[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.
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