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.
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/
Today’s guest post by Charles is an excellent primer on the diversity of beliefs held by many of the best minds that think about our overshoot predicament. Charles wisely reminds us that no one knows what the future will bring.
Charles recounts his journey of increasing awareness that led to depression and despair, followed by an awakening of acceptance and constructive action, that has provided him with some peace and happiness.
It’s funny how I (we?) construct incorrect mental images of people we meet on the web. I imagined Charles to be an elderly retired reclusive spiritual philosopher, not a middle-aged top-tier software developer with a deep scholarly interest in human overshoot, and an impressive sustainable food growing sideline.
Charles concludes by asking readers to share their own visions of the future. If you have something to say that deserves more than a comment, please contact me about posting a guest essay.
P.S. I believe Charles now holds the doomosphere record for the most links in a single essay.
The idea for this post originates from an exchange with fellow doomer davelysak who states:
I foresee, based on various portents, an extreme human population crash in the relatively (10 – 50 years? Maybe sooner?) near future.
I’ll be surprised if there are more than 2 billion people alive on earth in 20 years.
This made me reflect about my own anticipation for the future, even more crucially, the way I communicate it to others. Or rather as a matter of fact, don’t so much anymore. Like Cassandra, I have come to understand that I find myself psychologically between a rock and a hard place: I foresee a future of extreme hardships which I do not particularly desire. Worst, I have long felt compelled to share my projections, driven by the naive impulse to initiate collective preemptive action. However, torn apart between the pride of intellectual rigor, my ideal not to harm others and increasingly aggressive or irrational reception of the message, I have slowly learned to repress myself, not to voice my concerns and conform to the group. After all, even Cassandra brought ill fate to herself. (It turns out my strategy is no solution, as the rage is turned inside and builds up, but that could be a story for another day.)
Hopefully, our host, Rob provides a safe haven to any doomer who wishes to bravely face the crude, unadulterated nature of our predicament.
As doomers, we share a myth, the myth of collapse. In a nutshell, it unfolds, as I understand it, as follows:
The old age of material opulence is about to end, as current trends can not continue for long.
A world-scale crisis has been brewing for quite some time; it is about to burst.
After it eventually recedes, once balance is somewhat restored, a new normalcy, a new age will be revealed (that part of the myth is optional).
Lurking for a quarter of a century in the doomosphere has taught me visions of the future, even among doomers, may vary tremendously. The stroll through the exhibit of studies can go on for hours, ranging from loss of material affluence (Richard Duncan’s Olduvai theory) to complete life wipe-out (James Hansen’s Venus Syndrome), with population collapse (Club of Rome’s limits to growth) and near term human extinction as middle-grounds (I guess).
The fall is seen as either rapid and brutal as in Hugo Bardi’s Seneca cliff, or manageable as in John Michael Greer’s catabolic collapse. Even our preferences and values differ: some like Jack Alpert’s sustainable modern civilization of 70 million wish to preserve the current living arrangements trading population level, on the contrary, primitivists such as Derrick Jensen do not equate humans with Homo Industrialis and impatiently wait for the machine to (be) stop(ped). There are even some fringe organizations advocating voluntary human extinction and euthanasia, while most would just like to manage degrowth. (To be fair, the church of euthanasia’s ultimate goal is species awareness.)
Model after study after analysis after opinion piece paint different aspects and outcomes of the fall. Some radically scarier than others.
My personal journey through doom
What then do we really expect, fear and hope? At first I had planned to cold-heartedly present the scenarios I found most probable and then invite you to share your own prospects. But, given the heavy emotional load that the subject carries, I somewhat changed my mind: after all we are discussing the possibility of not only material losses but the widespread increase in suffering, deaths, extinction of the living world. At the very least, our cultural identity is at stake. So I’d like to add a personal twist and narrate how my understanding of the future evolved during my personal journey.
I was born in 1978 in the then extremely affluent and sophisticated country of France (WesternCiv). I was inculcated with the idealism of my time and place which originates from the Age of Enlightenment: triumph of reason, humanism, universalism, materialism, progress and atheism. Even though I had a really hard time learning the fundamental necessary last piece allowing anyone to function in an ideal world (hypocrisy), it was indeed the best of all possible worlds.
At 6, I was profoundly marked by Chernobyl. I remember the haunting masks of the liquidators, courageously shoveling the entrails of the angry machine, promised a certain death as a reward for saving our, my lives; and the helicopters hauling sand; and then the oddly reassuring claims from my country statesmen about the spread of the cloud. A first encounter with official doublespeak?
As a city boy living on the 6th floor of a modern building, I grew up a book-worm. Books offered countless windows into exciting realms out of the deprived environment of a sanitized flat. In particular, I vividly remember feeling a strong emotional bond with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale Five Peas from a Pod. Was it a hint, a reverberation from a destined future of my deep yet unacknowledged nature? More were to follow. At a relatively young age, I watched the extremely violent Japanese TV series Fist of the North Star (right-minded censorship hadn’t caught up yet). A brilliant blend between the universes of Mad Max and Bruce Lee, it depicts a brutal post-apocalyptic world set in barren landscapes and desolated ruins. This time around the call of agonizing farmer Smith to plant rice seeds for tomorrow particularly resonated (captions are read from right to left).
I was faintly aware of the environmental crisis, in particular climate change as a life changing but slow process with only distant impacts. Shortly before the new millennium I stumbled upon information which blew my comfortable world view. It was Colin Campbell explaining depletion and predicting peak oil.
At that point, I was convinced global population would have to come down during my lifetime and challenging times were ahead. I thought it would still be manageable, spanning through the coming century from the current population of 6 billion back to pre-industrial levels between roughly 1 and 2 billion (respective estimates of the population around 1800 and 1930).
I was a rational realist, not buying into modern human exceptionalism which asserts we can achieve higher agriculture yields than our predecessors with fewer resources on an environmentally degraded planet. Even though the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function in a Tragedy of the Commons, I had faith humanity would soon change its ways: it was just a matter of spreading the crucial piece of information about resource depletion widely enough. After all, there were already some men of good will, such as Jason Bradford, taking action. In South Korea, I had just met the love of my life, some years later we married. We were fruitful. Our daughter Rachel, as an homage to Rachel Carson, was born in 2007. Determined to carry my load in curbing population growth, I convinced my wife to stop multiplying at one.
I was to be punched in the face again. It was 2012. A somewhat egocentric professor was sternly announcing near term human extinction (this is most probably the presentation by Guy McPherson I watched at that time). The future was sealed. I was now standing on the edge of a steep final cliff. For me, it was the start of a very dark period. You know that kind of aftertaste which lingers a while after watching a documentary such as the Island of Flowers.
Except everyday, as a background of everything else. I couldn’t help but feel hopeless for my then 5 years old daughter. The key notions were feedback loops (for instance methane according to sad Nathalia Shakhova) and tipping points.
Evidence accumulated from every side. State of the ocean: apocalyptical; ice: disappearing; trees: under assault; soils: eroding. It was suddenly the 6th (or was it already the 7th) mass extinction. I quit flying (for what that is worth, there surely is, unfortunately, a substitution of demand paradox similar to Jevons?).
Having thoroughly assimilated this new data, two years later, I wrote a dense blog entry to get it off my chest. I reviewed my script: I was now expecting 1 billion humans by 2040 and extinction at the end of the century. News still got worse. Moving goalposts, shifting baselines and worse than predicted by the model were the expressions of the days.
Homo Sapiens’ response was to pretend all was safe. The manufacture of consent, merchants of doubts had it easy with a general public all too eager to keep on basking in comforting denial.
Kevin Anderson exposed the half-truths of even a supposedly rigorous official body, the IPCC, about non-existing negative emissions technologies included in their models. The remaining carbon budget was already getting slim and the task to turn this ship around incommensurable.
I took Wing Chun classes (even though I was not sparring with these ladies) and practiced like an addict would inject heroin.
I felt increasingly ashamed and guilty for being part of this holocaust of a new kind (let’s not mince words, this is un-Denial after all 😉 ). Only this depressed collapsitarian on his boulder brightened me up, at least for his accent and hat. I considered taking ‘shrooms to communicate with the spirit of the Earth.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, an ordinary miracle was happening on my very own balcony. For no real reason, I had installed a large clay pot and was everyday discarding some food waste. It was fun watching soil building. 7 years later I harvested 3 peaches on a small tree that had grown on its own out of a minimal daily routine. It died the next year, but had shown me a way forward.
I went back to my bookcase to dust off Fukuoka’s One-Straw Revolution. I had read it at 20, but as a conformist computer scientist did not know how to respond to the strong appeal it had on me already at that time. I bought all translated Fukuoka’s books and Larry Korn’s excellent clarifications (for a western mind that is).
Haunted by images from The Burmese Harp, I stopped Wing Chun one year just before covid struck. I lived this surreal period as a blue pill/red pill moment: do we still put our faith into an authoritative centralized science, absolved from any personal implication and effort, or do we fend for ourselves and look for other ways. Although, it was a slow grind, a long arm wrestling, I felt the price of resistance turned out surprisingly not to be very high: give up on restaurants and movies mostly. I have to admit I am proud I was able to withstand (especially for my daughter’s sake) peer pressure and the manipulative wannabee bully Emmanuel Macron we have as president, a corporate valet, if anything.
I enrolled in the local community gardens and bought a small piece of land in the country side to plant a resilient edible forest garden. I started at ground zero: the previous rectilinear poplar plantation was clear cut just before the sale (in modern mindset no profit is too small).
I don’t really worry about the future anymore. After all, if we let her be, life unveils tremendous amounts of strength and resilience. Humanity does not deserve only contempt. I’ve found many people to admire and approaches to follow.
Masanobu Fukuoka’s natural farming:
Ernst Götsch’s syntropic agriculture:
Joseph Lofthouse’s landrace gardening:
I learned acceptance of what I can not control: other people’s behavior, preferences and own internal limitations. I learned the importance of doing small things at my pace, my scale, everyday. I unlearned duality (that’s another story).
Current thoughts about the future
In the span of 25 years, my outlook on the future changed three times. Today, I am not even sure were we really stand. In Vonnegut typology, rather than the classical doomer’s narration, I now find myself in the “Which way is up” shape of story. In this section I will outline my current personal view and preferred outcome.
Although, nothing can completely be excluded, I don’t believe the planet will either go Venus nor abiotic. I do not believe the human species will be extinct by the end of the century. I do not believe we will escape to the stars onboard metallic ships. We may nuke ourselves out of existence, but it is in nobody’s interest. We may experience multiple severe nuclear power plant accidents. But maybe scarcity of nuclear fuel will compel us to progressively shut them down before. In the longer term, the human species could even survive the ongoing extinction event.
As depicted by Joseph Tainter for prior civilizations, ours chose a similar path of increased complexity. Following this strategy, it has cornered itself: in my country almost every service has been converted into an “app” or is in the process of doing so. Thus creating the biggest single point of failure: all this convenience relies on the continued operation of the grid, data centers, the network, chips, long supply chain, rare minerals, etc.
To me, a Seneca cliff scenario is unavoidable and guarantees rapid material loss. We will lose our technological gadgets and crutches. Our machines will stop, thirsty. Pollution will be reduced and assimilated by the organic world. We won’t do much about it other than pretend.
Will there be a population crash or a graceful decline? Will the planet temperature stabilize at a livable level? What will the ultimate stable population be? I don’t know.
Our current ways impact the web of life brutally. I will really be surprised if the planet sustains more than 2 billion people for long. Biomass tonnage of mammals gives an idea of the scales at play:
I expect a crash in the following 2 to 3 decades. Eyeballing the world population age pyramid, if we had to achieve this four-fold reduction tomorrow in a “fair” way, then all males above 30 years of age should go soylent green (females are given 5 more years). For long term survival wouldn’t this be preferable to a slow long agony? This won’t be said out-loud. So I won’t go further on that path.
A call to inaction
Fortunately, there could still be room left to maneuver. Fuel could be rationed for food usages. The population could spread out, reducing the need for transportation and providing labor for agriculture. Degraded land could be regenerated, deserts converted to forests, cereal fields hybridized into agroforestry, or converted to orchards or edible forests as once was the case in Europe.
There are some success stories (propaganda of our times, maybe) all around the world.
China:
Saudi Arabia:
India:
Africa:
New Zealand:
USA:
Agriculture from the green revolution is productive (given external fossil fuels), but soulless, dumb and destructive: the philosophy at work in every step (delineating plots, tilling, applying pesticides and herbicides, irrigating) is that of control, rendering the soil inert, blocking the natural flow of life. The idea, disconnected from reality, is to make agri-culture an industrial process so that outputs can be maximized following a known function of inputs.
Life is not inert, its potential surpasses anything we can fathom. A miracle akin to the one that happened on my balcony could be made possible on the large scale. We don’t (and I believe never will) understand the whole system.
The theory of the biotic pump gives us a glimpse into the full extent of its processes at the planetary level:
I cannot recommend this presentation by Anastassia M. Makarieva enough:
Large forests work like a planetary air conditioning system: pumping water from the ocean and circulating it across the continent, cooling temperatures, releasing heat above the layer of greenhouse gases directly into space.
I accept this may well be sophisticated denial on my side. But why not try?
Conclusion
I agree with Guy McPherson when he states everybody in the industrialized world was born into captivity. But that’s primarily a mental prison we can break out of. So far this culture has lived by the motto divide and conquer, waging war on every side, engrossed in the illusion of control. The fire has grown to the point it has now become a matter of life and death.
Course must be changed. It is not even that hard. All it requires is some generosity: stop the aggression towards the planetary organism which shelters us all, let forests grow absolutely everywhere. Feed ourselves, heal and replenish life at the same time. Tend to be taken care of.
This, to me, is the concrete meaning of love: the cycle of co-dependence illustrated by Yggdrasil, the tree of life surrounded by the eternal snake Ouroboros.
In any case, this is the path I have chosen for myself, regardless of the circumstances, and my proposition for mutually assured survival.
Your turn
Thank you for reading. At least, I hope this post was somewhat entertaining. Please let me know what your own visions, hopes and propositions for the future are. I love to be surprised.
Dr. Bill Rees, Professor Emeritus from the University of British Columbia, gave a presentation on our overshoot predicament earlier this month to a zoom meeting of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome (CACOR).
I’m a longtime fan of Dr. Rees and consider him to be one of the most aware and knowledgeable people on the planet.
This is, I believe, the best talk I’ve seen by Dr. Rees and he covers all of the important issues, including topics like overpopulation that most of his peers avoid.
Presentations like this will probably not change our trajectory but nevertheless I find some comfort knowing there are a few other people thinking about the same issues. This can be a very lonely space.
The Q&A is also very good. I found it interesting to hear how much effort Dr. Rees has made to educate our leaders about what we should be doing to reduce future suffering. He was frank that no one to date, including the Green party, is open to his message. Not surprising, but sad. Also inspiring that someone of his stature is at least trying.
Summary
Climate-change and other environmental organizations urge governments to act decisively/rapidly to decarbonize the economy and halt further development of fossil fuel reserves. These demands arguably betray:
– ignorance of the role of energy in the modern economy;
– ill-justified confidence in society’s ability to transition to 100% green renewable energy;
– no appreciation of the ecological consequences of attempting to do so and;
– little understanding of the social implications.
Without questioning the need to abandon fossil fuels, I will argue that the dream of a smooth energy transition is little more than a comforting shared illusion. Moreover, even if it were possible it would not solve climate change and would exacerbate the real existential threat facing society, namely overshoot.
I then explore some of the consequences and implications of (the necessary) abandonment of fossil fuels in the absence of adequate substitutes, and how governments and MTI society should be responding to these unspoken biophysical realities.
Biography
Dr. William Rees is a population ecologist, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus, and former Director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning.
His academic research focuses on the biophysical prerequisites for sustainability. This focus led to co-development (with his graduate students) of ecological footprint analysis, a quantitative tool that shows definitively that the human enterprise is in dysfunctional overshoot. (We would need five Earth-like planets to support just the present world population sustainably with existing technologies at North American material standards.)
Frustrated by political unresponsiveness to worsening indicators, Dr. Rees also studies the biological and psycho-cognitive barriers to environmentally rational behavior and policies. He has authored hundreds of peer reviewed and popular articles on these topics. Dr. Rees is a Fellow of Royal Society of Canada and also a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute; a founding member and former President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics; a founding Director of the OneEarth Initiative; and a Director of The Real Green New Deal. He was a full member of the Club of Rome from 2013 until 2018. His international awards include the Boulding Memorial Award in Ecological Economics, the Herman Daly Award in Ecological Economics and a Blue Planet Prize (jointly with his former student, Dr. Mathis Wackernagel).
I left the following comment on YouTube:
I’m a fellow British Columbian and longtime admirer of Dr. Rees. Thank you for the excellent presentation.
I agree with Dr. Rees’ prescription for what needs to be done but I think there’s a step that must precede his first step of acknowledging our overshoot predicament.
Given the magnitude and many dimensions of our predicament an obvious question is why do so few people see it?
I found a theory by Dr. Ajit Varki that provides a plausible explanation, and answers other important questions about our unique species.
The Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory posits that the human species with its uniquely powerful intelligence exists because it evolved to deny unpleasant realities.
If true, this implies that the first step to any positive meaningful change must be to acknowledge our tendency to deny unpleasant realities.
Canadian author and journalist Andrew Nikiforuk addressed our overshoot reality on November 17, 2021 at the University of Victoria.
It’s a brilliant must watch talk that touches on every important issue, except unfortunately Ajit Varki’s MORT theory and our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities. Nikiforuk does acknowledge that denial is an important force in our predicament.
It’s refreshing to find a journalist that understands what’s going on and that speaks plainly about what we must do.
Nikiforuk introduced a new idea (for me), the “technological imperium”:
…our biggest problem is a self-augmenting, ever-expanding technosphere, which has but one rule: to grow at any cost and build technological artifacts that efficiently dominate human affairs and the biosphere. The technological imperium consumes energy and materials in order to replace all natural systems with artificial ones dependent on high energy inputs and unmanageable complexity.
Nikiforuk seems to be implying that technology is the core problem and is driving the bus. Maybe. I think more likely advanced technology emerges as a consequence of unique intelligence (explained by MORT) coupled with fortuitous buried fossil energy, driven by a desire for infinite economic growth that arises from evolved behaviors expressing the Maximum Power Principle (MPP), all enabled by our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, which causes us to ignore the costs of growth and technology. Regardless of which is the chicken and which is the egg, Nikiforuk is correct that technology has made our society very fragile, and is harming our social fabric.
An example Nikiforuk provided of the technological imperium is British Columbia’s trend of replacing sustainable natural salmon runs in rivers with fish farms that are totally dependent on non-renewable fossil energy and advanced technology. I’ve witnessed this first hand on the coast of Vancouver Island and it makes me sick to my stomach. I also witnessed how hard it is to oppose the technological imperium when a political party here was elected on a promise to close fish farms and then reneged after being elected.
As an aside, the technological imperium idea gave me a new insight into the covid mass psychosis of most rich countries and their obsession with a single high tech “solution” to covid while aggressively opposing all other less energy intensive, less risky, and lower tech responses.
Nikiforuk began his talk with a quote I like from C.S. Lewis:
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
I observe sadly that this must watch video has only 160 views, 3 of which are mine. 😦
Here are a few other ideas and quotes I captured while watching the talk:
“We have all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life support system in fewer than 200 years mainly by making thermodynamic whoopee with fossil fuels.” – Kurt Vonnegut
“Our political class is in a complete state of denial and will not act until things get much worse. You can expect more blah blah blah.”
“Energy spending determines greenhouse gas emissions. We only want to talk about emissions, we need to talk about energy spending.”
“We must contract the global economy by at least 40%.”
“We can choose a managed energy decent, something few civilizations have ever achieved, or we can face collapse.”
“People who do not face the truth turn themselves into monsters”. – James Baldwin
“In sum, expect extreme volatility and political unrest in the years ahead along with atmospheric rivers, heat domes, and burning forests.”
“We are now at revolutionary levels of inequality everywhere.”
“We are being fed 5 green lies because we do not want to discuss economic growth and population:
dematerialize the economy;
direct air capture;
carbon capture and storage;
hydrogen;
electric cars.”
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” – Frank Herbert
Conversations we avoid or deny:
Population
“There is no problem on earth that does not become easier to manage with fewer people. We don’t want to admit this, we don’t want to talk about this.”
We are currently using up the renewable resources of 1.7 earths and unless things change we’ll need 3 earths by 2050.
Energy Blindness
Our energy is so cheap and convenient it has blinded us to its true ecological, political, and social costs.
“Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be.” – Joseph Tainter
A single tomato today requires 10 tablespoons of diesel to grow it.
The Technosphere
An energy dissipating superorganism that destroys natural systems and replaces them with artificial systems dependent on high energy technologies.
Wild salmon running in rivers are replaced with fish farms.
Wetlands are replaced with water filtration projects.
Old growth forests are replaced with tree plantations.
Technology is to this civilization what the catholic church was to 14th century France, the dominant institution that controls every aspect of your life.
“A major fact of our present civilization is that more and more sin becomes collective, and the individual is forced to participate in collective sin.” – Jacques Ellul
“A low energy policy allows for a wide choice of lifestyles and cultures. If on the other hand a society opts for high energy spending its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labelled capitalist or socialist.” – Ivan Illich
Civilizations Do Collapse
Life is a cycle, it is not a linear path.
We have peaked and are now entering a phase of incredible volatility.
Every citizen needs to know the consequences of bad policy. Percent death on the Titanic by class was:
39% first class
58% second class
76% steerage
What should you do with this awareness?
Withdraw from the fray of the Technosphere.
Do something to help preserve the natural world.
Get your hands dirty doing real work in nature.
Insist that creation has a value beyond utility.
“Think, less” – Wendell Berry
Build refuges and prepare for the storms ahead.
Wake each morning and ask yourself what you can give to this world rather than what you can take.
Comments and answers from the Q&A:
“The worst thing about the pandemic was that so many people and so many children were forced to spend so much time with colonizing machines.”
“We have to get a political conversation going about contracting the economy.” This won’t happen at the central government level but might happen within individual communities.
“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
“The only way we can get out of this mess without sacrificing millions and millions of people is to power down.”
Two weeks later, Nikiforuk reflected on his talk and responded to questions:
Two weeks ago, I gave a talk at the University of Victoria arguing that our morally bankrupt civilization is chasing dead ends when it comes to climate change and energy spending.
I argued that by focusing on emissions, we have failed to acknowledge economic and population growth as the primary driver of those emissions along with the unrestrained consumption of natural systems that support all life.
I added that people plus affluence plus technology make a deadly algorithm that is now paving our road to collective ruin.
As Ronald Wright noted in his book A Short History of Progress, civilization is a pyramid scheme that depends on cancerous rates of growth.
I also explained that many so-called green technologies including renewables, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage are not big solutions. Because they require rare earth minerals and fossil fuels for their production and maintenance, these technologies shift problems around.
In addition these green technologies cannot be scaled up in time to cut emissions or require too much energy to make any difference at all.
I also emphasized that our biggest problem is a self-augmenting, ever-expanding technosphere, which has but one rule: to grow at any cost and build technological artifacts that efficiently dominate human affairs and the biosphere. The technological imperium consumes energy and materials in order to replace all natural systems with artificial ones dependent on high energy inputs and unmanageable complexity.
This technological assault on the biosphere and our consciousness has greatly weakened our capacity to pay attention to what matters, let alone how to think. The result is a highly polarized and anxious society that can’t imagine its own collapse let alone the hazards of its own destructive thinking.
The best response to this constellation of emergencies is to actively shrink the technosphere and radically reduce economic growth and energy spending. Our political class can’t imagine such a conversation.
At the same time, communities and families must re-localize their lives, disconnect from the global machine and actively work to restore degraded ecosystems such as old-growth forests. Anyone who expects an “easy fix” or convenient set of solutions has spent too much time being conditioned by digital machines.
My cheerful talk generated scores of questions. There wasn’t time to answer them, so I selected five representative queries submitted via Zoom in the interest of keeping this heretical conversation going.
Growth in population tied to consumption is a big problem
Many listeners expressed disquiet about population growth being an essential part of the problem. “I am disappointed that once again Malthus has entered the room when the difference between per capita emissions for GHGs between the Global North and Global South are significant. Isn’t it how we live not how many of us there are?” asked one.
The real answer is uncomfortable. How we live and consume matters just as much as the growing density of our numbers combined with the proliferation of our machines that devour energy on our behalf. (Roads and cell phones all consume energy and materials too.) All three demographic issues are increasing at unsustainable rates and feed each other to propel more economic growth, more emissions and more fragility.
The world’s current population is 7.9 billion and grows by 80 million a year. It has slowed down in recent years because the affluent don’t need the energy of children as much as the poor. Even so civilization will add another billion to the planet every dozen years. Redistributing energy wealth (and emissions) from the rich to the poor will not avert disaster if human populations don’t overall decline.
Our numbers also reflect a demographic anomaly that began with fossil fuels, a cheap energy source that served as Viagra for the species. Prior to our discovery of fossil fuels, the population of the planet never exceeded one billion. Our excessive numbers are purely a temporary artifact of cheap energy spending and all that it entails — everything from fertilizer to modern medicine.
Isn’t capitalism the real threat?
Many questions revolved around the nature of capitalism. “Wouldn’t it be more accurate to denounce the capitalist organization of technology rather than technology as such for problems like polarization and fragmentation?”
No, it would not. Technology emphasizes growth and concentrates power regardless of the ideology.
Capitalism, like socialism and communism, is simply a way to use energy to create technologies that structure society in homogeneous ways. Removing capitalism from the equation would not change the totalitarian nature of technology itself. Or the ability of technologies to colonize local cultures anywhere.
Every ideology on Earth, to date, has used technologies to strengthen their grip on power by enmeshing their citizens in complexity and reducing humanity to a series of efficiencies. All have supported digital infrastructure to monitor and survey their citizens. As the sociologist Jacques Ellul noted long ago ideologies don’t count in the face of technological imperative.
What comes next?
Many listeners asked if “there is a sequel to the energy-rich market economy?” I have no crystal ball but here is my response.
There will always be some kind of sequel and it is not written. But there is no replacement for cheap fossil fuels and their density and portability. They made our complex civilization what it is. As fossil fuel resources become ever more expensive and difficult to extract (a reality the media ignores), the “rich market economy” will experience more volatility, inequality, disruptions, corruption and inflation. It is rare for any civilization to manage an energy descent without violence let alone grace.
“Can you say more about the connection between the technosphere and totalitarian societies?” asked one listener. “How do you see connections between dictatorships and the technosphere?”
This is a subject for a much longer essay. The technosphere, by definition, offers only one system of thinking and operating (triumph of technique over all endeavors) and has been eroding human freedoms for decades. It simply creates dependents or inmates. Social influencers now tell its residents what to buy and how to behave. As such the technosphere has become an all-encompassing environment for citizens whether they be so-called democracies or totalitarian societies.
The major difference between the two is simply the degree to which techniques have been applied to give the state more total control over its citizens. In both democratic societies and totalitarian ones, technical elites actively mine citizens for data so that information can be used to engineer, monitor and survey the behavior of their anxious and unhappy citizens in a technological society. (You can’t live in a technological society without becoming an abstraction.) The Chinese state does not hide its intentions; the West still clings to its illusions of freedom.
The technosphere corrupts language
One listener wanted to know “more about the empty language” employed by the technosphere as I mentioned in my talk.
Just as the technosphere has replaced bird song with digital beeps, the technological imperium has increasingly replaced meaningful language with techno-speak.
A world dominated by reductionist and mechanistic thinking has produced its own Lego-like language completely divorced from natural reality. Decades ago the German linguist Uwe Poerksen called this new evolving language “plastic words.”
They include words like environment, process, organization, structure, development, identity and care. All can be effortlessly combined to convey bullshit: “the development of the environment with care is a process.” This modular language creates its own tyranny of meaningless expression.
Experts, technicians, politicians and futurists employ this plastic language to baffle, confuse and obfuscate. Poerksen notes these words are pregnant with money, lack historical dimension and refer to no local or special place. This language, divorced from all context, does to thinking what a bulldozer does to a forest. It flattens it.
Hope is not a pill you take in the morning or a crumb left at the table
Last but not least many listeners asked how do we maintain hope in the face of so many emergencies, abuses and appalling political leadership?
“How do you get up in the morning?” typically asked one.
This frequent question confounds and puzzles me. My humble job as a journalist is not to peddle soft soap or cheerlead for ideologies and futurists. My job is not to manufacture hope let alone consent. I have achieved something small if I can help readers differentiate between what matters and what doesn’t and highlight the power implications in between.
Yet in a technological society most everyone seeks an easy, canned message pointing to a bright future. I cannot in good conscience tell anyone, let alone my own children, that the days ahead will be happy or bright ones. To everything there is a season and our civilization has now, step by step, entered a season of discord and chaos. History moves like life itself in a cycle of birth, life, death and renewal.
Jacques Ellul, who wrote prophetically about the inherent dangers of technological society, also addressed the need for authentic hope because it does not reside in the technosphere. The technosphere, a sterile prison, may promise to design your future with plastic words, but what it really offers is the antithesis of hope.
Ellul, a radical Christian, wrote deeply much about hope and freedom. He noted that hope never abandons people who care about a place and are rooted outside the technosphere for they will always know what to do by their real connection to real things. He adds that hope cannot be divorced from the virtues of faith and love. Like all virtues they must be quietly lived, not daily signalled.
For Ellul, hope was a combination of vigilant expectation, prayer and realism. “Freedom is the ethical expression of the person who hopes,” he once wrote.
Hope is living fully in a place you care about and acting against the abuse of power every day. Hope, in other words, is using every initiative “to restore the possibility of people making their own decisions.”
P.S. This talk inspired me to make my first donation to a news source, The Tyee, for which in 2010 Nikiforuk became its first writer in residence.
Ecologists Eric R. Pianka (University of Texas) and Laurie J. Vitt (University of Oklahoma) provide a scientific summary of the overpopulation crisis facing humanity and itemize its many consequences, including climate change (global warming), conservation biology, economic systems, energy and resource shortages, human instincts, immigration conflicts, politics, pollution, poverty, technological problems, and solutions needed. Their underlying thesis is that denial and delusion work synergistically to undermine our ability to confront these serious issues, and unless we undertake proactive measures now, overpopulation and its impact on resource competition and climate change will ultimately lead to the collapse of civilization.
Authors’ Overview
In Road to Survival 70 years ago, William Vogt tried to call attention to the human overpopulation crisis, but failed. Paul Ehrlich raised this issue again 20 years later but was also widely ignored. We wish to re-open this long overdue and much needed discussion about population, a toxic topic that politicians globally avoid. We have written a book “Our One and Only Spaceship:Denial, Delusion and the Population Crisis.” We are two well-known ecologists Eric R. Pianka (University of Texas) and Laurie J. Vitt (University of Oklahoma).
Our book is based on a great deal of research that we have conducted into the topic and on a course that Pianka taught. http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/
We have edited and written books together, both scientific and semi-popular. Using fact-based analyses, we make the case that human population size and growth is the greatest threat to human survival, and that most if not every major global problem (including spread of AIDS and other communicable diseases, wars and other conflicts, climate change and in particular global warming, food water and energy shortages, poverty, political unrest, pollution, extinctions, etc.) are all direct results of overpopulation. Our birth rate far exceeds our death rate and the current global population of 7.7 billion in itself is unsustainable even without additional growth. This has put us on a collision course with disaster. It is perilous to remain in denial about all of the threats emanating from overpopulation.
As we become ever more and more desperate in trying to provide resources necessary to meet critical demands, our environmental problems will only worsen as we continue to deregulate thus allowing increased exploitation of dwindling natural resources. The thin skin of life on our planet is seriously threatened by the actions of a single species, Homo sapiens. Remarkably, even with our putative high intelligence, we don’t seem to be able to even admit that the problem is population such that discussions can begin on how to stop population growth. One thing is certain, it must and will stop—either we can do it through a series of logical steps (educating the public, coming up with a global plan, implementing the plan), or it will occur as the result of a combination of wars over resources, spread of infectious disease, or even famine. Such a discussion will have a greater impact on human survival than any of the many news stories currently dominating our media.
Overpopulation has only one outcome, and we have all seen it when mold takes over an orange—unlike mold growing on an orange, we do not have another “orange” to which we can send our offspring (There is no planet B). We are fully aware that discussions on population are “politically incorrect” and will be extremely sensitive to many people (especially religious groups) who take up arms in response to any discussion to limit reproduction. The ultimate biological reason for this response is simply that our genes control much of what we do, and reproduction is the currency of future generations. A more proximate reason is simply that our hormonal systems kick in when we reach puberty and all reason is washed away in the maelstrom of hormonal activity pushing us to reproduce. We must do something — ignoring our pressing problem and expecting it to go away is like hoping in vain to win the mega-lottery.
AJ’s Review
This is my brief review of the book, “Our One and Only Spaceship” subtitled “Denial, Delusion and the Population Crisis” written by Drs. Eric Pianka and Laurie Vitt. Copyright 2019.
I came across this book through one of the comments on your website. Since it was one of the few books that concerned population (in the title) I decided to buy it and read it.
The authors are ecologists. Dr. Eric Pianka is a Professor at UT Austin and Dr. Laurie Vitt is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. The forward was by Paul & Anne Ehrlich.
I overall liked the book. My feeling is that it is somewhat like Tom Murphy’s book and was intended for an intro college course in ecology/sustainability (without the math). That said I never had the impression that the authors were talking down to the reader.
There is some hope in this book. “This generation will be the last with decision-making powers to save our spaceship for all future earth-lings, including human beings.” But as the authors state in the Prologue, “The problem can be easily framed in three words, population, population, and population.” Human civilization is in overshoot and that we in the west are living far beyond the carrying capacity of the planet is covered in detail. So, the problem is both overshoot and population.
There is an acknowledgement that denial and optimism bias are part of our problem. But, I think that the authors are also in a little denial, “If humans are to survive into the next century, we need to reduce population growth, convert to renewable energy sources, use much less energy overall, and develop a plan for the future this is based on fact and not on fiction.” Their opinion is that we can maintain much of our technology (through “green” tech transition) and slowly reduce population with education and enlightenment. I don’t know if they really believe this or like Tom Murphy need to give students something positive to live for in the face of a depressing predicament.
Don’t get me wrong. This book touched all the right notes and I only disagreed with a tiny bit of it. I thought that the preface/into to the last chapter was perhaps the best quote I have seen on our place in the universe (other than Rob’s quote):
“Man did not have forever to harness the forces of the sun and stars. The Sun was an elderly light, long past the turbulent heat of youth, and would some day join the senile class of once-luminiferous bodies. In some incredibly remote time a chance collision might blow it up again into incandescent gas and start a new local cosmic cycle, but of man there would be no trace. In Balfours’s terms, he “will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. ‘Imperishable monuments’ and ‘immortal deeds,’ death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that IS be better or worse for all that labour, genius, devotion and suffering of man have striven through countless generation to effect.” –Homer Smith (1952) “Man and His Gods” and Earl Balfour (1895) “Foundations of Belief”
Nate Hagens has published a new book on the predicament that fossil energy consumption and depletion, and our denial of this reality, have created for life on this planet.
A skim suggests the book will be excellent and I hope to write a review after reading it.
I observe there is no mention of Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory which is sad because MORT provides an evolutionary foundation for the denial that Nate discusses, and explains why only one species has emerged with the intelligence to exploit fossil energy.
Denial of our genetic tendency to deny reality is apparently the strongest form of denial, even among the few of us that are aware of the human predicament.
You can read Nate’s book for free and purchase a copy here:
Thanks to friend and retired blogger Gail Zawacki at Wit’s End for bringing this excellent new talk by professor William Rees to my attention.
Rees discusses our severe state of ecological overshoot and the behaviors that prevent us from taking any useful action to make the future less bad.
Rees thinks there are two key behaviors responsible for our predicament:
Base nature, which we share with all other species, to use all available resources. Most people call this the Maximum Power Principle.
Creative nurture. Our learned culture defines our reality and we live this constructed reality as if it were real. “When faced with information that does not agree with their [preformed] internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information” – Wexler.
I don’t disagree with Rees on the existence or role of these behaviors, but we also need Varki’s MORT theory to explain how denial of unpleasant realties evolved and is symbiotic with our uniquely powerful intelligence, and other unique human behaviors, such as our belief in gods and life after death.
Some interesting points made by Rees:
The 2017 human eco-footprint exceeds biocapacity by 73%.
Half the fossil fuels and many other resources ever used by humans have been consumed in just the past 30 years.
Efficiency enables more consumption.
The past 7 years are the warmest 7 years on record.
Wild populations of birds, fish, mammals, and amphibians have declined 60% since 1970. Populations of many insects are down about 50%.
The biomass of humans and their livestock make up 95-99% of all vertebrate biomass on the planet.
Human population planning has declined from being the dominant policy lever in 1969 to the least researched in 2018.
The annual growth in wind and solar energy is about half the total annual growth in energy. In others words, “renewable” energy is not replacing fossil energy, it’s not even keeping up.
The recent expansion of the human enterprise resembles the “plague phase” of a one-off boom/bust population cycle.
50 years, 34 climate conferences, a half dozen major international climate agreements, and various scientists’ warnings have not reduced atmospheric carbon concentrations.
We are tracking to the Limit to Growth study’s standard model and should expect major systemic crashes in the next 40 to 50 years.
This is the new “age of unreason”: science denial and magical thinking.
Climate change is a serious problem but a mere symptom of the greater disease.
Every year Nate Hagens gives a talk on Earth Day. I missed the announcement of his talk a month ago, perhaps because I killed my social media accounts, but better late than never.
Nate’s presentation as usual is excellent, and this year he provides thoughts on how the virus may influence our overshoot predicament.
Here are a few of Nate’s predictions and ideas I thought were noteworthy:
The virus gave our economy a heart attack, although it was already sick.
The Great Simplification has begun: a GDP decline of 12-20% is likely this year.
Global peak oil was, with no uncertainty, October 2018.
Diesel availability is at risk because of surplus gasoline (my note: big problem because diesel powers everything we need to survive: tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships).
The financial system has been nationalized: central banks are now both the lender AND buyer of last resort.
Global debt/GDP, which was before the virus already unsustainable at 350%, will now rocket to 450+%, which sets us up for another more acute crisis in the not too distant future.
Poverty will increase in all countries.
Renewable energy is in trouble.
25+% of higher education institutions will go bankrupt.
The experts don’t have answers: they do not understand energy or how our system works.
We need humans to have better bullshit filters: if we don’t use science to help us going forward we have no hope.
We should nationalize the oil industry and drain America last.
Nate concludes with many constructive and positive ideas on how we might respond to our predicament.
Unfortunately Nate did not mention the most important response needed: rapid population reduction. Yes I know that reality denial and the Maximum Power Principle, which govern our behavior, make voluntary population reduction highly improbable, but so do they make improbable all of Nate’s suggestions.
I’m thinking that since it’s unlikely we’ll do anything except react to crises as they unfold we might as well focus on the one and only action that would improve everything: population reduction. It simplifies the conversation, and makes it (theoretically) effective. Much better than talking about many things that we also probably won’t do, but even if we did wouldn’t address the core issue: overshoot.
Imagine this political platform: “We only need to do one thing, and there’s only one thing we need to do, don’t have children unless you win the lottery, so there can be future generations.”
You can find other excellent work by Nate that I’ve posted in the past here.
un-Denial 
