Today’s post includes a recent sobering comment on overshoot reality by un-Denial regular Hideaway that I thought deserved more visibility, and a new essay on acceptance by B, who has recently emerged as one of the best writers about human overshoot.
The ideas of Hideaway and B complement some of the recent discussions here about acceptance and the nature of our species.
P.S. I did not receive permission from B to re-post his essay but I’m hoping that since un-Denial is not monetized he will not object, and I will of course remove the essay if B expresses concern.
By Hideaway: On Radical Reality
The human enterprise of modernity and 8.1+ billion humans is going down. Reduction in available energy is the trigger and there is nothing we can do to stop it, or make it less unpleasant, or save the macrofauna from extinction.
As we build more energy machines of any type, their output increases overall energy available, and used, providing this happens faster than the retirement of old energy producing machines. Over the last few decades we, as in humanity in it’s entirety, have increased fossil fuel use developing more, tearing up the environment more, while increasing the build of renewables.
On a world wide scale, we have not replaced any fossil fuel use, we have just increased all energy use with more fossil fuels being part of that increase, and renewables being part of the increase. At some point growing energy use must stop, unless we make the planet uninhabitable for all life, which means we stop anyway.
Because of our economic system, as soon as we stop growing energy production and use, the price of energy goes up, and we go into recession/depression. It becomes impossible to build ‘new’ stuff of any kind once energy use declines, unless we take the energy from other users, for our ‘new’ builds.
Building more renewables, batteries, EVs, etc., currently means using more fossil fuels to build it all. There is no realistic attempt to build it all with electricity from renewables, nor is that possible. If we diverted existing renewable energy production to, for example, a new mine, then that renewable energy, removed from a city, would have to be made up by increasing fossil fuel generated electricity for the city.
If we ‘ran’ the new mine from new renewables, then these have to be built first, meaning we need the mine for the minerals to build the renewables, or we take minerals from existing users, elsewhere. It’s all just more, more, more and none of the proponents of renewables, including major green organizations want to acknowledge it.
The circular economy can’t work as we cannot physically recycle everything, plus we would need to build all the recycling facilities. If we were to try and do this without increasing total energy use, where does the energy come from to build these new recycling facilities? Other energy users? For the last couple of centuries it’s always come from ‘growth’, especially in energy use. None of us, nor our parents or grandparents, have known a world where the amount of energy available to humanity does anything other than grow.
Because of losses of all materials due to entropy and dissipation into the environment, we will always need mining, of ever lower ore grades, meaning an increasing energy use for mining. It is simply not possible to maintain output from mines once we go to zero energy growth, unless the energy comes from other uses, and users.
Once energy production growth stops, the price of all energy rises, because we need energy production to go up just to maintain the system, as population grows, ore grades decline, etc. If energy production was to fall, the price becomes higher, making everything else cost more. We can see this on a micro scale every time an old coal power plant is closed. On average, the wholesale price of electricity goes up, until compensated for by some newer form of electricity production (the new source taking energy to build).
Visions for the future usually include extra energy efficiency for buildings, etc. but never, ever, include the energy cost of these energy efficiency gains. For example, a simple hand wave about using double glazed or triple glazed windows. To do this, on a worldwide scale, we would need to build a lot of new glass factories, and probably window manufacturers as well. It will take more energy to do this, just like everything else ‘new’.
The phrase ‘build new’ means more energy is required for construction and mining the minerals for the new or expanded factories. The Adaro coal power plant (new) and aluminium smelter (also new) in Indonesia are perfect examples of our predicament. The world needs more aluminium for ‘new’ solar PVs, EVs, wiring, etc. which means more energy use and environmental damage, regardless of whether we use fossil fuels, solar panels, or pumped hydro backup.
Civilization is a Ponzi scheme energy trap, we either grow energy and material use, or we stagnate, and then collapse. Following feedback loops, we see there is no way out of this predicament.
People often claim the future is difficult to predict, yet it is simple, obvious, and highly predictable for humanity as a whole. We will continue to use more energy, mine more minerals, and destroy more of the environment, until we can’t. The first real limit we will experience is oil production, and we may be there already.
Once oil production starts to fall with a vengeance as it must, say 2-3 million barrels/day initially, then accelerating to 4-5 million barrels/day, it will trigger a feedback loop of making natural gas and coal production more difficult as both are totally dependent upon diesel, thus reducing the production of both, or if we prioritize diesel for natural gas and coal production, then other consumers of diesel, like tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships, must use less.
Mining and agriculture will come under pressure, sending prices for all raw materials and food through the roof. World fertilizer use is currently above 500 million tonnes annually. A lot of energy is required to make and distribute fertilizer. World grain yields are strongly correlated to fertilizer use, so less energy means less fertilizer, which means less food, unless we prioritize energy for agriculture by taking energy from and harming some other part of our economy.
If we banned discretionary energy uses to keep essential energy uses going, while overall energy continues to decline, then large numbers of people will lose their jobs and experience poverty, further compounding the problems of scarcity and rising prices.
Money for investing into anything will dry up. If governments print money to help the economy, inflation will negate the effort. If governments increase taxes to fund more assistance, then more people and businesses will be made poorer.
The ability to build anything new quickly evaporates, people everywhere struggle between loss of employment, loss of affordable goods and services, increased taxation, and will be forced to increase the well-being of their immediate ‘group’ to the detriment of ‘others’. Crime rates go through the roof, the blame game increases, with some trying to dispossess others of their resources. This will occur for individuals, groups and countries. Crime and war will further accelerate the decline in energy production, and the production and shipment of goods in our global economy. One after the other, at an accelerating rate, countries will become failed states when the many feedback loops accelerate the fossil fuel decline. Likewise for solar, wind and nuclear.
We rapidly get to a point where our population of 8.1+ billion starts to decline, with starving people everywhere searching for their next meal, spreading from city to country areas, eating everything they can find, while burning everything to stay warm in colder areas during the search for food. Every animal found will eaten. Farming of any type, once the decline accelerates, will not happen, because too many people will be eating the seed, or the farmer. Cows, sheep, horses, chooks, pigs, deer, basically all large animals will succumb because of the millions or billions of guns in existence and starving nomadic people.
Eventually after decades of decline, humans will not be able to be hunter gatherers as we will have made extinct all of megafauna. Whoever is left will be gatherers of whatever food plants have self-seeded and grown wild. Even if we were able to get some type of agriculture going again, there would be no animals to pull plows, all old ‘machinery’ from decades prior would be metal junk, so food would remain a difficult task for humans, unless we found ways to farm rabbits and rats, without metal fencing. While we will use charcoal to melt metals found in scavenged cities, it will limited to producing a few useful tools, like harnesses to put on the slaves plowing the fields, or for keeping the slaves entrapped.
Once we go down the energy decline at an accelerating rate, nothing can stop complete collapse unless we can shrink population much faster than the energy decline, which itself may very well be pointless as we have created such a globalised economy of immense complexity, where fast population decline, has it’s own huge set of problems and feedback loops.
Our complex economy requires a large scale of human enterprise. Reduce the scale, and businesses will have less sales, making everything more expensive. Rapid population decline will mean many businesses won’t just reduce production, but will often stop altogether when the business goes bust.
Because of interdependencies of our complex products, a scarcity of one seemingly uncritical component will have far reaching effects on other critical products. Maintenance parts will become difficult to obtain, causing machinery to fail, in turn causing other machines to fail that depended on the failed machines. Think of a truck delivering parts required to fix trucks. The same applies to production line machines, processing lines at mines, or simple factories making furniture, let alone anything complicated. If we only reach population decline as energy declines the problem is still the same.
So what is radical acceptance? For me, it means: accepting that no single technological civilization based on finite resources is sustainable. Neither in the bronze age, nor in the iron age; let alone in an era of industrial revolutions. None. Why? Because all spend their nest egg — be it fertile topsoil, forests or coal, lithium and copper — a million times faster than it can be replenished. Recycling and “sustainability” practices can only slow down the process somewhat… At least in theory, but rarely in practice. The “circular economy”, together with „renewables” are nothing but fairy tales we tell ourselves to scare off the wolfs at night. Sorry to be this blunt, but the decline of this techno-industrial civilization is inevitable, and is already well underway.
The only type of civilization (if you want to use that term), which proved to be more or less sustainable so far, was a basic hunter-gatherer society; complemented perhaps with some agroforestry, pottery and some low key metallurgy. Anything beyond that inevitably destroyed the soil and the very resource base supporting the entire edifice. With that said, I’m not suggesting that we should immediately go back to the caves and mud huts… That would be impossible for 4 billion of us, entirely supported by large scale agriculture based on artificial fertilizers and a range of pesticides. However, it is important to note, that this is the direction we are headed, with the only question being how fast we will get there and how many humans can be sustained via such a lifestyle.
And this is where acceptance comes into view. Once you understand (not just “know”) that burning through a finite amount of mineral reserves at an exponential pace leads to depletion and environmental degradation at the same time, you start to see how unsustainable any human civilization is. All that technology (in its narrowest technical sense) does is turning natural resources into products and services useful for us, at the cost of polluting the environment. Technology use is thus not only the root cause of our predicament, but it can only accelerate this process. More technology — more depletion — more pollution. Stocks drawn down, sinks filling up. Simple as that. Of course you can elaborate on this matter as long as you wish, conjuring up all sorts of “game changer” and “wonder” machines from fusion to vertical gardens, the verdict remains the same. It. Is. All. Unsustainable. Period.
There are no clean technologies, and without dense energy sources like fossil fuels there wont be any technology — at least not at the scale we see today.
Many people say: Oh this is so depressing! And I ask: why? Because your grand-grand children will have to work on a field and grow their own food? Or that you might not even have grand-grand children? I don’t mean that I have no human feelings. I have two children whom I love the most. I have a good (very good) life — supported entirely by this technological society. Sure, I would love to see this last forever, and that my kin would enjoy such a comfortable life, but I came to understand that this cannot last. Perhaps not even through my lifetime. I realize that I most probably will pass away from an otherwise totally treatable disease, just because the healthcare system will be in absolute shambles by the time I will need it the most. But then what? Such is life: some generations experience the ‘rising tide lift all boats’ period in a civilization’s lifecycle, while others have to live through its multi-decade (if not centuries) long decline.
I did feel envy, shame, and anxiety over that, but as the thoughts I’ve written about above have slowly sunk in, these bad feelings all went away. It all started look perfectly normal, and dare I say: natural. No one set out to design this modern iteration of a civilization with an idea to base it entirely on finite resources; so that it will crash and burn when those inputs start to run low, and the pollution released during their use start to wreck the climate and the ecosystem as a whole. No. It all seemed like just another good idea. Why not use coal, when all the woods were burnt? Why not turn to oil then, when the easily accessible part of our coal reserves started to run out? At the time — and at the scale of that time — it all made perfect sense. And as we got more efficient, and thus it all got cheaper, more people started to hop onboard… And why not? Who wouldn’t want to live a better life through our wondrous technologies? The great sociologist C. Wright Mills summed up this process the best, when writing about the role of fate in history:
Fate is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people.
Scientifically speaking this civilization, just like the many others preceding it, is yet another self organizing complex adaptive system. It seeks out the most accessible energy source and sucks it dry, while increasing the overall entropy of the system. We as a species are obeying the laws of thermodynamics, and the rule set out in the maximum power principle. Just like galaxies, stars, a pack of wolves, fungi or yeast cells. There is nothing personal against humanity in this. We are just a bunch of apes, playing with fire.
Once I got this, I started to see this whole process, together with our written history of the past ten thousand years, as an offshoot of natural evolution. Something, which is rapidly reaching its culmination, only to be ended as a failed experiment. Or, as Ronald Wright put it brilliantly in his book A Short History of Progress:
Letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while, but in the end a bad idea.
So, no. I’m not depressed at all. It was fun to see how far a species can go, but also reassuring that it was a one off experiment. Once this high tech idiocy is over, it will be impossible to start another industrial revolution anyway. There will be no more easy to mine, close to surface ores and minerals. Everything left behind by this rapacious society will remain buried beneath a thousand feet of rocks, and will be of such a low quality that it will not worth the effort. Lacking resources to maintain them, cities, roads, bridges will rust and crumble into the rising seas, while others will be replaced by deserts, or lush forests. The reset button has been pressed already, it just takes a couple of millennia for a reboot to happen.
Contradictory as it may sound: this is what actually gives me hope. Bereft of cheap oil, and an access to Earth’s abundant mineral reserves, future generations of humans will be unable to continue the ecocide. There will be no new lithium mines, nor toxic tailings or hazardous chemicals leaching into the groundwater. Our descendants will be forced to live a more sustainable, more eco-friendly life. There will be no other way: the ecocide will end. This also means, that there will be no “solution” to climate change, nor ecological collapse. They both will run their due course, and take care of reducing our numbers to acceptable levels. Again, don’t fret too much about it: barring a nuclear conflict, this process could last well into the next century, and beyond. The collapse of modernity will take much longer than any of us could imagine, and will certainly look nothing like what we see in the movies. And no, cutting your emissions will not help. At all. Live your life to its fullest. Indulge in this civilization, or retreat to a farm. It’s all up to you, and your values. This is what I mean under the term, radical acceptance.
We are a species of this Earth, and paraphrasing Tom Murphy, we either succeed with the rest of life on this planet or go down together. Nurturing hope based technutopian “solutions”, and trying to remain optimistic does not solve anything. This whole ordeal is unsustainable. What’s more, it was from the get go… And that which is unsustainable will not be sustained. And that is fine. We, as a species are part of a much bigger whole, the web of life, and returning to our proper place as foraging humanoids will serve and fit into that whole much better than any technutopian solution could.
Steve takes a local perspective and discusses what a wise community and individual might do to become more self-reliant and resilient, and to prepare for the collapse of our high tech, energy intensive society.
My premise is that at the global, nation-state, or even state level, the current hierarchical system is not capable of climbing down from overshoot, or anticipating and preparing for a lower energy, lower consumption future. Any efforts to prepare must be done at the personal, and then small, local level, where like minded people can coalesce and work as a cooperative community to make the needed transition in lifestyle.
Local self-reliance is foremost about the basics: food, water and shelter. There are abundant resources online and printed that range from the Foxfire Book series, which captured lore from Appalachian settlers, to the most up to date beans and bullets prepper website. Local self-reliance is not about saving the knowledge we humans have accumulated, or western culture (god forbid), and it is not even a solution. It is simply a greater than zero chance to get some humans through the bottleneck.
Collecting books is NOT enough. Sure, learn from others, to avoid newbie mistakes, but actual hands on doing is needed, even if the first step is just growing a tomato plant on your balcony or patio. Don’t be afraid of small failures. More is learned from mistakes than successes.
A short time frame response to collapse is the solitary prepper, for those with the means to do so. But a longer term and more resilient response to collapse and the coming new arrangement is a collective effort. Our forebearers survived the African veldt, and then went on to overrun the world, because of group cooperation. Any success at surviving the coming bottleneck will be a small, local, group effort. Think Dunbar’s number or smaller.
Cooperation is not an easy thing to accomplish, humans being a fractious, conniving species, with a hard-wired dark side permanently bound to our empathetic, benevolent side. Recall the back to the land hippie commune movement of the 60’s and 70’s, when environmental awareness and cultural turmoil drove many to try intentional communities. Virtually every one failed. In part due to ignorance of the earthly details of self-reliance and provisioning through human labor, but also due to governance and group cooperation dysfunction. Most intentional communities were ideology driven (Vietnam, civil rights, etc.), but few had long-term sustainability as their central purpose. And it’s damn hard work.
Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 communes existed in the U.S. in the 1960s and ‘70s with about 75 in the small state of Vermont, making it one of the epicenters of the experiment.
Describing what a sustainable small community would look like is fairly straightforward for the physical needs dimensions of food, water, and shelter, however the social dimensions of hierarchy, communal agreements, security, and governance are the difficult puzzles to solve.
The Amish are an example of a culture that has chosen to be very intentional about what technology they adopt. In general, farming and practical avocations that provide the essentials for rural life are the center of their economy. The size of Amish communities is constrained by a reasonable trip by horse to conduct business and socializing. There is, however, a tradeoff. Their rigid social structure is paternal and religion based, but has shown staying power, with many examples of effective cooperation, such as barn raising. Full religious commitment, and submitting to rigid community rules, will not be acceptable to many modern humans.
That said, even Amish are not long term sustainable, but a model to consider as a step down from where we are, and a kind of “training wheels” for adjusting to the next step down towards living within the local carrying capacity.
Being set in their ways, Amish will likely suffer like everyone else when flexibility in fast changing conditions is required, but they will at least already have strong social connections and a tradition of group effort.
Before cooperating at the level of a barn raising or similar large group efforts, and after simply being a good neighbor, is the level where barter and more involved trading favors need to be navigated.
I am still trying to figure out barter, and trading more substantial favors with neighbors takes time to develop trust and some sort of shared value system that is not denominated in dollars.
How many eggs is a bale of hay worth? What if you have too many eggs right now, but will need the hay next winter. Maybe eggs are free in the spring, but quite dear in winter, when hens have stopped laying. This is just one example of the myriad components of a truly local economy.
How does one remember all these transactions to make sure you are being a fair trading partner? Money turns out to be real handy unless it gets too concentrated and unleashes the dysfunctional side of capitalism or is welded by the more sociopathic among us.
The point is, it will take time to achieve a sophisticated level of cooperation, and is not something that will go smoothly if it has to happen immediately after a crisis ends BAU.
All future self-reliant communities will consist of collections of self-reliant households. Therefore developing self-reliant skills is important for all possible futures. It is time to simplify, reduce consumption, and prioritize. As John Michael Greer has said for years, “collapse now and avoid the rush.” Work on becoming a potential positive contributor to a “collapse community” should one emerge.
Here is a little on my background and personal journey towards self-reliance.
I was raised on a farm in Indiana, and left the farm as many did during the Earl Butz era, to work as an engineer for the same company my entire career. I was a small cog in the industry that builds extractive infrastructure for oil companies. Sigh.
After becoming aware it took me a long time to get off the treadmill. I was very lucky to have a wife who shares my world view.
I am now doing what little I can to pay restitution for my past. We are transitioning 40 acres (17 hectares) to a permaculture based system with food plants that are native or fill the same ecological role. I am learning skills and taking incremental steps to becoming more self-reliant.
We have quite a large garden and grow about 30 types of vegetables. We dehydrate, can, freeze, and ferment, including hard cider! We seed save many vegetables, and are working on saving more.
We have planted a dozen apple trees, ten cherry trees, eight pear trees, six mulberry, and hundreds of hazelnut and chestnut trees. The hazels are now 11 years old and in full production, the chestnuts are slower and are just coming on.
Our wooded areas were pasture until about 30 years ago, so are in transition, mostly brush and brambles. We have cut in trails, and have planted oak and hard maple to speed succession a bit.
We heat with wood in a Russian furnace, which is a type of masonry stove. We are not yet off grid, and it will be a huge lifestyle change when that happens, but we have two PV arrays, and capture rain water off the pole barn for watering trees and the garden. A cistern for water storage is in the works. Many more projects are planned to increase self-reliance, and to be contributors to whatever local community emerges.
We are slowly engaging neighbors in joint efforts. We share the cost and upkeep of a small tractor with two neighbors. I own a cider press that I share with the neighbors. A neighbor had some logging done, but the tops and branches left by the loggers were more than he could ever get to, so he let me harvest firewood.
Here are some tips for increasing self-reliance that I have learned, in no particular order of importance:
Eat the elephant one bite at a time – it’s overwhelming to think about doing all the things needed to be maximally self-reliant, or to create a local community. Just do one small thing, then another, rinse and repeat. (Although a bit of urgency is warranted given world affairs.)
If at all possible, move to a place with access to land to grow food. However you slice it, getting out of urban centers and figuring out how to be part of growing food, or learning a craft, or both, will be better than collapsing in place.
Grow food with priority to calories like potatoes and beans, not lettuce; perennials like fruit trees; and chickens- just a couple layers will help with kitchen scraps and learning husbandry.
Preserve food- can it, dehydrate it, ferment it, and freeze it while you can.
Reduce energy use- by whatever means you can afford/accomplish.
Build redundancy- more than one way to get water, more than one way to heat the house, etc.
Learn to repair things- house, car, clothes, appliances, etc.
Make things- clothes, chicken coops, root cellar, flour, beer, etc.
Security- think about how you might protect yourself, or be part of a collective security arrangement. Depending on location and how things play out, increased violence is very likely.
I have scores of bookmarked sites about homesteading, gardening and permaculture, and three book shelves full in our library, but these tend to focus on improving the skills of an individual.
Here are a few resources relevent to building community strategies and skills that I have found useful:
I volunteer at a local folk school. It’s a good way to acquire skills, and maybe link up with like minded people.
A book I found helpful for imagining a transition path to self-reliance is Sharon Astyk’s Depletion and Abundance.
Chris Smaje has written extensively about what a small farm economy might look like, and his book A Small Farm Future argues for a reversal of urbanization back to individual farms, and identifies local governance issues that need to be worked out.
The Living Energy Farm has ideas for small scale community energy systems.
I do not follow the transition towns movement, as I hear little about them any more. They had quite the buzz for a while, but perhaps tried to do too much? Maybe someone here knows if transition towns offer any useful resources?
I hope others add to this list of resources in the comments.
Rob here: If a substantial list of resources emerges I will copy and organize them somewhere for easy reference.
Today’s guest essay by paqnation (aka Chris) tackles a challenging topic with deep ties to Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory which inspires un-Denial.com.
Chris discusses yet another strange behavior that is unique to our species.
And how hard it is to do the right thing in our modern world.
I have been fixating on evil lately (on an individual level). And by evil I am just limiting it to anything that degrades ecological integrity. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that 100% of my everyday actions are steeped in evil. There is nothing I do that does not involve evil towards the planet. Just typing this essay on my internet computer in my house powered by electricity with the heater on. Everything in my home used up resources and fossil fuels to get to me. And I pay for it by working at a corporation that only creates more evil in the world. Jeez! Too much evil within evil within evil, to even comprehend. Driving my car is the same story. Ditto for eating my grocery store bought food. Every action a person takes in this civilization already has loads of evil baked into it. So what is the opposite of this. Planting trees, gardening, rewilding land, composting my toilet waste? Yes, but I’m sure there is lots of evil within that, just to get to the non-evil deed. Besides, I don’t do any of those things. And even if I did, ok fine, maybe I get my 100% evil actions down to 99%.
It’s obvious that there is a threshold for an acceptable amount of evil that Mother Earth can tolerate and would even expect. Heck, just picking up a piece of deadwood and using it to make a fire is evil. So there is no way to avoid it. The ecological overshoot graphs we’ve all seen time and time again explain what this “threshold” limit looks like. Just another thing that comes down to balance, harmony, and equilibrium. Which, of course, human civilization, by default, cannot achieve.
That got me focusing on my greatest act of evil. It feels like something related to my eating habits would be the winner. The wasting of all the food throughout my lifetime. Or just the day-by-day participation in this horrendous cycle of how we eat in today’s world. But this is more about the accumulation that makes it so evil. I’m looking for a single act that can be labeled “most evil thing I’ve ever done”. Flying on a plane maybe? Prior to my awakening to reality, I was guilty of some horrible acts. On multiple occasions I have dumped trash/junk out in the desert to avoid landfill fees. When I was a teenager, I once changed my car oil and dumped the old oil on the side of the road. At least I’ve never started a forest fire, which has to take the cake for the most evil one person can do (or maybe I’m not thinking hard enough). But I believe I have a clear-cut winner that most of us will be guilty of and does not happen until we are dead.
A lot of people write about nature’s contract or the social contract. Here is a great link on the topic by Tom Murphy: In Breach of Contract.
The core of these “contracts” seems to me is the create/sustain/end part. The “end” portion is where I think our biggest act of evil may rest. We are the only species in which the dead do not return naturally to the eco-system.
Long-life coffins, clothes & decor, deep burial and embalming (which contaminates the soil and groundwater) result in the dead remaining intact for a very long time. Overall, embalming for burial uses over 800,000 gallons of toxic chemicals every year. As well as the costs thru time of mowing around your grave and re-erecting your crumbling gravestone. Not knowing much about this topic, I found out that we put coffins (wooden and metal) inside bigger cement coffins. Our fear of critters eating our corpse is laughably insane. This type of burial practice is just over a hundred years old, which makes perfect sense considering the insanity of modernity and being alive in the most abnormal moment in human history.
Cremation (which I have always preferred) is even worse and turns your body into air pollution and barren ash. Studies of emissions reveal that cremation turns people into at least 46 different pollutants. Some of these, like nitrous oxides and heavy metals, remain in the atmosphere for up to 100 years causing ozone depletion and acid rain. Cremation emits mercury, sulfur dioxide, and, in the US, about 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions into our air every year. Our bodies, on average, take three hours to burn in a crematorium, using up large quantities of fuels like electricity and natural gas. Once again, our fear of critters eating our corpse is laughably insane.
I was bouncing around the internet to get this info. And maybe my stats and figures can be debated, but I think everyone who is this far along into their collapse journey can easily understand how giving my 220 pounds of resources back to Mother Earth is much more beneficial than disintegrating my resources into ashes or keeping them preserved in a metal box inside of a concrete box. (and this is why it feels like my final act will be my most evil)
I can almost hear the absurd conversation with our “Creator/Sustainer/End” in my head. It goes something like:
Mother Earth: Ok, here’s the contract. I am going to create you using my resources, then sustain you with my resources, and when you die I will end you by consuming your resources so that I can keep creating and sustaining in this beautiful cycle of life. Deal?
Modern Humans: Ok, I’ll take you up on your offer for creating and sustaining me, but when it comes time for the end portion, I will renege on our deal and not allow you to use my resources for your benefit. In fact, I’m gonna go out with one last bang and continue harming you even though I’m dead. Deal?
Take, take, take. Never give. Just follows the normal human civilization theme of “everything we do and how we do it is wrong (evil)”.
Natural burials and green burials seem like a better way to go. A quick definition in case you’ve never heard of green burial: designed to have a minimal environmental impact and conserve natural resources. It emphasizes simplicity and sustainability. In a typical green burial, the body is not cremated, prepared with chemicals, or buried in a concrete vault. And some of the green burial sites sell it with options where you are buried with no casket and then a tree is planted on top of you. Having a tree sprout above my corpse is a beautiful idea that I would have mocked (or been grossed out by) prior to my “awakening”.
Unfortunately, the cost is high and availability is low. Average pricing (for my state) is $5,000. And for comparison, traditional burial is $8,000 and cremation is $1,500 (although, when my Dad passed away a few years ago, the cremation cost $2,500. No service or fancy urn. Just the bare minimum). And it looks like there is an even better way called human composting. Which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. But this is only available in a handful of states (mine is not one of them). And cost is $5,000 – $7,000.
I will definitely be looking into these alternatives more because I prefer my final act to not be evil if I can help it (and afford it). Might be my one and only good deed towards ecological integrity. There should be a legal, easy & inexpensive way to put our dead naked bodies into the soil for two obvious reasons. First and foremost, so that Mother Earth gets full maximum benefit. And second so that modern humans can at least honor a portion of our contract.
One last note. I came up with this topic by staring at the table below. Sounds weird, I know. I created this simple table a while back (which I’m sure can be nitpicked to death) for the sole purpose of keeping me on track. My bargaining phase gets me to waste time chasing magical solutions. Looking at this chart helps bring me back down to reality. Another positive outcome is that it gets me thinking about stuff I that I’ve never thought about.
Thanks for listening, Chris
Rob here, I can confirm Chris’ research because one of my university summer jobs was making precast concrete coffin liners.
Chris’ essay reminded me of a comedy skit on peak oil from the 2005 play by Robert Newman titled Apocalypso Now.
It’s a fun reminder of how many of us doomers thought 20 years ago.
If you’re in a hurry, skip ahead to the 6 minute mark for the relevant joke.
Physicist Dr. Tom Murphy is one of the most aware and smart people I know of. He’s also a wise man that cares about things that matter, and tries to set a good example with his lifestyle.
I’ve followed and learned from Dr. Murphy for 15 years, and have watched him grow through stages:
Learning about energy in preparation for teaching a university course.
Becoming aware of, and worried about, our total dependence on non-renewable depleting energy.
Researching renewable energy, building a PV system for his home to gain hands on experience, and realizing an energy transition will be very hard.
Changing his lifestyle to reduce energy and materials use.
After a rocket ride through science, I am hanging up the gloves, feeling a little ashamed and embarrassed to have devoted so much of my life to what I now see as a misguided cause that has done more harm than good in this world.
My path away from science involved a number of key elements.
I became aware that some of the pillars on which modern life is based were necessarily temporary. Growth on a finite planet would have to stop—both in physical terms like energy, but also in economic terms.
Fossil fuels, upon which we are utterly dependent, would soon taper off, being a finite resource.
Fertilizer and agriculture critically depend on fossil fuels, so human population could experience a large correction later this century.
The turbulence of a transition this momentous could be so disruptive (resource wars, economies in ruins) that all my work testing general relativity might be lost and rendered meaningless (as well as all the things my colleagues work on).
Renewable technologies are not as easy as they sound: fossil fuels do things that the electricity from renewables has a hard time replicating, and the materials demands ramp up extraction and its associated ills.
Biodiversity loss (extinctions, tragic population declines) spell an ultimate dire fate if we do not heed the warnings: we are obviously now powerful enough to destroy large swaths of the ecosphere and community of life.
Technology is what created the predicament, and constitutes an inappropriate response, as we will never master all knowledge and will inevitably create unintended consequences.
An energy substitute for fossil fuels is the last thing we need, as energy is what powers our expanding terminal encroachment on the living world.
Science is a narrow tool: powerful and tenacious like a pit bull, but having no intrinsic wisdom or context. It concerns itself with what we can do, not what we should do.
I now think a significant portion of my adult life has been mis-spent. Scientific institutions (and university STEM departments) are, to me, a sort of day camp for smart people. Our society approves of these institutions and rewards its practitioners, in part based on the misguided notion that this is where solutions to our problems will originate. Instead, science/technology is far more likely to produce the seed corn for another generation of ecological destruction.
In short, I came to realize I was one of the bad guys. I like the saying that everyone is the hero of their own story. Part of me would certainly like to believe so, but no—I’m still a villain, if unwittingly so. The projects I worked on demanded copious energy, resources, and travel far out of line with care for the natural world. The result in no way helped the more-than-human world. I can say the same about virtually all science. It’s extremely focused on short-term, narrow-boundary benefits for humans at the ultimately-unaffordable expense of ecological health. I lament our society’s squandering of talent that presently pushes on the very things that make our situation more precarious.
I suppose an item I could append to the above list of factors contributing to my exit (thus dialing it up to eleven) is: Science, as it is practiced in our society, is a nearly perfect expression of human supremacy. It’s all for us (humans); it’s all about us. Most science is, therefore, in service to the Human Reich. I’m tired of being associated with that team.
As I find myself more on the outside of “team science” these days (I would like to be accepted on “team life,” despite a steady record of crushing losses), I am reminded of a moving song by Dar Williams called The Great Unknown. I recommend listening to it or looking over the lyrics. It’s not a perfect fit, but it hits on some key themes.
I have much less impressive accomplishments in my life but went through similar stages of awareness and I think I know how Murphy feels. I wish him good health and some happiness for the remainder of his life.
This essay was written last year by Karl North and published on his site here. Karl offers a hopeful vision for how we might organize ourselves and live a pleasant life after the collapse of industrial civilization, by building on the research of Graeber and Wengrow in their book “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity“.
Here is a summary of the book:
“A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.”
Many of us, I’m sure, would like to find reasons for optimism.
Karl kindly agreed to write the following introduction to his essay, summarizing the reasons he holds an optimistic view of our future.
Introduction
In this essay I drew extensively on a book by Graeber and Wengrow because it overturns the “small egalitarian bands” conventional wisdom of stone age society to reveal the variety of forms of socio-political and cultural organization that humanity is capable of, despite severe energy and resource constraints. This evidence of the human potential to adapt to a diversity of physical and social environments suggests that human society at some sharply reduced demographics could weather the end of the oil age.
My most persuasive model of the social forms this could take comes from living in a Europe dotted with villages whose centuries-old architecture indicates specific social forms. To survive, these socially dense nodal clusters required a tight social, political and cultural organization that, in turn enabled a Commons managed without tragedy that mitigated the inevitable inequality, family scale agrarian enterprises enhanced with regular inputs from neighbors, for example at harvest time or pig slaughter day, and defense against invaders, all of which maximized the possibilities of community well-being. The village I inhabited with my family for a number of years was typical of the genre, and although partially deserted, still offered constant evidence of how things worked when fully inhabited.
Typically, these agrarian communities are small enough for the population to be within the Dunbar Number of 150 effective relationships. Even the larger “market towns”, often walled towns like this one, were organized to survive by relying on outlying villages for food and fighters in times of trouble.
All in all, my reading of European history combined with the enduring physical evidence suggests that life in such communities was laborious but provided a satisfying level of material comfort. David and Marcia Pimental’s pioneering work of food and energy cost accounting reveals that while the net energy of industrial agriculture is negative – 10 units of energy expended for one unit gained – the most efficient subsistence agriculture generates a positive net energy ratio of around 3/1. That seems small, but the historical evidence I have exemplified above suggests that with time-tested forms of simple technology and social organization, post-petroleum communities can use that small surplus to go beyond minimal survival to recreate a rewarding and durable life.
When global empires start to fall apart, the structure of interdependent elements accumulated over the years imparts an inertia that appears to sustain them for a while past their normal collapse date. In the case of the US empire, this illusory momentum, combined with a shocking degree of mendacity and deception in the mass media, is gravely misleading the US public. This is the proverbial Wile E. Coyote effect, where Wile E. has sped off the cliff but is apparently not yet in free fall. But bit by bit what US citizens are actually observing in their daily lives begins to contradict the official narrative from government leaders and media. This creates a foreboding –an inexplicable anxiety, and people cast about for explanations, making the general public an easy prey to the series of fear campaigns we have seen in recent years. However, eventually the contradictions become so sharp as to discredit official narratives, and revolts begin. States are expensive to maintain, and depend on cheap energy sources. As energy and other resource depletion weakens states, and authorities resort to palliatives that only aggravate the crisis, chaos reigns and opportunities arise for breakaway communities to form. What are their possibilities of social organization? What kinds of freedom should they embrace or preclude? This essay draws on a new view of human history to briefly frame discussion of these questions.
The dominant view of the long stretch of human history has humanity progressing stepwise inevitably from unconsciously derived egalitarian bands to statehood as the end of its history of social evolution. Graeber and Wengrow’s massive revisionist work, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, uses the latest archeology and anthropology to paint a less rigid progression where populations consciously experimented with different forms of social organization, often in sharp contrast to their neighbors. Societies found many ways of gaining freedom from subjugation, either by moving away from oppressive regimes, or at least from their urban centers toward peripheries where they could practice civil disobedience and “consciously shape new social realities”[1]. Framing this trio – escape, revolt and creative social construction – as categories of freedom or liberation, the authors discover many patterns of their expression across history.
According to conventional history, the world has been populated with states of various sorts for several thousand years. Graeber and Wengrow’s investigation reveals that this is only partly true. State structures are impressive, so they receive undue attention in historical narratives. However, states/civilizations have risen and fallen many times in their history of over five millennia. In the intervals after collapse, peoples have experimented with less oppressive forms. Also, even during the most totalitarian regimes, as one moves from centers to peripheries, state power ebbs somewhat. Rulers in many regimes have exercised diminishing power beyond their capital cities. An example is the 30% of the food economy in the latter years of the USSR that developed informally from popular initiative outside the state-run farms. All through history, a focus on fringes or outbacks reveals peasant social structures that present an often-fractious contrast to the more obedient lives of citizens nearer urban centers of power. Geopolitical analyst Rolo Slavskiy observes:
For pretty much all of human history, the elites and specialized classes of warriors have made war on one another for one reason or another while the peasants simply stuck together and did their best to make it through the war in one way or another.
So, as the US imperial juggernaut moves farther into degrowth, the chains of command and supply essential to the ravenous consumption of cities will weaken and finally disintegrate, and chaos and civil unrest will plague metropoles and their suburbs most severely[2]. Populations in rural areas potentially can be the first to profit from failing dominant structures, distance themselves politically from central control and construct the degree of political and economic autarchy that will be necessary to survive.
We can draw insights about the disintegration of Western civilization and its US center in particular from the history of the many civilizations that rose and fell in the last five thousand years. Conventional thinking depicts any emergence of an urban center as the culmination of an evolutionary process in ‘statehood’, which Graeber and Wengrow described as including three essentials – a monopoly on violence, a charismatic leadership, and an administrative bureaucracy.
As a historical model for the collapse of US industrial society, it would be intriguing to use the only large pre-Columbian city that existed in the area that became the United States – Cahokia in the Mississippi valley – which attained a population of forty thousand by the end of the first century AD. Cahokia ruled a large area mainly by violence (warfare and human sacrifice) and great ritual spectacles that drew participants from throughout its empire to enhance the status of elites and create cohesion. States disintegrate at different rates: compared to the Roman empire, Cahokia fell apart relatively rapidly, perhaps partly because it lacked the third essential element of statehood – an administrative bureaucracy.
What is interesting for purposes of comparison is how it fell apart – people just left the region, which, despite its highly fertile alluvial soil, became a kind of no man’s land for generations. As Graeber and Wengrow describe it,
Whatever the precise combination of factors at play, by about AD 1350 mass defection had depopulated the region. Just as the metropolis of Cahokia was founded through its rulers’ ability to bring diverse populations together, often from across long distances, in the end the descendants of those people simply walked away. The Vacant Quarter implies a self-conscious rejection of everything the city of Cahokia stood for.
Among the descendants of Cahokian subjects, migration is often framed as implying the restructuring of an entire social order, merging our three elementary freedoms into a simple project of emancipation: to move away, to disobey and to build new social worlds.[3]
Later in the post-Cahokian Mississippi valley, European explorers found people experimenting with petty chiefdoms and mini-republics governed by village councils that engaged in lengthy political and philosophical debate. Farther north, European invaders found larger scale diplomatic institutions like the League of Five Nations, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, which was preserving a kind of Pax Iroquoiana over a wide territory without anything that could be defined as a state.
Elsewhere in the world, Graeber and Wengrow also find “great hospitality zones” that have existed at various times in history without any administrative or authoritarian hierarchies, held together only by common culture or far-flung trading networks.[4] They describe many regimes throughout history as city-states, in which, as the term suggests, power diminished with distance from the city center. In many city states for instance, outlying satellite communities paid tribute to the central authority but otherwise went their own way and created their own social reality.
Hence, as the US declines as a state, we might consider the loss of administrative control, like the lack of it in Cahokia, as a harbinger of collapse. At the same time, the diversity of social arrangements that replaced Cahokia widens the scope of possibilities and helps frame the question of how to reshape the social space liberated during the US collapse as the opportunity arises.
What Kind of Freedom?
The trio of freedoms concept that Graeber and Wengrow propose initially sounds simple, but the devil is in the rights and duties spelled out or implied in the third freedom – to create a new social reality, as we shall see.
In the polarized US, the advocates of a variety of viewpoints have tossed around the concept of freedom like a political football until it is deflated of any clear meaning. Although most everyone can agree that a social contract should curtail some sorts of freedom, ranging from running stop signs all the way to premeditated murder; beyond that, the question becomes murkier, or at least more complex.
Highly visible at one pole are advocates of “free market capitalism”, which for some self-described conservatives appears to mean that in the domain of the economy just about anything goes, and furthermore, everything that occurs springs from the natural “invisible hand” of anonymous “market forces”. Hence, their logic goes, everyone will enjoy freedom so long as the public (as in government) does not interfere in the “free market”. One might object that the US capitalist system has evolved to the point where monopoly control reigns in every sector of the economy. In other words, most economic decision making, which pretty much shapes our lives, is in the hands of an elite minority that acts mainly in their own private interest, and thus undermines the imagined freedom of the majority. The trouble is, conservatives tend to focus on individual freedoms and overlook over-arching system-level power structures.
An instance of falling into that trap is the libertarian conservative who complained that an oil company’s hostile takeover muscled him out of a small business based on his invention of a more efficient electric battery, and buried the invention so that it would never compete with energy from oil. Had he an elementary knowledge of political economy – the study of power relations in a social system – he might have understood how the unfettered economic freedom he supported was his downfall. Conservatives’ advocacy of an economic system free of government interference also conflicts with their support for government-subsidized industries, expensive foreign wars that underwrite a lucrative weapons industry, protective tariffs, etc.
At another prominent political pole are those, often self-described as liberals, who traditionally champion freedoms defined in the constitutional Bill of Rights, such as speech and assembly, justice by fair trial and control of one’s person and private life. Liberals acknowledge imperfections in the free market system, but count on government regulatory agencies to fix the flaws. However, equally as ignorant as conservatives of power structures at the whole system level, they fail to understand that every such agency long ago fell victim to ‘regulatory capture’ by the very industry it was mandated to regulate. What is worse, liberals are especially prey to the illusion of government as elected servants of the people, whereas, due to the nature of the US structure of power relations, it is more like a stage show, where politicians promise to serve us, but then mostly serve the power elite who fund them. In the succinct synopsis of an early Supreme Court Justice, one can have most of the wealth in the hands of the few, or one can have democracy, but not both.[5]
Complicating the question of freedom these days is that in some ways conservatives and liberals seem to have switched roles, or at least ideals. Driven emotionally by a mass media so politicized against the Trump administration that it dropped all pretense of journalism, liberals have flouted all the civil liberties they used to champion in a frantic attempt to fraudulently remove an elected president whose administration in the end did no more damage to the nation than most others. Both major political parties have practiced electoral fraud for a long time, but once elected, US administrations have rarely experienced such an illegal attempt at removal. Meanwhile, because the media morphed into a weapon as the attack dog of the Democratic Party, it lost all credibility among conservatives. Consequently, when the media all in lockstep obediently trotted out a highly questionable pandemic narrative, conservatives had acquired some immunity against its scare campaign, and thus became the new champions of all the civil liberties that were violated by the pandemic lockdown policies.
In sum, it appears that groups at both poles of the polity are being snookered in different ways. In both cases it stems from the ability of ruling elites to keep the public in the dark regarding the many ways that they exercise their power, or at least deflect our attention from it. It seems to be human nature to easily fall for elaborate hoaxes, false flags, and other fictitious official narratives about how the world works, narratives that elites relentlessly fabricate to deceive us.
It is now an open question who will fall for the next campaign of fear. During another time of tumult, appalled at the frenzied mood of the industrial revolution, a 19th century French poet expressed his revulsion, writing, “Cité, fourmillant de rêves” (the metropole, an anthill swarming with dreams) where “alles ist gleichnis” (all is illusion).[6] Today we live in a similar time of outlandish moods, often indoctrinated, where the most preposterous and fantastical things can happen. Yesterday, no doubt spurred by the anti-Russian hatred spewing from German media and even its leadership, a crowd paraded in front of the German Reichstag in Berlin waving the swastika flag and calling for the genocide of the Russian people. Russians must be thinking: Did 27 million of us die in vain? Meanwhile it is said that here and there on the walls of Ukrainian villages is mysteriously appearing a mural of this babushka of legend; her red flag for most Russians now memorializing their victory over the scorched earth terror of the Nazi Operation Barbarossa.
Is it perhaps true that history moves in cycles, and that we must relive it again and again, “first as tragedy, then as farce”?[7] The present is another time of tumult where elites, desperate to preserve power, subject us to repeated psyops – well planned schemes of psychological conditioning either to fear or to hate – such that whole populations are swept up in episodes of mass psychosis.
Under these circumstances, maybe the question of what freedoms are likely to contribute to building a new form of civilization (and which ones are not) is a discussion better left to await calmer times. Perhaps this essay is only an attempt to set the stage for that conversation by 1) exploring the wreckage of current uses of freedom and 2) raising awareness of advances in the understanding of human history that display a much greater variety in the forms of society that the species has chosen, and thus suggest possibilities for the future. In the course of constructing a new social reality amid the disintegration of the old, I think we will need to take a holistic approach to what freedoms to incorporate, asking how particular freedoms might impact all sectors of society. A critical question will be an old one: how to strike the right balance between private and public rights, between individual liberty and the common good.
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. Ajit Varki is a co-originator of the Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory which explains why my species exists with its uniquely power intelligence, and why, despite this intelligence, is unable to see and act on its obvious state of overshoot that threatens the survival of itself and many other species.
I started this blog in 2013 to spread awareness of Dr. Varki’s theory because I believe all possible paths to reducing the coming suffering caused by overshoot must start with an understanding of MORT.
Evidence for this is that to date all environmental initiatives, climate change agreements, energy transition plans, degrowth movements, etc. have utterly failed to change our trajectory, and I’m certain will continue to fail, unless MORT is acknowledged.
It’s simply not possible to craft a useful to response to our overshoot reality until the majority becomes aware that a powerful genetic force is blocking its ability to see the reality.
Unfortunately, there’s a Catch-22: MORT predicts that MORT will be denied and therefore if MORT is correct then MORT will never be acknowledged.
Perhaps someone smarter than me will figure out a path around this Catch-22, I don’t know. Regardless, I still find value in MORT because it keeps me sane by providing a scientific explanation for why so many are so blind to so much that is so obvious.
The Catch-22 may explain why after 10 years of work I have built very little momentum and have scant few successes at spreading awareness of MORT into the 99% of citizens and leaders that aggressively deny reality.
The last interview with Dr. Ajit Varki occurred in 2017 at my prompting by Alex Smith of Radio Ecoshock. Unfortunately, as predicted by MORT, Alex shortly thereafter forgot about MORT and has spent the last 6 years reporting on the coming climate disaster and wondering why we do nothing meaningful about it. If you listen to the interview you will see that Alex at the time understood the answer, then his brain subsequently blocked this understanding.
I was pleased to learn that Varki was interviewed yesterday by Rachel Donald of Planet: Critical. Thank you to Rachel for her initiative, I played no role in setting up this interview. I have been impressed by some of Rachel’s prior work such as this interview she did with Joseph Merz.
Let’s hope that Rachel’s denial genes are sufficiently defective, like mine, so that she helps to spread the MORT message on an ongoing basis. MORT is central to everything that Rachel reports on so we’ll know shortly if she has normal denial genes and is captured by the Catch-22.
In the interview Varki introduces a new idea by proposing that we put more females in positions of power. Apparently females tend to deny reality less than males, as demonstrated by their higher rate of depression, and are more empathetic, both qualities we desperately need today.
Given the 50/50 polarized nature of politics today it does not take much of a voting block to swing an outcome. Perhaps if we target females with overshoot awareness they will abandon useless left/right politics and vote as a block for female leaders that support the only policy that will reduce suffering and improve every problem we face: population reduction.
Who’s in denial now? 🙂
If you are unfamiliar with the MORT theory, this is a very nice introduction by Dr. Varki:
If you want more detail on MORT, this 2019 paper by Dr. Varki is the best source, as it expands and clarifies the ideas presented in his 2013 book.
Today we have a heartfelt post by marromai from Germany sharing his experience of becoming overshoot aware and how he deals with the knowledge. The essay was written in German and translated to English.
Life is wonderful – sometimes at least. But most of the time it is a very monotonous thing. And the older I get, the more often I wonder about the purpose of it. Every day, every week, every year the same procedure – enjoy the little moments, but for the rest of the time, hope that it passes by as soon as possible. Most days consist of a typical routine like getting up, sitting at work for what feels like an eternity, having a short and stressful time with my family, and then either doing chores or attending social gatherings now and then. Get the house in shape on Saturdays, and on Sundays rest or do something with the family. Rinse and repeat, every day is groundhog’s day.
Although one could think I’m blessed, because I live in the best Germany ever1. I’m married to a wonderful wife – as wonderful as they can get in their late 30s – I have four adorable children whom I love very much but who often get on my last nerve, a house and a garden where there is always plenty of work to do for which I have neither time nor money nor desire, and my dream job as an electrical engineer, which nowadays is unfortunately all too often just another bureaucratic clerk who only sees the soldering iron from afar. So basically, I should be doing very well, you would think. I just sell a bit of my lifetime for money and can enjoy a decent life.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Personally, my biggest problem is this: Working as an employed engineer has lost its magic – it often doesn’t even make sense to me, it just sucks. For the most part, it consists of bureaucratic stuff that doesn’t solve any problems but is just to be done for its own sake. Consequently, I complete tasks at the last minute with minimal effort, which you can’t even call work to rule. Everyday work is dull, lacking real tinkering challenges and practical problems to solve. The “always having to be there” and the resulting disproportionate amount of wasted life time kills any motivation and makes me strongly question the purpose of the whole mumbo jumbo called “gainful employment”. Maybe work makes life sweet – but in this respect I have diabetes… Now and then I think about self-employment and alternative income possibilities, combined with more personal freedom – but the chance to earn enough money to support a family is close to zero. Especially since the difficult economic times that are looming mark a very unfavorable time for this. How nice it would be to have a 4-day half-day job, with full pay, of course. Or even better, if they would just transfer my salary to me, I would know what to do with my time, wouldn’t I?
Since a while it feels like I have no time at all for personal activities. Even on days off I don’t really know what to do with myself. Apart from the tasks on the house and garden, which absolutely have to be done, I often don’t manage to start anything, although I have so many ideas – but rarely the motivation to actually begin. Or too little time, that starting is not worth it – at least that’s what I tell myself. So, I end up just like at work, where I spend most of my time in front of a computer, trying to avoid getting bored while reading in some online forums. As it turned out afterwards, this was the point, where my problems began, resulting in a total destruction of any purpose in life.
You may ask, what is it, what one could read, that is so depressing?
Beside electronic forums (for new ideas, which I will never implement) I read mainly alternative news and discussions about current events. This made me realize a long time ago that official media are nothing but propaganda channels – and I really can’t listen to them anymore. Russia here, Ukraine there. Evil Putin will destroy us all. Corona is so dangerous, be sure to get vaccinated… I can’t understand how the majority of the population can believe this bullshit – but that’s another topic. It will soon matter little anyway, once you understand that all of this are just side effects to a superordinate set of issues I came across while browsing over some threads of my favorite forum.
Most people will dismiss the following problem as absurd and unrealistic. Some will understand it but will not feel affected by it or will not want to admit it. And the tiny remainder? They are left with no one to talk about a matter, for which the great majority will laugh at them as end-time prophets and declare them crazy. It is the realization that our entire civilization could only grow so fast with the help of fossil energy – and that we are running out of this energy source now. Not because we planned it so or think we can replace it to get a grip on the ridiculous CO2 climate change issue. (I think it is rather presumptuous and a huge farce to try to control the temperature of a whole ecosystem and save the planet by reducing a single trace gas in the atmosphere, while not being able to provide a solid weather forecast for more than 2 days.) But the decarbonization that politicians are longing for will happen anyway. Just not in the way they envision. That’s because fossil fuels currently still cover the main demand for energy, and the much-vaunted renewables can’t even replace a fraction of that. Now we have reached the limits of what our planet can provide. What we are currently experiencing with our gas and electricity prices is only the beginning of the coming shortages. The Ukrainian-Russian war, which actually is driven by the USA, is in fact an economic war – and the economy only works with energy. Without energy, all the money in the world is useless: “Our main problem is a caloric one. We can print money like hay, but not a single drop of oil”2. The coming lack of oil will tear everything apart and cost billions of people’s lives by cold and hunger.
How it could come so far is what nobody dares to speak about: There are simply too many people on this planet who have already consumed too much raw materials and energy and always want more. It is only through coal, oil and gas that humanity has been able to multiply so enormously. But without maintaining these energy flows, the population numbers cannot be sustained. There are 10 calories of fossil energy in every calorie of food. But the soils are depleted and no longer yield anything without artificial fertilizers, agriculture is so thoroughly industrialized and complex that it can no longer be run on pure muscle power, certainly not to feed a country as densely populated as Germany. And now, of all times, we are running out of fossil energy?
The promised rescue by renewable energies is just window dressing and cannot free us from this predicament, nor can nuclear power plants. They supply only a fraction of electrical energy, but no raw materials for industry, as can be seen well in the current European gas shortage situation. No fertilizer can be produced from solar cells, and we cannot melt steel with wind energy, not even with 10 times the number of windmills. In addition to oil and gas, many other natural resources are now depleted that are required to build alternative energy sources. Fossil energy has enabled exponential population growth and unprecedented prosperity with ever increasing complexity and interconnectedness. Likewise, future energy shortages will cause an abrupt reduction in complexity – which is called collapse. And no, this will not be in a distant future, we are already in the middle of it. The coming times will be bleak. And it can go much further down very quickly when “winter is coming”, as the current situation in Europe shows.
All in all, a huge complex of topics, in whose importance I have no doubt – but the momentous realizations from it are simply devastating and destroy any further motivation and search for meaning in life – a nihilistic vicious circle of demotivation, effects see above. And the worst thing is, that one suffers all alone from this knowledge. Because the majority of people are not able to even see this unpleasant reality, let alone understand: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”.
So how to continue? One may try to convince as many others as possible of this reality and build a low-tech community. With a group of collapse-aware people, surviving could be much easier, when the crisis fully hits. Unfortunately, in Germany this is very difficult, since most people are totally brainwashed by official media. So, for me, I have decided to just try to enjoy as much free time and remaining prosperity as possible – while it’s still possible. Since I need money for this, I have to work, which is contrary to “Carpe Diem”. So I go to work, but don’t really do work – not perfect, much more like business as usual. What a shame – denying the un-denial… not knowing in the first place would have been much easier.
But as long as the hamster wheel turns and turns, you inevitably have to run with it. You have to learn to control the speed, otherwise you die of exhaustion. For someone who has recognized being in a hamster wheel, one may eventually be inclined to consider a premature exit. But that should not be a solution – especially not if you have a family, which you don’t want to leave in the lurch. Besides, aren’t you too curious to see what happens next? How bad will the crisis get? How long does such a collapse take? And what will life be like in the future? Maybe there will be challenges and problems to solve that you missed so much in your current job, for example finding food every day? Doesn’t this give you an ultimate purpose in life? You’ll probably miss the days spent in the warm office, browsing through internet forums and dreaming up gloomy fantasies about the future…
Today we have another guest post by a member of the un-Denial community, Gaia Gardener, who posted these thoughts on denial as a comment. I thought they were interesting enough to warrant promoting them to a more visible post.
Hello friends, thank you for a very interesting discussion about the realities of denial and how we humans seem to be able to manipulate all perceptions to fit our chosen narrative, whether or not we are consciously aware of our programmed beliefs however they were initialised and ingrained.
I am wondering if we can look at another subject, removed from overshoot, in which denial plays a big role in our actions/inactions so we can step back and dissect out a bit more how denial originates and becomes intrenched without us even realising our immersion in it, just like we in the small minority see happening to the masses and even polymaths in regards to overshoot denial.
The topic I think can fit the bill is the question of the ethics of eating animals, namely farmed animals which we consume in the billions every year. I won’t cover using animals for our labour and experimentation as the ethics of these actions can be construed to be justified in benefitting humankind which the majority of human beings would be in favour of. But the eating of animals in the modern world is not only unnecessary (and we can be spared the example of Inuits or other very minority population cultures who rely solely on animal products for sustenance, we do not have their situation in the least) but in fact there is convincing evidence that it is harmful to both our physical bodies and the planet, but for the sake of this argument, one need not consider either of those reasons to engage in a discussion of why we cannot eat animals nor their products if we believe we have a moral obligation to another sentient being. Let’s face it–we eat meat because we were brought up to do so and it tastes good (to most human taste buds) and it’s readily available without much effort on our part. However, the fact that animals suffer solely for our pleasure, tradition, and convenience is not enough moral ground to do so, for one can easily see how this disconnect can apply to any sentient being, including other humans, which is so obviously not an ethical choice. And yet, we are in complete denial that it is okay to eat chicken, cow, and pig but outrageously wrong to eat dog, cat, or horse. It is fine for us to imprison a member of a food species in the most horrendous conditions but we can be charged with abusing and neglecting other species we call our domestic companions. We can kill a food species animal way before their natural life span in a most horrific manner (everyone knows a slaughterhouse isn’t a happy place) so we can buy our sanitized plastic-wrapped packages of pork, beef, and healthy white meat chicken, but if we organise a dog fight and enjoy it, that is disgusting and shameful. You’re right, it’s not about education (most of us know that a live being had to be killed to get meat on the plate), or even more extreme forms of presenting the facts (how many of us would volunteer to witness what happens in a slaughterhouse, or even more tellingly, choose that as our job?). Yes, we have been lied to about happy free-range chickens or happy cows enjoying being milked on the happy dairy farm, but how many of us actually have spared more thought for what really happens in these industries, we’re only too happy ourselves to buy the more expensive organic or free-range option as if that absolves us from the guilt we still harbour knowing that no matter how happy the picture of the old MacDonald’s farm, we know this is a fantasy. Every animal still comes to an end in a way far from their natural choice and inclination.
I can sense the mounting justifications and counter-arguments–we need meat for our health or else we would get sick and die, if we didn’t raise the food animal they wouldn’t have a chance at life at all, what about if we were stuck on an island with only rabbits to eat, you can see how inane these points are, and generally stated to obfuscate the moral issue at hand. I am talking about modern day humans who now have access to a wide range of very suitable and healthful plant-based protein, and the methods we use to obtain our meatstuffs, even the question of whether or not it is our evolutionary diet (very debatable) isn’t the point here. The point is our denial of other factors which should be considered when making the choice of whether it is ethical to eat farmed animals, or even a beloved family pet lamb (just these words should put it in perspective that it isn’t but somehow we still do it–is that denial? ) What is it that keeps the majority of people still reaching for their burgers and steaks and fried chicken and bacon and eggs despite knowing what everyone should know? Is it denial of the truth because to face the ethical question front on would demand a choice and most humans just cannot overcome the continuation of pleasure, tradition, and ease of living, especially if it means realising it is a morally wrong thing to do so. So it is far easier to adopt cognitive disconnect, join the masses who are in your camp, degrade and exclude those who are not, and just keep doing what you want for one more day after day as long as it can last because at least you got to enjoy it and no one can take that away. Sound familiar? See how easy denial becomes just our way of perceiving our reality, and that is why I chose this example to prove that point. Every thought that is possibly going through your head now is a function of denial, one way or another, and none of it was even conscious before I brought this so called controversial topic up–if one can deem supporting active suffering of sentient beings just because we like it, to have any controversy attached.
I guess what I’m trying to express, which is in full agreement with what has been discussed, is that all of us have the capacity for denial (whether or not MORT is the primal reason) but we can’t see it as denial when we’re in the thick of it because that is just our chosen narrative. The way we dichotomise over overshoot, population control, Covid, Russia, just about any topic you can name, all confirm this. Only others outside that narrative (and usually the minority) can see that there is another perspective (because it’s their reality) and then call out the majority as in denial, which is exactly what the majority thinks of the outliers! It’s like that endless hall of mirrors reflecting back to you ad infinitum, whichever way one looks, there’s another image looking away from you, too, with the prime cause of the illusion being your own presence and perception of your reality. I think denial is a bit like that–it’s what holds us in our place, and helps define our sense of self by creating another version of possible self to bounce off of. I’m not saying there’s any right or wrong in this, it just seems to be how we are wired and until now, it has kept us on the survival ascendancy (that and a whole heck of fossil fuels!)
I think a good question to always be ready to ask ourselves in any situation to draw out denial is “What knowledge or understanding or different perspective that I may not have now but is available to gain or learn, would change or enhance the way I see the situation? ” Try it, it is very hard to allow oneself the possibility of overcoming our deep-rooted beliefs but yet that is precisely the attitude it will take for us to change them. Forcing education upon others doesn’t work as we have seen, it has to come from a self-directed intention to fill the knowledge gaps (isn’t that how we all arrived at our overshoot awareness and acceptance? We didn’t find this site because we were lectured into it, we found it because we sought it out) and then an even more entropy defying self push to change our actions to match our new insights. If the motivation is great enough, this can and will happen, but everyone has a different threshold before the fire is lit under our bums. Maybe that is why we need to head hell-bent towards full-on collapse, perhaps the only way to save ourselves is to first come within a nanometer of destroying ourselves. I still take comfort and security from the once inviolable Newton’s third law and trust that is will prove true for this case, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Let us pray for calamity that we will reach that opposite reaction with the same energy swinging us out of our doom as going into it, and preferably very soon!
Namaste, everyone. Thanks for bearing with another Gaia attack.
un-Denial 
