Robert Paalberg

Harvard University Press 2009 Pbck 235pp

Harvard Professor Robert Paalberg has written a book that makes essential reading for anyone interested in global food politics and why Africa still fails to feed many of its people.

Africa remains the only region on earth with increasing poverty and hunger. The number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day increased 50% since the early 90s; Between 1991 and 2002 the number of malnourished people in Africa increased from 169 to 206 million, with nearly a third of sub-Saharan Africa malnourished, compared with just 17% in the developing world as a whole.

Paalberg accounts for this as a result of policies that since the 1970s have resulted in a massive decline in investment in agricultural science in Africa. While in Asia and South America, farmers benefited from the new science of the green Revolution, and have been able to both feed their growing population- confounding the predictions of neo-Malthusians- and bring many out of poverty as well. India started planting new Green Revolution short-straw varieties in 1964; by 1970 production had doubled, averting fears of famine.

Why did Africa get left behind? Paalberg argues that while in Asia and South America had strong enough institutions and science to continue with their own scientific developments with little further outside assistance, Africa was became influenced by a change in the political and cultural climate in Europe from the 1980s onwards. In particular, this has seriously slowed the uptake of Genetic Engineering in Africa, which Paalberg argues is a result in part of the ideological position of many NGOs working in Africa.

In order to examine what lies behind this ideological position, Paalberg gives a detailed account of the rise of the Organic movement in the west, and a strong consumer movement demanding more natural food:

“This reification of what is “natural” is in part a cultural reaction to the hegemonic expansion of modern science. Advances in modern science tend to diminish both unspoiled nature and unquestioned faith, prompting those with a strong romantic or spiritual side to register their objections by seeking foods that incorporate less modern science. “

This view had already emerged in the US as early as 1892 when a clergyman called Sylvester Graham invented the “Graham Cracker” as a reaction against additives used to whiten bread. Paalberg points out Graham was a “patriarch and a prude; he thought women should go back to milling their own flour and believed in vegetarianism as a means to control sexual passions.”

In Europe, Rudolph Steiner founded the vitalist school of philosophy called Anthroposophy.

“‘Vitalism’” explains Paalberg “was the once-dominant view that living things had a chemical composition different from non-living things”- a view known to be untrue by science since 1780, yet one that still underpins much of the organic movement even today. Steiner’s “Biodynamic” techniques- a mixture of sympathetic magic, astrology and animal sacrifice- seem to have been growing in popularity in recent years.

Sir Albert Howard’s 1940 publication “An Agricultural Testament” was also influential in this reaction against science in farming: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”

Lady Eve Balfour was next in 1943 with her book “The Living Soil” which inspired the formation of the Soil Association in 1946, “still the institutional guardian of organic farming traditions in Great Britain.” The SA’s leading patron is HRH Prince Charles, “the most prominent exemplar of this blue-blood attachment in England to pre-industrial, chemical-free farming”.

In the US, J.I Rodale coined the term “Organic farming” and founded the “Organic Farming and Gardening” magazine in 1942. Rodale was also a big fan of alternative health care and supplements.

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” perhaps did more than any other book to warn of the dangers of chemical pollution from farming. The environmental movement had come of age and began to have a real influence over public policy.

The movement grew rapidly with the rise of an alternative youth culture in the 1960s and 70s, getting a major boost in the US in 1990 with the creation of a single national standard for organic produce.

However, even today in the US the organic sector makes up only 2% of total food purchases and using only 0.4% of cropland. The claims of the organic movement of safer, more nutritious food, and of being more beneficial to nature, are not in general supported by scientific evidence. Paalberg argues that the per capita amount of land need to feed people has declined by more than 50% in the US since 1920; a switch now to organics would require far more land, threatening much of the remaining forest and wild areas.

“Carsonain environmentalists cannot refute this logic, but they resist accepting it because it requires them to endorse a larger rather than a smaller role for modern science.”

More science had already reduced some of the harm from chemical farming highlighted by Carson; bringing in more science to farming now is still the best way to address the environmental impacts by making farming more efficient. The Organic movement has proved to be still wedded to its ideological roots.

The prevalence of the “nature knows best” ideology has been possible because the west has already seen so much improvement in agricultural productivity, as a result of science and technology, that it is well-fed and unwilling to take on yet more in this sector, switching its concerns to reducing the impact on the environment of farming.

Paalberg accepts that this stance makes sense in the west with its excesses of CAFOs, and a subsidy system that encourages over-application of Nitrogen fertiliser, and problems of obesity rather than starvation.

In addition, the modern world seemed to feel an acute sense of loss of community and connection with the natural world and began to harbor romantic notions of returning to an agrarian past.

What might be understandable if misguided at home has become disastrous in Africa, where essentially farmers are poor- and therefore sometimes hungry- because of too little science, rather than too much. African farmers mostly own their own land (unlike in South America) and so would be well placed to benefit from improvements in crop technology for example, but a combination of powerful western NGOs and corrupt African governments discouraged investment in this area.

{Correction 16-09: Paalberg does not say most African farmers own their own land but emphasises that there is far more access to in Africa than in, say Latin America, with only 15 landless landless people in the countryside to every 100 smallholders: “This greater prevalence of land-secure smallholder farmers among the poor in rural Africa increases the chance they will benefit from a farm-technology upgrade. Yet not just any upgrade will do. A new farming technology will be pro-poor as well as pro-growth only if it raises the the total factor productivity of small as well as large farms.”}

This opposition to science is most strongly expressed when it comes to genetically engineered crops. This technology was first being developed at a time when public science funding in agriculture was declining, leaving private corporations like Monsanto to step in and lead the way. The organic movement has banned the use of GE crops; Europe has kept GE food crops out altogether so far. Paalberg sees the ideology behind this as going beyond the simple environmental and health concerns, extending to issues of carrying capacity and population:

“Carsonian environmentalists were offended because gene transfer was so clearly an attempt to engineer and dominate nature rather than live within nature’s normal reproductive constraints.”

Perversely, the environmental concerns of the rich world became transplanted into Africa, where people struggle to feed themseleves still.

“Farming in Africa is a world apart from farming in Europe or North America” writes Paalberg, and goes onto say:

“In Africa…farmers today are not involved in specialized factory farming. They are planting heirloom varieties in polycultures rather than scientifically improved varieties in monoculture. They have a food system that is traditional, local, nonindustrial, and very slow. Using few purchased inputs, they are de facto organic. And as a consequence they remain poor and poorly fed”.

Yields of maize in Malawi for example are less than one tenth of yields in the US.

Many NGOs working in Africa seem motivated to keep them this way. Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace places a great emphasis on safeguarding the “traditional knowledge” of the Africans. The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) is the most prominent amongst NGOs promoting organics in developing countries; their mission in Africa is not to increase productivity but to enlist farmers there into the organic movement. Since so few farmers use synthetic chemicals it will be easy to get them certified. “Poor and nonproductive” Paalberg notes ruefully , “but certified organic.”

Paalberg is scathing about some of the approaches by NGOs. The German organisation Networking for Ecofarming in Africa has partners in 13 African countries to warn them of the dangers of “Western agricvulture” supplanting indigenous knowledge, yet promotes biodynamic farming in its workshops.

“German trainers at one NECOFA session in Kenya in 2005 took the time to introduce local participants the importance of light rhythms from the planets and to instruct them in developing manure preparations that included essential bits of stinging nettle, chamomile, and cow horn (NECOFA 2005). Such knowledge is neither farmer-derived nor indigenous to Africa. Nor is it even knowledge.”

Pedalling pseudo-science to hungry people is akin to quack therapists promoting homeopathy for AIDS or malaria.

Paalberg details the political process used by NGOs, aided and abetted by the UN and supported by a complacent governments in the west and corrupt urban-based officials in Africa, to block the use of science to improve the farmers lot there.

How much of this is to support lifestyle choices of the rich in western countries? Paalberg sees it as neo-colonial in its effects: nearly all certified organic produce in Africa is specialty crops destined for the west, not food for the locals. “Organic farming advocates from IFOAM nonetheless like to assert that organic agriculture in developing countries is not a luxury but somehow a precondition for attaining food security.”

What could GE crops do for African farmers? The most obvious is drought-tolerance (DT). Monsanto has played a big role in developing DT corn in the US, but African will have to wait before they can try it. Only South Africa is an exception to the red tape and stiffing restrictions that all other African governments have place don GE technology, following the European model.

In any case, the big companies are not developing DT varieties suitable for Africa because they see little commercial gain there; African farmers are simply too poor. If GE gets into Africa, it will be through philanthropic organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has formed a partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation called Alliance for a Green Revolution In Africa (AGRA). Monsanto is working with AGRA however to donate some of its technology to develop DT crops there. There remain many political obstacles, and Africa which needs this new technology more than anyone, seems destined to be the last to get it.

Friends of the Earth have been opposed to DT crops in Africa since 1999, citing the danger of them growing in areas currently unavailable to other crops as one of its main objections to GE.

“How strange that agricultural crops with new growth potential would be seen as a threat by the NGO community” notes Paalberg, “but such was the new political reality.”

A new generation of GE crops may help shift attitudes in the Europe. So far, the technology has been used to benefit farmers, with little apparent benefit to the consumer; new crops may have tangible benefits to those who eat them, and as with GE in medicine- which has not met with the same opposition- may then come to be more accepted.

Paalberg makes a tightly argued case for the unnecessary prolonging of hunger in Africa being at least partly fueled by ideological and even religiously motivated western NGOs. While there is an understandable attraction to the simple life of living from the land in the west- something that I have shared- those of us who choose this life are wealthy enough to afford everything from tools and polytunnels to the best seeds we can get, and we do not have to worry about going hungry if the rains dont come.

GE and other scientific advances would farmers here, and the environment also, but we are wealthy enough -because of the benefits technology has brought us so far- to have the choice. To actively campaign to keep these benefits from the poor is not just anti-science, but anti-humanity.

Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand world history of the last 50 years is Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

Her extraordinary account begins with the exploits of one Dr. Ewan Cameron, president of the American and World Psychiatric Association, who’s theories on treating psychiatric patients by erasing their personalities became influential in the spread of Electric Shock Treatment (EST) in U.S. hospitals from the late 1940s.

Cameron believed that he could use a combination of sensory deprivation, EST and drugs to reduce the personality to a tabula rasa- “shock and awe warfare on the mind.”

The application of these methods in political torture are probably obvious and well-known, but what Klein’s book does is to show the link between this method of first erasing the personality and then reconstructing it according to the desires of the “therapist” were applied systematically, not just to individuals but to whole countries through the economic theories of Milton Friedman.

In the 1950s, Friedman was the main figure in the so-called Chicago school of economics out of which emerged the dominant political philosophy of our time: free market capitalism, and its most refined form of neoliberalism.

Milton’s philosophy was pursued with evangelical religious fervor. The doctrine states that an economy can only be healthy if government’s role is reduced to merely insuring that nothing interferes with the proper functioning of the market. According to this fundamentalist functionalist belief, any social problems- unemployment, inequality- are a result of government interference and the cure is alwasy the same: privatise more and keep taking the medicine.

Knowing that unrolling free-market economic policies will cause at least short-term pain that will be unpopular with the electorate, it was always understood that these “reforms” would need to be imposed abruptly, as many as possible, as fast and radically as possible.

Beginning with Pinochet’s Chile and the South American dictatorships of the 1960s, Klein charts the spread of this doctrine across the world: the end of apartheid in South Africa; the breakup of the Soviet Union; the miner’s strike under Thatcher; reaganomics; the collapse of the Asian Tiger economies in the late 90s- behind all of these earth shaping political events lies the workings of the shock doctrine.

It works something like this: a country is let slip into debt. It has problems. Often, if a popular government is coming into power it is inheriting the debts and problems of the previous regime. The World bank and the IMF offer loans- but the conditions are always the same: take the medicine of the Shock Doctrine and open wide the gates to Free market ideology. Only this will heal the wounds.

Almost inevitably, one by one each of these countries and regions succumbed to this tactic only to find their progressive ideals destroyed. Often deals were done behind closed doors right after a populist election, as happened in Poland for example, but the new leaders were left no choice.

Poland became the textbook example of Friedman’s theory: the disorientation of rapid political change combined with the collective fear generated by economic meltdown to make the promise of a quick and magical cure- however illusory- too seductive to turn down.

Behind these seismic changes in world affairs was always Friedman barking “more more”- more shock, more radical imposition of free market economics.

In its most recent form we have Katrina and New Orleans, the South Asian Tsunami, 9-11 and the most complete exposition of the Shock Doctrine so far: Iraq, the complete erasure of the personality of a whole nation, to be rebuilt in the image of its destroyer.

What Friedman has never admitted- nor his younger apostle Jeffrey Sachs- is that to actually impose these policies requires brutality, torture and oppression by the state. Friedman has always seen this a “unfortunate side-effects” rather than central, as Klein argues, to the whole program. Free Market policies would never be acccepted by a population who can see the wealth of their whole nation being ransacked, so we have the thousands of Disappeared, death camps and Guantanamo.

The mature form of the Shock Doctrine is Disaster Capitalism- the deliberate running down of economies through privatisation and deprivation in order to create an environment where the shock doctrine can be imposed. It is then wide open for private corporations to go and do the jobs which used to be the preserve of government social services.

For companies that are clever and far-sighted, like Halliburton and the Carlyle group, the destroyers and rebuilders are different divisions of the same corporations.

A minor but interesting aspect to all this is a different perspective suggested by Klein with regard to the 9-11 conspiracy theories.

Yes, Ive seen all the films and read all the books on this and I certainly don’t think that it is completely beyond the realm of the possible that Cheney was behind the 9-11 attacks- conspiracies certainly do happen-, but Klein offers gives another take on this and other conspiracies (the blogosphere is already humming with speculation about the recent attacks in Mubai):

The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. the appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dot-com collapse all demonstrate. Our common addiction to dirty, non-renewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters (up 430% since 1975) and wars waged for control over scarce resources (not just Iraq and Afghanistan but lower-intensity conflicts such as those that rage in Nigeria, Columbia and Sudan), which in turn create terrorist blowback… Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that simply by staying the present course, they will keep coming up with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market’s invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers.

As the march of the free market leads to the privatisation of practically everything including security forces, prisons and social services, the profit motif will ensure that none of these things serve the public very well: that is no linger their primary purpose.

How much of the current financial meltdown has simply been let happen to facilitate the unrolling of what might be the Endgame of free market Economics?

Klein’s impressive and authoritative survey of modern history ends with the optimism of the activist: the world may have gotten used to shock. Across South America, the region with the most experience of this process, Shock has worn off and the people are wiser and will no longer accept the overtures of the World Bank which, she claims, is nearly going bust. Perhaps the recent admission by Greenspan that he was wrong, and the widespread disaffection with the banks over here will have woken people up to how the world works.

Certainly, the more people who read Klein’s book the less likely we will be fooled again by the lie that the market will, left to its own devices, satisfactorily meet people’s needs.

“Here’s the point: you look out there, at the environment, and with your senses you can plainly see the wonderful, glorious, empirical world of nature. And of course you want to help save nature from destruction, not only because nature is beautiful, but because your own existence depends in many ways on a healthy environment. So you say, stop doing those things that are destroying nature! Stop polluting the oceans, stop dumping toxic wastes into our rivers, stop using fluorocarbons that create an ozone hole, stop burning carbon fuels that pollute the atmosphere and cause global warming- instead let us live in accord with nature, let us adopt energy-efficient production, use renewable resources, practice natural capitalism’ and in all ways honour Gaia. “Congratulations, you have just bought into the world of Flatland. And it is flatland that above all else is destroying Gaia. And thus your very efforts to save Gaia are destroying Gaia”.

-Ken Wilber, Boomeritis (2002)

Last week we looked at the story of the cultural and psychological evolution of human consciousness through the Spiral Dynamics model.

We stopped at Green- the environmental stage that has emerged as a significant cultural form in the last few decades in many western countries, influencing politics, social movements and heralding a New Age of transformation and care for all people and All Beings.

Green however, although representing much advancement in terms of ecological and social awareness over the previous stages of Blue and Orange, has failed to recognize that these earlier stages are necessary for the emergence of green in the first place. The Green belief of the dawning of a new Age of renewal and Global Consciousness cannot be realized because to reach Green requires a developmental process that must include and value all the stages and all their values in some way.

The Post-modern “meme” has a tremendous resistance to this idea however because it tends to be at war with its parents generation of Orange and Blue which extol the virtues of hard work, discipline and tradition. Green has other ideas and rebels against the earlier stages that generated the wealth and processes to make the Green meme possible.

In its rebellion, the Green meme rejects Orange materialism and Blue structure claiming that only its own values of Universal Rights and Ecological awareness are the best.

It also fails to recognize that perhaps yet higher stages that see even more may be emerging from the more progressive ranks of Green; a stage that recognizes not the need for the imposition of a new set of values so much as a deep understanding of the inner developmental process that leads to these values; a stage that not only looks outside at the world of Gaia and the need to care for Her; but that also looks inside at the development of the consciousness that is required for people to care enough about the world in this way and to understand their relationship to their environment.

In these two failings, coupled with a disaffection for the excesses of Religion on the one hand and Rationality on the other, Green makes a fatal mistake: in its distorted, pathological form, it mistakes the simpler, pre-rational and more “natural” and “holistic” -looking earlier stages of Purple and Red as being in some way more developed than modern rational perspectives. This translates as children being having higher consciousness than adults (they are “closer to the source” as one young mother once told me;) animals, trees and plants and even rocks have personalities and spirits with higher consciousness than humans (“more natural”); instinct and intuition being higher forms of knowledge than science or rational inquiry (“more spiritual”).

All these views are very common in New Age Religion which is really just a reversion to much earlier forms of human consciousness, forms which played their own essential evolutionary role in their day, but which will prove quite inadequate to meet the challenges of the modern world.

Instead of looking ahead to what the next Emergent meme may be, Green thinks it has found Nirvana already and in a paroxysm of narcissism and naïve romantic views of what life used to be like back in the good old days it destroys the goose that laid the golden egg- the very scientific method that lead to the deeper Green ecological understanding in the first place.

Psychological Models of Human Development

The psychologist Jean Piaget (1962) was one of the earliest to research the theory that there are distinct phases of cognitive development that a child will go through as it matures. Maslow (1943) amongst others suggested similar models of psychological development and produced a “hierarchy of needs” model showing how, as the more basic physical needs of the individual are met- food, shelter, relationships- so higher needs of “self actualization” can be pursued.

Clare Graves (Beck and Cowan 1996) suggested that these stages of individual development also had collective or cultural forms: he borrowed the word meme from genetics to describe broad stages of psychological development that resulted in a society stratified by culturally distinct values. These “V-memes” or Value-memes-are represented by colors corresponding to a sequence of values and coping mechanisms of psychological needs:

1 BEIGE -as natural instincts and reflexes direct; automatic existence, as in a new-born child. 2 PURPLE – according to tradition and ritual ways of group; tribal; animistic; parochial 3 RED – asserting self for dominance, conquest, and power; exploitive; egocentric; in contemporary societies, criminal organizations, Hell’s Angels, Mad max; 4 BLUE – obediently as higher authority and rules direct; absolutist; conforming; traditional values of church and state; The army, the boy scouts; 5 ORANGE- pragmatically to achieve results and get ahead; multiplistic; competitive; capitalist; materialistic; 6 GREEN -responds to human needs; affiliative; relativistic; “the sensitive self”; ecological consciousness, the Environmental movement; equality and social justice for all.; 7 YELLOW -build functional niche to do what one chooses; existential; systemic; “spans the spiral” with the ability to meet the core psychological needs of the other memes 8 TURQUOISE -experiential to join with other like thinkers; holistic; transpersonal

According to developmental models, to revert to some earlier stage of human consciousness- that of hunter-gatherers for example, who often had animistic and superstitious beliefs- would be like getting kindergarten children to run the country. The kind of scenario that might ensue has been explored in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

There are a few key ideas to understand the developmental model:

Firstly, you cannot skip stages. You cannot run before you can walk. Each stage builds on the earlier ones – including them but transcending them also in certain important ways. The stages can be pictured as concentric circles, like layers of an onion, a “nested holarchy”; this image makes it clear that while the higher stages contain all the earlier stages, the reverse is not true. Someone at say Orange “contains” beige, purple, red and Blue, and has access to these stages; particular behaviour may be emanating from the earlier stages but the “default” mode will still be of Orange. Purple, however, would not “have access to” the higher stages: for this, it would be necessary to first grow through each stage in turn.

Secondly, this is a naturally occurring growth hierarchy- not a dominator hierarchy. As such it is an elite to which everyone, in principle, is invited. The hierarchy of needs is fundamental- it is hard to reach the higher stages with an empty belly- but other factors also play important roles. Merely increasing wealth and privilege will not always lead to “raising consciousness”.

Thirdly, the principle characteristic of each successive stage is that it sees a bigger picture that the stage before; the view of the world is expanded and the concerns that the new stage has will be expanded. While the earlier stages in childhood are primarily narcissistic and concerned with the individuals’ own needs, the later stages become more concerned with the needs of first the whole community, then the nation perhaps as in patriotism, or an identification with a religious tradition; and this in turn gives way to eventually global concerns and concern for the well-being of all beings and the whole of nature. These widening circles of compassion/identification are bolstered by an increased cognitive awareness that sees things as parts of systems. This ability of the higher stages to think systemically is crucial in understanding how important the higher faculties are and how they can contribute to addressing the current global problems.

“The ego-centric and the ethno-centric stages of awareness could not care less about the global commons because they do not themselves possess a global awareness. And that means that Gaia’s main problem is not toxic waste dumps, the ozone hole or global warming. Gaia’s main problem is that not enough human beings have evolved from ego-centric to ethnocentric to world-centric levels of consciousness, yes?” -Wilber, IBID.

Growing into Freedom

Rousseau claimed that “man is born free, yet everywhere is in chains”. Wilber has pointed out that in psychological terms, the reverse is true- as new-born babies, we are helpless and dependent; as we grow, a lack of understanding of the world or our own bodies can lead to frustration and a desire to rebel; wisdom only comes with age and experience and it is more the control of desires rather than the egotistical insistence on their fulfillment that brings contentment. From this point of view, freedom is something that we must grow into.

From ego-centric (Beige, Purple and Red) to ethno-centric (Blue and Orange) to World Centric (Green and Yellow) each successive stage represents a “wider circle of embrace”.

In this sense, the developmental model provides an explanation for all the different values, points of view, political persuasion, belief systems and opinions that we find in the post-modern world.

It is not just that there are different views which should all be given an equal value; some are deeper, contain more levels or layers than others.

It was simpler in the earlier stages of human development- for most of human history, there has only been two or three stages present. With the advent of Green from the 1960s onwards and the subsequent (speculated) emergence of Yellow the world becomes much more complex, with many different stages of value-orientation which generally have a poor understanding of each others’ point of view- and which find themselves often in competition with each other.

“You cannot solve a problem from the same level that Created it”- Eintein.

E.F. Schumacher, in A Guide for the Perplexed gave an example of this from the French Revolution. The writers of the constitution for the new Republic could see a conflict between the two competing values of Liberte and Egalite: Too much Freedom leads to more inequality in a free-for-all competition of the market place: the strong get stronger at the expense of the weak, as can be seen in the western world. Too much enforced equality on the other hand as in the old Soviet Union and eastern European socialist countries seems to involve the loss of freedom. The reconciliation comes from a third quality from a higher level- fraternite. This inner quality of a sense of obligation for the good of the whole- that we are all brothers in a sense- requires a wider identification with all people.

Next week we shall look at some criticisms of this model; what the next stage of Yellow might actually look like; and how we might apply this model to meeting the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate change.

Part 1

In “Back to nature #2” I explored Deep Ecology and the idea that the response to the environmental problems we face should be to in some way “go back to nature” because “nature knows best”. I questioned this idea on the grounds that some versions imply an anthropocentric stance, projecting human feelings, consciousness and motives onto the non-human world in a way that seems more intended to fulfill our own psychological needs rather than actually healing our relationship with nature.

In this post, I want to explore an alternative: that rather than try to return to an earlier form of consciousness, that our consciousness itself – our way of understanding and relating to the world- is evolving.

What follows should be seen as a Story of the Evolution of consciousness. It is based on one particular model that has become popular in recent years- Spiral Dynamics, which I first came across in the writings of Ken Wilber. I do not endorse either the theory as a whole nor Wilber in particular, but see it as a tool that I think is worth consideration for anyone interested in the question: “Why aren’t more people interested in sustainabilty and protection of the environment?”

I am freely interpreting this version to make a story and adapting it . I am not claiming to attempt rigorous accuracy, but the basic idea does I feel have many different kinds of evidence to support it. The important thing is the implications such a view would have for seeking solutions to current global problems, and considering how it differs from the “return to nature” story.

In Spiral Dynamics, cultural “memes” or stage of development are colour coded, so I am referring to each stage with the same colours.

Enjoy reading it and make of it what you will.

Beige- Survival

The first glimmerings of what was to emerge as distinctively human forms of consciousness may have occurred some two million years ago. The Dawn Humans- so recently emerging as a novel form in the already 3billion-year old story of Life on earth- were limited still to the vagaries’ of a tough world where survival was the main activity. Instinct and other qualities bestowed by evolution ensured our ancestors survived in the environment they were ideally suited to.

On the scale of the individual this may correspond to a new born baby in terms of its consciousness still largely unformed, aware at first only of itself and subsequently of its mother, siblings, and slowly the awareness grows to form the first concept of an Outside World. This stage is essentially undifferentiated from its surroundings- the individual personality not yet solid.

Purple- Magic and Tribalism

For tens of thousands of years humanity lived lightly on the earth in small tribes. The economic base was hunting and gathering. As the earliest forms of social organization developed, along with language and tool-making, so the efficiency needed to survive and manage energy flows through food increased. Fire was the major technological achievement, making it easier to find game once the brush and understory were burnt. The first more organized systems of cultivation may have emerged at this time, a kind of nomadic forest gardening, in which tree crops and other useful plants may have been favoured through selective thinning and maybe even planted and grown from seed. At this stage, further developments in the human brain permitted language to become more complex. Art, as cave paintings and other symbolic forms emerged. The beginnings of a rich and diverse range of human belief systems tried to make sense of the world they had been born into.

Animistic beliefs saw spirits behind natural phenomena. Divination, messages in the animal and plant worlds, shamanism and hallucinogenic plants may all have played their role in people’s mythology. Neolithic monuments such as the stone circles of Britain and elsewhere may represent this stage of human consciousness. Tribal people were strongly united within the tribe and within their specific set of beliefs; but essentially still parochial with superstition and fear of the unknown still prevalent.

A child at this stage may also understand the world through magical thinking. The centre of its own universe, a young child may believe the clouds are making patterns just for her, that Santa is real and fairies and goblins populate the garden. It is a stage of narcissism: a lack of experience of the wider world, and yet strong receptiveness to it which allows it to develop.

Red- Will and Power

Red becomes more organized but potentially more aggressive. With the eventual expansion of human populations and the first signs of competition over resources coming into play, Red is dominated by egotistical and individualistic impulses. This is the era of the Hero- for a child, perhaps the Superhero phase.

Agriculture has emerged- some ten thousand years ago. Propelled into the domestication of plants and animals by the effects of over-hunting in some areas, or perhaps local climate change, agriculture lead to larger populations, and this required a different kind of belief system. This stage sees the emergence of mythological forms of thinking which began to supersede magical forms. A Pantheon of Gods and more complex mythologies began to be developed to explain the human adventure and the relationship to nature and to the Divine. The Gods were like super-humans, playing out their own stories on a grander stage of immortality. Slavery, sacrifices to the gods to ensure fertility from the land, and increasingly complex city states and empires arose. Debauchery and dysfunction amongst emperors and leaders who, with such large armies and free energy from slaves by invasion and conquer often went hand in hand with overshoot on a grand scale: the Mayans, the Anazasi, ultimately the Roman empire as well may all have suffered the same fate of overstretching their resource base. In child development this could likened to “the terrible two’s”: an egotistical stage where rage may play a role in getting what is wanted as the child tests the boundaries of what is permitted and possible. In the modern world still we may see Red meme structures in the form of the Mafia, street gangs, and fundamentalist terrorism. Red does not want to be negotiated with. Red believes it fortune and power on its side; the only way out of Red is into some kind of Blue structure.

Blue- Structure and Order

Blue is marked by the emergence of whole civilizations united under one common belief: an all-powerful Creator as in the Great Monotheistic religions born in the Middle east of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Blue is characterized by structure, conservativism and hierarchical authority, legitimized in the institutions of the Church. Mythology becomes more standardized as Great Books- the Word of God- lay down the law. The Law of God is immutable- it cannot be disputed- and the conveyors of the law in the Church hierarchy are often considered infallible.

For the Red meme child, the transition into Blue involves going to school and being more formally socialized into the wider mores and rules of the culture. The Scouts and the Police forces of the State could also be seen as Blue structures. Blue represents the limits of the mythological-agriculturally based societies: although Blue managed to unite many of the warring Red tribes into far larger belief systems, held together by faith in one supreme God, no one Blue system could take over the whole world without meeting another similar system at the same stage.

Orange- Making the Miracles Happen

Blue prospered and held sway for at least the past two thousand years. But as agriculture developed and succeeded in yielding more surplus energy, there were more opportunities for a class of intellectuals and administrators to emerge who had time to philosophize and spend time inquiring deeper into the mysteries of the universe.

Eventually this resulted in Galileo and a few other inspired individuals in making a radical discovery about our place in the universe: the Sun is not going around the Earth as it seems to be at all; rather, the earth is going round the sun. Far from being the centre of the universe as taught by the church, the Earth is in fact a mere satellite, orbiting the sun which is the rue centre of our solar system, just like the other planets. The implications of this discovery were dramatic and far-reaching: not only did we have to revise our view of ourselves, but we also had to revise the very way in which we gain knowledge about the world. No longer could we just take the Church authority at face value. The Pope himself might not be infallible after all. To have been in Galileo’s place must have been a truly extraordinary situation. He did not lose his faith, but he felt compelled to challenge the status quo, even at great risk to his personal safety. He could not ignore the Higher Truth that was being revealed to him through his scientific measurements. .

The enormous power of the scientific method, though fiercely resisted by the old Blue Structures that had held sway for so long, quickly gained preeminence and overturned to a degree thousands of years of myth and religion.

How did it mange this? Technology- the offspring of science- was able to make the miracles happen. It was no longer necessary to believe- what counted was what worked. The proof was in the pudding, and the rapid increase in technological innovations that followed particularly in medicine and machines lead to such increases at least on some levels in human well-being that it became clear that science was here to stay.

The most significant aspect of his discovery was the discovery of a new method of seeking the truth: experimentation and inquiry based on the scientific method. No longer was Belief something that was simply given by the particular religion or creed one happened to belong to; evidence became required and the possibility of creating replicable and verifiable evidence based on experiments. Whether a Christian, Buddhist, Jew or Atheist, anyone anywhere in the world had the potential to repeat Galileo’s experiments and check the evidence for themselves.

In so doing, the Orange Meme of Science and rationality heralded in the possibility of something that even the massive continent-wide mythological structures of Blue were unable to achieve: with the scientific evidence- (rather than belief-) based method for revealing the truth about Reality the potential emerged for a truly Global Consciousness.

Green – Feelings for the Earth

While Purple was animistic in its belief systems, Red Polytheistic and Blue Monotheistic, Orange became so infatuated with the technological wonders made possible by the scientific method that “belief” in anything “spiritual” became increasingly redundant. The separation from the natural resource base that had begun with agriculture- or possibly even before with the first tools allowing over-hunting- became greatly exacerbated with the rise of the Industrial Era. The exploitation of fossil fuels suddenly released far more surplus energy than had ever before been available to humankind and lead to the construction of vast cities inhabited with millions and eventually billions of people who were not directly involved with the careful husbandry of the natural resources that sustained them at all. Wealth previously undreamt of became available to substantial classes of people who had leisure time, free education, the ability to travel the world, and the opportunity to explore many more belief systems.

Out of this era, lead by the post-war baby Boom generation, emerged the post-war Civil Rights movements, feminism, gay rights, even Animal Rights movements, and of course the Green and Environmental Movement attempting to redress the excesses of Orange Technology.

Science began to be perceived with suspicion, hostility even by those who saw the damage and destruction that was being perpetrated in its name. At the same time, new but misunderstood ideas from science, especially Quantum Physics became synonymous with a New Spirituality based on a Return to Gaia. The buzz-word was Holism, which covered a multitude of sins from Alternative Therapies- “treating the whole person” to holistic education, design and political movements.

Genuine developments in the Earth Sciences lead to Systems Theory and Gaia theory. One of the drivers in science became concern about climate change which, using advanced computer modeling resulted in dramatic increases in our understanding of the way the biological and physiological systems combine to self-organize.

One of the products of the Green Meme was also permaculture- a Design for Life based on the ecological sciences.

For a whole at least there was optimism for a New Age, and age of healing and holism, of putting back together the fractured pieces of the human spirit, a new integration of old and new, humans and nature, body and spirit, feelings and the intellect.

Yet, 45 years on from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring the brave new world of ecological harmony seems more elusive than ever. The worst predictions of environmental alarmists seems to be coming true, and while governments argue over how to carve up the last remaining slices of the earth’s resource pie the human impact and population seems to be increasing towards an inevitable end-game of collapse and total system failure.

The great promise of Green has not come to pass. The vast majority of the world seems stuck at Blue or Orange with little interest in the values of Green.

In the next installment, I want to unpack some of the implications and issues presented by this story, consider some of the failings and successes of Green more closely, and ask the question: if this evolutionary unfolding of consciousness is in any way valid, each new phase transcending but including the previous ones, what next?

“If we knew all the facts, we’d have discarded the myth of the techno fix a long time ago. To my eye, our crisis, at its deepest levels, is a crisis not of technology, but of meaning and purpose… “Talking about this is the first step. Without this catastrophe is inevitable.”- Tim Bennett

What a Way to Go is a groundbreaking movie.

I watched this week for the first time with a few friends, most of whom have been watching Peak Oil films and discussing the issues around them for much of the past three years.

Going far beyond “The End of Suburbia” in its dramatic depiction of the state that we and the planet are in, writer and narrator Tim Bennett strives to provide a visceral experience of what it means to be living at a time of collapse:

“The situation is desperate. It’s the world-wide eco-scam where climate crash goes head-to-head with the Peak Oil kid and over-shoot tears into mass-extinction.

It’s the smack-down at the end of the universe and tickets go on sale this Friday.

The American lifestyle is unsustainable- that means it cannot be sustained. It’s coming to an end…

“The dominant culture is not going to stop until it has destroyed everything. It cant. Its built on a foundation of faulty assumptions. I see no way it can be reformed. It can only be discarded so that something else can grow in its place. We have to look at this”.

Bennett invites us on a train ride that takes us through the film and gives us a window-view of the multiple crises we are facing: Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot, global epidemics, loss of topsoil, war…the list goes on and on and we are given early in the film an intense assault on our senses as images of destruction and impending doom race ever faster before our eyes. Where other films tend to concentrate on the solutions to these problems and what we can do about them Bennett wants us to stay and look at them long enough to begin to feel what it means for us. He confronts us with the dark realities of living in this extraordinary time because everywhere there is a culture of denial. One of the contributors, Derrick Jensen says: : “Denial takes tremendous energy and if you have to work really hard to not acknowledge the fact that this culture is killing everything you’re not going to have much energy left over.”

Bennett himself goes on to say:

“It is the energy that I freed up when I stepped out of my own denial that has made this documentary possible. The more I let down any defences the more I find the power to look more deeply at the world”.

Bennett tells us a personal story of growing up in a loving farming family in middle America- secure, with plenty to eat and a strong community, and he paints an idyllic picture of his childhood on the upward curve of energy production, growth and economic prosperity in America.

But as alarms about climate change from the 80s onwards, and increasing warnings from the environmental movement that humans were dangerously exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet, the bubble of complacency surrounding his easy affluent lifestyle began to break. As Bennett becomes increasingly aware of the train gathering speed towards the abyss, he becomes more and more anxious, but had to deal with his awareness even when around him “nobody else seemed to notice”.

The second part of the film goes more deeply into some of the issues of but also contains an excellent section on the population explosion; it is not just the numbers, but the damage dome especially by the rich world which has many times the footprint per person that the global average.

The US has 70 times as many “energy slaves” as people in Bangladesh- making the US in those terms the population of 23billion…

In between contributions from Richard Heinberg, Derrick Jensen, William Catton, Thomas Berry and others we are shown short clips of people giving their reactions to this information: Is it all just going to end? Will we wipe ourselves out? The emphasis is on our reactions. Not content to just deliver the information on the coming catastrophes Bennett wants us to go deeper, to examine the cultural myths that have kept us asleep as the world burns: advertising, the myths of humans’ ability to control nature, consumerism the “somehow” story that “somehow” everything will be OK, that someone is looking after the situation.

Bennett posits then an alternative story: humanity has spent nearly its entire time living in small sustainable communities. For three million years we lived in a low-impact fashion with stable populations and consumption rates which could have continued, as Daniel Quinn argues, “for tens of millions of years. Now it’s more like how many decades- and if we keep living this way, it’s not many”. Somehow, something changed and we moved into a new lifestyle that began to abandon the careful husbanding of the earth that we had kept so long.

Agriculture began some ten thousand years ago and was inherently unsustainable because of its impact on the environment. It became more widespread however because it allowed the storage of food, insurance against hard times and the expansion of population. So successful was it that it eventually lead to the formation of cities as we became more and more adept at finding and storing the earth’s resources- wind-power, water-power, eventual coal, oil and gas with which we built the modern world.

This chapter on how different cultural beliefs can lead to a different relationship to the environment is a key part of the film and an important way of showing how the stories our culture has deeply embedded within it have shaped our lives and lead to the environmental crises.

Unfortunately however I’m not convinced that the particular story Bennett hits upon- influenced strongly by the views of Jenson and Quinn- is entirely accurate or useful.

It is true that some cultures remained, apparently, more “sustainable” for far longer than others, and that some took to raiding and farming and other practices with a heavier footprint earlier than others, until eventually all the traditional cultures were subsumed or destroyed by what Quinn, in Ishmael refers to as the “Taker” cultures, of which we are one.

An alternative view is that although early nomadic societies remained with a low impact for a long time, they did have a larger footprint than is often assumed. It may have been that over the long haul, they were ultimately unsustainable. A long slow incremental erosion of our resources- including the extinction of many animals through hunting, combined with localised climate change may have spurned us on to look for the potentially easier life of the farmer. This view is explored for example in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel which set out to explain using environmental differences why ultimately Europe and north America became industrialised first and now dominate the world with their military and economic power.

This is a more strictly “ecological” view that gives precedence to the shaping of culture by environment. In this sense, looking back to early hunters for inspiration may not be the only thing we have to do- in reality, early peoples may not have understood the global economic system, nor the long-term issues of sustainability any better than we do, and which story we believe does make a difference I think in how we understand our predicament and find ways to respond.

The film also considers the psychology of addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder, symptoms of the dominator hierarchy culture that we have come to take for granted.

Jensen again, draws a parallel with an abusive family, where everything is set up to protect the abuser; in the same way, in the culture of domination of the modern world, everything is set up to protect the rich.

While these are useful and enlightening approaches, again, a more strictly ecological approach would give somewhat different emphases, on the inevitability of consuming whatever available energy there was, and consequently, the need to transcend our purely animal behaviour if we are to survive.

It would have been interesting to see how differently the film may have turned out had Bennett taken this somewhat different story as his guide.

Probably, the ending would be the same.

Bennett refuses to end with what he calls a “Happy Chapter” as in “12 Things to do to Save the World”. Taking his cue from Joanna Macey’s “Despair and Empowerment” work, which teaches that in order to find the power and motivation to really tackle the challenges presented to us, we have to go through a period of despair, to really feel the dark reality, to go into that deep dark place that most of our TV culture is striving to repress, Bennett’s film is aimed to confront us with reality, not placate us with facile solutions.

However, unfortunately there was a general sense amongst those I was watching it with that he ends up with a happy chapter after all- a lengthy final chapter in which he lists the kind of actions we could take, from permaculture gardens to getting active on our local council, and all the community-building tasks discussed in Willits or the transition towns movement. It was felt by my companions-in-doom that this took the bite out of what is otherwise an incisive movie, that it would have been better off without the last 20minutes and that overall the film was perhaps too long.

Perhaps this is unfair; we were after all hardened peak oil activists and educators, or at least frequenters of the peak oil blogosphere, and more interested in seeing how the film was constructed than likely to take any new message from it.

I am left wondering, however, who I would show it to? It is a powerful message, fast moving at the beginning, but somehow not quite able to keep up that pace throughout, and left me with a slightly uneasy feeling of, well, what next? Ive been there, that darkness, too much already for it to have much impact, and I would feel, if I were showing it to a group, I would need some tools for group facilitation to actually unpack people’s responses and help process their feelings. I do think, though, that this may be the most important work we have to do.

Despite its failings- which I alluded to as being in my opinion a rather “retro-romantic” view of how humanity left the paradise of the hunter-gatherer society- I welcome this film as one of the best of the “gloom and doom” genre, particularly because I also believe the most important thing we can do right now is stay with the darkness a little while longer, let it sweep over us and then ask ourselves: what does it mean to be alive right now?

I’ll leave you with a final quote from the film by Richard Heinberg:

“As civilisation has done more and more for us, it has made us more and more infantile, so we have become less and less able to think for ourselves, to provide for ourselves, and this gives us more of a herd mentality, taking our cues from authority figures around us…. As all of this starts to shift and change and disintegrate and collapse there is an opportunity to come back to ourselves and to grow up, both individually and as a culture.”

You’ve said that you believe Peak is still a few years off…

The narrowing envelope of forecasts is from about now to 2020; ASPO have 2010- there is a range. Those who think we are there already- there is a lot of this on the Oil Drum- are going on the basis that crude oil and lease condensate production- the most tightly defined definition of oil- is marginally lower than July 2005- and total liquid production is actually lower than it was this time last year; and the reason that total production is lower than it was is that OPEC production is lower.

So the burning question I think is whether the OPEC reduction is voluntary or involuntary. You will find a lot of people on the Oil Drum assume that this must be involuntary. We do hear a lot of dark noises coming out of Saudi Arabia about the number of drilling rigs doing so-called “work-overs” on existing wells and It does seem there is difficulty at the northern end of Garwhar; but I’m not so sure the reduction is involuntary. I think we would have seen an even more dramatic price increase had it been involuntary. $70 where we are now- a lot of the speculative money has come out of the oil price and people are worried about the future demand growth because of the problems of the debt markets and stock market collapse- that $70 is not even anywhere near the inflation-adjusted peak of the oil price which would be about $90 looking back to 1980. No-one would get me to claim that markets are perfect and price indications are the only measure, but I feel if the marginal reduction in production we have seen over the last two years was involuntary, we would see a much larger price increase.

We may not be very far off at all, but based on the relative calm of the oil price, we may not be quite there yet.

Would you agree that we are effectively on a bumpy plateau and that any future increase will be minimal?

I wouldn’t say that. There are too many models that I trust for example PFC Energy, a reputable oil consultancy whose forecast appears to be around 2020. I trust their approach and they see production rising until 2020. Their chief economist says he cant see a world that produces more than 100m b/d; I doubt we will even reach that, but these people are well aware of the dangers of relying on Saudi claimed reserves. I would also say, that the date is not the important thing, that even 2020 is far too close for comfort. ASPO have spent a lot of time debating the date but I hope that at their upcoming conference in Cork we can stop stressing the importance of the date and all agree that it will be within this period and we should move forward and look for ways to mitigate it right now.

As Colin Campbell has said, it is not the date that matters so much as the unrelenting decline afterwards.

Yes.

One of the important scoops of your book is in the opening chapter where you discuss documents you uncovered show that the Iraq invasion was not just about oil, but about peak oil. Can you tell us more about what these documents said?

The publicly available material is very suggestive. You don’t have to read between too many lines- just look at what the Bush administration did as soon as it took to power: First of all there was to institute the Cheney Energy Taskforce document that absolutely reeks of energy paranoia. They are really really concerned about their energy security. That is of course a process that Matt Simmonds helped develop before the election. They are talking in that document about trying to lift various embargoes- Cheney has a history of being opposed to sanctions and embargoes which impact on American companies; Iran-iraq-Liybia eg; on the other hand, at the first meeting of the Security Council, they discuss attacking Iraq. O’Niell, the treasury Secretary, gives his account in his book “The Price of Loyalty”. The account of this first meeting is absolutely gripping- it had clearly all been orchestrated in advance and even though the other members had not heard of it; on top of that there was a leaked document in the New Yorker referring to instructions to officials to co-operate with the Cheney taskforce because that taskforce was charged with both acquisition of oil and gas assets around the world, as well as our approach to “rogue states” –an official document had clearly tied these two areas together.

On top of that, there are the documents referring to the US-UK Energy Dialogue which was a diplomatic liaison set up in April 2002 at the Crawford Summit with Tony Blair and Bush where is commonly accepted that Blair told Bush, Yes, I will support you attacking Iraq come what may. We will try the UN route for international legitimacy, but I will support you anyway. They spent a long time alone together unminuted. They kept this secret, and it was only revealed subsequently by a Freedom On Information release by the Guardian. It is quite clear in these documents they are considering energy security in very strategic way. In February 2003 just before the invasion they are discussing in one meeting with high-ranking officials the investment requirements of the Middle East if it were to meet the demand forecasts of producing an extra 15million b/d by 2030.

This is very interesting of course because the west and Western companies at this stage had practically no access to the Middle-East at all. The major oil companies were then and essentially are still now hired hands. There is no equity involvement. But this is what was being discussed on the eve of the war and we are invited to believe this had nothing to do with it.

It is quite true, there is no document I can produce in which Tony Blair writes to Georg Bush saying “It’s all about Peak Oil “- no such document exists. But I think you have to be pretty credulous given the intense thinking around all this on both sides of the Atlantic not to think this didn’t play an important role.

We also know that the Security Council was well aware that the sanctions were wrecking the Iraqi oil industry, because of lack of materials and equipment. They were denying them chemicals, high pressure pumps, explosive charges for drilling new wells, and so on, and as a result the Iraqi oil industry was pursuing production methods such as unmanaged water injection that were likely to cut off very large areas of reservoir.

It was quite clear that Iraq was the only country left in the world that could easily increase its oil production, potentially from 2m b/d to 6m b/d. So the thinking was, we need to lift sanctions, but we cant do this while Saddham is still there, so find a way of getting rid of Saddham – hey presto WMD. The thinking was then to hopefully replace Saddham with some kind of democratic government friendly to the West, release more of the Iraqi oil and therefore put off the date of Peak. The logic seems pretty good to me- if Id been in their position Id have done the same thing!

Has this strategy worked? If you are saying that sanctions had lead the Iraqi oil fields into a state of disrepair- what has been the effect of an invasion?

It has been an unholy catastrophic failure. A complete mess. Its not sanctions that are now doing the damage, but the insurgency, with daily attacks on oil facilities, and I mean for goodness sake, the deputy oil minister was kidnapped the other week.

Some people would argue that that means it cant have been about oil, and I think that is completely wrong. Dick Cheney and his pals all thought they were going to be garlanded when they arrived in Iraq. If they got it that wrong about their reception in Baghdad, no wonder they got it wrong about the oil as well. All the failure means is the arrogance and stupidity of those who planned the attack, not that it wasn’t about oil in the first place.

What is the situation in Saudi Arabia? The U.S. has had a long-standing arrangement with the Saudi Royal Family to secure cheap oil, but now seems to be a rapidly growing young and perhaps angry Islamic population there.

It’s a kind of a pact with the Devil on both sides really. On the American side, it goes back to the meeting between Roosevelt and Ibn na Saad just after the second world war. America was to get access to oil and in return they would guarantee the Saudi Royal Families’ position, and that has been the arrangement pretty much ever since. But in some respects the Americans have had to put up with some humiliation since- the cutting off of the oil in 1973, the fact that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi.

Bush appeared to have somewhat back- tracked on this deal with his recent State of the Nation speech, talking about the need for energy independence, and that he plans to eliminate dependence on Middle East oil- clearly a fanciful idea! It would be quite easy for America to reduce its consumption by the amount that it imports from the Middle East if he had the spine to do it, but that’s not how the oil industry works- it’s a fungible product, so if the Middle East goes up in flames- whether from a US attack on Iran, or as a consequence of the collapse of Iraq- America will still be vulnerable to the price impacts of that even if it doesn’t import a single barrel from there. So it is a relationship they are stuck with.

Is an attack on Iran likely?

There are some very respectable journalists like Seymour Hersh http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/01/24/050124fa_fact who suggest this is being discussed, but it is very difficult to read the tea-leaves concerning who is in the ascendant in Washington; you would think that the neo-cons would be in headlong retreat given the disaster of Iraq, that even Bush wouldn’t be so stupid as to try the same tactic again, but having said that perhaps they still can be, and perhaps the Bush administration is uniquely dangerous now that it is on the flight path to oblivion with no more than two years left and if it wants that agenda tidied up it hasn’t very long in which to do it; but I don’t really know.

Is this the beginning of the end of the American Oil Empire? Especially given the current economic implosion that is happening there.

That comes from the other end of the equation. An economic slow-down will put off the date of Peak.

But there could be a serious recession…

It depends how deep it goes. We need to put it in context. The demand increase in China is a factor; but if America goes into recession that will presumably impact on China as well since it exports so much stuff to them. But I do think that in terms of Amercian Hegemony, yes the situation has flipped in the last 10years. It is pretty obvious now that Russia won the Cold War hands down- of Russia, China and Amercia, Russia is the only one with nukes AND oodles of oil and gas which both China and America- and Europe- and the rest of the world of course- need. The political structures in Russia do seem to work in their own terms so no one is going to be able to invade Russia for its oil! They might be able to attack Iraq, Iran maybe…

…Canada?

… well I don’t know they need to attack Canada- Canada is part of NAFTA and did not choose to opt out as Mexico did form its obligation to provide oil to America -while Canadians freeze- so maybe they have already achieved their objective there. No, the flashpoint is between America and China over access to Middle eastern Oil, and Iran is very important there in that it continues to make deals with China to develop oil and gas and it continues to irk the US that their strategy is to buy up access to whole fields rather than just individual barrels as America would prefer them to. The US have set up a special commission to look at this, they are obviously worried about it and so they should be- basically, every barrel that China gains access to in the Western hemisphere is one less barrel for the US.

This is one of the reasons that I think Oil Peak is quite near, because both superpowers are behaving already as if it is a zero-sum game.

Moving onto the effects and responses to Peak Oil. You’ve said in the book that there is no need worry about congestion because the roads will be empty soon enough anyway, and yet the idea that we may have to say good-bye to the car-based economy in the not-too-distant future is not on the radar screen at all in public discourse. How does this make you feel?

Its frustrating- and it’s fascinating to watch. How can governments be so blind?

How can invading Iraq be apparently their only response?

Yes indeed- how can governments pursue such totally dysfunctional transport policies such as expanding Heathrow Airport we are seeing in the UK knowing what they do about Peak Oil? There is a huge chasm there and it is frankly schizophrenic. This is the Politician’s Dilemma. They are terrified of confronting “The System” and voter’s expectations- the politician who actually stands up and says, sorry but it is belt-tightening from now on can hardly hope to get re-elected. Politicians also have a natural difficulty with taking pre-emptive action- it is difficult enough to convince enough people of this anyway- predictions of peak Oil have come and gone in the past and the sky hasn’t fallen in so…

But they apparently managed to convince a whole nation to go to war on the completely spurious story of weapons of mass destruction…

Yes but that was only to help them prepare people for what they had decided to do anyway, and although it may have required people to take leave of their senses it didn’t require them to take leave of their car keys.

You go through in the book the limitations of various renewable options and how they cannot replace oil, but you do seem to come down on the side of nuclear. Is this just a reluctance to acknowledge that we cant keep an unsustainable system running without cheap oil, that Peak Oil means the end of growth.

Don’t paint me as an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear. Clearly there are a lot of problems with nuclear and were we simply able to dispense with it the world might be a better place in many respects.

I approach it mathematically. In Britain something like 20% of our capacity is nuclear- that’s a big chunk of low- CO2 emitting capacity. If we were to simply close that down and say “no more nuclear” and if we were to replace that with low CO2 emitting sources, then about our next 9000 wind turbines that we build in Britain will simply get us back to the starting line by replacing that lost capacity, and we currently have only 1700 and have to fight to get each one built so my worry when I hear for example GreenPeace and Friends of the Earth argue that we don’t need it, that we can do it all with efficiency gains and decentralised district heating and so on, particularly as neither of those two organisations are doing anything to address Peak Oil, and given that our own oil production is set to fall off steeply, we are cutting off a low-CO2 emitting chunk of our supply at a time when we are going to need every last scrap we can get.our hands on.

Even allowing for your “Powerdown” approach and everything else, the outcomes of energy shortages would be that much more brutal and that much more short-term.

**It still sounds like a supply-side solution rather than a demand-side one. You don’t really cover powerdown approaches in the book. **

It calls the techno-optimists bluff. We are going to have to mechanistically impose reductions on our consumption- and deal with it- but I don’t say renewables cannot replace oil. There is actually no shortage of energy. This may not be the case in a couple of hundred years’ time, but in the actual supply of energy, there is no shortage. What there is is a massive shortage of time, in order to convert from certain forms to others. There are absolute shortages of primary resources like land, but it is also a question of time.

In theory, the offshore wind resource in Britain is massive. In theory it could supply all of our electricity and a whole big chunk of our total energy demand should we choose to do it.

It would require a complete change of infrastructure- as would nuclear- to run electric vehicles for example.

Yes electrification is the big challenge. What I find frustrating in the climate change camp is that in a sense they are dealing with the easy bit- there are lots of options for producing clean energy and we are still screwing it up, particularly in Britain, it’s pathetic, and there are lots of potential sources of clean energy and in fact concentrated solar thermal power in North Africa could make a real difference for example.

I am absolutely not saying that we are going to have as much energy in the future. But even with current technology it could make a massive difference to our supply.

I was surprised to hear there are already 6 high-DC sub sea connections from North Africa to Europe.

We are clearly going to need both a supply and demand response, and I hope if we had something like TEQs or Richard Douthwaite’s Cap and Trade system, we can get to a point that is equitable and sustainable.

To go back to the nuclear issue, the difficulty of that position is that you are trying to persuade people to relinquish something that is available. And that is a really difficult political sell. It wont fly in the democracies of the western world.

Peak Uranium?

Yes maybe. I’m sceptical that stated uranium reserves are all that there is. I’ve talked to a number geologists about this, I’m satisfied that the world is not as well explored for uranium as it is for oil. But we will hit peak uranium sometime. I just think at one more generation of nuclear will help us ride some of the fossil peaks that are coming. We have to deal with the waste of course. Given the choice I would of course say- concentrated solar power, that’s a great idea- although . I havn’t yet read Ted Trainers’ Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society . Probably the difference between us is that I think are problem is largely to do with time and deadlines more than actual resources.

Thankyou.