Growth is Madness!

110 responses so far ↓

• 

  Blair T. Longley // January 17, 2008 at 4:17 pm

  We used to struggle to overgrow others, and thus be able to survive, while they perished. However, we are rapidly reaching the point where everyone attempting to overgrow the others means almost nobody will survive by doing that.

  I found it refreshing to read something that attempted to face these facts that there are currently no signs that human beings are going to change, until that was too little and too late.

  I had already been thinking that way myself for several decades. Although I continued to hold irrational hopes for a series of political miracles, all of the political experiments I have engaged in have confirmed that things are much worse than I would have otherwise liked to believe.

  Even though this article endeavours to be more realistic about the apparent failure of people to face the facts and adapt, until whatever they do ends up too little too late, I still find most of it superficial in that it talks about what we “should” do without respecting the mechanisms of what actually does happen.

  I remember an experimental futurology course that I took at university back in the 1970s where the professor emphasized as much as he could the importance of what actually happens in society and why.

  He pointed out then that the pessimists had way more evidence than the optimists had.

  He pointed out that technological fixes were not enough, although they could help buy some more time.

  The financial system we use does not allow any overall sane ecological accounting of the real world as a whole.

  The financial systems have become electronic frauds backed up with the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

  I agree that the financial systems might be the first to collapse, because they are a house of cards based on huge lies, that only worked because of the history of real violence in the past being able to maintain the social habits that made the threats of more violence in the future be effective enough.

  Every currency in the world is now based on faith, and that faith is based on the history of being able to back up huge lies with coercions.

  However, as those systems create more and more new money out of nothing but the borrowers’ promise to repay, and the ability to enforce those repayments depend on being able to threaten harm to the borrower, this financial house of cards is the most extreme manifestation of the problem of the madness of exponential growth.

  There was a history of debt control and death control. Both have gone into exponential growth.

  More and more new money made out of nothing to pay for strip-mining the planet, and more and more weapons of mass destruction to be able to back up the debt collection.

  Now we have trillions of new dollars being made out of nothing every year, and weapons that are trillions of times more powerful than anything that ever existed before in history.

  Both of our debt and death controls have grown exponentially, based on huge lies backed up with lots of violence. However, the violence did not make the lies become true, but only enabled those lies to get further and further away from reality and out of touch with real limits, since their social success was based on some bullies being able to get away with bullshit.

  We could make the money out of nothing to pay to strip-mine resources, and we could back that up by being able to overkill people many, many times.

  However, the resources were only there to strip-mine once, and after killing somebody once, it does not matter if there are enough weapons to kill them trillions of more times.

  Yet, all of our social habits and political institutions were evolved in times when those things were not yet true, and none of our behaviours are yet related to those realities, but rather are based on realities that no longer exist. Thus our difficulties that all our habitual behaviours have become insane.

  For those few who have enough information, intelligence and imagination, we are sweating it in the sweltering hot box of anxiety in the relative calm before the social storms that we can see brewing on the horizon of history.

  The paragraph that I found most unrealistic in the above article was the following:

  “The sustainable community of the future will need to have a population in the thousands to be viable. It must have a strict population control policy and environmental focus to remain sustainable and always look to the long-term future. Decisions should be made by the population as a whole; perhaps all members would be expected to spend a year as part of a governing council.”

  When people did not agree, they ended up resolving the conflict by fighting, and those who were best at being dishonest and violent ended up prevailing.

  That is what made the kind of civilization that we live in now. I see nothing in the paragraph I quoted above that has any realistic attitude towards the kinds of death controls that it would take to make strict population controls work.

  I see nothing in the paragraph that I quoted that explains why democracy is going to work when the established systems of death control break down.

  The way I cope with these facts is regard human behaviour as going down the path of least resistance, the same as everything else does in nature.

  We can build damns, and channel water, and within the law of entropy, we can still even pump water uphill somewhat.

  However, we live in an exploding universe, and thus water runs down hill.

  Future surviving human beings will still live inside the laws of thermodynamics and information.

  Unless there is some unthinkable miracle to get out of that context, then we are going to see our real ecologies of forces and symbols continue to evolve within the laws of the conservation of energy and the increase of entropy.

  Any genuine sustainable system in the future will have to be an ecology that is based on new systems of lies and coercions.

  Talking about population controls without talking about death controls is silly.

  Indeed, what we need, and will really get, is the evolution of new systems of death controls that make new systems of debt controls.

  The reality of death controls will make the reality of debt controls.

  The problems we have now are that our debt controls are huge frauds, and our death controls are similarly out of touch with reality.

  As possible triple whammies, such as peak oil, climate change, and people fighting with each other over the consequences of those things, all converge in the foreseeable future, we will be forced to face real facts about so many things that we are getting away with lying to ourselves about now.

  Beginning to face the facts that exponential growth will end in catastrophic collapse and chaos is the catalyst to thinking through how to make those genocides evolve into sustainable systems of death control where the rates of robbery reach an ecology with a sustainable dynamic equilibrium.

  We need to evolve a new monetary system that is based on more of a truth standard.

  We have to face the fact that Spaceship Earth is our lifeboat, and live inside of that. Even though the solar system has at least a trillion times more resources than planet Earth does, that still would not be enough to sustain endless exponential growth.

  Everything that is happening to human beings is that they are being forced to grow up and face the facts that they live in one spaceship that is their lifeboat, and that any future groups of people are going to be living in even more intense varieties of the same situation.

  What we are doing now is acting like children that refuse to become adults.
  Spaceship Earth is in a state of mutiny, and our lifeboat is threatened to be overloaded and sink … leaving a life raft, if we are lucky, that would be even more precarious than the lifeboat was … etc. …

  Human beings fundamentally act like robbers in their environment, and they lived by fighting with each other to see who would rob whom, and tried to reproduce as much as possible in order to have the biggest gang of robbers to defeat the other gangs of robbers.

  All of that has led to where we are now, and only by facing those facts and developing radical ways to evolve within the context of those facts might some of us being able to survive the exponential growth phase we are in now.

  The most important things we need are a new military ethics, for a new age warfare, that does effective and efficient death control, that will enable sustainable human ecology, that will make it possible to have a sustainable industrial ecology, that will integrate the natural ecology.

  The real way we are going to get there is along the path of least resistance.

  There is going to be more and more growth, until it eventually collapses, and then there will be genocides.

  Transforming those genocides to evolve new systems of death control is what may happen.

  Understanding that, and working with it, and through it, are our best real hopes.

  Right now, we have extremely well developed systems of death control that are as dishonest about themselves as possible.

  Right now, it is practically impossible to talk rationally about death control in public, even though it controls and regulates everything else.

  Everything begins and ends with militarism. Adapting to weapons that are trillions of times more powerful is the biggest challenge, and the way to do that is develop a real, radical, revolutionary military ethics.

  We are headed towards martial law, as a phase of the collapse caused by exponential growth going into gross overshoot.

  What we should try to do is to transform that martial law into something that works. Of course, that still seems as improbable as any of the other political miracles that I like to daydream about.

  Without a breakthrough in understanding death control, that reconciles artificial selection with natural selection, then martial law will be another step towards dismal failure and even worse collapse into deeper chaos.

  The difficulty of the human species growing up is that we have to stop believing in childish fairy tales and impossible ideals.

  We have to build everything real out of real forces, and those real forces are robberies. Those robberies were what make it possible for social stories that are lies to have prevailed.

  We have been able to use dishonesty backed up with violence to live, but, in the process of doing that, we have convinced ourselves to believe in our own huge lies.

  We can not change the laws of nature. We can not stop being robbers in our environment with the potential to reproduce at an exponential rate.

  However, we could and should change the social stories that we tell ourselves that deny and suppress those truths. We are still going to have bullies, but we should stop believing in their old bullshit.

  A new military ethics, a new kind of bullies’ bullshit, is what we need more than anything else to adapt to the triumphs of science and technology understanding the world better, and being able to make our machines work trillions of times better than they ever did before in history.

  A greater use of information and higher consciousness in our death control is what is necessary, and is the only thing that might evolve to make it possible for human beings to survive having science that works.

  The article above is correct that a sustainable society “must have a strict population control policy.”

  However, I do not get the impression that the writer has thought through enough of what that means, and how it might really exist and evolve to be.

  Any strict population control is a death control system that requires military ethics.

  Warfare is the oldest and best developed social science, and it is warfare that has to undergo the most profound paradigm shifts, to enable human beings to survive in the future.

  Warfare ran the death controls, that directed the growth of civilization. New age warfare has to change the death controls to change the direction of civilization.

  As long as any human beings at all survive, the chronic political problems will stay the same.

  If exponential growth is pushed until it causes uncontrollable collapse, then there will be martial law and genocides.

  Really planning for the future is being open and flexible to how to try to direct the martial law and genocides to become new sustainable systems of death control.

  Things will continue to go down the path of least resistance, and building systems of resistance to change that path are done within that overall context.

  The bullies’ bullshit about democracy does not describe the real world now, and more of the same are not going to be the real solutions in the future.

  Real death control systems will grow, and die, and new systems be reborn to grow again in that context.

  A dynamic equilibrium of the real rates of robbery is what exists now, and will be punctuated by the collapse of that equilibrium, to change state to some new one.

  Although I found this article to be refreshing in that it tries to face the facts that we seem already committed to exponential growth overshooting into collapse and chaos, I did not find it deep enough in its understanding of the mechanisms that are driving that to happen, which also will be the real mechanisms that must change to cope with that, and eventually, perhaps, transform to become new mechanisms that cope with that having actually happened.

• 

  Paul Chefurka // January 17, 2008 at 6:02 pm

  Well, well, well.

  Ken, I am in 100% agreement with your analysis and your conclusions. I’ve been thinking along precisely the same lines regarding the convergence of ecological, energy and economic catastrophe for a while now. The problems we face are indeed insuperable, and I believe we need at this point to be putting all our energies toward facilitating the survival of small, widely distributed groups to carry our species through the bottleneck.

  I have a slightly different orientation regarding the nature of those seed communities, though. One of my biggest concerns is about the degree of resilience our species will need to come through the bottleneck. I think that planned communities lack the necessary resilience. This is mainly due to the fact that the necessity of planning will reduce both their number and their overall diversity. I think we may be better off with as large a number of such communities as we can generate, organized in as many ways as possible, even though some or even many may seem sub-optimal. We have no way of knowing in advance what forms will succeed and what will fail, so diversity is our best defense. They also need to be as disconnected as possible from each other to reduce the risk of failure cascades.

  Fortunately, I think the seeds for such communities are already in place, though they tend at this point to be more communities of interest than physical villages.

  The signs I see pointing towards this potential are outlined in <an article on my web site as follows:

  The question for me has become, “How do we ensure that the seeds are in place for a value set that will survive through and bloom after the bottleneck, a value set that will ensure that the next cycle of civilization has a chance at sustainability even in such a badly damaged, resource-poor world?” How will we ensure that our descendants will eventually inherit a sustainable world, even though our current situation is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination?

  I’ve become convinced over the last couple of months that the seeds for such a transformation have already been planted. They are even resilient enough to make it through the bottleneck, and they carry the correct values for the rebirth I suggest.

  American activist Paul Hawken has just written a tremendously important book called “Blessed Unrest” in which he describes a set of one to two million local, independent, citizen-run environmental and social justice groups. These groups exist world-wide, and each is acting on local problems of its own choosing. There is no overarching ideology beyond “making the world a better place”, there is no unifying organization, no white male vertebrate leader setting the agenda. As a result the movement is extremely resilient - no government action anywhere can shut it down, even though individual groups may be suppressed. These groups make up the largest (though unrecognized) social movement the world has ever seen. For a glimpse of some of these organizations, take a look at the web site WiserEarth.org.

  Hawken sees this movement as part of humanity’s immune system. While I like the metaphor and think it is exactly correct, I believe the importance of these groups is much greater than just their efforts to mitigate an unavoidable collapse. These groups have been called into existence by the world’s dis-ease, and do two things: they work to fix local problems now (which will mitigate some local effects of the collapse), but more importantly they act as carriers for the values of cooperation, consensus, nurturing, recognition of interdependence, acceptance of limits, universal justice and the respect for other life. Those are precisely the values that a civilization will need to achieve stability and sustainability. To top it all off, many of these groups are led by women or espouse specifically matrifocal values, one attribute I sthink is essential for any sustainable civilization.

  At the risk of sounding sentimental, I call these groups the antibodies in Gaia’s bloodstream.

  I am convinced we will not save this civilization, and will lose a large fraction of humanity in the process. But I’m equally convinced that thanks to the seeds that have already been planted in these groups we have a shot at a much better one in a couple of hundred years. The crucial change in perspective required to see the hope in this is to stop looking from here forward into the decline, and instead look backward from a position out two hundred years and imagine what it will take to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization from the ashes of this one. The values required are already embodied in a resilient organization, enough of whose elements will survive to transmit a sustainable value set into the ecologically damaged, resource-depleted world we will bequeath to the future.

  Another area in which I’d like to add a different perspective is on the root causes of population growth. I just wrote this article yesterday:

  When most people look around the world today they see a set of problems. They see energy/technology problems. They see ecological/environmental problems. They see economic problems. If they are slightly deeper thinkers they may see population problems. I believe they are all suffering from vision problems.

  What most people see as “technological problems” are, in my estimation, more correctly seen as the set of symptoms of the real underlying problem, symptoms that are that are manifesting themselves in the technological arena.

  In the same sense, what people interpret as “ecological problems” are the set of symptoms that are manifesting in the world’s ecology.

  And what people call “economic problems” are merely the set of symptoms that are manifesting in the world’s economy.

  The underlying problem is the same in all three cases. Humanity is an overly successful species with no effective predators, the ability to manipulate its environment on a planetary scale, and the perception that it is apart from that environment.

  I actually disagree with the spreading perception that the core environmental problem is human population growth. I used to think it was, but I now realize that population growth is just another symptom of that same problem. You can prove this to yourself with a simple thought experiment:

  Imagine that we miraculously stabilized our population tomorrow, at our current 6.6 billion people. Would that fix the problems of resource depletion, ecological devastation and the economic instability caused by our insistence on continual material growth? I maintain it wouldn’t. After all, those problems are still worsening in places where populations have already stabilized, or are even in outright decline.

  Addressing any one of the problem areas - energy/technological, ecological, economic or population - would still leave us with problems in the other three. We can (and will) tinker around in each of these areas, because that’s our Buddha-nature — human beings are innate tinkerers. We will inevitably do things to ease the situation in each of those symptom domains, but none of that tinkering will, or even can, address the fundamental problem:
  ***********************
  Humanity appears to have evolved without a crucial internal self-restraint mechanism. That happened because, as is the case for every other species, those restraints were readily available within the environment - mainly resource scarcity, predation and disease. Because those external restraints were available, selection didn’t endow us with internal restraints. They simply weren’t needed. In fact, during our early time as a species, any internal self-restraint mechanism acting in addition to the external restraints would have been counter-productive, and so would have been actively selected out of our makeup.

  However, as we developed the intellectual ability to circumvent those external restraints — through extinguishing all large predators, and developing agriculture, mining and medicine — we outfoxed ourselves. In the absence of either internal or external restraints we are left with no effective way to reign in our genetic urge for expansion. All that remains is our intellectual capacity to foresee outcomes and to regulate our behaviour through reason. As far as I can tell, mere reason is not a strong enough counterbalance to our innate behavioural tendencies. The evidence of this is no further away than the $2500 Tata Nano.
  ***********************
  So I hold out no hope whatever that our tinkering will solve the “real” dilemma of humanity. We are behaving exactly as our evolution intended, and it’s unlikely that we will stop. What we need to do is to figure out ways in which our feeble reason can create the necessary conditions for the continued survival of our species (and perhaps some of our civilization), despite both our unconstrained, innate urge to grow and our glorious but ultimately tragic ability to reason.

  These aspects of our nature that are at the root of all our troubles however, and we will need to be enormously cunning to outmaneuver them.

  You have my complete respect for your clear-eyed comprehension of the problem, its scale, and the probable outcome. Thanks for writing this.

• 

  Steven Earl Salmony // January 17, 2008 at 7:21 pm

  Dear Blair and Paul,

  I completely agree with both of you, with Ken Whitehead and also with a growing number of contributors to blogs like this one.

  The point I have been feebly trying to make is simply this: the adamant and relentless pursuit of fossil fuel-based economic globalization, marked so starkly as it is by the rampant expansion of unbridled business activities we are seeing today, could possibly result in either cataclysmic ecologic challenges or economic collapse or both in these early years of Century XXI.

  A global economy, one that demands cheap fossil fuels as its primary source of energy, could lead life as we know it to a place named nowhere, I suppose.

  Could any manmade economic structure, however religiously defended and idolized, ever be judged more vital to human wellbeing and life as we know it than God’s Creation as a fit place for human habitation?

• 

  Janne Haarni // January 18, 2008 at 12:36 am

  Hear, hear! I totally agree with Paul about the “solution”. Diversity is the key to survival. Nobody knows what the “winning” strategy will be - and it certainly can be different in different places.

  Of course, these planned communities can also work. But they are not the only way.

• 

  Trinifar // January 18, 2008 at 1:01 am

  While I appreciate the courage it takes for a mainstream academic (meaning one participating in a PhD program) to express these thoughts, I don’t agree with the presentation or the conclusions.

  John writes, “Ken Whitehead starts with a different assumption — that the magnitude of the challenge upon us and the history of our responses to similar challenges makes a collapse of today’s civilization inevitable.”

  That assumption is so dramatic that presenting it and drawing conclusions from it without any attempt at motivation is irresponsible. For that, I fault Ken as its author and John for giving him a forum. There is much in Ken’s piece with which I agree, but I have this (possibly naive) notion that dramatic conclusions (especially) should be motivated by evidence and rational argument, not appeals to Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Doing otherwise merely contributes to the doomsday literature which is by no means lean.

  So that’s my “tisk, tisk, shame on you” diatribe.

  I’m not so naive as to not recognize a “cry for help” or “can’t you see what might happen” narrative which is what this is and what I wish John had labeled as such. It makes Danny Bloom look like a sage with his polar cities meme. (Apologizes to Danny who I think knows what he is doing.)

  If it needs to be said, Ken should be making a case for why his projections should be believed, why “Civilisation as we know it will no longer exist within 30 years”, why “we are heading towards a major ecological breakdown which the majority of us are unlikely to survive.”

  I’m so old school I believe in evidence first, ranting and radical projections second. Shit, anyone can make crap up. That’s easy (Asimov wrote 500 books). Showing why it should be believed is the hard part. Get to fucking work and spare me the histrionics — or at least label them as such.

  [Whew! Got that off my chest. It's not about Ken or John, it's about me and what I care about. It's about the GIM community of which Magne, Steve, Paul, and maybe Danny if he hangs around are a part.]

• 

  Trinifar // January 18, 2008 at 11:31 am

  I have a rather angry comment in the moderation queue which is probably best deleted when John gets to it.

  The non-angrgy version is just this: I don’t see value in doomsday literature and have a strong, visceral reaction to the idea of throwing up our hands and planning for survival post-collapse. Danny Bloom’s Polar Cities may be great alternative messaging. Ken’s piece here is just deflating.

• 

  Paul Chefurka // January 18, 2008 at 11:55 am

  Trinifar,

  I understand your reaction, but I urge you to take a wider view.

  There are a lot of people advocating for a huge variety of outlooks and actions. this diversity in approaches is a good thing, even if it includes things like ethanol for happy motoring or planning post-collapse communities. We are in serious trouble here, and we need to be examining all possible options. There are enough people doing this that no one needs to involve themselves in aspects of it that run counter to their sensibilities.

  However, if we refuse to consider possible outcomes because they are distasteful, we run the risk of missing important avenues of exploration. Declaring such musings to be beyond the pale seems little different than the mainstream rejection of all discussions of overpopulation. After all, Ken’s postulated future amounts to little more than an extension of the ideas of overpopulation and overshoot with the added wrinkle that evolutionary psychology will constrain our response domain.

  I’m at a loss to understand why such mental explorations seem to have no value for you. To me they seem to be essential, though I’d be the first to admit that my opinion is coloured by the fact that my research and analysis has propelled me to precisely the conclusions as Ken.

• 

  Blair T. Longley // January 18, 2008 at 12:13 pm

  I agree with the theory behind Paul’s comment about diversity providing adaptability. That is common throughout the ethical parables that can be learned from studying evolution.

  Consider that the dinosaurs are not extinct, rather, the most improbable dinosaurs were the birds, and they have flourished.

  Human societies might be like that in the far future. The most improbable of societies might be the ones to finally survive.

  However, I will return to my main point that the reason the world does not have significant diversity in human societies now is that globalized gangs of pirates went everywhere, and assimilated every one of those diverse societies by force.

  We have a global fascist plutocracy that ate all of the other different cultures.

  I agree that “leaderless resistance” is about the only kind that seems possible at the present time. However, I still maintain that, eventually, the Sovereigns’ power to rob and kill will matter the most.

  Alternatives have to survive, and eventually a system of alternatives is necessary for survival in an integrated Spaceship Earth, or any other holistic spaceship of life.

  The article above rightly worries that:

  “the coming crisis will result in millions of refugees, with a mass movement towards areas which are still capable of producing food. This is likely to be the main threat to the survival of many of these planned sustainable communities.”

  The most important aspect of any invasion of refugees is that they may be armed and dangerous.

  Indeed, the paradox of being prepared for bad times is that one makes one’s preparations a target for those who were not as prepared. What happens if you work so hard to build a more sustainable system, and then the first thing that happens during a disaster is that the armed forces of your own country commandeer it?

  While I agree with more diversity of alternatives, I will continue to maintain that the most important of these is the alternative forms of death control.

  When we concern ourselves with long-term survival, the short-term struggle to see who can kill whom first will still take precedence.

  The point is that diversity is already collapsing. Every native cultural has already been wiped out or hybridized beyond recognition, as it was assimilated.

  The real world problems are already due to the triumph of dishonesty backed up with violence, and any genuine solutions have to work through that reality.

  I think it is very worthwhile to attempt thought experiments about what would be necessary after the current civilization that controls the world finally collapsed.

  I think those thought experiments converge with those who attempt to do thought experiments about how to change the current civilization to prevent it from collapsing.

  I think they are two sides of the same problem. I think that only focusing on what we should do to change to enable civilization to survive is assisted by focusing on what would be necessary to try to survive even after the dominant civilization failed to adapt and did not survive.

  I think it is a bad idea to only talk about how we could change to enable our current civilization to survive.

  These things are mostly thought experiments, which attempt a diagnosis of the problems, to try to find treatments.

  I happen to believe that the prognosis for the current global civilization is very bad. I hope I am wrong. However, even if I am wrong, then it still helps to gain perspective on our current problems to try to imagine what would be necessary to try to survive after our current civilization died.

  That is why I try to blend artificial selection with natural selection, rather than separate them. That is why I try to understand how death control really works now, to try to understand how it might be changed to really work in the future.

  Right now, it is huge lies backed up with coercions that are organizing what human beings are doing. That continues to be the dominant factor within any possible future, since things will always still go down their own path of least resistance.

  I sympathize that it is a lot nicer to work on lower level alternatives, inside of the established systems of death control that one takes for granted.

  However, the highest level alternative is alternative death control, and working on that most important of problems can not take for granted the established systems.

• 

  Paul Chefurka // January 18, 2008 at 12:38 pm

  Blair,

  I understand where you’re coming from, but frankly the semantic load of phrases like “fascist plutocracy” and “death control” put me off. That sort sort of value-driven language makes attempts at reasoned debate uncomfortable, and may even make it impossible, depending on the philosophy and personalities of the debaters. I agree that our civilization is being driven by various flavours of authoritarianism, corporatism and fascism, and that they need to be resisted, but language that borders on sloganeering isn’t helpful. We are not a rabble to be roused.

  Having said that, have you run across the book “The Parable of the Tribes” by Andrew Schmookler? It’s a look at power relationships that is based on a very simple thesis: power always wins. The parable itself is very concise:

  Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one choose peace, and that one is ambitious for expansion and conquest? What can happen to the others when confronted by an ambitious and potent neighbor? Perhaps one tribe is attacked and defeated, its people destroyed and its lands seized for the use of the victors. Another is defeated, but this one is not exterminated; rather, it is subjugated and transformed to serve the conqueror. A third seeking to avoid such disaster flees from the area into some inaccessible (and undesirable) place, and its former homeland becomes part of the growing empire of the power-seeking tribe. Let us suppose that others observing these developments decide to defend themselves in order to preserve themselves and their autonomy. But the irony is that successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power, and if the threatening society has discovered ways to magnify its power through innovations in organization or technology (or whatever), the defensive society will have to transform itself into something more like its foe in order to resist the external force.

  It explains a lot about human interactions in a pleasingly parsimonious manner. Given your particular interests and worldview, I thought it might be a useful tool for you.

• 

  George Mobus // January 18, 2008 at 2:57 pm

  Seeds through the bottleneck

  Ken Whitehead said:
  “Unless humans change their entire philosophy and way of life such band-aid solutions will do little to avert the coming crisis. Unfortunately, powerful national and corporate interests will never allow the kind of fundamental changes that are necessary to address these issues constructively.”

  Ken,

  I fully share your sentiments regarding the impending collapse and consequences. But I have a slightly different take on the causes that might provide insights into the above referenced “national and corporate *interests*”. I also suspect, if I am right about the “cause” then it provides a potential insight into what kinds of seeds we should focus on preserving for after the bottleneck.

  For the last ten years I have reshifted my research focus from the emulation of natural intelligence in machines (see: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/research.html for a synopsis of my research and links to details) to a related but much broader issue — wisdom.

  For many years I have observed the foibles of humanity in something like disbelief. My main question has been: If we are so smart, why is the world the way it is, and seemingly getting worse? I discovered that intelligence is not the key. Nor is creativity. These are the main cognitive facilities that have been rapidly evolving in Homo sapiens for the past 100,000 years or so (see reference list links from above URL). In my studies I ran across several references to the psychology of wisdom which I found intriguing and followed. In a nut shell here is what I have discovered.

  Homo sapiens is misnamed. I now think that humans did indeed evolve a capacity for higher moral judgment based on two key elements of what I now call sapience. The difference between wisdom per se and sapience is that the latter is directly tied to brain functions of the prefrontal cortex, whereas wisdom also relies on internalizing the lessons of life experience. The two are strategic thinking and systems thinking. The former can briefly be described as the ability to coordinate one’s life with the world, including other humans. The latter is the ability to comprehend causes and effects through dynamic systems relations — to see the world as a whole and understand the interconnections between seemingly disparate objects and processes.

  But the evolution of that facility was just getting purchase (through, it turns out, the advent of grand parenting) and was finding selective value in terms of family and tribe and territory when an explosion in cleverness (the combination of intelligence and creativity) led to agriculture and a complete restructuring of social needs. What had been a growing reliance of wisdom (generally described in the psychology literature as tacit knowledge used to make moral judgments in complex social problems) to govern the life of a tribe was irrevocably altered. The needs of villages and farming (e.g. location protection) put more emphasis on the more aggressive and manipulative aspects of human nature. The Machiavellian was selected for from that time onward. And wisdom (sapience) has taken a back seat ever since. While systems thinking has still been needed it tends to be restricted to solving local technical problems rather than global social problems.

  The end result is that today we are a species that should be called Homo calidus (man the clever) rather than sapiens. I submit that the problems we are facing are due to an incomplete or minimal competency in sapience. Our brains are simply not sufficiently developed, on average, to develop the wisdom needed to base good judgments on global issues. None of the current batch of world leaders and none of the wannabe’s currently running for US president display any great signs of wisdom in my view.

  That doesn’t mean that the genetic basis for sapience is not still in the species extant today. There is sparse evidence that some individuals still possess at least the genetic propensity for sapience such that if the behavioral traits associated with sapience were of selective advantage then it is conceivable that over a span of, say 10,000 to 1M years a new, robust species of humans might emerge that would be better equipped, mentally, to be the basis of a new civilization with a new capacity to understand the consequences of their integration with the natural world. I have christened the new species Homo eusapiens — man the truly wise.

  I would like to suggest that the seeds we should focus on would be the genetic basis of higher sapience (not higher intelligence!) and a form of nearly indestructible yet readily recoverable recording of the most important knowledge that you mention in the article. It would be an ark with people who showed the highest capacity for wisdom and a library of knowledge gained by our species that could be used in the future by the new. I doubt very much that we should try to, or even could, preserve other species other than food stuffs. As several have pointed out, it is impossible to predict what will happen so plans, per se, might not be very useful. Preparation would be focused on preservation and genetics with just the hope that symbol manipulating sentience will survive on this planet, but certainly no guarantees.

  Meanwhile, I still exert effort to prevent the worst case scenario.

  George Mobus
  Assoc. Professor
  Institute of Technology
  http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/

• 

  John Feeney // January 18, 2008 at 4:32 pm

  I’m travelling for a few days with limited Web access, but see a fascinating discussion it taking place. (Welcome, Janne and George.) I’ll try to offer my two bits when I get back home in a few days.

  In the meantime, if a comment gets stuck in moderation or the spam filter, be patient and I’ll free it up just as soon as I can get online again.

• 

  Ashit Shanker Saxena // January 19, 2008 at 5:45 am

  Ken is not shying away from calling a spade a spade and, in this case, I do not mind his crying ‘wolf’ at all, specially if all of us here seem to feel in their innards that what Ken is positing is very, very likely to transpire.

  Trin, ‘reasoning’ works sort-of-adequately while the adopted paradigm continues to be ‘workable’. However, when the artificially-imposed-on-the-ambient-environment paradigm begins heading towards a breakdown, the intuition must and does step in; the rational ‘constructs’ holding up that paradigm have begun to fray and we can all sense the oncoming breakdown.

  Using a geological event as an example, fauna and certain tribal peoples were all aware of the oncoming tsunami in SE Asia and were conspicuously absent from the areas hit by that visitation. I am sure there must have been other ‘reasonable’ humans waiting for research and evidence to confirm to them that the tsunami was indeed coming or, after the fact, that it was indeed a tsunami that had just hit them.

  Paul, I find your conclusions very comprehensive in the complexity of their consideration as well as your assertion that we cannot really anticipate what will work. We are trying to imagine what uncharted territory is likely to be served up to humans. I completely agree with you on the population issue being symptomatic and not causative - a symptom that, I think, has been aided and abetted by all of the ’successes’ of the Age of Reason.

  Paul, with the ‘vision’ thing, could you be pointing at the problem being that of the MIND? If so, I am completely in agreement with you. In fact, it is the inability to see the MIND as causative that we focus on wrestling with the symptoms at the apparent level.

  The Tata Nano is the latest and very logical serving of the current global mind-set.

  sincerely,

  Ashit

• 

  Steven Earl Salmony // January 19, 2008 at 6:46 am

  Dear Friends,

  I do not know how to say what I want to say here. This is not a new a problem for me, as most of you are aware.

  I am only going to begin, in a very brief way, now.

  Trinifar, there are no statements in this thread more important than yours. Regardless of what we are seeing, saying, understanding, as least for me, it would be an absolute mistake to suggest that there is NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE. Who among us could make such a statement?

  As was reported to us in the Qumran Scrolls, “Not one there is that knows the whole tale.” For me, that means the is always a place for hope.

  As Ashit suggests so well, Ken is calling a spade a spade and, yes, a tsumani appears on the far horizon and, yes, the road ahead looks bleak, but that should not mean to any one or all of us that there is not a real foundation for hope in our circumstances.

  We are a small group on a promontory of sorts from where we can see the colossal wave in the offing and, therefore, at some kind of beginning……..

  Always,

  Steve

• 

  Magne Karlsen // January 19, 2008 at 11:08 am

  First, let me express my agreement with Trinifar. I’m definitely not going to start, all of a sudden, to discuss how a relatively small population of “post-collapse survivors” are going to have to organize themselves in order to lead their lives. The reason is simple: I’m just not interested. What I am looking at, is a situation in which humanity overwhelms the Earth and all of its ecosystems, and thus make living conditions impossible for a lot of other lifeforms. I’m thinking of a mass extinction that will not affect us humans all that much. It will be caused by humans, though. Human overgrowth activities will affect the environment in a lot of foreseeable ways, and if we cannot change our ways, well, that would be a pity. But so long as there is food, water and (relatively) fresh air, the human species will show itself quite able to adapt to all sorts of human driven changes to the biosphere.

  I don’t know about Ken Whitehead — he seems to have taken an overdose of Mad Max — but I can assure everyone else here that I’m still looking at a foreseeable future in which more than 10 billion people are alive and kicking, while not a single ice bear is doing the same.

  As far as I know — and I do believe it is knowledge, and not some utopianist dream — we are still up against problems that can and should be solved. As far as I can understand, it is all a question of will-power. And this is the point where it is all starting to depend. Will “westernized humanity” ever be willing to make some sacrifices? It depends. I believe, just like Ken does, that “we must now move beyond free market capitalism and the philosophy of unlimited growth.” — Well, again: it depends.

• 

  Magne Karlsen // January 19, 2008 at 1:04 pm

  Ken: “The problem is that now the ideology of the capitalist age is now so entrenched in society that few are capable of visualising a future which does not involve economic growth.”

  That’s right. — And this is the lesson learnt from the UN’s Climate Change Conference on Bali: the more powerful climate diplomates made it perfectly clear that future economic growth concerns supercedes the environmental plight which the IPCC scientists presents to the world, meaning: if it is not profitable, it cannot be done.

  Ken: “The ideas and philosophies which have served us in the past can have no place in a future society. In particular, the concept of nation states, which protect their own interests at the expense of all others, and corporations, which exist only to make money, are not compatible with a sustainable vision of the future.”

  I’m in total agreement. Solving problems that are global in nature would be much, much easier if only the nation-state could be removed from the picture. You do not need to be much of a philosopher in order to understand that much. But the nation state is not going to disappear from the world map, just because it would be a convenient solution to a long range of problems faced by the whole of humanity. So I think, short term, what should urgently be put in place is an International Code of Environmental Conduct. A ruling and regulating body under the guidance of a reformed United Nation’s structure is what I have in mind. Not that it is ever going to happen, but hey … are we discussing desperate matters that require an openness of mind? … I think so …

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Inequality

  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau

  Now, here’s another mighty problem, — a problem of political and economic philosophy which has been with us ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his first major discourse for the Academy of Dijon, in the year 1754, titled: “What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?”

  Rousseau’s answer was: the institution of property, and especially the ownership of land, is the origin and root cause of inequality among men. And he did not think that it was authorized by natural law. He accused civil society, social and cultural regulations of bringing such an atrocity to the realms of men.

  “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

  - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Full text: http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq.htm

  Now, seriously: less than five percent of the world’s population control more than ninety percent of the property of this planet. — How can that be? And how can that make for a sustainable world system? Well, it beats me. It beats me very hard, too. Because I do understand that I am trespassing here, and making enquiries that the political ruling class and all of the cultural, social, and economic elites of this world do not want to about. And this is where the ruling class is bound to resort to cruelty. I dare say that without doubt in my mind. The institution of property is the holiest of all holy capitalist grounds.

• 

  Magne Karlsen // January 19, 2008 at 1:27 pm

  Yes, I am naïve. But the fact is fact. Almost 7 billion people are sharing one planet that is owned, secured and violently controlled by a fraction of humankind. What is not owned by people or corporations, belongs to nation-states, counties, and religious societies; all capable of calling it a natural fact. I say: this is only a natural fact in-so-much as Eminem is stating a natural fact when he’s saying that he has “the money to have you killed by somebody who has nothing.” — At which point he concludes: “I’m past bluffing.”

  http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eminem/squaredance.html

• 

  George Mobus // January 19, 2008 at 2:42 pm

  Other than the evidence provided by researchers such as Jared Diamond (c.f. “Collapse” the strength of argument for an impending global collapse must come from modeling the factors that led to the collapses of other civilizations applied to the global situation.

  Chief among the factors that determine any system’s density and organizational complexity is the flow of high quality energy to do the work of sustaining the system in dynamic evolution. I would have to say that my personal experience in working with alternative energy systems leads me to conclude that we will never be able to adequately scale up to the level of energy production needed to sustain our current population in time to offset the decline of energy flow due to depletion of fossil fuels.

  I know there is a strong belief that technological breakthroughs will somehow come in time to save us (suspecting that the old saw, “Necessity is the mother of invention” somehow still applies). I am even engaged in developing a Master’s degree in Energy Systems Engineering in the event that such breakthroughs come and we will need people trained in developing the technology (c.f. http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Admin/EnergySystemsEngineering/MSEnergyEng.html)
  So it isn’t the case that I have given up entirely. But the odds that these breakthroughs will come in time are slim, in my opinion. We have gotten close to the maximum conversion efficiencies for most of our alternative energy capture equipment (e.g. photovoltaic cells). While there are marginal increases in efficiency being reported in the press, the fact is that we would need significant increases to supply the kind of energy needs of 7-9 billion people.

  WRT: the notion of collapse and evidence that it is likely: There is no data on such a phenomenon because it has never happened before. We can only surmise that given something like the above considerations and reflection on the lack of psychological factors such as sapience, that unless something truly amazing comes to pass in the technology realm (all of our hope) that collapse is the most likely scenario. It seems prudent to me to consider all possibilities, anyway.

  George Mobus
  http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/

• 

  Trinifar // January 19, 2008 at 5:26 pm

  Paul,

  We are in serious trouble here, and we need to be examining all possible options.

  To use engineering lingo, if you have a large solution space, the first thing to do is take to the plainly useless options off the table so you can concentrate on the ones with potential value.

  Declaring such musings to be beyond the pale seems little different than the mainstream rejection of all discussions of overpopulation.

  Only if one ignores the vast difference between talking about overpopulation and the end of civilization. It’s important to declare foolish musings foolish if for no other reason than sustaining the credibility of more rational thought.

  After all, Ken’s postulated future amounts to little more than an extension of the ideas of overpopulation and overshoot with the added wrinkle that evolutionary psychology will constrain our response domain.

  “Little more than” hardly applies here — even accepting that evolutionary psychology has anything to offer (it’s a field in its infancy, struggling for acceptance).

  Ken says,

  Civilisation as we know it will no longer exist within 30 years. This bleak conclusion is not one I have arrived at lightly. However, wherever I look the evidence suggests that we are heading towards a major ecological breakdown which the majority of us are unlikely to survive.

  His hyperbolic writing (based on nothing but guesswork) is exactly the kind of thing that undercuts the efforts of people who work in this space.

  The main focus should be on sowing the seeds of a future sustainable society… I believe that our best hope lies in developing entirely new sustainable settlements which can act as focal points for the development of a new society.

  “The main focus”! Really, this is just rambling. If packaged as a novel or poetry maybe it has value, but it’s not. It’s Danny’s Polar Cities all over again but without the saving grace of being guerrilla theater.

• 

  Paul Chefurka // January 20, 2008 at 7:00 am

  Trinifar,

  In order to decide that an option is “plainly useless”, you first have to be sure you understand both the problem and the solution under consideration. That’s been a constant theme of my investigations – trying to discover the true shape of the problems the world faces today and the full impact of the proposed “solutions”.

  To understand how this can go drastically wrong we need look no further than the promotion of agrofuels as a solution to both oil depletion and global warming. Contrast that with the fact that Terra Preta, a technology that has a remarkable potential to simultaneously enhance soil fertility, sequester carbon and even supply a bit of liquid fuel, all from a scalable and low-input technology, has so far failed to even enter the debate. Unfortunately Terra Preta has no corporate champion like Archer Daniels Midland or Monsanto. As a result agrofuels are seen as a useful solution (rather than the crime against humanity that they actually are) while Terra Preta, if it is known at all, is dismissed as inconsequential.

  My position is that many of the solutions being proposed today are “plainly useless” when one understands the nature of the problems the world is facing. Beyond agrofuels, that set of useless options includes such things as electric cars, an expansion of nuclear power generation, liquidity injections into the world financial markets, underground CO2 sequestration, fish farming, and pushing the Green Revolution deeper into Africa. My judgment that these “solutions” will actually be damaging is based on my quantitative and qualitative understanding of the nature, scope and interactions of the energy, ecological and economic problems the world faces.

  You seem to take the position that discussions of overpopulation can and should take place absent any consideration of possible extended consequences to our civilization. I think that sterilizes the debate.

  The threat to civilization that Ken and I see so clearly has overpopulation as one of its factors, but it’s by no means the only one. It’s not even the largest one. The threat to industrial civilization starts with the energy changes I outlined in the article “World Energy to 2050” that you reviewed so ably on your blog. That article and the follow-on piece about consequential GDP changes illuminate the nature of the coming population crisis within the context of growing energy and economic constraints. It is seen in the graphs of haves and have-nots, and how the number of have-nots quadruples over the next 40 years.

  There is undoubtedly a population crisis coming in the underdeveloped world. In fact it has already begun, and will only get worse as time goes on. I’m currently working on a third article in that series, one that will quantitatively address Africa’s deteriorating human situation over the next 40 years. While I haven’t finished all the number crunching yet, early indications are pointing to a massive food shortfall starting within the next decade, due to the convergence of declining energy, rising fuel and fertilizer costs, reduced crop yields due to climate change, and a rising population. That convergence will likely prompt the first large scale Malthusian event the world has ever seen, with the potential to kill hundreds of millions outright and shorten the lives of hundreds of millions more. And while Africa may be hit first and hardest, the numbers seem to say that South Asia won’t be far behind.

  Now, deaths in Afrasia (even in very large numbers) don’t necessarily mean the end of civilization. After all, civilization is really a Western phenomenon, and we’re not going to starve to death because we’re too rich for that, right? (I’m half kidding here, but only half kidding.) The coming influences on Western nations will be different from those in Africa, and will primarily hit our industrial base rather than our agriculture. The net oil export crisis described and analyzed by Jeffrey Brown appears to have the potential to reduce the international oil market to an empty tank, and to do it in very short order – perhaps within 30 years. Given our dependence on oil and the evident inability of our national and corporate masters to address the problem, this bodes poorly for the continuation of a culture based on the massive mobility of people and goods.

  If the dominant culture of the planet (basically represented by the OECD) stumbles, at what point does civilization take a hit? What does that phrase even mean? As I’ve said before, the full outcome of this change is unknowable because it looks like it’s going to involve a major non-linearity.

  However, some things can be postulated with reasonable accuracy. One is that the institutions that define a civilization (economic activity, political cohesion, the rule of law etc.) will probably fragment into smaller systems as our ability to transport people and goods at will over long distances diminishes. This fracturing is likely to lead to increased conflicts of various sorts. Some regions will inevitably do better than others, but disparities even between “civilized” regions will probably increase. There is likely to be an upsurge in authoritarian governments and inter-group scapegoating . There will probably be a decline in our ability to maintain widely distributed, highly interconnected, technologically sophisticated systems. That last effect is already being seen in the electrical grid problems spreading through the underdeveloped world.

  So, a Malthusian crisis in Afrasia and an industrial resilience crisis in the West, both of which are quantitatively supportable projections, will happen essentially simultaneously. What kinds of interactions will they generate? Will the potentially vast flow of refugees from the Malthusian areas impact the ability of the industrialized areas to support their own civilizing institutions? Might the West decide to keep those people from swamping the lifeboats? Would decisions like that affect even further the trade ties necessary to maintain a global economic “critical mass”? At what point might economic, technological and social disruptions - all of which flow naturally from those quantitatively supportable projections – make large-scale activities in any of those spheres impossible? If that happens, at what point do you say that civilization as we understand it today is gone?

  In fact it doesn’t even need to be “gone” to make attractive the kinds of village-scale social organizations Ken and I are thinking about. Groupings of that size (insert obligatory reference to Dunbar’s Number) have been successful throughout human history. The fact that I consider them to be an effective bulwark against the kinds of changes I have deduced from the available evidence should not be surprising.

  Will civilization as we know it be gone in 30 years? That depends greatly on how you characterize civilization, and what degree of dissolution you require to declare it gone. Based on the evidence, I certainly think there is a better than even chance that our industrial civilization will undergo a massive transformation within that time. Whether such a transformation qualifies as “civilization as we know it being gone” is open for debate, but I think that is one reasonable description of such changed circumstances.

  Regarding the credibility of the debate, my position is that the circumstances humanity faces over the next generation are so dire that a bit of hyperbole is useful. The situation is itself hyperbolic as far as I can tell. Such contemplations are always loaded with emotion of course, as evidenced by your use of words such as “foolish” and Blair’s use of phrases like “death control”. I’d like to think it’s possible to consider even the possible end of our current cycle of civilization dispassionately and objectively. I therefore think your attempt to proscribe the debate rather than to guide it in directions you might feel more appropriate is unhelpful. In my opinion these matters cry out for good-faith discussion.

  I’m sorry for the length of this response, but I think this is a crucially important topic.

• 

  Magne Karlsen // January 20, 2008 at 7:54 am

  http://www.lecturelist.org/content/view_lecture/3241

  Paul,

  It seems to me like “death control” is simply a term which you are not familiar with. I’m not particularly familiar with it myself, as Blair T. Longley here is the first berson I’ve “met ” who is using it. Anyway: it’s more than just a phrase. As far as I can understand it should be a term which most, if not all, demographers would be familiar with. Especially these days, as child mortality is going down, while the elders of society may live for much longer than ever before, and a great lot of people expects the average age of death to be rising to 90, 100, and 120, depending on the time frame.

• 

  Mikael Kandell // January 20, 2008 at 8:25 am

  I agree Ken…you have written almost exactly what i’ve been thinking last couple years..looking forward to find more people who think like you.

• 

  Paul Chefurka // January 20, 2008 at 8:28 am

  Magne, I just googled the term “death control” and it doesn’t seem to be in wide use among demographers. From the references I saw it’s being used fairly loosely in a number of contexts. But yes, it does appear to be more benign than I at first assumed.

• 

  Magne Karlsen // January 20, 2008 at 8:31 am

  Another thing.

  I’ve seen that many of the regular users of this forum “believe in” a future of smaller towns and villages, scattered around in what today must be called wilderness. I understand that many of you are full of hopes that mega-cities like Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Jakarta, and Lagos (to mention just a few) are the results of urbanization processes which should need to be coming to and end, and a relocation of people would ensue: a movement of people from these mega-cities and back to the countryside. John, Trinifar, and Paul are among those who have proposed such an ideal development.

  Now, I wonder: how can this be. The population of the world is going to rise by 50% in the next 40 years. I mean: get real here. The population explosion is a sure sign that the total number of mega-cities is bound to increase. And rapidly so! So the best solution would surely have to be that of “greening” the city environment, and not to be dreaming of a ruralization movement that simply can’t come true.

  The combination of population explosion and a capitalist system and ideology is a certain way of ensuring further urbanization. In order to realize that this is the case, you need only to take a look at recent history. Village and countryside life is being abandoned because of a patent lack of jobs and the economic impossibility of surviving that often idyllised life of subsistence farming. What we are seeing is that more and more land belongs to fewer and fewer large-scale farmers, and that those who are selling out, either by choice or by force, are very soon leaving the countryside in order to find a job and settle down in large towns. More often than not in some slum area which is a toxic cesspool of open sewers and a lack of clean water. Enjoy.

• 

  Magne Karlsen // January 20, 2008 at 9:31 am

  Yes, Paul, that’s right. I have googled the term myself, and found that it’s definitely not in wide use. I believe most demographers are choosing not to talk too much about the average age of old age death, and I think that would be because this is yet another taboo topic. Problems concerned with exceptionally long lifetimes, as developed by the medical profession, aren’t being discussed at any length by anyone, because the topic itself is taboo. And my God! How I hate taboo topics!!

  It is popularly assumed — and quite rightly so — that almost all human beings want to live for as long as possible. Therefore, the issue of average age of old age death is hardly ever mentioned by anyone. Any possible “problem” concerned with the average length of life, is readily assumed to be unspeakable. And rightly so, I believe. This is human nature, and that’s final.

  If the human species is in fact going to do itself in, it will most probably be because of the frantic up-keep of taboo topics. Problems that cannot be discussed, because … well, because! … so shut up about it, please! … you’re out of line! … don’t mention! …

  And that’s what a taboo topic looks like.

• 

  Paul Chefurka // January 20, 2008 at 9:31 am

  Magne,

  For my part, I emphatically do not believe that the population of the Earth is going to grow by 50% over the next 40 years. The energy/economic/ecological numbers simply do not support any such development. If I had to put a stake in the ground, I’d say a more realistic outlook is a population peak of 7.5 to 8 billion in 2020-2025, thereafter declining to 4 billion (+/- 1 billion) by 2050.

  The onrushing net oil export crisis is going to pose a severe challenge to capitalism in its current form.

  We will see a greening of the cities in various places (similar to what happened in Havana) though we may also see natural or forcible depopulation of urban centers.

  Economic opportunity is unlikely to remain a driver of urbanization if the economy takes a hit and food distribution becomes problematic due to fuel costs and/or outright food shortages in some areas.

• 

  Magne Karlsen // January 20, 2008 at 11:51 am

  Thank you, Paul. Now we’re getting somewhere. You have finally thrown some of your more interesting cards on the table. And I’m not being sarcastic here. I understand that you have undertaken a lot of research here, and I’ve been in agreement with you for a while now, especially when it comes to the notion that we’re discussing future events that are not going to happen. That is: we’re dreaming of future developments that would make for further sustainability, like the reduction of CO2 emissions, for one. That is not going to happen, and the main drive behind this is the shear growth of the world’s population, as teamed up with rapid industrialization projects in plenty of third world countries.

  - —

  http://trinifar.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/your-shrinking-carbon-dioxide-allotment/

  Trinifar’s mathematic model here, makes for the best possible argument of why the proposed CO2 emissions cuts are not going to happen. It’s going to require too much for too many, that’s all. And it’s making it difficult to hold faith in a forseeable future of sustainable development.

  http://trinifar.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/sustainability-requires-justice/

  Now, my most basic kind of philosophical view, is that human beings, when pooled together into large groups or great masses of people think, act and behave like little children. Which means that so long as it is impossible for North Americans, Western Europeans, Australians, Japanese and Middle East peoples to cut down on any form of consumption what-so-ever, there is no reason to expect that poor people of South America, South Asia and Africa south of the Sahara are going let themselves be persuaded to think green. That is why we need to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and that is definitely not going to happen any time soon. Not in a million years, so to speak, and certainly not by 2015, as is the target year of the UNDP; a year which, as a matter of cruel coincidence, is the final year of the “window of opportunity” as proposed by Al Gore and the IPPC.

  - —

  However! — I think you are underestimating the human ability of adaptation. I have said it before and I gladly say it again: the human species is already producing food enough to feed about 12 billion people. I only wish I could remember the source of this information. I first got it at a time when I still wasn’t too disturbed by the future of the ecosystems, the biosphere, the planet, and in the last instance, humanity. But I remember the key elements. It was an article on “Why on this Earth should anyone be starving, so long as we produce enough food to feed 12 billion people?!” The answer was a very complex matter. We used a lot of the food as animal feed, and lots of food went to waste as litter, garbage or thrash. There was huge amounts of different foodstuffs stuck in storage buildings in Europe and the USA; like butter and other milk products, eggs, vegetables and fruits. — I must have read this article around the year 2000.

  A future of real possibility of food shortage, will probably mean a future of serious re-thinking of the value of food. Another problem, of course, is that of fresh water. — I believe this is just another problem that is going to be solved.

  All in all, I have every reason to believe that the world’s population is going to reach 9 billion by 2050. I don’t believe in a massive human die-off. I believe this species is too good at adapting, and that it will not allow for any such experience.

  There is one development that is disturbing, though. This is the prospect of outright war over control of dwindling natural resources, and the adoption of “killing off” tactics, starting from the moment when (and not if) the ruling class of this first ever world civilization (which is armed to the teeth) decides to take a more serious — and sinister — look at the population explosion and the issue of overpopulation. Believe me: you do not need to be much of a prophet in order to see the possibility of genocide.

  I remain hopeful that we are going to arrive at a more humane form of trouble-shooting; namely that of coming together in co-operation. But I’m not so stupid that I do not understand when I am dreaming and not thinking.

• 

  Magne Karlsen // January 20, 2008 at 12:59 pm

  Magne: “Now, my most basic kind of philosophical view, is that human beings, when pooled together into large groups or great masses of people think, act and behave like little children.”

  - —

  And the first thing you need to know about little children, is the oft-heard phrase: “It’s not fair!”

  And the first thing you need to know about the impoverished masses of grown-ups, is the oft-heard phrase: “I’m sorry, we can’t afford to …”

  The second thing you need to know about the impoverished masses of grown-ups, is the oft-heard phrase: “I want to travel to America; I’m a good worker, and that is my dream.”

• 

  Trinifar // January 20, 2008 at 2:02 pm

  Paul,

  I appreciate your long, thoughtful response. I’ll try to keep my emotions in check and respond in kind.

  I know no more about Ken than what John writes at the top of this post (he’s a PhD candidate studying glaciers). While Ken offers a few qualifiers — very few — most of his essay consists of declarative sentences offered with no supporting evidence. Given the conclusions he comes to are so dire and the course of action he suggests (”The main focus should be on sowing the seeds of a future sustainable society” so morally objectionable, I find Ken’s approach intellectually irresponsible at best. (And that it comes from a grad student in science pisses me off all the more.)

  What Ken has done in his essay is different than the work of yours that I reviewed in a couple of important ways:

  (1) you have that giant qualifier at the top of your essay which says in part, “Given projected trends in energy supplies, energy efficiency and population levels, this is a probable outcome if we just continue business as usual.”

  (2) you provide data and analysis, even put your raw data online for inspection.

  As I said in my post, those two things give you credibility. Not having done that, Ken’s essay can not be distinguished from the ravings of a madman which is unfortunate for everyone interested in this area. It is just fodder for people to say, “Look, these folks are just making crap up” — in stark contrast to your work which forces people to think and consider. (To put it in personal terms, Ken’s approach strikes me as like that of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Rielly, Ann Coulter, etc.: talking in extreme language that enflames people and showing not an ounce of feeling for people who will suffer the consequences of the path they advocate.)

  Why I find Ken’s course of action morally objectionable:

  He says, “The main focus should be on sowing the seeds of a future sustainable society.” We should use angel funding to build lifeboats, remote communities of like-minded people, to land on the shores of a post-apocalyptic future after many billions have perished from thirst, hunger, war, and disease. The parallel to any number of doomsday cults is obvious: save the people like us to build another civilization of people who are just like us. Screw everybody else. It’s like a Eugenics movement on a grand scale — justified by claiming (again without evidence) that these lifeboat people will be able to create a sustainable society without the problems of the current one.

  Anyone who builds models (in their mind or with computers) must understand the difference between the model and the thing being modeled. It’s a vast difference in the simplest case and even more so (to say the least) when modeling the entire world and its people. Even two years ago did anyone guess that 48 new coal-fired power plants in the US would be stopped by concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, or that Florida would elect a Republican governor who is a bleeding-heart greenie opposed to coal-fired power?

  We have no accurate models of societal change. Unrestrained global capitalism might well have seen its day and be on the wane. (I think that’s the case and my evidence is at least as good as Ken’s musings.) As oil prices continue to increase, more water shortages ocurr, and food becomes more scare, society will change, but there is no guarantee that that change will only cause more strife. In the face of resource contraints, it’s a least as plausible that our economy will evolve away from its current destructive course as stay on it.

  One thing that is highly probable is that none of the business-as-usual scenarios will actually occur. I’m not a Panglossian. I’m worried about the presence of a large number of nuclear armed countries in a world of shortages, but I never thought I’d see the day when Russia and the US were working together dismantle nuclear warheads and submarines (called the Nunn-Lugar program in the US).

  In any case, the future will be a mixed bag consisting of some dramatic pitfalls and some marvelous, positive changes. We can’t know what will happen. I think it is silly to assume we will peg the meter on all the negative possibilities.

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  Paul Chefurka // January 20, 2008 at 4:33 pm

  Trinifar,

  I’m sympathetic with Ken’s musings because they’re where I started out as well. My first run at the subject, Population, the Elephant in the Room, was much the same sort of position statement, driven by a developing but still intuitive understanding of our circumstances. . Even my second kick at the can, Energy and Population to 2100 was little better. In fact, I went much further than Ken in my assertions, postulating a sustainable carrying capacity for the earth of 1 billion and pointing to energy as the proximate cause of the die-off. I had nothing but intuition to back up my position. After I was roundly pummeled for both of those articles, I decided to back off and try to build a defensible quantitative framework.

  However, something very interesting has happened as I built that framework. While my projections have grown more nuanced, my original intuition has turned out to be broadly correct. Humanity does indeed seem to be facing a set of potentially insuperable problems that will probably result in a dramatic reduction in our numbers over the next 100 years.

  This has led me to be very sympathetic to Ken’s perceptions. I see in them the road I’ve traveled, and I’m now confident that the numbers support that inchoate, intuitive assessment. Ken is experiencing his part of the great awakening that’s going on all over the world right now. When we first wake up we don’t yet have all the hard facts, but there is this overwhelming feeling that we’re screwed. I think objective assessment does little more than put flesh on the bones of that gut reaction.

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  Trinifar // January 20, 2008 at 7:07 pm

  Paul,

  But, given your assessment of the situation, what actions are you suggesting? Do we put most of our effort into Ken’s lifeboat program (or Danny’s Polar Cites)? That’s the part of Ken’s essay that distrubes me the most. In short, are you of the opinion that we should give up on existing human society and just plan for a future one (or put most of our effect into the lifeboat)? And if so, on what basis? How do you “see through” a chaotic system to the “one true outcome” in a way that is distinguishable from mere prophecy?

  While my projections have grown more nuanced, my original intuition has turned out to be broadly correct. Humanity does indeed seem to be facing a set of potentially insuperable problems that will probably result in a dramatic reduction in our numbers over the next 100 years.

  How do you measure “insuperable problems”? How can you decide that your intuition is “broadly correct”? Is it on the basis of pluging inputs into a crude, unverified computer model, a model for which you can not show correctness or even appropriateness? All you can say is that if these assumption are correct (and complete) then this is the outcome of my model.

  Do you think, as Ken does, that we should abandon billions of people to their “fate”? These are hard question which require honest, evidence-based responses.

  Nothing wrong with guessing or intuition as long as it is labeled as such. I have my own dark imaginings of the future, and I’m not disparaging your work for which I’ve shown much appreciation. What this is about is how we talk about it. Do we say it as an appropriately qualified model with reasonable error bounds (and lacking a set of reasonable scenarios, or even verifiable scenarios) or relax into some doomsday vision presented as a fiat accompli? Where’s the intelligence in that?

  I’m interested in good, solid reasoning, not intuition for which I have enough of my own. Anyone can choose a position and do nothing but select data and rhetoric that supports it. We’re dealing with a vast system — the world and its people — and, to date, no one has modeled it accurately. No one will. It can’t be done for reasons that should be obvious to any sophisticated modeler.

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  Paul Chefurka // January 20, 2008 at 9:51 pm

  Trinifar,

  One of the things I’ve tried to do since I began this morose adventure is to refrain from prescriptions. I’ve done that largely because I didn’t think I had a good enough handle on the situation to be sure my suggestions would be any better than anyone else’s. And God knows, there are enough suggestions out there already. I’ve concentrated on describing the problem as best I can, given my marginal competency with modeling and my unfortunate tendency to go with my gut.

  Nobody has a clue what we “really ought” to be doing. Everybody has an opinion, founded on some combination of information, interpretation, misinformation and misinterpretation. I’m just another third-desk violin in the orchestra, playing as best I can (don’t tell anyone, but most of the time I’m just sight reading).

  The most I can say about my models is that I have yet to find a piece of evidence that conclusively invalidates them (though selection bias may be playing a role…).

  I laid out my personal opinions on population levels above, and I’ll do the same about human behaviour here. As individuals we have very good intentions, but in groups we tend to act out a toxic brew of self-interest, parochialism, short-sightedness, denial and laziness. As a result, despite people like you, John Feeney, Steve Salmoney, Al Gore, James Hansen, Davis Suzuki, Tim Flannery, Lonnie Thompson , David Attenborough and me, humanity as a whole will probably keep doing what it’s doing until it can’t.

  That doesn’t mean we stop trying to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg. It means we should be realistic enough to accept the amount of inertia we’re dealing with.

  What do I think we should be doing? I think we should be fostering diversity, redundancy, localization, economy and distributed architectures in every possible aspect of human endeavour. I think small towns are a great idea. So are Community Supported Agriculture, local barter economies, off-grid living, educating women, co-housing, learning a trade, knowledge retention projects, universal health care and putting a stick in the spokes of corporatism at every turn. Beyond that I haven’t a clue what we “ought” to be doing. In the past we’ve muddled through some pretty tough times, and I expect a lot of the outcome this time will come from that same source.

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  Janne Haarni // January 21, 2008 at 2:25 am

  I think that indeed, we should be “sowing the seeds of a future society”. But I also believe that we should be sowing the seeds right were we are, in the cities and neighborhoods we live in. Seeds of a future society are not lifeboats, they are memes. I also happen believe we should do everything we reasonably can to make the situation better right now. Maybe we can even make the inevitable collapse a little less horrific..

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  Magne Karlsen // January 21, 2008 at 6:53 am

  Janne,

  I hear you, and I agree with you. What you just said corresponds very well with the (humanist) points of view that have always guided — and still guides — my way of thinking. That sentence — “I also happen (to) believe we should do everything we reasonably can to make the situation better right now” — has been part of my vocabulary for years now. I am also thinking that “the inevitable collapse” can can be made a little less horrific, as you put it.

  As a matter of clear thinking, and as a result of good planning, I believe it should be possible to make “the inevitable collapse” a lot less horrific. But then, based on my personal experience with structures of authority over the past few years, I can do nothing except agree with George Mobus, above, and conclude that “our brains are simply not sufficiently developed, on average, to develop the wisdom needed to base good judgments on global issues,” and that the very competitive, and very warlike, political regimes of our times are crowded with people who do not “display any great signs of wisdom.”

  I believe Paul’s horror scenario of a period of mass human death occurring from 2025 - 2050 would have to come as a result of bad leadership: leadership of the kind that talks of lasting peace while at the same time wages bloody war in the name of … whatever. — It’s the kind of leadership we have grown extremely used to over the past 20, 50 or 100 years or so. We need to move on, and get out of this vicious circle of violence and bloody madness. We need to move on, and start to co-operate, as a unified species that is facing a common enemy as abstract as global warming, but yet as concrete as disrupted climate systems and local environments that are systematically and methodically destroyed for no other reason than ensuring economic growth.

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  Magne Karl