart shows the total contribution of energy from non-FF or TB, with columns 1-4 representing the period 1990-2020, and column 5 is what is ‘expected’ to happen by 2050.
We can see how little decarbonization progress we have made over the last 30 years, and the extraordinary progress we expect to make over the next 26 years, towards achieving our climate goals.
Now let’s consider fossil energy used as feedstock for products, and high heat applications.
There are around 1,100 million tonnes of coking coal mined, 700 million tonnes of oil products, plus vast quantities of gas (I couldn’t find the quantity of gas used as feedstock for products or high heat applications) to make 430 million tonnes of plastics, 240 million tonnes of ammonia (fertilizer), 160 million tonnes of asphalt, plus huge amounts of high end heat for cement and steel production, and hundreds of other products and high heat applications.
OWiD does not provide data on energy used for product feedstocks, or high heat, or normal heating, or transportation, or agriculture, or mining. It’s a huge weakness in all energy calculations.
Product feedstocks, by themselves, are a huge gap in our plan for an electricity only future. A world based on renewables would have to make these products from captured carbon, because there is no unused biomass, and we cannot increase our use of biomass without causing significant further damage to the natural world that sustains us. Only if we were willing to decimate remaining forests could we replace fossil fuel products with biomass, especially as world food demand is expected to go up by 60-70% by 2050 according to the FAO.
The only example of using renewable energy to create synthetic fuel, which is the base for all fossil fuel products, is the Haru Oni plant in Southern Chile. It has a 3.4Mw Siemens Gamesa wind turbine with an expected 70% capacity factor producing an expected 20,848Mwh of electricity per year. The first ‘commercial’ (sic) shipment of e-fuels was just sent 11 months after beginning operation, and 8 months after declaring commercial operations, of 24,600 litres. That is a process efficiency of only 1.77%, assuming an annual production of 36,900 litres, without considering the energy expended in the capital ($US75M), or operating and maintenance costs (unknown or not released).
Assuming we had to make ‘products’ from this process, replacing the Coking Coal 1.1Bt = roughly 7,700Twh, plus approximately 10% of a barrel of oil (using all liquids), another 6,205Twh, the raw energy needed from renewables to do this at a 1.77% efficiency rate would be 785,000Twh, or nearly 5 times current annual energy production from all sources!!
This is before adding the energy needed to mine, process, manufacture, and transport the materials required to build it all!!
It’s a ridiculous idea.
Considering I didn’t include the products from natural gas, or any capital, operating, or maintenance costs, and even assuming significant improvements in efficiency, it’s not even close to being possible.
One final calculation to further expose the mirage.
To make the products from renewable energy, with a Haru Oni type efficiency, would require over 1.8B tonnes of copper for the energy production side of the operation, based on 5 tonnes per Mwh of a solar power plant, and over 5 hrs/day of sunshine. This would consume 100% of our current copper production for about 80 years.
Modern civilization is a complex system. It has systems within systems, and a complexity far too high for anyone to understand as a whole. Our discussions and plans for continuing modern civilization after changing from fossil to renewable energy usually concentrate on one minor part of the overall system. It’s the only way to get an answer that looks plausible.
When multiple feedback loops are considered, it becomes obvious that we do not have the energy nor materials to keep modern civilization going for all. Unless of course, the real plan is to retain modern civilization for only a very small portion of humanity, much smaller than present…
February 15, 2024
Rob here, there are many interesting comments by Hideaway below that expand on his energy and materials analysis.
I found one comment particularly interesting because it introduced Hideaway’s background and the life path that led him to his current clear-eyed view of our overshoot predicament.
I’ve copied that comment here for better visibility.
I first learnt about limits to growth in 1975 in my first year of an Environmental Studies course. I’ve been studying and researching everything about energy and resources for decades. My wife and I moved to the country 40 years ago onto a block of land and started farming.
I was the state secretary of an organic farming group and on the certifying committee over 30 years ago. Virtually all organic, biodynamic, permaculture, regenerative properties I came across had similar characteristics. The profitable ones used lots of off property resources, which I argued was unsustainable, because of diesel use etc. I left the organic movement, also decades ago, because there was nothing really sustainable about it.
I was a believer in a renewable future for decades, always believing it was only a matter of time until they became better and cheaper than fossil fuels, which were clearly depleting. I had an accident 15 years ago, and since then have had way more time to do research than just about anyone. I really got stuck into working out how mines could go ‘green’ until I just couldn’t make the numbers work. (BTW I also had some economics and geology in my tertiary studies, but have learnt way more on both subjects in the last 15 years).
Eventually I reluctantly did my own calculations on EROEI because I just couldn’t find anything with an unbiased approach that came close to making sense. I’ve been against nuclear for decades, mainly because of humanities failure to deal with wastes and the nuclear bombs we create, so I very reluctantly calculated the EROEI using my method and was stunned at the results.
I use to be a believer in the 100:1 EROEI that everyone in favor of nuclear constantly states (before I worked it out for myself). The reality is nothing like that, it’s pitiful worse than solar and wind, which instantly made me realise that modern civilization is not sustainable any any way, shape or form.
I also kept checking the numbers I calculated for Saudi oil and a small gas project in WA. Sure enough these came to the rough numbers we need for modernity, but of course fossil fuels are leaving us due to depletion, they are a dead end anyway, even before we consider climate issues.
All my work, over years, has given me a point of reference for when the world as we know it is in real trouble. It’s when the oil extraction decline accelerates to the downside. Everything runs on oil, especially farming and mining and heavy transport. The world falls to pieces without any of these, once they struggle to get the diesel/bunker fuel they need, collapse is baked in. A date of when? no idea, but suspect we will know by higher oil prices and a failure to respond with greater oil production, then the next year a further decline in oil production, while oil prices remain high etc.
Not even coal can save modernity, the EROEI is too low. Even if we went on a massive Coal to Liquids campaign, the energy return for the cost is way too low. When coal was last king we had approximately a 70% rural population even in the west, now we have multiples of the overall population, mostly in cities, and badly degraded agricultural land.
Today’s guest post is by un-Denial regular Mike Roberts. Mike has on several occasions commented that “humans are a species” and this best explains our overshoot predicament. In this essay Mike nicely elaborates his idea.
I was a regular reader of Dave Cohen’s posts at Decline of the Empire. He had a great writing style and was always very rational in laying out his arguments (although, as always, that’s a personal opinion). Many of his posts made the point that humans are a species and what you see is what you get.
If you want to know how late Stone Age humans might have behaved in the 21st century, look in the mirror, read a newspaper, watch TV, or browse the internet. They were us, and we are them.
This kind of analysis eventually made me realise that humans are a species and so its characteristic behaviour (what you see humans doing in a collective sense) is built in. The characteristic behaviour of a species can’t be altered by wishing it. It can only be altered, over deep time, through an external consistent influence, like a changing climate, which may ultimately lead to a new species or simply to a superficial change in a population (like skin colour).
Our polycrisis could be regarded as a profound stressor which could alter collective human behaviour. But though it’s happening quite rapidly, compared to environmental changes of the past, it’s still too slow for humans to really take it seriously enough that it becomes a consistent stressor which can alter behaviours. It will only be enough once a significant minority are having their lives forcibly changed and most everyone else notices. There is no way out, and it just is what it is. It will have to play out. This is the kind of thinking I was applying at the time.
However, my thinking was honed more with much of the information that was flowing through un-Denial.
A Nate Hagens round table featuring William Rees, Nora Bateson and Rex Weyler confirmed that humans are a species and should act like other species insofar as the consumption of resources go. Any species who is given easy access to resources which help them (immediately – there is no forward thinking) will use whatever they can, as quickly as they can. Any genes which enhance this ability will be much more likely to propagate in the population, thus being self-reinforcing. This is until the resources become harder to access (perhaps through depletion, competition or environmental change). Eventually, the ecosystem settles into a relatively stable state, the climax state, until something perturbs it again (e.g. climate change or an invasive species). Humans are fairly well adapted to accessing resources as they have opposable thumbs and a quite large encephalization quotient, making them clever. Consequently, they are likely to become the apex predator in any ecosystem that they encounter.
Recent posts have also introduced the Maximum Power Principle: organisms that capture and use more energy than their competition will have a selective advantage in the evolutionary process. This reinforces the idea that humans are a species, acting like other species but being more successful because they are able to capture and use far more energy and resources than other species.
We’re now getting at the essential idea, not that human behaviour can’t be voluntarily changed, but that humans really act like all other species. How could it be otherwise?
Sapolsky’s views on free will add further support to these ideas. As he mentions, we all recognize that the world, including us, is made up of various molecules, atoms, electrons and so on, but still, some of us think there is room for something else, that can manifest as “free will.” No-one can explain how this other stuff interacts with our molecules to cause the actions involved in our free will decisions. With no known mechanism (nor any empirical, or mathematical knowledge of this other stuff) for this to happen, it is easy to deduce that it doesn’t happen, that there is no other stuff. A belief in free will may well require a belief in an all-powerful creator who can simply imbue humans with a mechanism which does not require adherence to physical laws. So, all species arose by the same mechanism (filtered random variation), even if we haven’t yet figured out how the first species emerged, and so we should expect all species to act in the same way, at the most basic level.
There have been many studies trying to determine the mechanism of how we make decisions. For example, this study appears to suggest that decisions are made subconsciously well before (in some cases, up to 10 seconds before) we are aware of those decisions. This fits quite well with Sapolsky’s position. Our apparent free will is simply us rationalising decisions which our subconscious has already made. And decisions made in our subconscious mind can only be due to all the factors that lead to where we are at the time of our decision; our genes, our upbringing, what we read yesterday, what the weather was like on our way to where we are, and so on.
Of course, humans are unique, in many ways, but so are many other species. They all have special qualities and abilities that can’t be found in other species, or only in a very limited number of other species. But in the essential attributes of a species, humans are identical to all other species. Consequently, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Maximum Power Principle, MORT and other attempts to figure out why humans act like we do, are simply consequences of our being a species. It can’t be any other way. I’m afraid that there really is no way out. The unique human ability to understand stuff should make these realisations hard to take. We can’t even think, “what if we had done something different at that point in history,” because almost nothing would have changed except the timeline. Other species are largely employed at staying alive, as are some members of our species, but most of us have the luxury of spare time to contemplate other stuff and, to some extent, to enjoy living.
Still, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Cohen, Sapolsky, Lotka and Wyler were wrong. Apparently, it’s in our genes to be optimistic, and no-one can predict the future. So we can live in hope for the rest of our lives even if society and civilisation are crumbing around us, even if the environment is collapsing. Maybe someone will think of something and delay the inevitable for a few centuries. Or decades. Or years.
Physicist Dr. Tom Murphy is one of the most aware and smart people I know of. He’s also a wise man that cares about things that matter, and tries to set a good example with his lifestyle.
I’ve followed and learned from Dr. Murphy for 15 years, and have watched him grow through stages:
Learning about energy in preparation for teaching a university course.
Becoming aware of, and worried about, our total dependence on non-renewable depleting energy.
Researching renewable energy, building a PV system for his home to gain hands on experience, and realizing an energy transition will be very hard.
Changing his lifestyle to reduce energy and materials use.
After a rocket ride through science, I am hanging up the gloves, feeling a little ashamed and embarrassed to have devoted so much of my life to what I now see as a misguided cause that has done more harm than good in this world.
My path away from science involved a number of key elements.
I became aware that some of the pillars on which modern life is based were necessarily temporary. Growth on a finite planet would have to stop—both in physical terms like energy, but also in economic terms.
Fossil fuels, upon which we are utterly dependent, would soon taper off, being a finite resource.
Fertilizer and agriculture critically depend on fossil fuels, so human population could experience a large correction later this century.
The turbulence of a transition this momentous could be so disruptive (resource wars, economies in ruins) that all my work testing general relativity might be lost and rendered meaningless (as well as all the things my colleagues work on).
Renewable technologies are not as easy as they sound: fossil fuels do things that the electricity from renewables has a hard time replicating, and the materials demands ramp up extraction and its associated ills.
Biodiversity loss (extinctions, tragic population declines) spell an ultimate dire fate if we do not heed the warnings: we are obviously now powerful enough to destroy large swaths of the ecosphere and community of life.
Technology is what created the predicament, and constitutes an inappropriate response, as we will never master all knowledge and will inevitably create unintended consequences.
An energy substitute for fossil fuels is the last thing we need, as energy is what powers our expanding terminal encroachment on the living world.
Science is a narrow tool: powerful and tenacious like a pit bull, but having no intrinsic wisdom or context. It concerns itself with what we can do, not what we should do.
I now think a significant portion of my adult life has been mis-spent. Scientific institutions (and university STEM departments) are, to me, a sort of day camp for smart people. Our society approves of these institutions and rewards its practitioners, in part based on the misguided notion that this is where solutions to our problems will originate. Instead, science/technology is far more likely to produce the seed corn for another generation of ecological destruction.
In short, I came to realize I was one of the bad guys. I like the saying that everyone is the hero of their own story. Part of me would certainly like to believe so, but no—I’m still a villain, if unwittingly so. The projects I worked on demanded copious energy, resources, and travel far out of line with care for the natural world. The result in no way helped the more-than-human world. I can say the same about virtually all science. It’s extremely focused on short-term, narrow-boundary benefits for humans at the ultimately-unaffordable expense of ecological health. I lament our society’s squandering of talent that presently pushes on the very things that make our situation more precarious.
I suppose an item I could append to the above list of factors contributing to my exit (thus dialing it up to eleven) is: Science, as it is practiced in our society, is a nearly perfect expression of human supremacy. It’s all for us (humans); it’s all about us. Most science is, therefore, in service to the Human Reich. I’m tired of being associated with that team.
As I find myself more on the outside of “team science” these days (I would like to be accepted on “team life,” despite a steady record of crushing losses), I am reminded of a moving song by Dar Williams called The Great Unknown. I recommend listening to it or looking over the lyrics. It’s not a perfect fit, but it hits on some key themes.
I have much less impressive accomplishments in my life but went through similar stages of awareness and I think I know how Murphy feels. I wish him good health and some happiness for the remainder of his life.
Today’s guest post by German speaking marromai contemplates the implications of peak everything caused by energy depletion and concludes the coming collapse will be rapid, harsh, and permanent. Other essays by marromai can be found here.
Systems have the tendency to increase their degree of complexity more and more and thus to become more and more susceptible to collapse by the smallest triggers. This is true for any chaos-mathematical system, for any physical system and, of course, for civilization. Every self-organizing system needs energy to be kept away from the chaotic state.
The replacement of human labor by the production of fossil fuels led to the fact that less and less humans were needed to produce food more and more cheaply, to mine metals and of course to extract fossil fuels themselves. Wealth increased exponentially – as did the population of Homo sapiens – and the labor force became increasingly differentiated and redirected into higher-skilled fields to meet people’s increased consumption needs, which in turn relied on the use of fossil fuels, other raw materials, and innovation.
Initially, in any self-organizing system that runs out of fuel, synergy occurs to compensate for the loss of cheap energy (globalization; outsourcing of production tools from companies), which further increases complexity. After that, the highly interconnected structures collapse.
But how can a fully mature civilization collapse worldwide? To understand this, we must familiarize ourselves a little more deeply with dynamic systems and the so-called “tipping point” and relate this to the raw material robbery and the compulsion for permanent economic growth of a system built on exponential credit growth. The true extent of the catastrophe will then reveal itself unvarnished.
The geophysicist Heribert Genreith calculated the life span of our system solely based on the debt based money view, according to which there will be a sustainable GDP decline from 2009 and a destruction of values until 2024, with subsequent hyperinflation until 2030 and the catastrophic finale (GDP exit) until 2034. In his forecast, which is supported by pure mathematics, however, he leaves out the most serious and destructive factor “peak everything“, which we will come to in a moment. It is this factor that will throw the system out of its orderly course during a global economic crisis and destroy civilization as we know it. To back this up scientifically and in terms of systems theory, we recommend reading the overview by the “Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability”, or “Feasta” for short, the essay by an international think tank based in Ireland, entitled “Tipping Point“:
We are trying to solve problems within the same systems that are responsible for creating them and that only exacerbate those problems. Moreover, we are locked and trapped in these systems. […] But these systems are far too complicated and too interconnected to fully understand their function. Managing these systems in a way that would allow for controlled shrinkage while maintaining our prosperity is not possible. There is no path to sustainable or planned decline. […] The conclusion of this report is that a decline in energy will almost certainly initiate a series of processes, at the end of which will be the collapse of our civilization. We are close to a point where world oil production will decline or may have already reached that point (peak oil). Our civilizational structure reacts unstably to a withdrawal of energy. In all likelihood, our globally interconnected civilization is on the verge of a surprisingly rapid and imminent collapse.
Oil is the foundation of our economic system and at the same time the bloodstream of civilization. It is taken for granted as a source of energy that simply exists to drive the debt-based global economic ponzi scheme – also understood and included by this think tank – and thus “economic growth”. It is subject, like all commodities, to “Jevons’ paradox“, which in economics is understood to be an observation by William Stanley Jevons “according to which technological progress that allows the more efficient use of a commodity ultimately leads to increased use of that commodity rather than decreased use. In a broader sense, this is now referred to as the rebound effect.”
We observe this effect in other areas, too: The world’s oceans have already had their “peak fish” for decades. Ever more brutal methods are used to fish at ever greater depths, with the help of ever more energy-intensive technology and with ever more unwanted by-catch to satisfy the demand for the last fish. The extinction of species is proceeding at a gigantic pace. The widespread use of pesticides and genetically modified plants is already having its first effects, and the extremely environmentally damaging mining of industrial metals (aluminum, copper, nickel, etc.) will reach its peak in a few decades, but in reality, will already become unprofitable before then due to peak oil. Whereas in the 19th century, for example, copper nuggets weighing tons were still lying around on the earth’s surface, today people are digging for the metal in kilometer-wide and hundreds of meter-deep pits to extract the metal from the stone through chemical processing, in which it is often only found in the order of per mill. So the more metal that is mined – and this yield must increase steadily to maintain our debt backed monetary system – the less copper per ton is found in new mines. This makes mining even more energy intensive and expensive, and it has been shown to be along an exponential curve – the less metal per ton, the exponentially more oil is needed to extract it.
The same phenomenon is taking place with oil itself. The largest oil reserves were already pumped dry in the 1970s. Today, oil is pumped out of the ground using increasingly costly methods (which in turn require oil), and although the price of oil is rising inexorably, there is no longer any increase in production, no matter how refined and expensive the method of oil production or how high its price, because there is simply less and less oil distributed over an ever larger area and no new large oil fields have been found for decades. And the more the oil runs out and the more its price rises with it, the more expensive the mining of industrial metals becomes, which in turn additionally reach their peak in a few decades.
So these processes are based on feedbacks and they build each other up. The same phenomenon can be observed with the technology metals (indium, gallium, germanium, etc.) and the rare earths, which are not only approaching their peak in a few decades, but are also becoming increasingly expensive due to peak oil.
Peak oil is followed by peak water: Scientists estimate that by 2030, due to population growth alone we will need about 30 percent more water, 40 percent more energy and 50 percent more food (while at the same time arable land will become scarce). How is this to be accomplished when the only cheap energy that has been available to us across the board for the past several decades is rapidly running out? Peak water” will be followed by “peak food”, which is already close to its maximum because of climate change and will be completely stifled by rising oil prices. Substitutes for oil are not in sight. High-quality coal had already peaked 20 years ago, even low-quality coal will peak in the foreseeable future, and the so-called “renewable energies” could substitute oil demand to a large extent in the most optimistic case, but only under the assumption of an immense consumption of raw materials to produce these technologies.
One cannot simply take away the cheap energy source from an overpopulated, highly complex world that grew on the foundation of cheap energy and replace it with a more expensive one because, after all, cheap energy was the cause of overpopulation and complexity in the first place. So if no miracle happens in the next few years in the search for cheap energy or in the development of new technologies, one has to agree with the conclusion of Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers in their book “Limits to Growth – The 30-Year Update: Signal to Change Course”: a continuation of “business as usual” will lead to collapse from the year 2030.
Everything is striving towards the magic point “Peak Everything“, which of course will be the final nail in the coffin for the debt based economic system, if it does not perish by itself before then. And of course, already before “Peak Everything” the global commodity wars will break out, and the motives will of course be underpinned with ethical arguments – there will be little to read about commodity wars in the system media.
In the so-called ‘developed’ regions, there will be no more ‘growth’; in fact, the development will be the reverse. Constant economic growth will be replaced in the future by perpetual economic recession. How will the industrialized countries react to this enormous challenge? These peoples will experience that they are in a permanent state of siege, in which the material living conditions will be as modest as during the two world wars. The modest way of life during the wars was temporary, but the future one will be permanent and increasingly serious. A small consolation for the present and future generations, because one thing should be clear by now: The world’s population has also peaked, and like any exponential curve, as cynical and horrible as it may sound, it will collapse along with “Peak Everything” – to about one billion people. In the medium term, humanity will fall back to the level of the Neolithic Age.
———
The following is copied from discussions in the yellow forum (a German economic forum). It illustrates what may happen post peak everything during collapse and what effective prepping may look like.
Q: Why should our highly complex society not “only” be thrown back to the development level of the 16th century?
A: This is just not possible. Where are the tools of the 16th century? Where are the robust but low-yielding seeds of the 16th century? Where are the cows of the 16th century? Small-framed, robust, calving unassisted because the offspring are not uterus-bursting high-yielding cattle?
All that is no longer there. Instead, we have corn rootworm, fire blight, Colorado potato beetle and other pests that were unknown in the 16th century.
Where are the 30 people per square kilometer of the 16th century? How many do we have today? Around 250.
No one is going to push aside some humus and use a pickaxe to mine coal or ores anymore. These resources are gone, no longer extractable without large-scale industrial material and energy input.
Economic reconstruction, by the way, goes the same way as energy consumption: No energy, no recovery.
Nobody will found a city at the sea anymore and reach a population density of 100 persons per square kilometer, thanks to fishing like in the antiquity.
The shoals of fish for this are also gone and will be for our lifetime.
Even if we still hurriedly forge everything possible to plows: Where are the oxen?
Even if we plow the fields with human power: Where is the non-F1 hybrid seed for next year’s harvest?
(Comment by another person) I do not want to criticize these views. Unfortunately, I find too few discussions here that are constructively positioned and deal with the will to survive inherent in every human being, which historically proves that after every system collapse, reconstruction has taken place, resulting in a better living situation than before the crisis.
Good then a constructive approach: What does man need to survive?
Man dies after:
3 minutes without air
3 days without water
3 weeks without food
3 hours without shelter (in a snowstorm without special equipment)
Air: We have plenty. But what about this in the event of a crisis? When solvents, detergents and chemical precursors of all kinds are stored in countless tanks and plants as a result of an economic crash and these rust away merrily.
What about the decay ponds of nuclear power plants when the water supply fails and the freshly burned fuel rods ignite themselves after a few weeks? Not to be extinguished and with consequences in the dimension of Chernobyl.
Where is the fire department in the collapse when whole areas full of low-energy Styrofoam pressboard wood façade houses are in flames for whatever reason?
Or the parched meadow of farmer Horst in midsummer bursts into flames due to a discarded glass bottle?
Water: We have plenty. But … is it drinkable? In many areas, even if one should succeed in reactivating one of the wells, which had to become deeper and deeper due to the falling water levels, the groundwater is no longer drinkable.
Be it because of agriculture, be it because after WWII the bomb craters were filled up with used oil drums, paint cans and similar debris and today no politician dares to tear away the corporation (and major employer of the region) that was created on it, to clean up the contaminated site.
Not to speak of the dozens of “pits” and embankments in each municipality, which were used as garbage dumps, whose positions are well known thanks to measuring helicopters, but no one dares to touch them, because otherwise the municipalities would be immediately broke.
Streams and rivers? Full of sewage from overflowing house pits, failing municipal sewage treatment plants, unmaintained oil separators from gas stations?
Food: Huge problem in the worst case. Today, 10 calories of oil are in every calorie of food. Without oil, there is no food. The oil does not even need to “run out”. It is enough if we can no longer afford it or if the producing countries simply do not want to or can no longer supply it.
Or the transport routes fail, the farmers go broke, the freighters no longer run, the JIT logistics fail, etc.
The greatest danger: On the one hand, hunger does not kill immediately (i.e. the hungry person goes in search) and on the other hand, the stomach then takes control of its evolutionary-biological protuberance (aka. brain).
This offers plenty of room for scenarios, nature shows how little squeamish “hungry people” deal with each other without stockpiling.
The only consolation is that if we are going to have an abundance of one resource in the crisis, it will be “long pig”.
Accommodation: The small cottage with garden in the wasteland, in it the stove rumbling away, a sign of civilization in a dehumanized world, a source of warmth and life energy, the small dream of every serious “prepper” and “survivalist”, on it delicious chicken soup from own chickens…
In short, a gigantic target, visible from afar thanks to a column of smoke and smellable for miles in the wasteland, attracts uninvited guests like flies and they will usually outnumber you and most likely be better armed. The owner of the oven could well end up as a “long pig” in that oven.
Are you happy now with this constructive approach?
If you don’t have any obligations, you might want to get a shotgun ready, one shot is enough. Probably better than being beaten to death in the fight for the last edibles.
This time we get Game Over… in all aspects, not only monetarily. The main problem is a caloric one, we can print money like hay … but not hay, nor potatoes, and not a drop of oil.
This essay was written last year by Karl North and published on his site here. Karl offers a hopeful vision for how we might organize ourselves and live a pleasant life after the collapse of industrial civilization, by building on the research of Graeber and Wengrow in their book “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity“.
Here is a summary of the book:
“A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.”
Many of us, I’m sure, would like to find reasons for optimism.
Karl kindly agreed to write the following introduction to his essay, summarizing the reasons he holds an optimistic view of our future.
Introduction
In this essay I drew extensively on a book by Graeber and Wengrow because it overturns the “small egalitarian bands” conventional wisdom of stone age society to reveal the variety of forms of socio-political and cultural organization that humanity is capable of, despite severe energy and resource constraints. This evidence of the human potential to adapt to a diversity of physical and social environments suggests that human society at some sharply reduced demographics could weather the end of the oil age.
My most persuasive model of the social forms this could take comes from living in a Europe dotted with villages whose centuries-old architecture indicates specific social forms. To survive, these socially dense nodal clusters required a tight social, political and cultural organization that, in turn enabled a Commons managed without tragedy that mitigated the inevitable inequality, family scale agrarian enterprises enhanced with regular inputs from neighbors, for example at harvest time or pig slaughter day, and defense against invaders, all of which maximized the possibilities of community well-being. The village I inhabited with my family for a number of years was typical of the genre, and although partially deserted, still offered constant evidence of how things worked when fully inhabited.
Typically, these agrarian communities are small enough for the population to be within the Dunbar Number of 150 effective relationships. Even the larger “market towns”, often walled towns like this one, were organized to survive by relying on outlying villages for food and fighters in times of trouble.
All in all, my reading of European history combined with the enduring physical evidence suggests that life in such communities was laborious but provided a satisfying level of material comfort. David and Marcia Pimental’s pioneering work of food and energy cost accounting reveals that while the net energy of industrial agriculture is negative – 10 units of energy expended for one unit gained – the most efficient subsistence agriculture generates a positive net energy ratio of around 3/1. That seems small, but the historical evidence I have exemplified above suggests that with time-tested forms of simple technology and social organization, post-petroleum communities can use that small surplus to go beyond minimal survival to recreate a rewarding and durable life.
When global empires start to fall apart, the structure of interdependent elements accumulated over the years imparts an inertia that appears to sustain them for a while past their normal collapse date. In the case of the US empire, this illusory momentum, combined with a shocking degree of mendacity and deception in the mass media, is gravely misleading the US public. This is the proverbial Wile E. Coyote effect, where Wile E. has sped off the cliff but is apparently not yet in free fall. But bit by bit what US citizens are actually observing in their daily lives begins to contradict the official narrative from government leaders and media. This creates a foreboding –an inexplicable anxiety, and people cast about for explanations, making the general public an easy prey to the series of fear campaigns we have seen in recent years. However, eventually the contradictions become so sharp as to discredit official narratives, and revolts begin. States are expensive to maintain, and depend on cheap energy sources. As energy and other resource depletion weakens states, and authorities resort to palliatives that only aggravate the crisis, chaos reigns and opportunities arise for breakaway communities to form. What are their possibilities of social organization? What kinds of freedom should they embrace or preclude? This essay draws on a new view of human history to briefly frame discussion of these questions.
The dominant view of the long stretch of human history has humanity progressing stepwise inevitably from unconsciously derived egalitarian bands to statehood as the end of its history of social evolution. Graeber and Wengrow’s massive revisionist work, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, uses the latest archeology and anthropology to paint a less rigid progression where populations consciously experimented with different forms of social organization, often in sharp contrast to their neighbors. Societies found many ways of gaining freedom from subjugation, either by moving away from oppressive regimes, or at least from their urban centers toward peripheries where they could practice civil disobedience and “consciously shape new social realities”[1]. Framing this trio – escape, revolt and creative social construction – as categories of freedom or liberation, the authors discover many patterns of their expression across history.
According to conventional history, the world has been populated with states of various sorts for several thousand years. Graeber and Wengrow’s investigation reveals that this is only partly true. State structures are impressive, so they receive undue attention in historical narratives. However, states/civilizations have risen and fallen many times in their history of over five millennia. In the intervals after collapse, peoples have experimented with less oppressive forms. Also, even during the most totalitarian regimes, as one moves from centers to peripheries, state power ebbs somewhat. Rulers in many regimes have exercised diminishing power beyond their capital cities. An example is the 30% of the food economy in the latter years of the USSR that developed informally from popular initiative outside the state-run farms. All through history, a focus on fringes or outbacks reveals peasant social structures that present an often-fractious contrast to the more obedient lives of citizens nearer urban centers of power. Geopolitical analyst Rolo Slavskiy observes:
For pretty much all of human history, the elites and specialized classes of warriors have made war on one another for one reason or another while the peasants simply stuck together and did their best to make it through the war in one way or another.
So, as the US imperial juggernaut moves farther into degrowth, the chains of command and supply essential to the ravenous consumption of cities will weaken and finally disintegrate, and chaos and civil unrest will plague metropoles and their suburbs most severely[2]. Populations in rural areas potentially can be the first to profit from failing dominant structures, distance themselves politically from central control and construct the degree of political and economic autarchy that will be necessary to survive.
We can draw insights about the disintegration of Western civilization and its US center in particular from the history of the many civilizations that rose and fell in the last five thousand years. Conventional thinking depicts any emergence of an urban center as the culmination of an evolutionary process in ‘statehood’, which Graeber and Wengrow described as including three essentials – a monopoly on violence, a charismatic leadership, and an administrative bureaucracy.
As a historical model for the collapse of US industrial society, it would be intriguing to use the only large pre-Columbian city that existed in the area that became the United States – Cahokia in the Mississippi valley – which attained a population of forty thousand by the end of the first century AD. Cahokia ruled a large area mainly by violence (warfare and human sacrifice) and great ritual spectacles that drew participants from throughout its empire to enhance the status of elites and create cohesion. States disintegrate at different rates: compared to the Roman empire, Cahokia fell apart relatively rapidly, perhaps partly because it lacked the third essential element of statehood – an administrative bureaucracy.
What is interesting for purposes of comparison is how it fell apart – people just left the region, which, despite its highly fertile alluvial soil, became a kind of no man’s land for generations. As Graeber and Wengrow describe it,
Whatever the precise combination of factors at play, by about AD 1350 mass defection had depopulated the region. Just as the metropolis of Cahokia was founded through its rulers’ ability to bring diverse populations together, often from across long distances, in the end the descendants of those people simply walked away. The Vacant Quarter implies a self-conscious rejection of everything the city of Cahokia stood for.
Among the descendants of Cahokian subjects, migration is often framed as implying the restructuring of an entire social order, merging our three elementary freedoms into a simple project of emancipation: to move away, to disobey and to build new social worlds.[3]
Later in the post-Cahokian Mississippi valley, European explorers found people experimenting with petty chiefdoms and mini-republics governed by village councils that engaged in lengthy political and philosophical debate. Farther north, European invaders found larger scale diplomatic institutions like the League of Five Nations, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, which was preserving a kind of Pax Iroquoiana over a wide territory without anything that could be defined as a state.
Elsewhere in the world, Graeber and Wengrow also find “great hospitality zones” that have existed at various times in history without any administrative or authoritarian hierarchies, held together only by common culture or far-flung trading networks.[4] They describe many regimes throughout history as city-states, in which, as the term suggests, power diminished with distance from the city center. In many city states for instance, outlying satellite communities paid tribute to the central authority but otherwise went their own way and created their own social reality.
Hence, as the US declines as a state, we might consider the loss of administrative control, like the lack of it in Cahokia, as a harbinger of collapse. At the same time, the diversity of social arrangements that replaced Cahokia widens the scope of possibilities and helps frame the question of how to reshape the social space liberated during the US collapse as the opportunity arises.
What Kind of Freedom?
The trio of freedoms concept that Graeber and Wengrow propose initially sounds simple, but the devil is in the rights and duties spelled out or implied in the third freedom – to create a new social reality, as we shall see.
In the polarized US, the advocates of a variety of viewpoints have tossed around the concept of freedom like a political football until it is deflated of any clear meaning. Although most everyone can agree that a social contract should curtail some sorts of freedom, ranging from running stop signs all the way to premeditated murder; beyond that, the question becomes murkier, or at least more complex.
Highly visible at one pole are advocates of “free market capitalism”, which for some self-described conservatives appears to mean that in the domain of the economy just about anything goes, and furthermore, everything that occurs springs from the natural “invisible hand” of anonymous “market forces”. Hence, their logic goes, everyone will enjoy freedom so long as the public (as in government) does not interfere in the “free market”. One might object that the US capitalist system has evolved to the point where monopoly control reigns in every sector of the economy. In other words, most economic decision making, which pretty much shapes our lives, is in the hands of an elite minority that acts mainly in their own private interest, and thus undermines the imagined freedom of the majority. The trouble is, conservatives tend to focus on individual freedoms and overlook over-arching system-level power structures.
An instance of falling into that trap is the libertarian conservative who complained that an oil company’s hostile takeover muscled him out of a small business based on his invention of a more efficient electric battery, and buried the invention so that it would never compete with energy from oil. Had he an elementary knowledge of political economy – the study of power relations in a social system – he might have understood how the unfettered economic freedom he supported was his downfall. Conservatives’ advocacy of an economic system free of government interference also conflicts with their support for government-subsidized industries, expensive foreign wars that underwrite a lucrative weapons industry, protective tariffs, etc.
At another prominent political pole are those, often self-described as liberals, who traditionally champion freedoms defined in the constitutional Bill of Rights, such as speech and assembly, justice by fair trial and control of one’s person and private life. Liberals acknowledge imperfections in the free market system, but count on government regulatory agencies to fix the flaws. However, equally as ignorant as conservatives of power structures at the whole system level, they fail to understand that every such agency long ago fell victim to ‘regulatory capture’ by the very industry it was mandated to regulate. What is worse, liberals are especially prey to the illusion of government as elected servants of the people, whereas, due to the nature of the US structure of power relations, it is more like a stage show, where politicians promise to serve us, but then mostly serve the power elite who fund them. In the succinct synopsis of an early Supreme Court Justice, one can have most of the wealth in the hands of the few, or one can have democracy, but not both.[5]
Complicating the question of freedom these days is that in some ways conservatives and liberals seem to have switched roles, or at least ideals. Driven emotionally by a mass media so politicized against the Trump administration that it dropped all pretense of journalism, liberals have flouted all the civil liberties they used to champion in a frantic attempt to fraudulently remove an elected president whose administration in the end did no more damage to the nation than most others. Both major political parties have practiced electoral fraud for a long time, but once elected, US administrations have rarely experienced such an illegal attempt at removal. Meanwhile, because the media morphed into a weapon as the attack dog of the Democratic Party, it lost all credibility among conservatives. Consequently, when the media all in lockstep obediently trotted out a highly questionable pandemic narrative, conservatives had acquired some immunity against its scare campaign, and thus became the new champions of all the civil liberties that were violated by the pandemic lockdown policies.
In sum, it appears that groups at both poles of the polity are being snookered in different ways. In both cases it stems from the ability of ruling elites to keep the public in the dark regarding the many ways that they exercise their power, or at least deflect our attention from it. It seems to be human nature to easily fall for elaborate hoaxes, false flags, and other fictitious official narratives about how the world works, narratives that elites relentlessly fabricate to deceive us.
It is now an open question who will fall for the next campaign of fear. During another time of tumult, appalled at the frenzied mood of the industrial revolution, a 19th century French poet expressed his revulsion, writing, “Cité, fourmillant de rêves” (the metropole, an anthill swarming with dreams) where “alles ist gleichnis” (all is illusion).[6] Today we live in a similar time of outlandish moods, often indoctrinated, where the most preposterous and fantastical things can happen. Yesterday, no doubt spurred by the anti-Russian hatred spewing from German media and even its leadership, a crowd paraded in front of the German Reichstag in Berlin waving the swastika flag and calling for the genocide of the Russian people. Russians must be thinking: Did 27 million of us die in vain? Meanwhile it is said that here and there on the walls of Ukrainian villages is mysteriously appearing a mural of this babushka of legend; her red flag for most Russians now memorializing their victory over the scorched earth terror of the Nazi Operation Barbarossa.
Is it perhaps true that history moves in cycles, and that we must relive it again and again, “first as tragedy, then as farce”?[7] The present is another time of tumult where elites, desperate to preserve power, subject us to repeated psyops – well planned schemes of psychological conditioning either to fear or to hate – such that whole populations are swept up in episodes of mass psychosis.
Under these circumstances, maybe the question of what freedoms are likely to contribute to building a new form of civilization (and which ones are not) is a discussion better left to await calmer times. Perhaps this essay is only an attempt to set the stage for that conversation by 1) exploring the wreckage of current uses of freedom and 2) raising awareness of advances in the understanding of human history that display a much greater variety in the forms of society that the species has chosen, and thus suggest possibilities for the future. In the course of constructing a new social reality amid the disintegration of the old, I think we will need to take a holistic approach to what freedoms to incorporate, asking how particular freedoms might impact all sectors of society. A critical question will be an old one: how to strike the right balance between private and public rights, between individual liberty and the common good.
It has been a hard road fighting against corrupt entities that I never knew existed to such an extent in the halls of power. And against the relentless propaganda that has seemingly usurped most if not all of academia and medicine.
It has been a hard road fighting against corrupt entities that I never knew existed to such an extent in the halls of power. And against the relentless propaganda that has seemingly usurped most if not all of academia and medicine.
This account came about because I knew that we had been lied to in February 2020 about the origin of COVID and with the help of others we were able to prove it.
Since that time there has been a pyre of lies that we have had to unpick, whilst showing ourselves to be the ones that endeavoured to uphold the values of real science that required the pursuit of truth over politics and corruption.
The time is right to retire now because two things have happened.
The first is that the public is now becoming aware not only of what is true, but how to discern what is truth against that which is untrue. I believe that was my task and much of that work has been done.
The second is that the threats against me from groups with proven ties to pharma lobby groups have intensified. The people involved know who they are and they attempt to justify their activity by creating a bogeyman story directed at us. But that’s all it is. When the dust settles and the horrendous death tally is finally counted, the people that will be most responsible are those that used their unlimited resources (supported by pharma corporations and corrupted government departments with unlimited funds and power) to silence those of us whose only crime was to highlight scientifically evidenced dangers to the public about interventions that could – and did – cause death and disability.
Those groups – mainly #shotsheard in the US and #muttoncrew in the UK with their groupies on social media, all coordinated through a central point – are merely an extension of the same groups that did exactly the same things 20 years ago in relation to Vioxx (where 30,000 people died because doctors and scientists were threatened into silence) and before that thalidomide (where 20,000 children were born without limbs because doctors and scientists were threatened into silence).
We care about this but the majority of the public and the government appear not to. There are no resources available to us and the government – who many of you trusted – have never offered any resources or protection to accounts such as ours or the people behind them. On the contrary they have shown – in the US, UK, Europe, Canada and Australia – that they will be the ones to silence us. In some cases they have threatened to imprison us.
The public remain quiet. Anger is brewing but the government and media will ensure that that anger is directed at us – the very people who showed you where corruption and malfeasance exist in establishments that should be above reproach. I predict that there will be no public protests to “protect medical whistleblowers” or “bring back Jikkyleaks”. There will for instance be no public protest at the supreme court in Victoria where @realMarkHobart will be fighting for the right of a doctor to protect the fundamental and global right to bodily autonomy of patients. There will be no clamour for the pharma-affiliated bully organisations to be prosecuted for what they have done for the last 20 years. Nobody was jailed for Vioxx – or thalidomide – because the public did not demand that they were.
The media played the biggest part. They universally disparaged people as “antivaxxers” who merely wanted to retain their human rights as declared in the UN declaration on human rights. Instead they protected the very people who created this pandemic (and by extension previous pandemics). And more importantly they failed to give any voice to those of us with scientific and medical expertise who tried to raise concerns and advocate merely for the retention of the human right to bodily autonomy.
Instead, the media gave a platform to the likes of David Gorski, Tony Fauci, Albert Bourla and Peter Daszak as if they were saints instead of the face of a global biomedical mafia. Their support group of minions who threaten scientists and non-scientists, scouring their personal files and tracking their homes, children and employers know who they are. So do I. Everything is archived.
The result of this collusion between pharma, government and media (with minions acting on their behalf for a pittance in reward) was millions of deaths with not a sniff of culpability. This is not their first rodeo, but this time instead of 30,000 deaths it was 6 million and counting. And the general public never raised an eyebrow in criticism of the biomedical corporations and governmental and military entities responsible and acting in lockstep.
So the result will remain. 6 million deaths and counting this time. The next time will likely be more. And if the public again rely on the media without question to guide them through it will never stop. There is too much money to be made and power to be gained. Why would those involved stop when there was not a single protest at any regulator or any government or academic institution despite the fact that deaths were known to have occurred and been covered up with no transparency from government agencies – who should have been desperate to release every document they possess to prove to the people that they were above reproach.
The silencing of this account is just a symptom of a disease so insidious that cannot remain untreated. One person – or mouse – cannot treat this disease. I have served my time here as far as I possibly can and must now devote time to other avenues, for what they are worth.
But without the help of the public we cannot do any more. Apathy feeds corruption and only the public en masse can stop feeding it.
To those that have supported this account please now that I appreciate everything that you have done and many thousands, if not millions, either do already or will do so in time.
For now I will bow out. I will continue for the time being to interact with other accounts posts, replies and existing DMs. But there will be no more new posts, exposures or #Gates on this platform until real protections are put in place for whistleblowers.
Just one caveat.. if the threats directed at me or those around me persist or resurface, I will have no choice but to return.
Good night. God speed.
And may the #mousearmy continue its fight for truth and against corruption in science.
Howard T. Odum: co-originator of Maximum Power Principle
Today’s guest post by Preston Howard discusses an issue central to our overshoot predicament that is often ignored: The Maximum Power Principle (MPP). The MPP states that life optimizes for maximize power, not maximum efficiency, and implies that life does not look forward in time to consider the consequences of maximizing power today.
While preparing an initial report for Florida’s first Area of Critical State Concern1 in 1972, I had the immense good fortune to spend time with Howard T. Odum, an environmental engineering scientist who directed the Wetlands Center at the University of Florida. The area of state concern was the Big Cypress Preserve adjacent to the Florida Everglades. Dr Odum and several of his graduate students had ongoing studies in the area. In informal conversations, Dr Odum explained the Maximum Power Principle as described below. I believe it presents Humanity’s current situation better than anything I have seen about global warming, overshoot, or climate collapse. However, to my knowledge no one has mentioned it in any serious article except Gail Tverberg in her articles about resource consumption.
To understand the Maximum Power Principle2, let us imagine a square island, barren of any vegetation. As happened many times in Florida, suppose our island was created by fill where a shipping channel had been deepened. Situated close to the seaport, someone intended to build something on the new island, but permitting requirements and other administrative delays where taking “forever.” (These details provide a “context” for the discussion.)
The barren island does not remain barren for long, as plants soon begin to grow on it. The solar energy that bathes the island provides abundant energy for the early pioneer plants. Seeds blow in on the wind. Some may wash ashore. Birds drop some. Those initial plants found a world filled with more (solar) energy than they could use. In this bounty they made their best efforts to use as much as they could and to grow as fast as possible, even at the expense of wasting energy by not using it efficiently.
Point 1: The Maximum Power Principle states when energy is abundant, those organisms survive best that maximize their use of energy, even if they are wasteful in how they use it (because the supply of available energy is “infinite” in a relative sense).
Weeds grow quickly, and they soon cover most of our imaginary island. The fact that weeds are wasteful in how they use available energy does not matter, because there is plenty of solar energy for all the plants.
Slower growing, but more efficient, plants also germinate, but they compete poorly because higher foliage from the faster growing weeds blocks energy-rich sunlight from the young trees and shrubs. Perhaps by chance some of these seeds fall on a higher elevation where weeds cannot easily block them from the sun. Or, perhaps they are near the shoreline, where the water provides weed-free access to adequate solar energy along the water’s edge. If these more efficient shrubs and tree seedlings find niches to assist their growth, they can survive even though they cannot compete well against the weeds directly.
In time, vegetation covers our imaginary island. Now the situation changes dramatically concerning the Maximum Power Principle.
Point 2: When the energy supply is limited, those organisms compete best that maximize the efficient use of the energy available to them.
Now every plant on our island has neighbors nearby, pushing leafy branches where a plant wants its own leaves to collect sunlight. Plants no longer have access to unlimited energy where growth is maximized even if excess energy is wasted. Soon there is no energy to waste. Plants find it difficult to obtain all the energy they desire, and the increasing competition with other plants for available energy adversely affects their growth.
In this new environment the struggling tree seedlings and shrubs have an advantage because they use available energy more efficiently than the weeds. Over time these changes allow shrubs to win out against the inefficient weeds, just as the trees will — in time — overpower the shrubs.
Examples of the Maximum Power Principle
As a general rule, all biological life embraces the Maximum Power Principle. If a life form confronts an energy source it can use, it succeeds best if it uses it as the Maximum Power Principle indicates. To understand the Maximum Power Principle as it impacts the real world, let’s look at a few examples.
Example 1: Paramecium in petri dish3. Paramecium are single-cell organisms that live in water and consume a variety of foods, including yeast. Here, we examine where we put several paramecium in a petri dish with an abundance of yeast. The buffet has been served, and the paramecium begin to consume the yeast. The paramecium flourish, reproducing more and more paramecium as the yeast is slowly consumed. Until… until there is no more yeast to consume, at which time the (now many) paramecium all die of starvation. Unfortunately, there is no natural system to suggest to the paramecium problems they may encounter if they eat all the yeast as fast as they can.
Sometimes events occur that regulate unrestrained growth that otherwise harms an organism in the long run. For example, if yeast gets down to 10% of the initial amount, suppose a lab assistant regularly restores it to 25% of the initial amount. In this situation the paramecium population fluctuates with the availability of yeast.
Example 2: Deer on the Kaibab Plateau4. The Kaibab Plateau is a relatively inaccessible area on the north side of the Grand Canyon comprised of approximately 700,000 acres. In 1907 there were an estimated 4,000 deer resident on the plateau, in addition to pumas and wolves, which were predators of the deer. The predators and the prey maintained a relative balance with one another. Between 1907 and 1923 a successful effort removed most of the predators, allowing the deer population to increase. By 1925 the deer population grew to more than 100,000, which was far in excess of the carrying capacity of the vegetation available on the plateau. All vegetation was consumed. Over 40% of the herd died in two successive winters, and the deer population plummeted to around 10,000. There it stabilized because of the significantly compromised vegetation available for food. (Earlier estimates suggested the Plateau could originally support 30,000 deer).
Example 3: Deer on St Matthew Island5. St Matthew Island is a remote island in the Bering Sea, north of the Aleutian Island chain in Alaska. During World War 2, the United States needed to know whether or not Japan attacked the island. The US Coast Guard established a radio navigational system on the island. It was understood that the 19-member team on St Matthew could never defend the island, but before capture the team could alert HQ by radio in the event it was invaded by Japanese soldiers. Because the island is so remote, the military was unsure whether it could provide regular supplies. As a backup food source, the US relocated 29 reindeer to the island so the radio team would not starve. For the deer, the buffet had just been served! St Matthew is 32 miles long and 4 miles wide, and it was covered with lichen, a favorite food of reindeer.
When World War 2 ended, the radio team left the island, but the reindeer remained. In 1957 Dr David Klein, (then) a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, visited the island with a graduate student. They determined that the 29 original reindeer had grown to a population of 1,300. When Dr Klein returned a second time, in 1963, the reindeer population had grown to 6,000, or almost 50 reindeer per square mile. Just like the paramecium, this did not look good for the reindeer. Due to overconsumption, lichen was increasingly scarce. The winter of 1963-64 was one of the worst on record for that part of Alaska. In 1966 Dr Klein returned to St Matthew Island to find just 42 reindeer, including only one male. It had deformed antlers and probably could not reproduce. All the St Matthew Island deer perished during the next decade.
The Maximum Power Principle lesson: If resources allow, the organism should use the resources to grow as the tried-and-true way to survive best over the long run. Ecologically, there were no checks and balances to suggest that 600 reindeer could live on St Matthew Island, but 6,000 could not. This is important.
How Humanity Embraced the Maximum Power Principle
No animate life form is exempt from the Maximum Power Principle, not even Humans. Starting in the 1700s, Humans began using coal to power an increasingly industrialized Western society, starting primarily in Great Britain. Around 1850 oil was discovered in open ponds in Pennsylvania. Humanity soon found oil worked as well, and perhaps better, than coal. For the next 175 years Humanity (at least parts of it) had access to these energy-rich resources. And, just as the Maximum Power Principle dictates, Humanity used as much of these resources as it could get. Simply put, in 300 years Humanity harnessed the power of lightning and taught sand (silicon) to think6. Humanity electronically connected most of its 8 billion inhabitants and extended its presence into outer space. Humanity has no predator to threaten its dominance in any corner of the globe.
One might think Humanity’s success is guaranteed, except for a few things: First, the increasing scarcity of oil and coal and natural gas suddenly threatens to remove the punch-bowl from which Humanity has been feeding. Second, the carrying capacity of the Earth is far less than 8 billion humans unless we continue to supplement with increasingly scarce resources. And, last, our centuries-long party has now broken the Earth in ways Humanity cannot repair.
All the King’s horses and all the Queen’s men, will never restore this spherical jewel, regardless of what we do. We have transitioned from a “grow as much as you can quickly” environment to a “use remaining energy resources as efficiently as possible” environment, but we refuse to notice. As increasing numbers suffer because we do not adapt, those with power and authority choose to continue as before because it enriches them. Except in small, cosmetic steps, we do not even try to save one another. Instead countries say to one another, “you go first,” and “no, you go first.” But, that’s how money talks in the United States, where corporations are declared to be people under law. The job of corporate citizens is to enrich their shareholders, not to act in concert with environmental constraints.
Humanity’s Future Foretold
Nonetheless, one can take heart. Humanity is right where it is supposed to be. We will continue to use energy that remains available to us to build electric cars and windmills and nuclear weapons as we now increasingly compete against one another. And, just like the deer and the paramecium, we are certain to collapse as critical resources dwindle. The Maximum Power Principle is deeply embedded in all life, and — like it or not — we are no exception.
We are foolish if we think we can escape7 the Maximum Power Principle. As fast as scientists tell us of the need to address looming dangers (starting with global population concerns in the 1960s), and as fast as people far and wide demand global change, and as carefully as the United Nations forces all countries to accept the need for step-by-step remediation, it will never happen. We will continue to burn more coal when oil is scarce. And we will continue to drill for increasingly hard-to-extract oil until our electronic interconnected house of cards crumbles around us. This behavior is hard-wired at the cellular level, allowing us little choice concerning whether or not to embrace the Maximum Power Principle.
One might ask when this catastrophe will occur. Don’t look now, but it is occurring before your very eyes. Regardless of whatever we do at this point, we have broken the World, and we cannot fix it. Our actions cause extinction of hundreds of living organisms8 every month. Human activity warmed the globe to the point that arable land is less available, decreasing the global food supply. Actions with unintended effects melt polar and glacial ice, and yet have not kept seawater temperatures from increasing. We now discover fish cannot live in the warmer ocean water. Rising ocean water and weather extremes adversely impact Human settlement across every corner of the globe. Unfortunately the Maximum Power Principle does not allow do-overs.
The Earth suffers from a runaway infestation of Humanity. Just like the paramecium, as necessary resources increasingly become unavailable Homo sapiens will join the long list of extinct flora and fauna previously unable to survive a changing world. But the Earth will not die. After Humanity’s demise, the Earth will heal itself. This could happen quickly. Perhaps in less than an eon (2250 years), a “blink of the eye” in planetary time. It would be nice to think Humanity might recognize its bleak future, and would attempt to facilitate the successful transition of whatever life manifests itself after Humanity’s exit. That, however, is not likely because of the Maximum Power Principle.
If I knew today was Humanity’s final day to exist, I would most want to plant a tree.9
Addendum
I would be remiss not to call attention to the single situation I know where Humanity acted contrary to the Maximum Power Principle and instead chose to minimize present energy use in return for greater resource bounty in the future. American “First Peoples” — at least some of them — chose to plant corn from larger husks while instead eating only corn from the smaller husks. Over time, this gave them a larger harvest.
While this may seem “obvious” to someone today, it embraces action directly contrary to that expected by the Maximum Power Principle. Somewhere in their historic past someone in those tribes stood before others and suggested they eat less now in return for the promise of more food in the future. I expect whoever it was, she probably convinced the other women (who tended the plants) and never mentioned it to the men who were perhaps out hunting.
Sources and Notes
1Howard, P. (1974) “The use of vegetation in the design of regulations pertaining to coastal development of the Big Cypress critical area.” Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Restoration of Coastal Vegetation in Florida (Tampa, Florida: p. 16).
2Odum, H. T. and Odum, E. C., (1976) Energy Basis for Man and Nature. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company (pp. 39-40). [Co-author E. C. Odum was Howard Odum’s wife and research partner. Not to be confused with Eugene Odum, below.]
also
2Lotka, A. J. (1956) Elements of mathematical biology. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. (p. 357). [Here described as the Law of Evolution.]
3Lotka, A. J. (1956) again. [Here described using bacteria, while noting, “… a man, for example, may be regarded as a population of cells.” (Lotka’s emphasis.)]
4Odum, E. P. (1959) Fundamentals of Ecology. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company (pp. 239-240). [This was the first college-level textbook to include the word “Ecology” in its title. Eugene Odum wrote this book “with” Howard Odum, who provided an energy basis for nature.]
6Lesser, H. G. (1984) “Microprocessor pioneer and industry mover.” Computer Accessories and Peripherals, 1:5 (p. 69+) [Quoting Harold Lee: “One good way to look at our (computer) industry is that, literally, within the last three hundred years, we’ve harnessed lightning and used it to teach sand how to think.”]
9Merwin, W. S. (quote) “On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.” [Apologies to Merwin (1927-2019), a Pulitzer Prize winner and United States poet laureate, for my alteration.]
About the Author
Preston Howard has a Masters degree is in geography and retired in 2011 after a wide-ranging career in data management. In 1972 he developed a simulation of seaport growth, the first of his many national and international publications and presentations. Today he lives in a log cabin in one of the more successful intentional communities in the United States.
Rob here again.
I do not know what Preston thinks of Dr. Ajit Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory however I believe that the MPP and MORT theories are both true and together are the primary cause of human overshoot.
The MPP governs biology just as the laws of thermodynamics govern the universe. Nothing in the universe may violate the laws of thermodynamics and no life may violate the MPP. How could it be otherwise given that life at its core is chemical replicators evolving to compete for finite energy and resources?
Assuming that the MPP governs all life and cannot be overridden, how is it possible for an intelligence to exist in the universe that is smart enough to understand that behaving in accordance with the MPP will destroy itself and all that it cares about?
A solution that evolution discovered on this planet, and perhaps the only solution possible on any planet, is to prevent high intelligence from emerging unless it simultaneously evolves a tendency to deny unpleasant realities, like for example, the fact that it is in overshoot. Otherwise the intelligence might override the MPP to reduce suffering and possible extinction, and the replicators that created the intelligence won’t permit that.
Apparently it’s quite improbable and/or difficult to simultaneously evolve high intelligence with denial because it has occurred only once on this planet, despite the obvious fitness advantages of high intelligence.
The MPP and MORT together explain why we seem to have no free will to do anything wise about overshoot. They also explain why an honest assessment of our responses to overshoot symptoms would conclude we are doing the opposite of what a wise intelligent species with free will should do.
Despite this bleak assessment I’ll continue to push awareness of MORT and population reduction, just in case I’m wrong and there is a way to override denial and MPP, because our existence on this planet is so rare and precious, and because there is much suffering coming soon that could be reduced.
It’s possible that Preston disagrees with my opinions on MORT. That’s OK because even if I’m wrong, Preston’s points about the MPP are still probably correct.
Today’s guest essay by Karl North discusses how agriculture practices must change as oil depletes and we no longer have the diesel for machines and the natural gas for fertilizer that underpins our current industrial agriculture system.
Karl recently published this essay on his site and approached me about re-posting here. I read his essay and was impressed.
I’m not a farming expert however I have some relevant knowledge and experience having taken a one-year course on small scale farming, and having worked on four small organic farms over the last fifteen years.
One of the most sobering lessons I have learned is how completely dependent farms are today on non-renewable inputs, including small farms doing their best to use sustainable practices.
Examples of non-renewable inputs that are a challenge to farm without include:
plastics and metals for irrigation tanks, valves, pipes, and drip lines
rare earths, copper, and other materials for well and irrigation pumps
plastics and metals for greenhouses
steel and plastics for fences
refrigeration equipment and insulation for produce storage coolers
polyester for row cover fabric
plastic for haylage wrap
metals for hand tools
electricity for irrigation pumps, coolers, and seedling bed heaters and lights
diesel for big machines like tractors and combines
gasoline for small machines like walk-behind tractors and strimmers
gasoline for trucks to get supplies and to take produce to market
lithium, cobalt, and copper for battery operated machines
energy used to manufacture and transport fertilizer, including organic fertilizers not made from natural gas
plus a LOT of non-renewable energy and materials to manufacture and maintain all of the equipment mentioned above, with emphasis on the word “maintain” because everything on a farm breaks on a regular basis – I know because I’m the fix-it guy.
One of the farms I worked on made a heroic effort to not use any machines or non-renewable inputs. We did almost everything by hand including scything and threshing grains and legumes. It was a LOT of work and I’m pretty sure I could not sustain that level of effort today having aged 10 years. Despite this effort we were still completely dependent on non-renewable irrigation equipment and a truck for transport, and we were blessed with unusually fertile soil that could be drawn down for a few years without having to replenish it somehow.
With this experience I am certain that 8 billion people cannot be fed when oil soon becomes scarce or unaffordable. I do however believe that a much smaller population can be fed using different agriculture methods.
Many “sustainable agriculture” methods promoted today are in my opinion naive and not grounded in reality. They often feel like an excuse to sell books and courses. I often wonder why it is necessary to sell books and courses if the idea being promoted produces a bountiful surplus. I did not get this feeling from Karl North as he seems grounded in reality and has built an impressive farm.
I like Karl’s model because 1) it includes animals 2) it sets aside the majority of land for the animals 3) it understands energy and ecology and takes a systems perspective 4) he understands that getting from here to there will be very difficult, and it won’t be easy when we do get there.
I did spot one important issue not addressed and my follow-up question with Karl’s answer is appended at the end of the following essay.
Introduction
Modern civilization is urban down to its rural roots, hates nature, ignores nature, depends on nature, destroys nature, yet expects nature to keep on giving. Now nature is striking back. The result is a slow-motion tragedy of catabolic collapse[1], like the oroboros tail-eating snake. To withstand the collapse, a revolution in food production will be critical. This essay is a contribution to that revolution.
My exploration of this subject will be based on three premises:
1. Following the laws of energy and matter known to scientists as the Laws of Thermodynamics, the geological record shows that affordable access to the resources that underpin industrial economies is finite and rapidly declining on earth due to ever more mining by those very industrial economies.
2. Human society is subject to the laws of nature we see working in natural ecosystems. Ecosystem science teaches that any species, including ours, that overshoots the carrying capacity of its resource base eventually goes into collapse. Hence, the science of ecosystems is the proper disciplinary framework to design ecologically healthy, durable farms to weather the collapse. That is, we must conceive farms as agroecosystems.
3. Our world is characterized by connections, and functions in wholes. Any attempt to understand it by looking only at parts will produce limited results, and ultimately, failure. Three centuries of scientific research looking at only relations of a few parts produced a body of knowledge whose technological consequences are reliable only under those laboratory conditions. A holistic approach to problems is essential to bring the process of advancement of knowledge back into balance.
These premises are not widely understood, and are actually often denied or opposed by currently dominant beliefs. Modern society holds these deeply indoctrinated myths: ‘resources are infinite and material progress has no limits’; ‘man is in control of nature, not the reverse’; ‘the miracles of technology prove that reductionist/laboratory science is good enough to solve all our problems’. Therefore, before presenting my thoughts on an agroecological model, the following discussion will expand on the perspective of each premise in the hope of gaining a better basis for understanding what follows.
Premise #1 – Resource Scarcity
Afirst premise of this essay is that the industrial age and the fossil energy that fuels it is gradually ending. This assumption will be bucking a headwind, the apparently secular religion of industrial times, that these times and their associated technological miracles will go on forever. The religion persists for two reasons: it is partly due to ignorance of the conclusive evidence from the historical, geological record of accelerating resource depletion, carefully kept from most of humanity’s sources of information. Faith in industrial progress also endures partly due to willful ignorance, because the end of the three-century industrial bonanza is too insufferable for most people to contemplate.
Therefore, this essay will target that slowly increasing marginal population that is open to taking the premise seriously. In short, the geological evidence from the extractive industry is that the easy oil (and all other raw materials essential to sustaining an industrial society) has been consumed. When we have to drill through a mile of seawater and another mile of bedrock in an extremely risky project in the Gulf of Mexico called Deep Water Horizon, which ended in a disaster that wiped out the fishing and tourist industries from Tallahassee to Houston, that should tell you that the age of easy oil is over.
The pattern of raw materials extraction is always to harvest the low hanging fruit at any given time. In most cases, humanity is now harvesting the dregs, throwing ever more scarce energy at the problem to temporarily keep the flow of raw materials going that the industrial economy needs to survive. An extensive literature documents this ‘energy descent’ from cheap finite resources to their increasing scarcity that is now occurring, so I hope readers will be prompted to do their homework on this critical issue. Moreover, the literature includes conclusive evidence that the attempted replacement of fossil energy at any significant scale by “renewables” will be too costly in fossil fuel itself as access to it declines. I provide homework suggestions from the energy descent literature in the references[2].
Consequently, this essay will offer a model of adaptation to living with increasing scarcity of fossil energy, a model of increasingly radical emancipation from external inputs and devotion to input self-sufficiency. And it will suggest a pathway from the luxury of the current energy-intensive distance economy to a decentralized, local one. It will focus on the challenges of adaptation of food production systems, one of the essentials of survival, to increasing resource scarcities. Viewed as a goal pursued incrementally, this historic paradigm shift will be more manageable. Rejected as impossible or insufferable, it likely will diminish chances of survival for multitudes of humanity.
Premise #2 – Subservience to Nature’s Laws
One way to convey the second premise might be that while man appears in control, nature bats last. It is easy to revel in the current bonanza of technological miracles and not see the undertow of consequent damage to the natural resource base on which our survival depends. We can see the laws of nature working out this way in the legacy of the ancient societies that were the cradle of Western Civilization. From an ecological perspective, the historical result of the advent of agriculture and the subsequent rise of urban civilizations in the ancient societies in Western Asia was progressive desertification, visible and continuing in the region today. Where today are the fabled cedars of Lebanon, which held the soil on the hilltops? Overshoot of its resource base, leading to erosion of its carrying capacity, has been a major factor in the rise and fall of civilizations ever since. As an ancient philosopher observed, ‘where man walks, deserts dog his heels’.
The science of ecosystems is replete with demonstrations that the survival of all species, including the modern human primate, is dependent on holding consumption of resources within the carrying capacity of its resource base. Ecology teaches that the wholes called ecosystems consist of interacting clusters of species whose populations are regulated in large part by the fact that each species is food for others. Thus, the capacity of the resource base of each species to ensure its survival varies as a result of a complex interdependency of many elements of the whole. When one species (ours, let’s say) overshoots the carrying capacity of its resource base, it can throw the whole food web into violent oscillation and even collapse. Ecology has demonstrated many examples of the oscillation, collapse and even extinction of species populations locked in a food web of interdependency. To give a simplified example, the tundra supply, the arctic hare population that feeds on it and the arctic fox population that feeds on the hare all experience complex changes and severe oscillation over time that are the result of interdependency in an arctic environment low in species diversity (and the resilience that diversity affords).
Farming in a future increasingly less dependent on fossil energy and its related external inputs must therefore rely more on internal inputs provided by a deep understanding of ecosystem processes and the complex interactions of the many parts of the wholes that farmers will have to manage primarily as agroecosystems, not just production systems. The size of the human population and perhaps its ultimate survival will hinge on such a redesign of the food system.
This challenge is daunting. Today, few farmers, including organic farmers, study ecosystem science, nor is it the basis of programs in agricultural schools. Farmers in the organic farming movement have developed many practices that will be useful. But lacking exposure to the study of how natural ecosystems work as complex wholes, few have undertaken the design of whole agroecosystems. This essay will offer examples and initial steps as food for thought along these lines.
Premise #3- A Holistic World
It is easy to see that our world is characterized by connections, and functions in wholes. But to claim that the pursuit of knowledge must acknowledge this reality challenges the dominant way scientific research has been done since the 17th century. It challenges and exposes the limitations of the reduction of inquiry to studying the interaction of two or three variables – known as the reductive method – when in the real world whole clusters of elements interact and are often interdependent, with very different consequences. It challenges us to find ways to understand how these real-world webs function and change over time. Holistic methods of inquiry have shown that only by studying a problem behavior over time in its relevant systemic context can we hope to explain those nonlinear behaviors generated by the interaction of elements in the whole. Known to complexity science as emergent properties, they are all too common in our world, as the time graphs included below reveal.
Despite three centuries of scientific advancement of knowledge, we have only a limited understanding of the workings of living systems, from earth science down to the science of organisms like ourselves. Why is that? Decades ago, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn described a progression in scientific inquiry where anomalies accumulate that the dominant paradigm or way of doing science cannot explain, and this eventually provokes a revolution. The revolution in scientific inquiry that is now challenging reductionist laboratory science goes by various names – system dynamics, complexity science, holism, chaos theory or simply systems thinking. The prototypical systems science is systems ecology depicted in premise #2, not only because of its methods, but also because it brings all other fields of inquiry under its umbrella. Thus, the need for a holistic perspective discussed here and the need for an ecological perspective (premise #2) are clearly related, and must work together to address the present state of ecological scarcity.
Examples of the necessary marriage of the two perspectives have appeared to nourish the revolution that Kuhn described. Using the methods of system dynamics to study a planetary system that is both social and biophysical, the Limits to Growth world model[3], which originated fifty years ago, generated these dynamics (how things change over time):
Updates since then have shown that the model tracks the historical record to date regarding at least the shape of change:
In another example, in 1980 William Catton was one of the first to combine the perspectives of social and ecological science in his book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change[4], in which he said that the advent of fossil fuels had led to an unsustainable “phantom carrying capacity” in natural resource use. He called it phantom carrying capacity because it permitted temporary human population levels and in the rich societies, per capita resource consumption levels, that took the planetary ecological load far above real carrying capacity. Eroding carrying capacity due to overshoot would cause collapse, as would become clear once fossil fuels became scarce.
The systems revolution is not meant to displace reductionist science or to deny its utility, but rather to acknowledge its limitations and go beyond them. By studying problems in a real-world context that requires understanding of many disciplines, it challenges the compartmentalization of inquiry. An academic acquaintance once described his ivy league university as a gaggle of warring fiefdoms connected only by parking lots. Inquiry into the complexity that typifies our world must become transdisciplinary.
The investigation of complexity has revealed the limitations of even a systems approach. Although it can produce insights about how things work in holistic context, and can sometimes predict the rough shape of change, it can never completely crack the nut of complexity as a given way the world works, so it cannot deliver the predictive accuracy of laboratory science. Nor has any other existing method of studying problems in their real-world context, where cause and effect often feed back to generate unexpected consequences that are not accurately predictable.
However, the study of complexity has shown that, while revealing the limitations of science, systems thinking can improve with practice because, like proficiency as a musician, it is somewhat of an art. Peter Senge[5] advises The Five Whys (just keep asking why) to get to root causes in complex situations. Alan Savory[6] has created an accessible tool to gain practice in holistic thinking and decision making. Two of us organic farmers have adapted Savory’s work for farm planning in the US Northeast[7]. Such tools all train us to see problems in terms of their relevant larger systemic context.
To conclude this introductory discussion of premises, it appears that failure to take them seriously has led to a world whose ecosystems are so depleted and ecologically damaged as to threaten the collapse of our species as well as many others. In the words of William Ophuls[8], who has been tracking the process for fifty years:
“We have been spoiled by ecological abundance, a false abundance based on cornucopian premises, into thinking that the wants of the individual are more important than the needs of the human and natural communities.”
Because of strong resistance to accepting these premises, the revolutionary overhaul of all industrial societies will likely not be due to policy changes except at the very small scale, local level, and will be forced on society by the train of events. This essay will present some possibilities for adaptation in farming systems designed in ways that acknowledge and work within the premises I have outlined.
Agroecosystem design: natural ecosystems as models
Our planet consists of ecosystems, of which humanity and its works are a subservient subset. Ecosystems are clusters of elements, some animate, others not, that interact and become interdependent in complex ways, and are dynamic, changing over time. Long before the advent of our species, life self-organized into these complexes, whose interaction achieved two important synergies:
They often maximized the carrying capacity of the system – the maximum biomass that the land could support.
They also achieved a degree of self-regulation via food webs – a matrix of predator-prey and cooperative relationships – that enhanced the sustainability of the whole.
“To put it in thermodynamic terms, nature’s tendency is to internalize costs and thereby wring a maximum of life from a minimum of energy, trapping it and using it over and over within a given ecosystem to produce biological wealth before it decays into dispersed, random heat as the Second Law ordains.” – William Ophuls – The Tragedy of Industrial Civilization. 2023.
Historically, Nature’s ‘farming systems’ have a much better track record for durability than ours. This is why, in the words of two pioneering agroecologists[9], “farming in Nature’s image” needs to become our design standard. While no replacement for serious study of ecosystem science, this section will outline ecosystem processes and principles sufficiently to give direction to thinking about farming systems as agroecosystems. Thinking about sustainable design to respect carrying capacity has effectively focused the attention of ecological scientists on maximizing the long-term health of four fundamental ecosystem processes in agroecosystems:
Mineral cycle
Mother Nature does not buy fertilizer. Minerals tend to cycle through the plants, animals and microbes in the food web where each living thing becomes food for others, and back to the soil where they become nutrients for plants and subsequently for the rest of the food web all over again. The implication for farming is to design the agroecosystem so that each organism is best managed to carry out its function in the mineral cycle.
Water cycle
Mother Nature does not seed the clouds or dance for rain. Driven ultimately by solar energy, water cycles from earth to clouds and back, and is captured in various ways for use in the ecosystem. Good agroecosystem design will enhance that capture in many ways, not least in the organisms in the food web themselves.
Energy flow
Mother Nature is off-grid, relies entirely on the sun and its derivative energies, like wind and wave. Solar energy enters the system through plants, thus called ‘primary producers’, and flows through the food web, but is ultimately lost as heat to outer space. Continued flow, including storage for later use, is a necessity of survival. Farm systems that maximize the primary producer population and its productivity will capture the most energy for re-use in the rest of the system, and thus maximize productivity in the whole. Species diversity will store energy for re-use.
Biological community dynamics
Mother Nature puts all the organisms to work together for the health of the whole. Nature is not just competition: ‘bloody in tooth and claw’. Cooperation is essential for survival, not only of individuals, but of the whole ecosystem. Species collaborate in symbiosis, enhancing health and productivity of each. They perform regulatory roles to keep population growth of other species in check. Farm design will include not just production species, but all species that can work toward the health of the whole, deliberately placed in collaborative roles. It will include a species diversity that fills all niches in the ecosystem that are relevant to agroecosystem health and durability. It will include species that perform important functions in the recycling of energy, water and minerals.
The ecosystem processes described above all exist on farms, and work either for or against each other, depending on how we manage them. The weakest one will be the limiting factor that determines the health of the whole agroecosystem. As in all living systems, improving the weakest link in a chain will do the most to improve the whole. This general rule, known as Liebig’s Law of the Minimum was first stated in the 19th century by agronomist Justus von Liebig who discovered that the uptake of the minerals in plant nutrition is inhibited by the least available one.
Agroecologists have shown that sustainability pertains only to whole farming systems. Hence, thinking only about practices must become part of a larger design and management approach that judges practices according to their ability to improve the ecosystem processes and therefore the whole system. If that sounds complicated it is because farming in Nature’s image takes much more knowledge than conventional agriculture.
However, a focus on these four ecosystem processes has led to the development of principles or attributes of sustainable agroecosystem design intended to maintain, or in many cases regenerate, the health of these ecosystem processes. Some of these principles and their implications are:
Low external inputs – Input self-sufficiency.
Low losses – Relatively closed water, nutrient and carbon cycles that avoid losses of valuable resources, leaks that eventually cause environmental damage.
Stability – Resilience – Adaptive Capacity – These qualities of sustainability are all necessary, but since they exist somewhat in tension, one must attempt a balance among them. Stability is the quality that produces reliable results and minimizes risk, but in excess, stability can become rigidity. Hence, a certain flexibility is required for resilience, which is the ability to rebound from sudden change, weather events like a dry period in the farming season. Flexibility also includes adaptive capacity to respond to slower environmental changes, both man-made and natural, that have been a constant for millennia. These include invasive species, decimation of keystone species, weather disasters and climate change with long-term consequences and management policies that provoke ecological succession or even its reversal, all of which are disturbing the natural tendency toward a rough balance in the ecosystem. Reserves of material or energy, overlaps, redundancy, or other slack in a system provide that flexibility, but at the price of efficient use of resources.
Knowledge intensity – Reliance on technologies that are powerful but derivative of a narrow, specialist knowledge base will give way to a broader, more demanding knowledge of farms as complex ecosystems of interdependent species, a knowledge that enables the creation of biodiversity to capture synergies, to biologically control pests with trap crops, for example.
Management intensity – Farming for input self-sufficiency and limited leaks will require more labor devoted to management planning and monitoring to replace other resources or use them more efficiently to maximize sustainable yield: productivity/acre.
Food for thought: historical models of agricultural systems
Some of the most durable and productive low input farming systems in history are designed around two concepts:
Animals that can accelerate the growth and conversion of plants to fertilizer. Because they are highly multifunctional, ruminant mammals rank highest among these. Beyond their manure production function, they can consume fibrous perennials unusable for human food. These perennials can grow on hill land too rocky or too erodible for food cropping. Used as work animals, ruminants multiply the energy input from human labor many times. They provide a source of concentrated protein food that can be conserved and stockpiled for winter consumption. They provide hides and fiber for clothing as well. Cattle, sheep, goats, alpacas, llamas and bison are ruminants that we can most easily use in agricultural systems in our environment.
2. Water management schemes that integrate streams, ponds, paddies, floodplains or wetlands. Examples are Aztec Chinampas[10], East Asian rice-fish-duck paddy systems[11] and flood plain management systems in colonial New England[12]. Learning from models such as these, instead of draining wetlands, farmers could manage them for high production per acre, while retaining their function as wetlands that provide ecosystem services to the region.
Animal integration has emerged as a key to successful agroecosystem design. According to Albert Howard, regarded by many as the father of organic agriculture, Nature never farms without animals. A major revolution in animal integration was first documented in detail by the French farmer/scientist, André Voisin[13]. High organic matter soils are central to achieving healthy water and mineral cycles, and soils in humid temperate regions are exceptional in their ability to store organic matter and accumulate it over a period of years. Voisin’s book Grass Productivity demonstrated over fifty years ago that pulsed grazing on perennial pasture is the fastest soil organic matter building tool that farmers have, at least in temperate climates.
Based on Voisin’s methods, so-called ‘rotational grazing’ methods have spread among farmers in the US organic farming movement, but few have grasped the holistic nature and importance of Voisin’s work – to make intensively managed grazing the driving core of a crop/livestock agroecosystem that is highly productive with minimal external inputs. A notable exception is the group of Cuban agroecologists who came to the rescue of Cuban agriculture in 1989 when it lost access to the imports that its essentially high-input agriculture required. Building on Voisin’s thesis, their research showed that a system with roughly 3 acres of intensively managed forage land will both sustain itself in fertility and provide a surplus of fertility via vermicomposted manure to sustain roughly 1 acre of cultivated crops (Figure 2).
Like the Cubans, we operated Northland Sheep Dairy in upstate New York using insights from Voisin’s research. We designed our farm agroecosystem to adapt and improve on the natural grass-ruminant ecosystems that helped create the deep topsoils of Midwestern North America. In summary, the design focus is on three areas that are crucial to manage to maximize tight nutrient cycling. Key points of the farm nutrient cycle:
Pasture management for a synergistic combination of productive, palatable perennial forages, kept in a vegetative state via high density, pulsed grazing throughout the growing season to maximize biomass production (according to planning principles developed by range ecologist Alan Savory[14]);
Manure storage in a deep litter bedding pack built under cover during the cold season to maximize nutrient retention and livestock health;
Vermicomposting the bedding pack at a proper C/N (carbon/nitrogen) ratio during the warm season to maximize organic matter production, nutrient stabilization and retention, and spreading the compost during the warm season as well, to maximize efficient nutrient recycling to the soil.
This design is working well on our farm and confirms Voisin’s thesis: in a few years forage production tripled on land previously abused and worn out from industrial methods of agriculture, and soil organic matter is slowly improving. Like the Cuban system, it provided a gradually increasing surplus to fertilize cropland.
Conclusion: A Historical context
What are the chances that the agroecosystem approach will prevail?
It helps to put the age in which we live into historical context. The era of cheap energy permitted the mechanization and chemicalization of agriculture. In turn, this produced the largest increase in food production since the advent of agriculture. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, although very energy-intensive, alone was responsible for tripling the global population since its use became widespread. At least 80% of the energy in food production comes from oil. Mechanization has permitted economies of scale, and driven out family scale farming in many countries. Where the small farm has survived, in the organic movement for example, it has found a niche or a gentrified market. As one US Secretary of Agriculture warned, farmers have to “get big or get out”.
In the short to medium run therefore, designers of agroecosystems will contend with powerful forces in the political economy of agriculture that oppose any change from the dominance of the industrial model. Moreover, as the collapse of industrial society progresses, elites desperate to maintain social control are already resorting to policies that are ever more desperate and violent in every area of society, including the farm economy and the larger food system. This complex subject merits separate treatment, which I may undertake in a sequel to this essay.
However, as the oil age wanes, industrial agriculture, its associated large-scale farms and distance food economy will be less affordable and will fade away. This will provide the opportunity to return to small farms that serve a local economy. In the best of scenarios, energy and raw materials depletion will be slow, thus offering the time to transition gradually to such a relocalized agrarian society. On the other hand, unfavorable scenarios are likely. The demise of industrial agriculture could easily accelerate due to wars over depleting resources and a resultant collapse of global supply chains, which will hasten the collapse of the industrial system as a whole, not just agriculture. Moreover, as depletion progresses, net energy and net mineral per unit energy will decline ever more rapidly (see graph), and accelerate the increasing scarcity of essential resources.
For longevity, natural ecosystems historically have far outperformed human managed ones in the modern age and every other age in the last 5000 years. All two dozen major civilizations since the advent of agriculture have crashed and burned from overshoot of carrying capacity and depletion of their resource base, or were overrun by peoples who still had resources to spare.
Whatever chance humanity might have of reversing this pattern will require a paradigm shift in the way we see ourselves and the world. A main thesis of this essay is that it will compel an acknowledgement of the premises on which I dwelt early in the essay. The shift must occur not just in our thinking, but in the way we live.
Despite lip service to learning from nature, only academic renegades and ecologist outliers like the Odum brothers, Holling, Wes Jackson, John Todd, Peter Rosset, Alan Savory, Miguel Altieri and Steven Gliessman learned enough ecosystem science to make serious contributions to improving agricultural sustainability to where food production might outlast the industrial, fossil fuel age. At least Altieri and Gliessman made the effort to write the first agroecology texts. These people are all outliers because almost no attempt has been made in academia to put agricultural science on a rigorous disciplinary basis, which is ecosystem science/systems ecology. Relying on these pioneers for inspiration and guidance, farmers will need to design their own agroecosystems to survive in the post-petroleum era. They should start now.
[5] Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization.2006.
[6] Savory, Alan. 1999. Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making.
[7] Henderson, Elizabeth and Karl North, Whole Farm Planning – Ecological Imperatives, Personal Values and Economics. Northeast Organic Farming Association. 2004
[8]The tragedy of Industrial Civilization: Envisioning a Political Future. 2023.
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. 1977.
[9] Piper, Jon and Judith Soule, Farming in Nature’s Image. 1992.
[11] King, F. H.(Franklin Hiram). Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
[12] Donahue, Brian. 2004. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord
[13] Voisin, André. 1959. Grass Productivity. Philosophical Library, New York. Island Press Edition, 1988.
[14] Savory, Alan. Holistic Management. A Common Sense Revolution to Restore Our Environment. Third Edition. 2017
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After reading his essay I sent Karl the following message:
“I agree with your ideas in the essay but have a question that the essay did not address.
Assuming a farm embraces your approach, and exports nutrients off of the property via the sale of food, do you believe that farm can be sustainable in the long run without being dependent on non-renewable imports to replace what was lost?
Basically I’m wondering if any form of commercial agriculture is sustainable in the long term, or will we eventually have to return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles?”
Hi Rob,
Thanks for your reply. Un-denial has been a quality source for me in recent years, attested also by the quality of your commentariat.
In Western history, I trace my concern with your question to Justus von Liebig’s concept of a metabolic rift (in the mineral cycle), exemplified he said by the pattern of London dumping its sewage into the Thames rather than trucking it back to the farms, ending with the impoverishment of the English farmland, forcing England to import guano and Chilian nitrates. In the East, I trace it to the widespread traffic in ‘night soil’ from the cities back to the farms. This seems to have sustained East Asian farming longer than it would have otherwise.
If humanure could be kept pure, it seems technically possible to mend the metabolic rift in a scale limited only by the economics or transporting the (composted) sewage. The main problem I see is political. Under capitalism, the maximization of profit whatever the cost overrules most ecological concerns. Hence, I am not optimistic about the sustainability of commercial agriculture beyond small agrarian communities practicing horticulture that might agree to something similar to the night soil solution.
I wrote about this question briefly in part three of a six part series, Visioning County Food Production, which was commissioned and published by an energy descent educational group in Ithaca, NY. The county, of which Ithaca is the urban center, has a population of about 100k. Here is some of what I wrote:
Because the agriculture of the future will need closed nutrient cycles, fertility for all county food production cannot be considered apart from county organic waste streams.[vi] To maintain fertility, organic waste must return in some form to food production sites. As the dense urban population produces the bulk of the waste, public institutions will need to take responsibility for separate collection of the purely organic component of the urban garbage and sewage waste streams, recycling part of it back to rural farms.[vii]
Fertility in urban and peripheral agricultural soils can be sustained with compost from the city organic garbage stream alone. A study of one urban community revealed that urban agriculture alone could absorb 20% of the organic waste production of the city.[viii] This will require a municipal policy and program of careful triage, collection, and composting at optimum C/N ratio by mixing high-nitrogen food garbage with high-carbon sources like leaves and shredded paper trash. The city could assign responsibility to urban institutional sources, such as schools and restaurants for moving their large organic waste streams to composting facilities at specific peri-urban food production sites. A map of existing Tompkins County composting sites demonstrates the composting potential (Figure 3).[ix]
As for sewage, eventually Ithaca will have to desewer, converting to urban night soil collection, biogas extraction, and the recycling of residual organic matter to county farms that will be necessary to maintain the mineral content of rural agricultural soils. In the short run, guerilla humanure composting from backyard compost toilets can build toward full conversion (Figure 4). These household facilities are satisfactorily self-policed, because the product will be used in closed-cycle residential food production.
[viii] Mougeot, Luc J.A. Growing Better Cities: Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Development. Ottawa: International Development Centre, 2006. http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/226-0/
un-Denial 
