Mexico City, from Overdevelopment,
Overpopulation, Overshoot
Carrying
Capacity - Our Wickedest Problem
Carrying capacity is the Earth’s ability to support
the aggregate effects of the human population
indefinitely. It’s simple-minded to ask “How many
people can live on planet Earth?” The answer has
dozens of interwoven variables, rendering this a
“wicked problem” (a technical term). Questions about
carrying capacity must at least ask “How many
people, at what average level of consumption, with
what attitude towards Nature,” and the more serious
systems thinkers need to add “and further allowing
for [insert a couple of dozen additional variables
here].” The human problem, the problématique
humaine, as the Club of Rome termed it, is
tangled beyond any hope of definitive answers, and
perhaps beyond hope of solution. But if we don’t
try, we can be certain that the world itself will
eventually tell us what our limits were. This fairly
short work will attempt to identify a couple of
dozen variables, threads, or dimensions to this
tangle, as embedded within the greater ecosystem.
The word “overpopulation” seems at first glance like a plausible synonym for “carrying capacity overshoot.” Both terms imply a still ill-defined number of people that this world can’t support indefinitely. But the word also has weaknesses. It oversimplifies the larger human problem by constraining the issues to only one dimension, limiting its usefulness in both practice and argument. And it has a nasty habit of triggering irrational denial across the great mass of humanity. Those who dare to speak it might even be accused of colonialism, eugenicism, genocide, coercion, or racism. How is it racism to want to spare a billion or more Africans from an inevitable death by famine when the biosphere’s bills at last come due? We are limited to a dialog with other rational people, and this is not a majority.
Often the subject will get quickly changed to “overconsumption,” another huge piece of the human problem. Even here, though, this thread itself is seldom addressed in any comprehensive way. So we only get to talk about smaller slices, like poor food distribution patterns, income inequality, fresh water shortages, topsoil degradation, greenhouse gases, climate change, or meat and dairy diets. And then we are seen as traitors to corporate capitalism, which is the only way that business can be done now. For all the yakking that gets yakked about taking holistic approaches, nobody wants to hurt their heads with multi-dimensional, whole systems analysis. So we whack at one mole at a time, in a field of moles without end. And problems propagate faster than we can fell them.
Overpopulation and overconsumption are parts of a braid that can’t be disentangled: changes in one part will affect the other, and in many cases they are meaningless when considered alone. Different parts of the world have different jobs to do on different parts of the problem. Clearly, Asia and Africa have different issues than Europe and North America. This can make it confusing to talk globally using global averages. It’s important to note here that we’re already far enough into overshoot that both strands will have to be dramatically reduced, whether by us or by a destabilized nature. But there’s also a third strand in the braid that gets little mention: human exceptionalism. This is the belief that we are just too special, too infinitely sacred, for nature. Whether we think ourselves angels or spirits, walking around down here in meat puppets, or simply the crown of creation, entitled to divine rights, we are the center of the universe. We’re entitled to claim life itself as a property right, to monetize the commons, to take whatever we need and want, ingrates with no care or duty to give anything back. It’s our destiny to grow without limit, until everything not human enough gets pushed off the face of the world.
The simplest way to explain the need for multidimensional thinking is to ask whether you would measure the area of a rectangle or the volume of a box by looking only at its width. No. Without looking also at the height and depth, the effort is absurd. The limits on carrying capacity demand multidimensional analysis, not just a simplistic stab at what constitutes overpopulation.
This work will consider all three strands of this braid in its pathological aspects, which might be referred to collectively as human parasitism. And we will be scoping those couple of dozen other issues that system thinkers need to work with. The good news is that much of our human parasitism is cultural, and therefore learned. The bad news is that this species of ours has a major problem with unlearning, a process that might easily require generations that we no longer have.
The word “overpopulation” seems at first glance like a plausible synonym for “carrying capacity overshoot.” Both terms imply a still ill-defined number of people that this world can’t support indefinitely. But the word also has weaknesses. It oversimplifies the larger human problem by constraining the issues to only one dimension, limiting its usefulness in both practice and argument. And it has a nasty habit of triggering irrational denial across the great mass of humanity. Those who dare to speak it might even be accused of colonialism, eugenicism, genocide, coercion, or racism. How is it racism to want to spare a billion or more Africans from an inevitable death by famine when the biosphere’s bills at last come due? We are limited to a dialog with other rational people, and this is not a majority.
Often the subject will get quickly changed to “overconsumption,” another huge piece of the human problem. Even here, though, this thread itself is seldom addressed in any comprehensive way. So we only get to talk about smaller slices, like poor food distribution patterns, income inequality, fresh water shortages, topsoil degradation, greenhouse gases, climate change, or meat and dairy diets. And then we are seen as traitors to corporate capitalism, which is the only way that business can be done now. For all the yakking that gets yakked about taking holistic approaches, nobody wants to hurt their heads with multi-dimensional, whole systems analysis. So we whack at one mole at a time, in a field of moles without end. And problems propagate faster than we can fell them.
Overpopulation and overconsumption are parts of a braid that can’t be disentangled: changes in one part will affect the other, and in many cases they are meaningless when considered alone. Different parts of the world have different jobs to do on different parts of the problem. Clearly, Asia and Africa have different issues than Europe and North America. This can make it confusing to talk globally using global averages. It’s important to note here that we’re already far enough into overshoot that both strands will have to be dramatically reduced, whether by us or by a destabilized nature. But there’s also a third strand in the braid that gets little mention: human exceptionalism. This is the belief that we are just too special, too infinitely sacred, for nature. Whether we think ourselves angels or spirits, walking around down here in meat puppets, or simply the crown of creation, entitled to divine rights, we are the center of the universe. We’re entitled to claim life itself as a property right, to monetize the commons, to take whatever we need and want, ingrates with no care or duty to give anything back. It’s our destiny to grow without limit, until everything not human enough gets pushed off the face of the world.
The simplest way to explain the need for multidimensional thinking is to ask whether you would measure the area of a rectangle or the volume of a box by looking only at its width. No. Without looking also at the height and depth, the effort is absurd. The limits on carrying capacity demand multidimensional analysis, not just a simplistic stab at what constitutes overpopulation.
This work will consider all three strands of this braid in its pathological aspects, which might be referred to collectively as human parasitism. And we will be scoping those couple of dozen other issues that system thinkers need to work with. The good news is that much of our human parasitism is cultural, and therefore learned. The bad news is that this species of ours has a major problem with unlearning, a process that might easily require generations that we no longer have.
1. Common Knowledge and Overshoot
Choosing a Team of Thinkers
The Wickedest Problems
Pessimists and Futurists
2. Human Parasitism and Coevolution
Overpopulation and r-strategies
Overconsumption and Footprints
Human Exceptionalism and Humanism
Resources and Capital
Renewable Resources
Non-Renewable
Natural Capital
Environmental Sinks
Land Conversion
Biodiversity and Habitat Losses
Climate Change and Air Quality
Oceans and Fisheries
Fresh Water and Aquifers
Agriculture and Topsoil
Meat, Dairy, and Grazing
5. The Dimension of Social Order as Environmental Support
Systems
Infrastructure and Systems Failure
Economic Order and Toxic Paradigms
Inequalities of Opportunities, and Outcomes
Political
Insecurity, Migrants and Refugees
6. The Dimension of Sustainability and Honest Accounting
7. The
Dimension of Remediation and Restoration
8. The
Dimension of Contingency and Surplus
9. The
Dimension of Living Standards and Development
10. The Dimension of Human Ingenuity and Due Precaution
11. The Dimension of Wilderness and Deep Ecology
12. The
Dimension of Human Ignorance and Misinformation
13.
Carrying Capacity, from Maximum Down to Optimum
1. Common Knowledge
and Overshoot
The
carrying capacity of Earth (or Terra, or Gaia) is nearly
always cast in terms of human populations: “How many
human beings can this world sustain indefinitely,
assuming that our technology will solve most of our
problems as necessities arise?” The science is lacking
here for any hard and fast answers and we are thrown
back on thought experiments. The calculations simply
have too many variables, not least of which being
average per capita consumption. It seems this
uncertainty is often all that humans need to rationalize
continuing business-as-usual, until more has been
learned and knowledge grown perfect. Answers to the
global question will vary widely. The majority seems to
think our population can stabilize successfully
somewhere around 10 billion, with plenty of others in
the wider range from 5-20 billion. And we all get to
keep our carnivorous dogs and cats. But a great many of
these thinkers also think that the world was created in
six days by a bronze-age tribal deity afflicted with
clinical paranoia, with a talking snake for an
arch-enemy, who wants us to be fruitful and multiply.
Something other than a vote is needed here.
One of the most discouraging things about being in this field is having to continually observe the limitations of the human mind when facing complex and wicked problems, even in those who are relatively awakened and sincere. This is particularly prevalent with inabilities to think in systems. We isolate one or two aspects of the situation and declare these to be the problem, not those other issues. Linear thinking is especially common where appeals to the larger public are concerned. We wind up playing the whack-a-mole game instead of unplugging the machine. An equal difficulty concerns our limited time horizons. Politicians can't see past the next election or bribe, the CEOs, beyond the next quarterly report. Even when people are trying to peer into a future decades away, they tend to assume that other variables won’t vary. The UN keeps showing us continued population growth without a hint of societal and/or environmental collapse playing any role at all in crashing our numbers eventually. They limit their factors strictly to human reproductive choices, as though other serious consequences aren’t already entering the picture, and others winding up to take some big, involuntary bites out of our numbers. One-dimensionality doesn't give us helpful pictures and graphs, but more realistic projections, grounded in systems thinking, are harder to understand and they threaten to hurt human heads and human feelings. Mention of a need to reduce the human population hasn’t been seen in UN papers in decades, and family planning only gets mentioned in the context of reproductive rights. A fear of losing sponsors may be in play.
One of the most discouraging things about being in this field is having to continually observe the limitations of the human mind when facing complex and wicked problems, even in those who are relatively awakened and sincere. This is particularly prevalent with inabilities to think in systems. We isolate one or two aspects of the situation and declare these to be the problem, not those other issues. Linear thinking is especially common where appeals to the larger public are concerned. We wind up playing the whack-a-mole game instead of unplugging the machine. An equal difficulty concerns our limited time horizons. Politicians can't see past the next election or bribe, the CEOs, beyond the next quarterly report. Even when people are trying to peer into a future decades away, they tend to assume that other variables won’t vary. The UN keeps showing us continued population growth without a hint of societal and/or environmental collapse playing any role at all in crashing our numbers eventually. They limit their factors strictly to human reproductive choices, as though other serious consequences aren’t already entering the picture, and others winding up to take some big, involuntary bites out of our numbers. One-dimensionality doesn't give us helpful pictures and graphs, but more realistic projections, grounded in systems thinking, are harder to understand and they threaten to hurt human heads and human feelings. Mention of a need to reduce the human population hasn’t been seen in UN papers in decades, and family planning only gets mentioned in the context of reproductive rights. A fear of losing sponsors may be in play.
Even a good percentage of the so-called Greens consider
the problem to be largely one of more equitable
distribution of food, as though this were our only weak
link, as though all an enlightened society needs to do
is sit in the garden, in the rain and snow, without
building materials or transportation, and eat homegrown
vegetables. Diet, including high-quality protein and
safe drinking water, is one of many real concerns.
Others believe that once we get climate change under
control, we’ll be sitting pretty. Others hold that the
real problem is the inequality of accumulated wealth. It
always seems to be one single problem that gets singled
out of a vast, interconnected network of problems.
Lately, the problem of population growth, if it gets
mentioned at all, is discussed in terms of stabilization
at some level higher than now, and rarely in terms of
reduction. This is even in places where current
overshoot is explicitly acknowledged. It’s as though
nobody knows what overshoot means. Overshoot is always
and by definition temporary. It necessarily corrects
itself through population culls, increased predation,
crashes, collapses, or diebacks. There are many further
dimensions to the question of carrying capacity that
take us well beyond “how many humans can survive here?”
We are hindered by our failure to look at the problems
systemically, as a whole system, an almost unimaginably
complex system.
It’s asserted here that, even if we assume that Earth
and its web of life is nothing more than a kit of raw
materials with which to build a human civilization in
order to maximize our numbers, and that any value nature
may have must be cast in the economic terms of the
environmental services it provides, it really takes an
utterly delusional species, with no vision at all beyond
a single generation, to fail to see that we are already
well over the limit and into an ecocidal and
self-destructive overshoot. Our thinking here is
shortsighted, linear, and anthropocentric. The
scientific question of our fitness to survive, suggested
by Spencer and then Darwin, is one of adaptive fitness.
Fitness has little to do with our strength, or might
making right, or the victors writing the histories, and
everything to do with how well we fit our niche and
adapt to the ways it changes, or the ways we ourselves
change it. In order to make this fit, we will need to
comprehend the problems we face both in a lot more
detail and in a more comprehensive way.
Environmental groups won’t raise or entertain the
overpopulation issue for fear of losing members. They
may speak of overconsumption, though, as if these two
could be disentangled. Neither the UN’s 17 Global Goals
for Sustainable Development nor the WWF’s 2016 Living
Planet Report mention overpopulation. Goal 3 of the
latter mentions unmet needs for contraception, but this
is only applied to the health of families. The humanists
seldom want to face the subject at all, since this
implies that the human species is something other than
the center of both the world and the universe, or
somehow lacks the genius to solve any problem it might
choose to create. That hurts their feelings and makes
them angry. They are also more than a little myopic when
it comes to human migration, relative to both national
and global issues. Economists tend to live in a world
that has already overgrown its limits, a world that is
fundamentally unsustainable to the extent that it
demands continual growth within finite systems, many of
which are already threatening immanent cascade failures.
It’s the economists and the economic players that wind
up telling everyone else how life must be lived, and
most people listen because their economic fears and
insecurities can be played like musical instruments.
Across much of the population today, if family planning
is even mentioned, it’s only in the context of rights,
women’s education, autonomy, and dignity. Proposals to
correct our problems are economic instead, Drawdown and
Plan B, for example. But in an effort to circulate these
ideas more widely, they must fail to mention
overpopulation as a problem, and at most, they will
mention stabilization, or a reduction in the rate of
growth. Everybody is pussyfooting around the issues. But
afraid to offend is afraid to inform, and this will only
perpetuate our ignorance.
In
deep time, all things need to end, or yield to some kind
of succession. It’s one thing to know intellectually
that unsustainable behavior will lead, by definition, to
the extinction of that behavior, and that the continued
evolution of a sustainable civilization requires the
failure of any unsustainable status quo. It’s quite
another thing to be here to watch that failure start to
cascade in earnest. The scariest part is in the ecology
of population dynamics: a species exceeding it’s
environment’s carrying capacity must eventually undergo
a population crash, which by definition means either a
major dieback or cull, always to a level below carrying
capacity. This in turn means a lot of people dying
younger than they otherwise might and the suffering that
goes along with that. This clearly won’t be voluntary,
given the moral conundrums, the intractability of our
ignorance, and the time we have remaining, but
eventually there can be no alternative to morphing into
a steady-state economy and a population with its
consumptive lifestyles at or below this world’s carrying
capacity.
1a. Choosing a Team
of Thinkers
We
will usually begin to study a subject with our rough
opinions and then be drawn to further research sources
that tend to confirm and refine that. I can't honestly
exempt myself. I had personally begun to suspect that we
were in overshoot by the late 50s, while playing “duck
and cover” to the sound of practice air raid sirens. But
I did have some worthy criteria for further research on
this topic, particularly recently. I noticed that a
respectable number of thinkers were enumerating much
larger sets of problems, and looking at their
interactions with systems thinking and analysis. They
weren’t just naming a few select problems and treating
them individually. I also noticed that their carrying
capacity numbers were much lower than the 10 billion
average, even below the 5 billion low end of the more
common range. Today, the highest of this group is
roughly 5 billion, supported by the Global Footprint
Network (2018) with its Earth Overshoot Day. This is
based on a calculation of Earth’s biocapacity being
sufficient for each and every one of us to appropriate
about 1.8 global hectares per year. Yes, it’s
oversimplistic, and perhaps therefore popular. It’s
homocentric as well. Bioproductivity is seen as just
that: nature is primarily for the servicing of a human
need for nature with its ecosystem services. And it also
neglects a few other large parts of the larger problem.
Ecological footprint and biocapacity calculations leave
little room for non-renewable capital depletion,
degenerating lands, for nature itself, the wear and tear
on civilization’s
infrastructure, and the waste of human efforts in
political chaos. It’s a snapshot, with no time horizons,
no rainy day planning, and no buffers.
Gretchen Daily, with Anne and Paul Ehrlich, have
proposed a considerably lower number of 1.5 to 2
billion, a number derived from a broader range of
considerations and dimensions. Although based first on
energy consumption, the Daily-Ehrlich numbers also speak
to better distribution of resources to everyone, a basic
floor of rights and human welfare, and the preservation
of both biological and cultural diversity. Paul Ehrlich
may more privately favor a more conservative one
billion, the human population around the year 1804. At
this point, all we can offer is prophesy. If or when we
pass through our crash or dieback, the real number will
be somewhere above the number we crash to. Spoiler
alert: by the end of this book, I will be proposing two
population levels: a maximum carrying capacity of 2
billion, which leaves a functioning, but severely
degraded biosphere, with just enough left of nature to
get by; and an optimum carrying capacity of one billion,
in which there is opportunity for all life on Earth to
thrive. The lower number also means that the world’s poorest can still
have food, shelter, some leisure, and an education,
which drags the carrying capacity number down quite a
bit from the numbers that people like to entertain. But
to get to such a guess we will be looking at several
dimensions that are currently being ignored or neglected
in most of the current studies.
Aurelio Peccei referred to the aggregated cluster of our
problems as the problématique humaine. The term
human problematic was adopted as a central concept by
the Club of Rome and then operated on with systems
analysis. This specifically regards attempts to address
single problems individually as being doomed to failure.
The only hope is with a more global perspective,
regarded with a much deeper sense of the long term. The
authors of The First Global Revolution sought a
comprehensive rally against the “problematic” as a new
common enemy, to take the place of more parochial foes
like nations, races, and religions, something to unite
the human race. This global enemy may be referred to
here as human parasitism, our pathological or dark side.
Walt Kelly, or course, nailed it down best: “we have met
the enemy, and he is us.” In less militant terms, the
first global revolution might also be recast as a new
Marshall Plan, a new New Deal, or a Moon Shot. All of
these must launch pan-national efforts, including the
more petulant nations and their corporate overlords.
We
already have at our disposal a number of workable
technologies and practices, together with the potential
to develop new and truly sustainable technologies.
Examples abound with simpler living, net zero architecture, renewable
energy, improvements in efficiency, algal and cellulosic
biofuels, material substitutions, regenerative
agriculture, higher quality protein from the second
trophic level and better management of the third, and
the potential to develop a secular environmental ethic.
But every one of these is moot in the long run as long
as we remain in overshoot, except to the extent that we
are developing prototypes for the survivors of our
dieback.
You
will generally find the ideas shared here to be in a
camp with Lester R. Brown, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, John
Holdren, Gretchen Daily, Dennis and Donella Meadows,
Jorgen Randers, David Pimentel, Jared Diamond, Joseph A.
Tainter, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, Richard
B. Norgaard, Jem Bendell, Philip Cafaro, Jacques
Cousteau, E.F. Schumacher, Edward O. Wilson, and David
Attenborough; some old timers and their admittedly
imperfect prophesies like Thomas Malthus, Nikola Tesla,
William Vogt, and Fairfield Osborn; newcomers Karin
Kuhlemann and João L R Abegão; and even the pessimist
Pentti Linkola. If we averaged their numbers, where
they’re offered, the recommendation for a maximum
carrying capacity might be found somewhere between 2 and
3 billion. At least that’s a fair intermediate goal for
this present survey.
1b. The Wickedest
Problems
Wicked problems are social or cultural conundrums that
are extremely difficult or impossible to solve for
multiple reasons: a hypercomplexity of interrelated
subsystems or factors (often each in itself a problem),
incomplete or contradictory knowledge, multidimensionality,
changing conditions and
requirements, large numbers of people and opinions
involved, gridlock in the legislative and social
orders, conflicting stakeholder
agendas, indeterminate cascade effects and failures,
excessive economic burdens or fundamental
incompatibilities with economic systems themselves, and
consequences unknown until attempts at correction are
well underway. Multiple dimensions of a wicked problem
need to be tackled at the same time, with unpredictable
outcomes. According to Horst Rittel, they will have no
definitive formulation, they bleed into one another,
there is no idealized end state or stopping point, there
can be improvement but not a final solution, they are
unique and without templates, and they have multiple
explanations. There are a number of smaller and
separately nameable wicked problems involved in the
issue of carrying capacity. Climate change is currently
the most often cited, followed by the conservation of
biodiversity. Overconsumption gets cited far more than
overpopulation, although these are actually braided
together with human exceptionalism into a single wicked
problem refer to here as human parasitism. If there is a
single umbrella name to cover them all, it may well be
the Anthropocene, the period wherein human impacts on
Terra ramped up most significantly, around 12 kya, which
roughly coincides with the Holocene geological epoch,
beginning with the last great glacial retreat. Ecocide
of the biosphere and the Holocene Extinction are two of
its faces. At a minimum, it's an existential threat to
both human civilization and natural biodiversity, and
without this infrastructure, the human population will
have no alternative but to crash to a small fraction of
its present size
One
of the more significant difficulties here is that
voluntary efforts to solve the problems are wholly
inadequate, while coercive policy measures are wholly
unacceptable. One seemingly positive factor is that a
large number of the contributing dynamics are cultural
in nature, or learned instead of natural. But opposing
this is the human reluctance to learn alternative ways
of being in this world. Most necessary tasks require
cultural consensus and education, followed by changes in
human behavior, a process that can take generations. But
time for this is rapidly running out. And key elements
of this change are militantly opposed by the
fundamentalist religions. Pyramid scheme and Ponzi
economists are fully embedded and entrenched, and more
than a little reluctant to drop the pro-growth paradigm
and surrender to steady-state economics. Effective scare
tactics come easy: you will lose all that you have
acquired. Those proposing to solve the problems are far
too frequently the ones creating them. Corporations are
drafting the bulk of the ‘solutions’ to the damage that
the corporate ethic is doing. Even the global proposals
like UN’s “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”
appear to be written by the same forces that need to be
dismantled, and soon. This amounts to a one-way,
dead-end path dependency. From the Dark Mountain
Manifesto, “Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’
to these problems: solutions which usually involve the
necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious
application of human technological genius,” but
“transformative change can expect opposition from those
with interests vested in the status quo”
Humans are proud of their adaptive intelligence, but
it’s by no means certain that they have enough of that
stuff to get out of the present messes already made, let
alone the new levels building. For one thing, humans
keep fixating on ‘the most pressing crisis’ and fail to
address the greater drivers of the multitude of crises.
They also tend to not get agitated until a problem has
become a full-on crisis, when there’s no time remaining
for carefully planned responses. Further, you don’t
manage or micromanage a complex system from the top with
the limited intelligence and understanding of
politicians and their appointees. There you just get
diminishing returns and compounded blunders. Long-term
solutions require a long-term vision, and one that will not rely on hyperbolic discounting to calculate the future.
Corey Bradshaw and Barry W. Brook write “even if the
human collective were to pull as hard as possible on the
total fertility policy lever (via a range of economic,
medical, and social interventions), the result would
[still] be ineffective in mitigating the immediately
looming global sustainability crises (including
anthropogenic climate disruption), for which we need to
have major solutions well under way by 2050 and
essentially solved by 2100.” They at least suggest that
this voluntary approach might cut our numbers by a
couple of billion. But even this is too little too late.
Coercive measures are highly unlikely, and morally
unacceptable. War, surprisingly, has never been enough
to put more than a small dent in our growth. For the
most part, then, the Reaper will simply be Consequences,
no angry messiah, no holy-book prophesy, no planetary
alignment or magical calendars, just the consequences of
human ignorance and a refusal to adapt intelligently.
It’s unlikely that the problems will be solved by our
growing up any time soon.
Potential efforts to merely reduce the population’s rate
of growth may not be entirely in vain. They will reduce
total human suffering in the long run, and they may
delay dieback. The four biggest contributions to such a
reduction would remain women’s education, family
planning, meeting basic needs with the best available
technology, and overriding religious dogma. But delaying
dieback may be a bad thing for the world’s biodiversity,
since the longer it’s delayed, the more long-term and
permanent damage is being done. A human population
crash, even if involuntary, might well be a boon to the
future of Earth, including its human or post-human
inhabitants. No well-known current projections include
such mass-mortality events, except perhaps those of
Donella Meadows and friends, which are again in need of
an update. We haven’t seen one of these population
crashes on a truly global scale since Toba, 74 kya. The
Black Death that ravaged Europe was significants
in scale, but it did its ravaging mainly in Europe and
the Mideast. You can see from this that any discussion
that may approach the necessary scale of things is going
to be seen as misanthropic. But at least it need not be
racist or genocidal. This can be an equal opportunity
holocaust, for all the pretty human colors, for rich and
poor alike.
1c. Pessimists and
Futurists
It
seems that most of those who hold the Terran carrying
capacity to be 5 billion humans or less still manage to
hold forth some degree of optimism about the human
future here, at least publicly. That may show a desire
to encourage the broader public to a spirit of reform
and not spread a gloom of despair. We are a plucky
little band of Cassandras and Star Throwers, but many of
us are still crying privately for all that’s going to be
be lost. At this point it still seems unlikely that our
species will suffer a complete extinction, even in the
thick of runaway climate change. That can't be worse
than our designs to live on Mars. A collapse of
civilization in the first round of a population crash is
far more probable. But even the most pessimistic of us
have to hold onto some shred of hope that something of
culture might survive, perhaps a digital record of our
several prototypes, experimental communities,
inventions, solutions, and bright ideas might be cast
into some form durable enough to last a couple of
centuries. And there are seeds to plant now that might
only grow later, when our species has learned some
things the hard way.
Stable climate, biodiverse ecosystems, sufficient natural capital, reliably renewable resources, ample sinks for
the reabsorption of our wastes, and a functional social
order are all environmental systems that allow a
temporary tolerance of capacity overshoot. This is
ecosystem resilience. Pieces of these systems are
already failing in spectacular ways, but the systems
themselves are only beginning to fail in concert. When
that happens in earnest, the synergy will become cascade
failure. Not all parts of the globe will fail or succeed
equally, even if we are all in this together. We are
still concerned here with the whole of the Terran niche
and average per capita impacts. I expect that
significant population reduction will begin happening
many decades within the frame of the 21st century,
hitting hardest in Africa and Asia. Europe and North
America will have a different set of problems, more
closely related to large per-capita environmental
footprints. But the line between those will be thick and
fuzzy. Any significant measures that humans might take
to address this will be emergency measures deployed in
mid-crisis, not voluntary measures developed with
long-range planning.
Donella Meadows writes that “our most important
statements about the likelihood of collapse do not come
from blind faith in the curves generated by World3. They
result simply from understanding the dynamic patterns of
behavior that are produced by three obvious, persistent,
and common features of the global system: erodable
limits, incessant pursuit of growth, and delays in
society’s responses to approaching limits.” I will
discuss these three later, in places within a different
arrangement and set of categories. Certainly the system
of economics we’ve set up will need to fail out of the
way. Economics as usual is flat out opposed to the
necessary solutions and is structurally incompatible
with them. Economists can’t even glance sideways at the
problems without their heads exploding, being unable to
face the idea that both population growth and growth in
consumption must end, and soon.
I
take a fairly dismal view of the near-term future of
humankind, and that’s based largely on some
interdisciplinary understanding of the intractability of
human ignorance, particularly in adults. I think we lack
both the collective will and the adaptive intelligence
to turn this juggernaut around. And I see us as having
passed several important tipping points way back in the
early 1970s, when the corporations got fuller control of
our governments and we refused to learn lessons about
perpetual war. Most of the people who are capable of
getting motivated to work on this are already motivated.
Most of the rest can’t even see the real problems yet,
or see only glimmers and slices, or can’t imagine a role
for themselves in any real solution. And of course, most
of the people living in high fertility regions are too
busy struggling to meet their fundamental needs to look
around at global issues, or care. The religious will be
stubborn to the last, and many will continue to pray for
the End of Days. We will eventually see the problems
collectively, but not until we’re trapped with no
solutions. A dieback will be inevitable, this being the
consequence of overshoot. This leaves us with the
question of how much of civilization might survive. My
guess is that our population will have crashed by at
least a billion before the majority of humanity even
admits to having population problem. And if you want to
see how bad things can get while maintaining a high
birth rate, just look at Sub-Saharan Africa. These
people, and others in r-strategy populations, have
nowhere to run, and will be the first to go, barring war
between developed nations. By then, the developed
nations will have too many problems of their own to lend
any adequate aid.
I’m
wrestling with any remaining optimism, but I can still
be a futurist here and write for the survivors. We can
hope there will be a Wayback Machine that's hardened
against CMEs and EMPs. I’m not just writing this for the
Cassandras, the Star Throwers, and the Deep Ecology
choir. The main point of implementing practical
solutions today will be to show the survivors that our
proposals and prototypes might have worked, had cultural
inertia and human ignorance not been so intractable. The
steps being taken now will probably not be taken for
nothing. Good ideas can survive dark ages, as the
Epicureans and others have shown us. We don’t know yet
if the survivors of the coming bottleneck will be selected for any kind of
ecological savvy. It could be some other, wrong kind of
adaptive fitness, or perhaps a dystopian Road Warrior
citizenry. The sustainable, off-grid ecovillage or
intentional community, practicing peace and regenerative
agriculture (like we should all be doing) might not be
the fittest for survival if it can’t defend itself
against roving marauders and bandits, or seizure by
despotic governments. Some solutions might need to hide
themselves, like Asimov’s Second Foundation.
I’m
a pessimist, but I’m also a futurist. Even if we have no
choice but to face a devastating population crash, we
still can’t give up. I don’t expect humanity to find its
way to any happy solution voluntarily, or as a result of
far-thinking planning. We might assume a total collapse
of the present global economy. Transition will be
accomplished with much kicking and screaming. A
steady-state economy ultimately means no usurious
interest on loans, big profits on investments, or overly
burdensome rents, stripping the economy of much of its
current motivation. Many of today’s truly promising
solutions, including renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, desalination, terra preta,
reforestation, substitutes for high-quality protein, simple living, cradle-to-cradle
accounting, natural capitalism, localization, devolution of function, ecolonomics, drawdown, universal education
for women, and experimental community will be necessary
parts of any great big, beautiful tomorrow. All have
important pieces to the puzzle. All will need to find
their way into a comprehensive and integrated system,
with a great deal of diverse expression. But such a
system still will not function at current or projected
population levels, not even if everybody goes vegan and
stays at home. And it won’t ever function without an end
to perpetual war. Our experiments, and our written
legacies, are the prototypes the survivors will need - a
little something we can give to them besides a ruined
world. Even at the most extreme, we can be leaving
scrolls and artifacts for archaeologists digging through
our ruins. Even if those archeologists have tails and
huge, yellow teeth, life will go on.
We are likely faced now with helping to design what Rupert Read calls “successor civilization(s).” And in the transition to this, we can still do small scale experiments and prototype communities, as lifeboats, arks, wooden ships, seed cultures, as the first steps in our “transformational adaptation." We don’t know what a collapse of the present civilization will entail, or what the selective pressures will select for. It’s easy to imagine Road Warrior or warlord scenarios, now constrained to a much-diminished environment and carrying capacity. Experiments kinder than that may need to be well-armed and defended. Jem Bendell, who is pessimistic about a survivable modification of the status quo, advocates instead for “deep adaptation”, fundamental adaptive alterations to the way humans do business here. Bendell sees three parts to our needed deep adaptation: “Resilience asks us ‘how do we keep what we really want to keep?’ Relinquishment asks us ‘what do we need to let go of in order to not make matters worse?’ Restoration asks us ‘what can we bring back to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies?’” It may be that the most useful thinkers and designers of these “successor civilizations” will be our science fiction writers, at least those of us who haven’t surrendered wholly to dystopian visions.
In sum, my remaining hope lies with the survivors of a deep population crash somehow having been able to learn some hard lessons and adapt to a much-diminished world. Still, the intractability of human ignorance makes even our learning the hard way seem a bit doubtful to me. That not only needs culture - it needs the right culture, and generations of time. We have most of the pieces to the puzzle, we know how it could be done. Can pockets of us pull it off? Some of us are still obligated to try. This isn’t so much a book of practical solutions and the science behind them as it is about scoping or enumerating our many problems and their dimensions, filling in the inputs for the systems thinkers. We have been proceeding with far too narrow and piecemeal a view of these. Solutions, insofar as wicked problems allow, will evolve more slowly, out of improved understanding. Our biggest problem is a failure to comprehend the scope of the wicked Holocene problem in its many details. This is also about trying to personally apologize to future generations, and show that not all of us were thoughtless idiots and parasites.
We are likely faced now with helping to design what Rupert Read calls “successor civilization(s).” And in the transition to this, we can still do small scale experiments and prototype communities, as lifeboats, arks, wooden ships, seed cultures, as the first steps in our “transformational adaptation." We don’t know what a collapse of the present civilization will entail, or what the selective pressures will select for. It’s easy to imagine Road Warrior or warlord scenarios, now constrained to a much-diminished environment and carrying capacity. Experiments kinder than that may need to be well-armed and defended. Jem Bendell, who is pessimistic about a survivable modification of the status quo, advocates instead for “deep adaptation”, fundamental adaptive alterations to the way humans do business here. Bendell sees three parts to our needed deep adaptation: “Resilience asks us ‘how do we keep what we really want to keep?’ Relinquishment asks us ‘what do we need to let go of in order to not make matters worse?’ Restoration asks us ‘what can we bring back to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies?’” It may be that the most useful thinkers and designers of these “successor civilizations” will be our science fiction writers, at least those of us who haven’t surrendered wholly to dystopian visions.
In sum, my remaining hope lies with the survivors of a deep population crash somehow having been able to learn some hard lessons and adapt to a much-diminished world. Still, the intractability of human ignorance makes even our learning the hard way seem a bit doubtful to me. That not only needs culture - it needs the right culture, and generations of time. We have most of the pieces to the puzzle, we know how it could be done. Can pockets of us pull it off? Some of us are still obligated to try. This isn’t so much a book of practical solutions and the science behind them as it is about scoping or enumerating our many problems and their dimensions, filling in the inputs for the systems thinkers. We have been proceeding with far too narrow and piecemeal a view of these. Solutions, insofar as wicked problems allow, will evolve more slowly, out of improved understanding. Our biggest problem is a failure to comprehend the scope of the wicked Holocene problem in its many details. This is also about trying to personally apologize to future generations, and show that not all of us were thoughtless idiots and parasites.
2.
Human Parasitism and Coevolution
Numerous writers have described the relationship between
humankind and the planet's biosphere, with special
regard to our unchecked population growth and our
overconsumption of resources, as a pathological process
analogous to malignant neoplasm, or cancer (Gregg, 1955;
Eisley, 1961; Hern, 1990; and Forrester, 1991).
Unlimited and poorly differentiated growth in a finite
system certainly has this characteristic. It was Edward
Abbey who wrote “Growth for the sake of growth is the
ideology of the cancer cell.” While such an analysis has
a number of things to teach us about the dynamics of our
predicament, the much simpler pathological model of
parasitism will convey the same core message with
greater simplicity and just as much mortal urgency. E.
O. Wilson has characterized parasites as “predators that
eat prey in units of less than one.”
It
hurts people’s feelings to be called parasites. They
don’t like to hear that, or that there are too many of
them, or that they’re too greedy, or that they wrongly
think they’re the crown of creation and the center of
the universe. They will call you a misanthrope. But they
take and take from this world, and they give nothing
back, and that’s what a parasite does. In our
species-wide narcissism, we frame nature as
environmental services, frame time in human generations,
and frame divinity in human form. Our insatiable
appetite even leaves our own descendants out of the
picture, and out of luck.
Human parasitism will be looked at here as a braid of
overpopulation, overconsumption, and human
exceptionalism. All three of these are driving our
coming failure as a civilization. Although demographics
characterized by high population,
high consumption, and human
arrogance will fail for different reasons, this braid
can’t really be disentangled. To say we can separate
them is like saying it’s not magnetism but electricity
that makes the motor go around. We are so far into
overshoot that solutions are required on all three
strands of the braid. None of the three can be ignored.
Another formula treats the first two as inseparable.
This is described as I=PAT, from Paul Ehrlich and
John Holdren. Total human Impacts are the result of
population x affluence x technological interventions.
Impacts can remain the same if population grows at the
expense of affluence, or if the population falls within
an increasingly affluent culture. Technological
developments can make impacts better or worse, with the
other two strands holding constant. Personally, I
incorporate the T within the A, along with efforts at
greater resource and capital efficiency, since the A is
really all about our level of consumption, however it’s
modified. The parasitism braid is similar, but it
functions as a combination of attitude and ideology,
leading to behavior that diminishes the host being fed
upon, the host that sustains us. Human exceptionalism is
more than just a philosophical stance that underpins the
other two. It’s behavioral and it’s expressed in ways other than
overpopulation and overconsumption. Some might question
whether this attitude is an actual cause, whether
proximate or final, but we are speaking here of an
engaged exceptionalism, not theoretical or ideological.
It’s
behavior as if we were the crown of creation and the
center of the universe. It’s what allows us to claim
nature as property, transforming life itself into
environmental services dedicated to human ends, and a
future that’s somehow subject to our hyperbolic
discounting. It lets us claim human rights without
accepting corresponding human duties. We own the world.
Overpopulating it and overconsuming its resources and
capital is our right. To even ask that any population
restrain itself is therefore misanthropic, coercive, and
genocidal. This is pathological.
There are a number of human cultures still existing in
this world that have long demonstrated a true
sustainability, spanning millennia, and even tens of
millennia. These are symbiotic cultures, distinct from
the parasitic. We have destroyed most of them with our
seductive new paradigm, or absorbed them, or tempted
them into less sustainable lifestyles. The first order
of business for the first wave of missionaries is to
introduce the pleasure of consuming things never needed
before, in exchange for a little labor. The religion
comes later. The fact that these cultures have existed
historically, and that some still do, tells us something
important: parasitism is not a human universal. It’s
largely cultural, and not genetic except to the extent
that it plays upon our inherited triggers. It must be
learned, and so perhaps it can also be unlearned, were
more humans able to unlearn. But in order for us to
learn or unlearn something, the promise has to be as or
more attractive to us that the other options before us.
This will become a lot easier once we have more fully
entered dystopia. Until then, denial can keep better
alternatives from our view.
We
coevolved with the Pleistocene epoch, which saw us
change from h. habilis to h. erectus,
into the present h. ignoramus. We did reasonably
well here as symbiotes, all things considered. We
thought we were doing even better in the Holocene, until
we filled up the world and then some, and the real
consequences of our overshoot began to show. People
still don’t grasp the seriousness of the word
sustainable, or the correlate that an unsustainable
behavior leads by definition to the extinction of that
behavior. Most of us don’t yet grasp that fitness means
adaptive fitness, the ability to respond in viable ways
to evolving environments. It really has little to do
with ‘might makes right.’ We will either return
voluntarily to sustainability, by way of adaptive
fitness, or we will suffer population collapses or
diebacks until we do. But we won’t return to what we
used to be. That great, empty world is gone now. The
niche has changed. Some of us know more and better now.
We have to invent new ways of being in this world. It
will have to have things like medicine and dentistry,
regenerative farming, electric cars and their roads,
science and art, and computers with digital audio. These
don’t have to kill the world. But we can also keep or
regain some of the lessons the old ways have taught us.
2a. Overpopulation
and r-strategies
Thomas Malthus offered the
following: “Famine seems to be the last, the
most dreadful resource of nature. The power of
population is so superior to the power in the earth to
produce subsistence for man, that premature death must
in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices
of mankind are active and able ministers of
depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army
of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work
themselves. But should they fail in this war of
extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence,
and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off
their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be
still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in
the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population
with the food of the world. Must it not then be
acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories
of mankind, that in every age and in every state in
which man has existed, or does now exist, that the
increase of population is necessarily limited by the
means of subsistence, that population does invariably
increase when the means of subsistence increase.” Some of the problems associated with human
parasitism are more closely tied to overpopulation and
others to consumption. Food production, biodiversity
loss, water consumption, and land conversion tend to be
functions of human populations, although the growing
demands for meat and dairy diets, and pet foods, are
more closely tied to levels of affluence.
However insightful he may have been, Malthus did get a
couple of things wrong. But his prediction of where we
are headed in the end isn’t one of them. His biggest
omission was a failure to predict the now ironically
named ‘green revolution’ or ‘third agricultural
revolution,’ the advent of modern industrial
agriculture, with its massive inputs of fertilizers,
biocides, high-yield seed varieties, and its mechanized
farming aids. This has allowed the agricultural output
per unit of land a temporary exponential growth that’s
been keeping pace with exponential population growth.
This temporary failure has been enough for critics to
get by with claims that his vision was just plain wrong.
But his critics have failed to look at diminishing
returns on the technological, resource, and the mineral
inputs needed to temporarily boost the per capita
productivity of land, and ultimately the decline of
these inputs along with natural productivity. They have
also failed to notice the over-appropriation of fresh
water, particularly from in-stream river flows and
fossil water aquifers. They have failed to notice the
conversion of topsoil to sterile dirt, as well as losses
from wind and water erosion. They have failed to grasp
that carbonaceous life in the soil is the way nutrients
are captured from weathering parent material, and that
healthy, living soil is also our easiest means of carbon
sequestration. In short, the agricultural revolution
that has allowed food production to keep up with
population growth is a loan drawn against natural
resources and capital, but treated on the human books as
income. We haven't planned on paying anything back. This
is a very long way from sustainable.
That Malthus miscalculated his timeline, and failed to
see a few variables, does nothing to refute the overall
trend that has continued to develop at a somewhat slower
rate. We’re still moving in that direction. To say that
Malthus is wrong because it hasn’t happened yet is a
specious argument. It’s like saying “The gangrene is
only in his toe, but I’ve heard that it progresses
almost overnight. It has failed to reach his knee as
soon as predicted and he’s still alive now. Therefore,
he is going to live forever.” The predictions by
Malthus, and then Ehrlich in 1968, were only a bit
premature in the larger frame of things. As long as
there is either growth or overshoot in a finite system,
the predicted outcome still lies ahead. Furthermore,
limitations on the availability of food aren’t the only
ones to which the Malthusian model applies. It can refer
to any limiting necessary resource, especially the
non-renewable natural capital in finite systems. The
bottom line is that without a birth-rate solution, there
can only be an unavoidable death-rate solution, in war,
famine, toxification, pestilence, habitat loss, and our hypertrophy
into deadlier living environments and geohazardous
regions.
In
ecology we have r/K selection theory, developed by
ecologists Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson. This
describes a species’ preference either for producing
greater numbers of offspring with less individual
parental care, or smaller numbers with greater parental
investment. Humans who are doing well in their
environments lean towards the K-strategy, with fewer
offspring, and have been gradually moving further in
this direction. Local populations tend to move in this
direction following improvements in living
circumstances, particularly with reduced infant and
child mortality, the meeting of basic needs, more
sociopolitical security, and improved education and
career opportunities, especially for women. Women are
offered alternatives to being mere baby-making machines
and servants of the family. It should be noted more
often that educating young women doesn’t end with them
making better informed decisions about family size. When
they have children, they pass along the benefits of
better understanding, and when they have fewer children,
each child gets more of her attention. And childhood
adversity is thereby reduced, with benefits that may
last for generations. Smaller families are not
diminished families.
The
r-strategy gets diminished along with a reduced need for
spare or replacement children. This tendency is
described by Demographic Transition Theory or DTT, which
explicitly refers to declining birth and death rates as
populations transition from pre-industrial to
industrialized economies through four or five distinct
stages. This is not really a law, and the transitions
aren’t necessarily as automatic as the theory describes,
but it does highlight a general trend. The most
significant milestone in this transition occurs as a
population’s total fertility rate (TFR) falls below the
replacement rate of 2.1-2.2 children per woman. This
point looks like a positive step against the global
population problem, but it isn’t as positive when the
increased per capita consumption that has triggered the
change is accounted for. Once again, population and its
consumption can’t be disentangled, either in the
parasitism formula or the I=PAT formula, and the
accompanying increase in consumption can more than
offset the decreased impacts of population reduction.
Growth-driven local and national economies, and their
economists, already have issues with falling growth
rates. But they pick up even more difficult challenges
when fertility falls below replacement. Locally, this is
where immigration might be reconsidered, but this
doesn’t solve any of our global population problems and
it may well perpetuate local capacity and overshoot
issues. At this point, the supporters of growth start to
spend big on campaigns against too much family planning,
and governments begin to encourage their citizens to
make more babies. Here we see some fair arguments and
some truly specious ones. The fact that we are already
in a state of overshoot, with the prospective
consequences of that, means that even the fair arguments
merely describe conditions that we will have to find
other ways around, and the sooner the better. There is a
great deal of confusion between reductions in population
growth rates, reductions in population growth,
population stabilization, and population reduction. The
last of these is the only survivable response to
overshoot. The issue is overpopulation, and the
subsequent collapse of support systems that collectively
define what overshoot means. The good news about simply
passing peak fertility rates would be better if we
weren’t already so far beyond carrying capacity. We need
to understand more clearly that it isn’t really a
promise of success that half the world’s population now
lives in countries with fertility at replacement levels
or below. Those people are also consuming much more per
capita, and most still believe that humans are the
center of the universe, and that money makes the world
go around.
The
greatest real challenge is referred to as youth and
old-age dependency ratios. We get fewer younger people
taking care of increasingly older elders, with their
rapidly rising health care costs. We get fewer adults in
the working class age group, so we have fewer workers
paying into retirement, social security, and health care
programs. These are funds which have long been borrowed
against by nations with no ability or intention to repay
them. They have been counting on a growing population.
This makes them Pyramid and Ponzi schemes in effect, if
not intent. This is especially terrifying to nations
upside down in debt or already verging on bankruptcy. On
a different scale and side of things, we should also be
aware of a real ‘only child’ issue that also recommends
we make village and community improvements, so that
children can still grow up in age-diverse, extended
family environments, such as those we are best adapted
to. These give children younger ones to teach and older
ones to learn from.
There are specious arguments claiming that more people
means more bright leaders and brain power. There could
be some benefit in number of patents, copyrights, and
fortunate genetic mutations. But the best counter comes
from Steven Jay Gould: “I am somehow less interested in
the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in
the near certainty that people of equal talent have
lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” A
better grasp of childhood
adversity and the horrors it inflicts on early cognitive
development is the
counterargument to make. Counterarguments that quality
of life is more desirable than gross quantity are hard
to make to the already-convinced.
It’s argued that we need to keep growing because that’s
both human nature and the nature of economies. It’s as
good as a natural law. But sustainable population levels
are wholly incompatible with a growth and Ponzi economy,
which demands increasing downstream users to pay off the
debts we’re incurring today. Having to live within our
means is, of course, out of the question, because we are
far too special and deserving for that. Nations begin to
scream in pain and fear as soon as their populations
begin to decrease, but there is no other option that
also includes survival. Most arguments fail to mention
that it only gets worse with delays. We are hooked on
delusional hyperbolic discounting. But we must lose the
gangrenous toe, or else we lose the limb.
Other specious arguments include fundamentalist
religious resistance to population management, along
with outcries about reproductive rights violations, racism, and eugenic
coercion, especially wherever attention gets trained on
the more r-strategist, developing-nation populations.
The new left, with its politically correct humanists and
humanitarians, will tend to overreact at the merest hint
of population control, even where it’s called
management, or non-coercive. Reactions to even the most
incentivized and voluntary proposals for distributed
contraception frequently mention the half-baked eugenics
movements of the early twentieth century, culminating in
Hitler’s activities. Most will try to avoid the
population question issue altogether. Of course this
‘racist’
point is idiotic. The PC people are now well into
convincing even science writers to abandon the very word
race, because it’s
caused trouble in the past. But whatever word you want
to use to describe those dark-skinned people living all
over Africa, those are the people who are going to
suffer the worst as the population begins to crash. So
who is it that’s saying that trying to prevent this is
racist, colonialist social engineering? Human parrots,
that’s who, who just aren’t thinking things through. How
is it racist to want to spare the Africans death by
famine of hundreds of millions or even billions? Aside from famine, Jared Diamond cites five
more interconnected causes of collapse, all seen at the
end of prior civilizations and all related to overshoot:
the non-sustainable exploitation of resources, climate
changes, diminishing support from friendly societies,
hostile neighbors, and inappropriate attitudes for
change.
A
typical boom-and-bust cycle is described in population
dynamics 101. A population cannot survive in overshoot
because it over-consumes both natural capital and
renewable resources, and it fills the environment’s
capacity to absorb waste products. Eventually, it must
undergo a necessary crash or dieback to below its
environment’s carrying capacity. Meanwhile, carrying
capacity itself suffers some long-term damage from
capital depletion, especially while in overshoot.
Capital depletion is more characteristic of human
societies, not those of the plants, fungi, and animals.
Rebounding populations again exceed capacity and crash
again in a dampening oscillation around a gradually
diminishing carrying capacity, a limit that a reasoning
species would stay comfortably below. The thing about
population cycles is that eventually they will describe
realities that are no longer optional or voluntary.
Eventually, non-renewable capital runs out or down and
substitutes for some can’t be found. Sometimes the
support systems for renewable resources are too badly
compromised and themselves become non-renewable capital.
Sometimes sustainable rates of renewal are exceeded in
ways that their consequences can’t be avoided.
Eventually, unsustainable population levels have no
alternative to a crash.
Until we reach a fully blown population crash, any coercive measures for population management will remain out of the question, for moral reasons and questions of human rights. Mass sterilization of the infirm, mentally feeble, or undesirably colored, just isn’t going to catch fire again. Of course, if we were smart, we would stand clear of programs that have failed us in the past and learn from our mistakes. China has moved on from its one-child policy to its ‘later, longer, fewer’ approach. The best policy, of course, is in setting an attractive example, showing how a non-coercive management can lead to a better life. Many are looking to Botswana for such an example. People must be persuaded to produce fewer people, and the most persuasive agents are usually economic. Tax incentives might help, where governments aren’t panicking over depopulation crises. For instance, a nation might offer only a single tax deduction for ‘children,’ regardless of whether a family has zero or three. Free contraception, freely distributed, would be a huge help if funding could be found, and this would take a huge bite out of the abortion problem.
Until we reach a fully blown population crash, any coercive measures for population management will remain out of the question, for moral reasons and questions of human rights. Mass sterilization of the infirm, mentally feeble, or undesirably colored, just isn’t going to catch fire again. Of course, if we were smart, we would stand clear of programs that have failed us in the past and learn from our mistakes. China has moved on from its one-child policy to its ‘later, longer, fewer’ approach. The best policy, of course, is in setting an attractive example, showing how a non-coercive management can lead to a better life. Many are looking to Botswana for such an example. People must be persuaded to produce fewer people, and the most persuasive agents are usually economic. Tax incentives might help, where governments aren’t panicking over depopulation crises. For instance, a nation might offer only a single tax deduction for ‘children,’ regardless of whether a family has zero or three. Free contraception, freely distributed, would be a huge help if funding could be found, and this would take a huge bite out of the abortion problem.
2b. Overconsumption
and Footprints
“Few educated people realize that the marvelous advances
in technique made during recent decades are improvements
in the pump, rather than the well.” Aldo Leopold
Many people are already declaring the population problem
solved because so many nations are achieving
below-replacement total fertility rates (TFRs). As Adair
Turner describes, “In all countries that have achieved
middle-income status, and where women are well educated
and have reproductive freedom, fertility rates are at or
below replacement levels…. Rich, successful human
societies choose fertility rates that imply gradual
population decline.” This also results in more people
feeling entitled and over-consuming to fully obtain
their due. Rises in per capita consumption will more
than overcompensate for population-based reductions in
the total human footprint. Overpopulation vs
over-consumption balance remains a local affair.
K-populations have concerns about footprint, demographic
decline and immigration, while r-populations have
concerns about the low value of human capital, poor
standards of living, and inefficient environmental
exploitation. Between these are the transitional
populations, with their rising living standards amidst
demographic decline, caught temporarily in what’s called
a demographic trap. K-populations might panic here and
turn to pro-natalist programs, or as a last resort,
immigration, to hold the population in growth mode, when
they would be better advised to constrain any such
efforts with negative population growth until reaching
the local carrying capacity.
Most of the drive to accumulate stores of capital and resources appears to be cultural, since there are many cultures in which this is almost entirely absent. There may remain in us some evolved general adaptations to go the whole hog when encountering scarce necessities, notably dietary sugar and fat, which have led to notorious problems of restraint when these resources are no longer scarce. Evolutionary psychology may one day point to a stronger trend to hoarding goods among ancestral Europeans, who have long had better reasons than more southerly relatives to store supplies over long winters. But such a theory would need to account for the relative absence of same in the still more northerly, non-Caucasian tribes.
Most of the drive to accumulate stores of capital and resources appears to be cultural, since there are many cultures in which this is almost entirely absent. There may remain in us some evolved general adaptations to go the whole hog when encountering scarce necessities, notably dietary sugar and fat, which have led to notorious problems of restraint when these resources are no longer scarce. Evolutionary psychology may one day point to a stronger trend to hoarding goods among ancestral Europeans, who have long had better reasons than more southerly relatives to store supplies over long winters. But such a theory would need to account for the relative absence of same in the still more northerly, non-Caucasian tribes.
Knowledge of the workings of the human mind has perhaps
contributed more than anything else to our present
overconsumption, especially through the development of
advertising and propaganda as sciences and technologies.
Human needs are easily played to, and brand new human
wants are too easily created. Self-image, self-worth,
and the craving for belonging and social status are
easily exploited, with devastating consequences to the
environment. You can prove yourself to others only by
consuming more conspicuously and out-competing them for
the money to do so. Try to guess how much is spent on
sexual conquest and arm candy and the chunk of GDP that
represents. This drives much of the socioeconomic
inequality and inequity at the root of many of our other
problems. Governments will also play heavily on our
fears and insecurities in order to metastasize in their
powers, military and otherwise. Prohibition organizes
crime, which then justifies more government. Growth
becomes self-sustaining or automatic this way. We get
ever-increasing socio-economic-political arrangements
and machinations to service our growing aggregate
consumption, until things grow too complex to manage.
We
are most concerned here with global numbers, especially
our average per-capita environmental footprints.
Ecological footprint measures human demand on nature, in
terms of quantity in natural capital, resources, and
sink capacities. Average per capita footprint can then
be measured against the environmental support system’s
natural capital and its biocapacity for sustained
regeneration. Clearly, there are major differences and
inequalities between cultures, and we’ve already pointed
to strong inverse correlations between fertility rates
and consumption described by Demographic Transition
Theory. That so many countries are now falling below
replacement-level reproductive rates is often cited as a
sure sign of our eventual coming around to
sustainability. But when this is brought up for
discussion, far too few will mention this in relation to
the more-than-compensatory increase in affluence and
environmental footprint. Further, these model countries
are frequently panicking over the threat to their Ponzi
economies and instituting programs to increase the birth
rate again. Meanwhile they are also frightened of using
immigration to make up the difference, for unrelated
xenophobic reasons.
Herman Daly (1971), advocating steady-state economics,
claimed “The stationary state would make fewer demands
on our environmental resources, but much greater demands
on our moral resources.” The most needed of these moral
resources is restraint, but this is best supported by
other virtues like contentment, security, humility,
greater concern for posterity, and gratitude for what we
already have. Both contentment and security are much
frowned upon by advertising, churches, and governments.
It’s the cultivation of discontent, envy, and insecurity
that funds so much of these operations and drives the
economy as a whole. Inflation of demand, planned
obsolescence, perceived obsolescence, and conspicuous
consumption are are all big parts of the toxic toolkit.
Social insecurity over-consumes. That’s why advertising
cultivates it. The Communists are coming, too, so buy
what you can while you can. Voluntary simplicity is
almost seen as a form of treason. It costs your nation’s
economy life-giving jobs. Nobody is encouraged to
investigate the line between real needs and wants. Much
will be said later about the attainment of happiness (or
better, eudaemonia) by way of consumer behavior,
but the bottom line is that we can do a lot of
decoupling of consumerism from quality of life using
values that are far more easily satisfied than those
which currently drive us. What does it take to resist
the forces that drive us in directions not our own and
not really to our benefit? Then the only remaining
bogeyman is what to do with all that spare time and/or
money.
More than a little disingenuously, supporters of the
current market system tout their ideal as laissez
faire, free-market economics. It’s nothing of the
sort. It’s actually an economy run by corporate
capitalists who draft and purchase their own legislation
and manipulate the economy itself at will. Free market
economics runs on the simple laws of supply and demand,
not subsidies, sweetheart deals, and trade treaties to
circumvent government oversight. Scarcity can’t be
concealed in a free market because it means something
important. As some have claimed, the invisible hand has
lately become the invisible foot, now tripping everyone
up.
There is, however, an enormously important deficiency in
true free-market economics that demands that it be
supplemented by restraint on its actions that render it
quite other than free. We need public intervention on
behalf of public and common assets, capital, resources,
and sinks. Noam Chomsky offers, “A basic principal of
modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are
socialized to the extent possible, while profit is
privatized.” If free-market economics is to work
sustainably, it must be unfree to the extent that
society at large, and the biosphere it exists within,
can be otherwise burdened with costs and risks. External
costs must somehow be incorporated into pricing. The
easiest way to do this is for a government to tax what
the public wants to have less of, and particularly,
costs to the commons. If you want smaller families, you
offer a single tax deduction for children, regardless of
whether a family has zero or three. If you want better
fuel economy, you build the socialized costs and risks
of climate change and wars for oil into the price of
vehicles and fuel. Use taxes are suited to this
objective.
All
real costs of consumer items should be made visible and
even itemized for consumer information, even though the
information won’t always be used. This should include
all of the embedded or embodied energy, water, and
materials that go into production or manufacture. This
might, for instance, highlight the big difference in
footprint between feedlot beef and grass-fed and
finished beef. Perhaps the price of gasoline in the US
could reflect the cost of perpetual war in the Middle
East. Informing the consumer is a vital step towards
intelligent consumption. The consumers would less likely
be blissfully unaware that their carnivorous dogs and
cats have environmental footprints which can be similar
to those of human beings in developing nations.
The
careful use of Best Available Technology (BAT, and the T
in I=PAT) can mitigate many of the impacts of high rates
of consumption through better efficiency, life-cycle
planning, sustainable or low-impact alternatives, and
material substitutions. This is far more available in
more affluent cultures, but at least this is where
mitigation is needed the most. There is no way around
the fact that, as people’s income levels rise, they buy
more consumer goods. They eat less grain-based food and
more meat and dairy. The technologically better options
aren’t always available to low-income populations. You
must buy the twenty-dollar boots instead of the
forty-dollar brand that lasts ten times as long. And you
can expect the charitable organizations to provide the
cheap boots. There are also a number of systemic forces
working against implementing BAT, self-reinforcing
barriers to change. Among these are safety and building
codes that are made to cover all worst-case
scenarios and disallow special consideration for actual
field conditions. Similarly, written laws and standards
must be applied equally to all (for the sake of
fairness), regardless of mitigating circumstances. We
also have technological lock-in and path dependency that
determine the components of inventive measures.
Since estimates of carrying capacity are so often driven
by calculations of per capita footprint, these
calculations should embrace more metrics, and more
resources and capital, and also account for interrelated
factors, potential for cascade failures, Liebig
minimums, and peak production forecasts for finite
resources. Most calculations, as with the Global
Footprint Network, are based on oversimplifications that
omit significant dimensions of the overall questions.
Hopefully, most of the important ones will see some
discussion in this book. There is a lot more to our
overall impact that can’t be surrounded with simple
metrics like net primary production, or the output of
greenhouse gases, or land used per capita.
2c. Human
Exceptionalism and Humanism
“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in
our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the
sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all
the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move
along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own
image, in the image of God he created them; male and
female he created them. God blessed them and said to
them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the
earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and
the birds in the sky and over every living creature that
moves on the ground.’ Then God said, ‘I give you every
seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and
every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be
yours for food.’” Gen 1:26-29 (NIV). God didn’t make no
junk, and we are his favorites, of all of creation. Many
of us have evolved beyond this anthropocentric way of
thinking, while many claim proudly, and perhaps
correctly in a way, to have never evolved at all. While
there is much that makes us special, there might yet be
even more that makes us a huge mistake, and partly
because we are capable of thinking like this. Survival
of a species is not a right or entitlement, much less a
function of unconditional cosmic love or divine
favoritism. It’s earned, with proof of adaptive fitness.
We have long confused human dignity with unearned human
divinity. Unlike God, evolution makes plenty of junk,
and some of that is many of us.
“[The human] story has many variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic. But all tell of humanity’s original transcendence of its animal beginnings, our growing mastery over a ‘nature’ to which we no longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity which will follow when this mastery is complete. It is the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures.... The last taboo is the myth of civilization. It is built upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen species. It is where our vision and our self-belief intertwine with our reckless refusal to face the reality of our position on this Earth.... We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths” (Dark Mountain Manifesto).
“[The human] story has many variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic. But all tell of humanity’s original transcendence of its animal beginnings, our growing mastery over a ‘nature’ to which we no longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity which will follow when this mastery is complete. It is the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures.... The last taboo is the myth of civilization. It is built upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen species. It is where our vision and our self-belief intertwine with our reckless refusal to face the reality of our position on this Earth.... We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths” (Dark Mountain Manifesto).
Human exceptionalism is not considered here as a
philosophical problem but a behavioral one within a
framework of cultural ideology. Like the first two cords
in the braid, it might be amended with more enlightened
culture. It comes with behavioral problems that are
distinct from the other two cords, such as poaching,
trophy hunting, and the multiple use mentality. It’s the
foundation of the environmental services model that
represents the primary means of calculating our impacts
and guiding the only implemented policies of restraint
we’ve developed. It's our arrogation of a right to
monetize the global commons. It’s how we behave towards
the world, right up to the bitter end, where our
funerals are little more than a final insult to the
biosphere as we refuse to return what was borrowed. We
don’t need to give anything back: that’s just how
special we are. The ever-cheerful Pentti Linkola offers,
“On a global scale, the main problem is not the
inflation of human life, but its ever-increasing,
mindless over-valuation. Emphasis on the inalienable
right to life of fetuses, premature infants and the
brain-dead has become a kind of collective mental
disease.”
Not all of our problems are cultural. We do still have a pesky handful of inherited tendencies to overcome, at least when overcoming serves a greater good. Our inclination to perceive our own group as somehow qualitatively different from Theirs is a big one. A lot of our emotional responses to social situations are concerned with our place within the social hierarchy, and not with how equal we are to everyone else. We come equipped with social and behavioral tendencies to sort experience into specific categories, archetypes as Jung intended the term, though much misunderstood by his readers. We allow ourselves to be overly influenced by others with prestige, charisma, physical beauty, and power. We also seem to make temporary (but still generational) epigenetic adaptations to certain environments, such as to the stresses of urban living.
Not all of our problems are cultural. We do still have a pesky handful of inherited tendencies to overcome, at least when overcoming serves a greater good. Our inclination to perceive our own group as somehow qualitatively different from Theirs is a big one. A lot of our emotional responses to social situations are concerned with our place within the social hierarchy, and not with how equal we are to everyone else. We come equipped with social and behavioral tendencies to sort experience into specific categories, archetypes as Jung intended the term, though much misunderstood by his readers. We allow ourselves to be overly influenced by others with prestige, charisma, physical beauty, and power. We also seem to make temporary (but still generational) epigenetic adaptations to certain environments, such as to the stresses of urban living.
One
of the biggest problems we have is our arrogated ability
to claim rights over and against nature, with nothing
outside of ourselves to oppose us, other than the
consequences of our actions, which may take a long time
to appear. Even our things are given rights: capital has
a right to replicate, governments to legislate,
corporations to appropriate, all without the benefit of
conscience or consciousness. These things have purposes
of their own, but have little to do with processing the
feedback a system needs for health and sustainability.
They are all about growing ever larger. We lay these
claims without the understanding that rights don’t serve
us well unless they come with corresponding duties,
including and especially that our rights must end where
those of others begin, even where the other may be
unable to articulate such claims. We have human rights
with no sense of human wrongs, at least with respect to
nature. This denial of an opposing voice includes our
own unborn and young descendants, as well as other life
forms, whether sophont, sentient, or something ‘less’ or
‘lower’ than those.
The
rights of reproduction are an important case. The UN
asserts “the basic right of all couples and individuals
to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and
timing of their children and to have the information and
means to do so, and the right to attain the highest
standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also
includes the right of all to make decisions concerning
reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and
violence as expressed in human rights documents. In the
exercise of this right, they should take into account
the needs of their living and future children and their
responsibilities towards the community. The promotion of
the responsible exercise of these rights for all people
should be the fundamental basis for government and
community-supported policies and programs in the area of
reproductive health, including family planning” (UNFPA,
2014). There is no mention here of duty, or even a
suggestion of a conscience or vision that goes beyond
the family and present human population. There is no
mention of any corresponding duty of restraint or a
perspective on the species or the world as a whole. You
will not find this in any UN documents.
All
human life is thought sacred, usually infinitely so, and
all other life is subordinated to our convenience and
claims of necessity. The religious right, of course, may
object to all forms of family planning. Many of its
worst examples will even regard the offspring of rape
and incest as god’s will. How can there be too many of
us when every human life is infinitely precious? Most
aren’t bright enough to see that free contraception is
the best way we have to reduce abortion, but this is
partly because they need the baby killing as the hottest
button for their protests. Too much damage is also done
by the social justice left, the humanists, and the
politically correct, who may quickly regard any global
push for population management and reduction as coercive
policy, eugenics, racism, genocide, and colonialism. The
media now fears any mention of population management for
fear that these moronic buzzwords will get thrown at
them. The biggest pushes still need to be made in
economically poor, r-strategist populations, where the
most likely alternative to sound population management
will be famine, massive dieback, and other mass
suffering, and likely at a time when the more developed
nations will have too many problems of their own to
provide any of the much-needed relief.
Rights to make or arrogate property claims against
nature, whether to other life forms, natural
capital, renewable resources, or environmental sinks,
are a second major problem area, this one more concerned
with overconsumption than overpopulation. The commons
have no legal proxy to stand up for their protection,
other than a few laws that have been grudgingly passed
to silence protests. The human genome, biology itself,
seeds, water, air, food species, the air waves and the
media that use them are all being privatized and
corporatized to some extent. Wilderness, public lands,
and other natural areas are contained in shrinking
reserves, and most of them still allow (or even
encourage) multiple extractive and consumptive uses such
as logging and mining. The commons may be monetized now,
and they remain one vast waste receptacle. The US Forest
Service actually calculates a monetary value for the
extra floodwater that rushes over the ground of clearcut
forests, ignoring its load of topsoil and soil
nutrients. No corruption visible there. Heigham writes,
“Over the last 40 years or so, neoliberalism has
produced an expectation that certain members of global
society can go wherever they like and buy whatever they
want, a sort of detached mentality that rejects the
previously perceived need for regulation and control in
the national or community interest.”
As
our population has grown to the point of reaching and
exceeding the world’s physical and biological limits, we
have found ourselves in need either of some form of
ethic, or some form of rationalization, that can be used
to inform legislative and policy choices. The commons
are no longer unlimited sources and sinks, and this
demands either a new kind of respect or a working
substitute. Honestly facing the facts of human
limitations, and the dangers of remaining ignorant, does
not seem to be part of our natural skill set. In what
may be deemed a wrong turn by succeeding generations, we
have largely elected to use economic frames and
rationalizations in the form of ecological economics.
The natural world is valued in terms of the
environmental services it provides to the human economy
and the human civilization. Little more than lip service
is given to the intrinsic worth of a thriving biosphere
and the diversity of its inhabitants. The sad thing is
that this is the most practical approach for now, even
though it perpetuates economic paradigms that lie at the
heart of our problems. We don’t seem prepared to look at
the ways of indigenous tribe that have managed millennia
of coexistence with nature. We don’t seem ready to prioritize our
real needs over the new wants installed by advertising.
Human exceptionalism drives both growth and consumption,
in addition to bringing its own set of problems along.
It’s our entitlement, as the crown of creation, to take
what we want and do as we will. This leaves us without a
requisite sense of duty to the whole, no moral
accountability, no sense of obligation to pay any sort
of rent for the privilege of being alive on this world.
But we may still pay nature back for all those millennia
of suffering it put us through. We will finally conquer
nature. Exceptionalism is also very much alive in
competition between individuals and local populations,
such as nations, which in turn drives the socioeconomic
inequity that also plagues us with social and political
problems. Human ignorance is proving too intractable for
this problem, and human intelligence too one-dimensional
for the needed systems thinking. It’s probably going to
take some extremely unpleasant consequences to start
bringing our numbers back down
The
most useful opposite and antidote to our human
exceptionalism is probably Deep Ecology. This is an
acceptance of membership in the larger community of life
on Earth. The humanist is ready to embrace the whole
human species. This is a step in the right direction,
and at least acknowledges a need to outgrow nationalism
and patriotism, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The
Sioux phrase mitakuye oyasin, all my relations,
acknowledges this larger kinship. But we also want to
make a point of including those less charismatic
species, the vole and the housefly, and if we really
know what’s good for us, we will also embrace plant and
microbial life as our kin. If we are to survive, it will
become essential at some point to assert and enforce
proxy rights on behalf of nature, a public trust
doctrine, to secure the survival of future generations
of other species as well as our own.
3. Environmental Services
It’s with no small reluctance that this chapter carries
this title, given the preceding complaints about human
exceptionalism. Valuing the environment economically, or
monetizing its services, currently represents the best
chance for environmental policy reform, even where
it has backing from those who are doing the environment
the most damage. It also has the salubrious effect of
alerting the otherwise unaware to just how valuable, and
even precious, a healthy environment is. It helps some
of us to better appreciate the world we live in, in the
sense of increasing its perceived value. But we have
failed so far to incorporate these quantified values,
particularly of our negative impacts on the commons,
into the pricing of goods, where these costs would work
to drive demand downward. And policymakers still tend to
be more often educated by bribes and other stimulus from
the corporate world than by these assigned economic
values.
As
living beings, it’s perhaps legitimate to think that we
inherit the world we’re born into. By virtue of having
no choice in this, it would be hard to claim that we
have no inherent right to make the most of life and take
what we need to survive, even thrive, even without a
corresponding sense of duty to not make a mess of
things. And until we get our most basic needs met, it’s
pretty difficult to consider anything other than
providing for our own self-ish needs. Social and
political protest can emerge from states of
impoverishment and deficiency, but protest over
environmental damage will more often come from the
better-fed and educated among us. This may in fact be
the best argument for global socioeconomic equity and
better education. Beyond a point, though, we get greedy.
We arrogate rights to property in the common
environment, we arrogate rights to far more than we need
to thrive, and in ways which seriously compromise our
ability to continue to thrive. We exterminate other life
forms, both deliberately and collaterally. Perhaps a
billion of the religious are actually praying for an End
of Days. We act like we care little for the future of
life on Earth, and we even apply our hyperbolic
discounting to the value of our own descendants. We’re
even bad at being exceptionalists.
The
phrase “tragedy of the commons” comes from Garrett
Hardin (1968), who wrote, “Therein is the tragedy. Each
man is locked into a system that compels him to increase
his herd without limit - in a world that is limited.
Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each
pursuing his own interest in a society that believes in
the freedom of the commons.” But the idea goes back at
least to Aristotle: “What is common to the greatest
number has the least care bestowed upon it.” We need to
learn how to embrace the commons as essential to our own
well being in order to get past this. We need to get
over ourselves for the perspective and overview needed
to do this.
To
properly study Aurelio Peccei’s and the Club of Rome’s problématique
humaine, the full meta-system of predicaments and
problems facing the world will require systems thinking
and analysis from comprehensive points of view. But this
still needs to have the parts identified, and these
parts are best sorted into useful categories for clarity
of analysis. This chapter and the next will attempt
this. One popular way of sorting environmental services
comes from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (See
Bibliography). This offers four categories, but there is
also much multiple occupancy of items. Some of these
must be exploited with human technology supported by
good social order. Shortages of some of these can lead
to resource wars and other political destabilizations.
The following isn’t verbatim, since I’ve made bold to
add a number of services and shift some into different
categories:
* Provisioning Services:
actual products, biochemicals, biofuels, fiber, firewood
and cellulosic fuel, food, fresh water, genetic materials,
geothermal heat, insolation (incoming solar radiation),
lumber, medicine, nutrient uptake from weathering parent
material, raw minerals and other raw materials, and
volcanic ash.* Regulating Services: air quality, atmospheric maintenance, biological pest control, detoxification, disease control, flood control, global heat redistribution, groundwater recharge, local weather and climate, soil fertility and regeneration, stormwater and meltwater runoff pacing, waste processing, water purification or quality, soil water retention, weather event moderation.
* Supporting Services: adaptive capacity and resilience, biodiversity maintenance, biogeochemical cycles, carbon sequestration, disease resistance, genetic resilience, hydrologic cycles, nutrient cycling, oxygen production, pollination, primary photosynthetic and biomass production, soil formation, speciation, and species habitat.
* Cultural Services: aesthetic inspiration, appreciation, biomimetic inspiration, cultural heritage sites, design inspiration, ecoliteracy, ecotoursim, educational value, elucidogens (entheogens), field trips, natural monuments, opportunities to practice stewardship, ornamental resources, recreation, reverence and gratitude, scientific discovery, sense of home and place, sophrosyne, and spiritual enrichment.
Having high-quality and timely information about the
state or health of these services is vital, and yet
there are special interests that will deliberately delay
or distort this for short-term gain. The world itself is
still large enough to conceal some of the damages being
done, especially in conjunction with a willful blindness
or denial in the majority of humanity. The environment
still holds some buffering capacity. Overshoot of both
component and system-wide limits can persist for some
time. As is often the case, we may not awaken to these
until we’re already in mid-crisis.
Diminishing returns on the efforts to make use of these
services, especially on those becoming increasingly
scarce, is another neglected aspect. It’s natural that
we would till the most fertile soils, pluck the
low-hanging fruit, and mine the richest veins before
moving on to the harder extractions and exploitations.
More work for the latter will also entail greater
collateral damage to the environment. At some point we
have to give up and find substitutes or change the way
we live.
Liebig's law of the minimum asserts that growth is
dictated not by total resources available, but by the
scarcest resource as a limiting factor. The law has also
been applied to biological populations and ecosystem
models for factors such as sunlight or mineral
nutrients. This becomes particularly vital with certain
forms of non-renewable natural capital, and its
importance will increase with the depth of our time
horizons.
3a. Resources and
Capital
Every year, humanity extracts or otherwise consumes
nearly 100 billion tonnes of materials, including
biomass, fossil fuels, metals, and other minerals. As these
materials become more scarce, the cost of extraction
rises. And sometimes this drives up costs and profits in
ways that ramp up extraction efforts. For materials
being seriously depleted, the only alternative is
planned conservation and reuse. We have been doing
ourselves and our science a great disservice by
referring to all of these materials and environmental
services as resources, or natural resources. The word
resource itself means ‘that which resurges.’ A resource
is either a reliable flow to which we might return for
more, or else it rebounds or comes back if we
appropriate a flow at too high a rate and later back off
from that demand. The common phrase “non-renewable
resource” is therefore an oxymoron. Non-renewables will
be referred to here as natural capital instead, and only
renewables will be regarded as resources. In this
chapter, services will be parsed into renewable
resources, non-renewable natural capital, and
environmental sinks. The chapter will conclude with the
various contexts for these, categories of land use and
how lands are being converted from one use to another,
more often than not, in or into degraded form.
We
have also committed a still more heinous error of naming
and thought, particularly in the recently conquered
regions of the Western Hemisphere and Oceania. We have
taken the natural capital of these stolen lands and
regarded it as income, earned at the relatively minimal
costs of extraction, and perhaps including the costs of
exterminating the aboriginal populations. You just can’t
liquidate capital and call it income and then hope to
survive as an economy forever. This sly bookkeeping
catches up. It already seems to have caught up, from
looking at national debts. And now we are so far in
debt, as Daly puts it, we are “treating the Earth as if
it were a business in liquidation.” The US, especially,
has treated its malappropriated resources and capital as
income, with costs only seen in the costs of extraction.
And even the costs of extraction have been heavily
subsidized for the sake of economic growth. No services
will be regarded here as income, not even sunlight. All
have costs, and one of the great lessons we have yet to
learn is that these costs should be borne by the
harvesters, depleters, polluters, and ultimately,
consumers. A tax on resources
and capital at the point of use
is perhaps the most rational. This might be done with a
standard deduction for absolute necessities, so that
only our excesses need pay for the excesses. We should
also be taxing the things we want less of.
From the point of view of deep ecology, the words
resource and capital should only be applied to those
elements that a species with a conscience would need to
lay claim to in order to survive, and thrive within
reasonable limits. For many, like E.O. Wilson, that
would be no more than half of those available, and
further, with a deeper respect for the commons as
possessing their own inherent value. But we have so far
failed to develop that conscience, which appears to also
require a certain standard of living and a carefully
crafted education. In any case, we would do well
to quit monetizing the global commons altogether,
including the rain.
As
with many dichotomies, the line between resource and
capital is fat and fuzzy in places. Some will say that a
supply is non-renewable if it takes more than a human
lifetime to rebound. This would make the natural
production of topsoil a non-renewable. And yet an
unnatural production of topsoil, as with
mycoremediation, accelerated seral succession, or
regenerative agriculture, could return it to a renewable
status. The atmosphere’s capacity as a carbon sink would
also be non-renewable capital by this measure. This
could be made somewhat more renewable again with
large-scale carbon sequestration projects like
reforestation, low and no-till farming, terra preta,
and perhaps iron fertilization of marine algae.
On
the other side, renewable resources must often be
captured or collected using technologies that are
heavily dependent on the use of non-renewable natural
capital. Those magnificent offshore banks of windmills
still need to be built of minerals mined from the earth.
They need to be transported to the site using trucks,
roads, ships, cranes, and fuel. They need to be
maintained with replacement parts, along with
environmental costs of maintaining a human workforce.
And when their life is over, they will need to be fully
replaced. The battery storage of renewably harvested
electricity still wants minerals to make the batteries,
and eventually to make the replacement batteries. The
electric car isn’t that much less costly to build or
replace than a conventional car. Although both the
automobile and steel industries have long been leaders
in recycling, there are embedded resource and natural
capital costs in that as well. Natural capital can only
be thought a resource to the extent that it may be
recyclable, and it can never be fully or perfectly so.
Environmental sinks, the ability of the environment to
absorb wastes and recover from other impacts, comprise a
third category of services. Until recently in our
history, in our vast, empty world, this was never much
more than a local problem. It hasn’t been that long
since cities in the industrialized nations quit dumping
their sewage directly into rivers, and non-point-source
pollution hasn’t slowed down at all for agricultural
runoff. Until recently, our impacts here weren’t
significant enough globally to do much lasting damage to
the whole. At about the time we were approaching (what I
regard as) our real carrying capacity, a fuller Earth,
and some of our common limits, the industrial revolution
gave us more significant and widespread air and water
pollution. Within a couple of centuries, the population
growth enabled by new industry necessitated the now
ironically named “green revolution” of modernized
agriculture and the quantity of our wastes exploded with
our population. But now we had nowhere to put it that
allowed us to just forget about it. We are only now
being forced to redirect our wastes back into productive
cycles. Simply sequestering our wastes is becoming
untenable, although some of the places where we have
done this might one day be regarded as mines by poorer
generations of humans.
Resources can be said to have a natural yield, as sinks
can be said to have natural rates of absorption. The
economist Herman Daly suggests basic rules of thumb to
define the limits of these. For renewable resources, the
limit is the rate of regeneration or resurgence (perhaps
with some seasonal dips or borrowings against highly
predictable cycles). For natural capital, the limit is
the rate at which renewable substitutions can be found
or the capital can be recycled. Reaching the limits to
natural capital can also be deferred a bit by
improvements in technology, efficiency, and waste
cycling. For environmental sinks, the limit is the rate
of recycling, absorption, or detoxification.
To some extent, these services can be augmented beyond their natural rates, with the greatest limitations being on natural capital. Resource productivity is especially amenable to increase. For instance, nature isn’t perfectly efficient in its net primary production, so that agricultural systems like Permaculture can increase a natural yield sustainably. But even this is provided that any requisite non-renewable minerals that are taken from the soil are somehow replenished eventually by composting, organic soils activity, or deep root structures uplifting minerals from weathering bedrock. The same goes for fresh water, which, with more careful planning, can be used several times before it disappears back into some stream. With regard to environmental sinks, we are only beginning to explore our better augmentation options, and we have some good human-scale and low-tech options, as with reforestation, terra preta, and mycoremediation.
To some extent, these services can be augmented beyond their natural rates, with the greatest limitations being on natural capital. Resource productivity is especially amenable to increase. For instance, nature isn’t perfectly efficient in its net primary production, so that agricultural systems like Permaculture can increase a natural yield sustainably. But even this is provided that any requisite non-renewable minerals that are taken from the soil are somehow replenished eventually by composting, organic soils activity, or deep root structures uplifting minerals from weathering bedrock. The same goes for fresh water, which, with more careful planning, can be used several times before it disappears back into some stream. With regard to environmental sinks, we are only beginning to explore our better augmentation options, and we have some good human-scale and low-tech options, as with reforestation, terra preta, and mycoremediation.
3b. Renewable
Resources
Eventually, we will have to start regarding property
rights as usufructs (use of the fruits), particularly
with the commons. This a right to use the yield of a
system without damage to the system producing the yield.
This will, to some extent, permit borrowing yields
against predictable seasonal fluctuations. The word
sustainable means to uphold from below, meaning a due
regard and respect for the systems supporting a yield.
As long as we fail to see what this means, we will
continue to be surprised when support systems collapse.
Once again, renewable resources are most often captured
or collected using technologies that are heavily
dependent on the use of non-renewable natural capital.
The extraction, processing, and transportation of this
capital can also inflict costly damage on the
environment, even though this capital may lack other
economic value. We cannot forget that renewables have
embedded or embodied costs in minerals, energy, and
water, most of which have external costs to the commons.
Included here is the cost in human time, energy, and
labor, and the environmental costs of supporting human
lives during extended processes of exploitation.
Resources require income to the overall system. There
are only a few of these: insolation (or incoming solar
radiation, including wind and hydro), geothermal energy,
chemosynthesis, meteoric dust, the recruitment of
available minerals into soil from weathering of rock and
microbial activities, and new deposits of volcanic ash.
Water is distilled from the sea and land and pumped into
the system by insolation. The atmosphere is refreshed by
photosynthesis. Differentials in energy inputs and gains
circulate climate and ocean currents. Numerous factors
will contribute to rivers, groundwater recharge, and
flowing freshwater aquifers, while fossil water aquifers
are capital, not resources. These inputs all drive
potential biocapacity and biomass, subject only to the
ability of life to make use of them. When there is no
income, there will be some depletion or degradation.
Soil nutrient depletion can’t be counteracted either
completely or indefinitely with NPK fertilizer inputs.
Other sources will eventually have to be found. Nitrogen
compounds can be synthesized, but the phosphate rock and
potash needed to make phosphorous and potassium
available to crops are finite and alternatives aren’t
close to being cost effective yet. Peak phosphorous is
coming soon, and this is a vital element for life.
Food production is generally regarded a renewable resource, and one that is subject to much improvement in yield. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) is most often seen these days being scoffed at or derogated by overpopulation deniers for having erred in his general observation that exponential population growth will necessarily outpace the linear growth in food production, leading to a population collapse. Food production did go up in a non-linear way. Malthus’ mistake was in not foreseeing this. The early Club of Rome made a similar miscalculation. But what their critics can’t see yet is that food production didn’t increase in any sustainable way. In effect, the green revolution in agriculture took out a huge loan and entered it into the books as income. It’s now far too heavily dependent on new inputs from limited natural resources and finite, non-renewable natural capital. Agricultural outputs are now subject to overpopulation pressures on land use, pressures for higher trophic level protein, climate change, water shortages, fossil water aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, biocides, biodiversity loss, pollinator crashes, finite fertilizer inputs, and finite fossil-fuel-intensive mechanical inputs, among others. All are functions of both population and per-capita consumption levels. We are likely to soon find ourselves back to regarding food production as either linear or decreasing in both per capita and per hectare metrics, and shortly after that, in total. But that’s probably after we pull out a couple more tricks we have up our sleeves.
Food production is generally regarded a renewable resource, and one that is subject to much improvement in yield. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) is most often seen these days being scoffed at or derogated by overpopulation deniers for having erred in his general observation that exponential population growth will necessarily outpace the linear growth in food production, leading to a population collapse. Food production did go up in a non-linear way. Malthus’ mistake was in not foreseeing this. The early Club of Rome made a similar miscalculation. But what their critics can’t see yet is that food production didn’t increase in any sustainable way. In effect, the green revolution in agriculture took out a huge loan and entered it into the books as income. It’s now far too heavily dependent on new inputs from limited natural resources and finite, non-renewable natural capital. Agricultural outputs are now subject to overpopulation pressures on land use, pressures for higher trophic level protein, climate change, water shortages, fossil water aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, biocides, biodiversity loss, pollinator crashes, finite fertilizer inputs, and finite fossil-fuel-intensive mechanical inputs, among others. All are functions of both population and per-capita consumption levels. We are likely to soon find ourselves back to regarding food production as either linear or decreasing in both per capita and per hectare metrics, and shortly after that, in total. But that’s probably after we pull out a couple more tricks we have up our sleeves.
The
first trophic level, the food at the bottom of the food
webs, relies most heavily on insolation and a handful of
basic nutritional elements. The yield here is called NPP
or net primary production, the usable chemical energy
captured by plants in a system, less the energy spent in
plant respiration. This energy budget determines the
maximum total biomass of a system at all of the trophic
levels. Level one consists of the autotrophs, using
photosynthesis or chemosynthesis. On level two are the
grazers, on level three, the carnivores. On level four
are the consumers of carnivores, including detritivores
and parasites. Trophic cascade failures can be upwards,
as when a volcanic winter reduces plant life, or
downwards, as when the wolves are removed from an
ecosystem, allowing grazers to overconsume.
The
renewability of resources is normally calculated in
terms of flows or sustainable yields, over specified
periods of time to allow for seasonal and other
predictable fluctuations. This makes an unbiased
calculation and representation of these flows a must.
The exploitation of fisheries must allow for illegal
fishing as well. Forest planners, often with educations
supplied by the timber industry, use formulae for
estimates of fiber productivity in board feet. These
estimates may be derived with sound principles, but when
it comes time to harvest the timber, the harvest figures
can be tweaked and juggled to the harvester’s advantage.
I have seen an example with aspen OSB production from US
Forest service lands, where logging trucks are weighed
to determine initial volume, which is then adjusted by a
factor of efficiency of use to get board feet. Aspen is
said to weigh 62 pcf and be utilized at 25%. But in
fact, aspen weighs about 40 pcf and is utilized at over
67%. Combining these two means that the loggers are
harvesting more than four times the calculated
sustainable yield. To add still more insult, a
sustainable yield has come to be regarded as a
sustained yield, “a non-diminishing flow of commodity
outputs” rather than as a usufruct.
Occasionally, buffer limits are set on the exploitation
of yields. In the case of minimum instream flows for
aquatic ecosystems, the limits will be set over loud and
well-financed protests, perhaps claiming that humans
need the water more than the fish (where are your
values, man?). Other limits will arise as
overexploitation or overharvesting entail diminishing
returns, or perhaps the diminishment defines what’s meant by ‘over.’ We
harvest until this becomes cost-ineffective. This can
happen with wild medicinal plants, fish stocks, grazing
pastures, game animals, forests, and water aquifers.
With a resource, scarcity will generally be temporary,
except when a species is harvested to extinction, or to
below its genetic viability.
3c. Non-Renewable
Natural Capital
The category of non-renewable capital includes energy
minerals (fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal;
and uranium), higher grade mineral ores (phosphate rock,
potash, antimony, indium, silver, copper, titanium, and
tantalum are particularly important as peak production
approaches), other metallic ores like bauxite,
gemstones, rare earth minerals (the fifteen elemental
lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium, in pockets
concentrated enough to be mined economically), lithium
(with its increasing importance in battery manufacture),
fossil groundwater, and by some measures, renewable
resources that take more than a human lifetime to
recover. According to Global Resources Outlook,
extraction has been tripling in the time it takes
population to double. Biodiversity is be regarded as
non-renewable, given the permanence of extinction,
Jurassic Park scenarios excepted. Genetic engineering
can be a little too blind to its consequences. Arable
land, whether exhausted, deprived of aquifers, or
overpaved, is non-renewable in the short run. Marginal
land, to which we move after the best land has been
exhausted, is even more non-renewable, especially where
converted to desert. Construction materials (sand,
gravel, brick clay, crushed rock aggregates) and
industrial minerals (nonmetallic substances such as
salt, limestone, silica, talc, and mica), while
non-renewable, are generally in more plentiful supply,
but it must not be forgotten that these must be mined
from the earth or ocean, with inevitable collateral
impacts and long-term damages from extraction. We also
have underutilized materials like volcanic and fly ash
that can be used as partial substitutes for cement.
The
calculation of value of natural capital needs to include
its value in the distant future (too often rounded too
far down with hyperbolic discounting) along with the
irreversibility of depletion. This is the worst place we
can think of to deploy hyperbolic discounting to make
our current myopic plans look better. Even where we are
looking at peak production rates 50 years away, with 500
years to exhaustion, this is not sustainable, and to say
that it is is merely myopic, a failure of long-term
vision, perhaps with a blind faith in technology and
human ingenuity. Oil production has already peaked, but
we have substitutions already waiting in the wings. Peak
phosphorous, on the other hand, is estimated at 2030,
and its depletion within a century. This is vital to
agriculture and fertilizer as we know it, yet it’s is
presently being lost in large quantities from erosion
and runoff from agricultural lands, and into aquatic
ecosystems, where it causes pollution problems.
There is no such thing as a sustainable rate of
extraction and use of a finite stock of non-renewable
‘resources.’ The word ‘reserves’ should be used instead
of supply or flow for non-renewables. If there is any
yield at all, this must be interest on the investment of
capital. Continued use will require either further
exploration to expose currently unknown reserves or the
development of substitutions. But substitutions are not
always possible, as with the nutrient elements vital to
plant, fungal, and animal life. Substitutions might also
entail both known and unknown consequences or external
costs. Outside of dropping unnecessary consumption of
natural capital, finding easy substitutions, and
decoupling, our main fallback is reuse or recycling,
where waste management becomes the input for other
production systems. Nature is our best guide here, and
biomimicry is what we do when we get ideas there.
Many of the more finite materials are already
approaching or surpassing peak production out of their
known reserves. Donella Meadows describes an example of
the gradual process: “Oil depletion will not appear as a
complete stop, a sudden drying-up of the spigot. Rather,
it will show up as lower and lower returns on
investments in exploration, increasing concentration of
the remaining reserves in a few nations, and finally a
peak and gradual decline in total world production.”
Exploitation or extraction of capital in a post-peak
state nearly always involves diminishing returns and
greater environmental damage in the process. Eventually
there comes a point still short of complete exhaustion
where further action is untenable. But up to this point,
the nature of capitalism works against conservation of
the reserves. Scarcity, even on its runup to peak
exploitation, will drive the commodity prices and
profits up, thereby accelerating exploitation. Once the
easy pickings are picked and the low-hanging fruit
plucked, further exploration entails higher energy costs
and more environmental damage, like pollution and new
inroads.
Given all of this, a system’s carrying capacity must be
thought to diminish over the long term from depletion of
non-renewable and non-replaceable natural capital. It
falls most quickly during overshoot. Limiting factors or
Liebig minimums are the first necessary capital to be
regarded as depleted. These are physical or chemical
factors that will limit the existence, growth,
abundance, or distribution of an an organism, a
population, or an ecosystem. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen “argues that economic scarcity is rooted in physical
reality; that all natural [capital is] irreversibly
degraded when put to use in economic activity; that the
carrying capacity of earth - that is, earth's capacity
to sustain human populations and consumption levels - is
bound to decrease some time in the future as earth's
finite stock of mineral resources is being extracted and
put to use; and consequently, that the world economy as
a whole is heading towards an inevitable future
collapse, ultimately bringing about human extinction”
(Wikipedia). Extended analogies to the 2nd law of
thermodynamics have been used by Georgescu-Roegen and
others to discuss the dissipation of limited natural
capital like minerals, and also the costs of maintaining
social order as a growing population’s support system.
But because these have not been prefaced as analogies,
critics have been eager to dismiss such expository
writing as invalid and unscientific argument (the 2nd
Law being strictly about energy, as any fool knows)
before strutting off smugly believing they’ve refuted
all that’s been said. So please note: I’m suggesting
that there’s a useful analogy here. Herman Daly uses
this analogy as well, and comes to the depressing
conclusion, as must we all if we’re honest, that there
is no winning a game against entropy. In the end, even
the steady-state economy that remains our best option
will one day run out of necessities. Hence the talk of
mining the asteroids and the settling of other worlds.
But as long as we can maintain an analog to climax
ecosystems, where our living and dying are equals, we
can still delay the inevitable long enough to have a
civilization worthy of its name.
3d. Environmental
Sinks
Waste materials released into the environment have only
become a real problem since we filled up our empty world
and exceeded our carrying capacity. Before this, we
simply couldn’t make enough of a mess, except locally.
We crossed a line just a few decades into the Industrial
Revolution. Urban sewage and air pollution were the
first clear signs. Herman Daly states, “For a pollutant,
the sustainable rate of emission can be no greater than
the rate at which that pollutant can be recycled,
absorbed, or rendered harmless in its sink.” We can also
add decomposed, detoxified, and sequestered to that. As
the world got smaller, the specific industrial
pollutants began to multiply. By the beginning of the
20th Century, the effects of fossil fuel use and mining,
such as oil spills and tailings, were becoming clear to
those with eyes to see. Lately, we’ve added
substantially more groundwater pollution from activities
like hydraulic fracking, which also releases a lot of
methane. By mid-20th Century, we began to add the wastes
from our so-called green revolution in industrial
agriculture. Agricultural fertilizer run-off brings
another set of problems as our additions to the nitrogen
cycle and our added phosphorous flows enter marine
ecosystems. This has created hundreds of aquatic dead
zones, while much of this pollution is food in happier
contexts. Better waste management could pull some load
off the environment, as by harvesting algal blooms to
make biofuels and fertilizer. Still, the runoff also
carries sediment, pathogens, endocrine disruptors,
biocides, heavy metals, and salts.
Many of these biocides (herbicides, insecticides, and
fungicides) are accumulating in agricultural soils,
while the native biotic community in the soils is either
gone now, or too compromised, or simply unable to break
them down. Insecticide toxicity loading has become
especially problematic in corn and soybean crops.
Shortly after mid-century would come nuclear waste, where decisions about the next hundred millennia are being made by politicians with less than two years of vision. The technology is improving here, as with fourth-generation fast neutron reactors. Used fuel from present reactors and large stocks of depleted uranium will get new life as fuels sources. It’s also vital to find better ways to concentrate and sequester low-level wastes. Of course, as anyone who has been around for Chernobyl and Fukashima knows, Murphy’s Law likes to play tricks on the nuclear industry. Medical wastes followed with the rise of wonder drugs, and now measurable quantities of prescription drugs are showing up in our water supplies. Lately, the one that seems to have snuck up on everyone is the proliferation of non-degradable plastic wastes, from our single-use, throwaway culture. The pieces just get smaller. Over 8 billion tonnes of plastic made from 1950 to 2020 (with 4 billion more by 2050) now exists either in landfills or as free-range pollution. The end state of our fabrics and clothing is becoming more problematic now, with ubiquitous microfibers entering the environment and food webs.
Shortly after mid-century would come nuclear waste, where decisions about the next hundred millennia are being made by politicians with less than two years of vision. The technology is improving here, as with fourth-generation fast neutron reactors. Used fuel from present reactors and large stocks of depleted uranium will get new life as fuels sources. It’s also vital to find better ways to concentrate and sequester low-level wastes. Of course, as anyone who has been around for Chernobyl and Fukashima knows, Murphy’s Law likes to play tricks on the nuclear industry. Medical wastes followed with the rise of wonder drugs, and now measurable quantities of prescription drugs are showing up in our water supplies. Lately, the one that seems to have snuck up on everyone is the proliferation of non-degradable plastic wastes, from our single-use, throwaway culture. The pieces just get smaller. Over 8 billion tonnes of plastic made from 1950 to 2020 (with 4 billion more by 2050) now exists either in landfills or as free-range pollution. The end state of our fabrics and clothing is becoming more problematic now, with ubiquitous microfibers entering the environment and food webs.
We’re now releasing novel substances and entities into
the environment, molecules that nature has never needed
to deal with before. Man-made legacy contaminants such
as PCBs, PFASs, and other persistent organic pollutants
circulate more or less indefinitely through the
biosphere. We can still use the words absorption and
sink, but not conversion and detoxification. Life will
have to adapt to what we’ve done here, even after we
quit doing it.
Greenhouse gases are getting the most attention now, and
threaten some the direst consequences, or rather,
several of the direst cascades of consequences across
numerous environmental sub-systems. Carbon dioxide
remains the most threatening of these, followed by
methane. The burning of fossil fuels are a huge problem
by themselves, but by their contribution to total CO2
ppm, they are also helping creating dangerous positive
feedback loops as rising temperatures acidify the
oceans, crashing marine photosynthesis, and melting the
permafrost, releasing still more massive quantities of
CO2 and CH4. The
current melting rates of permafrost are showing
previous estimates to have been far too conservative,
in optimistic error by several decades. With this go
the sequestration services locking up bad bugs or old
diseases. We have hardly begun to see the
effects of melting methane clathrates. While many of us
have been assured that the Methane Dragon of clathrate
release is still somewhere a century hence, the overly
conservative predictive errors we’ve made so far should
give us some pause. The worst part of the GHGs is the
centuries that it will take for any system, natural or
manmade, to absorb them, while we already see their
runaway effects. The ocean has long served as a carbon
sink, and today absorbs around 25% of fossil fuel CO2
production. But the default sink is the capacity or
appetite of marine phytoplankton, algae, and other plant
life, which is also diminishing as our output is
increasing. The balance is absorbed in seawater, where
it forms carbonic acid, a growing threat to most life,
but most especially to the calcium carbonate used to
build seashells and coral reefs.
The
rapid expansion of industrial agriculture is deemed
necessary to keep pace with the exploding human
population, but the rapid conversion of lands to this
use strips the soil of our most effective means of
carbon sequestration. Regenerative agriculture, which
combines such methods as low and no-till perennial
crops, mycoremediation, biochar, terra preta,
Permaculture, and Holistic Range Management, still offer
much promise in reversing this trend, but even this
won’t carry our growing population, or even anything
even close to our present numbers over the long term. On
average, and at present, the agricultural impacts are
more closely tied to our overpopulation than to our
overconsumption, but this is changing rapidly as more of
the global population shifts to a meat-and-dairy diet
with the growing affluence of some populations. We are
further compounding this problem by using arable land
and fresh water to grow crops for CAFOs, and worse, for
biofuels. Biofuels are a great idea, but we should be
developing cellulosic and algal crops that don’t consume
as much water or soil. They have no good business to do
on valuable farmlands.
Some of the environment’s sink capacity occurs within
the food web itself. The most familiar example is the
upward migration of mercury pollution into living
tissues at the higher trophic levels, rendering
predators in particular the most unsafe meat to eat.
This removes the consumption of invasive predator
species like Burmese pythons and monitor lizards from
the range of solutions to the invasive species problem.
Our
recycling ethic remains poor enough still that great
quantities of baled materials, representing our best
efforts, are merely becoming sequestration efforts, only
one step less problematic than landfills. However, at
least these recycling storage facilities might one day
be regarded as material mines by our
resource-impoverished descendants. Too many of us still
have the illusion that putting out most of their
recycling once a week to the curb is doing their part to
save the environment. There are a lot of Rs to the more
comprehensive ethic we need, though their number and
sequence keeps changing: Reduce, Replace, Reuse, Repair,
Rebuild, Refurbish, Repurpose, Rot, Rotate, Recycle,
Recover, Refuse, Remember, Restrict, Reject, Rethink, Reinvent, Remake,
Resell, Re-gift, and Restore. Unfortunately, many of
these Rs are still in conflict with civilization’s
larger economic goals of unlimited growth and
consumption, the advertising that supports them, and the
way that goods are packaged shipped around the world.
3e. Land Conversion
Lands and local niches tend to evolve naturally through
successive stages, normally from bare minerals to climax
ecosystems, constrained by available nutrients and
evolving microclimates. Ecosystems do change naturally.
Most of Canada was once under a mile-thick ice sheet,
and Antarctica used to be tropical. The lifespan of
niche evolution is called a sere, and the evolutionary
process is called seral succession. Humans, and a few
other animals, can interrupt this dramatically. Nobody
comes close to doing it as ham-handedly as we do. The
primary reason is our hypertrophy, or overgrowth. This
is what’s driving us to build on top of earthquake
faults, onto the slopes of Vesuvius, and into flood
zones. We need a revised set of Horsemen now, with
Hypertrophy joining Famine, Pandemic, and War, to denote
the most effective ways we have of ‘involuntarily’
reducing our own population. Our available per-capita
land keeps shrinking, and our growing population, with
its economic growth obsession, overconsumption, and bad attitude
towards the biosphere, keeps demanding ever more lebensraum.
Conversion often means degradation of the land from
forced production of environmental services.
The conversion of land has its most serious impacts on the availability of fresh water, biodiversity loss, habitat loss, and climate change through loss of carbon sequestration. Too many of our industrial practices turn the soil to dirt and dust, and eventually to desert. Population growth, with its agricultural demands and other pressures for water, fibers, and fuels, is the primary driver of deforestation and other land use conversion. Such conversion “accounts for over 80% of biodiversity loss and 85% of water stress as forests and swamps are cleared for cropland that needs irrigation.... Three-quarters of all [usable] land has been turned into farm fields, covered by concrete, swallowed up by dam reservoirs or otherwise significantly altered” (Jonathan Watts). Little remains outside of Africa of the world’s former tropical and temperate grasslands, now converted to agriculture and renamed bread baskets. These now become especially vulnerable to changes in temperature and precipitation. Aquifers are being overused to stabilize irrigation. New land conversion is currently worst in the tropics and subtropics, with the fastest encroachments being in areas of vital biodiversity hot spots. Three-quarters of freshwater rivers and lakes are now used for crop or livestock cultivation.
The conversion of land has its most serious impacts on the availability of fresh water, biodiversity loss, habitat loss, and climate change through loss of carbon sequestration. Too many of our industrial practices turn the soil to dirt and dust, and eventually to desert. Population growth, with its agricultural demands and other pressures for water, fibers, and fuels, is the primary driver of deforestation and other land use conversion. Such conversion “accounts for over 80% of biodiversity loss and 85% of water stress as forests and swamps are cleared for cropland that needs irrigation.... Three-quarters of all [usable] land has been turned into farm fields, covered by concrete, swallowed up by dam reservoirs or otherwise significantly altered” (Jonathan Watts). Little remains outside of Africa of the world’s former tropical and temperate grasslands, now converted to agriculture and renamed bread baskets. These now become especially vulnerable to changes in temperature and precipitation. Aquifers are being overused to stabilize irrigation. New land conversion is currently worst in the tropics and subtropics, with the fastest encroachments being in areas of vital biodiversity hot spots. Three-quarters of freshwater rivers and lakes are now used for crop or livestock cultivation.
The
most drastic of our activities here convert our natural
and biodiverse ecosystems into monocultural agricultural
crops. To the extent that we do this with industrial
agriculture, we are also stripping the soil of mineral
nutrients, exporting them in our crops, replacing only
what we must with NPK fertilizer inputs. We use new
biocides to remove insect populations, both noxious and
beneficial, and the still poorly understood fungal soil
networks. The soil eventually loses significant amounts
of sequestered carbon in root structures both living and
dead. The living root systems that once uplifted new
mineral nutrients from weathering parent material below
are gone. The sequestered carbon becomes atmospheric CO2
or CH4. Regular plowing deprives the soil of the
structure it needs to store water, as well as to resist
the wind and water erosion. Meanwhile, water is diverted
from nearby aquatic ecosystems, often to levels well
below recommended minimums, in order to supplement
natural rainfall. Whether or not a parcel of land has
already been converted to such a degraded state is
irrelevant in the long term - it will always be moving
in that direction unless we are practicing regenerative
agriculture. In most cases, the arable land that’s used
up first will be the most fertile and cost-effective for
production. It will be fairly flat, often bottom land
that naturally received additional nutrients from
flooding events, before the rivers were dammed. The land
we move onto once this is degraded is usually upslope,
poorer in agricultural potential, more subject to
degradation, less available for carbon sequestration,
less cost-effective to farm, and requiring still more
inputs from mechanization, infrastructure, irrigation
facilities, biocides, and fertilizers. To make matters
worse, we also incur these degradations to good arable
land and nearby aquatic ecosystems to produce
carbon-based biofuels and animal feed for CAFOs
(concentrated animal feeding operations) with huge
inefficiencies in the use of NPP (net primary
production).
Biomes are communities of animals, fungi, and plants
adapted to particular environments at particular stages
of seral succession. Few are truly safe from our
agricultural expansion, particularly as we move on from
biomes we’ve already degraded as we accelerate expansion
for meat and dairy production. Prairie and grasslands
are early natural choices, even with their demands for
additional water, which too often must come from
non-renewable fossil water aquifers. Shrublands and
savannah, even if unsuited for irrigation, can still be
converted to rangeland, but these lands are normally
grazed unsustainably for maximum temporary outputs.
Rainforests seems to get raided next, even with
relatively poor soils, because water is readily
available until the larger biome is too compromised.
Temperate and boreal forests would be more of a last
resort for agricultural conversion, but they carry the
added short-term profits from timber harvesting.
Mangrove forests, sloughs, bogs, and other riparian
systems are too often targeted. The classic Faustian
bargain, and the basis of Faust’s deathless fame, leads
to the grand project of draining the swamp for lebensraum
and great agricultural productivity to feed our growing
numbers and make a handsome profit, “for by that means
he will create a home for millions of happy and
industrious burghers, to dwell not in secure idleness
but in free activity.”
While industrial agriculture has been the primary focus
of land conversion efforts, it isn’t the only one. We
can convert just about any biome on Earth into a
lifeless, open-pit mine. We have little use for desert,
but we seem to be creating it as furiously as though it
were a primary goal. Coastal ecosystems will soon be
lost in larger quantities from rising sea levels. The
only lands we’re really gaining here are coming at some
large costs to the climate from deglaciation and melting
permafrost. Since both urbanization and our road
thoroughfares have a natural affinity for flat and
moderately-sloped land, much otherwise arable land is
lost to overpaving and urban sprawl. Also lost there is
the stormwater retention of overpaved soils.
Remediation has been half-hearted so far. The
reforestation of our clearcut forests has been too much
in name only, to satisfy requirements made prior to
getting permits to cut, with too little regard for
damage to soils systems and microclimatic effects. Of
course, even failed attempts count on the books as
reforested lands. Most true remediation will require
fresh water that we are reluctant to spare, especially
for damaged riparian systems. There is still a great
deal of potential for remediation, using such practices
as restorative agriculture, mycoremediation, accelerated
seral succession, and the planting of pioneer species strategically as crops, but at the moment these seem only like
luxuries, in a category with disintegrating
infrastructure, on semi-permanent hold while we fund our
perpetual wars. It’s just something else we can leave
for our kids to take care of.
4.
Systems Under Siege
There are many dimensions to the carrying capacity
problem that emerge directly out of human parasitism.
While the problems aren’t all sourced in environmental
degradation, that will be the focus of the present
chapter. It might be depressing, even read as a horror
story, but we need to start facing the magnitude of the
damage we’ve done and are doing, in comprehensive and
detailed ways, not in oversimplified and one-dimensional
sound bites. In Will Steffan’s words, “human activity
now rivals geological forces in influencing the
trajectory of the Earth System.” People will say, “We
can't hurt Earth, only ourselves,” but it isn’t really
Earth we’re concerned with. That will in fact continue.
It’s Earth’s
biosphere we worry about, and this is several orders of
magnitude more vulnerable. This Earth System with its
vulnerabilities is the focus here, while the
vulnerability of the cultural system and the human
social order, perhaps equally vital in even temporarily
supporting our present population levels, will be
charted in the next chapter.
Some environmental subsystems were seen briefly in the
last section in the context of biomes. This chapter will
look at six general sets of environmental problems and
the subsystems within them. Although this is broken into
six categories, there are numerous potential spillover
effects, keystones, and tipping points that lead to
further destabilizations and cascade failures that knit
them all back together eventually. Some of the
interrelationships here will be referred to or implied
in passing, but not in any systematic way. There is no
room here for a more comprehensive analysis, especially
on two-dimensional screens and paper.
Herman Daly points out a habit we have, one left over
from 19th century economic theory, and long before
systems theory, of regarding resources as somehow
fungible, disconnected, and interchangeable. We might
assume that that resources, capital, sinks, human labor,
social order, and technological inventiveness might all
be substituted for one another, and with nearly infinite
faith in human inventiveness. Now that we are closer to
and beyond more of our limits, we can see stresses
propagating through the webs that connect all of these.
Systems can be complex, integrating numerous subsystems
which may or may not be critically intertied. When
planetary thresholds, boundaries, or limits are
transgressed, tipping points are reached and failures
begin, first in subsystems, then propagating through the
larger systems. Some subsystems may collapse in relative
isolation. Some collapses share common causes or
triggers, some have simple domino effects on others, and
some will trigger wider cascade failures, often with
unpredictable outcomes. Sometimes these are runaway
positive feedback loops that expand until stopped by an
external limit. Sometimes one or two stressed
subsystems, still shy of their own tipping points,
interact with others in ways that tip those systems into
failure. Even though the interconnectivity of subsystems
is a large part of system resilience, interconnections
can also potentiate contagion, the propagation of
problems into larger scales and greater complexity.
Here is one straightforward example of a domino cascade:
Global warming melts the high country glaciers. The
darker earth absorbs heat more quickly and stores it for
winter. Snowmelt and spring runoff happen more quickly,
leaving late summer streams over-appropriated and
diminishing groundwater recharge. Farmers’ wells, sunk
into the free-flowing aquifers, now run dry in
mid-season, so they turn to pumps sunk into fossil water
aquifers, depleting these non-renewables that were best
saved for sparing use during unavoidable emergencies.
The diversion of late summer water from off-site
diminishes the biomass at the source site, further
harming water retention there.
A
study by Juan Rocha (2018) refers to these failures or
destabilizations as “regime shifts.” These are “large,
persistent changes in the structure and function of
social-ecological systems, with substantive impacts on
the suite of ecosystem services provided by these
systems.” He suggests that, of the 30 subsystems
identified in his paper, only 19% were entirely
isolated. Another 36% shared a common cause or driver,
but were not likely to interact. The remaining 45% had
the potential to create either a one-way domino effect
or mutually reinforcing feedbacks. “Driver sharing is
more common in aquatic systems, while hidden feedbacks
are more commonly found in terrestrial and Earth systems
tipping points.” The Rocha study is only a sampling, and
it’s important to note that there are a lot more than 30
subsystems. But this does indicate that there is a lot
more to be studied here, and it also suggests that
understanding these compound and cascade effects may
help us to better focus on the keystone corrective
activities. We should start looking at these in more
detail now. We are presently getting inferior, delayed,
and deliberately distorted information about the
long-term damage that’s being done to our environmental
support systems. The most important decisions are being
made by politicians and corporate entities, with
hyperbolic discounting and too little regard for science
and long-term consequences. Since effective system
management will be a function of feedback, feedback
delays, errors, and distortions are not our friends. We
are only ensuring that we will be still further over our
limits and deeper into our various crises before we even
see them.
4a. Biodiversity and
Habitat Protection
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an
animal or plant, ‘What good is it?‘ If the land
mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good,
whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the
course of aeons, has built something we like but do not
understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly
useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first
precaution of intelligent tinkering” (Aldo
Leopold, A Sand County Almanac).
Biodiversity is capital, not a renewable resource, even though there may come a time when genetic engineering or genomics will allow us to replace lost species, especially critical ones. Life has been adapting for as long as life has been. But today’s rate of change in the environment is too challenging to the adaptive fitness of most of our species. Critical losses are happening both within species and on the whole. This describes a period known as punctuated evolution, where mass extinctions clear out entire niches by rendering them uninhabitable to most present occupants. The normal pace of change is called gradual evolution. In Donella Meadows words, the biotic gene pool is our library of life’s “lessons in survival, resilience, evolution, and diversification strategies.” It’s far more fundamental to our continued existence than the Alexandria Library ever was, and its loss is even more heinous and criminal.
Biodiversity is capital, not a renewable resource, even though there may come a time when genetic engineering or genomics will allow us to replace lost species, especially critical ones. Life has been adapting for as long as life has been. But today’s rate of change in the environment is too challenging to the adaptive fitness of most of our species. Critical losses are happening both within species and on the whole. This describes a period known as punctuated evolution, where mass extinctions clear out entire niches by rendering them uninhabitable to most present occupants. The normal pace of change is called gradual evolution. In Donella Meadows words, the biotic gene pool is our library of life’s “lessons in survival, resilience, evolution, and diversification strategies.” It’s far more fundamental to our continued existence than the Alexandria Library ever was, and its loss is even more heinous and criminal.
Biodiversity translates directly into an ecosystem’s
strength and ability to sustain impacts, like depth on a
team roster, in providing alternative services to
portions in failure, both resilience in recovering from
impacts, and adaptive fitness in adjusting to rapidly
changing environments. Monocultures and plantations are
the opposite of rich, diverse ecosystems. We can have
large increases in net primary production on converted
land, but this comes at an enormous cost. These are the
least resilient systems and the most in need or
artificial defenses, supports, and inputs. Resilience
has value for its own sake, and can be measured by a
redundancy of entities performing similar functions,
right down to intraspecies genetic variation. Losses
here open the system to invasive species, pests, and
rapidly evolving disease vectors. We make problems with
monoculture even worse when we do it unnecessarily, as
when biofuels such as corn ethanol, feed for CAFOs, and
fibers for high-footprint fabrics compete for irrigated
agricultural land.
Humans will tend to focus their protection efforts on individual species, and this usually means charismatic megafauna, or keystone and indicator species. Many care that the biomass of wild mammals has fallen by over 80%. It seems to confuse us when protection of the entire ecosystems that support them is recommended. This denies us desired ecosystem services. It makes the loggers want to hunt spotted owls. But the move from species conservation to a holistic approach to biodiversity preservation has to be made, even if it looks like we’re wasting money on that stupid little vole, digging around the tree roots, connecting mycorrhizal communities, and allowing the trees to become a true forest. Still, it helps to name the species at risk. CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) is the international agreement for the monitoring of threatened and endangered species of both wild plants and animals. Our global seed banks and captive breeding programs both seek valiantly to maintain global biodiversity and hold extinction at bay. More than a thousand participating botanical gardens, zoos and aquariums are also by far our richest source of data on known species, their needs and breeding habits, information desperately needed for species preservation. Threatened migratory species pose special problems, calling for distributed series of sanctuaries and protections.
Human civilization has become heavily dependent on some wild species of both animals and plants. The old red jungle fowl from Southeast Asia, who became the chicken, is a great example. So is the honeybee. It’s often wise to retain copies of the original species, from before we began our breeding programs (cisgenic GMOs). We are about to encounter some trouble with the familiar banana, since we no longer have versions that bear seeds, and diseases are spreading. But far more frightening than this is what could happen to our cultivated rubber trees if South American leaf blight (SALB, ascomycete microcyclus ulei) ever got loose globally. That means the loss of tires on motor vehicles, since no substitutes come close to having rubber’s properties for this and numerous other applications. That’s enough to crash civilization.
Microbial ecology is another weak point in our thinking. This is far too complex to be more than poorly understood. The microbial world was already billions of years in the making before complex life emerged. It’s what allows complex life to emerge. Cells had a lot to learn before they could learn to specialize and play nicely together. In the soil, microbial losses are also losses of symbiotic relationships that create nutrients out of raw materials. Microbes are vital to carbon and nitrogen cycling. Soil is Earth’s most valuable carbon sink. Fungi are every bit as important as bacteria. They break down detritus back into useful nutrients. Symbiotic mycorrhizal relationships knit the living plant and soils community together into a whole. In the ocean, microbes, especially marine phytoplankton and algae, are another of the world‘s great carbon sinks, but rising ocean temperatures are compounding vulnerabilities. The complexity of genetic diversity in marine microbial communities is truly astounding. Craig Venter’s boat, Sorcerer II, on a two-year voyage over 32,000 mid-latitude miles, collected millions of new genes and nearly 1000 genomes, and many of these may hold promise of unforeseen technologies, such as photosynthesizing gaseous hydrogen.
Humans will tend to focus their protection efforts on individual species, and this usually means charismatic megafauna, or keystone and indicator species. Many care that the biomass of wild mammals has fallen by over 80%. It seems to confuse us when protection of the entire ecosystems that support them is recommended. This denies us desired ecosystem services. It makes the loggers want to hunt spotted owls. But the move from species conservation to a holistic approach to biodiversity preservation has to be made, even if it looks like we’re wasting money on that stupid little vole, digging around the tree roots, connecting mycorrhizal communities, and allowing the trees to become a true forest. Still, it helps to name the species at risk. CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) is the international agreement for the monitoring of threatened and endangered species of both wild plants and animals. Our global seed banks and captive breeding programs both seek valiantly to maintain global biodiversity and hold extinction at bay. More than a thousand participating botanical gardens, zoos and aquariums are also by far our richest source of data on known species, their needs and breeding habits, information desperately needed for species preservation. Threatened migratory species pose special problems, calling for distributed series of sanctuaries and protections.
Human civilization has become heavily dependent on some wild species of both animals and plants. The old red jungle fowl from Southeast Asia, who became the chicken, is a great example. So is the honeybee. It’s often wise to retain copies of the original species, from before we began our breeding programs (cisgenic GMOs). We are about to encounter some trouble with the familiar banana, since we no longer have versions that bear seeds, and diseases are spreading. But far more frightening than this is what could happen to our cultivated rubber trees if South American leaf blight (SALB, ascomycete microcyclus ulei) ever got loose globally. That means the loss of tires on motor vehicles, since no substitutes come close to having rubber’s properties for this and numerous other applications. That’s enough to crash civilization.
Microbial ecology is another weak point in our thinking. This is far too complex to be more than poorly understood. The microbial world was already billions of years in the making before complex life emerged. It’s what allows complex life to emerge. Cells had a lot to learn before they could learn to specialize and play nicely together. In the soil, microbial losses are also losses of symbiotic relationships that create nutrients out of raw materials. Microbes are vital to carbon and nitrogen cycling. Soil is Earth’s most valuable carbon sink. Fungi are every bit as important as bacteria. They break down detritus back into useful nutrients. Symbiotic mycorrhizal relationships knit the living plant and soils community together into a whole. In the ocean, microbes, especially marine phytoplankton and algae, are another of the world‘s great carbon sinks, but rising ocean temperatures are compounding vulnerabilities. The complexity of genetic diversity in marine microbial communities is truly astounding. Craig Venter’s boat, Sorcerer II, on a two-year voyage over 32,000 mid-latitude miles, collected millions of new genes and nearly 1000 genomes, and many of these may hold promise of unforeseen technologies, such as photosynthesizing gaseous hydrogen.
Injuries to biodiversity come from bottom-up trophic
cascades (loss of primary producers), bycatch losses and
wastage, forced species migration, hydrologic changes,
land use conversion (for farming, ranching, logging,
urbanization, and suburban development), microclimatic
effects, pollution (air, land, water, and now ubiquitous
plastics), seasonal timing changes, soil nutrient
losses, desertification,
stratospheric ozone depletion, local temperature
changes, and top-down trophic cascades (the loss of apex
predators). Land conversion as habitat loss poses
perhaps the greatest threat to biodiversity, with
agriculture being the greatest contributor to that.
Conversion for production of animal feed hasn’t yet
exceeded conversion for cropland, but this is the most
frightening trend. Conversion to crops for textiles
still makes a little more sense than using irrigated
crops with their soil nutrients for biofuels, but crops
like cotton have enormous impacts and input costs.
Trying to decrease deforestation for fuel wood and
charcoal production should be more of a no-brainer by
now, given more affordable, human-scale, solar cooking
technology that’s easily exported to the Third World.
However, charcoal production still has a promising place
in carbon sequestration with low-tech biochar and terra
preta. Ironically, the only commonly seen positive
land conversion for biodiversity happens when the
degradation of arable cropland stops shy of
desertification and the pioneer species take over to
jump-start a new sere.
Habitat shrinkage and fragmentation can lead to genetic
bottlenecks and inbreeding. Seed and nutrient dispersal
is limited. Vagility, which measures the degree to which
a plant or animal can migrate, circulate, or spread
within its environment, is compromised. It should be
noted, however, that some partial fragmentation can actually
be used as a remedial tool to increase edge effect and
biodiversity. But this is also used as an excuse for
exploiters, like the timber industry, to deliberately
fragment a habitat: “We’re going to cut these patches of
forest out in order to increase habitat diversity and
edge effect.” Such statements should be examined for
sincerity.
Other major threats to diversity come from malpredation,
the hunting of bush meat, overexploitation, overfishing,
wildlife over-appropriation for
the pet trade, poaching,
sanctuary loss, and trophy hunting. Governmental
predator extermination programs have downward trophic
cascade effects throughout the food webs. Keystone
species, the most integral and sensitive populations in
a food web, can trigger food web disruptions from any
trophic level. And paradoxically, gaining inclusion
within a sanctuary, if primarily nominal and
unsupervised, can lead to increased exploitation. Should
the human population begin to crash, whether from
collapse of natural systems or of supporting social
order, pressures on wildlife, as both forage and
game, will be amplified, and the mechanisms to control
overexploitation will be severely compromised.
The
life forms that aren’t our friends are rapidly finding
new ways around our cleverest wonder drugs, herbicides
and pesticides. Adaptive pathogens and disease migration
carry epidemiological risk for new disease and pest
outbreaks, and this is supported by newly warming
regions of the world. Introduced and invasive species
are also not our friends, but our meddling is helping
them propagate. Disease susceptibility from population
stresses, as on diminished nutrient availability,
contribute to the spread of parasitic pathogens.
Non-species-specific biocides are ecocidal. These are
considered necessary for “green revolution” industrial
monoculture, but they will both create and increase
needs for biocidal pest management. The applications for
integrated pest management require thought and work and
are generally ignored in favor of genetic modification
and transgenic (interspecies) modification. When these
have done their work, the pesticide and herbicide
residues often remain.
Our war on the insect world, particularly with insecticides, is already starting to show a frightening depth and array of unintended consequences, especially from the loss of pollinator species, and the loss of food sources for certain birds and other insectivores. Many of these populations will crash along with their food supply. It’s not just about the honeybees. We lose beneficial insects, which also decompose detritus and manage other insect pests. We’re even beginning to deprive ourselves of the growing promise of entomophagy, the use of insects as nutrient-rich food for ourselves. Integrated pest management takes more thought but less money and other resources. Some collateral casualties of this war include soil fungal networks, still poorly understood, but known to be critical to healthy soil, and the loss of other decomposers and detritivores that return nutrients to soil.
Our war on the insect world, particularly with insecticides, is already starting to show a frightening depth and array of unintended consequences, especially from the loss of pollinator species, and the loss of food sources for certain birds and other insectivores. Many of these populations will crash along with their food supply. It’s not just about the honeybees. We lose beneficial insects, which also decompose detritus and manage other insect pests. We’re even beginning to deprive ourselves of the growing promise of entomophagy, the use of insects as nutrient-rich food for ourselves. Integrated pest management takes more thought but less money and other resources. Some collateral casualties of this war include soil fungal networks, still poorly understood, but known to be critical to healthy soil, and the loss of other decomposers and detritivores that return nutrients to soil.
4b. Climate Change
and Air Quality
Climate change has vast implications and repercussions
in almost every other dimension of the human problem,
but it's largely a media problem that it’s held to be of
greater importance than the underlying systemic factors
that create it. Climate stability, within an
historically normal range of variability, should be
considered a non-renewable capital asset, especially
since the predictability of climate that agriculture
requires has always been marginal (as any farmer in debt
will attest). Destabilization is as serious as
variations in precipitation. Global warming can be
considered irreversible on timescales from centuries to
millennia. This is largely due to the ocean’s capacity
to absorb and hold heat. The specific heat (retention
ability per unit of weight) of water is nearly five
times that of stone. Climate change is largely the
result of atmospheric greenhouse gases, or GHGs,
principally carbon dioxide or CO2, nitrous oxide or N20,
methane or CH4, and chloro-fluorocarbons or CFCs. Per
Cafaro, “Greenhouse gas emissions account for about
three-quarters of anthropogenic climate forcing; the
other quarter comes from deforestation and the
conversion of wild lands to agriculture.” The planet’s
several ecotones have evolved in reliance upon a
particular and limited range of variations. When
variation becomes excessive, selection pressures force
plant and animals to adapt, die off, or migrate, at
rates far faster than normal. Forced vegetation
migration, to lands less well adapted would be analogous
to a trail of tears for the plant kingdom, and at a time
when our human population growth would demand an
increase in plant productivity. Along with these
migrations will come new microorganisms, diseases, and
insect pests.
More sensitive still are our human agricultural
adaptations, with their monocultural crops, in need of
even more particular and predictable patterns of
temperature and rainfall or irrigation. Elevated
temperatures and unpredictable rainfall patterns give us
both both overly dry and waterlogged soils. Steffen
(2018) writes “agricultural systems are particularly
vulnerable, because they are spatially organized around
the relatively stable Holocene patterns of terrestrial
primary productivity, which depend on a well-established
and predictable spatial distribution of temperature and
precipitation in relation to the location of fertile
soils as well as on a particular atmospheric CO2
concentration.” Human agriculture relies heavily on
predictability for crop and market planning, so that
simple climate irregularity can be just as disruptive to
food security as steady change in one direction or
another. Destabilization of important weather patterns
like the South Asian Monsoon (SAM) could have
devastating effects on large populations. Irrigation
water is a big part of agricultural planning and it
doesn’t help that the systems supporting it are also
beginning to fail on a number of fronts, to be discussed
later. We are already seeing growing effects of this
change as populations around the world become unable to
raise their own food. Some of this is also from topsoil
degradation.
We
have stripped unthinkable quantities of carbon from the
soil with our green revolution in industrial
agriculture, as we’ve gradually ‘busted the sod’ and
turned the soil into lifeless dirt, thereby hastening
its erosion by water and wind. Increasing boreal,
tropical, and subtropical deforestation has robbed the
atmosphere of another huge carbon sink. Climatic
stresses on the forests have left them more susceptible
to disease, insect invasions, and CO2-releasing
wildfires. On the whole, the increasing atmospheric CO2
concentration has been predicted to help the carbon sink
of primary production, since this feeds the
photosynthetic process. But there will come a point soon
enough where both photosynthesis and plant fertility
will be more seriously compromised by greater heat. Many
of our crops may go through reduced yields if
temperatures exceed 32ºC during the flowering stage.
Microbial respiration will increase in warming soils. More aerosols could add to
precipitation.
Having said all the above, though, potential increase in cloud cover and associated albedo changes are still being debated. Potential levels of water vapor in the air over particular vegetated biomes are still being debated. Potential changes in photosynthesis still have unknowns. A hotter atmosphere will potentially hold more water vapor, increasing humidity, but the sudden cooling that produces rain may decrease. And that potential may not be realized due to other climatic factors, leading to deficits that affect a plant’s water absorption. This could have significant negative effects on net primary production. Wenping Yuan sees a decline in atmospheric water vapor that’s correlated with a vapor pressure deficit over vegetated areas, leading to an actual decline in plant growth over two recent decades, following a period of increase. Systems remain complicated, to the point of seeming whimsical, and destabilized systems will be even more so.
Having said all the above, though, potential increase in cloud cover and associated albedo changes are still being debated. Potential levels of water vapor in the air over particular vegetated biomes are still being debated. Potential changes in photosynthesis still have unknowns. A hotter atmosphere will potentially hold more water vapor, increasing humidity, but the sudden cooling that produces rain may decrease. And that potential may not be realized due to other climatic factors, leading to deficits that affect a plant’s water absorption. This could have significant negative effects on net primary production. Wenping Yuan sees a decline in atmospheric water vapor that’s correlated with a vapor pressure deficit over vegetated areas, leading to an actual decline in plant growth over two recent decades, following a period of increase. Systems remain complicated, to the point of seeming whimsical, and destabilized systems will be even more so.
Rising sea levels are almost the least of the
biosphere’s worries, although the coastal riparian
ecotones and reefs will be affected to more tragic
degrees. Civilization will suffer the most here. More
extreme weather events will bring killer droughts and
heat waves, and new levels of cyclonic storms with their
companion costs of disaster relief and recovery. Floods
and cyclones release massive pollution into the
environment, largely through river and marine pollution.
Property and infrastructure lost in floods will have to
get replaced, whether that’s back in the same flood zone
or somewhere more sensible. Environmental refugees need
to be re-accommodated with new infrastructure as well,
and we ought to consider that infrastructure replacement
is costlier than original installation. Warmer oceans
will find new things to do with new levels of heat. Heat
is almost by definition the same as restlessness itself.
A major disruption of the global oceanic thermohaline
circulation (especially the Atlantic’s AMOC) could
disrupt the climate on a continental scale, with
more extremes of temperature at both ends.
CO2
is primarily overproduced in the burning of fossil
fuels, but the diminished reabsorption or sequestration
from net losses of growing plant biomass is another
major factor. Vast quantities of CO2 (and CH4) are now
being released from organic decomposition in melting
permafrost. It’s argued that a global ‘greening’ of the
planet has significantly slowed the rise of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere since the start of the
century. Plants have (or had) been growing faster and
larger due to higher CO2 levels in the air and warming
temperatures that reduce the CO2 emitted by plants via
respiration. (Bendell). But this only helps with a
fraction of our problem, and it comes with other
consequences. This includes a lowered nutritional value
per pound of agricultural product, given that CO2 only
affects carbohydrate production and not the balance of
required nutrients, which become diluted. We think total
global emissions remain above 10 billion tonnes of
carbon per year (nearly 40 billion tonnes of CO2). But
some vested interests are playing games with the
estimates. The US military is the single largest
institutional producer of GHGs (and consumer of liquid
fossil fuels). This doesn't even count the GHGs produced
by private military contractors or arms manufacture. But
these figures have also been exempted from calculations
of the US carbon footprints in international agreements
such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Accord
(Belcher, 2019). Further, GHG emissions from melting
permafrost may have been dangerously underestimated.
N2O
in the atmosphere has now increased by nearly a third
due to human activity, principally agriculture,
fertilized soil activity (from NPK inputs), runoff and
leaching, manure, and combustion of biomass, with some
fossil fuel and industrial sources. N2O is a significant
scavenger of atmospheric ozone, on a level comparable to
CFCs. Impacts are increasing from quantities added above
natural baseline. It’s contribution to climate warming
is about a third that of CO2. Mitigation should focus on
better and more efficient agricultural practices.
CH4
is primarily overproduced by biological decomposition,
especially in melting permafrost, and this, too, is
subject to diminished reabsorption or sequestration by
dying soils. Compromised forest soils are a big factor.
CH4, while found in smaller quantities than CO2, has
roughly 25 times the global warming impact of CO2.
Looming somewhat more distantly is the melting of
methane clathrates or natural gas hydrates, massive
quantities of CH4 trapped within the crystal structure
of water ice in the cold oceans. Per Steffan again, “The
ocean methane hydrate feedback, although not likely to
lead to a significant release of carbon in the 21st
century, is included [in this account] because on the
longer term it is likely to be activated by a 2°C
temperature rise, will lead to large releases of carbon,
and is irreversible.” In other words, this is a huge
turbo boost to global warming waiting for us once the
climate change starts to enter runaway mode. This
runaway effect is thought to have played a significant
role in the Permian mass extinction event, 250 mya. But
the predictions for this tipping point may soon need
revision in the wrong direction, given the
overly-conservative trend of so many of our projections.
CFCs pose their most serious hazards in stratospheric
ozone depletion and in their persistence as pollutants
in the environment. Ozone depletion allows higher energy
particles through the atmosphere, where ionizing
radiation can damage tissues and mutate DNA. Gradual
improvements in the ozone layer have resulted from
international bans on their manufacture. These are now
being replaced by hydrofluorocarbons and other
chemicals. But N20 increases.
New
ideas for sequestering atmospheric CO2 are being
entertained with increasing frequency, but the higher
tech solutions, like using large industrial plants to
pump and store the gas underground, are still fairly
ludicrous in their costs and impracticality. Passive
sequestration has occurred in fossil fuels and
carbon-rich mattes of deposits on the ocean floor. One
of the more plausible mid-range technical solutions
calls for fertilizing marine phytoplankton to
photosynthesize more atmospheric CO2. Their little dead,
carbon-rich bodies eventually fall to the ocean floor.
Forests are among nature’s primary means of actively
sequestering carbon. Boreal, temperate, subtropical and
tropical forests account around 60% of terrestrial
sequestration. This is both in forest soils and in
growing wood. Extensive reforestation remains the best
remedial plan, and this could also be integrated with
agroforestry to retain agricultural productivity (while
diminishing monoculture). Changing the way we now do
agriculture from high input industrial monoculture to
regenerative agriculture will of course generate howls
of protest from those who fail to realize that the green
revolution is absolutely unsustainable at even current
population levels. Promising experiments are now
underway with low and no-till farming to retain soil
carbon, as well as planting elemental carbon directly
into the soil (biochar and terra preta).
Holistic grazing is exploring the use of animals (which
have co-evolved with plants) to restore soil root
structure and water retention.
Outside of GHGs, air pollution has immediate
consequences on the life forms that breathe it in, and
that includes plant respiration. Pollution and land-use
change that increases the release of dust and smoke adds
to the atmospheric aerosol load. But we haven’t yet
reached the atmosphere’s limits as a sink because
particulates are redeposited, microorganisms are
distributed, and the gasses are absorbed in atmospheric
moisture and return by way of hydrologic cycles. This
includes radioactive particles with long half-lives. The
secondary pollutants, such as ground level ozone or
smog, form in the atmosphere when primary pollutants
interact. Persistent organic pollutants resist
environmental degradation and can accumulate in tissues
in the food web, biomagnifying in the upper trophic
levels. Whatever damage they do in circulation, the
effects are temporary in the air and more persistent in
the water and soil, and in living tissue. And air
pollution still kills many millions of us directly every
year, on its way back to field and stream.
Atmospheric warming melts glaciers, exposing darker earth. This diminishes the ability to reflect heat back into space, especially where glacier cover was once relatively permanent. The effect here is not insignificant, and may be as much as a quarter of our carbon emissions when all is done (Bendell). Furthermore, permanent ice sheets cap the organic decomposition of permafrost layers.
There will be high socioeconomic costs from climate change as well, ranging from the mass migration of climate refugees to the destruction brought on by increasingly violent weather events. Both of these demand both cleanup and the repair or provision of infrastructure.
Most recently, scientists in the climate field are discovering significant errors in projections and predictions of climate effects and their intensities. They are finding them to have been far too conservative in some frightening places. This may be from avoiding the appearance of being overly dramatic or alarmist, or simply from wanting consensus badly enough that they absorb the more conservative estimates into their numbers. We are now seeing consensus predictions made decades ago showing up as dangerously over-conservative, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude. The rates of melting permafrost and glacial cover are two good examples, with levels of melt occurring many decades ahead of ‘schedule.’
Atmospheric warming melts glaciers, exposing darker earth. This diminishes the ability to reflect heat back into space, especially where glacier cover was once relatively permanent. The effect here is not insignificant, and may be as much as a quarter of our carbon emissions when all is done (Bendell). Furthermore, permanent ice sheets cap the organic decomposition of permafrost layers.
There will be high socioeconomic costs from climate change as well, ranging from the mass migration of climate refugees to the destruction brought on by increasingly violent weather events. Both of these demand both cleanup and the repair or provision of infrastructure.
Most recently, scientists in the climate field are discovering significant errors in projections and predictions of climate effects and their intensities. They are finding them to have been far too conservative in some frightening places. This may be from avoiding the appearance of being overly dramatic or alarmist, or simply from wanting consensus badly enough that they absorb the more conservative estimates into their numbers. We are now seeing consensus predictions made decades ago showing up as dangerously over-conservative, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude. The rates of melting permafrost and glacial cover are two good examples, with levels of melt occurring many decades ahead of ‘schedule.’
4c. Oceans and
Fisheries
One
of water’s more interesting properties is its ability to
hold heat (at 1 cal/gm-degree Celsius). Soil, rock, and
concrete will only hold about a fifth as much heat as
this by weight. This is where the bulk of planetary
warming is being stored, at roughly one yottajoule
(10^24) for each degree Celsius. This gradual rise in
water temperature is also having a few side effects.
Warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen available to
marine fauna. We’re also risking increased bacterial
respiration in the ocean, further compromising oxygen
levels. With the addition of glacial and
arctic/antarctic sea ice melt, the currently
well-balanced thermohaline currents that distribute
global ocean heat around the world are threatened with
disruption, or even a shutdown, leading to more local
extremes and more of the cyclonic weather events that
this engenders. Changes in temperature, combined with
increased ocean travel, are also resulting in changes to pristine
ecosystems by exotic and invasive species.
The
ocean also absorbs CO2, so far about 30 percent of what
humankind has discharged. There it reacts with saltwater
to form carbolic acid, acidifying the ocean, dropping pH
from 8.2 to 8.1 since the pre-industrial era, and
projected to fall to 7.8 by century’s end. This in turn
is eating away at the calcium carbonate structures that
life forms such as mollusks, corals, and certain
phytoplankton depend on for survival. Collapse of these
populations threatens widespread disruption of marine
food webs and bottom-up cascade failures, particularly
as we advance towards pH 7.8. But coral reef death is
happening much sooner.
Biochemical discharges from land-based agriculture are
largely non-point-sourced and harder to redirect. These
are loading the local lake and coastal ecosystems with
excessive fertilizer, leading to algal blooms and
subsequent eutrophication, often leaving only dead
zones. This is especially problematic with the
predominant NPK fertilizers phosphorous and reactive
nitrogen. If this were a condition that isn’t going
away, the only useful countermeasure would be to harvest
these blooms and render them into biofuels and
fertilizer for return to the crops.
Organic pollutants, heavy metal compounds (especially
mercury), and radioactive materials enter the food web,
where they bioaccumulate and become concentrated in the
tissues of the top predators, which are frequently also
either dietary mainstays of human consumption or
charismatic ocean life that most people would rather
protect. We are only now beginning to see the effects of
widespread plastics pollution on marine systems, and
devastating effects on individual life forms, including
cetaceans. Microplastics, the least amenable to cleanup,
are becoming ubiquitous throughout the food web. Oil
spills continue to wreak havoc, and every animal that
gets cleaned up also means a bucket load of waste. We
are experiencing a growing pollution load in the runoff
from flooding and other extreme weather events, such as
the contents of septic pits from hog farms and the
industrial wastes so often found stored or staged near
the sea.
Human overfishing has become increasingly ham-handed as
we ramp up operations for economies of scale. Today’s
operations might drag the ocean floor, including coral
reefs, or sweep the sea with miles-long nets, capturing
and killing everything in their path, laying waste to
unacceptable levels of indirect exploration or bycatch.
But even despite rising efforts, marine catch has been
falling. The growing industry of marine aquaculture is
now showing us some of its unintended side effects,
particularly with the susceptibility of monocultures to
diseases that can then spread to native populations. The
poaching of marine species for specious medicinal
properties (like manta gill plates) or food fads (shark
fin soup and totoaba bladders) is cutting deeply into
important and protected populations. Some of the killing
of top predators is deliberate, even where it
isn’t sanctioned, as we see with the killing of sea
lions to improve fish harvests. And some of the killing
is incidental, as from sonar and mechanical noise
pollution, which disrupts the cetacean sensorium, often
with serious neurological damage, leading to mass
beachings, and possibly even suicides.
Finally, our coastal land conversion is costing the
biosphere many coastal defenses, like reefs, barrier
islands, riparian areas, and mangrove forests, all
important to extended marine ecosystems.
4d. Fresh Water and
Aquifers
Much of the world is already in trouble with the timely
availability of fresh water. Supply from rain and snow
has been a relative constant historically. This comes to
us from the clouds, more or less in distilled from, save
for the particulates that rain and snow condense around.
We can tweak the supply a little with cloud seeding
technology. The primary variable here has been simple,
routine variation from seasonal norms, but this is now
also subject to more radical changes in the climate
itself. It seems likely for now that global warming will
largely magnify the existing contrast between the wet
and dry regions and the seasons within them. The only
place we are increasing water runoff is from development
of impermeable surfaces like roofs and roads, or from
damaged environments like logged or burned forests,
accelerating discharges that carry added ingredients
like wasted topsoil.
Storm runoff now carries more chemical pollution, from
industry, roads and transportation, and agricultural
fertilizers, and much of this pollution occurs in heavy
pulses as weather events like storms and flooding grow
more extreme. Eutrophication, especially from surcharges
of phosphorous and reactive nitrogen kills aquatic
ecosystems, or demands expensive mitigation. Mangrove
forests, sloughs, bogs, and other riparian systems that
perform water cleaning services (and carbon
sequestration) are compromised by land conversion.
Riverine systems, in most areas, are already being
overappropriated at levels well beyond what a dedicated
aquatic biologist would recommend for optimum (or even
minimum) instream flows, further compromising water
quality downstream. This also deprives live aquifers of
some of their needed groundwater recharge. Interbasin
water transfers have substituted economics and politics for sound aquatic biology.
Building more dams will also mean evaporative losses of
roughly a tenth of each dam’s capacity every year.
Free-flowing aquifers themselves are also becoming
overappropriated, as well as being polluted from such
operations as fracking, or leaching of such contaminants
as nitrates. Dams are fragmenting aquatic habitat, as
well as collecting unnatural levels of silt and
sediments on both sides. Free-flowing aquifers are a
resource, which will have maximum draws, and diminishing
returns on technologies for extraction. Fossil water
aquifers are another, more serious matter, although they
remain out of sight and therefore largely out of mind.
These are non-renewable banks of natural capital. If
we’re going to use these at all, their use should be
limited to emergencies. Yet we pump them out as though
they were bottomless, all the while thinking the green
revolution in agriculture that does this is indefinitely sustainable.
The
melting of alpine glaciers is beginning to effect
quicker spring runoff and diminished late summer
snowmelt and river flows [effect was the correct word].
This has big implications for any agriculture that
demands irrigation water in late summer and early fall,
when heat and evapotranspiration are also at their
greatest.
We
have just about ignored the water storage capacity of
healthy, carbon-sequestering soils, especially those in
the forests and grasslands that we are converting for
industrial agriculture. This, combined with hotter and
more poorly structured soils, actually increases the
need for irrigation. The tropical drylands that support
so many of us, especially in Africa, are growing hotter
and drier.
Conservation efforts remain poor. There are places in
the developed world where you can be fined for growing
food instead of a lawn and ornamentals. This is somewhat
self-correcting, however, as communities eventually pay
for ignoring the hardships of drought and institute
rationing and conservation rules. We wonder when Phoenix
will drain its hundred-thousand-plus private swimming
pools and quit wringing its hot little hands over water
issues. Coastal areas, at least those not compromised by
rising sea levels, may at least see some benefits from
increasingly affordable desalination projects. Energy
efficiency is improving here, and moving towards
solar. The technology is far from perfected,
though, producing on average more brine in need of
disposal than desalinated water, and this must broadly
dispersed. Current technology also produces toxic
chemicals, antiscalants, and antifoulants that need to
be dealt with or resolved. Inland is another matter,
where the best new lower-tech technologies seem to be
wind traps.
Globally, water crises will continue to grow, or burgeon, as the stratification of power and wealth increase. Corporations like Nestle and Coca Cola will continue to privatize the fresh water commons until they are stopped by new laws. Since the price of idiot water in single-use plastic is higher than gasoline, and profit margins even higher, this will not be a voluntary humanitarian step. We are only beginning to see the water refugees crossing national borders. We can count on seeing some wars happening over this.
Globally, water crises will continue to grow, or burgeon, as the stratification of power and wealth increase. Corporations like Nestle and Coca Cola will continue to privatize the fresh water commons until they are stopped by new laws. Since the price of idiot water in single-use plastic is higher than gasoline, and profit margins even higher, this will not be a voluntary humanitarian step. We are only beginning to see the water refugees crossing national borders. We can count on seeing some wars happening over this.
4e. Agriculture and
Topsoil
The
early development of agriculture enabled humankind
through its first series of steps towards larger viable
populations, as we moved from hunting and gathering,
through pasturing, and into tillage or farming. Tillage
then triggered the first urbanization and we were on our
way, though that was often to war. But now, according to
Lester R. Brown, “Today’s 7.6bn and the 2bn more
expected by 2050 must feed themselves from soils with,
according to the UN, less than 60 more harvests to give,
decimated fish stocks, a finite supply of fresh water
facing even greater demands upon it and, most
frighteningly, the risk of a collapse of insect
pollinators and of millions of square miles of land made
unproductive by climate change.” It’s unclear why most
of the voices at the UN are calling for steps to
accommodate higher human numbers instead of steps to
reduce our numbers. This makes no sense at all, unless
there is a great deal of peer pressure to avoid
upsetting the global Ponzi economy and its wealthy
supporters. Development must be sustained at any cost?
That isn’t what sustainable development means.
Instead of building soil, modern agricultural practices
are slowly turning it all into lifeless dirt. But then
we say these practices are necessary to feed the growing
population, although some wonder where the water will
come from. And the nutrients. The increased productivity
has been real enough, but this is temporary, only to
last a few decades. Unfortunately, most planning only
looks a few years ahead, and the legislators see no
further than the next election or campaign contribution.
Our agricultural capability is now facing a decline
after a long run of unsustainable growth. Both land per
capita and unassisted land productivity are beginning to
fall. Growth rates of agricultural production and crop
yields have decelerated in recent years and will soon
reverse. The fact that we could presently feed everybody
on earth with present agricultural production, given
better food distribution, is completely beside the point
and dangerously myopic. This is a temporary state, gains
bought on unsecured credit, to be repaid by impoverished
future generations. Cisgenic
GMOs, and especially high-yield crop strains, may be the
most sustainable of our newer improvements to agriculture.
But we can’t forget that the nutrients (other than C, H,
and O) have to come from somewhere. If not from the
soil, then where? They won't come from the lifeless dirt
we are turning the soil into. We also need to ask about
the end states of our changes to the biogeochemical
cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and
potassium, among other nutrients.
Vast historical quantities and rates of manure and urine have gone missing from our lands. Wildlife once grazed what is now farmland and range, and eventually returned everything to the soil, including the decomposed dead. Today, this is often collected in CAFO lagoons instead, or as heavily regulated human sludge (now full of hormones, antibiotics, and cleaning materials) or as the plastic-bagged excrement of our dogs and cats, or in disposable diapers. Much of this is now rendered useless in landfills, but these are the molecules that we have consumed in our food, the products of our largest industry, and stripped from our topsoil. The world had far better uses for all of this stuff, including our corpses, to keep its biosphere going.
Vast historical quantities and rates of manure and urine have gone missing from our lands. Wildlife once grazed what is now farmland and range, and eventually returned everything to the soil, including the decomposed dead. Today, this is often collected in CAFO lagoons instead, or as heavily regulated human sludge (now full of hormones, antibiotics, and cleaning materials) or as the plastic-bagged excrement of our dogs and cats, or in disposable diapers. Much of this is now rendered useless in landfills, but these are the molecules that we have consumed in our food, the products of our largest industry, and stripped from our topsoil. The world had far better uses for all of this stuff, including our corpses, to keep its biosphere going.
To
give some scale to things, the USDA claims that, in the
United States, “food production currently devours 50
percent of the surface area, 30 percent of all energy
resources, and ingurgitates 80 percent of all
freshwater” Abegão (2018). There really is only one way
to answer the question “How will we feed our
ever-growing numbers?” That is “Increasingly less well
at first, and then, for many, with little to nothing at
all, until our global numbers have fallen dramatically.”
The green revolution in industrial agriculture presents
us with a grand illusion of progress and sustainability
by showing us many decades of progress in the quantities
of its outputs. Aldo Leopold noted that we have simply
made improvements to the pump, rather than to the well,
which won’t help us at all when the well starts to run
dry. Too few of us are looking at the sustainability of
the inputs that these outputs demand, or at the growing
diminishing returns on their investment. We must begin
with a harder look at these inputs.
Paul and Anne Ehrlich write, “Agriculture made
civilization possible, and over the last 80 years or so,
an industrial agricultural revolution has created a
technology-dependent global food system. That system,
humanity’s single biggest industry, has generated
miracles of food production. But it has also created
serious long-run vulnerabilities, especially in its
dependence on stable climates, crop monocultures,
industrially produced fertilizers and pesticides,
petroleum, antibiotic feed supplements and rapid,
efficient transportation.” The agricultural system is
thus intricately interconnected with other, still more
industrial drivers of carrying capacity. We use power to
cook, freeze, and dry food, as well as ship it globally.
We use enormous amounts of plastic and other packaging
materials. Supermarket coolers and freezers are also
part of the costs of feeding ourselves. Many of these
costs exist either to accommodate a global shipping
economy or because that’s just how things got set up.
It’s efficient within its own reality, but
relocalization and locavore diets are far more efficient
in absolute terms and don’t depend on a vulnerable
global infrastructure. The global system currently does
have the ability for now to avoid local food production
shocks. Collapse of a fishery will increase demand for
land-raised meat. Flooding or drought in one breadbasket
may be offset by its opposite in another, and will
simply alter global distribution patterns a little. But
resilience will diminish along with food reserves,
political and economic stability, and other buffers.
“Industrial agriculture displaces smallholder and
indigenous farmers from their land. Smallholders make up
a third of the world’s population and half the world’s
poor; they nevertheless produce about 70% of its food on
one quarter of its farmland, and that mostly without the
ecological damages listed above” Weizsäcker (2018). The
problem is that this is more labor intensive and this
has to compete with the economies of scale boosted by
the heavy subsidies of money and resources that big
agriculture receives for its use of externalities. Trade
regulations and treaties don’t help at all. An ethic of
food localization does, at least where it’s rational.
Shipping live chickens from America to China, only to
import the processed chicken back to America in cans,
only makes sense in a deeply confused and overly
manipulated economic system.
The
first large input to modern agriculture is the
conversion of wildlands or wilderness to cultivation and
grazing. Overpaving often happens on the most fertile
land, since flat and bottom land is where silt and
nutrients collect and water move or migrates most
slowly. Ever more conversion is required both as the
population grows and as our formerly fertile lands
weaken in their productivity. We already have
diminishing per capita arable land even without
population increase, except to the extent that we are
invading and occupying new ecosystems. We generally
begin with the low-hanging fruit, the easiest conditions
to exploit, and are (or soon will be) eventually forced
to move on as more impoverished or problematic lands
become relatively more attractive. This is the nature of
diminishing returns. These newer lands are generally
upslope, with poorer soils to begin with, even though
though they might catch a little more rainfall, and
erosion increases as we climb out of the bottom land.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen calls attention to the heavy
mechanization and upscaling of modern agriculture,
causing us to use the mineral and other non-renewable
capital resources that we need to make the machinery,
irrigation systems, fuel, biocides, and fertilizers as
substitutes for human and animal labor and renewable
sunlight. The costs are in fact a great deal higher than
the old days, but the high costs are hidden in subsidies
for exploiting the commons. Modern food production would
appear to be a lot less sustainable if all of the
long-term damages to the commons, the hidden costs,
environmental losses, and industry subsidies were to
appear in our food prices.
Irakli Loladze speaks to the argument that CO2 is plant
food, leading to greater product weight and volume. It
is, at least until global warming gets worse, and
barring other questions discussed in the last section,
but this also compromises nutrient balance. Genetic
modification made for harvest volume does the same
thing. While it might be true that added atmospheric CO2
is contributing to plant growth or primary production,
this is measured largely in cellulosic gross weight, or
sugars. Crops are measured and sold by weight, not
nutrient density, so we would now need to eat more food
to get the same vitamins and minerals. This joins the
GMO modifications being made for characteristics other
than nutrition, like appearance, insect resistance, and
transportability. Further, fertilizer inputs now consist
disproportionately of nitrogen, phosphorous, and
potassium. Peak phosphorous availability isn’t far off,
and effective depletion is seen within a century. Human
activities now convert more nitrogen from the atmosphere
into reactive forms than all of the Earth’s terrestrial
processes combined. Runoff gives us soil acidification
and nitrate pollution in steams and groundwater. Other
essential plant nutrients, like iron, zinc and iodine,
don’t increase in the same proportion, so that overall
our food nutrient density is diminishing. Moist soils
that have deep, complex, living root structures, healthy
mycorrhizal relationships, microflora, and microfauna
will literally pump vital mineral nutrients up from
weathering parent material below. Living soil
self-fertilizes to some extent. Industrial agriculture
turns this living soil into sterile dirt, or quite a bit
worse, into chemically contaminated dirt.
The
weakened structure of the soil diminishes its capacity
to hold water, increasing the inefficiency of
irrigation, and also leads to the wind and water erosion
that constitutes another big driver of topsoil loss.
Soil salinization is an ancient and growing problem.
Soil is also rendered more subject to mass wasting,
especially through more frequent wildfires and storm
runoff. All of this is in addition to decarbonizing one
of the planet’s greatest carbon sinks. The counterforce
to all of this is regenerative agriculture, sets of
practices which build living soil instead of depleting
it. Soil is either not tilled or tilling is minimized,
and perennial plants are preferred. Cover crops are
important. A step more high tech than this is
restorative agriculture, which can be used to repair
damaged and polluted soils with mycoremediation and
accelerated seral succession. Putting numbers to current
losses, the UNCCD, in its Global Land Outlook (2107)
claims that “Each year, we lose 15 billion trees and 24
billion tonnes of fertile soil.”
Soil nutrient export from harvest and animal husbandry
has always carried a necessity for refertilization. At
the same time, the quality of manure from both
human sewage systems and CAFOs has degenerated
chemically with the addition of biological contaminants
and medicines, and household cleaning products. This
compromises nutrient recycling when it’s improvement
that we urgently need.
Insect populations are rapidly becoming a visible
collateral casualty of our biocide use. This was
discussed under Biodiversity. The consequences of this
trophic-level disturbance of the food web are now being
felt in bird, bat, and other insectivore populations, as
well as in the efficiency of integrated pest management
and the decomposition of detritus.
Agriculture has always been uncomfortably dependent on
fairly predictable temperatures and rainfall, and an
ability to irrigate. Large-scale, monocultural
operations are now even more susceptible to climatic
vagaries, at least regionally, such that geographic
hedging and surpluses have become even more important.
And yet, global food surpluses are falling now, like our
reserves in other areas. We are also running more
serious pandemic risks by having fewer crop varieties.
This narrowing of crop diversity is even supported
politically, and sometimes enforced, by patent-holding
crop developers.
Biofuel production on arable land, especially for corn
ethanol, is one of our more myopic and boneheaded
projects. Far kinder things might be said of dryland
cellulosic biofuels, and algal biofuels made from
agricultural wastes, if we had more vision and sense to
invest in that. Both of those could give us a value in
harvesting noxious and invasive weeds and algal blooms,
instead of topsoil and water losses.
This section has concerned trophic level one and its
ability to feed level two, the growing of the level one
or autotrophic plants that feed the herbivores, such as
irrigated crops, dryland crops, and agroforestry. We
encounter yet another set of frightening problems when
we step up to trophic level three with meat and dairy
production, food for the carnivores.
4f. Grazing, Meat,
and Dairy
On
average, the calories and nutrients obtained from animal
sources are around seven times as costly to the
environment as those obtained from plants. These are
basic trophic level conversion inefficiencies. In terms
of quantities, our annual global consumption is now
nearly 400 megatonnes of meat, including fish, and over
800 megatonnes of eggs and dairy. Many of us are still
awaiting some more authentically tasty, plant-based meat
and dairy substitutes for our high-quality protein. Many
of us may even be looking forward to palatably textured
vat-grown meat. And almost everybody wants those smug,
proselytizing vegans and the nut jobs from PETA to shut
up. In the meantime, however, per capita meat and dairy
consumption is growing in non-linear ways with both the
human population and the growing affluence of the
developing world. Further, demand has been jacked up and
suppliers over-encouraged by advertising, cheap
irrigation water, subsidies on grain production, and
below-cost grazing on public lands.
One might suppose that if we had a human population that was at or below the carrying capacity suggested by all other dimensions of the human problem, we would also have adequate room on this world for reasonable and wholesome amounts of meat and dairy in our diets. But at current levels of overshoot, diets at the third trophic level are among the major drivers of ecosystem collapse, with our rapid land conversion, deforestation, biodiversity loss, fresh water consumption, GHG production, and soil decarbonization leading the way. A global move towards more proportionately vegetarian diets, particularly in the developed world, would move us significantly further in the direction of sustainability, but the more fervent and fevered supporters of this must realize that this is only one of the issues to be addressed, and it’s far from being the only solution we need. The primary solution is to have fewer human beings trying to live here, but cutting back on our consumption isn't far behind Human numbers are climbing at about 1.2% a year, while livestock numbers are growing non-linearly at about 2.4%. This reflects an overall increase in prosperity in the developing world. We do want to decrease global poverty, but this will drive our carrying capacity numbers still further down.
One might suppose that if we had a human population that was at or below the carrying capacity suggested by all other dimensions of the human problem, we would also have adequate room on this world for reasonable and wholesome amounts of meat and dairy in our diets. But at current levels of overshoot, diets at the third trophic level are among the major drivers of ecosystem collapse, with our rapid land conversion, deforestation, biodiversity loss, fresh water consumption, GHG production, and soil decarbonization leading the way. A global move towards more proportionately vegetarian diets, particularly in the developed world, would move us significantly further in the direction of sustainability, but the more fervent and fevered supporters of this must realize that this is only one of the issues to be addressed, and it’s far from being the only solution we need. The primary solution is to have fewer human beings trying to live here, but cutting back on our consumption isn't far behind Human numbers are climbing at about 1.2% a year, while livestock numbers are growing non-linearly at about 2.4%. This reflects an overall increase in prosperity in the developing world. We do want to decrease global poverty, but this will drive our carrying capacity numbers still further down.
Surprisingly to those who don’t think of such things,
our dogs and cats are carnivores. Many of those who
complain loudest about animal cruelty, while loving
their pets, are having meat and dairy impacts here that
are equivalent to the mostly-vegetarian third world
humans. Big dogs are even more so. Plus there’s the cat
litter, owner-packaged dog shit, and food packaging
waste. There are devastating levels of house cat
predation on wildlife, particularly songbirds. We really
need to start incorporating all of the external
costs into animal product pricing as well.
Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are a large environmental problem in addition to their ethical and animal rights and cruelty issues. We've touched upon the great waste of using irrigated farmland to grow feed for CAFOs, at least where freer range operations are viable. These facilities output enormous quantities of waste, dozens of times the waste sent to wastewater treatment plants. On the positive side, most of this collected waste does find its way back to farmland as fertilizer, with plenty of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. But it also carries heavy metals, methane, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and bacteria like salmonella, and these materials are also subject to catastrophic environmental releases from extreme weather events.
Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are a large environmental problem in addition to their ethical and animal rights and cruelty issues. We've touched upon the great waste of using irrigated farmland to grow feed for CAFOs, at least where freer range operations are viable. These facilities output enormous quantities of waste, dozens of times the waste sent to wastewater treatment plants. On the positive side, most of this collected waste does find its way back to farmland as fertilizer, with plenty of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. But it also carries heavy metals, methane, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and bacteria like salmonella, and these materials are also subject to catastrophic environmental releases from extreme weather events.
Modifying the extent of these problems, it should be
noted that certain recently developed forms of animal
husbandry, holistic grazing, and dairy production can in
fact be beneficial and restorative to the environment. It’s also well-established
that regenerative grazing can sequester significant
and impressive amounts of carbon back into the soil. These
also avoid overgrazing our rangelands at unnatural
levels and impact cycles. Jem Bendell writes, “Research
into “management-intensive rotational grazing” practices
(MIRG), also known as holistic grazing, show how a
healthy grassland can store carbon. A 2014 study
measured annual per hectare increases in soil carbon at
8 tons per year on farms converted to these practices
(Machmuller et al, 2015). The world uses about 3.5
billion hectares of land for pasture and fodder crops.
Using the 8 tons figure above, converting a tenth of
that land to MIRG practices would sequester a quarter of
present emissions. In addition, no-till methods of
horticulture can sequester as much as two tons of carbon
per hectare per year, so could also make significant
contributions. It is clear, therefore, that our
assessment of carbon budgets must focus as much on these
agricultural systems as we do on emissions reductions.”
(p. 10).
At current population levels, not even these practices can be thought sustainable, but their growing practice is developing a new knowledge base for good regenerative methods, to become more useful once the population falls, and they can help minimize the damage done in the meantime. Even here, it might be plausibly argued that we need to retreat to less than half of the land we are currently using for meat and dairy production, to pull out of arable cropland for animal feed almost entirely, and scale way back on our use of CAFOs. Regenerative grazing might also be used on an interim basis prior to ceding repaired land back to wilderness, forest, and wetlands. Note that this ‘less-than-half’ figure assumes a much higher average level of global human prosperity than we now have, which is one of the oft-ignored dimensions of sustainability, to be discussed later. If we want more meat per capita, we can just have fewer capita. At the same time, we could use a better, more grateful ethic for our animal product consumption, targeting just a fraction, or at least less than half, of our current developed-world per capita consumption.
At current population levels, not even these practices can be thought sustainable, but their growing practice is developing a new knowledge base for good regenerative methods, to become more useful once the population falls, and they can help minimize the damage done in the meantime. Even here, it might be plausibly argued that we need to retreat to less than half of the land we are currently using for meat and dairy production, to pull out of arable cropland for animal feed almost entirely, and scale way back on our use of CAFOs. Regenerative grazing might also be used on an interim basis prior to ceding repaired land back to wilderness, forest, and wetlands. Note that this ‘less-than-half’ figure assumes a much higher average level of global human prosperity than we now have, which is one of the oft-ignored dimensions of sustainability, to be discussed later. If we want more meat per capita, we can just have fewer capita. At the same time, we could use a better, more grateful ethic for our animal product consumption, targeting just a fraction, or at least less than half, of our current developed-world per capita consumption.
Pork production could be much more fully integrated with
food waste and composting operations. This was, in fact,
the main point behind the pig’s original domestication.
These animals can absorb losses from mold, pests, or
faulty climate control, supermarket surpluses, intentional food waste,
and cooking misadventures, given timely local
collection. Livestock can consume corn stalks, potato
waste, and other inedibles. Poultry production could be
better combined with integrated pest management, and
ungulate grazing withdrawn more fully to grass fed and
finished systems. We might not have to limit animal
production to the natural environmental services they
perform, but this would be a good baseline. The vegans
seem to be unaware that there are coevolved
relationships between ungulates, grasses, and forbs, and
they do in fact serve some of each others needs.
Agriculture which ignores this ignores some useful
biomimetic opportunities, like the usefulness of manure
and urine. Adam Sacks observes, “We are only beginning
to understand the potential of intensive planned grazing
with animals that break capped soil surfaces with their
hooves, fertilize, moisturize and aerate the ground, and
make earth hospitable to thousands of vital soil
organisms. There is no climate-saving strategy that has
anywhere near the potential of soils.” Such managed
grazing can do more than natural grazing to sequester
carbon and maintain living soil (Permaculture’s ‘obtain
a yield’ principle), but it still has to respect and
replenish nutrient export. We will also soon have more
reasons at local scales to return to draft animals, for
low-till plows and harvesting.
To
those who offer output statistics for GHGs and other
pollutants from animal husbandry, we need to start
asking the question: “Before there were cattle, there
were natural grazers and natural processes on the same
land, and these had their own outputs of gasses and
chemical compounds. Has anybody ever deducted this
natural baseline from calculations of domesticated
animal impacts?” In looking at natural baseline impacts,
we are also wise to compare these to the different
species now used in animal husbandry. That would give us
higher quality information. There is a broad scale of
animal impacts here, with an order of magnitude in
variation, from low impact, free-range poultry to
high-impact CAFO beef and mutton. There are other
impacts as well, which should be accounted and
incorporated into pricing, to help drive down the
demand, as for water demand, energy, transport,
processing, and refrigeration. Still, no impacts are as
great as ecosystem conversion, deforestation, and
biodiversity loss. At the least, some of the killing and
decarbonization of soil is very slowly becoming optional
with regenerative agriculture.
It’s a little misleading, and sometime intentionally
deceptive, to compare or equate the land footprint of
grazing to that of crops, since most grazing is done on
non-arable or non-irrigated land. This land is largely
unavailable for crops. But we often see these lumped
together. Unirrigated rangeland can still leave
significant impacts on wildlife populations, and we
ought to stop trying justify predator control for
ranching as good practice. Irrigated crops destined for
feedlots are another matter, of course, and these
impacts are enormous. Critics would do well to
concentrate their efforts to change things here and then
work on changing the standard practices elsewhere.
5.
The Dimension of Social Order as Environmental
Support
“Massive nonlinear events in the global environment give
rise to massive nonlinear societal events” (Spratt &
Dunlop).
We are new to issues with high and dense populations, having evolved to inhabit small tribes and villages until about 12 millennia back. We were generalists, like rats and raccoons. We continue to evolve, of course, and we appear to get some help adapting from epigenetics as well as adapting genes. Now at least the great mass of us are dependent on the evolved social order, vastly more complex, with a high-resolution fabric of specialized social functions and rules to maintain predictable behaviors. More recently still, both religion and politics have made much use of deities and other supernatural bogeymen to help manage overwhelming societal complexity, especially when populations rose above the hundreds of thousands. Some of these came to be supplanted with more secular ideologies, but even most of these had to appeal to a more primitive human nature, despite the illusion that we are rational beings. There is no way that we could maintain anything close to our present numbers without our cultural adaptations. But at present population levels, social order has grown more vulnerable in step with hypercomplexity and overspecialization, especially where it lacks redundancy and diversity of function. Individual autonomy, resilience, and adaptability are often excluded or prohibited to favor predictability and enforcement of the order. The acronym VUCA is used to denote an early threat of destabilization. Society grows Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous, or changeable, unpredictable, perplexing, and multivalent. We add our reactions to this, like Toffler’s “future shock.” And increasing population may actually inhibit our cultural evolution because cultural mutations come from discrete individuals. A growing socioeconomic inequality can cheat us culturally by raising many of our young gifted in adverse childhood conditions.
Participatory democracy begins to fail us quickly as we grow beyond the village scale (128-150 people, or Dunbar’s Number). We need representative democracy beyond this scale, but because we keep thinking in terms of real democracy, we just don’t give enough care and attention to developing representative democracies that work in reality. We especially need better and quicker checks on abuses by representatives. The Romans had a “Council of Censors,” answering to the people, which had the power to remove Senators from office for abuses of their trust. This is what James Madison meant by “The censorial power is in the people over government, not the government over the people.” But what we have instead of this are career politicians with private agendas, and the great mass of people preoccupied with smaller things and lacking larger reference frames. This has been topped by a great dumbing down and de-skilling. When a social order like this crumbles, especially in the developed world, the efficiency with which we got our eggs is gone. Does the electric grid stay hot? Is water still on tap? What momentum carries? We’ve had enough regional wars and crises to see that humans generally get by, but this is usually with some outside help from the larger civilization. We have yet to see a truly global failure. The closest we’ve come may be the fall of Rome that gave us the dark Ages.
Civilization is a commons resource in both a real and a metaphorical sense. A humming social order is as vital to sustaining a large population as a bountiful land. Human beings are social and cultural animals. We learn from each other and we build on what we’ve learned over generations. We’ve been building since our ancestors were hairier hominins, beginning with language, weapons, tools, and fire. To some extent, what we can build is a function of our population size. Cultural innovation appears to move slowly in small, isolated tribes, where we might be lucky to come up with a single new stone tool every thousand years. Our tribal culture and ecoliteracy play all-important roles here. Intertribal cultural diversity or fertility plays a big part in further cultural evolution, as the failure of maladaptive local cultures plays a part in cultural selection. But even smaller human social structures are not inherently stable. What stability they have must be maintained with permeable system boundaries to let new energy into the system, and by human decisions based on imperfect information and delayed feedback. Success demands an ability to do useful things with feedback, otherwise known as adaptive intelligence.
We are new to issues with high and dense populations, having evolved to inhabit small tribes and villages until about 12 millennia back. We were generalists, like rats and raccoons. We continue to evolve, of course, and we appear to get some help adapting from epigenetics as well as adapting genes. Now at least the great mass of us are dependent on the evolved social order, vastly more complex, with a high-resolution fabric of specialized social functions and rules to maintain predictable behaviors. More recently still, both religion and politics have made much use of deities and other supernatural bogeymen to help manage overwhelming societal complexity, especially when populations rose above the hundreds of thousands. Some of these came to be supplanted with more secular ideologies, but even most of these had to appeal to a more primitive human nature, despite the illusion that we are rational beings. There is no way that we could maintain anything close to our present numbers without our cultural adaptations. But at present population levels, social order has grown more vulnerable in step with hypercomplexity and overspecialization, especially where it lacks redundancy and diversity of function. Individual autonomy, resilience, and adaptability are often excluded or prohibited to favor predictability and enforcement of the order. The acronym VUCA is used to denote an early threat of destabilization. Society grows Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous, or changeable, unpredictable, perplexing, and multivalent. We add our reactions to this, like Toffler’s “future shock.” And increasing population may actually inhibit our cultural evolution because cultural mutations come from discrete individuals. A growing socioeconomic inequality can cheat us culturally by raising many of our young gifted in adverse childhood conditions.
Participatory democracy begins to fail us quickly as we grow beyond the village scale (128-150 people, or Dunbar’s Number). We need representative democracy beyond this scale, but because we keep thinking in terms of real democracy, we just don’t give enough care and attention to developing representative democracies that work in reality. We especially need better and quicker checks on abuses by representatives. The Romans had a “Council of Censors,” answering to the people, which had the power to remove Senators from office for abuses of their trust. This is what James Madison meant by “The censorial power is in the people over government, not the government over the people.” But what we have instead of this are career politicians with private agendas, and the great mass of people preoccupied with smaller things and lacking larger reference frames. This has been topped by a great dumbing down and de-skilling. When a social order like this crumbles, especially in the developed world, the efficiency with which we got our eggs is gone. Does the electric grid stay hot? Is water still on tap? What momentum carries? We’ve had enough regional wars and crises to see that humans generally get by, but this is usually with some outside help from the larger civilization. We have yet to see a truly global failure. The closest we’ve come may be the fall of Rome that gave us the dark Ages.
Civilization is a commons resource in both a real and a metaphorical sense. A humming social order is as vital to sustaining a large population as a bountiful land. Human beings are social and cultural animals. We learn from each other and we build on what we’ve learned over generations. We’ve been building since our ancestors were hairier hominins, beginning with language, weapons, tools, and fire. To some extent, what we can build is a function of our population size. Cultural innovation appears to move slowly in small, isolated tribes, where we might be lucky to come up with a single new stone tool every thousand years. Our tribal culture and ecoliteracy play all-important roles here. Intertribal cultural diversity or fertility plays a big part in further cultural evolution, as the failure of maladaptive local cultures plays a part in cultural selection. But even smaller human social structures are not inherently stable. What stability they have must be maintained with permeable system boundaries to let new energy into the system, and by human decisions based on imperfect information and delayed feedback. Success demands an ability to do useful things with feedback, otherwise known as adaptive intelligence.
It
seems obvious that our first big steps to enabling
larger populations were the development of agriculture,
early urbanization, and the specialization or
organization of labor and other vital social functions.
Around the dawn of agriculture, the human population was
around 5 million. Social order gave us “the system” as our means to deal
with entropy. The population began to explode only much
later, first with the industrial revolution, and then
with the revolution in industrial agriculture, but both
of these systems are founded on non-renewable natural
capital, and thus are unsustainable almost by
definition. It does seem useful and even justifiable to
have a billion or more of us around, to have the
critical mass needed for much of our cultural
creativity, and a working social system, organized and
specialized, set up to exploit it. But it also seems
that we’ve gone way too far and too far wrong in this.
We
are progressing through never-before-seen population
sizes and levels of cultural complexity, and complexity
increases with population at an exponent greater than
one. Complexity itself can destabilize order or incur
unacceptable diminishing returns (Tainter). The
overpopulated rats in John B. Calhoun’s experiments
still carry an ominous warning for us about the dangers
of simple hypercomplexity in social interaction, even
when all other problems of living are solved. This would
also account for some of our rampant shallowness or
superficiality. Toynbee notes that societies that
develop expertise in problem solving become incapable of
solving new problems by overdeveloping their structures
for solving the old ones. Success can be maladaptive,
leading to insoluble or wicked problems. Globalization
is relatively new. But how well organized is this?
Mesarovic distinguishes between undifferentiated growth
and organic growth (growth with differentiation, or with
a properly controlled balance of subsystems). The former
simply follows the opportunistic growth patterns of
parasitism and metastasis. We have never had this level
of cultural inventiveness or technological savvy, but
many of the problems we are now needing to address
haven’t been seen before (as if we could learn from
history anyway). We have, to date, sustained or been
able to tolerate our local failures, including those
spanning whole continents, but this tolerance has relied
on more global support and resilience. It’s getting
easier now to imagine Africa undergoing a devastating
famine with the developed world being far too busy with
its own problems to lend the needed aid.
Some might believe that the apex of social order is
maximum top-down control, but this is the state of a
system about to fail. The healthy social order exhibits
maximum devolution, or subsidiary function. Here, no
social task needs to be delegated to entities larger
than necessary to do the job, while upper levels act
primarily as information hubs, or otherwise doing no
more than what they do best. Command-type, top-down
control is unnecessary in many natural systems, hives
being a well-known example of ‘fast, cheap and out of
control.’ The more power that the upper levels exert,
the greater the diminishing returns. Authoritarian
efforts to force social cohesion amplify the strain.
Bureaucratic or legislative gridlock grows, and those
who find and legislate the loopholes and ways around
them become a political priesthood. Rigidification and
harsh standardization of the social order is a bad sign,
an overreaction to growing complexity. It’s also
incorrect to think that good social order also suggests
full assimilation, homogeneity, or monoculture. Cultural
diversity functions just fine at global scales. We want
individual cultures, as with Richard Norgaard’s
patchwork coevolutionary quilt. We just need to find
better ways to cope with our human “us v. them”
dichotomizing, to learn to communicate, arbitrate, and
cross-fertilize more effectively, and stop defining
ourselves as not being what those other people are.
As
a thought experiment, try imagining a global population
anywhere close to the current 7.7 billion if we lacked
any of the following global sub-systems of civilization,
and try mentally to quantify the impact: Air travel
(less vital, but contributing); Commerce; Consensual
secular ethics (a minimal moral baseline that nations
can agree upon); Defense (legitimate, as distinct from
militarization for economic reasons); Disaster
relief; Education; Electronic media and communication;
Fossil fuels (or as replaceable by wind and solar);
Fresh water infrastructure (where quality of life
is important); Global food distribution; Global
governance (with trade agreements and international
policing); Industrial agriculture (replaceable with
labor-intensive and regenerative practices); Internet
(replaceable with snail mail and libraries); Irrigation
and water impoundments; Legal institutions and standards
of behavior; Manufacture; Medical services (or return to
ethnobotany); Medical research; Mining; Peacekeeping
forces; Political structure (more often than not more
helpful than not); Power grids (replaceable with
distributed generation and storage); Property boundaries
(with security and enforcement); Roads; Sewage treatment
(wherever quality of life is important); Shipping;
Technological development; Transportation of goods;
Urbanization support networks; and Vocational
specialties. Might cities be the first to collapse? How
many people do you think would remain?
We begin to see that the infrastructure we’ve built over many generations, and at great capital expense, temporarily supports our carrying capacity overshoot as much as a resource and capital-rich natural environment. But when the tipping points are reached and systems destabilize, cascade failure will strip away the surplus depth and resilience. The overshoot that was enabled before is left unsupported, leading to a crash in both population and per capita consumption (especially from war, famine, poverty, and disease) in addition to any crash resulting from environmental destabilization alone. The effects might even be comparable in scope. Recovery for any successor civilization, in addition to demanding generations of effort, and now-depleted resources and capital, would be heavily dependent on the conservation of cultural information, continuity in lessons learned, and any truly sustainable prototypes that were being developed prior to and during the crash.
We begin to see that the infrastructure we’ve built over many generations, and at great capital expense, temporarily supports our carrying capacity overshoot as much as a resource and capital-rich natural environment. But when the tipping points are reached and systems destabilize, cascade failure will strip away the surplus depth and resilience. The overshoot that was enabled before is left unsupported, leading to a crash in both population and per capita consumption (especially from war, famine, poverty, and disease) in addition to any crash resulting from environmental destabilization alone. The effects might even be comparable in scope. Recovery for any successor civilization, in addition to demanding generations of effort, and now-depleted resources and capital, would be heavily dependent on the conservation of cultural information, continuity in lessons learned, and any truly sustainable prototypes that were being developed prior to and during the crash.
Unfortunately, some of our more destructive cultural
systems have learned to support themselves while
resisting pressures to play more nicely with the
biosphere. Extractive industry funds our environmental
resource education. Corporations and their lobbyists
purchase politicians on the cheap, deregulate
themselves, and even draft whatever legislation they
want to have passed. Economic exploitation of the poor
does what it can to preserve job and mortgage
insecurity, thus maintaining behavioral compliance.
Privately-owned media regulate the flow of information
to the public. Advertising creates an endless flow of
new wants. Durable goods are made to be obsolete.
Political party systems narrow the universe of public
political discourse to limited false dichotomies. This
translates directly into social factionalism and
polarization, short-circuiting policy solutions,
diplomacy, and compromise.
As
a resource, good social order also relies on such
intangible currencies as confidence, security, trust,
empathy, and charity, all of which will allow us to make
reasoned predictions about the behavior of others and
the outcomes of our dealings with them. Confidence
underlies our monetary systems, which are no longer
backed by anything more real than the public’s belief
that its nation will eventually be able to pay its
debts. The irresponsible accumulation of debt,
particularly in unnecessary endeavors like perpetual
war, is undermining this confidence. Security is being
undermined as the wealthy seek to maintain a level of
financial insecurity in the poor, so they will do their
jobs at minimum wage and not risk foreclosure or
eviction with sassy protests. Insecurity isn’t only the
purview of terrorism: it’s nurtured and cultivated as
matter of course by businesses, governments, and
religions, that these institutions might be seen to
provide the wanted security. Trust is being undermined
by parties seeking to keep races, classes, ethnicities,
nationalities, and sexes in dynamic tension with each
other, in order to feed on the social friction and heat.
Charity, at least seen as a proportion of income, is a
frequent casualty of socioeconomic stratification, as
those taxed for wealth resent those in need of support.
The concept of noblesse oblige seems all but
lost now in all but the most natural aristocrats.
The
people have long ago lost their individual sense of
agency and sovereignty, and now accept both political
impotence and anonymity. They have allowed their
governments to claim a higher sovereignty than theirs,
and have become convinced that governments and their
constitutions are the sources of their rights. Despite
the lip service, they think their vote means nothing,
and that voting is limited to election day. Cultural
inertia and path dependency don’t help. People just
believe when agencies like DARPA tell them what the
future of war will be like, as though they had no power
at all to change things. We are back to Margaret Mead’s
“small group of thoughtful, committed people” if we ever
want to get anything done, even if we’re running out of
time. Hive mind is not a real mind, however much it
might get things done, and it has no native conscience.
The
close bonds formed in small communities, the tribe and
village models of old, and the life to which we are best
adapted genetically, continue to be lost or forgotten.
We move into neighborhoods where we aren’t allowed to
choose our neighbors. Our jobs may demand that we change
residence at least once or twice. Many of us are either
moving up or moving to town or the city. Our exposure to
life elsewhere in the world gives us a stronger sense of
transiency, a sense that home is now only home for now.
We lose our sense of place, our rootedness and
belonging. We often lose our native language or forget
our indigenous local knowledge, even as we substitute
abstracts like patriotism and memberships. Lasting
social bonds don’t form nearly as well in these
conditions. The population numbers at the community
level of social organization (128-150, or Dunbar’s
number) also represent the highest numbers at which true
participatory democracy functions, at which every member
might feel that they can have a say. In many places,
organizing communities of this size, and choosing their
members, is now illegal. That sort of community is now a
compound, or your gathering is a cult, a threat to the
culture. Cultural resistance and nimby attitudes towards
experimental lifestyles like ecovillages and intentional
communities can discourage the widespread longing to
recapture this lifestyle and its benefits. Losing this
link, this scale of community, has been a disaster for
our larger-scale sense of personal agency. And as we
make a needed transition to having more one-child
families, we are giving up something important: age
diversity in childhood, as we enjoy with older and
younger siblings. This is still important to childhood
development, and this is challenging enough with our
age-segregated public schooling. To compensate, the
local community will become still more important.
Adaptive intelligence is measured against a changing
niche. The idea that human civilization will need to
adapt to deep and inevitable changes in the services
that civilization must provide is gaining some traction
and is being called ‘deep adaptation.’ Jem Bendell
writes, “We can conceive of resilience of human
societies as the capacity to adapt to changing
circumstances so as to survive with valued norms and
behaviors. Given that analysts are concluding that a
social collapse is inevitable, the question becomes:
What are the valued norms and behaviors that human
societies will wish to maintain as they seek to survive?
That highlights how deep adaptation will involve more
than ‘resilience.’ It brings us to a second area of this
agenda, which I have named ‘relinquishment.’ It involves
people and communities letting go of certain assets,
behaviors and beliefs where retaining them could make
matters worse. Examples include withdrawing from
coastlines, shutting down vulnerable industrial
facilities, or giving up expectations for certain types
of consumption. The third area can be called
‘restoration.’ It involves people and communities
rediscovering attitudes and approaches to life and
organization that our hydrocarbon-fueled civilization
eroded. Examples include re-wilding landscapes, so they
provide more ecological benefits and require less
management, changing diets back to match the seasons,
rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play,
and increased community-level productivity and support.”
And yet, as Lester R. Brown notes, “there is not much evidence of societies mobilizing and making sacrifices to meet gradually worsening conditions that threaten real disaster for future generations.” We seem reluctant to even acknowledge a problem until it has overtaken us with multiple crises. This happens when you can’t see past the next quarterly report or election year. On relinquishment, Tainter argues that “investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response reaches a point of diminishing marginal returns.” At this point, he recognizes collapse when a society involuntarily sheds a significant portion of its complexity. Back to earlier squares.
And yet, as Lester R. Brown notes, “there is not much evidence of societies mobilizing and making sacrifices to meet gradually worsening conditions that threaten real disaster for future generations.” We seem reluctant to even acknowledge a problem until it has overtaken us with multiple crises. This happens when you can’t see past the next quarterly report or election year. On relinquishment, Tainter argues that “investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response reaches a point of diminishing marginal returns.” At this point, he recognizes collapse when a society involuntarily sheds a significant portion of its complexity. Back to earlier squares.
5a. Systems
Infrastructure and Systems Failure
Complexity refers to the number, articulation, and
functional specification of constituent parts. Complex
systems, when healthy, don’t always require a center
that can fail to hold. Grassroots self-government, with
devolution of function and invisible hands, can often
manage the thing just fine with only a nominal queen at
the center. A federation of states might do little more
than coordinate local activities and only be a suzerain
for common defense. The queen of a hive need not be
fully informed. But health is easy to lose as systems
age and their structures ossify, or as they close
themselves off to new information and energy. Cultures
are seen in failure fairly often, failing in forms like
empires, nations, dynasties, and religions. The average
lifespan of such entities is only a couple of centuries.
So far, none of these failures have ended the world. We
had the Muslims of southern Spain to keep the lights on
through Europe’s dark ages, with enough embers still
burning to ignite the Renaissance. The Soviet Union fell
and got invaded with economic support instead of enemy
armies. We now face the new problem of having become too
interconnected and interdependent, which at first blush
seems like a good thing. But we haven’t seen anything
like a global collapse yet.
As
cultural systems get more complex, they also grow more
dependent on system integrity. The system components,
even those “large and in charge,” and too big to fail,
become increasingly unable to mircomanage the details,
even through well-specified chains of command. System
integrity is largely a function of fresh information and
energy inputs. Chaos is not shut out by closing the
system off, by keeping it the same, or by “fixing” it.
Further, the individuals trying to function within
systems where they’re denied both devolution of function
and bottom up or grassroots organization necessarily
lack the ultracomplex minds needed to solve the complex
problems. They’re forced instead into tackling one
dimension of one problem at a time. The environmentalist
trying to turn the culture away from ecocide is stuck in
a game of Whack-a-Mole against one corporation or
government agency after another. Meanwhile, the top-down
decisions are either rooted in corruption or they
consist in decision strategies that are formulated for
worst-case scenarios and applied generally, regardless
of mitigating circumstance, with huge inefficiencies in
resource allocation. Situational ethics, a local first
resort, gives way to the rule of law, which soon becomes
the rule of lawyers.
When a system has grown unable to learn or adapt and
begins to fail, its management becomes confused by
complexity. Overspecialization doesn’t fare well in
system collapse. The individuals within it can no longer
perform any but the most highly specialized functions.
They are forced to re-skill as generalists to manage
interconnected problems. Overgeneraliztion doesn't fare
well either. The culture that has fully assimilated its
subcultures has now lost all of its indigenous
ecoliteracy and local-niche knowledge. Lack of vision,
scale, or proportion becomes an even bigger issue. Those
in power may still seem able to give their power base
red herrings enough to keep them occupied, but their
power base itself is doomed to the extent that its
ignorance is encouraged. Desperately, the system will
try to centralize control. In that scramble, those at
the top forego all the advantages of system
self-organization and devolution. Disorder slips into
cascade failure of the integrated systems. And nobody
knows how to fix it. As Juvenal remarked, “Already long
ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People
have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon
a time handed out military command, high civil office,
legions, everything, now restrains itself and anxiously
hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” Rome
falls, but this, too, takes more than a day.
Analogies to the 2nd law of thermodynamics have been
used historically to discuss the dissipation of limited
natural capital like minerals. They can also be used to
discuss the costs of maintaining our social order as a
population support system. Once again, because some of
these assertions have not been prefaced as analogies,
critics have been eager to dismiss such expository
writing as invalid and unscientific argument (the 2nd
Law being strictly about energy) before strutting off
smugly believing they’ve refuted all that’s been
said. There remains a useful analogy here. Social
systems are hampered in their self-maintenance when
system boundaries ossify, when energy inputs are
restricted, when feedback loops are interrupted or
deliberately distorted, and when top-down centralized
management wrests control from devolved and grassroots
functions. Self-maintenance might fall victim to poor
prioritization of tasks: the population is all excited
about the next phase of its perpetual war, but ignores
its badly deteriorating infrastructure, rotten roads,
and corroding bridges. This is the last thing a system
wants to deal with when its sexier parts begin to fall
apart.
Parkinson’s law of triviality, also called bikeshedding,
refers to giving a disproportionate weight to trivial
considerations, rather than apportioning attention and
effort according to an issue’s real-world importance or
value. A political board or deciding body may devote as
much time to the color of a chair as it does to an
annual budget. This may point to a failure to delegate,
decentralize, or devolve authority to the appropriate
level. It’s busywork and fussing, instead of triage.
Data is treated with too much equality. This is also
plaguing our global information system, particularly in
the news media and its manipulation of the public
opinion with sensationalism, buzzwords, and sound bites.
The new royal baby gets a hundred times the media
coverage of an ecological disaster or a military screwup
that kills thousands.
We
shouldn’t assume that “good” social order is needed to
support a large or growing population, at least
temporarily. We have only to look at Sub-Saharan Africa
and Bangladesh to see that error. We shouldn’t assume
that human groups can’t survive and grow powerful under
despotic and otherwise toxic political and religious
systems. Failing states might easily revert from K to r
reproductive strategies. But good order does seem to be
necessary for the support of a developing population,
one with better hopes for a better future. Neither does
the oppressiveness or topheaviness of the social order
seem to be a short-term factor, since these can often
thrive for decades, a generation, even if still
short-term. We haven’t seen more distant calamities
avoided yet, like famine and disease, especially where
an otherwise robust global civilization is no longer
resilient enough to aid other populations in trouble. We
have, however, seen calamities like Stalin’s purges and
Mao’s Great Leap Forward, with their tens of millions of
corpses apiece, and been unable to intervene. And the
Americans themselves have committed similar atrocities
against their own indigenous tribes and the slaves
imported from Africa. It’s now beginning to look like
the developed world may soon be too busy with its own
problems to help others in need. For our purposes here,
we need to enumerate some of the functions of global
civilization that might threaten a global population in
overshoot, or one undergoing extreme changes in climate
and the natural environment.
5b. Economic Order
and Toxic Paradigms
It’s interesting, in a scary way, how the worth of
things in life comes to us already assigned by others.
Worth is thought of as given or found, not made or
taken. It’s interesting, too, how the terms used in
economics derive from things that should be more
important than material gain. It’s easy to find better
uses for words like: appraisal, appreciation,
appropriate, assessment, balance, charity, contribution,
credit, economy, endowment, enrichment, enterprise,
equity, fortune, indebtedness, inheritance, interest,
legacy, leverage, liquidity, pledge, precious, premium,
proceeds, purchase, realize, redeem, reserve, resource,
reward, richness, right, security, solvency, speculate,
treasure, trust, value, venture, and wealth. Sometimes
the parts of speech can change: the words prize, trust,
treasure, and value, for instance, work better as verbs,
and more to our benefit. Every one of these words from
economics refers to something we can get or do for free:
they hold the keys to being rich, satisfied, and
grateful, without spending much money, or working hard
at anything besides our own attitudes. How did this get
so twisted? A true economy should meet needs, not create
them. Can’t we take back our control of value and need?
And isn’t time worth more than money? Doesn’t it make
more sense to value all forms of capital, natural,
biological, and human, with its components of time,
labor, and leisure, with as much care as we value money?
The more we monetize the world, the more it seems like we have added to its value. Of course that’s all within the fantasy world of our human exceptionalism. Perversely, though, there is much of real value that we have failed to monetize, like the housewife’s housework and the chores of motherhood. Quality of life and ecosystem health have also escaped much due valuation. We also seem disproportionately drawn to the shiny things, while the less sexy necessities languish, roads and bridges deteriorate until they start eating cars and people. The slower development of human capital, like quality education, tends to drop lower on the list of priorities because returns aren’t seen to be immediate.
The more we monetize the world, the more it seems like we have added to its value. Of course that’s all within the fantasy world of our human exceptionalism. Perversely, though, there is much of real value that we have failed to monetize, like the housewife’s housework and the chores of motherhood. Quality of life and ecosystem health have also escaped much due valuation. We also seem disproportionately drawn to the shiny things, while the less sexy necessities languish, roads and bridges deteriorate until they start eating cars and people. The slower development of human capital, like quality education, tends to drop lower on the list of priorities because returns aren’t seen to be immediate.
Despite decades of growing opposition, GDP and GNP are
still in use as primary measures of development, and
even of national happiness. G stands for gross. It’s all
about quantity and nothing to do with quality. It
includes prices we pay for all of the things we don’t
want. The broken window fallacy, an idea
introduced by Frederic Bastiat in 1850, asserts that
gross economic activity is wrongly seen as a better
measure of prosperity than measures of net activity that
subtract such things as damage repair, forgone
opportunity costs, the health care costs of
environmental damage, cancer cures necessitated by
pollution, and inflated prices from long-term resource
depletion. Perpetual war and toxic sludge are regarded
economic goods. But these unintended negative
consequences will affect the economy in ways that aren’t
seen or accounted. Weizsäcker writes of an alternative,
the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which “starts with
personal consumption expenditures (a major component of
GDP) but adjusts it using about 25 different components,
including income distribution, loss of leisure time,
costs of family breakdown, unemployment and other
negative outcomes like crime and pollution; depletion of
natural resources; as well as the numerous environmental
costs of GDP growth, such as loss of wetlands,
farmlands, forests and ozone, and long-term damage such
as climate change. GPI also adds positive components
left out of GDP, including the benefits of volunteering
and household work.”
Money began as pretty useful stuff. It simplified
exchanges of goods and services. Supply and demand
managed the pricing. You could store wealth without
having it rot. You could secure it in mattresses and
banks. You could accumulate some, to keep life going
over the rough patches and failed crops. You could take advantage of local fluctuations
in product prices. Then we
started to borrow at interest, with the usurers taking
what rents they could, based on the expected usefulness
of the money borrowed. Then it got too easy to live on
credit. The primary use of credit now seems to be to
live beyond our means, to get ahead of ourselves. Living
within our means seems to have become an insult to our
hopes and dreams. But we rarely catch up to our big
appetites. Our habit is of course to give ourselves more
credit than we deserve. As perpetual optimists, we
discount the costs of our futures because tomorrow will
be so much better, so much closer to living the dream.
This, in its turn, leaves us insecure about our
collateralized equity. We then need to behave ourselves,
to toe whatever lines are drawn before us, so that we
don’t fall into bankruptcy and ruination, and lose all
of the stuff we have worked so hard to purchase. Now we
have moved from an empty world into a full one, to fight
for what remains, but first come, first served is the
first rule of order. We rarely think about how our
discounted posterity will think about us. It’s probably
safe to assume that they won’t be reviving ancestor
worship.
Similarly to money, capitalism started out a lot more
benign that it was to become. It was fair that your
money did some of the work for you. It created some jobs
for others. And some of that really did trickle down
through your workers’ pockets before it found its way
back to your own. Labor eventually got a full complement
of rights to organize, however tightfisted management
and governments might be about that. Free-market, laissez
faire economics and unregulated trade only brought
a few problems to solve along with it. It did, however,
lack any native means to incorporate external costs to
the commons and unintended consequences into the price
of goods and services. Too few governments figured out
the wisdom in taxing only what they didn’t want, to
cover these costs, even though diminishing the things we
don’t want is the very purpose of government, at least
from the people’s side of things. Most of the voting
population seems to believe that the economic system
that this has evolved into is similar to free market
capitalism, although some may suspect that the system is
rigged and not free at all. In fact, it’s largely owned
by non-living corporations, which have somehow now
gained a political sovereignty greater in many places
than that of citizens, and without any need to
demonstrate any conscience greater than a duty to
shareholders to show profit. Gone are most restraints on
rents and usury. Transnational corporations are now
given more enforcement clout on trade than nations.
These corporate “persons” now write much of the
legislation that they want, and openly pay the
legislators to pass it. Capital counts more than votes
and it has unrestricted mobility through the deregulated
banks. We have grossly confused laissez faire,
free market economics with deregulated corporate
capitalism and its wholly-owned legislatures rigging the
system. The transition has been long in the making, but
the strongest footholds were found in the early 70s (not
in the Reagan era as many will claim). The signal flare
in the US was the Powell Memorandum of 1971 but the
movement soon went global.
Pyramid and Ponzi economics present their own set of
problems, especially with regard to pressures for
population and economic growth. These systems promise
only failure when there are fewer payers on the next
level down, the downstream generations, on what’s
supposed to look like a demographic pyramid. What was
supposed to be a demographic dividend, with a large
working-age group, becomes an aging deficit, a burden on
the shrinking younger generations. Where will we get our
armed forces (since we’re just too stupid to swap war
for diplomacy, or learn to depose our own tyrants)? Will
we need to hire immigrants or ban condoms? Social
Security in the US didn’t have to look like it does, had
the people the sense to push for population
stabilization. But it had to “borrow” the surplus, which
is actually theft if you never really planned to pay it
back. Not paying it back would have no impact on the
budget.
Debts can be played with linguistically, too: you can convince people that these big promises are just “unfunded liabilities,” kept in a separate column altogether. Bad bookkeeping, hidden subsidies, and twisted terms now run throughout this system of credit. Maybe we think we can print our way out of trouble, because it’s all in our minds anyway. But other, harsher bills come due, with collectors who will take more than kneecaps. There really is only one final response to Ponzi schemes and their analogs: you have to amputate the gangrenous part, and the sooner the better. And then don’t do that stupid thing ever again. Grade school arithmetic should tell us that we can’t have unlimited growth on a limited world. The ecosystem that we need to live within is a steady state economy, but we don’t want to learn this. Yes, it has income, like sunlight, but life stays on budget or else. The worst consequence of all this, as it now pertains to the human problem, is in the need for increasing generations of our younger descendants to pay our bills for us. Unthinking governments and economists with no time horizons lobby hard for the elimination of family planning efforts and even push incentives to breed beyond replacement levels. Failing this, they may next turn to deregulated immigration as a next resort. In short, our economic forces have gone to war against our adaptive intelligence.
Debts can be played with linguistically, too: you can convince people that these big promises are just “unfunded liabilities,” kept in a separate column altogether. Bad bookkeeping, hidden subsidies, and twisted terms now run throughout this system of credit. Maybe we think we can print our way out of trouble, because it’s all in our minds anyway. But other, harsher bills come due, with collectors who will take more than kneecaps. There really is only one final response to Ponzi schemes and their analogs: you have to amputate the gangrenous part, and the sooner the better. And then don’t do that stupid thing ever again. Grade school arithmetic should tell us that we can’t have unlimited growth on a limited world. The ecosystem that we need to live within is a steady state economy, but we don’t want to learn this. Yes, it has income, like sunlight, but life stays on budget or else. The worst consequence of all this, as it now pertains to the human problem, is in the need for increasing generations of our younger descendants to pay our bills for us. Unthinking governments and economists with no time horizons lobby hard for the elimination of family planning efforts and even push incentives to breed beyond replacement levels. Failing this, they may next turn to deregulated immigration as a next resort. In short, our economic forces have gone to war against our adaptive intelligence.
Much of the developed world today is built up on
entrenched economic strategies and their institutions.
Since the bulk of this is now founded on the confidence
that we can pay down our debts some day, the structure
looks much like a house of cards, or an imposing
murmuration of kited rubber checks. The economy is built
on confidence in bubbles and the vapor that fills them,
less hinged than ever to realities and consequences.
Whatever you do, don’t panic: that’s like heresy or
sacrilege. That puts cracks in the system. The “green”
economists are working now to capture the prevailing
system and train it to do more sustainable tasks. We can
somehow turn this pro-growth corporate capitalist
economy into a friend of the Earth without changing its
fundamental dynamics in ways that make it
unrecognizable. But sadly, that economy has to be
changed by the people who are causing the problems, and
the legislators they lobby. The corporate capitalists
want to monetize even the commons, in order to regulate
them. But this is different from seeing the intrinsic
value of the commons, and the external costs of their
destruction. The consensus seems to be that the system
is too big to fail and too big to fight. Even the
medium-sized portions of it, like a big bank or
insurance company, must be protected from failure, at
the public expense. It’s like we never learned a single
thing from the concept of natural selection. With our
subsidies and tariffs, we stick out our “invisible foot”
and trip the whole thing up.
The
original free market economic system might have left us
in much better shape, had we been able to deny rights to
non-living entities, forbid the purchase of legislative
votes, constrain the creation of artificial needs, and
incorporate all long-term external costs into consumer
pricing. We needed timely and accurate feedback for the
system to work as it should. We could have used
subsidies and tariffs for good. Now it may be that the
whole system has to crash, with the loss of any wealth
not bound to something real, plus the inflated wealth in
whatever is, the vapor. This economic system has to die
if civilization is to survive. At the very least, it
will need to return to the simpler origins of economy,
back when it used to mean thrift, and the conscientious
allocation of resources. Growth and sustainability, or
economic expansion and a steady state economy, are not
reconcilable. This collapse might not be so bad if we
did something to plan for it, and had some sound ideas
for substitutes in mind. But this is not our way. Our
vision seems to be one of hindsight, deployed only in
mid-crisis. Even so, a collapsing economy will at least
assist in reducing our numbers.
Under the current system, any supply will become more
vulnerable as its limits are approached, whether this is
a renewable resource or natural capital. Rising prices
promise rising profits, prompting more extensive
exploration and exploitation. Since the same is
achievable with artificial scarcity, this occurs as
well. Eventually, diminishing returns puts a stop to
this, but only because lasting damage is done. This is
another reason to internalize all real costs into the
pricing of goods and service, even through trade
agreements. Logically, this could be a source of
government revenue, taxing what you don’t want, and not
taxing what you do. Environmental protections can be
sources of revenue instead of barriers to trade.
Starting economics over will mean learning to build
wealth on capital collateral and specie instead of fiat,
confidence, and indebtedness. It will mean forbidding
ourselves to treat the extraction or exploitation of
natural capital as any kind of income. It will mean
internalizing all of our real costs, articulating
embedded or embodied minerals, energy, labor, time, and
water. It will mean reigning in the creation of
artificial needs and wants, the cultivation of
insecurity, and pressures for competitive conspicuous
consumption from economic and political entities. It
will mean weighing cradle-to-cradle costs and value, in
a circular economy, with nearly complete recycling,
reuse, and remanufacturing, justifying greater initial
expense on more durable and maintenance-free systems,
and turning our waste into resources. It will mean
robustly progressive luxury taxes on excessive
lifestyles, following a clear definition of excessive.
It will mean revisioning development as something quite
other than growth, such as improvement in the quality of
life. A reboot that neglects these lessons will fail
just like this last false start.
Economic growth must give way to a form of economic development that is qualitative instead of quantitative. The goal of severing the link between economic growth and its impacts is called “decoupling.” This word is used freely to imply that growth can still be quantitative. But growth must give way to the more modest idea of development, and an implication that this also means degrowth. This begins with some redistribution of global wealth and resources, constraining the great excesses and eliminating both extreme and moderate poverty. Not only can’t this be accomplished under our current numbers, it will necessitate a still deeper cut in what we think our sustainable numbers can be. This goes against the trend noted by Malthus, to wit, that mankind has a propensity to utilize his abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living.
Economic growth must give way to a form of economic development that is qualitative instead of quantitative. The goal of severing the link between economic growth and its impacts is called “decoupling.” This word is used freely to imply that growth can still be quantitative. But growth must give way to the more modest idea of development, and an implication that this also means degrowth. This begins with some redistribution of global wealth and resources, constraining the great excesses and eliminating both extreme and moderate poverty. Not only can’t this be accomplished under our current numbers, it will necessitate a still deeper cut in what we think our sustainable numbers can be. This goes against the trend noted by Malthus, to wit, that mankind has a propensity to utilize his abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living.
5c. Inequalities of
Opportunities, and Outcomes
“We cannot possibly expect to exclude riches and poverty
from society, yet if we could find out a mode of
government by which the numbers in the extreme regions
would be lessened and the numbers in the middle regions
increased, it would be undoubtedly our duty to adopt it”
(Thomas Malthus).
We don’t need to make all incomes equal, but we do want to generate a rising standard of living for the world’s poorest and at least disincentivize the ridiculous excesses of the very rich. “Sustainable development requires the satisfaction of the basic needs of all, since endemic poverty can lead to ecological or other types of catastrophes” (Morandín-Ahuerma). Inequity, or socioeconomic stratification, has been a big part of our social organization since we were swinging through the trees. A great many of our evolved social heuristics concern our relative status in the troop or tribe, and very few have to do with how equal we are to everyone else. This is why it’s so hard to put a few limits on the distance between the haves and have-nots, now that we so desperately need to do this. This stratification has done its part in collapsing a few civilizations before this one. Historically, this trend does not reverse of its own accord. It ends with revolution, collapse, or a failed revolution triggering collapse. This one is already either approaching or exceeding that extreme degree that helped trigger historical crashes.
We don’t need to make all incomes equal, but we do want to generate a rising standard of living for the world’s poorest and at least disincentivize the ridiculous excesses of the very rich. “Sustainable development requires the satisfaction of the basic needs of all, since endemic poverty can lead to ecological or other types of catastrophes” (Morandín-Ahuerma). Inequity, or socioeconomic stratification, has been a big part of our social organization since we were swinging through the trees. A great many of our evolved social heuristics concern our relative status in the troop or tribe, and very few have to do with how equal we are to everyone else. This is why it’s so hard to put a few limits on the distance between the haves and have-nots, now that we so desperately need to do this. This stratification has done its part in collapsing a few civilizations before this one. Historically, this trend does not reverse of its own accord. It ends with revolution, collapse, or a failed revolution triggering collapse. This one is already either approaching or exceeding that extreme degree that helped trigger historical crashes.
Throughout history, stratification for any reason has
been confused with questions of merit and demerit.
Sometimes this is seen as one’s class of breeding
instead of an accident of birth, and sometimes it’s
past-life karma standing in for retributive justice.
Such rules or laws of merit always flatter the
well-to-do and ease their conscience some. In too many
cases, aristocracy is confused with meritocracy. The
have-nots have rarely stood a chance to truly rise high
in the order, although there are enough exceptions to
warrant more study than this is given. However, when low
socioeconomic status means levels of childhood adversity
known to harm cognitive and neurological development, it
becomes what should be regarded as criminal abuse or
neglect on the part of the society.
Equality of rights and opportunities is something quite
a bit different from equality of outcomes. This means
that everybody has a chance to test or prove themselves,
regardless of any economic, racial, or ethnic handicaps
of birth. Who should win at life becomes a question of
talent and character, and not the accumulations of one’s
parents. Character both is and should be destiny, or at
least humanity benefits greatly when this is the case.
An equitable society need not be the same as an
egalitarian one. If you want something, you should be
able to work for it. When you’re made to work
unreasonably long and hard hours, sometimes able to go
nowhere, there is a real problem. And when what you want
is unreasonably more than any person should need to live
a good life, you also have a problem. As to outcomes,
there is much to be said against everybody being either
considered or made equal. An absolute equality is
neither real nor desirable, but we might work to
constrain the gaps to within an order of magnitude and
use progressive taxation to more fully mitigate the
external environmental costs of luxury and excess.
There’s also a somewhat separate issue, only part moral,
that looks at defining an economic floor, a basic level
of needs satisfaction, rights, and opportunities, to
which every human being ought to be entitled, a fair
start instead of a handicap. As used here, this isn’t
the same as a “universal basic income,” since labor or
training would be a prerequisite. This is the subject of
Chapter 9, The Dimension of Living Standards and
Development, and is only touched upon here.
Globally, the greatest inequities of income and material
well-being are little more than accidents in the
geography or demography of birth. These accidents are
also the bars on the juvenile cognitive playpens of
racism, caste, class, sexism, patriotism, and the one
true religion. We do not earn or deserve these titles,
until we show too little character to question them. But
we also need an education to question them properly, and
not a limited education designed to prepare a working
class for servitude. With these walls we build between
us, we neglect and oppose our own human resources and
capital. We are only making diminished use of our labor,
hours, skills, and cultural knowledge. This is the real
argument for more equity in the distribution of
well-being: we do grievous harm to our own collective
potential.
Racial inequity is most problematic when it carries an
entrenched exploiter-exploited relationship, where wages
can be depressed below subsistence levels to feed the
ridiculously rich at the top. Class or caste of birth
will usually drive both exposure to childhood adversity
and a chance for a quality education, although
paradoxically, conditions of low birth may also be more
stimulus rich, more social, age diverse, and
multilingual. The ripples from misogyny extend even
further, as women raise the children they send into the
world. The global suppression and control of women is
among the most horrifying of all the dark deeds we do.
Aside from the obvious, like honor killings, genital
mutilation, rape, and sex trafficking, denying women
freedom of movement, a good education, and reproductive
rights adds a huge burden to our world’s carrying
capacity. The big losers are the children, who become
tomorrow’s adults, carrying with them the long-term
effects of their childhood adversity, poor nutrition,
poor hygiene and sanitation, and poor education. And
there is almost nowhere for the illiterate and
innumerate to go.
Currently, our high levels of socioeconomic
stratification are linked closely to our overconsumption
of renewable resources and natural capital, and the
environmental effects are highly disproportionate, even
where demographic transition shows the well-to-do having
smaller families. Again, the strands of overpopulation
and overconsumption cannot be teased apart, and all of
the strands of that braid need to be addressed at the
same time, and rendered less damaging, until we fall
below carrying capacity again. The surplus of wealth in
the hands of the few is probably enough today that
distributing this fairly, or at least equitably, across
the global population might alleviate much of our social
stress. But this is only myopic thinking. We would still
be in extreme overshoot. The hungry would be fed for a
while, but the resources and capital would be consumed.
A truly visionary solution to spreading the wealth would
have to also combine such pieces as family planning,
real education, training in regenerative agriculture,
and cultural support for simple living.
In
terms of justifying destratification, it’s important to
start remembering what’s at stake here: the future of
human civilization and much of the future of the natural
world. The moral issues of human rights and fairness
might even be regarded a lesser issue relative to the
fate of the world at large. Heavy costs need to be
imposed on extravagant, conspicuous, and unnecessary
impacts, reflecting the real external costs of luxury
and abundance to the commons. This cannot continue to be
subsidized. We will need to decide soon on any ethical
limits set over and above real costs. We need a
consensual, secular ethic that will append our rights
with a corresponding set of duties.
So
far, the redistribution of income has only been a local
solution, at most continent-wide. And it hasn’t always
been a roaring success. Still, the stock or standard
solution to reducing the extremity of stratification
will be some form of progressive taxation. There are
basic tax exemptions for those barely squeaking by,
although there are enough taxes embedded in even the
most basic goods and services, amounting to several
slices of each loaf of bread, enough perhaps to cover a
poor person’s minimal impacts. As we rise in multiples
of what resources we truly need, the burden grows
progressively heavier. With a better system than this,
we might calculate footprint rather than income, so that
it’s more truly our excesses that we are paying so
dearly for. With a more perfect system, however, prices
would reflect total impacts, and use taxes would take us
most of the way to our goals. Use taxes are preeminently
fair, but they could entail rebates, a standard
deduction, for our necessary expenses in meting the most
basic needs. What is taken off the top should be spent
in ways to help those on the bottom to better meet their
needs. This, of course, will cause resentment enough to
warrant that those receiving assistance at least perform
fair due diligence in working for their aid, or getting
vocational training. There is no need to hand people a
living where they can get fair recompense for honest
work. Heavier costs can be imposed on unreasonably
extravagant and conspicuous impacts, reflecting the real
external costs of luxury and abundance to both the
social fabric and the biosphere. This can’t continue to
be subsidized. And we will need to decide on more
absolute ethical limits over and above real costs.
We
treat economics like a game, with affluence as winning,
and poverty as losing. And yet in sports we have rules
against cheating. The main point of playing on a level
field is to show us who really has the merit, who
deserves to win. It’s unsportsmanlike, and usually
illegal, to violate this. We would be well-served with a
similar set of rules for our livelihoods, a bill of
duties to accompany our bill of rights.
5d. Political
Insecurity, Migrants
and Refugees
Social order is a true environmental support system,
allowing significantly larger human populations. As
already suggested, this order can be less than ideal,
even despotic, and continue in this way for a couple of
decades until it necessarily self-destructs. Also, a
deteriorating social order can trigger a reversion to
r-strategy reproduction (having more spare babies).
While still allowing human population growth, neither of
these contribute much to human development, so larger
populations lead lower quality lives. Eventually this
harms the environment, because it’s lived in with
greater ignorance, which in turn will lead to
depopulation. Our concern here, though, is with the
effects of political destabilization and collapse. What
happens when global diplomacy, commerce, and
infrastructure start to break down?
Steven Pinker’s work on The Better Angels of Our
Nature tracks a long-term decline in violence as
human and global society self-organizes or knits itself
together. He also shows how the media helps keep us be
blind to this by focusing on the bad news. Things have
indeed been getting better in terms of per capita
violence. But this is a look back, not much of a look
into the future, and it doesn’t account for
destabilization and collapse of the organization that
allows us to parasitize the world. His optimism won’t
allow him to see this coming. In fact, very few of our
optimists, who’ve remained confident in our short-term planning,
our band-aid solutions, and our technological wizardry,
will ever see this coming.
The
wars we have seen to date still haven’t done has much as
disease in keeping our numbers in check. All of the
fallen soldiers of the 20th century combined, and added
to triple that number in war’s civilian casualties,
barely made up for two years of late-century population
growth. Perpetual war has added much to human misery,
and taken much from our development, but it still hasn’t
done enough to convince a blind majority that it’s too
idiotic an endeavor to be worth pursuing. The
environmental footprints of rebuilding infrastructure
after our wars are expected to keep growing, but this
still isn’t waking us up. Overall, the human
“us-versus-them”
mentality is still a big contributor to weakened human
development. Nationalism still has more weight in our
decisions than our growing interdependence. And so much
of this us-them nonsense is founded on evolved
neurological substrata. Any solutions will require a
much better understanding of who and what we are as
primates. And that will be over the objections of most
of the world’s “great” religions, especially the Abrahamic. Our
14,000-plus nuclear warheads (as of mid-2018) still
retain some significant potential for more rapid
depopulation, and we still have fools standing guard at
those buttons with launch codes. A whole generation of
frightened children playing duck-and-cover through grade
school, to the tune of practice air-raid sirens, still
lacked the will to stop this insanity. We are not a wise
species.
The
need to maintain the infrastructure in good working
order is too soon forgotten by the shortsighted
civilizations. It’s just not as sexy as the next shiny
thing. Hyperbolic discounting has them looking the wrong
way through the futurescope. “That will take care of
itself when the time comes. We’ll fix that bridge when
we get to it, but right now we need this war.” By the
time things start to fall apart, capital and resources
are too compromised to fix anything. Maybe the most
important part of our overall infrastructure is the
system we use to educate our children, to provide them
with any skills they might need, and ourselves with
human capital. This is suffering as much disrepair as
our corroding bridges and utility infrastructure. Should
the economy crash, the neglect of basic infrastructure
maintenance could be our first great regret, since this
provides an important resilience buffer. We don’t want
rebuilding what we never should have lost to be among
our highest priorities, especially with compromised
resources and capital.
Issues of migration (globally) and immigration (locally and nationally) are confused somewhat when we fail to articulate the different varieties or drivers. These differences call for different responses. Sometimes these are divided into two categories, as push and pull migration, clarifying whether those on the move are driven or drawn to new locations. Those who are driven or pushed from their homes are refugees, those who are drawn are simply migrants wanting to be immigrants.
The primary drivers of refugees are political conflict, political repression, corruption, gang activity, racial intolerance, gender abuse, ethnic intolerance, religious extremism, grinding or extreme poverty, water shortages, drought, famine, and other anthropogenic environmental degradations. The Geneva Convention (1951) is somewhat more limited, but more official in terms of obtaining entry visas: a refugee is a person who, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.” These may be regarded as asylum seekers. Fear must be well-founded: you will be executed, imprisoned, raped, or beaten nearly to death. Today there are over 12 million refugees, and already they are dying in real numbers for a lack of welcome in new homes, or they are stuck in limbo for years in camps, in adequate tents if they’re lucky. It’s safe to say that this is only the beginning.
The US and its European allies create a special class of refugee, fleeing from military interventions, escalations of armaments, regime changes, and drug war activities, notably in the Mideast (especially after 1918) and Central and South America (especially after 1954). Refugee problems are exacerbated by nations like the US destabilizing other governments and feeding organized crime with draconian drug laws that drive the black market and build the drug cartels. And it’s a clear indictment of their lack of collective cognitive and emotional maturity that they are unable to own their role in the creation of this class of refugees. In a just world, this would strip these nations of any prerogative to turn these displaced people away at their borders.
The primary migratory draws are family ties, economic opportunities, educational opportunities, and religious freedom. Movement for reasons of economic displacement, as by land conversion, mining and timber production, or even by gentrification and prosperity, might be in a middle zone between migrants and refugees. Family ties are often already provided for in constitutional and legislative provisions for chain migrations and “anchor babies.” Beyond these, we have broader discretion. Here, even the globally awakened, who already know that we are all one species sharing his world, may have to allow that local populations and nations should have some prerogative and say over who enters their society, and accordingly set immigration standards. [We should never say that this is a sovereign nation’s right, because a nation is a non-living corporation, authorized by its sovereign individuals, and nations have delegated powers, not rights]. Surely it’s good to have free peoples moving freely around. But there are serious constraints that we need to start facing. Where we have migrants simply seeking better lives, it becomes a lot more morally acceptable to demand they submit to or comply with national standards. We ought to remember that migration will demand economic and physical infrastructure. Immigration is a sensitive subject, for liberals and conservatives alike, although for different reasons. The liberals and the Greens don’t look closely enough at the carrying capacity impacts. Immigration standards may be seen as racist or xenophobic. Conservatives, despite any racism or xenophobia, may want to open up to selected classes of migrants or immigrants to compensate for demographic decline, while making use of unused infrastructure and abandoned housing. They may have to overcome their diversity, multiculturalism, melting pot, and assimilation issues. The economists who are so easily frightened by threats to the Ponzi economy may want to fling open gates wider than they should be flung, at least after failing to encourage declining populations to step up the breeding efforts.
Some confusion arises when we don’t distinguish between the global and local points of view. We must come to understand that it does the future world no good at all to let the exploding populations in one part of the world simply move freely to other parts that have now achieved declining fertility rates. We really need to practice some tough love here, so that burgeoning populations eventually learn to accept responsibility for same. We have some options here that aren’t really coercive, like tying international aid to provision of family planning programs. The religious fanatics will resist that, though. We could do more to help improve living standards in places that produce these migrants, starting with schools and skills. For any nation in local carrying capacity overshoot (nearly all of them), immigration could still be welcome, but should to be managed to maintain a net rate of population reduction. The UK’s Green Party declares, somewhat myopically, “richer regions and communities do not have the right to use migration controls to protect their privileges from others.” Despite any moral issues we might have with rights of first possession, this show a nearly complete obliviousness to carrying capacity issues, which in turn shows an ignorance of ecological issues, and so-called Greens should be ashamed of themselves for this. Recall that this work regards Humanism as something of a problem, especially where it drifts recklessly into human exceptionalism. There is much more to this world than our cosmopolitan human brotherhood, and much of it is in trouble.
So far, failed states have largely remained local events, with their warlords, gang battles, and conscripted child soldiers. But the numbers of political refugees aren’t going away, or shrinking any time soon. If these people ever find a home outside of the tent encampments, their resettlement is going to require infrastructure and housing, and all of the capital and resource costs that go along with that. They won’t need any less food, and of course they will need paying jobs. That’s while all for their former infrastructure settles into ruin, and their former investments in capital and resources vanish, or all of that just gets bombed into ever-smaller bits, because transnational corporations need to sell more bombers and bombs. The social order that was barely able to maintain civility between rival ethnic, racial, and religious populations seldom needs to be weakened by much for the open conflicts to commence, and amidst a social collapse there may be no greater forces at hand to pacify them.
We don’t know yet how displacement for political reasons will compare with displacement for environmental reasons. But that race is underway now. There will be both skirmishes and larger scale wars over resources like habitable climate, water, and arable land. It doesn’t seem to be commonly grasped that China’s greatest rivers have their headwaters in Tibet and its glaciers. We’ll just put that out there and let the reader ponder the real motives for that conquest. Nations rendered agriculturally diminished by climate change will be pressed to do something about about finding better homes in greener valleys. We’re running pretty low on greener valleys. We’re running low on any color lebensraum, except the lands we’ve ruined or turned into desert. Populations facing widespread death by famine will first have to beg for relief from the rest of the world, but once failing agricultural production threatens hunger in the rest of the world, that relief won’t be so forthcoming. They won’t have the energy to march on their neighbors, so there may be no resource wars there. But prior to that, there could be a lot of climate refugees looking for somewhere to go. An increase in natural weather disasters will have a similar effect. Yet even all of this suffering won’t prevent refugees from having sex in their refugee tents, without the benefits of contraception, something to reassert their humanity and make some of the pain go away for a while. Ultimately we will likely see a lot of poleward migration, onto poorer soils, but following better climate. What percentage of the human population will one day be on the move like this is anybody’s guess.
Issues of migration (globally) and immigration (locally and nationally) are confused somewhat when we fail to articulate the different varieties or drivers. These differences call for different responses. Sometimes these are divided into two categories, as push and pull migration, clarifying whether those on the move are driven or drawn to new locations. Those who are driven or pushed from their homes are refugees, those who are drawn are simply migrants wanting to be immigrants.
The primary drivers of refugees are political conflict, political repression, corruption, gang activity, racial intolerance, gender abuse, ethnic intolerance, religious extremism, grinding or extreme poverty, water shortages, drought, famine, and other anthropogenic environmental degradations. The Geneva Convention (1951) is somewhat more limited, but more official in terms of obtaining entry visas: a refugee is a person who, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.” These may be regarded as asylum seekers. Fear must be well-founded: you will be executed, imprisoned, raped, or beaten nearly to death. Today there are over 12 million refugees, and already they are dying in real numbers for a lack of welcome in new homes, or they are stuck in limbo for years in camps, in adequate tents if they’re lucky. It’s safe to say that this is only the beginning.
The US and its European allies create a special class of refugee, fleeing from military interventions, escalations of armaments, regime changes, and drug war activities, notably in the Mideast (especially after 1918) and Central and South America (especially after 1954). Refugee problems are exacerbated by nations like the US destabilizing other governments and feeding organized crime with draconian drug laws that drive the black market and build the drug cartels. And it’s a clear indictment of their lack of collective cognitive and emotional maturity that they are unable to own their role in the creation of this class of refugees. In a just world, this would strip these nations of any prerogative to turn these displaced people away at their borders.
The primary migratory draws are family ties, economic opportunities, educational opportunities, and religious freedom. Movement for reasons of economic displacement, as by land conversion, mining and timber production, or even by gentrification and prosperity, might be in a middle zone between migrants and refugees. Family ties are often already provided for in constitutional and legislative provisions for chain migrations and “anchor babies.” Beyond these, we have broader discretion. Here, even the globally awakened, who already know that we are all one species sharing his world, may have to allow that local populations and nations should have some prerogative and say over who enters their society, and accordingly set immigration standards. [We should never say that this is a sovereign nation’s right, because a nation is a non-living corporation, authorized by its sovereign individuals, and nations have delegated powers, not rights]. Surely it’s good to have free peoples moving freely around. But there are serious constraints that we need to start facing. Where we have migrants simply seeking better lives, it becomes a lot more morally acceptable to demand they submit to or comply with national standards. We ought to remember that migration will demand economic and physical infrastructure. Immigration is a sensitive subject, for liberals and conservatives alike, although for different reasons. The liberals and the Greens don’t look closely enough at the carrying capacity impacts. Immigration standards may be seen as racist or xenophobic. Conservatives, despite any racism or xenophobia, may want to open up to selected classes of migrants or immigrants to compensate for demographic decline, while making use of unused infrastructure and abandoned housing. They may have to overcome their diversity, multiculturalism, melting pot, and assimilation issues. The economists who are so easily frightened by threats to the Ponzi economy may want to fling open gates wider than they should be flung, at least after failing to encourage declining populations to step up the breeding efforts.
Some confusion arises when we don’t distinguish between the global and local points of view. We must come to understand that it does the future world no good at all to let the exploding populations in one part of the world simply move freely to other parts that have now achieved declining fertility rates. We really need to practice some tough love here, so that burgeoning populations eventually learn to accept responsibility for same. We have some options here that aren’t really coercive, like tying international aid to provision of family planning programs. The religious fanatics will resist that, though. We could do more to help improve living standards in places that produce these migrants, starting with schools and skills. For any nation in local carrying capacity overshoot (nearly all of them), immigration could still be welcome, but should to be managed to maintain a net rate of population reduction. The UK’s Green Party declares, somewhat myopically, “richer regions and communities do not have the right to use migration controls to protect their privileges from others.” Despite any moral issues we might have with rights of first possession, this show a nearly complete obliviousness to carrying capacity issues, which in turn shows an ignorance of ecological issues, and so-called Greens should be ashamed of themselves for this. Recall that this work regards Humanism as something of a problem, especially where it drifts recklessly into human exceptionalism. There is much more to this world than our cosmopolitan human brotherhood, and much of it is in trouble.
So far, failed states have largely remained local events, with their warlords, gang battles, and conscripted child soldiers. But the numbers of political refugees aren’t going away, or shrinking any time soon. If these people ever find a home outside of the tent encampments, their resettlement is going to require infrastructure and housing, and all of the capital and resource costs that go along with that. They won’t need any less food, and of course they will need paying jobs. That’s while all for their former infrastructure settles into ruin, and their former investments in capital and resources vanish, or all of that just gets bombed into ever-smaller bits, because transnational corporations need to sell more bombers and bombs. The social order that was barely able to maintain civility between rival ethnic, racial, and religious populations seldom needs to be weakened by much for the open conflicts to commence, and amidst a social collapse there may be no greater forces at hand to pacify them.
We don’t know yet how displacement for political reasons will compare with displacement for environmental reasons. But that race is underway now. There will be both skirmishes and larger scale wars over resources like habitable climate, water, and arable land. It doesn’t seem to be commonly grasped that China’s greatest rivers have their headwaters in Tibet and its glaciers. We’ll just put that out there and let the reader ponder the real motives for that conquest. Nations rendered agriculturally diminished by climate change will be pressed to do something about about finding better homes in greener valleys. We’re running pretty low on greener valleys. We’re running low on any color lebensraum, except the lands we’ve ruined or turned into desert. Populations facing widespread death by famine will first have to beg for relief from the rest of the world, but once failing agricultural production threatens hunger in the rest of the world, that relief won’t be so forthcoming. They won’t have the energy to march on their neighbors, so there may be no resource wars there. But prior to that, there could be a lot of climate refugees looking for somewhere to go. An increase in natural weather disasters will have a similar effect. Yet even all of this suffering won’t prevent refugees from having sex in their refugee tents, without the benefits of contraception, something to reassert their humanity and make some of the pain go away for a while. Ultimately we will likely see a lot of poleward migration, onto poorer soils, but following better climate. What percentage of the human population will one day be on the move like this is anybody’s guess.
6.
The Dimension of Sustainability and Honest
Accounting
The human exceptionalism strand of our human parasitism
has us lying to ourselves a great deal about the meaning
of the word sustainable. We do have a semi-official,
stock definition of sustainable development as “meeting
the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
(Bruntland UN Commission Report on Environment and
Development, 1987). This also calls it “a process of
change in which the exploitation of resources, the
direction of investments, the orientation of
technological development, and institutional change are
all in harmony and enhance both current and future
potential to meet human needs [note that] and
aspirations.” And a few years later, “Caring for the
Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living” (International
Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources,
1991), defined sustainable development as “improving the
quality of human life while living within the carrying
capacity of supporting ecosystems.” We should note that
the term “sustainable development” is also known as
“weak sustainability” because it considers economic
growth to be indispensable. Strong sustainability would
have to be explicitly qualitative as well, and not
threaten to exceed planetary limits. We have more
definitions, but none really show much care or direct
concern for the quality of life of other species, or
maintenance of their populations. Most conceptions will
still tend to confuse our development with extended
growth in finite systems. Most still consider the system
of human economics as running parallel to the natural
ecosystem, and somewhat independent, rather than as a
vulnerable subsystem.
It
may be generally recognized that the word sustainable
means “for a long time,” but how good is our vision into
deep time? “Indefinite” means smaller things to smaller
minds. We will tend to look at things small-mindedly and
shortsightedly, in ways that serve our immediate goals,
in ways that flatter us for our accomplishments and
overlook our shortcomings. But this word is used here
more honestly, not in the greenwashing sense that humans
are currently using to mass-market green products. It’s
not a weasel word or a marketing buzzword. Sustainable
activity has indefinite longevity. The behavior can be
sustained indefinitely, for millennia if necessary,
while an unsustainable activity simply can’t be
continued long-term, period, and so must eventually end.
The success of any non-sustainable program or script is
necessarily temporary, as unsustainable behavior must by
definition extinguish itself. However, the time frames
that frame the unsustainable behavior can extend beyond
any perceived horizons, so that fatal consequences can
remain unseen by the near- and shortsighted. Perhaps
most of our present human behavior is unsustainable, at
least at our current population levels and the intensity
of our consumptive activities. A sustainable activity
must necessarily respect the conditions and supporting
systems that sustain it. Sustain is not the same word as
continue. The wino will continue to drink his gallon of
wine a day; our government will continue to bankrupt our
grandchildren. Neither of these can be kept up forever.
Accounts must come due. Hitting bottom and a need for
complete reorganization is the consequence.
Etymologically, the word sustain means to hold up from
below, to provide a basis, ground, or the necessary
preconditions. The extinction of a behavior, or a life
form, thus defines the boundaries of the sustainable.
This means that if an activity is relying on
non-renewable natural capital, then all of this finite
capital must eventually be recycled, or replaced with
sustainable substitutes, not merely a token percentage
of them to make our guilt go away. Or we must find a way
to live without it. We must put it out of our minds that
industries hungrily extracting natural capital are
sources of new wealth or income. In current use, the
term is a rubber check. Economists still speak of the
need for sustained growth in finite contexts. Corporate
public relations will even speak of sustainable
petrochemistry. Congress, with industry encouragement,
turned the phrase “sustainable yield” into “sustained
yield,” thus making it easy for the US Forest Service
(with its timber-industry educations) to reinterpret
this phrase as “a non-diminishing flow of commodity
outputs.”
Our
habit of using this word so loosely is also tied to our
habits of cooking our books and making our grand plans
and ideas look pretty in order to sell them.
Visionaries, progressives, and greens alike may pat
themselves on their backs for doing the “sustainable
behavior” that’s in fact little more than 20% less
unsustainable. This often applies to so-called “green”
building materials, which might represent only enough of
a reduction in embedded or embodied elements to ease a
shallow conscience. An electric automobile has a mining
and manufacturing footprint that isn’t that different
from an IC auto. Honest life-cycle cost accounting will
examine all of the embodied water, energy, and materials
in the manufacture, operation, maintenance, and
replacement of new green technologies, as well as
convert natural capital waste streams into new inputs.
Mining must be done to build and ultimately replace
windmills. When we deceive ourselves about this, we are
raising the bar just high enough to trip over.
Sustainable limits are what ultimately drive long-term
carrying capacity. It’s important to understand that
this still-indeterminate number, however it’s measured
and whatever its value may be, is continually decreasing
over time, especially during times spent in overshoot,
due to the consumption of irreplaceable natural capital.
This was pointed out in detail by
both Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly. There is one important distinction between
human population dynamics and those of plants, fungi,
and animals: the latter don’t really consume natural
capital. They use resources, a usufruct.
We
can too easily ruin something wonderful forever out of
our misplaced devotion to short-term ephemera, like
nations and dynasties. There is a “seven generations”
social and environmental ethic, said to come from the
founding law of the Iroquois federation. This states
“The Lords of the Confederacy of the Five Nations shall
be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of
their skin shall be seven spans.” Nietzsche also spoke
of time as a skin when looking ahead in time: “Live
unknowing of that which your age deems most important.
Lay between yourself and today at least the skin of
three centuries” (The Joyful Wisdom). Oren Lyons, Chief
of the Onondaga Nation, writes in American Indian
Environments: “We are looking ahead, as is one of the
first mandates given us as chiefs, to make sure and to
make every decision that we make relate to the welfare
and well-being of the seventh generation to come. ...
What about the seventh generation? Where are you taking
them? What will they have?” This is without question a
far better approach to the issue of true long-term
sustainability than the modern abuse of the term. At
least it has a 140-year reach. While this idea has
plenty of merit, the order of magnitude is no longer
sufficient to envision all of the long-term consequences
of our misbehavior. Extinction is forever, and warrants
a longer, even more serious look. It’s serious like a
heart attack or your house on fire. To sustain means to
uphold from below, to maintain the ground we stand on,
the same system that permits our emergence as a species.
This view will require either deeper time horizons or
else enough of a population crash to get this lesson
across and leave us humbled out of our exceptionalism.
Both the United States and the industrial revolution
have already managed to survive for more than seven
generations, while seven more generations of “more” is
looking extremely unlikely. Seven generations may be a
good first look, test, or stretch, but I would submit
that sustainable should not refer to less than a
ten-thousand year time horizon. We will also need to
outgrow our cognitive playpens of patriotism and
nationalism, to start regarding ourselves as Terrans.
Then, if we still need to identify a group that is “not
us“ in order to cohere socially, we might turn our
dissatisfactions on those among us who are killing our
grandchildren’s world. Personally, I’ve settled on a
ten-millennia frame of reference for four reasons: 1)
It’s close to the age of civilization as we know it, and
so it calls into question the manner in which we
feed, clothe, shelter, breed, govern, and even bury
ourselves. 2) It’s the average age of a sere, the
average span of the progress of an ecological niche from
lifeless mineral to climax ecosystem, during which the
physical niche itself adapts to the life that inhabits
it. 3) It’s roughly the average half-life of our toxic
waste, or perhaps an average recovery period for our
biosphere, time needed to rebuild the topsoil and
recharge the great aquifers. And 4) It’s the period
during which, under the relatively benign stewardship of
Native Americans, more than half of the species of North
American megafauna went extinct.
We have a few perceptual and measurement problems when we try to look at big pictures, even aside from those of time horizons, frames, and scales. Discounting the future is a big one. We're so used to second-comings and other apocalypses never coming true that real disasters usually take us by surprise. Our management efforts begin in mid-crisis instead of before the beginning. We tend to ignore the out-of-sight-out-of-mind externalities. We will look at hydrocarbons as a vastly more efficient energy source because we aren’t looking at the long-term consequences of their use. But at the same time, the costs of renewable energy are huge, and not merely in the transition into them where petroleum is used to manufacture and transport windmills. With some technologies, renewables might be less efficient by an order of magnitude. Batteries, which require eventual replacement, have enormous environmental footprints. Restraint, economy, and efficiency, or “negawatts,” to use Amory Lovins’ useful term, have by far the biggest energy payoff. When change starts to accelerate in earnest, we may turn to a shifting or sliding baseline that moves forward in time past many previous changes. This may diminish our perception of how much has really changed. It requires culture and a learning curve to keep all of these subtleties in mind as we’re consuming this world. This is another reason why use taxes on commodities can incorporate external costs in proportion to their use, will pay these costs as we go, and will keep these real costs in front of us, that we might more intelligently decide if we really want to pay them. Standard deductions or rebates can always be used to proportionately reward conservative use and efficiency.
We have a few perceptual and measurement problems when we try to look at big pictures, even aside from those of time horizons, frames, and scales. Discounting the future is a big one. We're so used to second-comings and other apocalypses never coming true that real disasters usually take us by surprise. Our management efforts begin in mid-crisis instead of before the beginning. We tend to ignore the out-of-sight-out-of-mind externalities. We will look at hydrocarbons as a vastly more efficient energy source because we aren’t looking at the long-term consequences of their use. But at the same time, the costs of renewable energy are huge, and not merely in the transition into them where petroleum is used to manufacture and transport windmills. With some technologies, renewables might be less efficient by an order of magnitude. Batteries, which require eventual replacement, have enormous environmental footprints. Restraint, economy, and efficiency, or “negawatts,” to use Amory Lovins’ useful term, have by far the biggest energy payoff. When change starts to accelerate in earnest, we may turn to a shifting or sliding baseline that moves forward in time past many previous changes. This may diminish our perception of how much has really changed. It requires culture and a learning curve to keep all of these subtleties in mind as we’re consuming this world. This is another reason why use taxes on commodities can incorporate external costs in proportion to their use, will pay these costs as we go, and will keep these real costs in front of us, that we might more intelligently decide if we really want to pay them. Standard deductions or rebates can always be used to proportionately reward conservative use and efficiency.
Trying out and combining different perspectives, and
moving frames of reference around to get more complete
pictures, are not cognitive skills that the majority of
us are notable for. But we need to add at least a couple
more than we are collectively using. We need start doing
more honest accounting than what we’re used to
performing, with true life-cycle costs and
cradle-to-cradle planning, a closer examination of total
embodied resources and capital throughout the
life-cycles of everything we use. Management of this
will be easier and more self-governing when actual costs
are reflected in consumer pricing, instead of being
actively subsidized by our corrupt, corporation-run
governments, as most are now. Subsidies still must be
paid, by the taxpayers, by the commons, or by future
generations. They should directly burden the consumer
instead. Scarcity is valuable information and shouldn’t
be hidden from view or removed from prices paid. The
politicians who are currently championing free markets
have no clue what free markets are: they have this
completely confused with deregulated corporate
capitalism. But free markets, reflecting true supply and
demand, can only move us halfway in the right direction.
We also need to internalize all of the environmental and
other external costs to the commons into commodity
pricing. And even then, we still need find ways to
prevent the rising of prices due to scarcity from
leading to the accelerated exploitation of diminished
capital and resources flows. The word resource needs
rethinking in popular dialog, as the prefix ”re-”
suggests that this is a source that we can keep coming
back to, and thus should apply only to true renewables
used at safe levels.
7.
The Dimension of Remediation and Restoration
Time horizons are the most neglected factor in our
planning calculations. We fail to divine the
accumulation of long-term impacts and depletions out of
some bottomless optimism about our adaptive
intelligence. We’ll burn those bridges when we cross
them. We won’t appreciate something important until it’s
going, going, or gone. But many of the lands or
environments that we’ve damaged or destroyed still lend
themselves to programs of remediation and restoration.
Little of the long-term damages that we have already
inflicted are truly permanent in deep time, except for
irreversible extinctions. Earth and life itself will
survive us, with temporarily diminished biodiversity and
some unpleasant climate extremes. What’s a million
years, give or take, to life itself? Considering how
much of this world we have ruined in ways that will take
far more than a human lifetime to repair, we need to
consider restoration of these damaged lands as an
important factor in recovering some of Earth’s carrying
capacity. Or else we need to start writing this out of
any calculations we do based on historical production,
yields, or outputs. A third program, one of restitution,
action by way of apology, is more of a moral or ethical
issue, which will be discussed later in Chapter 11, The
Dimension of Wilderness and Deep Ecology. It’s still too
much to ask of a species with so little conscience to
make restitution out of love or regret, although a
minority of our individuals are now ready to do this.
Earth’s carrying capacity itself is suffering some
long-term impairment with any human technological
presence consuming natural capital. Ultimately, the
inputs to the global ecosystem are few: insolation
(incoming solar radiation, including wind and hydro),
tidal energy, geothermal energy, chemosynthesis,
meteoric dust, the recruitment of available minerals
into soil from weathering of bedrock and microbial
activities, and new deposits of volcanic ash. Seral
succession will build habitable niches and topsoil only
at geological speeds. The great fossil water aquifers
are not going to replenish themselves as long as our
demands exceed their small trickle of resupply. Losses
of biodiversity through irreversible extinction are
permanent, although adaptive successors will eventually
fill all the surviving niches. The deserts we’ve made
will take thousands of years to come back to life, after
the climate is finished running amok with the added heat
we’re trapping.
When our wild animal populations crash, whether from
overpopulation, overgrazing, overpredation, diseases
related to overstress, or extremes of climate variation,
recovery of the niche is often fairly quick, but only
due to these populations being reduced to below the
carrying capacity. Eventually, populations re-stabilize,
with numbers usually oscillating first above, then below
capacity, but at a lower capacity until any long-term
damage has been repaired by seral succession. This is
where humankind is now headed, to a diminished capacity
and a population crash to some level below that. We are,
however, doing much additional damage by consuming
non-renewable natural capital and spreading persistent
poisons and pollution. The animals don’t do either of
these.
To
avoid an involuntary dieback, we would need to conduct
what amounts to a controlled population implosion. Our
best alternative is not a deceleration of growth, but a
rapid population decline to below carrying capacity.
This is almost certainly out of our reach morally and
ethically, and perhaps even culturally, so we will most
likely be incurring more long-term damages while we wait
for a destabilized nature to help crash our numbers for
us. Population decline seems to be occurring as a matter
of course in local populations, but this tends to be a
developed-world phenomenon that also requires a higher
standard of living, hence a larger per capita ecological
footprint, and good education, particularly for women.
If we cannot manage to attain dramatic population
reductions prior to reaching first-world levels of
development, it will need to be done nature’s way, and
every number in a population crash will mean real people
dying younger than they would in a better world, the
suffering and premature death of living individuals.
Undoing some of the damage we’ve done is both a present
employment opportunity and a way to ease suffering down
the road.
We
have only recently begun to think about reducing
pollution. Most of this thinking has arisen in the last
60 years. And we have to do battle here with powerful
economic interests that want to keep on introducing new
and often unvetted chemistry into the environment.
Plastics pollution, with its long-term persistence in
the food chain in its microplastic form, has only
recently got our attention, and this is rapidly becoming
an overwhelming problem, particularly for marine life.
Nuclear pollution, most obviously from Chernobyl and
Fukushima, has us questioning the renewed push for
nuclear energy, which of late has even come from the
greens, and people who can pronounce the word nuclear.
Landfills remain an issue, and to a lesser extent,
enormous yards of backlogged baled recyclables, although
ironically, these may be viewed by our descendants as
some of the more valuable mines we’ve left behind. Being
able to make better use of our waste will require better
planning in what goes into it and how it’s to be used later. If we’re going
to make better use of humanure and other sludge, we will
want to take better control of what chemistry we flush
down our drains. All waste should be regarded as some
kind of food, just like in climax ecosystems, if we want
honest sustainability. We should also start seeing our
nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium agricultural runoff
as food for other processes, like food for algae, to be
rendered into biofuels and re-fertilizer. One of the
lessons that government-mandated reclamation has failed
to learn is the wisdom of doing triage in allocating
resources to repair. Repairs are ordered with no regard
to relative hazards or cost-benefit studies. It would be
wiser to have a large reclamation fund to be apportioned
according to effectiveness, assuming of course that we
won’t be fixing all of the messes we’ve made.
Repairing the damage we’ve done still seems to be a step
too farsighted for us, particularly as our immediate
troubles grow more pressing. It’s the same problem we
have with aging infrastructure: it just isn’t shiny
enough. It redirects valuable resources and capital. If
these are wanted elsewhere on some more immediate or
urgent task, you already know what job is going to get
hyperbolically discounted. We are even too busy to
redirect our valuable waste and pollution streams where
this could save money. But such expenditures do restore
some of the world’s carrying capacity. You would think
that allowing more living beings to live here would
change things. It renders our otherwise unusable
environments productive again, without having to wait
for glacially slow processes like seral succession,
moving things from a category of depleted natural
capital to renewable resource. It’s unlikely, however,
that we will one day be pouring fresh water down into
depleted fossil water aquifers. It’s also unlikely that
we will be manufacturing depleted strategic mineral
stocks out of more plentiful atomic elements. Will we
still be able to reach the asteroids to mine those, or
will civilization have fallen too far?
Reforestation, or even new enforestation, provides a
dramatic example of remediation that’s realizable within
a decade or two. A number of dedicated souls have
enacted Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees
in real life. Search for Jadav Payeng, Abdul Kareem,
Bhausaheb Santuji Thorat, the Dandakaranya Movement, and
the Green Belt Movement. These show that just one or two
dedicated people with plenty of free time can create an
entire ecosystem by working with natural processes. See
also documentation of the Gaviotas project in Columbia
and the Instituto Terra of Lélia and Sebastião Salgado.
Agroforestry is another example of managed reforestation
that adds biodiversity and reduces erosion. These
projects are all distinguishable from the stock
replanting procedures of the timber industry and their
government assistants, where the preference is to
clearcut parcels (called intensive even aged management)
and replant monocultural tree crops in the damaged soil
structure. This is not true reforestation, which
restores a more complete forest ecosystem.
Not
all reclamation is as easily done as holistic
silvaculture, although low and no-till farming,
especially with perennials and cover crops, is still
pretty straightforward. Biochar and terra preta
introduce elemental carbon directly into the soil,
restoring or enhancing many of its original properties.
Other low tech systems are coming into their own,
although some require significant consideration and
planning, and more human labor. Regenerative agriculture
can turn dying, degenerating, and eroding soil around
and back into dynamic productivity. Soil nutrient
preservation and restoration are keys. Permaculture may
be the best known regenerative system for farming,
although it also knits farming into animal husbandry,
energy, and other living systems in general. Holistic
ranching does something similar for grazing, by
restoring patterns of activity that mimic the original
conditions under which animals and plants coevolved and
came to need each other. Both of these latter systems
also sequester large quantities of carbon in the soil,
retain more water, and bring dead dirt back to life.
Restoration ecology is the broad science of restoring
damaged ecosystems. Soil contamination is one of the
most problematic aspects of this and can be an expensive
cleanup operation, even for the relatively benign
salinization. Remediation has to be tailored to the
condition itself. Some forms can be treated with oxygen
or heat. Bioremediation uses living entities. Microbes
might be used to digest or convert a pollutant into
something less harmful. Phytoremediation uses absorption
of troublesome materials by plants, and mycoremediation
by fungus. Groundwater may be extracted and processed.
Surfactant leaching will carry dissolved contaminants
further underground and eventually into groundwater,
whether deconstructed or not. But often all we can do is
cap pollutants in place, or excavate ruined soil and
store it in isolation. It’s always easier to not stain a
carpet than to get the stain out again, but we’re only
beginning to think that far ahead. Groundwater
remediation might be the most problematic. It doesn’t do
much to clean groundwater itself, but some
microorganisms will treat it in situ. Most
recovery is done between the ground and a new end use
with such methods as chemical precipitation, membrane
separation, and ion exchange. Damaged land and soil
might be restored with accelerated seral succession,
beginning with pioneer species and replacing these with
successors as soon as soils build. This can move far
more quickly than natural succession if done with soil
nutrition and structure in mind. Other remedial efforts
employ more macro concepts of ecology, like habitat
defragmentation, population dynamics, and ecological
engineering.
8.
The Dimension of Contingency and Surplus
Contingency is another dimension that’s often forgotten
as we pick up the pace of our development and growth.
This is the backup plan, our disaster readiness,
emergency supplies, stocks, stores, spares, safety nets,
buffers,
rainy day funds, and reserves. It’s the substance
of our resilience. We seem to assume that our evolving
technology, combined with our human ingenuity and the
inventiveness of Mother Necessity will cover all of this
for us, so we continue to discount the future instead of
allowing safety margins. From time to time, our world is
hit with abnormal and extreme events, new diseases, long
periods of drought or ice, large objects arriving from
space, solar storms, earthquakes and tsunamis,
hurricanes and floods, big volcanoes and
super-volcanoes. We know with some certainty that
another coronal mass ejection (CME) on the level of the
1859 Carrington Event is on its way, and probably a lot
sooner than any asteroid strike or another Toba. Events
on this level or greater happen every couple of
centuries on average. The grid isn’t fused against such
an assault, even though we know that one of these could
shut civilization down for a decade or two. These force
majeure events, which now include our own wars and
other moronic pursuits, demand that a surplus of our
resources and capital be set aside for emergency use
only. Even the Bible shows this much wisdom, in Joseph’s
plan for Pharaoh to set aside a large, seven-year store
of grain (Gen 41).
We
can build surpluses from an environment at rates that
are faster than nature alone can provide. Given the
inefficiencies of natural systems, natural levels of
replacement or resurgence can be altered and yields
increased, even at sustainable levels, above natural
baseline. This is an important principle in
Permaculture, where it’s known as “obtaining a yield.” A
system will have a sustainable yield that is a function
of its energy and nutrient income and storage, minus
system losses and waste. This should be the basis of
yield computations, not wishes for what it might be.
With this knowledge, we can increase yield over natural
systems production, but realistic resource budgets must
still be respected, proven processes considered, and all
natural capital losses must be accounted. Non-renewables
aren’t replaced. With our “green revolution” in
industrial agriculture, we haven’t done anything close
to this. Instead, we’ve added non-renewable inputs and
subtracted non-renewable biodiversity. In effect, the
yield that’s been obtained here is the equivalent of
embezzlement, while the books only seem to look good to
those without eyes to see, or time horizons beyond a
couple of years. If we are to dip into extreme solutions
at all to get our added yield, it should almost
certainly be done in emergencies only.
Most of us know by now that civilizations come and go.
One of the things that sends them packing is the
occasional hundred-year drought. Another is the
exploitation of one-hundred percent of their occupied
niche, with nothing lying fallow or given any chance to
recover. And raiding adjacent niches isn't always an
option in a filled-up world, or when it is, this leads
to war and then to accelerated collapse. In other words,
it’s frequently unwise for us to occupy the whole of a
niche, and wiser in the long term to under-develop. This
is never our first option, which is usually to occupy
fully and overrun. Had we the wisdom, we would allow a
significant amount our forested, arable and grazeable
lands, in any normal year, to lie fallow, or else
managed by natural and biomemetic processes, with a
chance to recover some natural health. Wisdom will often
look just like restraint. Lebensraum, room for
living, can use some recycling as well. Such an ethic,
however, would require some time for most cultures to
absorb it, and this would require underdevelopment to
develop its own kind of attractiveness. Too few seem to
see the benefit now.
An
as-yet unnamed horseman of our coming apocalypse is
overextension, hypertrophy, our crowding into the flood
and tidal zones, onto the slopes of Vesuvius, on top of
the earthquake faults, and into our armed neighbor's
yard. Ecological spacing was the last good excuse we had
for war, but we lost it when we outgrew our tribes. Our
default response to a new opportunity is to exploit it,
to a new space, to expand into it, to a population void,
to populate it. When hazardous terrain is all the
remains, that’s just where we have to go next. Restraint
hasn’t been much of a strong suit for humanity, except
to the long-standing populations of indigenous peoples,
with cultures and lifestyles of proven sustainability.
Sadly, too many of these have fallen prey to the
seductive flash of our missionary and colonial cultures.
Such conversion is fully intended by the exploiters.
When they didn’t want to be assimilated right away, we
simply fenced them away on reserves or exterminated
them.
Having enough set aside for the future, for
contingencies and emergencies, is key to good
stewardship, while it’s our own insecurity that
overproduces, over-plants, overgrazes, and generally
overconsumes. Security is the steward: it has something
worth protecting or securing. Hyperextension and
security are fundamentally incompatible. The bubbles pop
and populations crash. While there’s no real need to
paralyze our civilization with excessive precautionary
principles, we nonetheless have been cashing in the
benefits of doubt when we should be accepting more
burdens of proof. It’s no matter of prophesy that big
challenges are coming. Magical calendars or planetary
alignments won’t be the cause: it's simply statistics
and human stupidity.
One
means of preparation that we are increasingly forgetting
is keeping our civilization’s infrastructure in current
repair and working order. We don’t seem to be smart
enough to spend money on this instead of war, even
though it creates even more jobs for the economy and
does good instead of damage. The arrival of an emergency
is not the best time to start thinking about this.
Starting a crisis with a failing infrastructure is the
opposite of a head start. You want your infrastructure
to hold throughout your crisis, instead of falling apart
and multiplying your miseries.
9.
The Dimension of Living Standards and Development
Malthus noted that mankind has a propensity to utilize
his abundance for population growth rather than for
maintaining a high standard of living. This became known
as the Malthusian trap. At its conclusion, populations
have a tendency to grow until the lower class suffers
hardship and want, and incurs a greater susceptibility
to famine and disease. This is called the Malthusian
catastrophe. We can escape the trap by re-prioritizing a
healthier relationship between population and living
standards, but it’s a cultural push. Better living is in
fact a part of the solution to our population problem,
but at the same time, it drives the numbers for both
optimum and maximum carrying capacity significantly
downward. Conspicuous consumption does nobody any good.
We don't really need equality here, and equalitarianism
even less. But we do have good uses for socioeconomic
equity for healthy social function. We should be using
an economic inequality index as one of the metrics of
national wealth and quality of life.
The
justice of a higher quality of life for the world’s poor
is an important limiting dimension to Earth’s carrying
capacity. Our focus is more often on the overconsumers,
not on those who really need to consume more. Naturally,
this can’t be achieved at current population levels and
reproductive rates, so moral questions still loom over
it all. What we need to come to grips with, and
ultimately establish, is an acceptable minimum standard
of living, or economic floor, that allows
self-actualization to any human being who cares to seek
it. This means that the poorest among us should be not
be impeded in meeting all of the basic human needs,
impeded by interference and surcharge from their
governments, or by repression and exploitation from
economic or corporate entities. This isn’t the same as a
right to be handed the basic requirements of life with
no personal effort. Some degree of work ought to be both
expected and demanded where assistance is needed in
reaching this floor, at least with modestly paid
vocational training or public service, if not adequately
paid, gainful employment. Yes, from each according to
their ability. There must one day be a right to achieve
this standard or floor within an amount of time that
still leaves hours for family, leisure, recreation,
travel, and education, because these too are among our
real human needs. Meeting this condition would elevate
the global per-capita ecological footprint to a level
well beyond the current global average and mean,
although this is still below the per-capita footprint of
several of the developed nations. A closely related
problem is the greater longevity that we are giving
ourselves, which also increases our footprints. This has
several implications, shifting us towards needing more
elder care, and social security that’s less of a Ponzi
scheme and less reliant on a growing population. We will
also have higher infant and child survival rates. Both
of these improvements are challenging consequences of
greater well being and will drive capacity still further
downward.
Despite its habitual association with low resource use,
there is nothing at all environmentally friendly about
poverty. Severe impacts from impoverished peoples in
overshoot include the high toll on forests from firewood
gathering, on wildlife bushmeat and local rivers from
food gathering, on biodiversity from poaching and the
pet trade, on soils from poor farming practices, on
water quality from poor sanitation, and on consumption
from the simple lack of affordability of more durable
goods. At still larger, village scales, outside
pressures for land conversion, especially mining and
forestry, wreak havoc on local environments, while
providing only minimal or sub-minimal subsistence
income, far out of proportion to local losses, but
desperately needed for basic survival. Childhood
adversity does long-term neurological damage to children
with malnutrition, poor health, impaired cognitive
development, and poor education, and all that unfolds
into environments of crime and social mistrust. The
rights of children to have a fulfilled and happy life
seldom enters the ethical debate. Donella Meadows
writes, “To reach sustainability, humanity must increase
the consumption levels of the world’s poor, while at the
same time reducing humanity’s total ecological
footprint. There must be technological advance, and
personal change, and longer planning horizons.” Even
from a selfish, homocentric point of view, by raising
new generations of diminished human beings, we are
depriving ourselves of vast stores of human resources
and resourcefulness.
The
UN 2030 Agenda avows (rhetorically at least) “ending
poverty in all its forms everywhere.” This might be
accomplished very temporarily if all wealth on Earth
could be evenly redistributed. Beyond that, somebody
isn’t thinking straight, knows nothing of human nature,
and can’t do math. Ending hunger, achieving food
security and improved nutrition, and promoting
sustainable agriculture would all be temporary
achievements at best at our current and projected
population levels, given the resource and capital
depletion involved. We would still be in dangerous
overshoot. Though well fed on fish for a day, we still
wouldn’t know how to fish, or run a sustainable fish
farm. Sustainable agriculture, or much better,
restorative and regenerative agriculture, is still a
must for any viable long-term scenario. Ensuring
availability and sustainable management of water and
sanitation for all is also a physical impossibility at
current and projected population levels, especially
given the already current climatic changes. Somebody
isn’t watching the water tables dropping, or watching
the industrial waste polluting the groundwater. Family
planning only gets two hurried mentions from the UN in
passing, contraception and birth rates get none, and the
word population appears a few times only in the
demographic sense. One may suspect that the UN document
was written by the very same people who are causing the
problems. Karin Kuhlemann offers, “the question is not
whether we are living well, but whether we are living
within our means.” The answer to this should be an input
in estimating our sustainable numbers, but it’s
currently one of our last and least considerations.
There are two further questions here, the first being:
“What does it take to meet our basic needs?” Life itself
needs sufficient space, water, food, and sunlight. For
humans, we add supplemental heat, shelter, clothing,
sanitation, medical care, exploitable resources,
education, and social organization. And in a still
better world, we could also add autonomy, security,
community, leisure, and discretionary income. The
current UN definition of absolute poverty needs to be
raised from the current $1.25 a day for 1.3 billion
people. The bar needs to be set a lot higher than this.
In the US, the generally accepted response is the called
the poverty line. This is the cumulative average cost of
a specified basket of goods and services. As of this
writing, the average global per capita income is
$10,298, but the median is only $3700. This contrast
illuminates the enormous and growing imbalance in
per-capita global wealth. That’s a thought problem you
may wish to ponder. The US poverty line (in 2018) was
$12,060, which represents the 82nd percentile globally.
Depending on the cost of living within individual
cultures, the suggested economic floor might be set
somewhere between the global median and the US line, an
order of magnitude above the UN standard for absolute
poverty, maybe averaging somewhere around $5500 per
year. This would represent an enormous increase in the
human footprint on Terra.
Up
to any true poverty line, people on average must remain
preoccupied with meeting the needs over which they have
little control, while beyond this, discretionary
expenditures of both hours and money will bring a degree
of liberty and happiness back into life. We will also
tend to see declines in reproductive rates with both
development and prosperity. This allows us to raise our
young with greater care, with greater attention to our
hierarchy of needs, such as described by Maslow. With
regard to our wicked problem here, what too few of us
see are the lasting effects of childhood adversity, the
deprivation of basic needs early in life, concurrent
with the most foundational layers of neurological
development. We would benefit greatly if we were to take
a deeper and broader look at this, and demand good
primary education (especially compensatory improvements
for girls), and even start looking at fundamentalist
religious indoctrination as a form of child abuse. Every
nation should have its own ability to manufacture
condoms or birth control pills and devices, and enough
education to know how and why to use them. Children are
resilient, but there are real limits to how much of
self-actualization six-year-old coal miners or war and
climate refugees can recover, especially if these
conditions persist for years. Gandhi wrote “To a hungry
man a piece of bread is the face of God.” We develop
into higher beings by satisfying our lower needs and
moving on. We humans only think ourselves “all that”
because we can’t see past our own deficiencies. We need
to become less self-important, but how do we do that if
basic needs can’t met? We will remain the center of the
universe until we have a chance to get over ourselves,
at least for a glimpse of a larger world than that of
our hungers and immediate needs.
The
second question is: “Within these parameters for a basic
standard of living, what more can be done to minimize
humanity’s ecological footprint?” Provided that we can
learn to need less, which seems to be easier said than
done, we can revisit the whole notion of economy that’s
been so deviously twisted of late. At bottom, we can
learn a degree of control over our own power to assign
value to this or that. We can, for instance, learn to
value time above money. If we have no choice but to work
a forty-hour week, but we only really need the income
from twenty-four, wisdom suggests that this be fairly
rigorously applied to investing now in working less
later, instead of being resigned to spending it all now
when it only appears to have more value. We would need
to learn to stop discounting the future. Voluntary
simplicity and poverty are two very different states of
being, even though they may be funded by identical
incomes. For the good of the world, lifestyle
enhancement must be accompanied by per-capita footprint
management. The footprint at the poverty line can vary
dramatically with the use of resources and the recycling
of natural capital. Being able to afford durable
products might warrant some public financing, even at
modest interest. It’s better to buy the thirty-dollar
boots than six pairs of the ten-dollar brand. Ted
Trainer advocates for a package that embraces “simpler
lifestyles, devolution to fairly self-sufficient and
cooperative local economies, while maintaining global
exposure and interconnectivity.” And
reinvigorating at least some portion of our ancient
community, village, or tribal lifestyles would return us
to a stronger sense of participatory democracy and
personal agency, thereby raising us to a stronger sense
of responsibility for the world around us.
We
need to be much clearer in distinguishing growth from
development. We see a beginning of this in metrics of
assessment moving slowly from GDP to HDI. Development
should be defined in terms of optimization, where it can
as easily be understood in terms of degrowth, or the
shedding of clutter and waste. Growth is specifically
quantitative, development is qualitative, with special
emphasis on quality. Some development costs nothing at
all: you can get it with a library card. Sustainable
development is only possible in finite systems because
it can include degrowth, otherwise it’s oxymoronic, with
the emphasis on moronic. We substitute optima for maxima
as system goals, and optimize for net benefit instead of
gross. To grow up or mature is to lose the growth
paradigm for one of health. Real development might
include lower productivity, or a reduction in the hours
a day needed to meet real needs. Voluntary simplicity
means a healthier work-life balance, solvency, and
self-sufficiency. It doesn’t need to be monastic or
ascetic. We needn’t spin our own yarn. We needn’t be
Luddites. There’s plenty of room in such a lifestyle for
some tourism, digital music, and a little fine dining.
Technological development in the developing world can bypass many of the less efficient intermediate steps that the pioneers in the developed world had to take. We can distribute solar ovens to villagers, and light mud huts with solar panels, and serve some villages potable water with high-tech filtration and wind traps. We can share information technologies in village centers and libraries. We can introduce them to Permaculture and other forms of regenerative agriculture. Development of new generations of environmentally sustainable, human-scale technology should transferred as quickly as possible to the developing nations, so they can leapfrog some of the consumptive and polluting 20th century technologies. Many of the things we’ve been learning are transmissible.
Technological development in the developing world can bypass many of the less efficient intermediate steps that the pioneers in the developed world had to take. We can distribute solar ovens to villagers, and light mud huts with solar panels, and serve some villages potable water with high-tech filtration and wind traps. We can share information technologies in village centers and libraries. We can introduce them to Permaculture and other forms of regenerative agriculture. Development of new generations of environmentally sustainable, human-scale technology should transferred as quickly as possible to the developing nations, so they can leapfrog some of the consumptive and polluting 20th century technologies. Many of the things we’ve been learning are transmissible.
The
change to subsistence economics will of course have huge
impacts on unearned income and speculation, the rewards
expected from these, and thus the motivation to invest.
This will eventually clarify a big difference between
corporate capitalism and free market economics. Beyond
optima, there are usually diminishing returns on the way
to maxima. In the growth economy, it’s been most of the
people and the health of the world that got diminished.
We want the best bang for the buck, not the biggest
boom. Studies have been done that correlate increases in
our incomes to self-rated happiness (how much happiness
does more money bring). The curve looks like you might
expect: having more money to spend does a lot at low
income, and very little as we move from millionaire to
billionaire. Unsurprisingly, at least to those who pay
attention, the best bang for your buck is had around the
poverty line, when real needs can be met and spending
becomes truly discretionary. These facts have to be
hidden, made to disappear by advertising and other
economic interests. You need to make more and spend
more, because that’s what makes the world turn. You need
to live at least a little beyond your means. You need to
feel at least a little anxious and insecure, so that you
will accept reassuring advice from your betters.
Housing, and rent in particular, remains the biggest
economic floor issue, and this will require some form of
major government intervention to address. But government
should absolutely Not be the provider of housing: this
has always been a really bad idea. It should exercise
its power to get out of the way. It can do this with
full tax exemptions for a minimal level of housing
needs, something like 25 square meters per person. It
can allow specific code exemptions and a freer use of
alternative building materials. It can prohibit NIMBY
zoning that pushes the working class out of the
communities in which they must work. It can provide low
interest financing until these minimum conditions are
paid off. Ownership opportunities would be a huge step
off of the endless treadmill. But GDP would fall with
freedom from rents.
One
of the more positive and promising steps that this
civilization is taking now is towards free online
education at all grade levels. Unfortunately,
accreditation for the self-taught still lags well
behind, although programs like G.E.D. and CLEP are
showing rays of hope. There ought to come a time when
any autodidact could challenge any higher education
course of instruction, or any full academic degree,
including those of guild monopolies like medicine, law,
engineering, and architecture. And this should be with
credit that’s widely respected. The subject of education
might seem out of place here to some, but it isn’t.
Education of women in the third world, for example,
might do more than any other factor in curbing our
population problem, and those women will teach their
children with the extra one-on-one time they have. Then
family planners can deal with issues of contraception,
abortifacients, abortion, grinding poverty, and
infanticide in their proper order of preference. The
introduction of a core critical-thinking or cognitive
hygiene curriculum early in elementary school could go a
long way towards neutralizing the ideological ignorance
and short-sightedness that prevents us from even looking
at our problems. We have to see what’s coming before we
can see our need for restraint. Better educated people
make better democracies, while ignorant populations will
only give us the democracies that are failing us now.
What if we had a population intelligent enough to reject
any national economy that demanded perpetual war? What
if any child on Earth could get a quality education and
a degree in a thatched-roof village library, for free?
10.
The Dimension of Human Ingenuity and Due Precaution
Humans are somewhat more fortunate than the animals
we’re driving to extinction, in that we can respond with
cultural adaptations and innovations a loft faster than
the natural biosphere can respond with genetic and
epigenetic adaptations. But given the time frame that
we’ve cornered ourselves with, and the general
intractability of human ignorance and belief systems, we
can still ask whether even culture may be too slow. What
would it take to rally us? The various media are
saturated with one-dimensional solutions, banners under
which to march forth. This will save us, no, that will
save us. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
(BECCS) is a geoenginering proposal that's often touted
as a major strategy to combat climate change. Of course
the large external costs aren’t often mentioned, and the
technology hasn't been scaled up. Regenerative
agriculture is promoted as the solution, but while this
will be absolutely necessary as a component of any
larger solution, but we aren’t going to fix anything
long term without a deep population reduction, along
with a few dozen other coordinated efforts. This one is ironic, too,
because regenerative agriculture is all about thinking
holistically, thinking in systems, not just in
one-dimensional threads. You have to ask: Why
does everyone think that their favorite piece of the
puzzle is the only important piece? Yes, we need
human-scale technology and relocalization. We need to be
saying “that, too,” more often, and less of “that, instead.”
When we aren’t looking to mythical deities, offering thoughts and prayers, we will often look to human ingenuity and technological advance as our savior. The cavalry is always just over the hill. Or we will combine the two in some fantastic deus ex machina. But technological optimism may not be serving us as well as we think. Our progress is also a history of unintended consequences, and techno-fixes that often require dedicated fixes of their own. Our greatest inventions have nearly all come with mixed blessings. Mass electronic communication has given us networking and online education, but it has also made possible the frighteningly effective mass brainwashing in advertising, politics and religion. We can plainly see the blind faith in typical comments like this, from Mashable: "As it turned out, though, Malthus and his successors hadn’t reckoned with human ingenuity. Every time we think we’ve hit a wall in terms of food production, we come up with new technology and new efficiencies – just as we did in the so-called Green Revolution of intensive agriculture in the 1960s and 1970 that put paid to the ‘population bomb’ problem.” There is a delusion here that’s probably much more dangerous than Malthus’s miscalculation: the belief that any or all of these improvements are sustainable for more than a couple of decades.
When we aren’t looking to mythical deities, offering thoughts and prayers, we will often look to human ingenuity and technological advance as our savior. The cavalry is always just over the hill. Or we will combine the two in some fantastic deus ex machina. But technological optimism may not be serving us as well as we think. Our progress is also a history of unintended consequences, and techno-fixes that often require dedicated fixes of their own. Our greatest inventions have nearly all come with mixed blessings. Mass electronic communication has given us networking and online education, but it has also made possible the frighteningly effective mass brainwashing in advertising, politics and religion. We can plainly see the blind faith in typical comments like this, from Mashable: "As it turned out, though, Malthus and his successors hadn’t reckoned with human ingenuity. Every time we think we’ve hit a wall in terms of food production, we come up with new technology and new efficiencies – just as we did in the so-called Green Revolution of intensive agriculture in the 1960s and 1970 that put paid to the ‘population bomb’ problem.” There is a delusion here that’s probably much more dangerous than Malthus’s miscalculation: the belief that any or all of these improvements are sustainable for more than a couple of decades.
The
Cornucopians are heeded far more enthusiastically today
than the Cassandras. We try to be plucky about what we
have coming our way. Ruin this world? No problem. We’ll
move to Mars first, mine the asteroids, and then move on
to the stars. Faster-than-light travel can’t be more
than a couple of discoveries away. This used-up world
cannot have been our destiny: we’re just too special for
that. Despite whatever tendencies we have to cultural
inertia and conservatism, we are also known to be overly
enthusiastic in embracing the new and the modern, often
just for its own sake, with little to no regard for
consequences. There’s an assumption that “what can be
done should be done.” Rebecca West wrote, “If the whole
human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its
headstone might well be: It seemed a good idea at the
time.”
It’s true that we will likely invent our way out of some
unknown number of problems, and even avoid some serious
tipping points at the eleventh hour, just prior to
subsystem failure. Nonetheless, we have to survey how
well this has worked for us in the past, with a special
eye to both real life-cycle costs and discouraging
surprises. New products are often touted for their
benefits while their salesmen pitch nothing about their
impacts, and many impacts are new or still unknown. They
may be billed as the greenest thing in all of history,
while providing only a 10% improvement over the old
ways. Huge windmills and electric vehicles must still
have their component materials mined from the earth,
must still be manufactured at substantial energy and
water costs, must still be delivered along maintained
roads using fuel, and must be repaired and eventually
replaced. Some pollution of the commons will almost
certainly occur. Paying interest on their financing
requires extra work, also done at real cost to the
environment. Honest efficiency calculations are needed
to expose all of the real costs, but our honesty is
getting rarer. In sum, the techno-fix dimension of the
carrying capacity problem might not have anything close
to the sustainability value that we have hoped for. On
the whole, our march of progress hasn’t really solved
many of our problems without incurring costs of similar
weight. Some of this is acceptable, such as advances in
medicine increasing our costs in elder care. But look at
the minuscule net energy gain in producing corn ethanol,
which also costs the commons in topsoil
losses and water consumption.
Many of our gains might just be a wash or worse,
especially the way humans like to do accounting.
Technology is the T in the often seen I=PAT formula.
Environmental Impacts = Population x Affluence x
Technology. However, it’s often mistakenly assumed that
more advanced technology translates into a reduced
impact, or that people living in poverty have next to no
environmental impact or will remain poor for ever. As
far as the T is concerned, we may even want to leave
this techno-fix dimension out of our calculations
entirely, or else turn any hopes for net gains in
carrying capacity into a much-needed contingency line,
tuition for the school of hard knocks.
Precautionary principles are one way to implement some
conservatism, particularly at governmental and
regulatory levels. We want to use a healthy skepticism.
In effect, this strips the benefits of doubt from new
proposals, products, patents, or designs. Where
extensive knowledge or testing is lacking and
consequences of implementation are in any way suspect,
the burden of proof falls on the proposer. There is
often an assumption of responsibility to protect the
public from harm, even where such interference is all
that incurs such liability. This has been growing
progressively less cautious in some important areas, as
corporations pay their legislatures to deregulate them.
Permissible amounts of incidental death and injury have
also become more accepted, as long as the statistically
acceptable cost-benefit analyses have been performed.
Precautionary principles can also be counterproductive.
We adopt codes and set standards for general
application, but in part because we are under “the rule
of law,” wanting to be fair to everybody, too few
exceptions are made for special or mitigating
circumstances. Laws of general application often result
in extreme design overkill in specifics, and an
associated waste of resources. It still makes sense to
use reasonable precaution. As a wise sorcerer said long
ago, “Don’t conjure what you can’t banish.”
As
a counterweight to overdone precautionary principles,
transhumanist thinker Max More has proposed a
Proactionary Principle: “People’s freedom to innovate
technologically is highly valuable, even critical, to
humanity. This implies several imperatives when
restrictive measures are proposed: Assess risks and
opportunities according to available science, not
popular perception. Account for both the costs of the
restrictions themselves, and those of the opportunities
foregone. Favor [those] measures that are proportionate
to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that
have a high expectation value. Protect people’s freedom
to experiment, innovate, and progress.” There are, of
course, edges and lines not to be crossed, often
predicted by science fiction writers, that might warrant
a still closer look, like grey-goo scenarios from
runaway nanite replicators, or their green-goo
counterparts in hyperadaptive artificial microorganisms.
But we can certainly use a better balance than we now
have between precaution and proaction, and this will
work in both directions if our thinking improves. Daniel C. Wahl asks, "Why not limit the scale
of implementation of any innovation to local and
regional levels until proof of its positive impact is
unequivocally demonstrated?”
When the risks we are facing are large and complex, and
might threaten our whole world and our future, we would
be well advised to take some much bigger steps back from
our blind faith in the techno-fix. Karin Kuhlemann,
writes of these as global catastrophic risks (GCRs): “There is great appeal in the proposition that
a (cost-free) technological solution may be just around
the corner. It plays right into our cognitive biases. We
do not want to bear any costs to mitigate GCRs
generally, let alone the embarrassing overpopulation or
the kill-joy climate change GCRs. We think we will be
richer in future than now, we do not much care for
future or geographically distant people, and we are
optimistic about our own chances. But the option of
foregoing mitigation in hopes of a technological
solution amounts to simply embracing the GCR and doing
nothing. It is unclear that a technological solution is
realistic; technological advances to date have greatly
increased (rather than done anything to reduce) per
capita consumption, while automation breakthroughs may
lead to catastrophic unemployment. And whether it is
realistic or not, a technological solution is not real.
We do not yet have effective technological solutions in
place for any unsexy risk. Until such time as a
technological solution actually exists and actually
solves the problem, we simply have no grounds for
assuming that it will exist and that it will solve it.
It would be unconscionable to rely on a non-existing
solution to a global catastrophic risk we contribute to,
and which is disproportionately likely to impact people
much more vulnerable than ourselves - children, the
young and poor, and those not yet born.”
Some of the more frightening nominees for prospective
global solutions involve geoengineering proposals. Part
of the frightfulness lies in the fact that we have come
to this, and another part from knowing there are people
with influence who think such things. The overwhelming
costs or impracticalities in most proposals are often a
big source of relief. We have too much carbon in the air
because we have taken too much out of the ground. So we
need giant industrial plants and big machines to put the
carbon back, because letting green plants and their
roots do this for us just makes too much sense? Why we
can’t address problems by treating their causes and
sources directly is often a puzzle that draws us deep
into human psychology, and particularly that of denial.
Karin Kuhlemann asks why we can’t just pull on the
levers that connect directly to the problem at hand. Is
it because we can’t work directly with who and what we
are because we don’t know who and what we are? So we use
Rube Goldberg contraptions, and roundabout approaches to
sneak up on ourselves. Ultimately, we are the
puppeteers, and not the puppets, but that thought is
just too frightening to face. We still have nuclear,
biological, and chemical weapons. And we aren’t offended
or outraged at all when DARPA proudly tells us what the
future of war will be like. Somewhere we got this really
bad idea that the individual is only sovereign when
convenient, but somehow not accountable in any way for
the actions of the whole. That’s how stupid we are as a
species. The sense of fate and helplessness is only
overcome by a few. For these, the solutions still
involve simply getting rid of a problem by dismantling
its causes and support systems. Geoengineering solutions
to climate change are getting increasing attention,
where our money would be far more effectively spent
funding contraception and education.
Decoupling refers to some change or switch in technology
that uses less material or energy per unit of output.
It’s the T in I=PAT that most often works. There’s
almost always some extent to which we can decouple our
development, prosperity, or well-being from our
environmental footprint. For instance, we might take
some waste stream and find a way to use it as a
resource, or as food for another process. Decoupling may
also consist of substitutions. The switch from a
manufacturing to an information or service economy
decouples a population from some of its reliance on
material extraction. We might find processes that cost
us more in some ways, such as more human labor, as in
moving from mechanized, high-input agriculture to Dacha
or Permaculture gardening. But what we save there is
non-renewable natural capital, the most valuable stuff
we have. One sense of decoupling might even regard
wisdom as a way to decouple our lifestyles from things
we don’t need to be doing at all. There is also relative
decoupling, getting more work done with less damage, or
simply increasing our efficiency in resource and capital
use. Appropriate technology might be the best input term
for further research. The term comes from Ernst
Schumacher and means “small-scale, decentralized,
labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally
sound, and locally autonomous” applications of
knowledge. Information isn’t impact free, but we have to
think of digital audio as sustainable or civilization
has produced too little of value.
It
sometimes happens that some new labor or time-saving
invention is so exciting that entire lifestyles grow up
around it, increasing costs in both labor and time.
Frequently, technological progress increases resource
efficiency in ways that drive up demand and lead to
increases in overall use. Sometimes converting to a
friendlier product will alleviate some of the guilt that
went along with the old product’s usage, so we use more
of it. You trade your 14 mpg Bronco for a 40 mpg Civic
and your conscience feels so good about that that you
now drive five times as far. This is known as Jevons
Paradox, or a rebound effect. Aside
from turning our interest and investments away from a
particular product, deciding that we didn’t need it so
urgently after all, maybe the next best technologies
to work on increase efficiency, develop negawatts,
and learn to consume wastes as food for other
processes.
Most dangerous of all our techno-fixes may be a
technological solution that alleviates only the symptoms
of a problem, while masking the underlying causes,
giving only the appearance of a real or long-term
solution. Industrial agriculture is perhaps the most
dangerous of these because people invariably focus on
the fact that increasingly more mouths get fed now,
while ignoring the unsustainable costs of increasing
non-renewable natural capital inputs, especially fossil
water, soil health, soil carbon sequestration, and
global biodiversity. Solutions have accelerated long
term losses in both soil quality and quantity,
increasing dependence on inputs even further. The
apparent progress has “animated the conviction that
human numbers are not constricted by environmental
forces but can elude limits through technological and
agronomic modernization” (Abegão 2018).
11.
The Dimension of Wilderness and Deep Ecology
Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things,
the divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that. Robinson Jeffers
Even a rigorous ecologist or systems theorist might
still see a scientifically acceptable underpinning to
“the interconnectedness of it all”: of us all, of all
our relations, including the microbes and detritivores.
For most of humanity, however, the dimension of
wilderness and deep ecology breaks us into a new realm
altogether, one of purely subjective opinion, or at
best, one of morals, ethics, character, and conscience.
We may have deep feelings about it, and we might even
weep for various reasons, happy or sad. But it can't and should not be quantified? Daniel Wahl writes, “The
aesthetics of complex dynamic systems are rooted in
valuing diversity, interconnectedness, and cooperative
exchanges or symbiosis as the basis for the dynamic
stability of the system.” We who
possess what Schweitzer called “reverence for life” have
to ask why so many others don’t, and others don’t seem
to. And how in the hell could anyone but a psychopath
kill a giraffe for fun or sport? Idiots. Others may note
that the intensity of reverence for life increases with
some practices of “breaking open the head,” with
mindfulness training, shamanic experience, or
mind-altering sacraments. Sometimes it might just be
Scouting, getting us out of the city and into the woods.
Sometimes it might be a fortunately-timed class or
family outing to a zoo, aquarium, natural history
museum, or observatory. Whatever the introduction to
this sense of sacred connectedness, it comes with a
horror when next we look around and see the crimes
humanity is committing against nature and future
generations, the suppression of our equal rights and
opportunities, the damage done by shortsighted greed,
and the unimaginable stupidity of war (which includes
signing on as a soldier).
A
deep respect for the more than 3.5 billion years of
“life’s struggle for existence” becomes reverence for
many of us, and is often accompanied by gratitude to be
a part of it all, even when we still need to struggle.
We also pick up a corresponding sense of duty. What is
it that keeps our fellows away from this, and what is it
that helps us to arrive in this state? Many, of course,
would call it a religious experience or epiphany.
Religion may at least call verbal attention to our interconnectedness,
and perhaps call for compassion, but there is very
little evidence that it pays more than lip service,
while it also interposes an ideological dogma that more
closely favors human exceptionalism. States like awe,
reverence, gratitude, and appreciation of the sacred are
in no way limited to religious or even spiritual
experience. Maslow would be quick to point out that most
of us, especially the very poor, are still stuck trying
to satisfy deficiency needs, which keeps our heads down
and our minds in less than exalted states. We may need
better exposure to higher and alternative states. Many
are simply deprived of close experiences with nature.
It
might come as something of a shock to realize that
humanism and socialism don’t help us much here at all.
The fantastic bubble of our great civilization, with the
beliefs that keep it inflated, reinforces the illusion
of our separateness, and our specialness. Pro-human
identities may give only lip service to a larger, but
somehow still separate environment. Humans are most
sacred of all, and then come the charismatic species
that we find ourselves attracted to, even if they don't
get to go to Heaven. The left and the politically
progressive political wings won’t have any necessary
commitment to the life beyond the human sphere.
Platforms may mention the need for a healthy environment
and resource conservation, but this still largely comes
down to a recognition of environmental services, things
supporting the human cause or project. It’s frightening
that such advanced cultures as Norway, Denmark, Iceland,
and Japan can still be involved in such an evil
perversion as whaling. But it does illustrate that
neither their humanism nor ‘the right amount’ of
socialism will be much of a help with our human
exceptionalism problem. We have to get over ourselves.
“Man is something to be surpassed.” as Nietzsche's
Zarathustra proclaimed.
Deep ecology is a world view that lends itself to at
least some degree of scientific systemization. It argues
for the inherent worth or value of all kinds of living
beings, without regard to the environmental services
they perform for humankind. All organisms are part of a
larger fabric of interdependence, mutualism, and
synergy. Without this greater fabric, without being part
of it, we are either lessened or nothing at all. The
inability to see ourselves as part of a greater whole
allows us to incur massive unpaid environmental debts.
Although the philosophy (if you will) of Deep Ecology is
central to the beliefs of many indigenous cultures,
cultures that have stood the tests of millennia, it is
nonetheless a cultural teaching, and not inherent in
humankind’s biological nature. We only seem to have a
default kind of goodness that doesn't want to wantonly
do damage. Deep ecology requires learning to restrain
ourselves collectively on a permanent and voluntary
basis for the benefit of the world around us and our own
future generations. To get there from where we are will
demand a pretty full transformation of our cultural
values to justify a much more minimalist footprint to
our ravenous appetites. More than anything else, we will
need to lose our appetite for things that can’t be
replaced or recovered. James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis
might play a part in this, if we think of Gaia as a
complex, self-regulating, adaptive system and not as the
conscious, self-directed entity it’s sometimes
mistakenly thought to refer to.
There are issues with degrowth (in both population and
consumption) that will be painful. We will be reminded
that climax ecosystems are steady states, with as much
biomass dying as living. Some periods and aspects of
negative population and market growth will feel like a
recession or depression, or an uncomfortable rebalancing
of age demographics, but important others might seem
like a dividend, with more good stuff per-capita to go
around. Per-capita land or lebensraum will grow.
If we shrunk to two billion, we could give E.O. Wilson
his whole Half-Earth in full and still double the
per-capita turf that we now occupy. And the progress
from A to B will include many of the subjective
characteristics of growth. We could return half of the
land we’ve deforested or otherwise appropriated for
agricultural use and let it self-replenish with wild
flora and fauna, with enough arable land remaining for
regenerative agriculture and holistic grazing, to return
carbon and nutrients to the soil that feeds us. We could
decouple from unsustainable mechanical and chemical
inputs. Even where we aren’t measuring environmental
services, humankind would be well-served by such an
approach, and we’d get to have some real living and
thriving descendants, instead of imaginary ones.
For
most of our long prehistory, the world was relatively
empty of us. Even much more recently, the loss of
wilderness was a great thing to the pioneers. There were
swamps to drain and savages to conquer or enslave. We
didn’t really have the necessity to outgrow all this
until we outgrew the world and found walls, staked
claims and property boundaries, and limits at every
turn. Suddenly, finding the intrinsic value in nature,
ecosystems, and non-human life has acquired new value in
the slowly-growing recognition that this is a sine
qua non of our survival. The conscience needed
isn’t native or well-supported by most cultures, so we
do have a steep learning curve ahead of us. Somewhere we
need to find a moral center or a secular environmental
ethic to which the religious folk can also subscribe.
But we may have to write off the billion or more who are
actually praying for an end to this world. Those minds
were long gone before Sunday school graduation. But we
could still eventually surpass them in numbers.
The
soundest place to begin an ethic is with the Golden
Rule, which began with the Confucian “What about
‘fairness? What you don't like done to yourself, don't
do to others” (Analects 15:24). We would only need to
add that “others” referred to other living beings, not
just the most sentient. We could then add on Aldo
Leopold’s Land Ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to
preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the
biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers, “When the values that
support a moral stance are parochial, it is impossible
to reach universal agreement on what is good or bad. The
only value that all human beings can readily share is
the continuation of life on Earth.” Maybe we could just
make a better effort to leave this world a better place
than it would have been without us. Given the amount of
damage that today’s human life does to this world,
that’s not an easy goal. Perhaps then we could constrain
the whole concept of property right to that of a
usufruct, a legal term defined as: “the right to enjoy
the use and advantages of another’s property short of
the destruction or waste of its substance.” The word
“another” here would refer equally to the global
commons. This leaves us with the question of how far we
might monetize the remaining portion of nature, how much
we might appraise ecosystem services at all. Is a
consensual conscience enough to place a limit on how
much we can regard life and its necessities as resources
and stocks at all? Should we not limit potential
property at least to that which is necessary for
survival and our qualitative human development within
the world’s carrying capacity, and exempt the whole of
the global commons from consideration as property? You
must know that corporations are out there right now
trying to monetize the atmosphere. Others have already
done it with our streams and aquifers.
For
all of its many flaws, one truly great concept came out
of aristocracy: noblesse oblige, or noble
obligation. Where we’ve been well-endowed by the world,
there is a corresponding duty to give something back,
and with some gratitude, particularly where we are
blessed with leisure. Thomas Jefferson claimed that
aristocracy as it’s commonly known wasn’t at all
necessary to the sense of noblesse oblige, and
that there was in fact a “natural aristocracy,” of
talent and virtuous character, that held that ethic just
as a matter of course. Mohammad Ali claimed “Service to
others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth.”
And Dave Foreman, of Earth First! infamy, has advocated
a similar ethic for the sake of the biosphere that gives
us life and so much more. Pay your rent. Try to make
your life a demonstration that you know life itself to
be more important than you are. Try to leave the world a
better place than you found it. To take and take and
give nothing back is the very definition of parasitism.
Meanwhile, the great majority of humankind seems to
believe that being born is all we require to have earned
or be granted the full complement of human rights and
privileges, indeed, all that we need to have our full
measure of worth and full justification for self-esteem.
We’re entitled by birthright to all we can take, subject
only to our own human laws. The biggest and hardest part
of taking little and giving much back is to set a
lifestyle example that will inspire others to do the
same. A particular challenge is making simple living
look more attractive than opulence with all of its toys.
We also need to find ways to help people who are still
living in parochial but sustainable cultures to see past
the seductiveness of our impressive growth, while still
encouraging their cultural development. It’s the cargo
that turns the indigenous village into the cargo cult.
That comes even before the missionaries roll up their
sleeves.
It
might seem kind of silly to grant rights to non-living
entities, like rivers, or Mother Earth, or to animals
who can’t speak up, especially to do so with flowery
prose. This might be taking things out of bounds
rationally, but some alternatives with similar effect do
exist, and rights must be somehow asserted. The more
honest approach, since sovereign individuals, and not
appointed instruments, are the source of all rights,
would be to claim proxy rights for such entities and
assume the legal responsibility for defending them.
Since we write the constitutions, duties can be legally
held to be as sacred as rights. The reality of our need
to reintegrate with nature, or suffer devastating losses
to the species, should also warrant keeping the rights
of future human generations within the scope of a
broader declaration. As sovereign peoples, we can still
secure proxy rights on behalf of these entities and
declare a corresponding and inalienable duty for
ourselves as stewards of this trust. This is often found
in common law as a Public Trust Doctrine, but where it
isn’t enshrined in the highest laws of a land, it really
lacks the teeth to take any necessary bites out of bad
actors, particularly multinational corporate ones
protected by such things as trade agreements. There is
also something fundamentally wrong with any conception
of rights that doesn’t acknowledge reciprocal duty. Of
course the obvious is often implied: our rights end
where others begin. But here we may need to make this
explicit and make “others” refer to all living beings
and the systems that sustain them.
12.
The Dimension of Human Ignorance and Misinformation
Honest ignorance, or simply innocence, may be the least
of our problems, especially when we can get to the
innocent during cognitively formative years, with or
around parental consent. As proposed in the beginning,
our human parasitism is, at least to a large extent,
cultural, and therefore learned. Policy intervention is
vastly more effective in the young. If you’re trying to
do good, then you want to start with the kids and have a
generation or two worth of patience. But our parasitism
is also culturally viral, by design. It sells itself to
the innocent and unsuspecting. Wisdom will sometimes
need to get more assertive to counteract this, but this
comes at the risk of the backfire effect, where those
infected with misinformation will double down and defend
an error with renewed vigor. Willful ignorance, or amathia
in Greek, is a much more intractable problem. And
between this and innocence is a complicated array of
levels of unknowing, such processes as defective
cognitive heuristics, emotional overreactions, cognitive
biases, coping strategies, psychological defense
mechanisms, and logical fallacies. It’s frightening to
know how much we need to wade through to get even a
small group of people to awaken to the seriousness of
our global problems in even a small portion of its
detail. We are like winos, doing suicide at the cowardly
pace. But where can sobriety come from in a hive mind
without any real agency? Our denial can look at life in
sub-Saharan Africa and take no action, and still see no
population problem. Denial won’t make these problem go
away, any more than it does for the drunkard or the
junkie. It only raises the long-term costs and makes the
problem harder to end. Do we merit being stripped of the
sapiens in our name? I would switch that for ignoramus.
“Man is something to be surpassed.”
For some of us there is the question of how much patience we can afford. How can we assert that the globe and its commons now need to have some equivalent to rights that are superior to those of nations, states, corporations, and religious ideologies. We also need to own a duty to stand proxy in defense of these claims. We should already be at the same level of urgent care that we might see in a global war or an alien invasion. But even the most progressive elements of the status quo are only pushing for a gradual greening of the status quo. The governments “suffering” from declining birth rates are actively campaigning for increased birth rates. The economists are digging in to defend the Ponzi economies. We are out of time for the gentlest solutions, while denial runs too deep for anything more than dismissal of any problem at all. We know that monoculture is nowhere close to an answer, but the Bible still calls it a sin to plant two different crops in the same field (Lev19:19).
For some of us there is the question of how much patience we can afford. How can we assert that the globe and its commons now need to have some equivalent to rights that are superior to those of nations, states, corporations, and religious ideologies. We also need to own a duty to stand proxy in defense of these claims. We should already be at the same level of urgent care that we might see in a global war or an alien invasion. But even the most progressive elements of the status quo are only pushing for a gradual greening of the status quo. The governments “suffering” from declining birth rates are actively campaigning for increased birth rates. The economists are digging in to defend the Ponzi economies. We are out of time for the gentlest solutions, while denial runs too deep for anything more than dismissal of any problem at all. We know that monoculture is nowhere close to an answer, but the Bible still calls it a sin to plant two different crops in the same field (Lev19:19).
The
human problem, or the Club of Rome’s problématique
humaine, has powerful supporters, and deep pockets
full of encouragement. Our common troubles serve the
short-term agendas of a heinously wealthy minority. The
forces arrayed against system correction are social,
economic, political, and religious, and they are
well-entrenched in the institutions there. Sometimes it
seems like the rebels are stuck wearing loincloths, only
setting examples of questionable impressiveness, and
using our words like Cassandra tried to do. The people
we need to turn around with these words are the voters
and the consumers. The people actively working against
global health are as much of a minority as those working
for it. It’s the vast murmurations of humanity between
them, being swept along, directed and manipulated more
that a little too effectively through the media, that we
still need to persuade to a more sustainable path. It’s
hard to change things with no movement there, and the
mob isn’t known for its genius. The worst and most
frustrating effect of willful ignorance is that it
delays system feedback, our perception of and response
to genuine crises that are headed our way or already
upon us.
In
grade school, my generation spent hours under our desks
playing “duck and cover” to the sound of practice
air-raid sirens, imagining our little bodies instantly
fried in a nuclear blast, wondering why the grownups
were so stupid and never grew up. It was about this time
many more of us started thinking there were already too
many people. By the early 70s we were sure the boomer
generation was waking up, and at last ready to put a
stop to this unimaginable idiocy. We got excited by
Malthus and the Club of Rome around this time as well,
and that pique left us too. Most of us just twitched a
bit and went back to sleepwalking, collecting our
paychecks, and borrowing more money, while the threats
got worse. There are other realistic threats we ignore
today, too, like a Carrington-level CME, and we do
nothing to fuse the power grid against it. That requires
a present investment against a hyperbolically discounted
threat. But the threat is twenty years without a power
grid, without civilization as we know it. What happened
to all those great lessons we were supposed to have
learned? Now we are told that degrowth is bad, a threat
to all we have built. Our workforce will be smaller, our
militaries weaker, our populations older and
overburdening the young. Governments are now campaigning
for larger families. Try to spare the poor people of the
world from inevitable famine and the other faces of
megadeath and you’re a just racist and a heretic to
capitalism. You can’t deny them their god-given
reproductive rights to famine and social collapse. Our
lifesaving proposals are recast as coercive policies
denying the human right to bear and raise children. And
the humanist left wing gets as irrationally hysterical
about this as the right. We do go mad in herds. And the
people just vote the way they’re told to vote, by
whoever can afford the most effective media.
Cultural inertia at the global level is a juggernaut,
“mercilessly destructive and unstoppable.” Much of this
is sourced in path dependency, the cultural equivalent
of the individual’s apperceptive mass, the inertia that
keeps us moving in our old directions. Culture is an
edifice, built gradually over long stretches of time.
The older layers become foundational and the newer
layers are adapted to functioning with them. It’s hard
to just jump in and move fundamental values around
without shaking up the entire system. Systems adapt to
preserving themselves, to conserving their order, and
the more a shakeup reverberates throughout a whole
system, the more it’s regarded a threat and dealt with
accordingly. Consequently, more believable promises of
improvement need to reverberate through a system as
completely as anxiety, and a little ahead of it.
Otherwise, the system will remain conservative. As
Toynbee observed, societies that develop great expertise
in problem solving will become incapable of solving new
problems by overdeveloping their structures for solving
old ones. The introduction of new strategies for new
problems has to be done more effectively than simply
floating the newest proposals. This is best done with
prototypes and examples wherever a culture hasn’t
prohibited these outright, out of anxiety. You need to
be sure that your experimental ecovillage is seen that
way, and not as some Satanic coven and cult compound, if
you can even get the permits to start one. Most
institutions will resist or fight others that threaten
in any way to replace them.
For
systems to run well, accurate real-time feedback is a
must. But in the current system, the manipulation of
information has become both an art and a science. Data
can be delayed, distorted, reframed, censored, filtered,
inverted, and discounted by anyone with control of the
media. The media has largely fallen into the hands of
transnational corporations, both in their ownership and
indirectly through their advertisers. It’s pretty safe
to claim that transparency in matters of global
importance is now a thing of the past, except in private
publication. The discrepancies between what people are
told and what is really happening don’t often become
clear until lies can no longer explain global events, or
a major crisis wakes people up to the fact they’ve been
lied to. Sometimes this comes too late and a whole
sub-system of the global order collapses. We are just
too plucky in our sense that necessity will provide a
timely solution in proportion to the urgency, so we can
let things grow more urgent in order to make our
responses more efficient. This error also demands a
sense of being “too big to fail,” like Rome had. We may
yet learn the hard way how big a dieback it will take to
finally set us in motion.
Human beings have important psychological needs for a
sense of who they are and why they must do what they do.
They want a sense that what they believe is correct, so
they look to ideological consensus in the social order.
They also want a strong sense of which groups they
belong to and where they stand in the social order.
Being without these can be loaded with anxiety, and once
they get hold of something that finally comforts them,
it can be nearly impossible to loosen that grip of
theirs. But since the birth of advertising and
propaganda, identity, belief, and belonging have become
extremely effective tools in social and economic
engineering and control, particularly useful to those
who can afford to employ them and buy the media time to
deliver them. Misinformation will get all the rich
sponsors and is freely seeded. But if you want to read
that new scientific paper on childhood adversity, you
will have to go through a paywall.
The
manipulation of personal fear and insecurity across
whole populations, particularly at the levels of
nationalism or patriotism and religious fervor, is one
of the more frightening things we do. We do get strength
in numbers, but often at great cost to intelligence. It
used to be that social insecurity was the big factor.
You wanted to be part of the group that got the social
rewards, or if you couldn’t belong, you could serve them
and get some of that trickle down. But more recently,
economic insecurity drives much of social control and
engineering. Fundamental to this effect is getting the
people to get ahead of themselves, living beyond their
means and in debt, so that even a month or two without
income can be catastrophic. This will keep the working
class obedient and following the advice of their
betters. This can be used to kill labor unions. Public
education gets dumbed down to prepare the lower classes
for servitude.
The
points of view that we see things from can be altered
either by our own choice or managed by others. Most of
us can be maneuvered into a single point of view and
cemented in place in that one true perspective. Then we
will see just what we are intended to see, and mind what
our minds are narrowed to mind. But some of us are able
to see things from multiple perspectives at the same
time, which gives us an added sense of depth. We can
respond to situations in varying ways, and can choose
different emotional responses to them. Do we need to be
taught how to do this?
Besides changing point of view, we are also able to
switch our frames of reference around, to see things in
different lighting, metrics, scales, and contexts. The
process is called reframing, and there are a few ways of
doing it. A small frame of reference can leave us
small-minded. Marketing ploys using terms like green and
sustainable can shrink a comparison frame down to
yesterday’s product versus today’s, so that a 10%
improvement is all the difference in the world. Spatial
reframing can get us thinking outside the box, too,
without even changing the metaphor. That’s often where
the real options are, the substitute resources and
materials, the decouplings, the divestments, the changes
of plans, and escapes from diminishing returns. But we
need to inhabit a larger world and that can lead to
anxiety and too much of freedom.
We
can manage what ingredients will go into a discussion.
Control of the universe of discourse may not entirely
censor things from a conversation, but it certainly
helps us to misdirect and refocus. The WWF Living Planet
Report between 2008 to 2016 dropped their old conclusion
“with the world already in ecological overshoot,
continued growth in population and per person footprint
is clearly not a sustainable path” (2008, p. 26). The
use of the word overshoot drops from 35 to 4 times. We
have to wonder what pressure they were under to do this.
The problem got a lot worse, not better, in those eight
years. Was it a major donor to the cause? Somewhat
earlier, a discouraged Peter Scott, a WWF founder, said
“I have often thought that at the end of the day, we
would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF’s
money on buying condoms.” How could they have fallen
that far from the cause when we’re all supposed to be
advancing? Noam Chomsky wrote, “The smart way to keep
people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the
spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively
debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more
critical and dissident views. That gives people the
sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the
time the presuppositions of the system are being
reinforced by the limits put on the range of the
debate.” We need to take better charge of the terms
under discussion and the scope of what's being debated.
Our
limited time horizons may be one of our weakest features
as a culture. Temporal reframing usually calls for
expanded or deeper time horizons, as with the “seven
generations” principle. It puts life’s evolutionary
“struggle for existence” into billions of years of
context, and it makes creationists’ heads explode with
rage. Perhaps springboarding off a Greek proverb, Rabindranath Tagore wrote,
“The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never
sit in their shade, has at least started to understand
the meaning of life.” Now our boards of
directors can’t seem to see past the next quarterly
report, and our politicians, the next election. Yet
these are the people we trust to sequester nuclear waste
with a hundred millennia half-life. We might build dams
with fifty years of vision, but fail to figure damage
from both silt and no silt, or the cost of removing the
dam in year 53. Waste and pollution must be held at or
below reabsorption rates, but how can you measure rates
if you have no sense of time? The right questions aren’t
being asked. Both Gandhi and Bucky Fuller are often
quoted about Earth having plenty for everyone, pending
certain social or economic adjustments. These are still
quoted today, although the population has tripled since
those words were spoken and the error has become more
obvious. Are the elites as oblivious as they seem to the
trajectory they are on? Wouldn’t they otherwise have to
see that they have even more to lose than the poor when
it all comes crashing down? They are, after all, more
invested in bubbles than in bunkers. We need adaptive
intelligence to keep up with a changing niche, meaning
that we need to look ahead farther to notice the
direction that the changes are taking. We need it to
understand irreversible environmental changes. This
gives us what Jared Diamond calls “the courage to
practice long-term thinking, and to make bold,
courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when
problems have become perceptible but before they have
reached crisis proportions.”
As
you may have noticed, the human problem is complicated
enough to be called a wicked problem, and in all
probability, too complex to ever fully solve. Karin
Kuhlemann has drawn a connection between wicked problems
and “unsexy” global catastrophic risks, notable for
their multi-dimensionality, interdisciplinary demands,
resistance to predictive analysis, politicization, and
gradual or “boiling frog” development: “There are too
many moving parts and feedback loops, complex patterns
of cause and effect that impose a high cognitive cost
onto anyone attempting to engage with these problems.”
Yet we have to appeal to vastly simpler intellects, who
might equate holistic thinking with “feeling instead of
thinking,” instead of intelligent systems analysis. The
big, multi-dimensional problem invariably gets broken up
in such minds into small, bite-sized, one-dimensional
chunks, and dealt with one bit at a time. Even lay
greens or environmentalists will largely neglect the big
picture and longer time horizons, and only concentrate
on a single cause or effect. Whack-a-Mole, the arcade
game in which players strike toy popup moles with
mallets, provides a wonderful analogy to
non-comprehensive, piecemeal solutions that result only
in temporary gains. The struggle never ends, and the
r-strategist moles like it that way. They have plenty to
spare.
The
United Nations’ population projections offer us a very
clear example of one-dimensional thinking. These are
based solely on human reproductive choices, taking no
account of any coming collapses in the environmental and
socioeconomic support systems that enable temporary
population overshoot. We could be well into an
involuntary dieback by 2100, beginning in the r-strategy
populations that have nowhere to run. And some of that
killing will be done by more clear and present dangers
sneaking up too quickly, like “where’d all the water
go?” We can’t count on the larger global population to
start thinking multi-dimensionally. The problems are far
too complex for the average mind. We get highly
fragmented pictures of our multi-dimensional problems.
People will focus all their attention or effort onto one
little sliver of a problem and eventually come to see
that investment as the primary key to salvation. Going
vegan is the solution to all of our ills. Some other
common examples are the redistribution of wealth, or
better distribution of food, or solar energy. We seem
stuck with having to train one army on problem one and
another on problem two. But somebody has to be at the
center of things, in possession of the Map to the whole
human problem, with the promising intervention points
highlighted, or a lot of effort is going to be wasted,
and maybe much of it counterproductive. We we need
reliable clearinghouses for comprehensive information.
Scientists, who tend to be specialists, don’t provide
any sort of guarantee that their projections will be
multi-dimensional and comprehensive, or will involve any
sort of systems thinking. They are more likely to see
little more than their own narrow area of interest and
neglect what those other scientists in those other
fields are doing. Consequently, it can be hard to take
scientific reports seriously, but credibility will
improve with consensus across a wider variety of
disciplines. We ought to consider as well that even
pessimists will try to sound more optimistic than they
are, in order to convince others that we still have hope
and time. We see a lot of Titanic deck chair
rearrangements in the scientific and academic journals,
but we ought to be paying attention as well to the
interdisciplinarians, who may be a little too far out
ahead of the hard science and evidence, and who are
still unable to provide anything close to precise
numbers. This may not be such a good reason to ignore
them.
A wicked problem is overwhelming by definition.
There is an emotional reaction to this, often
characterized by denial, or paralysis, to avoid
cognitive dissonance. A solution which demands that a
large population change its path dependency, values, and
behavior has to work around such a reaction. Look at
green parties and the larger environmental groups. Most
won’t even dare mention a population problem, and not
just for fear of losing members and new recruits. The
problems are too complex for most human minds, and way
too much for committees to handle. Pieces to the needed
work are in fact getting done, but the work is still
getting done only in pieces, and the less glamorous and
obvious pieces are getting neglected to the detriment of
the needed systems thinking. Weizsäcker laments
“Examples of ecological good news are restricted to
local successes concerning pollution control or species
protection, but offer no relief for looming global
disasters.”
It
becomes more than a matter of picking our battles
better. The fight for survival is on several fronts.
Those directing the effort need to keep the larger
picture in mind, understanding both the system and its
many pieces, and tasking individual talents to
individual problems. The objectives need to be
coordinated instead of fragmented. Joseph Tainter uses
agricultural pest control as an example of the problem:
“As the spraying of pesticides exacted higher costs and
yielded fewer benefits, integrated pest management was
developed. This system relies on biological knowledge to
reduce the need for chemicals, and employs monitoring of
pest populations, use of biological controls, judicious
application of chemicals, and careful selection of crop
types and planting dates (Norgaard 1994). It is an
approach that requires both esoteric research by
scientists and careful monitoring by farmers. Integrated
pest management violates the principle of complexity
aversion, which may partly explain why it is not more
widely used.” The only advantage the problem solvers
have over the troublemakers is that the latter are also
unable to see the big picture, and often far too myopic
to see past the next quarterly earnings report or
doomsday prophesy. Wicked men, with schemes and plans
but no vision, at least have weak spots to exploit.
13.
Carrying Capacity, from Maximum Down to Optimum
A distinction needs to be drawn here between maximum and
optimum carrying capacity. Both must absolutely be
understood as sustainable in the very long-term. Both
should count the number of people able to live healthy,
good, educated, and meaningful lives, and not the number
of people who could survive here in poverty, ignorance,
and squalor, or doing nothing more than tending their
gardens and eating vegetables. Carrying capacity is
vastly more complicated than simply dividing current
population by someone’s calculation of the number of
Earths we would need to support it, especially when
these calculations omit a significant number of impacts
and variables. This is the basis of the Earth Overshoot
Day calculations, which at least acknowledges that we
are already in significant unsustainable overshoot at
present population levels. By far the most grievous
omission in most numbers is an allowance for permitting
the non-human life on Earth to truly thrive. But there
are others, discussed below.
The largest portions of the difference between our maximum and optimum capacities, as seen here, can be found in three of the dimensions discussed above: 1) The Dimension of Contingency and Surplus means not consuming everything that we are able to consume, but learning to defer gratification and allow the resilience in our existential buffers to replenish. 2) The Dimension of Living Standards and Development means raising all of our survivors out of actual poverty, so that they can meet a fuller spectrum of human needs, and particularly throughout childhood and without regard to gender. And 3) The Dimension of Wilderness and Deep Ecology means outgrowing our human exceptionalism, along with our cognitive playpens of nationalism, patriotism, and religious affiliation, and even outgrowing our humanism, to become not just cosmopolitans but true Terrans, living symbiotically with all our relations. Yes, we can live here at our maximum capacity, but this is not living as well. We would have just enough of nature left to get by.
The largest portions of the difference between our maximum and optimum capacities, as seen here, can be found in three of the dimensions discussed above: 1) The Dimension of Contingency and Surplus means not consuming everything that we are able to consume, but learning to defer gratification and allow the resilience in our existential buffers to replenish. 2) The Dimension of Living Standards and Development means raising all of our survivors out of actual poverty, so that they can meet a fuller spectrum of human needs, and particularly throughout childhood and without regard to gender. And 3) The Dimension of Wilderness and Deep Ecology means outgrowing our human exceptionalism, along with our cognitive playpens of nationalism, patriotism, and religious affiliation, and even outgrowing our humanism, to become not just cosmopolitans but true Terrans, living symbiotically with all our relations. Yes, we can live here at our maximum capacity, but this is not living as well. We would have just enough of nature left to get by.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that we humans aren’t
going to attain to much of this voluntarily. Even
decades down the road from here, there might still be a
majority who deny that we even have a population
problem, who deny that we are parasites, and hundreds of
millions who do little more than pray that the Lord
return and save us by ending it all, by closing up His
shop of horrors on Earth following our liquidation sale.
Our capacity for denial is as intractable as our
parasitism. Still, by definition, unsustainable behavior
leads necessarily to the extinction of that behavior. So
where does this thought experiment leave us, if all of
these carrying capacity dimensions are given due
attention? It’s a SWAG, or “Scientific Wild-Ass Guess”
at this point. But let’s try. You had your spoiler
alert.
Gretchen Daly and the Ehrlichs (1992-1994) haven’t
really distinguished maximum from optimum, but focus
discussion on an optimum. “An optimum population size
should be small enough to guarantee the minimal physical
ingredients of a decent life to everyone.” They have
cautioned that “human population sizes have never, and
will never, automatically equilibrate at some level,”
and that realistically, “a global optimum should be
determined with humanity’s characteristic selfishness
and myopia in mind.” They have also acknowledged the
need for “viable populations in geographically dispersed
parts of the world to preserve and foster cultural
diversity,” and the need to “provide a critical mass in
each of a variety of densely populated areas where
intellectual, artistic, and technological creativity
would be stimulated.” They further note (nota bene)
that “an optimum population size would also be small
enough to ensure the preservation of biodiversity. This
criterion is motivated by both selfish and ethical
considerations. Humanity derives many important direct
benefits from other species, including aesthetic and
recreational pleasure, many pharmaceuticals, and the
very basis and security of agricultural production.
Furthermore, the human enterprise is supported in myriad
ways by the free services provided by healthy natural
ecosystems, each of which has elements of biodiversity
as key working parts.” and “Morally, as the dominant
species on the planet, we feel homo sapiens should
foster the continued existence of its only known living
companions in the universe.”
Reaching for a number, they write “At the upper end, the present [written in 1994] population of 5.5 billion, with its resource consumption patterns and technologies, has clearly exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it. This is evident in the continuous depletion and dispersion of a one-time inheritance of essential, nonsubstitutable resources that now maintains the human enterprise … On the population side, it is clear that avoiding collapse would be a lot easier if humanity could entrain a gradual population decline toward an optimal number. Our group’s analysis of what that optimum population size might be like comes up with 1.5 to 2 billion, less than one third of what it is today. We attempted to find a number that would maximize human options – enough people to have large, exciting cities and still maintain substantial tracts of wilderness for the enjoyment of outdoors enthusiasts and hermits.”
Reaching for a number, they write “At the upper end, the present [written in 1994] population of 5.5 billion, with its resource consumption patterns and technologies, has clearly exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it. This is evident in the continuous depletion and dispersion of a one-time inheritance of essential, nonsubstitutable resources that now maintains the human enterprise … On the population side, it is clear that avoiding collapse would be a lot easier if humanity could entrain a gradual population decline toward an optimal number. Our group’s analysis of what that optimum population size might be like comes up with 1.5 to 2 billion, less than one third of what it is today. We attempted to find a number that would maximize human options – enough people to have large, exciting cities and still maintain substantial tracts of wilderness for the enjoyment of outdoors enthusiasts and hermits.”
The
1.5 to 2 billion number from Daily and the Ehrlichs was
simplistic in its derivation, using a very limited set
of dimensions, especially using energy. I can’t really
agree with this method, suspecting that this was more of
a later rationalization to support an intuited number.
But this number, given the fuller scope of limiting
dimensions that we’ve looked at here, intuits pretty
well for me too. 2 billion was our number in 1927. From
a socioeconomic and political perspective, it makes
sense that we were at least approaching a maximum
carrying capacity by WWI, perhaps over it when the stock
market crashed in 1929, and well into overshoot by the
start of WWII. And around this time, many more of us
were beginning to notice the environmental damage we
were doing and take major steps into conservation
efforts. We can take factors included in the higher 2
billion “optimum” number, and add to this all of their
remaining undiscussed problems seen in the “Systems
under Siege” surveyed in Chapter 4, and our challenges
with the “Social Order as Environmental Support”
surveyed in Chapter 5, then control these with “honest
accounting,” and relegate “human ingenuity” to a
contingency line. With such a thought experiment, it
seems as though their 2 billion number would serve us a
bit better as a maximum carrying capacity. Remember that
part of our honest accounting must include any
irreversible consumption of our non-renewable natural
capital.
A
long-term optimum carrying capacity will be
significantly lower than the maximum. Daily and the
Ehrlichs claimed that “an optimum size is a function of
the desired quality of life and the resultant per-capita
impacts of attaining that lifestyle on the planet’s life
support systems.” This qualitative phrase “desired
quality“ gives us reason to set some even higher
standards. This number is of course a utopian ideal.
There is a larger set of socioeconomic limits to be
determined here. These would even have to accommodate
some inequity, managed by progressive taxation, possibly
to within an order of magnitude in wherewithal, and
scaled either according to effort or merit. A
progressive taxation should be directly applied to the
mitigation of human impacts, and people should all pay
their proportionate per capita share (including those
who take only the minimum share). The concept of an
economic floor was described in Chapter 9. This is
almost certainly a much higher standard of living than
that attainable by 2 billion. There would still be be a
degree of variety in per-capita income and impacts
associated with a necessary degree of cultural diversity
around the globe. Different cultures meet human needs in
different ways. We are still only looking at global
averages. But the exploiter-exploited model would be
long gone. An optimum would need to preserve personal
freedom and sovereignty, and realistic opportunities for
self-actualization. Aside from varying outcomes,
securing equal rights and opportunities would be a must.
Pay for full-time work would have to allow each person
to escape real poverty. But this will also maintain a
vastly better degree of socioeconomic stability.
Optimum capacity should allow for the “Remediation and
Restoration” surveyed in Chapter 7 as well as the
“Contingency and Surplus” surveyed in Chapter 8. But
most importantly, and most controversially, our
allowances for wilderness and deep ecology would have to
go far beyond any commonly held idea of environmental
services, at least wherever humankind wasn’t using these
for its real necessities, including all of the global
commons that we share with the biosphere. Optimum would
have to take steps that are well beyond the simple
survival of the biosphere demanded by the maximum, and
leave an environment that was fully biodiverse and in
robust good health once again. Even the resources and
capital being used by humanity to meet its own needs
would have to be regarded as a usufruct. Given all of
this, it seems fairly safe to suggest that this utopian
combination would draw optimum human numbers down to
around 1 billion, roughly our population in 1804. That
just doesn’t seem like too much of a setback in exchange
for the world we could have in return, but we might need
to become a lot more sapient to get there. In either
case, maximum or optimum, the only way out of our
present mess runs straight through significant
depopulation and consumptive degrowth. In the big
picture and deep time, there is no downside to that. We
need to have fewer children, live simpler lives, and
really see that there’s more to this world than its
human infestation.
Time, of course, will tell us what these two numbers
were or should have been. But it will make big
difference whether we can manage our population descent
before we really start a dieback or crash. Without
better population management, which now means nothing
less than significant reduction, we may never have the
leisure to govern by vision instead of by crisis. Much
of the smoothness of our civilization’s operations
relies not on our best and brightest minds, but on hive
mind, which in turn requires either things to run
smoothly on their own, or to maintain a systemic
resilience that we are seriously compromising on
multiple fronts by flirting with more than a dozen
tipping points at once. A serious breakdown of order now
will force a very large number of specialists to learn
general skills in too much of a hurry. Our hive mind
could suffer a widespread dementia. The grocery stores
will run out of milk and eggs. The costs of
overpopulation will not just be our nations. It could be
civilization, and with it, the means to come up with our
magical techno-fixes and fly off to mine the asteroids.
Further
Reading
Abegão, João Luís Ramalho. Human
Overpopulation Atlas, Vol. 1. Master’s Thesis,
Universidade do Porto, 2018.
Abegão, João Luís Ramalho. “Where
the Angels Fear to Tread: Immigration, Population and
the Identity Question.” Overpopulation Atlas (June
2019) 20 pp.
Belcher, Oliver, et al. “Hidden
carbon costs of the ‘everywhere war’: Logistics,
geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the
US military.” Wiley Online Library (May, 2019) 16
pp.
Bendell, Jem. “Deep
Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.”
IFLAS Occasional Paper 2 (2018) 36 pp.
Bourcke, Michael, et al. “Accounting
for demand and supply of the biosphere’s regenerative
capacity: The National Footprint Accounts’ underlying
methodology and framework.” Ecological
Indicators 24 (2013) pp. 518–533.
Bradshaw, Corey J. A.,
and Barry W. Brook. “Human
population reduction is not a quick fix for
environmental problems.” PNAS 111-46
(2014) 16610-16615.
Bradshaw, Corey J. A., and Enrico Di Minin. “Socio-economic
predictors of environmental performance among African
nations.” Scientific Reports (2019) 13 pp.
Cafaro, Philip. “Climate
Ethics and Population Policy.” WIREs
Climate Change 3
(2102) 45-61.
Cavicchioli, Ricardo, et al. “Scientists’
warning to humanity:
microorganisms and climate change.” Nature
Reviews (June, 2019) 18 pp.
Coole, Diana. “Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question.” Environmental Politics 1-21 (2012) 21 pp.
Daly, Herman E. Beyond
Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Beacon Press,
1997.
DiBartolomeis, Michael. “An
assessment of acute insecticide toxicity
loading (AITL) of chemical pesticides used on
agricultural land in the United States.” Plos
One (Aug, 2019) 27pp.
Ehrlich, Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich. “The Population Bomb Revisited.” The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1-3 (2009) 9 pp.
Ehrlich, Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich. “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?” Proceedings of the Royal Society (2012) 9 pp.
Ewing, Brad, et al. Ecological
Footprint Atlas 2010. Global
Footprint Network (2010) 113 pp.
Green
New Deal. Full text of House Resolution 109, 2019. 7
pp.
Hawken, Paul, Amory
Lovins, and Hunter Lovins. Natural
Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. US Green
Building Council, 2000.
416 pp.
Heigham, Steve. “Cultural
evolution and neoliberalism.” The Ecologist.org
(June, 2019. 6 pp.
IPBES. “Media
Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’;
Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’,” IPBES
(2019) 11 pp. Read
Draft Chapters.
Kingsnorth, Paul and Dougald Hine. Uncivilization:
The Dark Mountain Manifesto. Dark Mountain Project
(2009) 68 pp.
Kuhlemann, Karin. “Any
size population will do?: The fallacy of aiming for
stabilization of human numbers.” The
Ecological Citizen 1-2 (2018)
pp. 181–9.
Kuhlemann, Karin. “Complexity,
creeping normalcy, and conceit: sexy and unsexy
catastrophic risks." Emerald
Publishing, Ltd. (2018) 18 pp.
Levin, Kelly, et al. “Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change.” Policy Sciences 45-2 (2012) pp 123–152.
Loladze, Iraki. “Hidden shift of the ionome of plants exposed to elevated CO2 depletes minerals at the base of human nutrition.” eLife 3 (2014) 11 pp. See also
Malthus, Thomas. “An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society.” London, 1798. 134 pp.
Meadows, Donella, Jorgen
Randers, and Dennis Meadows. Limits
to Growth: The 30-Year Update. Earthscan (2004) 363 pp.
Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in
Systems: A Primer. Sustainability Institute (2008)
235 pp.
Mesarovic, Mihajlo D. and
Eduard Pestel. Mankind
at the Turning Point: The Second Report to the Club of
Rome. E.P.
Dutton, 1974.
Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment
Morandín-Ahuerma, Indra, et al. “Socio–Ecosystemic
Sustainability.” Sustainability 11 (2019) 26 pp.
Motesharrei, Safa, et al. “Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies.” Ecological Economics 101 (2014) pp. 90-102.
Nooten, George A. “Sustainable Development and Nonrenewable Resources- A Multilateral Perspective.” Open-File Report (2002) 6 pp.
Norgaard, Richard B. Development
Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Coevolutionary
Revisioning of the Future. Routledge,
1994.
Ranganathan, Janet, et al. “How to
Sustainably Feed 10 Billion People by 2050, in 21
Charts.” World Resources Institute, July,
2019. 14 pp. A good example of dreaming instead of
thinking: to simply say “increase fish supply” does
nothing to increase fish supply, especially while the food
chain is failing.
Ripple, et al. “World
Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.” Bioscience 67-12 (2017)
1026-1028.
Rocha, Juan C., et al. “Cascading
Regime Shifts Within and Across Scales.” Preprint of
text in Science 362-6421
(2018) pp. 1379-1383. See links at Watts.
Spratt, David and Ian Dunlop. “Existential
climate-related security risk: a Scenario Approach.”
Breakthrough policy paper (May, 2019) 11 pp.
The Royal Society. People
and the Planet. The
Royal Society Science Policy Centre, 2012. 134 pp. Summary
and Recommendations.
Steffen, Will, et al. “Trajectories
of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” PNAS 15-33
(2018) pp. 8252–8259.
Tainter, Joseph A. “Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies.” From Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, Island Press, 1996.
Trainer, Ted. “A Limits to Growth Critique of the Radical Left.” Simplicity Institute Report 14b, (2014) 27pp.
United Nations. “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” (2015) 41 pp. This is a another delusional document, not recommended for its wisdom, but it’s eye-opening.
Watson, Robert, ed. Environment
and Development Challenges: The Imperative to Act. Collected
contributions from Blue Planet Laureates. University of
Tokyo Press, 2016.
Watts, Jonathan. “Risks
of 'domino effect' of tipping points greater than
thought, study says.” Guardian,
Dec 20, 2018. The referenced paper is behind the Science journal
paywall, but the angels at Sci-Hub directed me here,
where this and a few more related articles are freely
available.
Weizsäcker, Ernst
Ulrich von and Anders Wijkman. Come
On! : Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the
Destruction of the Planet. Springer,
2018.
Cover photo "Waves of Humanity: sprawling Mexico City,"
photo by Pablo Lopez Luz, published in Overdevelopment,
Overpopulation, Overshoot, found here
as a large, free pdf download.