GeoDestinies 2022

 

Walter Youngquist (1921-2018) was a petroleum geologist, a University of Oregon professor, and my friend.  His life’s masterpiece is a 600 page book that’s now available to everyone as a free PDF download [HERE].  

Geologists study Earth resources, many of which are being degraded and depleted — aquifers, topsoil, hydrocarbons, minerals, etc.  These resources have limits.  Every drinker learns that the glass starts full, ends empty, and the faster you drink it, the quicker it’s gone.  Consumers pay little attention to resource limits, but they’re beginning to comprehend the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.  Mainstream experts repeatedly tell us not to worry.  They preach a fervent blind faith in miracles — a smooth and easy transition to a clean, green, renewable utopia.  Geologists wince. 

Youngquist didn’t believe in miracles or techno utopias.  Today, we’re living dangerously fast by destroying astonishing amounts of nonrenewable resources — a onetime binge that can never again be repeated.  Nonrenewable energy is finite.  We have been soaring in a beautiful dream world, where the air is perfumed with the intoxicating aroma of a nonrenewable prosperity.  The era of cheap energy is fading away in the rear view mirror. 

In 1973, the Eugene newspaper wrote a story about one of his lectures, “Dark Picture Painted by Youngquist.”  He gave many talks to Chamber of Commerce groups, trying to introduce them to the concept of limits.  He was almost never invited back.  America worships perpetual growth at any cost.  Growth is our god word.

In the mid-1990s, a number of the world’s petroleum geologists became alarmed that the volume of new oil discovered was declining, while the volume of consumption continued soaring.  This inspired the dawn of the Peak Oil movement, a wakeup call.  In 1997, Youngquist published GeoDestinies, which quickly sold out.  Folks begged him to print more, but Walt was reluctant.  He wanted to update the info first, but the story was moving faster than he could type. 

Finally, in 2012, he finished the update.  Unfortunately, the process hit some curves.  The book did not get to a printer, Walt died, the publisher went extinct, and the manuscript gathered dust.  In 2022, a small group of fans was able to get a digital copy, and make it available to the world.  Most of the content is still timely and very important.  For most readers, this book is largely going to be a banquet of new information, important stuff that’s rarely taught in school, if ever.

Today, many snicker at the Peak Oil dimwits.  Dudes, we didn’t run out!  We’ll always find more!  In the ’90s, the industry was primarily producing cheap and easy conventional oil (insert a straw and suck).  It appears that the global production of this oil peaked around 2005.  Unfortunately, mad scientists developed new technology for extracting oil, like hydro-fracking and horizontal drilling.  This enabled a sharp increase in the production of unconventional oil from sources including tar sands, heavy oil, shale oil (tight oil), and deep water wells.  This oil was far more challenging and expensive to extract (and the mother of many bankruptcies).

In addition to declining discoveries, a new boogeyman is EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).  It takes energy to extract fossil energy.  For example, a hundred years ago, the EROEI for conventional oil was very high.  Ram a drill into a huge pool of Texas oil, and a geyser of black gold often shot high in the sky.  Today, with the shift toward unconventional oil, the EROEI is far lower and declining.  As the energy needed for extraction approaches the energy content of the output, the industry moves closer to its expiration date.  A lot of fossil energy will be left in the ground forever. 

It took more than 500 million years for geologic forces to transform plant and animal residue into fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas.  It will take less than 500 years for humans to extract it and burn it.  We live during a brief blip in Earth history, an ecological hurricane.  Walt’s core message was a blunt warning.  “The momentum of population growth and resource consumption is so great that a collision course with disaster is inevitable.  Large problems lie not very far ahead.  …In some respects, the twenty-first century will be like the twentieth century in reverse.”

The public believes that adequate “renewable” substitutes will be available when needed.  Alternative energy is not clean, green, and free.  The hardware components have limited working lifespans.  Scaling up to replace nonrenewable energy would require vast land area, roads, power lines, and backup for when adequate wind or sunbeams are unavailable.  Manufacturing solar panels requires critical minerals like cobalt, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese, tellu­rium, titanium, and zinc.  Each wind turbine requires tons of concrete, steel, and other resources.

Walt described the alternative energy options, and their many limitations.  He concluded that renewable energy will not come close to replacing fossil energy.  In 2021, Alice Friedemann presented a far more thorough discussion in her book Life After Fossil Fuels.  A renewable utopia seems impossible. 

Oil is just one of many Earth resource topics in Walt’s book.  Plants and animals don’t need it.  Less than 200 years ago, oil was of no great importance to anyone anywhere.  For many thousands of years, nomads wandered across the Arabian Peninsula, under which laid oceans of ancient oil.  It never occurred to them to extract it, burn it, blindside the climate, and race down crowded highways in powerful motorized wheelchairs.  Naturally, in those days, the planet was in far healthier condition.  Then, in the twentieth century, Arabia became very rich, very fast.

Other resources are genuinely essential for the survival of the family of life — soil, water, air, and sunlight.  Of all minerals, soil is the most precious by far.  Fertile soil is created so slowly that, from a human perspective, it’s essentially nonrenewable.  In his book Dirt, geologist David Montgomery wrote, “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”  Peter Salonius studied soil for 44 years.  He concluded that all extractive agriculture, from ancient times to the present, was unsustainable. 

The problems associated with soil destruction are widely understood, and widely disregarded.  Nobody became a billionaire by promoting soil conservation.  Globally, billions of tons are lost every year.  Overall, one-third of the soil on U.S. cropland has been lost over the past 200 years.  Half of the excellent topsoil of Iowa is already gone.  The highest quality soil is close to the surface, and the first to erode.  Walt wrote, “Worldwide, the con­tinuing loss of soil and depletion of groundwater is leading humanity directly over the cliff.”   

All life needs water.  Water allows mineral nutrients in the soil to be absorbed by plants.  Your body is about 60 percent water.  In some regions, farms receive adequate water from precipitation.  Other regions require irrigation.  About 17 percent of cropland is irrigated, but it produces 40 percent of the world’s crops. 

Some underground aquifers are unable to recharge as fast as pumps are extracting the water — like the vast Ogallala aquifer in the U.S. midlands.  They are unsustainable water mines.  Several communities in Colorado are (temporarily) drinking from reservoirs of 10,000 year old water.  Forty percent of humankind now lives in regions with chronic water shortages, especially Africans, with their rapidly growing populations. 

When ancient aquifers are depleted, subsidence can occur — the ground sinks, filling the empty space where the water once was.  This makes it impossible for the aquifer to ever refill again.  In some portions of Mexico City, subsidence has lowered the ground surface up to 28 feet (8.5 m), causing much damage.  Irrigation can also lead to the accumulation of salt in the soil, which eventually creates a permanent wasteland.  In the cradle of civilization, the once thriving Tigris Euphrates floodplain is now “a glistening desert of salt.”

Earth resources have played a starring role in world history.  They enable the rise of civilizations, and their limited eras of prosperity.  It’s no coincidence that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, because they had abundant deposits of coal, iron, and limestone in convenient locations.  The U.S. skyrocketed into a global superpower by exploiting huge deposits of a wide variety of Earth resources.  In World War II, Japan was short on iron, coal, and oil.  Hitler invaded southern Russia in an effort to seize the huge Baku oilfields.

In coming years, as fossil fuel fades out, agriculture will once again be muscle powered and low tech (if the climate crisis allows crop production to continue).  Industrial scale food processing and distribution will fizzle.  Potent synthetic fertilizers and other agrichemicals will no longer be available.  As harvests decline, population growth will shift into reverse. 

Finally, a few footnotes.  GeoDestinies was written on a tiny digital typewriter that allowed files to be saved on a floppy disk.  As Walt typed, the display presented a single line of text.  He never owned a computer, and never had direct access to the internet or email.  He had no spare time.  Finishing this manuscript was job one.

I gave him prints of interesting online stuff, and copies of my book reviews, including Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming, and The Little Ice Age.  The Fagan reviews reinforced his belief that climate always changed.  Back in 2012, the notion that human-caused emissions were disrupting the climate was still controversial in the mainstream mindset.

In his 96 years, Walt witnessed remarkable changes in the American standard of living.  These were only possible because of our maniacal binge of energy guzzling.  Modernity’s high standard of living, and fabulous healthcare was awesome.  But the long term environmental impact of these short term benefits was huge.

He lacked some sympathy for environmentalists who opposed energy development projects in America, whilst they were enjoying a comfortable consumer lifestyle.  High impact projects were often diverted to poor nations that had few regulations, if any.  In 2012, Walt was not fully aware of the serious long term hazards of nuclear energy, and the lack of permanent storage for high level radioactive wastes.

Walt was especially horrified by exponential population growth.  In his lifetime, the human mob skyrocketed from 1.9 billion to 7.6 billion.  He was deeply disappointed that overpopulation was a taboo subject for secular and spiritual leaders.  Large numbers of immigrants to the U.S. came from cultures where large families are the norm.  Their dream was to live a maximum impact consumer lifestyle.

Youngquist’s book pulls away cultural blindfolds, and provides a mind-expanding full immersion baptism in the actual facts of life.  “The confluence of factors soon at hand may make this century the most turbulent in human history.  There will be adjustment of population size.  There will be a new energy paradigm.  There will be lifestyle change.  There will be great economic change.  There will be environmental change.  Although change has always been the order of life, the particular confluence of major factors in each of these areas will make the twenty-first century a fundamental turning point for mankind.”

Walt completed the manuscript of the second edition in 2012.  Since then, he wrote four papers for the Negative Population Growth Forum.  Our Plundered Planet (2014), A Geomoment of Affluence (2015), The Scale of Things (2016), Framework of the Future (2016). 

Wild Free and Happy Sample 49

 

[Note: This is the forty-ninth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

LIMITS

“Limit” is a power word, a gateway that can open or close, and influence the course of ecosystem trends.  When members of a species move into an ecosystem, and adapt to it, they make use of available resources, and expand until their growth is paused by limits — food, water, climate, predators, etc.  Herbivores are limited by the availability of digestible vegetation.  Predators are limited by the availability of prey.  The whims of climate can suddenly tighten limits, or relax them.  The dance of life is full of surprises.  Humans are unique in that we can sometimes blow away traditional limits via the wildcard of technological innovation. 

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote a landmark book announcing that there were limits to growth, an idea that many still consider to be silly nonsense (we have no limits!).  At the time, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was rapidly eliminating the traditional cottage-based craft workers who spun yarn, knitted garments, and wove fabric. 

During this era, aristocrats were also busy enclosing (privatizing) the common lands, which forced many peasants from homes where their ancestors had lived for generations.  Enclosure freed up land that could be used to raise lots of sheep, which generated far more income than rents from hungry dirty peasants.

Many displaced peasants migrated to filthy crowded cities to work in textile factories.  Kirkpatrick Sale described folks working up to 18 hours per day (never less than 10), breathing air that was thick with dust.  Many were injured by the whirling and jerking machines.  Most of the workforce was women and children (as young as 4 or 5), because they worked for far less money than men.  While the poor folks lived in misery, the well to do were surfing on big waves of wealth.  Life was grand!

Steam powered textile factories were driving cottage enterprises extinct, at the same time that enclosures were forcing many to migrate to cities, where low-paying factory work was available.  Factories could make clothing that was far less expensive, and far lower in quality.  Shoddy hosiery sometimes decomposed after a single wearing.  Poor folks could only afford the cheap crap.  Cottage workers were too proud of their craft to lower their standards, or work for peanuts.

Let’s take a quick side trip.  In the 1851 census, my great-great-grandmother, Sarah Cleaton Rees was a handloom weaver in the parish of Llangurig, Wales, as was her mother, sister, four of her sisters-in-law, and many of their neighbors.  The wool produced in the Cambrian Mountains was rugged.  Flannel woven from it lasted nearly forever, but was a bit scratchy.

Sarah had been a widow since 1844, when her husband died from “decline” at 23.  She had three sons.  Unlike factory rats, handloom weavers generally earned a living income.  Sarah did not marry again for 11 years, but she did leave Llangurig.  In about 1853, Sarah and her sons moved south to Merthyr Tydfil, an ironworking district.  Was she forced out by enclosure, or did her source of income go belly up?

In the 1861 census, she was working as a beer house keeper at the Green Dragon, and her sons were iron miners.  In the region, dense coal smoke made the air black, and the rivers too.  It was a miserable life — hard work, wee wages, filthy air, raw sewage everywhere, and tainted water that killed thousands.  Cholera was common.  Legends tell of families being alive and well in the morning, and all dead by sunset.  In 1863, Sarah, her sons, and new husband, packed up and moved to the U.S., where they found coal mining work in Ohio.

When Malthus wrote in 1798 there were about 8.8 million English.  By 1861, the number had soared to 20.1 million.  Sarah and Malthus spent their lives in a population explosion, an era of intense social turbulence.  In 1798, like today, the wizards in the center stage spotlights were radicalized utopians, like Marx, Engels, and Malthus’s crazy daddy, who enthusiastically celebrated the wonders of progress, and the limitless rosy future that laid ahead.

For 200+ years, legions of critics have been denouncing the legacy of Malthus, because he predicted that rapid population growth would soon lead to catastrophe.  Actually, he never made that prediction, although he was right to be wary of growth.  Few critics have actually read his book.  Over the years, Malthus penned six editions.  Garrett Hardin sat down and read them all, comparing the additions and deletions.  In Living Within Limits, Hardin concluded that 95 percent of his ideas were correct.  Not bad!

Carrying Capacity

William Catton put his finger on Malthus’ core misunderstanding.  Malthus simply could not imagine that it was possible for humankind to ever exceed Earth’s carrying capacity.  At the time, the global population was just approaching one billion.  Much of the U.S. Midwest was still a vast ancient forest.  He clearly underestimated the destructive potential of technological innovation, and what it would do to the planet.

Catton wrote a masterpiece on carrying capacity, and how it impacts humans and everything else.  On the book cover, his five word definition of carrying capacity was “the maximum permanently supportable load.”  His use of “permanent” doesn’t mean for all eternity, because all living systems never stop changing.  It sort of meant living in a manner that was not at the expense of the next generation(s), or the vitality of the ecosystem — something that could operate indefinitely, because it was not a belligerent enemy of the family of life.

Around 300,000 years ago, the planet’s carrying capacity for humans was limited by the resources available within their original homeland in east Africa.  They lived lightly, because that was their only option.  Later, as the ancestors migrated into Asia, Europe, and Australia, the planet’s carrying capacity for humans expanded, because they inhabited more territory, and had access to more resources.  Their expansion did not leave behind a wake of ecological wreckage, at first.  As discussed earlier, a number of large game species were gradually driven to extinction when the intrepid pioneers lived a bit too hard.

Over the passage of millennia, some ancestors gradually swerved farther and farther across the yellow line of limits.  Eventually, with the domestication of plants and animals, some clever ones closed their eyes and stomped on the accelerator.  Bye-bye forests, wetlands, topsoil, and animal life.  Bye-bye healthy wild ecosystems.  Hello growing mobs, civilizations, tyrants, slavery, patriarchy, and a wake of irreparable wreckage.  Whoops!

For any species, the carrying capacity limits for a region, or the planet, can be altered in two ways.  (1) Takeover is expansion into new habitat, which provides access to additional resources.  This is not inherently naughty.  For example, long, long ago horses and camels migrated from America to the Old World.  Mammoths and saber-tooth cats migrated in the opposite direction.  So, takeover can genuinely enlarge carrying capacity for a species. 

(2) Drawdown enables carrying capacity limits to be temporarily overridden by diminishing exhaustible resources — forests, topsoil, minerals, oil reservoirs, and so on.  For example, when an ancient forest is displaced to create farms and pastures, more food can be produced, and the mob can grow — at the cost of degrading exhaustible resources, and overthrowing traditional balances in the ecosystem.  Drawdown can include horses being replaced with tractors, manure replaced with synthetic fertilizer, and rainfall supplemented with water extracted from ancient aquifers.

Catton wrote that drawdown did not actually elevate carrying capacity.  Instead, it created “phantom carrying capacity,” because the expansion was unsustainable and temporary.  Writing in 1980, he said that the ongoing survival of 90 percent of humankind (including Americans) was dependent on phantom carrying capacity, far in excess of traditional limits.  Today, that percentage is certainly higher, because it is enabled by ever-growing dependence on fossil energy and other strategic nonrenewable resources.

Drawdown leads to overshoot — growth beyond an area’s carrying capacity, eventually leading to crash and die-off.  Blissfully ignorant consumers, as well as world leaders, often mistake overshoot for progress.  Today, humankind has advanced deeply into overshoot, impacting the entire planet.  Consequently, as the still soaring population works harder and harder to ravage the natural world, the global carrying capacity for humans is deteriorating, while phantom carrying capacity soars ever higher.

Overshoot doesn’t <bleep> around.  It is beginning a messy and merciless process of herding the enormous human mob into a narrow bottleneck, through which only a limited number can pass.  The tight squeeze will continue until the human mob is reduced to a number that can live in peace with a severely damaged Earth (if we don’t simply get pushed off the stage forever).

Energy and Growth

In this long and lumpy comedy of errors, the transition to fossil energy shifted the monster into warp drive.  In the famous story, Dr. Frankenstein’s creepy monster spoke these words to him, “You are my maker, but I am your master.”  Today’s globalized industrial civilization is living like there’s no tomorrow, and behaving as if we were the last generation.  This story will have a crappy ending.  Consumer society has zoomed far beyond the border, deep into the bowels of Crazyland, where folks soar away in beautiful hallucinations of limitlessness — a magical realm of progress, abundance, perpetual growth, maniacal shopping, and 500 channels of nonstop entertainment with no commercials.

J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke wrote about the planet shaking explosion of eco-destruction that has occurred since 1945.  They noted that energy is the guiding force, the trail blazer, of humankind’s long meandering saga.  We can’t photosynthesize sunlight, so we survive by eating plants and animals.  In the days before hominins learned how to kindle fire, their sole source of life energy was a raw food diet.  Fire led to cooking, which enabled the ancestors to transform indigestible stuff into an additional sources of life energy.  Increased access to edible energy enabled the survival of more food eaters. 

Tragically, with the emergence of plant and animal domestication, traditional limits to growth could be radically exceeded, temporarily, by rubbishing wild ecosystems, and replacing them with manmade ecosystems capable of producing far more edible energy, when conditions were favorable.  Cereal grains are energy dense, and suitable for long term storage.  Today, our food is produced by mechanized, irrigated, chemical drenched, industrial agriculture, which further accelerates overpopulation.

Similarly, the domestication of livestock and poultry generated even more food energy, especially when wild predators (competitors) were systematically exterminated.  Enslaved horses could convert the solar energy stored by vegetation into mechanical energy useful for carrying riders and cargo, or for pulling plows, carts, and carriages.  Prior to this time, for almost 300,000 years, the primary source of mechanical energy used by our ancestors was human muscle power.

Catton wrote that agriculture provided phantom carrying capacity.  Another phantom was the exploitation of “ghost acreage.”  The hungry mobs in places like Britain could be fed by importing lots of food produced on faraway acres in other lands.  Many nations are now depend on imported food.  Another phantom was industrial fish mining, depleting wild fisheries to feed hungry urban populations.  All wild animals have limits too.  The global food system can seem like a shaky house of cards.

The planet-eating monster is primarily powered by nonrenewable fossil energy, a form of stored sunshine that accumulated over the course of 500 million years.  Every day we move closer to the post-fossil era, and to the funeral wake for today’s global food industry, and the overshoot it conjured into existence.

In 2019, ecological economist William E. Rees wrote a stunning sentence: “It is a quirk of exponential growth that half the fossil energy ever used (and half the fossil CO₂ ever produced), has been burned (emitted) in just the past 35 years!”  Rees has come to the conclusion that humans are not “primarily a rational species.”  It’s hard to disagree.

Growth Soars Away

Eventually, our food production surpluses rose to the point where a portion of the mob was no longer needed in the fields and pastures.  It became possible to feed people who could indulge in specialized activities, like metallurgy, woodworking, ceramics, construction, warfare, religion, government, and on and on.  We swerved into the express lane, and commenced our joyride of turbocharged cleverness with no brakes, no roads, and no foresight — full speed ahead into the powerful nightmare world of unintended consequences.  Yippee!

Growing numbers of folks accumulated in villages, towns, and cities.  Poor sanitation, malnutrition, and high density living laid out the welcome mat to a wide variety of herd diseases.  William McNeill noted that for 8,000 years, cities were demographic black holes, because of their high death rates.  Their ongoing existence depended on the constant inflow of surplus people from the countryside, commonly bachelors, spinsters, orphans, and refugees who were not among the lucky winners in the land inheritance lottery.

William Stanton pointed out that around 1750, population trends shifted into a new mode, accelerating growth.  Food production was booming.  Colonies in Africa, Australia, and the Americas greatly expanded the area of land used for growing crops and raising livestock.  It became possible to import abundant amounts of food.  New World crop plants were sent back to the Old World, including two extremely productive super foods — potatoes and corn (maize).  Old World livestock was sent to the colonies, where they could explode into the millions. 

Our skills at soil mining improved.  The area of land that could support ten people in 1700, could support 50 by 1900.  New types of potent fertilizers became available, further boosting productivity.  Crop breeding research launched the Green Revolution, which enabled a dramatic increase in productivity. 

Stanton wrote that when agriculture became dependent on oil, the need for human labor was reduced by a factor of 40 to 1.  Using the latest mega-technology, the factor might be close to 100 to 1.  New farm machinery promoted higher crop yields.  New dams enabled deserts to become lush croplands.  New irrigation pumps enabled water miners to drain ancient aquifers.  New petrochemicals reduced crop losses by insects, diseases, and weeds. 

Birth control is intended to prevent unwelcome pregnancies.  Stanton talked a lot about its opposite, death control, which was intended to delay unwelcome deaths.  Prior to 1750, high mortality rates provided a reliable restraint on growth.  Then, from 1750 to now, stunning advances in death control kicked open the gateway to a horrific population explosion.  He decreed that this was an era of weak restraints on growth (WROG).  Naturally, when death rates drop below birth rates, population rises.  Growth happens.

In prehistoric times, there were periods of WROG that began when wild humans first set foot on uninhabited continents and islands, and discovered an abundance of delicious resources.  Five centuries ago, civilized folks from the Old World washed ashore in the New World.  The infectious diseases they carried with them rapidly spread, killing most of the inhabitants on two continents.  The massive die-off then cleared the stage for a 500 year WROG rocket ride.

In the current WROG surge, while birth rates chug along, death rates have been dramatically driven down by technological innovations.  Food production is booming.  Mortality from infectious diseases has been reduced by new vaccines, antibiotics, wonder drugs, antiseptic surgery, and other health care advances.  Public health has been improved by energy-guzzling systems for garbage disposal, safe drinking water, and sewage treatment.  What this one-time binge on fossil energy is doing to the climate will eventually drive a stake through the heart of the WROG era.

Growth Nears Retirement

As the old proverb says, what goes up, must come down.  During the current WROG nightmare, technological cleverness has made it possible to maximize drawdown, and foolishly override carrying capacity limits.  We’re rocketing into the future, at maximum velocity, blindfolded, out of control, lost in a dream world of vivid hallucinations — a joyride into the roaring flames of overshoot.  This is what is known as progress, sustainable growth, a high standard of living, and other oxymoronic gibberish.

When you spend every minute of your life pounded by a hurricane of conflicting, nonsensical, fabricated information, it can sometimes be difficult to see and think clearly.  Most folks unconsciously assume that the decadent lifestyles of the WROG era (including our entire lifetime) are perfectly normal.  Wrong! 

When I was born in 1952, there were 2.6 billion humans.  Today in 2020, it has tripled to 7.8 billion, and is still growing — a massive explosion resulting in catastrophic irreversible damage.  Oddly, most folks in the land of glowing screens consider the status quo to be not only normal, but the pinnacle of the entire human experience.  We have great powers of imagination.

We’ve gotten way too clever at exceeding limits — by sneaking around them, leaping over them, tunneling under them, or exterminating them.  Consumer society has soared away into a state of limitless debauchery.  No previous generation has ever lived in such a destructive manner.  This way of life has an expiration date, and there are folks alive today who will experience its arrival.

In the absence of wisdom, foresight, radical birth control, and enthusiastic worldwide cooperation, food will become increasingly expensive and/or scarce.  No matter how hard we wish, it is not possible to conjure megatons of food out of thin air via hope, prayers, voting, or positive thinking.  When overshoot finally slams into the stone wall of carrying capacity, carrying capacity giggles, overshoot splatters, and the obesity epidemic sings its death song.

Sooner or later, as the WROG circus rides off into the sunset, the most vulnerable regions will eventually reach what Stanton calls the violent cutback level (VCL).  When this happens, violence becomes inevitable, he says, because the surefire medicines that effectively cure acute overpopulation are bitter.  He noted that a number of regions began approaching VCL levels in the late 1970s, Rwanda for example.  The number of hotspots continues growing.  Stanton noted that folks having low social status, or high bad luck, will be among those affected first.  Political correctness will go extinct, as will sympathy for underdogs, scapegoats, heretics, and (fill in the blank). 

Societies that are ethnically and culturally homogenous, like Iceland, have not shattered into aggressively competing factions, so the possibility of reaching their VCL is not a constant danger.  On the other hand, in dysfunctional, oppressive, intolerant, multi-cultural societies — flaming hotbeds of merciless, power crazy, pathological selfishness — like the U.S., the Middle East, and many other regions, VCL is always just one spark away.

Peak Horse



In the early 1900s, automobiles, trucks, buses, and tractors were becoming very trendy.  The human population was two billion and growing, while the horse population peaked and declined.  Model T Fords did not require five acres of good grassland to fuel them, an area that could feed six to eight people.  While grassland was, in theory, a renewable resource, there was not an infinite supply of it.  Pasture could be degraded or destroyed by overgrazing, drought, plowing, or urban sprawl.

Of course, motor vehicles are dependent on a wide variety finite nonrenewable resources.  The global production of conventional oil peaked around 2005, and now we’re briskly advancing toward the peak of unconventional sources — tar sands, shale deposits, and deep-water — the fossil energy that’s far more difficult and expensive to extract.  When we pass Peak Oil, production will begin a continuous decline, and prices will rise.  Some estimate that this will begin around 2030.

Life is solar powered.  Plants have solar panels that use light to create carbohydrates.  Plant eating animals acquire these nutrients by feasting on the greenery.  Meat eating animals consume the flesh of plant eaters.  Legions of wee organisms extract the nutrients from biomass and build topsoil.  Solar energy is also embedded in coal, oil, and natural gas — carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago.

Throughout the three million year era of our ancestors, muscle power was the primary energy for moving people and things.  Muscle power is highly versatile, able to run on a variety of edible fuels — meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, roots, insects.  More versatile than horses, human muscles can move people and stuff through dense rainforests, up rugged mountains, and across deserts.  Horses are poorly adapted for hot climates and arctic regions.

Pita Kelekna noted that humans have a long history of acquiring stored solar energy via the consumption of horse flesh.  At the Roche de Solutré site, near Mâcon, France, archaeologists found a 2.5 acre (1 ha) bone bed, up to 29 feet (9 m) thick, containing the bones of up to 100,000 horses.  Neanderthals hunted horses there 50,000 years ago.  Later, humans hunted them from 37,000 to 10,000 years ago. 

Around 9,000 years ago, the last horse in the Americas died in Patagonia.  The once plentiful wild horses of Western and Central Europe’s river valleys were apparently eliminated by overhunting 8,000 years ago.  To the east, large numbers of horses managed to survive on the wide open Eurasian steppes, where trapping animals was less easy.

Horses were domesticated about 6,000 years ago.  Kelekna described how nomadic pastoralists became skillful horse parasites.  “The Mongols lived off the horse; as they traveled, they milked and slaughtered for food.  They consumed a steady diet of milk and yoghurt, drank the horse’s blood, and mixed dried milk paste with water, dried meat, and millet.”

Eventually, clever folks realized that horses were not just a tasty form of solar energy — they also had more muscle power than humans.  If properly enslaved, they could be used to pull stuff, haul stuff, and carry riders.  Four legged slaves enabled a tremendous expansion of soil mining, forest mining, mineral mining, bloody empire building, and economic growth.  They unlocked the gateway to industrial civilization.

Around 25,000 years ago, the mammoth hunters at the Dolní Věstonice site in the Czech Republic heated their mammoth bone huts by burning the solar energy embedded in two fuels: mammoth bones and black coal.  By the mid-1500s, English forest miners had nearly succeeded in eliminating the ancient rainforest.  This created an energy shortage that inspired a large scale transition to coal burning.  In the late 1800s, the oil industry emerged, and the war on the future became turbocharged.

As the age of mechanical horsepower accelerated, the long era of four legged horse power rode off into the sunset.  My grandparents witnessed the advent of Peak Horse, and my parents saw work horses largely disappear from farms and cities.  Physicist Albert Bartlett calculated that children born after 1966 will see the world consume most of its oil during their lifetime.  Industrial civilization has an expiration date.  So, we’ll just have to go back to horse power, right?  Well, umm, there are some challenges.

Eric Morris wrote a fascinating essay to help us remember life in the Peak Horse era.  By 1898, big city streets were jammed with horses, carriages, and wagons, squishing through a deep layer of manure and urine, past rotting horse carcasses, amidst dense clouds of flies and overpowering stench.  Cities were rapidly growing, as hordes immigrants moved in to enjoy miserable industrial jobs, while living in crowded, filthy, disease ridden slums. 

Each horse emitted 15 to 30 pounds (7 to 14 kg) of manure daily — 3 to 4 million pounds in New York City every day.  In 1800, farmers would pay haulers to bring manure to their fields.  By 1900, there was way too much poop, and it piled up on empty lots.  Some heaps were 60 feet high (18 m).  Clouds of flies picked up pathogenic microbes and brought them to your kitchen, spreading typhoid and other fecal-oral diseases.  In 1880, 41 horses died each day on the streets of New York.  The average horse weighed 1,300 pounds (590 kg).  Carcasses were often left to rot, making it easier to dismember them, so they could be hauled away.

Horses were jammed into filthy, poorly ventilated stables — excellent disease incubators.  In 1872, the Great Epizootic Epidemic struck, as huge numbers of horses were infected by the equine influenza virus.  Coughing spread it from one animal to the next.  Typically, they recovered in two to three weeks, but severe cases could immobilize an animal for six months.

During the epidemic, available horse power was drastically reduced.  Folks had to use wheelbarrows and handcarts to transport goods.  The postal service was hobbled.  Freight piled up.  Coal deliveries stopped.  Food distribution wheezed.  On farms, plows and other equipment fell idle.  Boats quit moving on the Erie Canal.  Horse-drawn fire engines and street cars did not move.  When a big fire roared in downtown Boston, firemen had to pull their heavy equipment from the station by hand.

Almost certainly, there are people alive today who will see the peak of motor vehicle production, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some (or many) will experience the extinction of motor vehicles, and the lights going out on civilization as we know it.  Bye-bye railroads, air travel, refrigerators, elevators, irrigation, mining, supermarkets, and so on.  Sewage treatment plants, municipal water systems, and digital technology will blink out.  Vast areas of cropland will cease being plowed, planted, and harvested.  The age of obesity and cell phone addiction will end, but we might see the screw-brained revival of wood-fueled motor vehicles.

Kelekna, Pita, The Horse in Human History, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009.

Olsen, Sandra L., “Pleistocene Horse-hunting at Solutre,” Johnson, E., ed., Ancient Peoples and Landscapes, Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 1995, pp. 65-75.

Dolní Věstonice webpage with awesome illustrations.  [LINK]

Morris, Eric, “From Horse Power to Horsepower,” Access, Number 30, Spring 2007.  [LINK]

Bartlett, Albert A., The Essential Exponential, Center for Science, Mathematics & Computer Education, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2004.   [LINK]

Surviving the 21st Century



In the old Three Stooges comedies, whenever Curly did something dumb, angry Moe gave him a dope slap (SMACK!).  With regard to humankind’s war on the future, a number of thinkers have been inspired to write passionate dope slap books, including Man and Nature (1864), Conservation of Natural Resources (1910), Checking the Waste (1911), Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913).  Dope slap books are a two-step: (1) describe the terrible growing harms, and (2) provide a motivating pep talk loaded with rational solutions — based on the assumption that the society is rational.

In the last 30 years, a tsunami of dope slap books have flooded the market.  The latest comes from Australian science writer Julian Cribb, Surviving the 21st Century.  He does a great job of providing a competent and sobering introduction to ecological reality in 2017 — vital knowledge that every 16-year old (and their teachers) should know (but don’t).  He’s good at explaining complex challenges in an understandable way.

The book has ten chapters, each discussing a category of serious risks.  (1) Dangerous overconfidence in human brilliance.  (2) Mass extinctions.  (3) Degrading the planet.  (4) Industrial warfare.  (5) Climate change.  (6) Pollution.  (7) Feeding an overgrown herd.  (8) Urban growth and disease.  (9) Moronic beliefs that trump scientific facts.  (10) It’s time for action — think like a species.

Humankind’s current mass hysteria has an oxymoronic name, Sustainable Growth™, and its destination is oblivion.  We are going to be slamming head-on, at high speed, into crucial limits — a magnificently irrational course of action.  Cribb prefers a mindful Plan B, a gradual, managed, and cooperative path to a slower, simpler, far less crowded future.

All humans have a hardcore addiction to food.  In his 2010 book, The Coming Famine (reviewed HERE), Cribb described the enormous degradation caused by feeding an ever growing population, and presented readers with many rational suggestions.  In the following seven years, the naughty world largely disregarded his recommendations.

In this new book, Cribb dreams of miraculously doubling food production, and feeding the growing mob until we hit Peak People, at ten or twelve billion, in 2060.  All nations will heroically cooperate in rapidly making many rational (and extremely radical) changes, we’ll avoid total catastrophe, and proceed with a bumpy but tolerable decline to a sustainable population of somewhere between two and four billion by 2100.  That’s a big dream.

Is it really possible to feed ten billion?  Readers learn that there are no new plant breeding miracles on the horizon.  In the 1960s, the Green Revolution research had noble intentions — temporarily boost food production, so humankind would have an extra ten years to resolve its embarrassing orgy of overbreeding.  It was a beautiful dream.  Food production actually doubled.  Unfortunately, the population problem was swept under the bed, and the human herd more than doubled, intensifying the original problem.

Hopium addicts have no doubt that the wizards of science will save the day.  GMO plants have been a stunning success at boosting the sales of toxic agrochemicals, but they have had minimal impact on harvest volumes.  The current rate at which we are depleting underground aquifers, and other freshwater resources, is going to crash into limits before 2030.  Destruction of the planet’s remaining topsoil continues at an impressive rate.  Food production trends are not encouraging.

“Outside of a nuclear war or asteroid collision, the biggest shock in store for the human population in the 21st Century will be the impact of climate change on the food supply.”  Luckily, readers discover a plan for doubling food production by solving big problems.  We’ll create a new form of agriculture that can survive in an unstable climate, produce lots of excellent food, and do so sustainably — without using a spoonful of fossil fuel!  We’ll make sustainable oil from algae.

The required inputs for algae farms are sunshine, salt water, and urban wastes.  “Algal oil… can be made into anything you can make from fossil petroleum — ‘green’ fuel, plastics, textiles, chemicals, drugs, food additives.  Furthermore, researchers have calculated, algae could supply the world’s entire transport fuel requirement from an area of 57 million hectares — which is a bit smaller than Switzerland — and can mostly be in the ocean in any case.”

Belief is the subject of the fascinating chapter nine, and something I’ve thought a lot about.  Belief may very well be the biggest threat to the survival of our species, worse than all the other threats combined.  Even the most ridiculous, insanely stupid, self-destructive beliefs can be highly contagious, readily passing from one generation to the next, fully resistant to reason, common sense, or factual reality.  Belief trumps reason.

Belief insists that human-caused climate change is impossible.  Humans do not share common ancestors with chimps and baboons.  Technology can solve any problem.  Perpetual growth is possible on a finite planet.  Good consumers must gain respect and honor by devoting their lives to working hard (at soul killing jobs), recklessly borrowing, impulsively spending, proudly hoarding trendy status trinkets, and promptly discarding trinkets the moment they cease being trendy.

Cribb believes that foresight is our ultimate skill, enabling us to perceive potential dangers, avoid them, and survive.  Wild humans, intimately attuned to the complex patterns of their ecosystem, excelled at foresight.  We don’t.  We are cursed to inhabit an industrial culture that mutates at a furious rate.  New technologies are often obsolete in five or ten years.  We can never become intimately attuned to something similar to a high-speed runaway train.

We’re trapped in a cycle of repeated mistakes, perpetually erecting new empires, watching them self-destruct, and never learning.  We’ve installed at least 440 nuclear power plants before we’ve built a single facility for safely storing the radioactive wastes that can remain highly toxic for a million years.  Nobody had the foresight to predict the staggering consequences of the Ford Model T, or the microchip, or metal smelting.  Hey, let’s colonize other planets!

Crusty old farts like myself, who have been reading dope slap books for 30 years, and observing how little they inspire society, no longer shout and cheer when the latest vision rolls by.  Cribb does an excellent job describing the challenges.  His grand vision requires humankind to undergo an amazing transformation, from the pathetic dullard Homo delusus (self-deceiving human) into the new, wise, and beautiful Homo sapiens (wise human).

Cribb has no doubt that “solutions to all of these challenges exist or can be developed.”  Today, essential information can be instantly shared with people everywhere in the world.  Scientific knowledge grows exponentially every decade.  Intelligent change is entirely possible!  Around the world, young women are having fewer children — voluntarily!  We are not obligated to commit mass suicide.

Understand that this is a textbook for college students.  Universities are monasteries that instruct the next generation in the management of Sustainable Growth™.  They require textbooks that reinforce the loony beliefs of the hopeless Homo delusus.  Cribb makes a heroic effort to tap-dance across a ballroom where the entire floor is covered with greased marbles.  It’s obvious that he is acutely aware of the growing challenges of reality (which are heretical nonsense at the monastery).  He knows that the young novices are likely to learn little or nothing about these challenges — unless he cleverly sneaks them into a gospel that appears to be orthodox.

Today’s novices are 100 times smarter than slobbering geezers over 30.  They are acutely aware that they have inherited a catastrophe.  They don’t need a dope slap.  They know that transforming all of nature into toxic landfill dreck is insane.  Hopefully, Cribb’s book will help the novices bombard the abbots with high-powered questions, and encourage our species to shift toward becoming Homo sapiens.  Good luck!

Cribb, Julian, Surviving the 21st Century: Humanity’s Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them, Springer International Publishing, Switzerland, 2017.

Sustainability Primer

I was recently interviewed via email by a group of ecologists in France.  I’m sharing it with English-speaking folks because it provides an easy map for learning, a basic introduction to environmental history and ecological sustainability.

My blog now contains reviews of 170+ sustainability-related books, and dozens of essays — stuff that would take more than a month to read.  Over the years, a number of important reviews have gotten buried in the pile, and get fewer views than recent work.  In the following interview, I have included links to my reviews of a number of important books.  Most reviews are less than three pages.  Bookworms may discover some neat books to add to their reading list.  Have fun!

1. How would you define the concept of sustainability?

There are two varieties of sustainability.

(1) The form you encounter many times every day is what I call ersatz (fake) sustainability — sustainable forest mining, sustainable fish mining, sustainable soil mining, sustainable development, sustainable growth, sustainable cities, and so on (even “sustainable mining!”).  Ersatz sustainability is oriented to the ongoing viability and profitability of business enterprises.  It’s a deceptive marketing buzzword intended to befuddle the clueless, and grease the wheels of destruction.

Recently, I watched a video of Derrick Jensen being interviewed.  He said, “Somewhere along the way, environmentalism stopped being about protecting the Earth, and it became about ‘sustainability,’ which is about continuing this culture that’s killing the planet.”

(2) The rare form is the essential one — ecological sustainability.  An ecologically sustainable way of life is one that can continue for millennia without causing permanent degradation to the ecosystem.  All (normal) animals have succeeded at living in this manner, and they have done so for millions of years.

For example, the San people of the Kalahari, in southern Africa, have been living in a very low-tech manner for maybe 100,000 years.  Until recent decades, they did not use nonrenewable resources, and they did not overuse renewable resources.  See The Art of Tracking, and Great Leaps.

2. The “dominant” society or culture, based on the ideology of unlimited growth that now proposes (because it needs evermore primary resources) to mine meteorites, the moon or the ocean floor isn’t very sustainable, would you agree?

I agree!  Understand that we don’t “need” more nonrenewable resources; we “want” more.  What all living things “need” is simple, stuff like food, water, air.  What modern consumers “want” is everything in the world.

Other important words include finite, carrying capacity, drawdown, renewable, nonrenewable, bottleneck, and overshoot.  To understand these, Overshoot by William Catton is outstanding.  The Essential Exponential by Albert Bartlett does a superb job of debunking the idiotic fantasies of perpetual growth.

Afterburn, Snake Oil, and The End of Growth, by Richard Heinberg, introduce readers to Peak Oil, and the dangers of creating a super-complex civilization that is fatally dependent on finite nonrenewable resources.  Scarcity by Christopher Clugston discusses the current consumption and remaining reserves of other nonrenewable resources that are essential to industrial civilization.

Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society by Ted Trainer explains why alternative energy cannot replace the current levels of energy consumption provided by sequestered carbon (fossil fuels).  Too Hot to Touch by William and Rosemarie Alley reveals a super-important challenge that gets far too little attention — the failure of industrial civilization to figure out how to safely store nuclear waste, which remains highly toxic for a million years or so.

Limits to Growth by Meadows and Randers was a classic, warning humankind of troubles ahead.  Living Within Limits by Garrett Hardin contributed to this discussion.  Foolishly disregarding limits led to a growing human mob.  The Population Bomb and The Population Explosion by Paul and Anne Ehrlich sounded alarms.  The Ostrich Factor by Garrett Hardin, and The Rapid Growth of Human Populations by William Stanton, provided additional insights.  In Old Fashioned Family Planning I commented on approaches used in different civilizations.

3. What do you think of the fact that most people believe in “progress” despite the growing social unrest and the unraveling of numerous ecological crises?

Do fish believe in water?  No, fish spend their lives in water.  When youngsters learn the meanings of words, they begin to absorb the beliefs of their culture, and imprint its worldview, which almost everyone will carry throughout their lives.  The worldview’s memes are constantly reinforced by education, religion, government, mass media, advertising, and everyone around them.  They tell us that our way of life is excellent, and the best is yet to come.  There is no challenge that technology cannot remedy.  Acceptance of this worldview makes you appear to be sane and normal.  To question it is heresy, lunacy, or stupidity.  In The Myth of Human Supremacy Derrick Jensen vigorously questions it.

Too Smart For Our Own Good by Craig Dilworth introduced the Vicious Circle Principle.  “Humankind’s development consists in an accelerating movement from situations of scarcity, to technological innovation, to increased resource availability, to increased consumption, to population growth, to resource depletion, to scarcity once again, and so on.”  It was a merry-go-round that kept spinning faster and faster.

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright was a best-selling critique of the myth of progress.  We have fallen into a “progress trap.”  The benefits of innovation often encourage society to live in a new way, while burning the bridges behind them as they advance.  Society can find itself trapped in an unsustainable way of living, and it’s no longer possible to just turn around and painlessly return to a simpler mode.

The Earth Has a Soul by Carl Jung examined how modern urbanization packs humans together in stressful density — insectification.  “The most dangerous things in the world are immense accumulations of human beings who are manipulated by only a few heads.”  Growing crowds multiply the stupidity level, and create psychic epidemics.  “We have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with even wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.”

4. What would you say to those who believe that happiness is a recent phenomenon?

Many observers who have spent time in uncivilized cultures were often surprised by the happiness of wild people.

In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff described the natives she met in South America.  The Tauripan people of Venezuela were the happiest people she had ever met.  All of their children were relaxed, joyful, cooperative, and rarely cried — they were never bored, lonely, or argumentative.  The Yequana people seemed unreal to Liedloff, because of their lack of unhappiness.  As an expedition was moving up a challenging jungle stream, she noticed that the Italians would get completely enraged at the slightest mishap, while the Yequana just laughed the struggles away.  Their daily life had a party mood to it.

Peter Freuchen spent a lot of time with the Eskimos, and married into their culture.  In Book of the Eskimos, he wrote that “they always enjoy life with an enviable intensity, and they believe themselves to be the happiest people on earth living in the most beautiful country there is.”

In his book, In Search of the Primitive, Lewis Cotlow visited Eskimos in arctic Canada.  One night, he spent several hours talking to local officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  They kept repeating one idea in different ways: “The Eskimos are the happiest people in the world.”

Colin Turnbull spent years with the Mbuti Pygmies, and described them in The Forest People.  He was amazed by their joyful way of living — he said that Pygmies laugh until they can no longer stand, then they sit down and laugh.

In The Human Cycle, Turnbull compared how Pygmies and Westerners move through the phases of life.  Pygmies do it beautifully, but Western culture damaged its occupants.  We tend to regard our childhood as a golden age of innocence and joy — before we’re shipped off to dreary schools, jobs, and nursing homes.  The Pygmies did not idolize childhood, “because, for them, the world has remained a place of wonder, and the older they get the greater the wonder.”

In Original Wisdom, Robert Wolff described the Sng’oi people of Malaysia.  They knew each other’s unspoken thoughts, communicating telepathically.  “They had an immense inner dignity, were happy, and content, and did not want anything.”  They loved to laugh and joke.  They were often singing and smiling.  Angry voices were never heard.

Daniel L. Everett was sent to the Amazon to translate the Bible into the language of the illiterate Pirahã hunter-gatherers.  He described his efforts in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.  He eventually realized that it was pointless “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.”  He became an atheist.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”

IMPORTANT:  In the above, I am asserting that happiness is not new.  I am not suggesting that wild people were angelic beings, flawlessly wise, and always lived in perfect harmony.

5. What would you say to those who think that human beings in the distant past led sad and painful lives?

Misfortune is a normal part of every life.  Wild people got sick.  They got injured.  They starved.  They had conflicts.  In The Falcon, John Tanner described the 30 years he lived with the Ottawa and Ojibwa Indians, from about 1790 to 1820.  He was kidnapped at nine years old, fully integrated into their culture, became an excellent hunter, and forgot his first language.  Whites resented his Indian aspects, and Indians resented his white heritage.  His life was a harsh one.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) believed that without the beneficial protection of government, primitive folks lived in “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  Hobbes was not a hungry, dirty peasant, but most people in his society were, and their quality of life really sucked, despite the presence of government.  Twentieth century anthropologists, who actually spent time in wild societies, reject Hobbes’ belief.

A New Green History of the World by Clive Ponting is an amazing 400-page summary of environmental history.  He concluded that life in civilization was often nasty, brutish, and short.  He wrote, “Since the rise of settled societies some ten thousand years ago the overwhelming majority of the world’s population has lived in conditions of grinding poverty.  They have had few possessions, suffered from appalling living conditions, and have been forced to spend most of their very limited resources on finding enough food to stay alive.”

We’re living in a bizarre era, soaring on a joyride of extreme waste, a temporary onetime-only explosion of mindless consumption, made possible by a reckless binge of energy guzzling.  We’re hammering the planet in ways never before possible.  When the fuel gauge approaches empty, the floor will drop out from under seven-point-something billion people.  Life will get exciting.

6. What would you say to those who believe that human existence has recently become cooler, and indeed has become bearable thanks to the washing machine, the refrigerator, the car and industrial medicine?

My path to becoming a wordsmith began with fat black pencils, followed by ballpoint pens, huge manual typewriters, the highly unstable word processing software of the late 1980s, and my current laptop, which has miraculous, incredibly amazing functionality.  Now we have the internet.  My writing is available to several billion, a quarter million have viewed my blog, and I have friends in dozens of nations.  In one sense, this is very cool; in another sense, a costly mistake.

Five days ago, I had surgery on my right eye, which removed a cataract-clouded lens.  Today, the world is strikingly clear.  I can see like an eagle.  I’m astounded by the improvement.

When I was born in 1952, there were no personal computers, color TVs, nuclear power plants, satellites, cell phones, shopping malls, or birth control pills.

When my father was born in 1913, there were no antibiotics, plastics, air conditioners, chainsaws, televisions, radios, missiles, or jet planes.  Almost all agriculture was organic.

When my grandfather was born in 1885, there were no airplanes, automobiles, refrigerators, or aluminum products.

When my great-grandfather was born in 1843, there were no oil wells, metal boats, tractors, telephones, electric lights, sewing machines, repeating rifles, or dynamite.

When my great-great grandfather was born in 1818, there were no railroads, cameras, bicycles, wooden matches, or telegraph systems.  Detroit and Chicago were trading posts in the wilderness.

When my great-great-great grandfather was born in 1798, there were 900 million people on Earth, and Los Angeles had 300 residents.

Note that none of the benefits cited above were sustainable.  All had enormous ecological costs and numerous unintended consequences.  Humans lived sustainably for tens of thousands of years without any of these amazing things.  In my 64 years, I have sent a mountain of trash to landfills, and I am not proud of this.

Carl Jung summed it up nicely: “Unfortunately, there is in this world no good thing that does not have to be paid for by an evil at least equally great.”  The Earth Crisis is a planet-wrecking disaster created by the unintended consequences of countless clever innovations.  There is no “free lunch,” everything has a cost.

Civilization would be impossible without the clever discovery of how to kindle and control fire, a technology that all other species have avoided.  Fire: A Brief History by Stephen J. Pyne is fascinating.  He wrote, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night’s terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches.”

Techno-Fix by Michael and Joyce Huesemann does a good job of analyzing our toxic obsession with technology.  Huesemann’s Law of Techno-Optimism states, “Optimism is inversely proportional to knowledge.”

Health & the Rise of Civilization by Mark Nathan Cohen describes how domestication and civilization ushered in the era of deadly infectious diseases.  Bird Flu by Michael Greger reveals how current methods for raising livestock and poultry encourage the emergence of deadly new strains of influenza viruses that could zoom around the planet in days, killing hundreds of millions.  The Antibiotic Paradox by Stuart Levy tells readers why we’re moving into the post-antibiotic era, when our wonder drugs will quit working.  Once again, bubonic plague will be incurable, and infections caused by tiny paper cuts could be fatal.

The history and harms of soil mining are discussed in Topsoil and Civilization by Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter, Against the Grain by Richard Manning, and Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery.  A Forest Journey by John Perlin is a great book on the history of forest mining.  Water mining is the subject of Pillar of Sand by Sandra Postel, and Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.

Fish mining is the subject of The End of the Line by Charles Clover, The Mortal Sea by Jeffrey Bolster, and Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat.  Swimming in Circles by Paul Molyneaux reveals the dark side of fish farming (aquaculture).

A number of factors indicate that we are not too far from Peak Food.  There are enormous obstacles to producing enough food to feed the expected mob of 11 billion.  Today, feeding a mere 7.4 billion is intensely unsustainable and destructive.  Three books on the subject include The End of Plenty by Joel Bourne, The Coming Famine by Julian Cribb, and Who Will Feed China? by Lester Brown.

7. What would you say to those who imagine that freedom and democracy are recent inventions?

My focus has been on sustainability, not philosophy or politics.  I would think that freedom is not an invention, but the normal state for wild organisms.  Abstractions drive me crazy.  Are the chimps who are subordinate to the alpha male not free?  I don’t know.

Hunter-gatherer clans require teamwork, so it’s important for them to avoid conflicts, and to be good at conflict resolution.  Some tribes made decisions by consensus, all agreed.  Was this democracy?  Other tribes allowed dissent — lads who didn’t want to join a war party were not forced to.  John Tanner mentioned this in The Falcon.

I was taught that democracy was invented in Greece.  The democracy of Athens in the fifth century B.C. allowed 30,000 to 40,000 people to participate, but excluded 80,000 to 100,000 slaves.

8. What would you say to those who have difficulty imagining a world where life couldn’t be enjoyable living generation after generation within a society, culture, which doesn’t feel the need to innovate frantically just for the sake of innovation?

This is complicated.  In Cradle of Humankind, I discussed our ancestors’ shaky beginnings as bipedal apes on the savannah.  We were slow, weak, and highly vulnerable to large predators.  Innovations like spears and fire increased our odds for survival, and this was a shift away from the traditional lifestyles of all other primates.

In Great Leaps I discussed how moving out of tropical Africa, into colder climates, presented us with new challenges — preserving and storing food, and surviving cold winters.  Hunters living in tropical savannahs needed no tools for killing fish, seals, or seabirds, but the pioneers did, and innovation provided them.

The Food Crisis in Prehistory by Mark Nathan Cohen described how growing population and diminishing wildlife eventually led to the domestication of plants and animals.  Growing crowds also led to growing conflicts between groups.  Innovation provided ongoing technological improvements for both offense and defense.  This led to a nonstop, continuously accelerating arms race, brilliantly described in Throwing Fire by Alfred W. Crosby — our journey from throwing stones to throwing nuclear weapons.

Today, in a consumer economy, innovation boosts survival in a different way.  The objective is no longer getting meat, but a maniacal pursuit of wealth and status, via inventing, manufacturing, and selling stuff like smart phones, self-driving cars, big screen TVs, and a million other varieties of silly nonsense.

9. What would you say to those who believe that, throughout time, all human cultures have destroyed their environments?

Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich described a trip to Hudson Bay, Canada, where he spent time with Inuit hunter-gatherers.  He was astonished to realize that every person in the group knew the tribe’s cultural information in its entirety.  They all knew how to tan hides, clean fish, weave baskets, and so on.  Yet, in our advanced civilization, nobody knows even a millionth of our cultural information.

Few in modern America receive a competent education in environmental history and ecological sustainability.  I’ve taken two online sustainability courses from reputable universities, and both were very low quality.  Universities train the teachers who will educate the school kids, so grand myths of magical thinking cascade from one generation to the next.  Thus, almost the whole population is largely ignorant, handicapped by dodgy beliefs.  The belief that humans are inherently stupid and destructive is false, but many use the belief as an excuse for our current consumer savagery.  “Hey, we can’t help it, we’re humans!”

I’ve communicated with a number of professors, and the impression I get is that most pursue a “don’t scare the students” approach.  If we tell them the truth, they will be overwhelmed with despair, and give up (as if they are currently trying).  Most people don’t smoke because we’ve taught them the truth about smoking and cancer — fear inspires intelligent life decisions.  Why wouldn’t teaching the truth about the Earth Crisis have similar benefits?  Unfortunately, the global economy and perpetual economic growth are more important than a living planet, or the generations that come after us.  So, the truth would be inconvenient, therefore we sweep it under the bed.  Let’s go shopping!

10. What would you say to those fatalistic people who believe that humanity is vowed to this path of destruction no matter what?

What is the alternative?  Is humankind likely to suddenly wake up and unite in revolutionary change?  Are we eager to see coercive birth prevention programs?  Are we ready to stop soil mining, forest mining, and fish mining?  Will we voluntarily cease burning sequestered carbon?  What will happen when the cooling ponds evaporate, and many tons of nuclear fuel are exposed to the air, and begin burning?  Guy McPherson wrote, “Civilization is responsible for life-destroying, abrupt climate change.  Turning off civilization kills us all faster.”

Our present way of life is extremely unsustainable, and therefore temporary.  A sustainable future is inevitable, because only the sustainable can endure.  We are zooming toward a solid wall of resource limits and other surprises.  Many agriculture-based civilizations collapsed, regrouped, and resumed, in several cycles, until their land base was reduced to a wasteland.

Like every civilization, our industrial civilization will also collapse, but depleted resources (energy, minerals, groundwater, topsoil, etc.) ensure that our super-intensive way of life will be a onetime catastrophe.  We’ll try like crazy to keep it on life support, but it will never again be so complex, because the planet has been pounded so hard.  Muscle power will eventually become humankind’s primary energy source once again.

So, we’re on the path to a bottleneck, in which the carrying capacity for humankind will be lowered to levels suitable for the new, much simpler, way of life.  Humans are both clever and remarkably adaptable to a wide variety of living conditions.  But, in addition to resource depletion and ecological devastation, another enormous predicament is emerging at the same time, climate change.

There is compelling evidence that humans are able to survive without smart phones, automobiles, and nuclear reactors.  Food, on the other hand, is an absolute necessity.  All food-producing plants and trees can only survive within a range of conditions — temperature, moisture, soil nutrients.  One source suggested the threshold temperatures for the three primary grains: wheat 26°C (78.8°F), corn (maize) 38°C (100.4°F), and rice 34°C (93.2°F).  Too much heat or aridity affects plant growth, pollination, and reproductive processes.  When crop yields decline, famines increase, and the herd downsizes.

Near Term Extinction is, by far, the most visited post on my blog.  This community is also known as Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE).  They are certain that the final generation of our species is alive today.  A prominent NTHE spokesperson is Dr. Guy McPherson.  They have a support group on Facebook.  I have no doubt that this will be a tumultuous century, but I have not been convinced that some humans won’t make it through the post-industrial bottleneck.

11. And finally, what do all of the sustainable cultures you have studied have in common?

They don’t utilize nonrenewable resources, like metallic minerals or sequestered carbon (coal, oil).  They don’t overuse renewables, like wood, freshwater, or wildlife.  They comprehend the carrying capacity of their ecosystem, and they mindfully strive to limit their numbers, when needed.  Most are nomadic, which discourages the accumulation of belongings, competition for status, and the bloody conflicts it generates.

The safest approach is adapting to your ecosystem, rather than attempting to control it.  Growing annual or perennial food crops, in dense concentrations or monocultures, creates ideal conditions for pests and plant diseases (like Ireland before the blight).  Agriculture based on tilling is a destructive process — soil mining.  Agroforestry seems to work in Tikopia, but the island is extremely isolated, and less likely to be visited by exotic pests and diseases.  It is vulnerable to rising seas, super storms, and an unstable climate.

I don’t recall reading about sustainable cultures that possessed domesticated livestock.  Tribal Ireland might have been ideal for mindful low impact herding (once they eliminated the wolves).  Topography of Ireland by Giraldus Cambrensis (1146 – 1223) was written when the island was still mostly rainforest, and the tribes raised cattle.  Wildlife was still abundant.  Fish, flesh, and milk were all they ate, and they wore nothing but animal skins.

The Irish climate was mild, rainfall was gentle and abundant, and the grass was green all year.  Snows were rare, and soon melted away.  It was a paradise for herbivores and herders.  Herders needed no structures to protect the livestock from the cold, and they had no need for cutting, drying, and storing hay.  When Cambrensis wrote, population pressure was growing, and tribes had mutated into warrior cultures.  A few centuries earlier, it might have been a happier story.

Germania by Tacitus described tribal Germany in A.D. 98.  They were also herders, and very warlike.  They kept the Roman Empire from spreading to their side of the Rhine.  In general, around the world, nobody owned wild grazers, but domesticated livestock were someone’s private property.  The more animals you owned, the richer you were, and the higher your social status.

Richard Manning once noted that telling a Samburu herder he is overgrazing is telling him he has too many cattle, which in his terms is like saying he’s too rich.  Telling him to protect wildlife is telling him to harbor the enemy.

There was no benefit in capturing and slaughtering 100 wild cattle at once, because most of the meat would be wasted.  But the lad that owned and confined 100 domesticated cattle or horses could exploit his livestock more efficiently.  He was wealthy, respected, and envied, but grazing enslaved animals was likely to degrade the grassland over time.  A Plague of Sheep by Elinor Melville discusses overgrazing in Mexico.  The Roots of Dependency by Richard White talks about Navaho country.  Grassland by Richard Manning examines the damages caused by the grazing industry in the American west.

Paul Shepard had a lot to say about our relationship with wild animals.  In his brilliant book, The Others, he described the importance of having daily exposure to wild animals, and how their presence is essential for our normal psychological development.  Shepard was not at all fond of domesticated animals.  In Where We Belong, he raged against the “total potato-heads,” the “hoofed locusts” (sheep, goats, asses, horses, cows, mules, yaks, camels) that scalped the slopes.  “Their dexterous tooth work and footwork buried cities” (with eroded soils).

“The magnificent forests of the Mediterranean rim and islands were progressively demolished and their seedlings and root-shoots chewed and trampled by livestock.”  The Minoan city of Jerash, a village of 3,000, was once home to 250,000, before the soil was trashed.  “Like the dinosaurs, which are known mainly for their vanishing, the ancestors we know best, and from whom we take our style, are those who seem to have lived mainly to call down calamity upon themselves.”

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest written story ever discovered.  King Gilgamesh was the madman who built the city of Uruk in the Fertile Crescent.  He destroyed the ancient forest, which led to catastrophic erosion and flooding.  Today, Uruk is a crude pile of brown rubble sitting amidst a desolate barren moonscape.

Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, was published in 1864.  It was an early masterpiece of environmental history.  He visited the sites of many ancient civilizations, and was shocked to realize that they were all victims of self-destruction.  Marsh saw ancient seaports that were now 30 miles (48 km) from the sea.  He saw ancient places where the old streets were buried beneath 30 feet (9 m) of eroded soil.  He stood in mainland fields, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, which used to be islands.  He tried to warn America that they were following the same doomed path.  America ignored him.

Finally, what (almost) all sustainable cultures have in common is that they have gone extinct — absorbed or destroyed by the unsustainable cultures that overwhelmed them.  Throughout history, civilization has trumped wild cultures.  Folks with jets and missiles will not be massacred by folks with spears and bows.  One exception is the Sentineli who fiercely resist colonization (and are extremely lucky to inhabit a place worthless for colonization and resource mining).  I will offer no magical solutions today.

All the best!