Wild Free and Happy Sample 21

[Note: This is the twenty-first sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 201 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Perfection of Hunting

Human pioneers continued their colonization of new regions.  Along the way, they kept learning new hunting strategies, and inventing more and better tools.  They became masters at killing big critters, and bringing home lots of meat.  But the more skillful they got, the greater the risk of unintentional overhunting.  Not only did many large herbivores gradually go extinct, but so did many of the carnivore predators that specialized in hunting them. 

For example, several large cat species had long upper canine teeth or fangs.  These cats were specialized for killing huge herbivores with very thick hides — including elephant-like species.  Big, strong, saber-tooth and scimitar-tooth cats evolved in Africa several million years ago, and eventually expanded across Eurasia and the Americas — and so did elephant-like species.  As hominin hunters gained skill, elephant-like species declined, as did the cats that killed them.  Baz Edmeades suspected that as the number of jumbo critters with thick hides declined, the cats’ long fangs may have become a handicap for hunting other types of prey. 

Evolution provided large herbivores with different self-defense strategies.  One was jumbo size and thick hides.  Another was the ability to flee at high speed.  As evolution gradually made the prey a bit faster, it also sped up the carnivores a bit, too.  Ecosystem health required that the two teams stay relative balance.  If carnivores got too fast, they would deplete their prey and starve.  If herbivores got too good at escape, they would overgraze the land and starve.  In some regions today, speedy lions, leopards, and cheetahs have managed to survive, along with a variety of fast moving herbivores.

When the sacred dance of eater and eaten drifted out of balance, trouble ensued.  Aldo Leopold wrote a famous parable that delivered a powerful ecological lesson.  The sun feeds the grass, the grass feeds the deer, the deer feeds the wolf, the wolf feeds the soil, and the soil feeds the grass.  In the family of life, we all feed each other.  The U.S. government’s predator eradication program has nearly driven wolves to extinction, much to the delight of livestock ranchers.  Leopold explained that when wolves are scarce, deer numbers soar, vegetation gets stripped off the mountain, the soil washes away, and rivers carry the future off to the sea.  The deer lived in fear of wolves, and the mountain lived in fear of deer.

Over the course of four million years, hominin hunters slowly gained some advantages via genetic evolution.  But it was cultural evolution that enabled them to begin a long journey down a powerful and dangerous path.  More and better tools and strategies amplified their ability to hunt and eat a wider variety of animals.  Their growing toolbox included gizmos specialized for killing animals of every size and shape — megafauna, small game, birds, fish, and so on.  

Saber-tooth cats were doomed by hyper specialization.  Human survival is not highly dependent on a narrow variety of food sources.  We are omnivores.  We can digest deer, rodents, eels, shellfish, locusts, worms, maggots, grass seeds, nuts, berries, roots, and so on.  Dietary flexibility, tool making, and cooking technology are important reasons why humans haven’t joined the saber-tooth cats in megafauna Valhalla.

Of course, in the good old days, the preferred prey was megafauna.  For the time and energy invested, they provided generous servings of high quality nutrients — far more than bunnies or maggots.  Of course, large game was not an infinite resource for skilled hunters.  Populations of some megafauna gradually declined, and eventually went extinct.  Plan B for human survival was to adapt to changing conditions, not be a fussy eater, and dine on whatever delicacies were handy.

In the good old days, there were no hunting licenses, regulations, or game wardens.  Hunters were free to do things that are restricted today.  In different regions, herds were sometimes driven into traps, where the killing was indiscriminate, and excess meat was left behind to be recycled by wolves, ravens, microbes, and other scavengers.  Nothing was wasted, but more animals were killed than the hunters needed.  This could weaken the herd.

In Europe, several sites indicate that hunters had focused on nursery herds, consisting of mothers and their offspring.  It was much less dangerous to kill a young mammoth than to attack its huge and powerful daddy, who could easily splatter you into a puddle of bloody mush. 

Edmeades noted that scimitar-tooth cats also preferred to dine on youngsters.  In the Friesenhahn Cave in Bexar County, Texas, excavations revealed the remains of 33 cats, and 300 to 400 young mammoths, mostly two year olds.  He added that the human youngsters in ice age Europe were similarly vulnerable.  Their homeland did not sound like traffic and sirens, it sounded like moaning lions and whooping hyenas.  Wandering away from the camp at night was dangerous and dumb.  Babies instinctively cry when left alone too long.  Even our chimp and baboon cousins have been known to snatch and devour helpless infants.

Evolution continuously learns new tricks via ongoing trial and error.  This is why every species produces surplus offspring, because they are insurance policies.  If each mating pair only had two offspring, they would be in the fast lane to extinction.  Bunnies produce many surplus offspring, and megafauna produce some extras.  This worked brilliantly for millions of years — until tropical primates acquired deadly superpowers via cultural evolution.  These dangerously clever critters developed new and unusual abilities far faster than the genes of other critters could evolve new adaptations to counteract them.  Oh-oh!

Fernando Fernandez noted that, on every continent that humans colonized, the process of driving species extinct often took at least several thousand years.  Abundant populations of megafauna could tolerate centuries of folks who sometimes hunted a bit too hard.  Over the passage of many generations, it would have been normal for the hunters to remain unaware of the gradual long-term decline in game — until the arrival of hunger times, when they slammed hard into the stone wall of resource limits.

In the good old days of abundant megafauna and simple weaponry, some bands of hunters reportedly had no sense of limits at all.  Dan Flores wrote that the Cree tribe believed that buffalo numbers were essentially infinite, and that the animals they killed in no way diminished their abundance.  Shepard Krech wrote that the Powhatan tribe hunted throughout the year, and killed animals regardless of their age, sex, or breeding state.  The Cherokee believed that every deer they killed was reanimated, each would be replaced.  Eventually, unpleasant experiences of scarcity revealed the existence of limits, which inspired a shift toward a more conservation-oriented approach.

Farley Mowat told stories about the Ihalmiut people who lived in the region around Hudson Bay in northern Canada.  When traders moved in, the natives learned that they could trade fox furs for cool stuff like guns and ammunition.  These made it far easier to kill deer, so their traditional mode of low tech hunting was abandoned.  Prior to firearms, it had never occurred to anyone that it was possible to kill too many deer.  Until then, the availability of deer was as reliable as the dance of the sun and moon.

Two factors were in play here.  (1) When each generation of hunters experienced adequate game, the sense of abundance could mask their gradual decline for centuries.  (2) Times of abundance could also absorb some growth among the hunting clans.  Dan Flores noted that the average size of coyote litters is 5.7 pups, but when food is abundant, or their numbers are dwindling, they have larger litters.  As I write today, the thundering herd of 7.7 billion humans demonstrates that, like coyotes, our numbers also grow when food resources increase.

Ronald Wallace noted that in times of abundance, intensification of hunting was normal.  When caribou herds were migrating, folks killed as many as they could, because winters were long, dark, and cold.  They could enjoy a stable (but temporary) way of life, for as long as intensification didn’t eliminate abundance.  Of course, the shadow of intensification was population growth, which had a tendency to hasten the end of easy living.  Scarcity inspired the nerds to innovate new hunting gizmos, like the leister, fish hook, net, snare, and bow and arrow.  Over time, as megafauna became scarcer, the menu expanded.  Red deer, elk, roe deer, wild pig, fish, shellfish, and waterfowl were eaten at the Maglemose site in Denmark 10,000 years ago.

Another star in this snow country soap opera was climate change.  When warmer eras moved in, ice sheets melted and retreated.  Ice was replaced by tundra, then steppe, then forest.  Much of Europe was covered with dense forest by 9,500 years ago.  Megafauna that live in herds thrive on steppe grasslands.  Forests were home to lower numbers of more solitary large game — elk, aurochs, deer, wild pigs.  Expanding forests encouraged some folks to migrate to coastlines, lake shores, wetlands, rivers, and streams.  Locations with abundant marine food resources sometimes developed into sedentary communities — like coastal tribes in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

Some cultures understood the notion of limits, and the risks of living too hard.  Some made efforts to live more conservatively, with greater emphasis on foresight and self-restraint.  Some developed traditions and taboos intended to reduce the risks of overhunting and overbreeding. 

Other cultures became less cautious, and pursued riskier paths.  Today, it’s clear that the risk-takers have overwhelmed the cautious, careful, and conservative.  Cultures that mindfully limit their numbers often become road kill for cultures that don’t.  Sadly, the world outside your window is a monster child of the risk fiends, for whom Growth is the god word — growth by any means necessary.

Anyway, Ronald Wright wrote that maybe 12,000 years ago, hunters in some regions had become too clever, too successful, and too numerous.  It was becoming apparent that their traditional lifestyle was approaching its expiration date.  Cave painters put down their brushes and became rabbit hunters.  Wild megafauna was not an infinite resource. 

Wright called this transition “the perfection of hunting,” and he declared it to be humankind’s first progress trap.  Progress traps are the unintended consequences of brilliant innovations that permit clever folks to survive by shifting to a new and improved way of life.  Unfortunately, they also tend to burn the bridges behind them as they advance.   Returning to the good old days is no longer possible. 

For example, our transition to fossil energy has fueled explosive population growth, which makes a quick and easy return to a muscle-powered way of life impossible.  It’s like we’re helpless passengers on the Titanic.  Despite our legendary big brains, our capacity for foresight is often abominable.  Over and over we fail to anticipate what the unintended consequences of our ingenious inventions might be — agriculture, automobiles, nuclear weapons, etc.  The list is endless.

Wright concluded that the perfection of hunting put the forks to an ancient tradition, forcing humans to explore dangerous paths, like herding and farming.  Hunter-gatherer cultures mostly blinked out over time.  A few have managed to survive into modern times.  He expected that the fossil record left behind by the Anthropocene will resemble the effects of an asteroid strike.

Mark Nathan Cohen lamented the shift to plant and animal domestication.  Hominins had been hunters for four million years.  He wrote that hunting “has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved.”  Around 10,000 years ago, almost everyone lived on wild foods.  By 2,000 years ago, most of humankind depended on food produced on farms. 

The early days of hunting megafauna was a luxurious life.  Gradually increasing population pressure was what drove the downward spiral to surviving on domesticated crops.  These foods were less nutritious and far more labor intensive to produce.  The engines of this decline were cultural evolution and technological innovation.  These forces were highly contagious, and spread around the world. 

Wright noted that in 1492, the culture of the Old World washed up on the shores of the New World.  The two cultures had been separated for 15,000 years or more.  The similarities between the two are striking.  Both had roads, cities, palaces, schools, kings, priests, temples, armies, peasants, merchants, sports, theater, art, books, music, and so on.

Diana Muir wrote a fascinating sketch about the early human experience in New England.  After the glaciers retreated, the land became home to animals including horses, musk oxen, wolves, saber-tooth cats, bison, giant bears, giant beavers, and four species of mammoths.  By 10,000 years ago, a number of the megafauna species had gone extinct.  The menu then featured deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, heath hens, salmon, shad, alewives, shellfish, berries, acorns, and so on.  This was a land of abundance, and the human population grew and grew.

Oysters and clams had once been famine food.  By 2,000 years ago, they became a dietary staple.  Digging them up was tedious backbreaking work, and a grown man needed to eat 100 every day.  Many thousands more were smoked and dried for winter dining.  Empty shells were dumped in huge piles.  At the lowest, oldest layers, the oyster shells were 10 to 20 inches wide (25 to 50 cm), indicating 40 year old animals.  In newer layers, the shells were much smaller.

By 800 years ago, agriculture was producing half of their food.  Staples included corn, beans, and squash.  Their slash and burn farming required tedious backbreaking work.  It also depleted the fertility of the thin, rocky soils.  The good old days had passed.

The Big Flatline

Jeff Rubin is the former chief economist at a major Canadian investment bank.  His book, The Big Flatline, gives readers an opportunity to see Peak Cheap Energy through the eyes of someone from the executive suites.  He spent 20 years flying around the world, hanging out with the rich and powerful, and this was a mind-altering experience.  In the process, he lost the rose-colored glasses that are mandatory in his field, and this cost him his job.

Rubin’s overview of the current geopolitical state of affairs is fascinating.  Energy costs far more than it did a decade ago.  Oil was $30 a barrel in 2004, and $147 in 2008 (crash!).  Since energy is the driving force behind the global economy, this sharp increase is a game changer.  When energy is cheap, we can grow like crazy, but triple-digit oil prices slam down on the brake pedal.

High energy prices are not a passing storm, they’re here to stay.  Perpetual growth is never a free lunch.  The inevitable approach of genuine scarcity guarantees rising prices.  In the world of geology, resources are the amount of oil in the ground, and reserves are the amount of oil that can economically be extracted.  For example, the Canadian tar sands contain 1.6 trillion barrels of oil resources, but only 170 billion barrels of reserves (11 percent of total).

As an economist, Rubin focuses on the price trends in energy, but the energy industry is paying close attention to EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).*  In the good old days of high-profit gushers, it was common to invest one calorie of energy to produce 100 calories of oil (100:1).  By 2010, typical EROEI was about 17:1, and some are predicting 5:1 by 2020. 

Rising prices enable the extraction of difficult and expensive non-conventional energy.  At some point, declining EROEI makes extraction pointless, regardless of market prices.  Consequently, most of the oil in Canadian tar sands will be left where it is.  (The EROEI of tar sands now in production is about 3:1, and 5:1 for shale deposits)

The world of coal is a similar story.  Coal resources are enormous, but coal reserves are far less than proclaimed by industry cheerleaders.  Anthracite is premium coal, and its production peaked in 1950.  Grade B bituminous coal peaked in 1990.  There is abundant grade C coal, lignite, which contains only a fifth of the energy in anthracite, and is especially filthy to burn.  Since grade C coal is so low in energy, it cannot be shipped long distances profitably.  The coal industry is also constrained by EROEI, and much of this resource will be left in the ground forever.

As we zoom toward a static no-growth economy, it would be intelligent to prepare for it, to make the transition less turbulent.  We aren’t.  The end of growth is intolerable, inconceivable, and unacceptable.  There is only one path forward, by any means necessary — a beautiful recovery followed by an eternity of perpetual growth and heavenly prosperity.  Rubin gives us a dope slap.  Recovery is impossible.  The era of wasteful excess is behind us.  Turn your brain to the ON position, pay attention, and prepare for a new reality.

Following the 2008 crash, governments borrowed vast sums of money bailing out pathologically reckless banks.  The trendy deregulation movement of the ’80s and ’90s dismantled prudent time-proven rules that prohibited bankers from behaving like spoiled two-year olds with other people’s money.  Bailouts created enormous strains for many nations.  As a consequence, “central banks are running printing presses almost nonstop to kickstart economic growth.”  As the value of the dollar declines, we’ll pay even more for energy, and dig a grave for growth.

Flooding the economy with new money will do nothing to encourage recovery, because it does not address the core problem, energy scarcity.  But it is creating catastrophic levels of debt that are guaranteed to inflate the misery down the road (beyond the next election cycle, hopefully).  Greece has a dim future, and Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy are not far behind.  Debt-crippled economies will be helpless sitting ducks when the next recession strikes.

In the first half of the book, Rubin describes the global mess, as he understands it, and he does a great job.  It’s important information, and it’s coming from a lad close to the inner circle of the banking industry, not wild-eyed radical extremists from the Sierra Club, or crazy doomsters like Richard Heinberg.  It’s a triple-shot of full-strength reality, and it brings many issues into sharp focus.

In the second half, he makes a heroic effort to recommend strategies for responding to the mess.  His goal is a fairly smooth transition to a static economy, which he presents as a realistic possibility.  For readers who have not been making a serious effort to understand the complex challenges of the Earth Crisis, Rubin’s analysis will be soothing.  The future isn’t roaring with danger.  Everything will be mostly OK, sort of.

The magic of the marketplace will rescue us by continually raising the prices on our bad habits, forcing us to live slower and lighter.  If governments raise taxes on energy, we’ll use less.  We don’t need more regulations on corporations.  If governments do nothing, we’ll still use less, because of ever-growing energy costs.

Mature people should be mindful of climate change, because it is not a trivial problem, but our fear of climate disaster exceeds the actual threat.  The gloomy IPCC warnings are based on silly energy resource projections — in a hundred years, we will not be consuming more energy than today.  We’ll be forced to quit our addiction to hydrocarbon fuels before emissions have time to cause catastrophic problems.

Manufacturing jobs will come back home, as rising energy prices drive up the cost of moving products across long distances.  The benefits of cheap Asian labor will be lost to rising shipping costs.  Transportation costs will also encourage the recovery of localized economies.  The food we eat will travel far fewer miles.  Local farm labor needs will provide exciting new careers for folks abandoned by obsolete industries (i.e., investing, insurance, real estate, etc.).

Trained as an economist, Rubin has an outlook focused on cost trends in the here and now.  He doesn’t slam nuclear energy, because it produces respectable output numbers every day.  It doesn’t matter that we have yet to figure out a safe and permanent way of disposing the waste, which can remain extremely toxic for many thousands of years.  It doesn’t matter that deactivating reactors can cost as much as building them, because the bill is sent to taxpayers and unborn generations, not today’s stockholders.

Critical thinkers who are well informed about the complex challenges of the Earth Crisis are not likely to be soothed by Rubin’s vision of the future, but his discussion of the present is excellent.  This should not be the only book you ever read. 

Rubin concludes with wise advice: “As the boundaries of a finite world continue to close in on us, our challenge is to learn that making do with less is better than always wanting more.”

*For a great illustration of EROEI trends, see figure 5.12 on page 75 of Perfect Storm by Tim Morgan.

 

Rubin, Jeff, The Big Flatline: Oil and the No-growth Economy, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012.  This book was first published in Canada as The End of Growth.  Here is a 27-minute video of Rubin talking about his book.

Scarcity

For maybe two million years, our ancestors lived relatively sustainably as hunter-gatherers.  Their simple way of life utilized renewable natural resources in a low-impact manner.  This worked very well until advances in weaponry enabled the possibility of megafauna overkill, which pushed many societies into a dark new direction — overtool — an addiction to powerful technology that forced some ancestors out of balance with the family of life.

Unfortunately, it’s possible to abuse and diminish renewable natural resources, and this is not sustainable.  About 10,000 years ago, some societies shifted to agriculture, which increasingly damaged renewable resources via soil mining, forest mining, and water mining.  The agricultural way of life provided little benefit for most people, but it excelled at ecosystem destruction, swept away ancient limits to population growth, and spread like cancer, eventually eliminating most sustainable societies.

Later came the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.  This was a sharp wrong turn, because we began using nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs).  Minerals are nonrenewable, so no form of mineral mining is sustainable, in theory.  Obviously, Indians making a few stone pipes caused insignificant harm.

Then, less than 300 years ago, the industrial way of life emerged.  It led to explosive population growth and massive ecological damage.  It was ridiculously unsustainable, because it was heavily dependent on consuming NNRs.  The rate at which it devoured mineral resources grew every decade, and has reached staggering levels today.

Imagine a society that was absolutely dependent on beer for its survival, and it had a finite supply of beer — one keg.  If they drank more and more of their nonrenewable beer every day, what would eventually happen?  They would run out of beer, and their society would collapse.

What would happen if they realized that the reserves of essential beer were shrinking, and they created a consumption ceiling that permanently capped guzzling at current rates?  Would the keg of nonrenewable beer last forever?

The problem here is the beer society’s complete dependence on the depletion of a finite nonrenewable resource.  Their politicians couldn’t eliminate depletion via laws and regulations, and their economists couldn’t fix this via money printing or borrowing.  It is simply impossible for this type of society to survive long-term.  The only possible outcome is collapse.  Societies can only be sustainable when based on using renewable resources in a low impact manner (an important idea to teach the young ones).

Christopher O. Clugston gasped when he realized this very important concept.  He fired up his computer, did a lot of research, and wrote a mind-blowing book, Scarcity — Humanity’s Final Chapter?  He identified the 89 NNRs that are essential to the existence of our industrial global society, and studied each of them.  He identified the NNRs that are now scarce, or will be scarce soon.  “By 2008, immediately prior to the Great Recession, 63 (71%) of the 89 analyzed NNRs were scarce globally.”  Scarcity means that society’s requirements for the NNR exceed the available supply that is affordable.

He found that the extraction of all NNRs in 2008 was dramatically higher than in 1900.  During this period, both the global economy, and the world population grew explosively — GDP grew 25 times larger.  To continue on the current trajectory would require enormous additional quantities of NNRs, far more than actually exist.  If the world chose to end growth, and keep the economy at current levels, it would still exhaust the remaining NNRs at a brisk rate.  Every industrial society is a dead end.

In 1900, America was essentially self-sufficient in all the NNRs it needed to whoosh away like a bottle rocket.  We grew like crazy, and temporarily became a superpower.  Things have changed.  “By 2008 America was (net) importing 68 of the 89 analyzed NNRs, including 100% of 19 NNRs.”  Importing NNRs is a further drain on our wealth.

Scarcity drives up prices.  In just the eight years between 2000 and 2008, the prices of most NNRs increased.  For example: cadmium 1,206%, chromium 266%, molybdenum 795%, oil 244%, potash 230%, sulfur 750%, thallium 202%, tungsten 239%, vanadium 547%.  Do you smell trouble?

Rising prices for resources hindered growth, and inspired corporations to move manufacturing operations to low wage nations, to cut costs.  Consequently, America shifted away from manufacturing, toward a service economy, which had less need for NNRs, and produced less real wealth.

Meanwhile, the government had kicked the teeth out of regulations that were created to prevent the financial services sector from disemboweling our economy, as they did in 1929.  This enabled America to produce less real wealth, and more imaginary wealth, which Clugston refers to as pseudo purchasing power.  This allowed us to purchase NNRs with Wall Street fairy dust — an exchange that will come to a tearful end when NNR exporters lose their faith in the value of fairy dust.  Our government is borrowing like there’s no tomorrow, generating stratospheric levels of debt that it has no intention of repaying.  It’s also printing money like crazy.

In 2008, the Great Recession fell out of the sky, rapidly vaporizing trillions of dollars of imaginary wealth.  We were blasted by a tsunami of fraud, idiotic recklessness, and pathological greed.  Clugston points out that growing NNR scarcity was a fundamental contributor to this meltdown.  He has a strong suspicion that 2008 was a major turning point in the human journey.  He wouldn’t be surprised if the industrial global society went into free-fall by 2050, probably sooner.

People who soar away in beautiful hallucinations of economic recovery have lost their connection to reality.  Looking forward, Clugston believes that the best-case scenario is little different from the worst-case.  No nation is sustainable, and all will fall, sooner or later.  World leaders will never agree to cooperate in reversing both population growth and economic growth.  “It is not clear to me that any intelligent response to our predicament exists,” sighs Clugston.  What is clear is that all paths eventually lead to sustainability, a return to the gentle use of renewable resources by a human population of a few million.  “Sustainability is inevitable.” 

Samples of Clugston’s work can be found here and here.  He predicts a painful future based on just overpopulation and NNR scarcity.  The threats of pandemic disease, nuclear disasters, and climate change catastrophes are beyond the scope of this book.  Clugston is not a geologist, but Walter Youngquist has a high opinion of this book.  Scarcity is a fire hose of mind-altering ideas.  It blows away many magical fantasies, and reveals more than a few super-inconvenient truths. 

Clugston, Christopher O., Scarcity — Humanity’s Final Chapter?, Booklocker.com, Port Charlotte, Florida, 2012.