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The Silver Lining to Impending Doom
G. Pascal Zachary, NY Times
ACROSS the world, doomsayers are smiling. The mounting signs of climate change have forced onto center stage the challenges of reducing carbon emissions and quickly adapting human activities to thrive in higher temperatures and more unpredictable weather.
Alas, the bad news about climate change is good news for business.
A curious feature of capitalism is that threats, or more precisely, the human response to them, are economically and technologically stimulating. Or, to put it another way, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
There will always be doomsayers, and fantasies about the end of human society are a staple of Hollywood and science fiction. But these days, a lot of smart people are seriously contemplating the looming destruction of human society, whether through a cascade of natural disasters, nuclear wars, uncontrolled terrorism, novel pandemics or, of course, climate change.
Because I attended the Woody Allen school of futurism and generally find humanity poised between the horrible and the terrible, I always remember the childhood story of the boy who cried wolf. Cry too often about ill-formed threats and you lose all credibility.
But there are good reasons to believe that crying wolf is exactly what the brightest innovators ought to be doing, and not only in response to the challenge of climate change. As a general matter, high anxiety will lead to more intense pursuit of innovation.
(6 May 2007)
Talking Ourselves to Extinction
Richard Heinberg, MuseLetter #181 via Global Public Media
Language is a powerful meta-tool that dramatically amplifies cooperative human efforts to control the environment. Language also opens the possibility for religion and science-which otherwise would not exist. Language helped generate our current ecological dilemma. Can language help solve it?
In systems theory and evolutionary biology, the word emergence describes the development of complex systems or organs; an emergent phenomenon is one based on the interaction of simpler elements but whose characteristics cannot be predicted based on a thorough knowledge of those elements. In the course of a species’ evolution a variation may appear that is retained because it confers an advantage in terms of existing functions; but once in place, the new characteristic may act in combination with other capacities of the organism to make truly novel and unexpected functions possible. Life itself has been described as an emergent property of matter, and sensation and mind are emergent properties of higher organisms.
Human societies are dynamic, complex systems, and most of their signal features are understandable as emergent phenomena. It is a fascinating thought exercise (I’ve been at it for two decades now) to attempt to trace series of events in the past in order to identify the most decisive developments that enabled the emergence of industrial civilization. Of course, societal complexity depends on humans’ ability to capture increasing amounts of energy from their environment, and so their genetic and social attributes that facilitate energy capture are crucial. Which of those attributes are keys to understanding the entire process?
Clearly, most of the emergent features of complex societies (their economies, technologies, and governments) depend on language. Now, language itself is an emergent phenomenon, a link in a long chain of them; however, it was a profoundly consequential one. In the grand edifice of human society, it should be considered a foundation stone.
(3 May 2007)
Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in the Room
Stoneleigh, The Oil Drum: Canada
At the root of all the converging crises of the World Problematique is the issue of human overpopulation. Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet’s finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing. The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do.
It is becoming clearer every day, as crises like global warming, water, soil and food depletion, biodiversity loss and the degradation of our oceans constantly worsen, that the human situation is not sustainable. Bringing about a sustainable balance between ourselves and the planet we depend on will require us, in very short order, to reduce our population, our level of activity, or both. One of the questions that comes up repeatedly in discussions of population is, “What level of human population is sustainable?” In this article I will give my analysis of that question, and offer a look at the human road map from our current situation to that level.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, the concepts of ecological science are the most effective tools for understanding this situation. The crucial concepts are sustainability, carrying capacity and overshoot. Considered together these can give us some clue as to what the true sustainable population of the earth might be, as well as the trajectory between our current numbers and the point of sustainability.
(4 May 2007)
UPDATE. Reader John Rawlins writes:
Avoiding this future would require the most massive imaginable switch from today’s farming methods to small, low-input farms. with everyone eating locally, over the next 2 decades. I have no idea how to make that happen, other than implementation of thousands of plans like that of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force. And as Heinberg pointed out recently, that will require sustainable food-growing education of one in six people around the world asap, then getting them into business. That would be on the order of a billion people. This should be our “Apollo” project, not wasting wealth and time trying to develop oil substitutes or grabbing other countries’ oil.
The Sprirituality of Collapse
Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
The first edition of this article was written in February, 2006, but I have recently revised and updated it. Since the first writing, the theme of collapse seems to have reverberated around the world, now manifesting its symptoms in the scientific community’s latest dramatic reports on global warming, the issue of Peak Oil coming further out of the closet–being discussed openly in mainstream media, and the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble that now finds 1 out of every 264 homes in the nation facing foreclosure as each day the value of the dollar decreases and the value of precious metals soars.
…For both groups of Americans [those who are doing “fine” and those who are deeply indebted], collapse is very bad news. It will mean the end of lifestyles they cannot imagine living without. They have become their lifestyle, and in its absence, they believe they will have no identity-that literally, they will cease to exist. For these folks, collapse will be extremely painful, and worse. Since they have isolated themselves in their hermetically-sealed suburban “dormitories,” they are not likely to survive unless they are willing to radically alter their behavior, and by the time they are, if they are, it may be far too late to do so.
Unquestionably, collapse will be brutal and agonizing. It is, in fact, the cessation of life based on fossil fuels, weather and climate as we have known them, and the money system to which we have become accustomed. It will be physically, economically, emotionally, and spiritually excruciating.
…So what might be some of the gifts of collapse?
First, collapse strips us of who we think we are so that who we really are may be revealed. Civilization’s toxicity has fostered the illusion that one is, for example, a professional person with money in the bank, a secure mortgage, a good credit rating, a healthy body and mind, raising healthy children who will grow up to become successful like oneself, and that when one retires, one will be well-taken-care of.
…Secondly, collapse will decimate our anti-tribal, individualistic, Anglo-American programming by forcing us to join with others for survival. You may own a home outright with ample acreage on which you have produced a stunning organic garden, have a ten-year cache of food and water, drive a hybrid car, and live a completely solarized life, but if you think you will survive in isolation, you are tragically deluded. Collapse dictates that we will depend on each other, or we will die
(5 May 2007)
Also posted at Atlantic Free Press, where it has a nice graphic.
