Thanks for a stout defense of your position. I'm always fascinated when people can look at the same set of data and arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions. That speaks strongly to the role that personal psychology plays in how we react to the world. There is precious little chance that either of us will convince the other of the validity of our position given our mutual level of personal investment in our own worldview, but in the interests of the onlookers I thought I'd offer some follow-up comments.
1. Carrying capacity is not, as most neo-Malthusians believe, fixed. For example, where land is plentiful, labor stretched thin and technology expensive as in Mashonaland in Zimbabwe, farmers will generally use a farming system involving plowing land and broadcasting seeds. That provides one level of productivity per acre. But where land is scarce, labor is plentiful and simple technology cheap and abundant, such as the rice paddy areas of China or the terraced agricultural areas of Indonesia, farmers use intensive rice systems, based on recycled organic waste and human or animal powered threshing, and the yield will be many, many times greater. It's not that one system is "better" than the other; it's that each is adapted to its particular environmental and economic context. If conditions changed, Zimbabwean farmers -- and by extension farmers in many parts of the world -- could adapt to a much more intensive system. In much of the agricultural world farmers are no where near the carrying capapcity of the land given existing technology. Moreover, most farming systems are based on renewable resources -- the land, rain and cycles of fertility.
The analysis of carrying capacity is fraught with uncertainty and differing interpretations. I define carrying capacity as the level of population an environment can support over the long term (i.e. many generations) without degrading the ecology of that environment. This may be somewhat more strict than others, but it comes from my Deep Ecology perspective. That position requires the recognition of the intrinsic value of the other life forms that share the environment, and their intrinsic right to continue to exist even in the presence of a human population. Deep Ecology also recognizes that humanity exists as one element of life among many in the biosphere, and that all life in an ecological niche is interdependent to some degree.
The conclusion that I draw from these principles is that carrying capacity has some upper limit. A sure sign that the upper limit has been reached is if the carrying capacity of a niche begins to erode for at least some of the species that occupy it. Are we seeing such erosion of carrying capacity in the world today? My conclusion, based on signals as diverse as glacier retreat, the vanishing of fish stocks in the world's oceans, declining soil fertility in the American Great Plains by 50% or more in the last 100 years, and declining global per-capita grain production is that we have reached or exceeded the earth's carrying capacity. Others with different definitions of carrying capacity or different value systems may disagree.
Humanity has always used technology to increase the productivity of our environment. This should not be confused with an increase in carrying capacity, however. Such an increase in productivity has always been gained at the expense of the other occupants of that environment. While such appropriation is is a normal feature of any species, ours has been so aggressive that it has driven other species to extinction in the process. While the extinction of other species is seen by some to be an unfortunate but essentially inconsequential byproduct of our activities, it doesn't take much of a shift in perspective to understand that if life is an interdependent network, humanity reorganizes and removes its nodes and connections at our peril. We have a very incomplete understanding of how this system functions. The Precautionary Principle warns us that in the face of such incomplete knowledge we must err on the side of caution lest we run afoul of Unintended Consequences.
The expansion of productivity has in the past also been achieved through an expansion of our territory, drawing lands previously uninhabited by humans into the domain of our ecological niche. This is no longer possible, as our ecological niche now comprises essentially the entire globe.
2. Most of the evidence of "overshoot" you present is evidence of greed, stupidity and the failure of government to regulate rather than any absolute lack of resources. For example over-fishing occurs because people like fish, fish is cheap and produced by nature rather than people, and governments refuse to limit catches. But fish is a substitute for other protein sources like chicken, not the only source of protein. Similarly, famines are not caused by lack of resources. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for showing that famines are caused by social systems not by resource scarcity. The most famous example was the Irish potato famine; Ireland exported food throughout the whole famine. His Nobel prize winning theory can be summed up this way: famines are not caused by there not being enough food; they are caused by poor people not being able to afford the food that is available. Again, as with demographics, social reform can end famine. Sen has also pithily stated about India that as soon as India became a democracy, it never experienced another famine, because it is impossible for a democratically elected government to survive allowing famine.
Certainly humanity has has behaved stupidly and greedily, and has failed to regulate its activities appropriately. I don't see this as a moral failure on the part of humanity, to be rectified with education and tongue-lashings. Rather, I see it as part of our nature with both biological and cultural components. Your rebuttal appears to shift the burden of ecological protection from individuals to regulatory agencies. The question is, if people are in fact capable of directing their behaviour rationally, why are such agencies even necessary? Should individual fishermen not realize that it isn't in anyone's best interest to keep fishing until no more fish can be caught? Certainly individual fishermen realized that (as in the case of the Northern Cod on Canada's Grand Banks) but it appears that any voluntary reduction in catches was immediately overwhelmed by the actions of fishermen from other nations. Why was that? Did those foreign fishermen not care about the state of the seas, or did they see the oceans as a rapidly replenishable resource, or did they see any problems they might create as purely local in scope? It was a combination of all those factors, along with a healthy dose of self-interest that seems to be inherent to our organism. Why was no regulatory action initiated until after the evidence of collapse was incontrovertible? I maintain that it is virtually impossible for a regulatory agency to institute curbs on resource utilization before frank evidence of scarcity is apparent. As you yourself point out, any body that tries such a thing will be voted out of office, either directly or indirectly. the end result is that everyone tries to download the burden of famine onto someone else by maximizing their own resource utilization.
3, 4, 5. Fossil fuels have been used because they are cheap and abundant. As fossil fuels become expensive people will substitute other sources of energy. I'm always amazed when people assume that we have no choice but to sit stupidly and watch the oil run out. With the right incentives, as oil runs out we will substitute other sources of energy, which become economically viable as oil becomes economically non-viable. It will be a gradual replacement of one source for the other, not the complete depletion of one source. The technological challenges of substituting other forms of energy are trivial; it's the entrenched economic interests and laissez faire attitude of certain political regimes that prevents us from doing so in a timely way that will minimize economic disruption.
Here we come to the crux of the matter. Your view is supported by economists world-wide, while the oil companies in turn support them with the message that there's lots of oil left anyway. I believe this view is a faith-based position, and has precious little objective support from the available facts - facts both of technology and social behaviour. 88% of the world's energy is derived from fossil fuels. Aside from hydro power, less than 2% is derived from renewable sources. There is a lot of activity in the renewable energy sector as oil prices increase. The issues that make me less than sanguine about the possibility of a smooth transition from fossil fuels to renewables are:
- The time frame is so short. According to my analysis Peak Oil is here now, and demand has already started to fall behind supply (that's why oil is trading over $70).
- The rate of production of replacement transportation fuels is very low, and and even this low level of production is having negative impacts on both the environment and food prices.
- The net energy of the replacements that are being introduced is declining. Net energy ranges from 90% for conventional crude oil, through 60% for oil sands syncrude, to 30% or less for ethanol. The lower the net energy, the more the energy economy needs to invest in itself, and the less there is for the end consumer.
- Alternative forms of transportation energy (e.g. battery vehicles), while technically feasible, appear unlikely to penetrate the market in sufficient quantity to offset the rate of oil decline I predict.
- As the price of oil rises, so does the cost of many of the feedstocks required for these new energy sources. The equation turns out not to be quite as simple as we'd been told. Just ask Suncor in Fort McMurray what has happened to project costs in the Alberta Tar Sands.
The question of belief enters the picture when you ask questions like "When will the oil peak happen?", How severe will the post-peak decline be" and "How vulnerable is our civilization to interruptions in its energy supply?" It is possible for reasonable people to differ on their answers to these questions, because this is an unprecedented event in human history, and we won't really know the answers until it is upon us. I base my conclusions on a good-faith analysis if the data I have available, and I hope those on the other side of the fence are doing likewise.
6. The consumption society is a particular social construct that we live under today in the United States. It is just not true that every society all through history has been a excess consumption based economy. You are posing a political/cultural characteristic of 20th century America as an unchanging human characteristic.
Well, it's a little wider-spread than that. The consumption imperative is evident in at least all OECD countries, plus India and China. In fact, the whole theory of Demographic Transition depends on societies being consumption-oriented. There is nothing peculiarly American about a society increasing its consumption, it's just that America is the prime modern exemplar of this tendency.
7. If characteristics like excess consumption and reproduction were genetically based they would be unchangeable. But the OP shows that where people are given choice and a simple technological fix, they constrain their reproduction to replacement or below replacement levels. How is this possible if the drive to maximize reproduction is genetic? It seems that your statement is counter-factual. If excess consumption was genetically based, then humans would have to have been like Americans at every stage of history on every continent. They haven't so your statement is again counter-factual.
Genetics doesn't turn human beings into automata. The current view of evolutionary psychology is that our genetic makeup predisposes us to behaviour patterns, and that in a group these tendencies are best understood as a statistical integration of the individual tendencies of its members. While an individual or a relatively small group may exhibit countervailing behaviours (such as reducing consumption, declining job promotions, or having no children) the larger the group you consider, the more the overall behaviour normalizes to the genetic predisposition. The smaller the group, the more likely it will be that its behaviour trends away from the norm.
There appears to be a genetic mechanism selected into every reproductive species, from bacteria to flatworms, robins to rabbits, tigers to chimpanzees that favours excess reproduction beyond the replacement rate. It's easy to understand why that is a general rule of nature. In an environment where there are predators this is a survival-positive trait: if a few individuals get eaten, the species isn't threatened. However, when there are no predators, it's catastrophic. Think of the rabbits in Australia. We are like those rabbits: we have no predators except ourselves. The result is a human population that has quadrupled in a century, to which we add over 75 million new members every year.
The question of why we see declining human birth rates when the genetic predisposition is the opposite is fairly simple to answer, though more complex in action. Human beings, as I said above, are not genetic automata. Their behaviour is influenced by a wide variety of factors including resource availability, the stability of the social environment, the perception of expanding or contracting opportunity, and the perception of whether the benefit of extra children outweighs their cost. It's likely that these considerations are evaluated quite differently from place to place. I'd put good money on the last one (cost/benefit) being a very important factor in explaining why reproduction levels are much lower in developed than developing nations, for example.
There is one other explanation that deserves mention. Reg Morrison, in his book "The Spirit in the Gene" postulates that humanity is exhibiting a population curve typical of any "plague mammal" in an environment with excess stored resources. His explanation for the drop in birth rates is that it is the herald of the peak and crash of the population as the resources are overrun. I find the support for his argument to be somewhat weak, but it's a suggestive idea that may bear thinking about.
8. Rather than being brittle, the world economic system is extremely diverse and flexible. Again, you seem to be generalizing from late 20th century early 21st century suburban America to the world. If these crises you are concerned with happen, what do you suppose would be the effect on the 800 million Chinese peasants who have never owned a car? Or the 600 million or so Indian peasants?
I suggest you look into the research of
The Resilience Alliance for a better understanding of complex adaptive systems and resilience. The system I am talking about is indeed our current civilization. It's obvious to me that earlier civilizations were much more resilient than ours. Take for example the fact that the Black Death did not decimate North America or that previous collapses of civilizations like the Romans or the Mayans did not resonate far beyond their borders. A trivial but trenchant example of how interconnections like transportation make a civilization more vulnerable is the global effect of the Spanish Flu in 1918.
Their own car ownership or lack of it is not what will affect those 800 million Chinese peasants. What will affect them is global warming brought on by the oil consumption of the 1.2 billion people elsewhere who do own cars, or perhaps the loss of medical supplies if manufacturing and distribution networks break down. Or the loss of clean water as the upper echelons of their society struggles to industrialize with coal.
While I appreciate your sense of urgency, your conclusion seems to be a nihilistic fantasy. Whether it was the best possible outcome or a bad outcome, for better or worse we now have 6 billion people and an economic system that produces more than enough food for them -- even though because of the terrible inequality built into our economic system, many people cannot afford the food that is available. We use our economic system to feed vast numbers of animals so that some humans can eat themselves into early death by eating too much meat. We use other parts of our farming system to produce useless gadgets and toys. But we have the "carrying capacity" to produce enough food for well over 12 billion people and have, through improvements in human welfare, discovered that we will never have a population over 9 billion. That means that we have averted a catastrophic fate and can build on that success.
In debates like this I always try to steer clear of emotive terms like "nihilistic fantasy". It verges on ad hominem, and distracts from the underlying facts of the debate. You disagree with my position, and that's entirely legitimate. But don't you think it would be better to let the facts and our interpretations of them speak for themselves?
"More than enough food" is true only in a very idealistic sense. In the real world we need to factor in such unpleasant things as economic competition for that food, the growing disparity between rich and poor, and the fact that most nations seem reluctant to give away any more than a pittance of their caloric wealth in the name of egalitarian justice. What is, is. That applies to regional disparities and our unwillingness to bridge them as well as to the bald technical fact that we produce 300 kg of grain per person.
The neo-Malthusian alternative offers us nothing. What do you propose if you believe your outcome is true? That several billion of us slit our throats on the unlikely possibility that we won't be able to feed everyone in the future? That we deliberately withhold food from the poor to starve them into balance with their alleged "carrying capacity" as one DU poster is fond of promoting?
Ah. Now that is a very good question. Here is my answer, as I posted it to another blog yesterday:
I've just come out of a two-year episode of despair brought on by realizing the inevitability of the decline of this cycle of human civilization. What brought me out was a spiritual (though empatically NOT religious) transformation that I describe briefly in "The Spiritual Effects of Comprehending the Global Crisis". Upon more reflection it turns out that the spiritual perception that I describe is more correctly and usefully understood as a conversion to Deep Ecology as defined by Arne Naess in 1972. I am convinced that such a "spiritual" realization is essential if one is to emerge from the inevitable despair and resume a functional life.
Now, what about hope? After all, the last thing in Pandora's Box was "Hope". Since we are staring deeply into that box right now, what new revelation might we take as a hopeful sign? The state of affairs right now seem utterly hopeless. Ecological devastation, oil depletion, population growth and socioeconomic instability are converging to give humanity the thrashing of its life, in the process reducing the human community to perhaps one billion members before the end of the century.
In fact there is a hopeful sign, but only if you change your perspective.
Start from these three realizations:
1. The genetic imperatives that drive our reproduction, consumption and competition guarantees that we will not change our civilization's value set voluntarily or preemptively.
2. Humanity is like yeast. We reproduce and consume until our ecological niche is stripped of resources and poisoned by waste, then we die off.
3. Humanity is like cockroaches. We are resourceful, adaptive and hardy, and you can't kill us all.
These three facts mean that some portion of humanity will survive to regroup and rebuild in a massively damaged, resource-poor world. On our way through the bottleneck we will lose much of our physical and social capital. The one good thing about this, from a species, biosphere and planetary perspective is that the existing socioeconomic structures will be forcibly and involuntarily stripped away, leaving room for new structures to take their place.
The question for me has become, "How do we ensure that the seeds are in place for a value set that will survive through and bloom after the bottleneck, a value set that will ensure that the next cycle of civilization has a chance at sustainability even in such a badly damaged, resource-poor world?"
I've become convinced over the last couple of months that the seeds have already been planted. They are even resilient enough to make it through, and carry the correct values.
Paul Hawken has just written a book called "Blessed Unrest" in which he describes a set of one to two million local, independent, citizen-run environmental and social justice groups. These groups exist world-wide, and each is acting on local problems of its own choosing. There is no overarching ideology beyond "making the world a better place", there is no unifying organization, no white male vertebrate leader setting the agenda. As a result the movement is extremely resilient - no government action anywhere can shut it down, even though individual groups may be suppressed. These groups make up the largest (though unrecognized) social movement the world has ever seen.
Hawken sees this movement as part of humanity's immune system. While I like the metaphor and think it is exactly correct, I believe the importance of these groups is much greater than just their efforts to mitigate an unavoidable collapse. These groups have been called into existence by the world's dis-ease, and do two things: they work to fix local problems now (which will mitigate some local effects of the collapse), but more importantly they act as carriers for the values of cooperation, consensus, nurturing, recognition of interdependence, acceptance of limits, universal justice and the respect for other life. Those are precisely the values that a civilization will need to achieve stability and sustainability. To top it all off, many of these groups are led by women or espouse specifically matriarchal values, one attribute I see as essential for any sustainable civilization.
At the risk of sounding sentimental, I call these groups the antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream.
I am convinced we will not save this civilization, but I'm equally convinced that thanks to the seeds that have already been planted in these groups we have a shot at a much better one in a couple of hundred years. The crucial change in perspective required to see the hope in this is to stop looking from here forward into the decline, and instead look backward from a position out two hundred years and imagine what it will take to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization from the ashes of this one. The values required are already embodied in a resilient organization, enough of whose elements will survive to transmit a sustainable value set into the ecologically damaged, resource-depleted world we will bequeath to the future. I hope this has been useful. It may not sway you, because as I said above I think we're both well past that. However, there are many others out there seeking a better understanding of the malaise they sense in themselves and others. I'm trying to clarify that inchoate feeling of unease, and having your passionately held arguments to work with is very valuable for marshalling my own thoughts.
Thanks,
Paul Chefurka
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