Thesis #17: Environmental problems may lead to collapse.
by Jason GodeskyIn Collapse, Jared Diamond argues that civilizations choose to collapse by neglecting their ecology. He spends most of his volume pointing to numerous examples of how civilizations collapsed because of ecological problems on Easter Island, Greenland, the southwest United States, and the Yucatan peninsula. He highlights the ecological role in conflicts in Rwanda, Haiti, Montana, China and Australia; he even provides a map which illustrates the nearly perfect overlap between the world’s most ecologically distressed areas, and its most politically distressed areas. Perhaps to shield himself from the charges of geograhpical determinism that came of his previous volume, Guns, Germs & Steel, Diamond includes a few examples of societies that faced ecological problems and “chose” to survive: in the New Guinea highlands, Tikopia, and the Tokugawa shogunate. Yet, it is precisely in these “counter-examples” that we see where Diamond’s model goes awry.
Though Tainter’s work, already discussed at length, provides the cornerstone of most recent academic studies of collapse, Diamond spends only a single line in his dismissal. This is unfortunate, as Diamond’s work provides an excellent case of Tainter’s theory, were Diamond willing to accept that role. Instead, Diamond tries to argue that all collapses are due to ecology, and that is simply not the case. Diamond provides “counter-examples” to try to inject some element of “choice” into the matter, but all it accomplishes is to provide a theory which does not necessarily make any predictions, and thus, is unfalsifiable–making it unscientific, as well. Tainter’s logic seems irrefutable, though. Managing ecological crises is one of the very reasons humans invest in complexity in the first place. Diamond’s “success stories” illustrate that. The Tokugawa shogunate especially illustrates the use of greater complexity to handle an ecological crisis. So long as a society is still below the point of diminishing returns, this is an entirely sensible strategy. Diamond merely rephrases the question from, “Why do societies collapse?” to “Why do some societies collapse due to ecological pressure, and others don’t?” That is the question Tainter so admirably answers. The diminishing returns of complexity are the ultimate cause of collapse, but there are other, proximate causes which ultimately deliver the coup de grace. By analogy, no individual dies of AIDS; rather, AIDS creates a condition where otherwise harmless infections become fatal. Likewise, the diminishing returns of complexity is the ultimate cause of collapse by creating a condition where factors which otherwise might have easily been overcome, prove disastrous instead.
That said, Diamond’s book provides an enormous catalogue of evidence for the position that the proximate cause of collapse is very often ecological. In the final section, Diamond warns of the possibility of our own society’s collapse due to our environmental neglect. That neglect is born of a groundless mythology which is codified in our language, namely, the unique place humanity is accorded in the world. “The environment” is something outside ourselves–something we are distinctly not a part of. We separate the world into “artificial” and “natural” things; a dam made by a beaver is “natural,” but a dam made by people is “artificial.” We think of “nature” as all that which lies outside the sphere of human activity, thus allowing for such bizarre notions as “being close to nature.” The duality of the English language may force upon us some idea of humans being separate from the rest of the world, but the poverty of our language to express our relationship does not alter it. Humans are animals, and subject to all the same basic, biological laws as any other animal. We require food, water and air. We depend on other animals, just as all animals do: we rely on plants to recycle the carbon dioxide we exhale into oxygen we can breathe, we rely on plants to convert sunlight into food we can eat and energy we can absorb, we rely on the bacterial ecology that naturally inhabits our bodies to digest food and fend off disease. We have as much to lose from catastrophic losses of biodiversity as any other animal.
Thus, the popular dichotomy that pits the economy and “the environment” is a false one. The ecology is the basis of all economies, and anything that harms that ecology threatens the economy more than any recession. The single greatest threat to any economy is the loss of the ecology on which that economy is utterly dependent for energy, raw materials, and the support base that allows both its consumers and producers to survive and continue consuming and producing.
Given that, the prominence of ecological problems in so many historical collapses is hardly unexpected. Societies, regardless of their level of complexity, are products of their ecology. This has led to great confuson between two senses of the term “collapse”: social collapse, such as we have previously discussed in detail, and ecological collapse, which is an entirely different and unrelated phenomenon (save only in the case that ecological collapse is a proximate cause of social collapse).
Ecologies are inter-dependent, with many species relying on many others in complex webs of relationships. There is a great deal of resilience in this kind of formation, but it also makes for a somewhat chaotic system, where the loss of one member can initate cascades of change throughout the ecology, as some species die off, and others prosper from the emptied niches. Take, for example, the elimination of wolves from Yellowstone. Ill-studied at the time, the wolves were hunted as nuisances to livestock herds. In “Wolves’ Leftovers Are Yellowstone’s Gain, Study Says,” John Pickerell writes:
Wolves were systematically hunted in Yellowstone and much of the Western United States from the 1800s onwards. Yellowstone’s last pack was eliminated in 1926.
“In the early 1900s no one stopped to consider the ecological role of wolves,” commented Robert Beschta, a forestry scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Wolves were considered a predator with no value and seen as a huge constraint on allowing a productive ecosystem to flourish,” he said. Wolves, mountain lions (Puma concolor), and coyotes (Canis latrans) were all targeted as threats to livestock and game, he said.
When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, changes cascaded through the ecology. In “Lessons from the Wolf,” Jim Robbins writes:
The wolf-effect theory holds that wolves kept elk numbers at a level that prevented them from gobbling up every tree or willow that poked its head aboveground. When the wolves were extirpated in the park as a menace, elk numbers soared, and the hordes consumed the vegetation, denuding the Lamar Valley and driving out many other species. Without young trees on the range, beavers, for example, had little or no food, and indeed they had been absent since at least the 1950s. Without beaver dams and the ponds they create, fewer succulents could survive, and these plants are a critical food for grizzly bears when they emerge from hibernation.
After the wolves’ reintroduction in 1995 and 1996, they began to increase their numbers fairly rapidly, and researchers began to see not only a drop in the population of elk but a change in elk behavior. The tall, elegant mahogany-colored animals spent less time in river bottoms and more time in places where they could keep an eye out for predatory wolves. If the wolf-effect hypothesis is correct, and wolves are greatly reducing elk numbers, the vegetation should be coming back for the first time in seven decades.
This is precisely what we have seen in the decade since the wolves’ reintroduction. This specific case must stand to illustrate one of the most basic ideas of ecology: that ecologies are governed by complicated, intricate inter-relationships. Robbins sums this idea up at the end of his article, writing:
Wolves have brought other lessons with them. They dramatically illustrate the balance that top-of-the-food-chain predators maintain, underscoring what is missing in much of the country where predators have been eliminated. They are a parable for the unintended and unknown effects of how one action surges through an ecosystem. More important, the Yellowstone wolves are bringing into focus hazy ideas of how ecosystems work in a way that has never been so meticulously documented. Just as the actions of the wolf echo through Yellowstone, they will reverberate into the future as they help to increase the understanding of natural systems.
Thus, ecological problems cannot be considered in isolation. Every part of an ecology affects every other part. Nor can we recieve news of ecological problems with passivity: nothing is more vital to our survival as a species than the health of the ecology we are a part of. Though our cultural mythology has created a scientific “blind spot,” by making the very question of what our inter-relationships might be, those inter-relationships still exist, and without a healthy, robust ecology, human survival itself–much less the fragile, complex societies we build on top of such ecologies–is imperilled. As E. O. Wilson described the position:
T’he first, exemptionalism, holds that since humankind is transcendant in intelligence and spirit, so must our species have been released from the iron laws of ecology that bind all other species. No matter how serious the problem, civilized human beings, by ingenuity, force of will and-who knows-divine dispensation, will find a solution. Population growth? Good for the economy, claim some of the exceptionalists, and in any case a basic human right, so let it run. Land shortages? Try fission energy to power the desalting of sea water, then reclaim the world’s deserts. (The process might be assisted by towing icebergs to coastal pipelines.) Species going extinct? Not to worry. That is nature’s way. Think of humankind as only the latest in a long line of exterminating agents in geological time. In any case, because our species has pulled free of old-style, mindless Nature, we have begun a different order of life. Evolution should now be allowed to proceed along this new trajectory. Finally, resources? The planet has more than enough resources to last indefinitely, if human genius is allowed to address each new problem in turn, without alarmist and unreasonable restrictions imposed on economic development. So hold the course, and touch the brakes lightly.
It is an unexamined bit of recieved wisdom, ridiculous once examined. Humans are animals like any other, and subject to the same laws and dictates.
Most of our current ecological problems can be organized under one of two general headings: the Holocene Extinction, and global warming. We will consider each in turn, before turning to the implications of these two looming crises.
The Holocene Extinction
In 1833, Charles Lyell introduced the name “Holocene,” or “Recent Whole,” for our current geological epoch, stretching back only 10 or 12 thousand years. This makes the Holocene an incredibly young geological epoch, the shortest by far. The International Geological Congress in Bologna adopted the term in 1885, and it has been the accepted terminology ever since. The preceding geologic epoch was the last ice age, the Pleistocene. It lasted for two million years, and while it was marked by significantly advanced glaciation, this was not the unremitting state of affairs. The Pleistocene had regular interglacial periods, during which the weather would turn warmer and the glaciers would temporarily recede. These interglacials typically lasted an average of 10 - 20 thousand years. In short, the “Holocene” is a perfectly typical interglacial. The Pleistocene–the “last ice age”–never ended. We’re still in it; a warm spell, yes, but in it.
If anything, our current interglacial is most remarkable for its brevity. If it ended this week and the glaciers returned, it would be marked as the shorter side of normal. In fact, it would have ended some 5,000 years ago–an interglacial of just 5,000 years–were it not for the ecological devastation of the Agricultural Revolution (see Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” [PDF] Climatic Change 61: 261–293, 2003). It was the threatened return of the glaciers, and the concommitant ecological changes, that pushed the first farmers in the Fertile Crescent to adopt their sedentary way of life. They were responsible for massive deforestation, and raising huge herds of livestock polluting the atmosphere with incredible amounts of methane–enough to hold the glaciers in check. For 5,000 years, our civilization has lived on borrowed time, extending our “Holocene” by balancing the earth’s natural cooling trend against our reckless environmental abuse.
Yet, in that short time, the “Holocene” has joined the Cambrian-Ordovician, the Ordovician-Silurian, the Late Devonian, the Permian-Triassic, and the Cretaceous-Paleogene for the dubious distinction of contributing its name to a mass extinction event.
Until recently, the term “Holocene Extinction” referred to a rather minor spate of extinction which took place at the beginning of the Holocene, with the end of the megafauna–woolly mammoths, North American horses, sabertooth cats, and other large mammals. This occured at the beginning of the Holocene, as humans were first moving into many new environments, like the Americas and Australia. This has led to a long-standing debate between “overkill” and “overchill.” Were the megafauna wiped out by climate change? Or by rapacious, brutal bands of overhunting human foragers? Both sides have their evidence, of course.
Nor is this merely an academic argument without reprecussion for the present. The “overkill” theory is routinely cited by some groups as if it were already a proven fact, and used as evidence that humans are an inherently destructive species. So we needn’t worry ourselves with the ecological destruction we wreak. We can’t help it. It’s our nature.
As you might expect, the truth lies somewhere between overkill and overchill. Human populations were almost certainly too small to wreak such havoc all by themselves, and the same climate changes that opened the way for humans into Australia and the Americas also had to affect the other large mammals living across the globe. More importantly, however, alpha predators–like wolves, and like humans–play important, keystone roles in any ecology. The introduction of a new alpha predator can have dramatic effects, even causing cascades of extinction. This is not necessarily because the alpha predators overhunt or are even in the least bit maladaptive; this is simply the nature of alpha predators and how they relate in any given ecology. When humans came to Australia and the Americas, they were as harmless as wolves, lions, or any other big mammalian predator. Their presence caused cascades of changes throughout the ecosystem. Given that it was also a period of major climate change, a great number of species that were already under stress adapting to the new climate were tipped over the edge into extinction by the further ecological changes created by the adaptation of a new alpha predator. Our ancestors were hardly noble savages; but neither were they bloodthirsty killers bent on the destruction of all life on earth. They were animals, like any other.
While Australians and Americans established a new equilibrium in their given environments, the same climate changes that allowed them to cross the Bering Land Bridge and shortened the boat ride between the islands of Oceania and ultimately Australia, were having other effects, as well. In the Middle East, some foragers had come to rely increasingly on cereal grains. Their lives became more sedentary as they established static resources necessary for their food source, like granaries and mills. As the weather turned, they were forced to intensify their food production–and agriculture was born. The weather was already turning colder, causing the glaciers to expand, the sea levels to drop, and the ways to America and Australia to reveal themselves from the ocean floor. But the agriculturalists of the Fertile Crescent were seeing hard times with the colder, drier climate. They intensified their production, which gave them more food. More food increased their population, which naturally needed more food. The Food Race was off to a running start.
To refer to the “Fertile Crescent” today is a cruel joke, but this was not always the case. Once, this region was abundant. The arid desert we see today is the result of agriculture. The first farmers stripped it of all life, and then spread out to the east and west to consume the next region, like the alien invaders of some clichéd science fiction movie. Yet it was not malice or greed that drove them; they were locked into an endless cycle of exponential growth. Their way of life required constant expansion. Good or evil, nice or mean, they were compelled to conquer, whether they liked it or not (see thesis #12 and thesis #13).
Deforestation, desertification and the herding of methane-producing livestock increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere–enough to halt the world’s cooling trend. The two balanced each other, cancelling one another out, to unnaturally extend the “Holocene” interglacial. All the while, the massive ecological devastation wrought by the spread of agriculture perpetuated new cascades of extinctions–often, as a matter of policy.
Wolf species were systematically hunted down by farmers, until they became extinct, in both Japan and Europe. Such hunting has endangered wolf populations in North America, as well. Such hunts were conducted because wolves would prey on livestock. Agricultural societies often circulate tales demonizing wolves and other predators that prey on livestock, providing a cultural basis for such hunts. It is a unique strategy in the animal kingdom: no other species wastes its efforts trying to systematically eliminate its competition.
But more often, extinction has simply been the unforeseen side effect of our expanding agricultural way of life. These continuing extinctions have led to some confusion, and argument about an “on-going” Holocene extinction. In fact, there are two seperate phenomenon going on here, unfortunately obscured because both began with a common cause–the changing climate of 12,000 years ago. The first was simply the product of a readjustment in ecologies, to a changing climate and a new large mammalian predator migrating in. This was relatively benign. The second phenomenon is what makes the Holocene extinction such a pressing concern. It is far more devastating, and because it is a systemic consequence of agricultural society, it will never “iron itself out” as the first one did, except with the end of agricultrual life–and civilization with it.
This, the real Holocene extinction, has been a significant problem for the entire history of civilization. Even all by itself, it would have eventually reached crisis proportions and still marked agriculture as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
Yet, this process has recently seen an incredible intensification, forcing us to face a crisis of unprecedented proportions now. This intensification began with the Industrial Revolution, which did not change the nature of agriculture nearly so much as it exponentially increased its scale. The intensification of cultivation had long before crossed a point of diminishing returns, where more calories of work were expended in cultivation than were returned in yields. This shortfall had previously been made up by animals, which could leverage energy sources that were otherwise unusable–for example, they could graze in fields too rocky for food crops. With first the Industrial Revolution, and then the Green Revolution, other energy sources–like petroleum–allowed us to push even further beyond the point of diminishing returns, to significantly increase yields simply by making the process unthinkably inefficient. Today, on average, every calorie of food we consume requires ten calories of work–primarily stored in fossil fuels–to cultivate, package and ship. Very little of the earth remains naturally arable; nearly all of it requires intense fertilization and irrigation. On the other end, the average piece of food an American eats has traveled 1,500 miles to the dinner plate.
The Green Revolution raised our carrying capacity to–essentially, wherever we want it to be. Human population jumped up in response, with growth slowing only now as we begin to approach a new asymptote somewhere near 9 billion. There are, at the time of this writing, only 6.5 billion people on earth, yet just that many requires 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. That is how much energy is required to support so many people, and the food that so many people require–and, as is often the case, the food that food requires. 40% of the total energy available to the entire planet is wrapped up in a single species; only 60% is currently portioned out among all the other millions of species on earth.
This is the essential reason for the Holocene extinction. Deforestation, desertification, climate change and other climatological and ecological disasters are often the immediate causes, but these are themselves symptoms of the ultimate cause–that we are, essentially, starving the world out. We are taking everything for ourselves, and laying siege to all life on earth.
The effects have been catastrophic. Extinctions are always happening, just like people are always dying. But like an explosively high death rate, an extinction rate far beyond the background rate is catastrophic. The normal background rate of extinctions is about two to five taxonomic families of marine invertebrates and vertebrates every million years. Normal background extinction would end one mammalian species every 200 years, on average. Some centuries might see two or three mammalian species lost; other times, several centuries may pass with no mammalian extinction whatsoever. Yet in the past 400 years, 89 mammalian species have gone extinct, and another 169 species are critically endangered–45 times the normal rate of background extinction, just among mammals. The total current extinction rate is difficult to calculate, since we don’t know precisely how many species there are on earth, but the most conservative estimates indicate that we are seeing 147 extinctions per day. Most scientists estimate that we are now seeing extinction rates that are anywhere between a thousand and ten thousand times the normal, background rate.
This is unprecedented. None of the previous extinction events were this lethal, or this quick. We are doing more damage than when a comet carved out the Yucatan and blotted the sun out of the sky. In 2002, E.O. Wilson predicted that at current rates, one half of all species on earth will be gone in a century. Previously, the Permian-Triassic was the worst extinction event in our planet’s history; it ended 95% of all species that then existed, but it took nearly a million years to unfold. We are seeing half of that in mere centuries.
No extinction occurs in a vacuum. All species exist in an ecosystem, and with each species lost, the ecosystem becomes weaker. If sharks go extinct, so too do remoras. Each extinction triggers a cascade of extinctions through its dependencies, running their course through the complex web of life on earth. The complex is too great to predict where those cascades will end, or what will be extinguished in its course. We are as dependent on our planet as every other species, and our willful blindness to this, our deluded, alienating fantasy of being higher and nobler than mere nature, does not change that basic fact.
The Holocene extinction, left unchecked, will ultimately claim us as well. All it will take is the wrong cascade, or simply weakening the earth’s ecosystems to a tipping point that can no longer support our way of life. Cereal grains are fickle; a temperature change of a few degrees might kill them all off. With 90% or more of our diet coming from just a few, closely-related grasses, our entire, global population is essentially in the same precarious boat as the Irish of 1845.
Diversity is strength; diversity ensures survival. The human population is growing, while the number of species takes an unprecedented nose-dive. The amount of life is not changing, but biodiversity is plummeting. We are, pound by pound, replacing every single lifeform on this planet with a corresponding unit of human flesh. We are reducing the planet’s biodiversity to a single species.
Taken to its extreme end-point, the insanity of this policy becomes evident. Humans will choke on their own breath and fall on each other in cannibalistic slaughter. We cannot survive all on our own. The general principle is more complex; long before we are alone in the world, this course will mean the end of our species. Therein lies the great irony of the Holocene extinction. It is the worst mass extinction in the history of the earth, and it is the only extinction ever driven forward by organisms themselves. But ultimately, those organisms–us, human beings–will be among the dead, if we do not soon wake up from our ten-thousand-year madness, and stop this before it’s too late.
In the article cited above, E. O. Wilson considers the question, “Is humanity suicidal?” Like Wilson, I do not believe that it is. Humans are omnivores, making them incredibly adaptable to new environments. They are also alpha predators. They can be as harmless and well adapted as wolves, lions, or hawks. When humans found themselves in a new environment–such as the Americas or Australia–there were some changes that took place, but these were well within the normal bounds of ecological change. What we have seen since, however, is something entirely different. It is not humanity that is maladapted to life on earth; it is agriculture that is maladapted to humanity. We are still Pleistocene animals, no matter how many stories we spin about our vaunted “Holocene,” and the agricultural life simply does not suit us. It forces us to grow exponentially, and wreak havoc on the earth.
Global Warming
As previously mentioned, ecological problems can never be considered in isolaton, and much of the cause of global warming can be found in the same causes of the Holocene Extinction. Humans have been causing the release of greenhouse gases and altering the earth’s atmospheric composition and global climate for 10,000 years. However, while previously our excesses were checked by the earth’s natural cooling trend as it tried to enter a new cycle of glaciation, the increases in scale since the Industrial Revolution have brought on a global climatological crisis.
Global warming is a subject of debate only because of the short-sighted nature of the modern corporation: a consequence of the nature of investment and the stock market. Because most of the proposed “solutions” to global warming are legal restrictons on economic activity, those companies which would suffer in the short-term (though they would propser in the long-term–as the benefits of their own survival and the survival of their customers) have invested a good deal of money in obfuscating the issue, in order to make global warming appear questonable, and thus avoiding the proposed political ramifications. It is worth noting that global warming is considered controversial only in the United States–the only other Western country than Australia that still considers evolution to be a controversial subject. With the United States as the single most significant consumer of petroleum and the worst producer of greenhouse gases, no international plan to reduce global warming can have any hope of succeeding without the support of the United States. The website Exxon Secrets maps the relationships through which ExxonMobil specifically funds nearly all of the “climate change skeptics” in the United States.
Yet global warming is an open question only in the arena of public policy. Among scientists and those who have honestly researched the topic, its reality is well known and widely accepted. Even the well-funded “climate change skeptics” can agree on the basics: that the greenhouse effect is real (and is even beneficial; with no greenhouse effect whatsoever, the earth would be too cold for mammalian life), and that the globe has been warming at a dangerous rate.
Political critics often allege that global warming is a non-issue, because mean global temperature has increased “only” a few degrees; specifically, as the IPCC WG I concluded, “0.6 ± 0.2°C.” Even more importantly, that rate has increased over the past two decades to 1.0°C per century. The critics’ use of the word “just” relies on our conventional concept of temperature, and dshonestly obfuscates the scale inside of which global climate operates. The difference between our current climate and an ice age is also “only a few degrees.” Climate is a very different thing from weather, and while the temperature outside may change drastically, the global average temperature is a very static thing, and even minor changes can have catastrophic consequences.
Eleven of the warmest years on record have occurred since 1990, and the five warmest of all have occurred in the last decade (in descending order: 2002, 1998, 2003, 2001, 1997). The polar ice caps are shrinking. In 2005, that shrinking of polar ice meant that the Odden ice shelf did not fully form. Normally, the Odden ice shelf’s melting in the spring releases a great deal of cold water into the Atlantic, providing one of the main forces pushing the Gulf Stream. The lack of much input from the Odden ice shelf made the Gulf Stream very weak through 2005. As a result, the hot water of the Gulf of Mexico remained n the Gulf, creating intense surface and deep sea temperatures–such that minor tropical storms that wandered over those hot waters became massive hurricanes. The record-breaking number of hurricanes in 2005 was entirely the result of normal mutli-decadal cycles, but the intensification of Katrina, Rita and Wilma into some of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded in the north Atlantic was a direct result of global warming. At the same time, the lack of the Gulf Stream may continue to have devastating consequences, in the form of an especially bitter winter in northern Europe, which normally enjoys a climate much warmer than its latitude would normally allow, thanks to the Gulf Stream.
So we already see that the effects of global warming are chaotic, and are best described as, “increasingly erratic weather.” Global warming drives weather into the extremes, rather than simply making everything hotter. This makes sense: the world is not uniform, why should we expect the effects of heating such a world to be uniform?
Of course, the world has been hotter in the past, but the question is not whether or not life on earth can survive; the question is not even whether or not humanity can survive. The salient question is whether a way of life that is utterly dependent on a small number of closely-related and fickle cereal grains that can barely survive the most minor perturbations of rainfall or temperature can endure in such a world. The U.S. Global Change Research Information Office outlines some of the threats our agricultural way of life might face:
It may be possible for global agricultural production to keep pace with increasing demand over the next 50-100 years if adequate adaptations are made, but there are likely to be difficulties in some regions. This conclusion takes into account the beneficial effects of carbon dioxide fertilization, i.e., given sufficient water and nutrients, plant growth will be enhanced by an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Changes in the spread and abundance of agricultural pests and the effects of climate variability were not reflected in this assessment. Regional changes in crop yields and productivity are expected to occur in response to climate change. There is likely to be an increased risk of famine, particularly in subtropical and tropical semi-arid and arid locations.
This is in addition to massive flooding, the spread of malaria with the spread of the tropics, and perhaps unpredictable crises we will face as our complex society faces the very same ecological problems that destroyed the Mayans and others.
In New Orleans, we may see a harbinger of things to come. Not only will the incidence of storms of Katrina’s magnitude increase, but so will sea levels–setting up conditions where even milder storms can wreak such devastation.
Global warming is not new, but we have recently crossed a threshold in scale and set off a new environment in which previously tolerable acts have become intolerable. Our greenhouse gas emissions balanced the earth’s natural cooling trend in the past, but our increases in scale have reversed that trend. Reductions in ice and snow cover make for darker land and water, which absorbs more heat from the sun. The Siberian permafrost is melting, releasing enormous amounts of methane. The frozen methane once locked beneath the arctic ice cap is also beginning to melt; that will drastically alter the atmosphere’s composition, and make it hotter still. We are no longer emitting greenhouse gases into a world that’s tending to become cooler: we’re emitting greenhouse gases into a world that we’ve pushed into a positive feedback loop that will make it hotter and hotter.
That positive feedback loop will eventually end; they always do. Climate has states of equilibrium where ti comes to rest, and when pushed out of one, it moves quickly to the next. We have succeeded in moving the earth out of the Holocene’s state of equilibrium, and the earth is now moving quickly–and catastrophically–towards a new, hotter state of equilibrium. It is by no means guaranteed that complex societies will be possible at this new state; in fact, it’s very likely they will not be. Nor is a complex society already beyond the point of diminishing returns at all likely to be adaptable enough, quickly enough, to survive the catastrophic transition.
Diamond’s Dozen
If the immediacy of our environmental crisis is still lost on anyone, Jared Diamond begins to draw down how crucial these concerns are at the end of Collapse:
Ask some ivory-tower academic ecologist, who knows a lot about the environment but never reads a newspaper and has no interest in politics, to name the overseas countries facing some of the worst problems of environmental stress, overpopulation, or both. The ecologist would likely answer: “That’s a no-brainer, it’s obvious. Your list of environmentally stressed or overpopulated countries should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus others”.
Then ask a first world politician, who knows nothing and cares less about the environment and population problems, to name the world’s worst trouble spots: countries where state government has already been overwhelmed and has collapsed, or is now at risk of collapsing, or has been wracked by recent civil wars; and countries that, as a result of those problems, are also creating problems for us rich first world countries. Surprise, surprise: the two lists would be very similar.
Today, just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.
The results of these transparent connections are far-reaching and devastating. There are genocides, such as those that exploded in Bangladesh, Burundi, Indonesia, and Rwanda; civil wars or revolutions, as in most of the countries on the lists; calls for the dispatch of troops, as to Afghanistan, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia; the collapse of central government, as has already happened in Somalia and the Solomon Islands; and overwhelming poverty, as in all of the countries on these lists.
Hence the best predictors of modern “state failures” prove to be measures of environmental and population pressure, such as high infant mortality, rapid population growth, a high percentage of the population in their late teens and 20s, and hordes of young men without job prospects and ripe for recruitment into militias.
Those pressures create conflicts over shortages of land, water, forests, fish, oil, and minerals. They create not only chronic internal conflict, but also emigration of political and economic refugees, and wars between countries arising when authoritarian regimes attack neighbours in order to divert popular attention from internal stresses.
In short, it is not a question open for debate whether the collapses of past societies have modern parallels and offer any lessons to us. Instead, the real question is how many more countries will undergo them.
Diamond lists what he sees as the twelve most critical environmental problems we currently face:
- Destruction of natural habitats (mainly through deforestation)
- Reduction of wild foods
- Loss of biodiversity
- Erosion of soil
- Depletion of natural resources
- Pollution of freshwater
- Approaching the “ceiling” for photosynthetic capacity
- Environmental pollution
- Introduction by humans of alien species
- Artificially induced climate change
- Overpopulation
- Large and deep environmental footprints
Point #3 is the Holocene Extinction exactly, with points #1, #2, #7 and #9 as either its causes, or effects. Point #10 is global warming exactly. That leaves us with #4, #5, #6, #8, #11 and #12 as seemngly unaddressed.
But in fact it’s in precisely these problems that we see the foregoing united under a single heading, and the illusion of Diamond’s “choice” revealed. Because civilization must always grow (thesis #12 and thesis #13), resources must always be depleted more this year than last, population must always increase, and environmental footprints must always grow deeper. All of these environmental problems–including the Holocene Extinction and global warming themselves–are the natural consequence of the Food Race.
Erosion of soil.
Soils of farmlands used for growing crops are being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 and 40 times the rates of soil formation, and between 500 and 10,000 times soil erosion rates on forested land.
The rampant destruction of soil is a natural consequence of monoculture. In a balanced ecosystem, soil is shared by many different species of plant, creating mutually beneficial utrient cycles analogous to the oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle that benefits both plants and animals. The nutrient that one plant needs is the excretion of another, and vice versa. Planting a field entirely with a single crop is as suicidal as locking yourself in a garage with a running car, and for all the very same reasons.
This is what makes agriculture so disastrous for the land it’s practiced on, and why agriculture leads to constant territorial expansion. This is why the Neolithic Revolution turned the Fertile Crescent into a blasted wasteland, why the situation in modern Australia is so dire, why agriculture leads to desertification and salination crises, and why merely farming in and of itself is sufficient to wreak environmental catastrophe on a very large scale.
Yet it is precisely monoculture that provides the large-scale yields of agriculture. Any plot of wild land has some percentage of human edible matter, but it is much less than 100%, because that same land also provides food for all manner of other species, as well. By clearing that land and planting a single variety of crop, the biodiversity and photosynthetic capacity of that land is converted purely into human food–and human mass. To back away from this would be stepping away from the Food Race–and like an arms race, that is a disastrous move unless everyone steps away from it at the exact same time.
Depletion of natural resources.
The prevalent view is that known and likely reserves of readily accessible oil and natural gas will last for a few more decades.
Here, Diamond addresses the end of our fossil fuel subsidies, a subject we’ll broach in the full detail it deserves in the next thesis.
Pollution of freshwater.
A good many prominent people have recently forecast, with a sort of gloomy relish, that wars will one day, probably soon, break out over water. These forecasts come not just from the environmental movement, which has long become accustomed to fits of Malthusian soothsaying, but from officials of so sober an institution as the World Bank. Ismail Serageldin, the bank’s vice president for environmental affairs and chairman of the World Water Commission, stated bluntly a few years ago that the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water.” Although he was roundly criticized for this opinion, he refused to disavow it and has frequently asserted that water is the most critical issue facing human development. The former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali said something similar about water wars. So did Jordan’s late King Hussein, who had obvious cause to mean it. Egypt has more than once threatened to go to war over diversions of the Nile.
The above quote comes not from Jared Diamond, but from Marq de Villiers’ “Water Wars of the Near Future.” That we are facing crisis conditions for lack of freshwater is not very widely recognized, but no less real. Water pollution forms one part of the threat; rising sea levels and the possible salination of existing freshwater reserves is another. Already, tensions over lack of freshwater have run high in the United States–one of the least affected regions in the world–west of the Mississippi. The term “water wars” presently refers to political maneuvering in the western United States, though the phrase is increasingly used to refer to looming armed conflicts in Africa and Asia. Erwin Klaas’ “Potential for Water Wars in the 21st Century” provides an excellent introduction to the problem we face.
Environmental pollution.
Though the amounts detected in water from a Louisiana tap were small—just a few parts per trillion (ppt)—they can be biologically active, another study finds. At these concentrations, one of the hormones measured and another found in birth control pills alter the apparent gender of fish and, possibly, their fertility. In a suite of yet more studies, collaborating state, federal, and university scientists report finding male carp and walleyes in Minnesota that were producing “sky-high” quantities of vitellogenin, an egg-yolk protein normally made only by females. Such feminization might explain the suspected inability of some adult male fish to make sperm. The researchers had caught the walleyes in the effluent of a sewage-treatment plant—a type of facility that others have shown can release estrogenic pollutants.
That is also not from Diamond, but from Janet Raloff’s June 2000 report, “Excreted Drugs: Something Looks Fishy.” We are seeing increasing incidences of asthma and allergies–trends which are best explained by declining air quality. We all breathe, we all drink, and thus we all need clean air and water. We have neither. The toxins in our air and water are poisons that we take in daily, and are responsible for much of our deteriorating health.
Overpopulation.
The world’s human population is growing. More people require more food, space, water, energy and other resources. … What really counts is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment … Our numbers pose problems insofar as we consume resources and generate wastes.
We’ll consider points #11 and #12 together, since their separation was somewhat artificial to begin with. Overpopulation is the root cause of all other environmental problems. Even the most meager environment can sustain a few people–foragers have flourished in the Arctic, the Kalahari, and other regions because their populatons are low, and their footprint is light.
Overpopulation itself is the natural consequence of the Food Race–driven by the constant need to expand. That need is a systemic consequence of complex society. The alternative to overpopulation, then, is to reverse the trend of intensifying complexity and accept greater simplicity: in a word, collapse.
* * *
Complex societies are a luxury that a healthy ecology can afford. They grow out of a healthy ecology and are sustained by it. A complex society that is detrimental to its ecology assaults the very foundation on which it stands. It is bound for collapse.
Yet, that is precisely what complex societies always do. Diamond tries to paint collapse as a “choice,” but the environmental problems we face are the direct result of the Food Race. Agricultural production creates more overpopulation, which is answered by more intensive agricultural production–resulting in still greater overpopulation, on and on for ten thousand years, however long it takes for the positive feedback loop to crash in on itself.
As Sam Vaknin worte in, “The Emerging Water Wars“:
It takes 1000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain and agriculture consumes almost 70 percent of the world’s water - though only less than 30 percent in OECD countries. It takes more than the entire throughput of the Nile to grow the grain imported annually by Middle Eastern and North African countries alone. Some precipitation-poor countries even grow cotton and rice, both insatiable crops. By 2020, says the World Water Council, we will be short 17 percent of the water that would be needed to feed the population.
The main driving force behind the Holocene Extinction is the twin forces of overpopulation and intensified agricultural production. As more land is converted into cultivated fields, we approach important tipping points in how much of the world’s photosynthetic capacity is tied up in a single species. Deforestation is driven primarily by the need to feed an ever-growing populaton, but also for that population’s other resource needs, such as lumbering and mining.
That deforestation has been responsible for anthropogenic atmospheric change for thousands of years, but as the positive feedback loop of the Food Race reached new levels, we were forced to either adopt fossil fuels, or collapse. Those fuels have intensified our atmospheric impact to obscene levels, yielding a new crisis in global warming.
We do not face a long laundry list of environmental problems: we face a single, multi-faceted crisis. That crisis is complex society itself. The problems we face are the direct consequence of the positive feedback loop of complex society, and the Food Race in particular.
Diamond points to several examples of societies that overcame their environmental problems, but all of those examples–and Diamond’s own suggestions–rely on greater complexity. They solve one proximate cause of collapse by intensifying the ultimate cause of collapse: the diminishing marginal returns on complexity.
In the passage above, Diamond writes:
Today, just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.
Those people are right to blame their governments. One of the main excuses by which Leviathan justifies its existence is that it can “manage” the ecology. Yet it is the very existence of Leviathan that ultimately threatens the very ecology on which it depends. Tainter’s logic is all too true: we cannot explain the collapse of complex societies in terms of their ecological resources, since managing those resources is precisely the promise complex societies offer. Why do such societies fail to deliver that promise?
The answer, of course, is the diminishing marginal return on complexity. The more a complex society manages its ecology, the harder it becomes to do so again. Diamond’s examples of societies that cheated collapse all existed below the point of diminishing returns, when greater complexity–in the form of environmental laws and regulations–still had significant marginal returns. That is not our situation; we are far beyond that point. That is why governmental regulations can never be more than stop-gaps for us, and why our choices are not between the environment and the economy, but between complexity to its bitter end, and survival.
Ultimately, though, it is conceivable that some solution may appear to this crisis. None of the available solutions seem terribly likely to succeed, or even especially effective should they by some miracle be realized. The Kyoto Protocol is a wonderful example of this. Its passage by the United States would be a minor miracle, and without the signature of the world’s single largest carbon consumer, it is completely ineffectual. Yet, even if it were somehow passed, it would be a mere stick in the river–the compromises already made to try to court the United States have made the treaty ineffective.
Ecological devastation is often the proximate cause of collapse–but not always. And, since complex societies specialize in managing their ecological resources, the possibility of some solution is possible, if miniscule and ever-shrinking. Ultimately, it is the diminishing returns on complexity that will end our civilization, but the final blow is difficult to predict. That said, it is extremely likely that the ecological devastation our complexity has wrought will be a proximate cause–and that our complexity will, in the end, be undone by its own consequences.
He is alive!
Jason, this is the thesis I was most looking forward to reading! =)
Comment by Miranda — 28 November 2005 @ 3:44 PM
Hope it was worth the wait, then!
A very good vacation, though. Just what the doctor ordered. I haven’t felt this sane and lucid in years.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 November 2005 @ 4:21 PM
Great one.
By the way, Jason, I start translating the Theses to Turkish and publishing them at my website. I hope it is ok. Yet, 3 of them was translating and just Theses 1 published.
Comment by Elfun — 28 November 2005 @ 5:00 PM
Oh, wow, awesome! So that’s why I keep seeing Turkish coming up in my Technorati search! I was wondering if I was being bad-mouthed in a language I can’t read.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 November 2005 @ 5:02 PM
Jason, good and ultimately worrying thesis - arrrrghhh.
I know it’s stupid but with every thought on the developing crisis we are living in I try to peer into the (complex) future, to try to have some idea of the time left. I know it’s futile, but I have kids and so am wrapped up in both hoping and searching for a solution, while knowing in my heart there isn’t one, that like so many other people some days it just seems best to turn to the wall, put my fingers in my ears and hope it’ll all go away. I’d try believing in God but I’m not farmer and can’t see the point.
What’s your intuitive ballpark timeline for the tipping point?
Comment by Adrian — 28 November 2005 @ 5:11 PM
2012-2015 is our working best guess. 2010 is our own deadline for self-sufficiency, and things are progressing nicely. There’s a whole world of hope for you and your children. If you act now to make yourself self-sufficient, and move into any of those pockets that civlizaton “forgot,” then I’m confident you can live a happy and fulfilling life without even knowing that the civilized world is dying. Your children will know a world where war, crime and disease are fading memories, the bugbears of their parents’ stories, but legends, forgotten and meaningless in their world.
Don’t despair … it seems grim only if preserving 6.5 billion humans is a personally important goal for you. If what you care about is you and yours, then there’s a whole world of hope–far more hope than you had before all this began to unfold.
The earth is very good at healing itself. If we ever stop propelling this damage forward, the earth can begin repairing it almost immediately. The future is very, very bright.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 November 2005 @ 5:20 PM
It’s defintely informative, unfortunately it came just a little bit too late. (I was hoping to reference it in my paper, oh well) It defintely was worth the wait though. =)
Comment by Miranda — 28 November 2005 @ 6:05 PM
Good post, but I think some sections aren’t quite right -quote: “When humans came to Australia and the Americas, they were as harmless as wolves, lions, or any other big mammalian predator. Their presence caused cascades of changes throughout the ecosystem. Given that it was also a period of major climate change, a great number of species that were already under stress adapting to the new climate were tipped over the edge into extinction by the further ecological changes created by the adaptation of a new alpha predator.”
I dissagree with your assesment based on these points:
1.) Megafauna extinctions were greatest in Australia, coniciding with the arrival of humans which was well before the end of the ice age (Call of Distant Mammoths p.152). Also, climate change was less pronounced in Austrailia.
2.) In New Zeland, the moas were overkilled into extinction while they enjoyed the best climate they had experienced in 10,000+ years and plenty of food (Diamond, J. The third Chimpanzee)
3.) Studies of the growth rings and chemical composition of mastadon tusks reveal that they were well fed and breeding frequently even as they were being killed off.
One reason that such large charismatic megafauna still exists in Africa, but was eliminated in most of the rest of the world is that said fauna co-evolved with us there and adapted to the pressures of anthropogenic predation as we adapted to hunt them. Our expansion and technological innovation gave us the power to become an invasive species in ecosystems that had evolved largely in our absence.
To quote Dave Foreman, who co-founded the original Earth First (back in the days when “Foward to the Pleistocene!” was a regularly used slogan)
“I believe the resistance [to the overkill theory] is based not on evidence or logic, but is simply ideological. Various anthropologists and social scientists cannot bring themselves to see Stone Age humans as the cause of mass extinction.”
and to quote E. O. Wilson, the justly famous conservation biologist:
“The somber archaeology of vanished species has taught us the following lessons:
*The noble savage never existed
*Eden occupied was a slaughterhouse
*Paradise found is paradise lost.”
Comment by michael — 28 November 2005 @ 7:54 PM
True, but so what? Australia also had the least biodiversity of any of the continents, being so isolated, making its ecosystem the most fragile–and thus, the most prone to extinction given the introduction of any new alpha predator. We’ve seen how dramatic the effect of wolves was on Yellowstone, but nobody thinks wolves are innately bad. You’ll note that my claim still invokes humans as a cause of extinction–but not because of overhunting.
Restating the overkill hypothesis, as Diamond does in the passage cited above, does not make it true. I take issue with Diamond’s assessment for the same reasons above.
Obviously. Very few animals in the wild die of starvation, even when they’re going extinct.
I think you’re restating my own thinking here, only in harsher terms. Africa’s ecosystem had already adapted to the prescence of humans as alpha predators. The introduction of a new alpha predator in new ecologies triggered a cascade of reactions, and often extinctions, as the ecology adapted to a change at such a high trophic level.
And to quote myself above, “The “overkill” theory is routinely cited by some groups as if it were already a proven fact, and used as evidence that humans are an inherently destructive species. So we needn’t worry ourselves with the ecological destruction we wreak. We can’t help it. It’s our nature.”
The megafauna extinction of the early Holocene saw the extinction of some 75% of large mammal species, but the human population was still measured in the millions. I can see a contributing role, but how could such a small number of humans have caused such massive problems simply by overhunting? It’s far too simplistic, an anachronistic projection of our current ecological problems into the past in order to paint our species as inherently destructive and in so doing, excuse our current behavior without requiring us to change anything about it. For the early Holocene extinction to be purely the work of human predation, you’d basically need the entire species utterly and consciously dedicated to the cause, coordinating with one another on a global scale and dedicating their entire existence to wiping out all large mammalian life–and even that might not be sufficient. I find that scenario, well, unlikely. And more than a tad simplistic. It’s a very popular theory, but that doesn’t make it correct.
As for E.O. Wilson, he is often very right, and often very wrong–and parroting the overkill theory in pretty words, I suppose you can guess how I’d characterize that particular quote.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 November 2005 @ 9:59 PM
How did you arrive at your best guess of 2015 as a tipping point?
Could there be some wishful thinking bias in this prediction?
If allowed to retreat from civilization in 5-10 years, you will have excellent chances of living many years of the tribal life you desire. But if the civilization lasts 20-30 more years, and you are not allowed an opportunity to retreat, your personal desires will be much more frustrated and your survival chances in collapse scenarios diminished.
In your opinion, how long on average is needed to prepare for self-sufficiency for a person with background, age and physical charactersitics similar to yours? Will people who are unprepared for self-sufficient living at a time of collapse have any choice?
Comment by _Gi — 29 November 2005 @ 1:50 PM
Based on the various crises we face, all with 2012-2015 as a major inflection point. Peak Oil is happening right now, and if the 1970s U.S. Hubbert peak is any guide, that means the resulting energy crisis will become dire in about ten years. Global warming is only going to get worse, and there are some major ecological tipping points we’ll be hitting in 2012-2015 with regard to photosynthetic capacity, mass extinction, deforestation and so forth. Basically, every problem we’re worrying about today reaches its climax inside the same, narrow window, and as already discussed, we’re already past the point of diminishing returns. The chances of civilization’s survival past 2020 is all but nil.
Once self-sufficient we can sustain indefinitely, by definition, so bugging out too early is not much of a concern for me.
Learning how is subject to a severe marginal returns curve. In a weekend, you can get up to speed sufficiently to stand a chance. After that, it’s quality of life–which, admittedly, one weekend just gets you the meanest survival. Those skills can be perfected your whole life long. That’s why so many people despair of how hard it is to learn, and how they’re not ready. They can see how much they still don’t know. But I tend to think they know enough.
Because of that, I think far more important than the training (which anyone can get) is the ability to look at a forest, and see food and shelter rather than a hostile, dark wilderness (which you either get or you don’t).
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 November 2005 @ 2:20 PM
i think you are right that 12-15 is a reasonable for the date of a civilizational collapse, but in the meantime there is some parts of it that are starting to happen now. particularly nateral gas in north america, and our economic collapse. these are not distant. and i have issue with your contention that learning hunter/gatherer skills is available to everyone. i have been learning some of them on my own but the real total stuff costs thousands of dollars, unless people start changing this, then only rich people will have help learnig these things then? i surely hope not.
Comment by Primal anarchist — 29 November 2005 @ 4:27 PM
As of Katrina, I’ve stopped referring to collapse as an inevitable future event, and begun referring to it as going on right now. 2012-2015 is my best estimate of when the process will have progressed to its inflection point.
As to learning the skills of a hunter-gatherer … Peterson’s Guide costs $20 or so, and there are still national forests in the world. I took a class on Wild Edibles first, and that was a good idea (I think), but not entirely necessary. It was $45. If it’s costing you thousands of dollars, you’re being taken for a ride.
A lot of the primitive skills teachers out there are hucksters, so you have to be careful. The bare minimum of what’s necessary can be self-taught in a weekend. It can take thousands of dollars and the rest of your life to perfect it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 November 2005 @ 4:32 PM
Bugging out too early is a crucial question. It is always being asked of you in the form of “If you like it so much, why aren’t you in the forest right now?”
Usually you come back with a bunch of clever answers, the major point of which is that while this civilization is strong, it is useless to retreat, because you will be found and forced to conform perhaps through taxes, or out of bureaucratic meanness or indifference or some other byproduct of the civilization. So, I understand, it will be very difficult to bug out too early even if you are self-sufficient.
I don’t understand. If I were to undergo basic training in forest living, and I didn’t learn that forest living is long-term sustainable and perhaps even desireable if things get very tough in the cities, then that would be a waste of a weekend.
I think you overestimate the average availability and willingness to take the basic training. I think the situation with such training can be compared with bio-diesel cars that run on McDonalds waste oil. The supply of such training is extremely limited, this is not likely to change a lot. However, the present demand is perhaps even smaller. And so, there is a catch for which I do not see resolution. Either the demand stays low to the end, and very few people get even the basics. And then vast majority will have no choice but to think hostile wilderness about the forest. Or the demand vastly increases at some point and the limited supply is not able to match. In which case, if you are reasonably prepared to teach your skills, you could make a small fortune, before your skills become truly necessary.
Comment by _Gi — 29 November 2005 @ 4:38 PM
Wow, very insightful post. I have bought a few books on self sufficiency and thought about this sort of thing often. But due to lack of time have not made any preparations for the impending doom. After reading these posts I will start my efforts in learning how to be self sufficient. I’d be very interested in finding more information on self sufficiency (websites, books etc) if you know of any.
Thank you.
Comment by Scott — 29 November 2005 @ 5:14 PM
Nice piece. I’ve got nothing to rattle or diminish anything, but perhaps a few comments to help tighten the screws down a bit….
[blockquote]There are, at the time of this writing, only 6.5 billion people on earth, yet just that many requires 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. That is how much energy is required to support so many people, and the food that so many people require–and, as is often the case, the food that food requires. 40% of the total energy available to the entire planet is wrapped up in a single species; only 60% is currently portioned out among all the other millions of species on earth. [/blockquote]
Could I check out the source for these stats? I’m trying to better understand how “stored” solar energy (in the form of fossil fuels) is tied up in our species (and our food species), and how that is accounted in the photosynthetic capacity percentages cited. These stored solar sources are, in effect, only available to humans (for rapid exploitation) and have been used in part to covert other biomass into human mass. But this energy is not what is available from the sun each day, it is “saved” from previous millennia of solar output.
We’re dealing with really big, sloppy numbers - I’m just trying to figure out what is being lumped where… And how they went about measuring/totaling…
—–
[blockquote]The amount of life is not changing, but biodiversity is plummeting. We are, pound by pound, replacing every single lifeform on this planet with a corresponding unit of human flesh. We are reducing the planet’s biodiversity to a single species. [/blockquote]
Human mass is replacing other, simpler forms of biomass, affecting the amount of life - globally. But pound for pound? Increases in complexity require more energy (above the point of diminishing marginal returns). So wouldn’t conservation of mass & energy suggest that as we replace simpler, faster growing forms of biomass with complex human mass - total biomass would decrease? (along, of course with diversity).
—–
[blockquote]Planting a field entirely with a single crop is as suicidal as locking yourself in a garage with a running car, and for all the very same reasons. [/blockquote]
Well, assuming a few things: The car is running on fossil fuel; The garage is sufficiently sealed; the car is not using a catalytic converter (neutralizing poisonous exhaust); there is enough fuel in the car to combust with enough oxygen in the garage to suffocate; you don’t use the car to break out of the garage and into another oxygen utility curve on the upslope…
Comment by JCamasto — 29 November 2005 @ 5:40 PM
An addition to the “pound for pound” discussion:
Also at play, and in the opposite direction of complexity reducing total biomass, is our conversion of fossil fuel into even more biomass. Perhaps these two essentially offset each other - or both are too small to affect global totals with any significance. Just thinking out loud, here…
Comment by JCamasto — 29 November 2005 @ 8:18 PM
We expand our food two ways. We take it from others and we trade on margin. When the oil runs out and the ecosystem snaps back and retakes what we’ve taken…. Using oil to further expand our program was a bad idea. It simply allowed us to further outstrip the capabilities of Earth. This should be interesting, in 100 years I wouldn’t be surpised by continent-wide rainforests.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 30 November 2005 @ 2:05 AM
Ben,
I hope I live long enough to see that.
Best
Bill Maxwell
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 30 November 2005 @ 2:44 AM
I think Jensen says (to the effect of): Forests have been successfully “harvested” (clear-cut) once or twice in a row - and can quickly rebound… but… third strike, you’re out (of biomass).
Comment by JCamasto — 30 November 2005 @ 3:20 AM
Hey Jim –
Do we know this? IE is there some data that shows that complex life forms require more per mass energy than simple ones? I actually supposed just the other day that the opposite might be true and explain some of the selection towards complexity — complexity is a result of random variation, technically, but there are still real world selection pressures that ‘choose’ between the complex solution and the simple one.
I’ve been reading chaos theory so I am looking at everything in terms of nested sets and simple rules –> complex behavior…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 30 November 2005 @ 10:07 AM
“in 100 years I wouldn’t be surpised by continent-wide rainforests.”
Which continent would that be? I am worried that when fossil fuels start getting scarce people will switch to wood to heat their homes and deforestation will increase even more.
Comment by DigitalDjigit — 30 November 2005 @ 11:39 AM
Ah, but when fossil fuels get scarce, mass agriculture will be a much more difficult prospect.
Agriculture is one of the biggest reasons for deforestation.
Comment by Miranda — 30 November 2005 @ 12:09 PM
also, people are likely to realize the burnability of books.
Comment by Miranda — 30 November 2005 @ 12:48 PM
If The Day After Tomorrow is any guide, they’ll realize the burnability of books before the flammability of tables, chairs, and uselessly ornate woodwork.
Jim: I’ve seen the 40% figure several times, most recently (and its reasoning elucidated most thoroughly) in Diamond’s Collapse. I’ve heard references to a paper by one “Daly” that supposedly proves the figure, but I’ve yet to track down a proper citation.
Janene: The whole costs more than the sum of its parts. An animal needs more energy than simply an equivalent collection of single-celled organisms, for very much the same issues that set in with The Mythical Man Month. Electro-chemical energy is expended though the neural system to make all those cells coordinate and cooperate. Circulatory systems must propel resources through that system, etc. Complexity most definitely requires more energy. An animal with a million cells will always use more energy than a million single-celled organisms.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 30 November 2005 @ 1:08 PM
Hey —
Jason I understand the argument… question is whether there is documented evidence to that effect.
I keep thinking of ecology and chaos — both of which are leading to me to consider this question. In a healthy ecology, each organism thrives off of the waste effluent of the others… which can be loosely translated to say: they don’t need to process thier own food because other organisms are already providing a tailor made stew. At what point does the increasing efficiency tip between overall greater efficiency and loss of efficency due to additional requisite systems? (Keep in mind, I am using the model of the animal-as-self-contained-ecology)
Of course there are blatent limitations to this — that’s why I always expand Gould’s ‘drunken walk’ metaphor to include not only a wall of minimum complexity, but also a gutter of maximum complexity…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 30 November 2005 @ 1:19 PM
Janene,
“is there some data that shows that complex life forms require more per mass energy than simple ones?”
I don’t have the data, but there is a big loss of energy every time you move up a trophic level (80% pops into my head, but I could be wrong) Given that humans don’t photosythesise, the total biomass of the earth should, at least if it weren’t for the effect of fossil fuels, be going down.
Complexity is not the most important issue here - more important is the fact that we are heterotrophs.
Comment by Clive — 30 November 2005 @ 2:03 PM
Hey Clive —
Yeah, that is an important point on the macro level at least… and it could point to one defining point where efficiencies are lost… but then again, the question arises that since ecologies need organisms at each stage in the process (primary producers, secondary producers, predators, bacterial/fungal decomposters etc) to function, is it really valid to ‘charge’ the cost of primary production against secondary and tertiary lifeforms?
More interesting to me at the moment, though, is whether a bacterium is more efficeint or less efficient than a bacterial colony… or is a nematode more or less efficient than an ameoba. How about blue green algae vs coral?
Janene
Comment by Janene — 30 November 2005 @ 2:25 PM
I’ve also seen the 40% figure floating around so I did a little digging at my schools library and found your citation.
Peter Vitousek, et al. “Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis.” BioScience 34(6) 1986
I’m surprised the article is almost 20 years old by now. You can get the article on JSTOR if you have access.
This one seems to be a more recent report:
Rojstaczer, S., Sterling, S. M. & Moore, N. J. (2001) Science 294, 2549-2552
Paul
Comment by Mal — 30 November 2005 @ 2:47 PM
As far as the rainforest thing goes. I predicted that based on a couple of facts:
1) once tipping point is reached the emision of greenhouse gas might be sufficent to maintain a high temperature even without us continuing to contribute.
2) pollution goes away. rapidly in fact, once we stop pumping it into the air. Note that after the Northeast blackout the air quality improved drastically in days.
3) More carbon means more food for plants, it’s the other pollution that makes that bad. But that pollution should go away before the carbon does. There by incuraging increased plant growth. Plant populations are based on food availability too, you know.
As for where exactly…don’t know. It would depend on what places had the proper climate, but what climates places have is in flux right now. So…no clue.
This is just why I wouldn’t be supprised, it’s also possible for the plant to become much colder after we stop interfering. I don’t know, but I’m preparing for both.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 1 December 2005 @ 1:30 AM
uh–
“If The Day After Tomorrow is any guide, they’ll realize the burnability of books before the flammability of tables, chairs, and uselessly ornate woodwork.”
let’s hope they stop and remember that it’s really handy to be carrying a picture of that mushroom you’re currently trying to place in the Poisonous or Not Poisonous category. having seen that film, those are actually some of my favorite on-screen librarians! they send everyone to the tax and government books to burn first “looks like we won’t be needing THESE anymore!” and then, they save someone’s life using their medical reference book to diagnose an infection!
(great post, though!)
Comment by Librarian — 1 December 2005 @ 6:21 PM
“As far as the rainforest thing goes. I predicted that based on a couple of facts:”
fact 1
-What tipping point? It the earth warms to such a degree that people in the majority of the northern hemisphere do not use fire in the winter to stay warm (say it’s 50-60 degrees across the US in January, for example) then we’ll quite probably will be looking at the extinction of humans or something very close to it due to catastrophic ecosystem failure. There would likely be a complete loss of most of our endemic tree species…salmon would die well before this point, as would trout and most stream dwelling fish due to higher water temps and ensuing decreased o2 levels…among other things.
fact 2
Particulates, ground level ozone, and sulfur/nitrous oxides dissipate rapidly. So, yeah if you shut down coal fired power plants, shut down industry and cut back on driving, the level of these and other EPA “criteria” pollutants drops in the immediate area. but they don’t just “go away” so much as they go somewhere else. Furthermore, most of our pollutants don’t dissipate duite so well. Many of them bioaccumulate and are passed up the foodchain (mercury, pcbs, etc.) This is why 1 in 6 of women of “child-birthing age” in the US has mercury in her body in levels unsafe for her present or future fetus. This is also why many Inuit people’s livers are so full of PCB’s that they are classified as toxic waste. What about endocrine disruptors, acid mine drainage, nuclear and industrial waste *and* our military pollutants (nuclear/biological/chem weapons)
Post-collpse, the production of such nasties will drop, but the existing ammounts will, in all likelyhood ravage the planet in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
fact 3
anthropogenic input of fertilizer tends to destabilize ecosystems (remember, there is a lot more to the forest than the trees).
Quote:
“As for where exactly…don’t know. It would depend on what places had the proper climate, but what climates places have is in flux right now. So…no clue.”
Soil. You have to remember that topsoil is important. Even if warming and precip. patterns shift so that, say central Canada has a better climate for vegetation growth it still won’t compare to the historic range of diversity of the US because much of their soil was scraped down into the mississippi river basin and since soil production generally moves at a slower rate than in northern climes…
There is no possible way, nor would it be a good thing in terms of biodiversity, for the continent (n. america) to be wall to wall rainforest in 100 or even 500 years.
Comment by Michael — 1 December 2005 @ 10:47 PM
Fact 1: I mean that our impact might very well be becoming self-sustaining. Point in fact: the permafrost in Siberia is melting. Once this happens many millions of tons of methane will be released in to the atmosphere. A huge increase in a shorter amount of time than we could accomplish if we tried. This would permenantly alter weather cycles. For instance, the gulf stream might never be as substantial a factor in global climate again. This would make the carribean hoter and europe colder while increasing the severity of storms across four continents.
Fact 2: Nuclear waste is scary, but only because of the length of time it takes for nature to handle it. Otherwise, since we store all of it in central locations, it’s less of a concern for me than for most people. It’s not like it’s spread around the whole of the planet. It’s buried under mountains, and, even if they get uncovered, it’ll only effect a relatively small area. As for the rest of the pollutents, nature has it’s way with them as well. Humans have never created anything so much as we move things around a lot. Give it time and nature will see to it that things harmful to life are away from life. Albeit, there will be problems, especially in cities, for hundreds of years. Perhaps longer. But forests, and even rural and suburban areas not near major manufacturing centers will heal with amazing speed. Life prevails.
Fact 3: And a lot more to fertilizer than cow dung. They’ve run studies, I’ll have to search to link to them…or they might be hard copy…don’t remember. Exposing plants to higher levels of carbon dioxide increases their growth. It’s the other polutants that hurt them.
Soil is a major concern. But regeneratable. It takes time, but when an ecosystem is destablized many processes that ordinarily take millenia are sped up to centuries or less. And we’re talking about a major disruption. Perhaps the largest in history.
I wouldn’t dare predict the future of the ecosystem right now. I merely said I would not be suprised. I would be equaly unsuprised by massive glaciation. And am preparing for both, everything in between, and for the possibility of nothing happening at all. Beyond that, I tend to leave determining what’s good for nature up to nature. I’m not qualified to judge such matters.
(P.S. never said North America. Might be S. America, Austraila, etc. a lot of continents out there.)
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 1 December 2005 @ 11:59 PM
I, personally, think it would be fun to have wall to wall rainforests.
With the occasional nuclear / chemical / biological mutant. (a la “The Prophecy” — not the fallen angel movie from long ago).
You know, fun.
And then there’s the cannabilistic hordes of zombie-like city dwellers.
More fun.
Do we really need to debate that which we don’t know?
Maybe I’ll take up skiing instead.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 2 December 2005 @ 1:15 AM
okay, I was seeing your “point one” as a response to DigitalDjigit’s concern that when civilization runs out of fossil fuel people will burn the forests to stay warm.
Also, if you consider the “tipping point” to be the point where global warming continues without further human help then we’ve arguably reached that point due to the “lag effect.” Basically, it takes several years for the insulating effect of increased co2, methane, etc. inputs to become fully effective…and, like you noted, artic permafrost is already melting.
2. Life prevails, true - I’m just trying to counter what I see as a hugely optimistic picture… Also, there are many pollutants other than nuclear waste that will have persistant negative effects even if civilization collapses tomorrow.
For example, salmonid populations generally decline in headwater streams where 10% of the surface area of the surrounding watershed is paved or otherwise covered by an impermiable surface. This is due in large part to thermal pollution (sun heats pavement, precipitation is heated by pavement, warm water flows rapidly into stream). Most suburbs have far exceeded that 10% threshold…and there are invasive species to think of as well.
3. A school in North Carolina (I want to say Duke but maybe its UNC?) did a co2/tree growth study that reached similar conclusions to what you are talking about. But I’m talking about ecosystems of which trees are just one part. Increased co2 helps trees grow faster and also changes the pH of water making it less favorable for plankton and a few other sensative aquatic organisms
What’s “good for nature” is to vague a phrase for me; that’s why I never used it.
I said that wall to wall N. American rainforest would not be good for biodiversity which is a measurable aspect of stable ecosystems that tend to favor the continuation of life.
Comment by michael — 2 December 2005 @ 1:15 AM
How do you know that such a thing would be bad for biodiversity? Or that it would be unstable? No rainforest has ever been subject to either, why would this one be?
I’m not overly concerned by plankton or salmon. Life perveils, and nature knows what it is doing. Any role being handled by a species might be handled by another. One niche opens and it is just as quickly closed. The question isn’t whether there will be life. The question is not whether humans could survive in such a world. The question is merely if humans will have a chance to live in that world. All things considered, we should have an opertunatey. We are too multi-adaptive for it to be otherwise. There are many animals with large ranges and a varied diet. But the majority have either a limited diet or a narrow range. Those with a varied diet and a large range have a greater chance of survival when there are large-scale climate shifts. We have already survived at least one.
As for concrete. It will be gone soon. Trees hate concrete and destroy it as soon as they can. Cities will be carved up by plants into rocky soil. Perhaps with a higher metal content than before. Maybe species of plants will evolve that incorporate that metal into their structure.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 2 December 2005 @ 2:52 AM
The 40% figure is also cited by Richard Manning in “The Oil We Eat.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 December 2005 @ 2:52 PM
Thanks for the 40% refs, folks - I located them all and will read ‘em.
Comment by JCamasto — 2 December 2005 @ 3:59 PM
Why would pan-american rainforest be a bad thing? Because it would displace existing ecosystems and push millions of species into extinction. Think of the sagebrush grasslands of the inter-moutain west or the deserts of the southwest. For a specific example, look at Mono Lake, a stopover for thousands of migratory birds on the edge of the great basin deasert on the eastern slope of the sierras. It is a stopover due to its specific level of water salinity which sustains a huge population of brine shrimp that the birds feed on. If the area suddenly became a rainforest the increase in precipitation and temperature would lower the salinity, the brine shrimp population would collapse, as would the metapopulations of migratory birds which would have huge consequences for the ecosystems across the globe that said birds are a key part of.
Another example: the mesophytic forests of the east (which from what I gather, you folks plan to live in post-collapse) are simply not rainforests but they are stable incredibly diverse ecosystems whose species have, due to the relative lack of glaciation, had a very long time (I can’t remember the approx. figure, but well over 10,000 years) to adapt to the soil types, topography and precipitation patterns of the region, and to co-evolve. There’s simply no way to replace that ecosystem with something more biologically diverse and stable in a mere 100 years.
“I’m not overly concerned by plankton or salmon. Life perveils, and nature knows what it is doing. Any role being handled by a species might be handled by another. One niche opens and it is just as quickly closed.”
What if Exxon or Monsanto made this statement? I would say that This attitude is to optimistic/simplistic and I think almost all ecologists and conseravtion biologists would agree.
“The question is merely if humans will have a chance to live in that world.”
Is that the question? Well, in that case lets sip our champagne on the deck of this “Noah’s Ark” that we’ve turned into a Titanic. Forget the species that co-evolved with us, our predators that taught us to be strong and aware, our prey/forage that taught us to be cunning and to interpret the interplay of weather, soils and relative abundance of plant life. Humans will have a chance; there’s probably a lifeboat around here somewhere…
My question is more like: How should we live so that salmon continue to surge up waterfalls, and whales filter plankton from the sea, how do we live so that the wonderous biological complexity is not impoverished by our actions, and how do we do so in such a way that allows us to live in peace (or at least tolerance) with the other members of our species?
“Maybe species of plants will evolve that incorporate that metal into their structure.”
And maybe nuclear waste will speed up evolution by increasing rates of genetic mutation. To me this seems like wishful thinking/wild conjecture.
Instead, lets focus on what we’re doing to ecosystems right now, and lets take some responsibility for the work of fixing/preserving them.
Comment by michael — 3 December 2005 @ 8:45 PM
The basic fact of the matter is that an massive ecological change is here. It’s beginning already. All I’m saying is that it is not for us to make moral judgements on nature. If the US becomes a huge rainforest (which was, again, not the continent I was thinking of) then it was the choice of the gods and to stand against it would be foolhardy. Yes, many species will go extinct. Many already have. Maybe we’ll be extinct as well. There is no “good” and “bad” involved here. Nature’s way is change, not preservation. I do not believe that we have a duty to protect salmon. That is not to say that I think we have a right to destroy the enivonment, that is also not for man. But attempting to save certain species from extinction due to climate change? Isn’t that also playing god? It’s a not a game we should play very often, we aren’t very good at it. In fact, we often loose our shirts.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 3 December 2005 @ 10:33 PM
Small point to start with…
The oxygen released from photosynthesis comes from the splitting of water, not from the CO2. It is released as a by product of the process and although significant energy is released when we heterotrophs use it, our cells contain complex mechanisms to protect our own bodies from the damage O2 does to our own cells. Thus this statement:
“we rely on plants to recycle the carbon dioxide we exhale into oxygen we can breathe”
is not technically correct.
It also downplays the role of algae in producing the majority (~3/4) of the oxygen that we breathe.
Increasing both the temperature and CO2 concentration of the atmosphere will give a selective advantage to plants that fix carbon using the C4 (and possibly CAM) cycle over the majority (currently ~95% by biomass on earth) of plants that use C3.
Also the statements:
“It is worth noting that global warming is considered controversial only in the United States–the only other Western country than Australia that still considers evolution to be a controversial subject.”
“Australia also had the least biodiversity of any of the continents, being so isolated, making its ecosystem the most fragile–and thus, the most prone to extinction given the introduction of any new alpha predator.”
The first statement is not correct. Mainly those following the US originated evangelical literalist interpretation of the bible take issue with evolution. And from what I gather, unlike in the US where parents/school boards seem to have significant influence over school curricula the same situation does not apply in Australia… pandering from some politicians not withstanding.
As far as I’m aware, Global Warming is not disbelieved by the majority of Australians, nor by the Government (meant here in the broader context including the opposition parties). Not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol was done for the usual reasons from a Party that believes that money is more real than nature. Big business (here meaning the mining/coal industry) was against it, and they could sell the idea that it would not be effective… with the usual references to the taxpayers wallet. Brown nosing to the US is not to be discounted either.
The second statement is missleading. How is this biodiversity being measured? Number of big animals? Southwest Western Australia is considered very biodiverse, as is the Great Barrier Reef. The “fragility” of this continent is mainly due to the massive and rapid deforestation that has occured since colonisation. This has changed the water balance leading to dryland salinity and erosion. Overextraction of water from catchments is also a problem. The concept of fragility depends (obviously) on the nature of the change.
I consider the situation in the UK more tenuous.
Having chopped down the trees, mined pretty well all of the coal and burnt the best part of their gas and oil can 60 million people survive on an island smaller than most Australian states?
Comment by Shane — 4 December 2005 @ 6:20 AM
On photosynthesis. Photosynthesis doesn’t actually release any energy:
6CO2 + 6H2O + energy(solar) –> C6H12O6 + 6O2
Later the plant then uses the standard aerobic respiration eukariotic cells all use:
6O2 + C6H12O6 –> 6C02 + 6H20 + energy(chemical)
Plants just photosynthesize a lot more than they respirate, also there is a lot more of them.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 4 December 2005 @ 10:38 AM
So, Shane, you’re saying there is no carbon cycle? Plants (and algae, sorry for the gloss) don’t remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that animals exhale as an input, and release oxygen as an output? So … why aren’t we all suffocating on our own breath at this point?
A fine refutation to a point I didn’t make. Perhaps my phrasing was clumsy. A careful reading yields that the United States is the only country where global warming is considered “controversial,” but the United States is also the only Western country other than Australia where they don’t believe in evolution. It was a statement to cast doubt on the U.S., i.e., “But yeah, what do they know? They don’t even believe in evolution!” Which required a modifier about Australia, because even though everything you say is correct about it being a U.S. evangelical import and that it’s not nearly as strong there as here, it’s still there in significant numbers, so saying the U.S. is the only country where evolution is controversial would be incorrect. Didn’t say a thing about what Australia believes about global warming, because I know that it’s not really considered controversial there. Evolution increasingly is, thanks to American efforts, but not global warming. So, a fine refutation to a misreading of an admittedly clumsy statement.
The UK is more tenuous, much more. Islands are always more tenuous than continents, and smaller islands tend to be more tenuous than bigger islands. So, Austrlia’s the most tenuous continent, and the most stable island. But measuring biodiversity is pretty easy. You count up how many species per unit of area.
Now, today, Australia’s facing a lot of environmental problems, just like everywhere else. But 10,000+ years ago, it still had significantly less biodiversity than Eurasia, Africa or the Americas. A very different set, mind you–no one can deny that Australian animals are f’ed up–but ultimately, a much more narrow range. Just a narrow range with very little overlap with anything we’re normally familiar with.
But that’s narrow compared to other continents; compared to islands, it’s very, very broad.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 December 2005 @ 12:22 PM
“Cloudy, with a Chance of Chaos“:
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 January 2006 @ 2:58 PM
Primal anarchist asked “i have issue with your contention that learning hunter/gatherer skills is available to everyone. i have been learning some of them on my own but the real total stuff costs thousands of dollars, unless people start changing this, then only rich people will have help learnig these things then?” In response to that I say I have never had an income of greater than $35,000 per year, and am currently at less than half that income, but I am learning. I simply go out in my yard and try plants growing there. Now admittedly I live in a small town and thus can afford to rent a place with a big yard, and the yard is not one that has been cultivated into a monoculture of a particular type of grass. Heck, most of the less expensive places to rent in small towns will not have highly manicured lawns and thus contain a decent amount of biodiversity. That resource and a few books equaling less than a $75 investment has me well on my was to being able to support me and my daughter off the land long enough to learn the other things I need. I honestly cannot even concieve of what “real stuff” costs thousands of dollars? Are you talking some kind of classes?!?!?! Nature will teach you. And I’ve found plenty of people [generally women] who can identify plants I cannot and are willing to share their knowledge for free so long as I take the time to go out with them and look in the ditches and pastures. As for books the most valuable one I’ve found is “Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places” by “Wildman” Steve Brill with Evelyn Dean. It sells for $21.95. The author is from New York City of all places so it doesn’t even take living in a rural setting to learn these things. I got the book in my local health food store, but I’m certain you could get it off Amazon as well.
Gi - I personally am not bugging out now because the system is still strong enough to track me down and take my child from me. Without her, to what purpose would I be doing it? To prolong my own existence? That’s short sighted. Rather I will continue to muddle along looking like a good cog while I make my preparations, learn as much as possible and get us into a physical location where I can make a break when the collapse is underway enough in earnest that the system no longer has the strength to track and harass me.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 23 February 2006 @ 8:27 PM
I am still scared of the Iran oil bourse. I have read elsewhere on the internet saying “Beware the Ides of March.” If the dollar being the only currency traded for oil wasn’t important, then why did we go to war over it? Why is the Federal Reserve not showing how much money they print in March? And if the US believes that it needs to stop this bourse, Iran can simply sink a few tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and I think I read that they set up tankers there preventing any oil from getting out of the Middle East which would cause a global depression I think I read. And this timeline also underestimates the elite’s wanting to continue their power and having a strategy- demand destruction, as I have read theories like this from places like From the Wilderness.
Comment by planetwarming — 23 February 2006 @ 9:17 PM
No worries, Ides of March is March 15. The bourse doesn’t open until the 20th
I don’t believe our elites to be cohesive enough to have just one strategy which they follow flawlessly.
This is because our elites are so huge in numbers.
I don’t think any of this site’s main authors believes that a global economical depression will be avoided for much longer. There is no need to be scared, this particular problem also contains multiple opportunities in it.
Comment by _Gi — 23 February 2006 @ 9:51 PM
I agree with Steve Lagavulin on the bourse:
Comment by Jason Godesky — 24 February 2006 @ 10:04 AM
Found this article today about Africa’s drought problems. Thought it was relevant to this topic.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4769978.stm
Comment by Nano — 3 March 2006 @ 5:04 PM
“Heat Wave” starts off with some great fodder for the book edit…
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 June 2006 @ 4:28 PM
Jason,
You might enjoy reading this newly published online book :
megafauna.com
To move forward effectively, we need to know the factual nature of our global ecological history
Comment by kerry — 7 September 2006 @ 6:03 PM
Yes we do, but unfortunately, that book has very little to do with the factual nature of our global ecological history. See “Overkill, Overchill & Human Nature.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 September 2006 @ 7:17 PM
Species ending? It’s our call
http://www.baltimoreexaminer.com/opinion/Species_ending_Its_our_call_story.html
By Frank Keegan
11/16/08
Relax general. Cheer up. Things shall get worse, but they could get better. The choice is ours.
Hearing a vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff utter the words “species ending” about our near future should be enough to wake us all.
Gen. James E. Cartwright uttered the phrase recently during the inaugural Johns Hopkins University Leaders + Legends lecture. He spoke on “Leading Organizational Change to Meet New Challenges.”
What challenges? Financial crises, climate change, weapons of mass destruction widely and readily available to rogue states and lunatic groups. Is that all? No.
“Competition (for scarce world resources) inevitably will lead to conflict,” Cartwright said. “Are we at a tipping point? Yes. Will we have control? No.”
Generals are interested because when leaders of state, commerce and church mess up, armed forces have to clean up.
Cartwright’s love and admiration for the men and women who fight for us if things go wrong is palpable. Figuring out when and where the next conflict breaks out, and how best to combat it, is what generals are supposed to do.
Now they also try to figure out why, and ways to prevent it. For example, a 2004 Department of Defense study determined global warming is the No. 1 threat to the security of the United States. How can that be if there is no such thing?
Just because history proves we turn upon ourselves when stressed with a ferocity unequaled by any other species, is there any reason to think this time will be different?
Nope, according to Cartwright. The stress level is rising, fast. Along with heating things up, we inflict upon ourselves an increasing host of things — from radioactive isotopes to organic chemicals to new and emerging diseases — never before endured by humans.
Family by family, friend by friend we now begin to see the price we pay for our toxic past. We have not seen the worst of it. Our despoiling of our narrow ecological niche leaves us little room for survival.
We are learning the real price of living it up instead of eating bread from the sweat of our brow. We arrogantly believe “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God” beseeched in our Declaration of Independence somehow do not apply to us.
Environmentalists weep about saving Earth when actually our planet is not at risk. We are. Other species come and go. Why not us?
Don’t worry about biodiversity. While exterminating thousands of species, we create opportunities for others. Cockroaches and rats are doing very well. Doing even better are myriad bacteria and viruses. For example, we’ve created perfect environments for growth and spread of staphylococcus and influenza, and the willfully ignorant and criminal negligence of our political and spiritual leaders helped HIV propagate around the globe in less than a decade. Thanks.
Sure, if we ceased all carbon dioxide emissions now it would take only 100,000 years to return to pre-industrial levels.
And those new substances — we cannot even count them all — we poison the born and unborn with will continue to kill us for millennia, especially if we use them as weapons.
But we and we alone hold the power to begin undoing what we have done. The hard fact is environmental responsibility is good business, creating jobs, adding real value and paying long-term dividends.
Environmental atrocities are bad business, merely deferring costs that accrue and compound — costs we cannot refuse to pay. Our ecological deficit is orders of magnitude larger than our fiscal debts, though both grow from our same inherent flaws.
We can pay down both at the same time if we have the wisdom and will to take control.
If we do we can thrive and prosper. If we don’t, Gen. Cartwright is correct. We’re doomed.
Frank Keegan is editor of The Baltimore Examiner. Reach him at fkeegan@baltimoreexaminer.com.
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