We were born in pre-history, an integral part of Mother Nature who nurtured us and taught us the Wisdom of the wilds, plant spirit medicine, and much more.

Being connected to Nature, so this story goes, was a birth rite robbed from us when we opened Pandora’s box and started unpacking nature’s laws with science, which then unleashed technology- the very opposite of Nature, with which we have created what we call The Modern World.

And, according to this powerful story, the modern world is everything that nature is not: mechanical, devoid of emotion, rational, intellectual, cold and meaningless.

One of the early formulations of this story that I came across in my Deep Ecological days, going back over 10 years, was in Thom Hartmann’s The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

In Hartmann’s formulation, humanity lived in a kind of blissful garden of Eden for many thousands of years, safe and secure in the bosom of Mother Nature, wise enough to live lightly and sustainably on the earth, never taking more than their fair share or more than the natural world can replenish.

Then, Something Happened: somehow, we separated from Nature, and so began the long fall which lead to the Atom Bomb, GE crops and Twitter.

Even as I repeated this compelling and popular story in those Deep Ecology workshops years ago I was aware of a small problem: why, if things were so good, did we leave Eden? Why did we give up on such a good deal and make the mistake of going it alone?

The answer is, because nature wasnt actually so great in the first place. Nature meant that we died young- in neolithic times, the average life expectancy was only about 20.

Being close to Nature meant high infant mortality, disease, danger, frequent tribal warfare, famine, slavery and cannibalism.

Being close to nature meant that life was tough, very tough, a struggle for survival, so when adaptations such as farming came along, the hairless apes who were our ancestors took it- even though there was a price to pay in increased work.

And as time went on and further technological adaptations enticed us, we took them , all of them, because although they all came with a price- a more complex, stratified society, the need for standing armies to defend the newly gained wealth, the pollution, the danger of collapse and return to earlier times if the crops failed- we took them every time because it always seemed worth the pay-off for a better life, a life with more opportunities, and, eventually, longer and healthier lives as the hard-won wealth that was gained by exploiting nature allowed us -or some of us- to improve our own local environments, and then by extension to care about the environment more as a whole.

And now, in the ultra-globalized world of the 21st century, we have a situation where some of the wealthiest, most secure and most successful humans, mainly people who have never known hunger and have never known real hardship, or what it means to have to live your whole life in one village with oppressive values (particularly to women), who have traveled the world on jet planes and have had every opportunity of education and leisure in their lives, perhaps not even having to have spent much time working at all, have turned around from all this and viewed nature from this privileged position and seen the destruction that must take place if we are to continue with our lifestyles, and have concluded that this human world of technology and concrete, schools and prisons and toxic sludge, is all deeply, profoundly flawed, because it is Not Natural, and that the answer is to Go Back to Nature and Reconnect with Her Wisdom, Her Purity, Her Sanctity.

From this complex modern world of ours, with all its flaws and rules and regulations, the natural world can seem just so much more appealing. The sunset, the ocean, the forest- beauty in nature can take the breath away and awaken a deep yearning for… something intangible … that the hubris of TV and fashion and celebrity and the filth of industry and the routine of manufacturing just cannot fulfill.

But there is a real danger in this yearning for a return to an idealized version of nature, because nature really isnt like that. In fact, it is only possible to see the natural world in this way if one is truly ignorant of what if means to eek out a living from the land- if, indeed, one truly has been separated from True Nature.

Because this is harder than modern people can ever imagine, and while many may find it a satisfying and rewarding lifestyle for a while, we would not choose it I think without the support system a modern society provides, without the safety nets of welfare, modern health care and cheap, readily available industrial food to keep the wolf at bay.

A real Return to Nature means a return to the wolf. It means Grizzly Man, it means Into the Wild , it means a life that is likely to be nasty, brutish and short.

It is completely understandable that these philosophies of the Return, steeped as they are in western Judeo-Christian myths, should emerge, for the comforts of the modern world do indeed often have a pay-off of alienation: part of us misses the danger, the excitement, the adventure, of life in the wilderness, and we want to escape the confines of security.

This is made up for in the immense popularity of sports, and in outdoor pursuits, and in gardening. But if we had no trappings of technology and modernity to come back to, even after extended stays away, we might see nature rather differently.

I have been through all this myself. I have on occasion had brief tastes of what it means to be part of nature in this sense, such as when getting lost for a few days in the Himalayas, and running out of food, entirely alone. A powerful, life-changing experience for a young 20-something full of the spirit of youthful adventure, but not something I would wish to repeat.

There is no doubt that gardening is one of the most beneficial activities, for all sort of reasons: exercise. fresh air, connection with the natural world, building social capital, education. It can even provide a useful amount of produce and, if you work hard and are good at it, even save money or earn you a living. It is absolutely right that we should encourage home gardening, community orchards and many other ways of providing for ourselves, but we shouldnt kid ourselves we really want to be self-sufficient.

It is natural that in a recession many will start to provide something for themselves and growing food is a natural place to start, but I think its main benefits will be social, unless we experience a Cuba-style collapse- although even in Cuba most food is still grown on large industrial farms.

But modern home gardening, with its improved varieties, crop protection, automatic irrigation and so on is a far cry from living wild from the land; and it would be a choice few would make if they had a choice. No-one really want to be a subsistence farmer, except at the weekends.

It is no doubt true that complete detachment from the natural world, as may occur in some cities. is extremely unhealthy, can lead to psychological and emotional problems, and that contact with nature and gardening can be very therapeutic. As Geoff Lawton says, “You can heal everything in a garden”.

Our predicament as a species is existential; in terms of improving our lot, as we will inevitably want to do, there is always a cost to the environment, and to other parts opf ourselves. Yet, the wealthier and more successful we become, the more space and time and leisure we have to appreciate, and therefore protect, the environment, and this is how it should be.

But beware those who explain the core predicament of the modern world as being “separation from nature”, unless you want to be eaten by a Grizzly.

Book review PeopleQuake by Fred Pearce Eden Project Books 2010 Pbck; 342pp

There is a scary book I have a half-share in with a neo-Malthusian friend which contains graphs of the exponential growth curves in population for each of the countries of the world.

The Rapid Growth of Human Population 1750-2000 by William Stanton predicts a likely collapse and massive die-off by the title’s latter date on account of human population exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet resulting in resource wars, famines and environmental systems failure.

Most of the graphs tell a similar, devastating story: starting around 1850- when the world reached its first Billion inhabitants- populations that in many cases had been relatively stable for thousands of years began to explode and the nearly flat lines all morph spontaneously into hockey-sticks. With another 84-million added to the planet every year at the books publication, the stats and the authors’ analysis lend powerful support to the petri-dish theory of humanity: like bacteria in a sugar solution, homo sapiens will simply keep on consuming all the available resources, leading to massive population increase, followed by die-off.

This is a compelling idea that originated of course 200 years ago in Surrey with Malthus, author of Essay on the Principles of Population in 1798, but as Fed Pearce shows in his recent rebuttal to Malthus PeopleQuakethe inevitability of die-off has strongly informed much of the environmental movement- and still does.

Including myself here on Z5. I have written at several blog posts over the last few years arguing that population is one of the “last taboos” which needs to be addressed much more strongly in debates on sustainability. The reasoning goes like this: all our powering down and reducing emissions can be canceled out- and are being canceled out- by increases in population.

Lets say the world manages to reduce its carbon emissions by 2%- something we dont yet seem to have managed anyway- but the population increases also by 2%- then the one might cancel out the other.

Of course it is more complicated than that, because it turns out that there is a huge disparity in footprints in the world, with someone in the richest 1 billion people consuming some 32 x what the average person in the rest of the world does;

however, I have countered that argument on the grounds that a)poor people want to get richer- consume more- and indeed that is surely their right; and b)we are in overshoot already, probably long past it: species extinction, peak oil, peak water, loss of topsoil and forest cover, all converging with the looming catastrophe of climate change- all of these would be easier to address with less people it seems, and in the event of catastrophes and famines, there would simply be less vulnerable people to suffer.

Of course we in the rich world should reduce consumption and be less greedy in every way possible- but just how far are we to go? Few in the West would give up basic amenities like washing machines, yet billions of people around the world dont even have electricity. So the question of “What is the carrying capacity of the Earth?” cannot be addressed without also asking “at what level of consumption are we willing to live?”

And therein lies the dilemma, because improving one’s lot may very likely involve increasing consumption.

Pearce’s book has made me question some of these assumptions, look at others in a new light, and realize that about some of the fundamental issues on population, I have been dead wrong.

Malthus was wrong

So far food production has in fact kept pace with population growth,and famines have been declining since the 1980s. Two-hundred years may be a long time to be wrong about something he was predicting in his own lifetime, but collapse theorists (like me) simply say: it’s coming. Peak Oil and all that- we have finally reached the point where the Malthusian nightmare of famines on a global scale are inevitable. The stresses we have placed on the environment that sustains us seem inevitably to overwhelm our technological improvements, with climate change the wild card with effects that may be impossible to prepare for adequately.

This view has been most forcefully expressed by Professor Al Bartlett in his discussions of the Exponential Function; and before him, William Catton in Overshoot (1980).

Pearce also looks at the landmark report “The Limits to Growth” by Dennis and Donella Meadows which came out in 1972. In an age of computer naivety, argues Pearce, the graphs were compelling enough to be taken at face value, without looking at the underlying assumptions.

It certainly grabbed attention. Science, the voice of American science, ran five pages. It noted that ‘the book reveals none of the assumptions and equations that are the meat of the model’. When these were finally published, critics said the apocalyptic conclusions had been fixed from the start. The formulae put into the model were Malthusian to the core. All the bad things- population, pollution, our deand on resources- were set to rise exponentially, while all the good things, like technological breakthroughs, increased only arithmetically. Surprise surprise, the world sank into a mire of pollution, soaring commodity prices and famine.

The counter to the Malthusian assumptions of meadows is that food production could keep pace with population proportionately- ie, the more people, the more labor, also the more minds and hands that might be able to make innovations to increase efficiency etc..

Pearce takes a historical view and explores Malthus from his upbringing, the world events he saw around him, and the political influence his ideas had.

Malthus didn’t see that technology could make a nonsense of his natural law. But just as importantly, I think, he was wrong about human nature. He saw the poor as mindless beasts driven by crude natural forces, incapable of controlling their own fertility. That was his “libel” on humanity. And it rather ignored the fact that his subjects were already controlling their own fertility.

Pearce explains how influential Malthus became, and why he was decried so much by for example Marx: After his death, British politicians, believing Malthus to be correct about population growth amongst the poor, did not act to intervene with the Irish Potato famine, in which millions starved while the island was operating the largest livestock exporting market in the world.

Was the famine a case study in the operation of Malthus’s law- or an illustration of its political misuse? In reality, the famine may be a terrible example of how, in the hands of mean-spirited politicians, Malthusianism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pearce also analyzes the Rwandan genocide, contesting Jared Diamond’s view of the crisis as “Malthus in Africa” in his famous book Collapse and arguing that it was the wealthy northern Hutus who perpetrated the genocide, not the over-crowded landless poor; the collapse of coffee prices 1989, plunging many smallholders in Rwanda into poverty, he cites as another contributory factor.

Pearce also suggests that the more densely populated Tutsi farmers were also planting trees and improving their land, even that there may have been more afforestation taking place amongst them than in the less densely populated areas; population growth and environmental destruction need not always coincide.

Still the doomsters will say: we are already in overshoot. Population needs to be reduced everywhere, not just in the poor world. This would be an argument from The Optimum Population Trust which puts a sustainable population for the UK at between 17 and 24million.

In addition, a country like Britain- one of the most densely populated of the world- also has one of the highest per capita footprints, and obviously depends on continued imports for essentials including food.

While this is undoubtedly true, with population, there can be no quick fix (unless one provided by Nature); clearly, we cannot let people starve and will continue to endeavor to feed them.

In Ehrlich’s famous equation I=PAT or Impact = population x Affluence x Technology, the last one is the least considered, but as Pearce points out, technology has been only one reason Malthus has been wrong

Malthus didn’t see that technology could make a nonsense of his natural law. But just as importantly, I think, he was wrong about human nature. He saw the poor as mindless beasts driven by crude natural forces, incapable of controlling their own fertility. That was his “libel” on humanity. And it rather ignored the fact that his subjects were already controlling their own fertility.

Blood and Soil and the Rise of the Greens

I have been aware for a while of course that the roots of some aspects of environmentalism are to be found in the Blood and Soil cults of early-20thCentury Right-wing movements including Nazism. Part of the Nazi ideology included the concept of lebensraum – the need to “space” for a people, a tribe- and an occult attachment of that people to a particular “soil” as in “The fatherland”.

A romantic and mystical view of the natural world as somehow “purer” than much of humanity also played a role in the rise of the Soil Association for example, which to this day has connections with Anthroposophy, an occult religion based on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner. Steiner’s views on karma and race should be more widely known; perhaps Anthroposophy is the clearest example of how this philosophy is still influential in parts today.

What also should be more widely known is that several of the most prominent contemporary Malthusians- including Bartlett, Herman Daly,William Rees and William Catton- are all on the National Board of Advisors to the Carrying Capacity Network, a Christian Right homophobic anti-immigration organization, which campaigns for stricter immigration policies in the US.

When I first looked at the CNN I thought it curious that a group concerned with population control should be homophobic- surely that would be opposing a potential solution? With so many of the heavy-weights of the Collapse movement associated with such ideologies, maybe it is worth questioning some of their other assumptions?

(It has been suggested to me that maybe some of those named as on the advisory board are not aware that their names are being used; this seems unlikely to me, but agreed it is also unlikely that some of them are involved with such an organisation.)

These associations do make me pause and wonder: just how much doomerism around, not just population but peak oil and general resource depletion, is actually influenced by this kind of right-wing agenda? To what extent has the environmental movement’s concern about the human footprint been colored by racist or anti-humanist ideologies?

Pearce makes a compelling case that immigration is good for both immigrants and host countries; it represents the fastest way for the poor to improve their lot, and money sent home makes a real difference to the economies of poor countries. There is much we should do to improve the circumstances and conditions of immigrants, but immigration is not itself necessarily the problem.

Demographic Patterns

Pearce’s book takes you deep into the world of the demographer, where one encounters fascinating concepts of baby booms and demographic windows; the politics of contraception and the history of attempts at population control such as the one-child policy in China ; graphs like mushrooms and inverted mushrooms (and the in the case of AIDS stricken South Africa, an hour-glass); and some surprising insights.

It was Stewart Brand who first made me question some of the conclusions from the Exponential Growth camp: worldwide, fertility rates have already peaked and are declining faster than expected. Population is expected to peak by 2050-some say by 2040- and will start to decline in total numbers.

One of the reasons for this is the large-scale movement of people from the countryside to the city, where surprisingly, footprints can be smaller per capita while opportunities for improvement increase. Like Brand, Pearce puts a positive spin on the burgeoning mega-slums of the world, many of which he has stayed in, finding them crowded, yes, but full of life and vitality, and far from hopeless.

As people move to the city and adopt more modern lives, consumption increases- but often from a very low vase to start with- while fertility tends to decrease as women gain more access to education, contraception and generally increase their independence and control over their lives.

Already across much of Europe, and this process is well underway, and the native population could halve by mid-century; but result will be an ageing population, the mushroom-shaped graph, as the baby-boomers of the 1960s- pass mid-life- I am myself now 45- and begin to age but with a much fewer children to follow on into the work force. An ageing population will have its own challenges of course, dramatically changing the dynamic of the world’s economies, and could even, as Pearce hopes, bring a more peaceful and thrifty world, in contrast to the testosterone-charged youthfulness of the last 50 years of rapid growth.

Pearce is of course aware of the enormous impact humans are having, but finds room for hope there too:

[In Costa Rica] tree cover is back to 50%, even though the population has grown more in the two decades since 1987 than in the two decades before… ‘We discovered it was government policies that were destroying the forests, not too many farmers. This is true across the world,’ says Carlos Manuel Rodriguez. This is an important lesson, and one which environmental pessimists miss. There is another way.

It seems that despite environmental angst and the darker motivations of groups like the CNN, and various government attempts to stave off Malthusian collapses with state-run large-scale family planning schemes , the world’s population is in any case inexorably heading towards decline.

The hockey-stick graphs of Stanton’s book were not wrong, they just didnt show the next couple of decades: if they had, the graphs would start to look more S-shaped.

In a resource depleted world, this still means that we in the rich world should power down and generally prepare for a leaner future. Pearce is no cornucopian: he knows that we are straining the limits of the planet nonetheless.

The issue of whether we can continue to feed the current population as it peaks and begins to decline over the next human generation is unknown. I have long believed that industrial food production is inherently unsustainable, but improvements in technology, combined with agro-ecological approaches are still feasible. This is really a topic for another post, but the key thing is that we have to try. We cannot just stop feeding people on the grounds that they might survive and breed and thereby increase the population and cause more problems.

Lamentably, I have recently heard more than one person argue quite emphatically that the only moral thing to do, in view of the impact humans continue to have on other species, is to cull our own.

Nor in my view is it ethical to deny people the opportunity to use technology to improve their food systems. In the rich world, even those of us back-to-the-landers are heavily subsidized simply by the wealth of our societies.

Most people would like to improve their lot and they have every right to do so. The life of a peasant is not an attractive one, and I for one, though I love my gardening life, do not wish to be at the mercy of the weather to be able to eat.

The Green Revolution was designed to maximize global food output.The next revolution needs to get local. It needs to help these poor farming communities, the ones largely left out of the last green revolution, to find ways to manage their own soils better, using livestock to fertilize soils, conserving rainwater on their land in case of drought, breeding and exchanging local crop varieties and finding natural predators for troublesome pests.

Humanity still faces huge challenges , but the leveling off of human population growth, and even its decline in the near future, is a fact that needs to be acknowledged.

Rather than worrying about population overshoot, we need to address the issues that will arise over the next 30-40 years with a much older population, and the very different society that will ensue: possibly, as Pearce hopes, one not just older, but wiser also.

We need to leave behind the idea that sustainability is only for a minority of the human family, and work to making a sustainable future for all.

Book Review: Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand

Atlantic Books 2009 316pp

“Civilization is at risk, but civilization is the problem”.

Stewart Brand is one of the iconic founders of the environmental movement, an original old hippy whose influence on the boomer generation should not be understated. With his latest book Whole Earth Discipline he takes that same movement to task for rejecting science and getting sidetracked by ideology at the very time when the practical application of science through engineering and technology may be the only way to save ourselves.

I came across an early copy of The Whole Earth Catalog, founded by Brand in 1968, on an early visit to a small “back to the land” commune about 25 years ago. It was a thrilling introduction to the possibilities of the burgeoning “alternative” lifestyle of organic gardening and renewable energy I was joining at the time.

Over the coming years, I read about his early involvement in LSD in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and currently have a copy of his 1999 book The Clock of the Long Now on my bookshelf.

In a recent interview, I heard Brand take on the environmental movement’s anti-science stance on various issues. I have been grappling with this issue myself for some time now, particularly in the credulous acceptance by most green organisations of “alternative medicine” for which there is no evidence, and the anti-science diatribes that are inevitably summoned up in defense.

More recently I have discovered for myself how little science there is behind the health claims of organic food, and how organisations such as the Soil Association are often pseudo-scientific in their claims and their treatment of evidence.

Whole Earth Discipline challenges the greens on four more holy cows: population, urbanisation, nuclear power and Genetically Engineered crops, and in reading this compelling and fascinating book I have had to do some serious re-thinking around these issues myself.

Of those four issues the one I have been most concerned about myself has been population: what use our hard-won per capita reductions in carbon emissions if this is to be always canceled out by more people? What chance of eco-system restoration if a growing population is constantly increasing the pressure?

In contrast to Brand- who had Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich as one of his early tutors- I do not see population really as a big environmentalist cause, rather it seems to be the elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about, perhaps because of connections with oppressive regimes, racism and the sheer intractability of the problem.

Brand claims however that world population will most likely peak within another generation at around 9 billion, far less than was being predicted in the 70s and 80s, and that there is one major reason for this: urbanization. Most of humanity now live in cities and as the rural poor move there they reduce their numbers of offspring, so much so that far from a population crash, we are facing a crisis of an aging population.

Brand paints a very different picture of this process of the move to town than that of the conventional environmentalist. The move to the city Brand claims is liberating on the whole, and especially for women. Rural village life tends to be parochial and oppressive, offering little by way of opportunity. Peasant subsistence agriculture is far from the romantic view of the back-to-the-land movement for most, but back breaking toil subject to the vagaries of the weather with no back-up in case of crop failure.

The mega-slums of the developing world may appear to be hellish and grossly over-crowded polluted and destitute to the affluent western greenie, but Brand argues that in fact they are preferable to squalid farming because they offer opportunities to escape poverty. One way this is happening is by the ubiquitous spread of the cell phone: even the poorest of the poor have one, with incoming calls often free.

Not only that, but growing cities mean an emptying countryside which is good for forest regeneration. The point is made clearly: if you want to be green, than the compact life in the city id for you, while those in wealthy countries who set up their small-holdings in remote rural locations are likely to have a larger footprint, subsidised as they are by car transport and long supply lines. (I would be a classic example of this last category.)

Surprising though Brand’s analysis is on cities, his more controversial chapters are likely to be the ones on nuclear and GE crops.

While I attended anti-nuclear demos in my youth- CND was at its height in the late 1970s when I was leaving school- more recently I have been swayed by James Lovelock’s position on nuclear, that which ever way you look at it, coal is the real dirty fuel and if your concern is over future generations, addressing climate change by decarbonising the economy is your first priority.

It does indeed seem that fears over the dangers of nuclear waste have been exaggerated. The total per capita waste from a lifetime of using nuclear fuel for one family would fit into a soda can. France runs 80% of its electricity from nuclear, but while many die every day in car crashes, nuclear seems to be very safe these days. Not only that, but there are new generations of nuclear power stations which are relatively small and which can be deployed anywhere. One scheme is to produce small power stations which contain their entire lifetimes worth of fuel, are buried for the duration of the fuel and simply switched off when that is spent, with no waste extracted.

Brand also points out that all the existing nuclear powers developed weapons technology first, which then gave rise to civil energy uses, rather than the other way round; since Iran actually does need nuclear power, the international community would be in a very strong place to insist how this is developed safely. In the west meanwhile, large numbers of nukes are being used as a source of fuel for power generation.

What Brand skips over in his book with barely a mention is peak oil. He clearly thinks new technologies and fuel sources can fill the gap somehow; uranium can be extracted from sea water, and if that runs out, we can use thorium instead.

Peak oil doomers like myself have long argued against nuclear on the grounds that it will take too long to construct, that the carbon footprint is still high once you have counted the embodied energy in construction and decommissioning;that uranium will peak also before too long should we try to run everything from nuclear. While Brand makes a convincing case for the safety of modern reactors and the promise of new technologies, he is clearly under no illusion about the challenge facing us were we to try to replace existing coal and oil with a range of alternatives, including nuclear, before the climate tipping point. Brand is no techno-fantasist, but a pragmatic and practical engineer.

Perhaps even more of a Holy Cow for environmentalists than nuclear is Genetically Engineered crops. (Brand prefers “GE” to the more common “GM”.) This seems to go right to the heart of what sees as the problem with the ideological position of “romantic” greens who are motivated by a spurious ideological notions of what is “natural”. Tampering with genes, especially crossing the species divide, seems unnatural to many and unholy to some.

But scientists are no more concerned about GE technology than they are about plant breeding and loss of diversity from farming in general, because they know as Brand says that genes are extremely fungible in nature: transgenic mutations, especially on the microbial level, are apparently quite normal, indeed we could hardly have evolved without this process. Although the “strawberry with fish genes” is apparently an urban myth, in fact any given gene may be nearly identical in two very different species so splicing genes from one organism into another may not be nearly as “abnormal” as it may appear.

The problem is not this or that particular kind of farming, but farming in general. Unless you advocate a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles (there are those who do) there is no reason to feel GE crops are uniquely evil or dangerous.

To an ecologist, or to a Gaian for that matter, agriculture is one vast catastrophe. The less of it the better.

Another urban myth which may be partly responsible for the extreme opposition to GE- in common with anti-abortion and anti-vivisection activism, anti-GE sentiment is deemed to justify violence on occasion- is the “terminator gene”, designed to produce sterile genes. This does appear to be unjustifiable, interfering as it does with ancient farming practices of seed-saving, until you read the true story: no “terminator” crops were ever actually produced, in part because of protests, but the real reason for their proposed development was to limit the dangers of the new crops running amok in the wild: in other words, terminator technology was part of the checks and balances that Monsanto were proposing to address some of the environmentalists concerns. Without this, preventing contamination may now be harder.

The absurdity of the opposition to these crops is expressed in the quote given by Vandana Shiva, from her book Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000):

“The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that would eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet”- a biological impossibility, since terminator plants would be unable to spread by seeds.

Brand gives a shocking account of how ideologically motivated environmental organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth campaigned extensively against US food aid to Africa during famines in 2001 and 2002 because it contained GE crops, threatening to prevent any African imports to Europe if this badly needed food was accepted. Brand ruefully quotes Brecht: “Grub first, then ethics.”

Starvation was treated as a measure of commitment to the cause. In the service of what was thought to be a higher good, the environmental movement went sociopathic in Africa.

That well funded environmental groups in Europe campaigned so vociferously against food aid that was meant for starving people is surely a shocking indictment that there is something seriously wrong with the movement.

Many of the arguments Brand discusses in favour of GE crops are given here;

-after a decade of real life trials, no evidence suggests any human health implications from eating GE food;

-checks and balances are employed far more diligently in GE than in many other areas;

-GE is already becoming decentralised with many smaller companies and NGOs becoming involved in using the technology appropriately to help the poor and the hungry, with many beneficial effects for the environment including less use of pesticides:

“Developing countries are building their own non -corporate GE programs suited to their unique agricultural needs.” The democratization of the technology may even have been hampered by anti-GE activism: “Only a few big corporate players have survived a period of consolidation, caused partly by excessive anti-GE regulation that drove out small companies”.

And the potential of the technology is impressive: unlike conventional plant breeding, GE can be highly specific and precise in the traits it develops, and has had many successes despite the hampering of environmental protests.

Brand discusses at length how the bogus concept of the “precautionary” principle has been used to scupper development of the technology. In the absence of any clear evidence of danger, the precautionary principle is merely a recipe for social apoplexy. No doubt there were protesters using the same argument when people first discovered fire. In fact there are lots of checks and balances and the scientists who know what they are doing are far more aware of possible dangers than protesters.

Quasi-scientific propaganda against climate change is no different from quasi-scientific propaganda against genetic engineering. Both try to harness science to a political agenda.

In the coming years, GE seems certain to spread and eventually to be accepted: “The fact is that the fastest-moving countries now with GE crops are the developing nations that have the scientific competence and confidence to stand up to excessively cautious environmentalists- China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Argentina, the Philippines. as they go, so goes the world.”

As I write this I am getting forwarded emails asking me to sign the Avaaz petition against the recent decision by the European Council to allow GE potatoes to be grown here. I wont be signing, but I know most of my colleagues- many of whom have pulled up GM crops themselves- will.

In the future however, the strategy is likely to be to aim the benefits of the produce at the consumer: if the technology is good enough, people will simply prefer the better product. The proof will be in the pudding.

Brand returns to the issue of the dysfunction of Greens in his next chapter, Romantics, Scientist and Engineers

Here he suggests that one of the driving forces of green movements has been the romantic notion of decline. As a peak -oiler myself a lot of bells rang as I read through the book and I found myself stopping to question how much of my beliefs about the inevitability of collapse and “the long descent” are ideological rather than based on real evidence.

Clearly the potential for collapse is very real, and perhaps an over-optimistic world view based on “positive thinking” has contributed to the recent financial collapse, as Barbara Ehrenreich has argued in her book Smile or Die.

Without discussing the ins and outs of the collapse theory- he has already outlined some of the worst scenarios of climate change in the opening chapter- Brand explores the idea that romantic greens are ideologically opposed to finding solutions, whereas engineers believe there must be a solution to everything.

A new set of environmental players is shifting the balance. Engineers are arriving who see environmental problems neither as a romantic tragedy nor as a a scientific puzzle but simply as something to fix.

I myself used to buy into the still prevalent myth of the Fall from an idyllic past: for thousands of years,so this particular myth goes- humans lived in harmony with Nature, responsive to Her (usually feminine) deepest energies and understandings.

At a certain unspecified point in our history, we lost our way, separating from Nature and playing God by manipulating natural laws. It is because this myth is still so powerful that anti-GE and anti-nuclear sentiment remains so strong and vitriolic- Thou Shalt Not meddle with the Deeper Law.

In reality, there never was such an idyllic harmonious past; Rousseau’s Noble Savage never was.

Nature does not care about us, nor does it have plans or desires; rather, any species that were to evolve the adaptive advantages of opposable thumbs and the neo-cortex would have come to dominate our predators and competitors in the same way we have.

Being close to nature has always meant short life-span, high infant mortality and constant resource wars. It has only ever been our technology- starting with fire- that has allowed us to escape such an existence.

As Brand outlines so succinctly in his opening pages, the fundamental problem of humanity is not separation from nature, but existential: everything we do has a footprint; yet we want our children to survive and prosper.

Brand takes a brief look at how these retro-romantic views have been associated with, and are not incompatible with, Nazism: yearning for a purity in nature not found in culture; and an elitism only possible in the well fed to moralize to the hungry.

But the engineer’s approach is very different from any kind of deluded new age pseudo-therapy, rooted as it is in science and practical experience. There is surely no guarantee that we will be able to pull off the kind of techno-fixes Brand describes in his last chapters- which includes such things as giant sunshades in space and the sequestration of carbon through biochar on a massive scale- but the worst aspects of the romantic’s world view should not hinder these attempts which may be our last chance.

Every environmentalist should read this life-changing – and maybe even planet-changing book.

The long-evolved Green agenda is suddenly outdated- too negative, too tradition-bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided for the scale of the climate problem. Far from taking a new dominant role,environmentalists risk being marginalized more than ever, with many of their deep goals and well-honed strategies irrelevant to the new tasks. Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilization, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilization from a natural system- climate dynamics.

Alexander Bell

Luath Press 2009

Hardback 208 pp

If oil supply peaks and begins to decline times will be hard. Standard of living will decline and people may go hungry but they will be able to adapt by powering down and making do with less.

If water supply- for domestic use but also for irrigation- peaks and declines people have no option but to migrate.

UK journalist Alexander Bell spells out his thesis starkly in this fascinating and clearly written book: many of the world’s major regions are past or on the brink of peak water and face growing populations with declining supplies.

The rich world will not escape the catastrophic  effects of this as they depend on vast quantities of “virtual water” imported for the most part from the global South in the form of food  and goods. They will also have to deal with increasing numbers of water refugees in the future.

Bell begins by tracing the link between water control and the development of civilisation.

Civilisation is a model of living that suits itself to socieites that control water

Six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia the Sumerians became the first to experiment in large scale water control by keeping back the floods of the Tigris and the Euphrates  allowing both productive agriculture on the fertile flood plane and a store of water for irrigation in the dry periods.

Ever since then water control has been both a prerequisite growth of cities and a symbol of the power that water can bestow on emperors and rulers. The spectacular viaducts of the Romans were more for bathing and recreation than irrigation providing a potent symbol. The hubris of the doomed city of Las Vegas with its fountains in the desert provides a contemprary example.

Bell make the interesting point about the other way in which control of water has become the mark of a civilised society is in the use of sewers and flush toilets. Our modern use of clean drinking water to flush away our bodily wastes may be the ultimate symbol of an unsustainable culture.

The control of water however takes enormous effort as the canals need to be constantly dug out to remove the silt, and this need for labour has formed part of the cycla of water supply, irrigation, and increased population :

An important thing happens when humans stop moving from place to place in search of water, food and safety. They have more children.

The other difficulty with constant irrigation is the build up of salt. Irrigation in hot countries leads to considerable losses in evaporation, leaving the mineral salts brought down from the mountains behind on the land. In many of the world’s major agricultural regions, as water supplies dry up the land becomes useless.

For millions, water supply in the future is threatened by climate change which is melting the glaciers which have provided steady supplies for millenia, causing first floods and later, permanent water shortages.

In the modern era, governments and presidents have used the mega dam as a show of strength and independence.

One example is the High Aswan Dam built by Nassar in the newly independent country.  This too has been victim to evaporation, but political reasons have made it impossible to make a better arrangement of building dams in the cooler mountains of Ethiopia. Thus Egypt is arming itself against the thirst of its poorer neighbours with growing populations and less ability to sustain themselves as the deserts spread and the planet warms up.

Many other areas are facing potential water conflicts: Israel and Palestine; Pakistan and India. Bell explains that historically the struggle for control of water has not usually lead to war because people feel they have to co-operate at least to some degree over water rights, but comments grimly

The idea of a water war has become commonplace.It may happen like the scenarios above, but I suspect the world has to face up to a more horrific future. Not one of war as we understand it in 20th century terms, but a state of ongoing global trauma as people witness civilisation decay when the water runs out. How we respond to that catastrophe will be the mark of the human race. Almost certainly it will mean the end of civilisation as we currently know it.

Peak Water is a valuable contribution to our understanding of human ecology providing a broad sweep  of the human predicament of overshoot: our thirst for control of water has been historically the core issue for civilisation, but as we have extended our temporary control over nature we have increasingly taken it for granted as just the stuff that comes out of our taps. Perhaps even the environmental movement, with its recent preoccupation over  peak oil and climate change, have also been lulled into a false sense of security over this vital resource, forgetting that no degree of adaptation can adjust to water shortages.

Alexander Bell has written a great book to remind us that we are soon  going to find out just how long a society can survive without enough water.

The Living Landscape: How to Read and Understand it

Patrick Whitefield

Permanent Publications 2009

334pp

48 color photos

When I first saw in the recent Permaculture Magazine that Patrick Whitefield had written a book on reading the landscape I became very excited and thought, “That’s probably a book David Holmgren would have liked to have written!”

Holmgren called it “reading the great Book of Life”- looking at the living landscape of the countryside  through the lens of ecology,botany, geology, archaeology, history and even politics and economics.

Observation of the natural world is the starting point of permaculture design and with this book Whitefield helps us gain an insight into the myriad of the many natural and human processes that make up our landscape, and how to interpret their  hidden indications.

Patrick Whitefield covers all of these impacts on the British Countryside, taking his examples from all over the country, and shows us how to be a kind of landscape detective, painstakingly uncovering the meaning of signs and indications of past land-use, some obvious – the absence of trees indicating ongoing grazing- some much less so- the horeshoe bat indicating an intact mosaic of different habitats.

The book begins with some  chapters on general patterns in the landscape and underlying features of   geology, soil and then climate and natural succession before moving onto more specific cases including animal signs; niches; succession;  Different Kinds of Woodlands; Grassland; Heaths and Moors; Water in the Landscape; and finally, Hedges and other field boundaries and Roads and Paths.

Throughout Patrick gives us pages from his extensive notebooks that he has kept over the years which show actual examples of reading the landscape in a wide range of landscape types he has encountered on travels up and down the country, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Somerset “Levels” – or Moors as they are more usually known locally; the remnants of diverse wildflower meadows still found on the chalk downs, and the semi-ancient wood of Lady Park Wood in the Wye valley.

Patrick is always an agreeable travel companion and makes fascinating observations throughout. The pleasure he takes at discovering new landscapes or unpicking the story of a woodland and how it got to have the species mix it has- the subtle interplay of geology, microclimate and grazing patterns- is always obvious, becoming most so when discovering a new hedgerow with large number of species ( a possible indicator of antiquity).

we have been using Patrick’s previous books, The Earth Care Manual and How to Make a Forest Garden on the Kinsale course for the past several years; The Living Landscape is another great addition which fills an important niche in permaculture literature. A fascinating and engaging read with great color photos,  it will have to find a place on every designers’ bookshelf.

Book Review-

Future Scenarios How Communities Can adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change

David Holmgren

Chelsea Green 2009

When I first saw David Holmgren’s Future Scenarios talk and slide at a permaculture design course in Slovenia in 2005 I was still quite new to the concept of peak oil and listened transfixed at what seemed to be a detailed vision of the future: not precise predictions but an outline of four possible scenarios that may unfold over the next generation and beyond as human societies adapt to the consequences of the peaking and decline of our primary energy sources, peak oil and natural gas.

A couple of years ago David continued his explorations of these issues first examined in detail in his earlier book, Permaculture- Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002) with a new website Future Scenarios.

Now in book form, Future Scenarios provides one of the most succinct and lucid accounts of the possible paths that await us as we start the new era of energy descent.

Holmgren is in agreement with John Michael Greer that while much mainstream discussion about energy futures centres on the first two of his scenarios- “Techno-explosion” and “Techno Stability”, and the doomer/survivalist meme amongst the peak oil community tends to focus on the fourth scenario of “lifeboats” or versions of collapse, the more likely would be the third possibility of “Energy Descent”- a more gradual adaptation to diminishing energy supplies resulting in a contracting economy and reversion to technological simplicity that may play out over many generations.

This pathway of earth Stewardship is assumed by the permaculture agenda- an adaptive approach in which human scale design and general sustainability practices are progressively implemented and are informed by the energy flows through human society and ecology, and the energy base of our economies is clearly understood.

The real problem is that this more likely future is currently still marginalised as the mainstream culture refuses to abandon its faith in the myth of progress- a belief that rests on the mistaken assumption that gains in human welfare over the past few hundred years have been as a result of some teleological process propelling us forwards, or of a general increasing application of our genious for technological improvements and innovation, while ignoring the underlying reosurce base that has made all this possible: technology is merely different ways of using energy that is usually dug out of holes in the ground.

The likelihood that this transition will be to one of less energy is such an anathema to the psychological foundations and power elites of modern societies that it is constantly misinterpreted, ignored, covered up, or derided. Instead we see geopolitical maneuvering around energy resources, including proxy and real wars to control dwindling reserves and policy gymnastics to somehow make reducing carbon emissions the new engine of economic growth.

Holmgren categorises the scenarios according to the varying potential severity of peak oil and climate change and how these tow factors interplay:

• Brown Tech- slow oil decline, fast climate change;
• Green Tech- slow oil decline, slow climate change;
• Earth Steward- fast oil decline, slow climate change;
• Lifeboats- fast oil decline, fast climate change

These typologies may necessarily be too simplistic- so many other factors may also come into play, such as financial collapse which, while no doubt linked to both peak oil and climate change, may impact in ways as yet unforeseen. However, Holmgren provides a deeper analyses by showing how the scenarios may be “nested” one within the other- each acting on the different scales of the household, local, national and international economies; or may take a stepped form over time- attempts by governments to keep the system going a little longer by following a Brown Tech path may hasten an eventual collapse; equally, an attempt to switch to green tech may result in the adoption of Earth Stewardship further down the line as renewables fail to fill the gap left by oil. The scenarios may also play out differently in different parts of the world.

Throughout Holmgren’s analysis is informed by ecological systems, the foundation for his permaculture principles, as he sees how energy dynamics in nature may be mirrored in human socieites:

Natural ecosytems tend to maintain homeostasis under stress through the allocation of stored resources. if the conditions continue to deteriorate, then further stress can fracture the homeostasis. If the stress involves a reduction in energy availability, the system may collapse. But total collapse and system disintegration are rare, at least in the short term. More typically a restabalization occurs at a lower level of energy processing and organisational complexity. The new homeostasis will typically be stable for some time before declining energy availability precipitates another crisis. This may also be a model for how human societies respond to the crisis of resource and energy decline.

Holmgren is keen to paint a more positive vision of the future in the earth Stewardship scenario- “conditions for ordinary people may actually improve when resources devoted to maintaining societal complexity are freed for meeting more basic needs”- a reference to the diminishing returns provided by endless growth.

There is a desperate need to recast energy descent as a positive process that can free people from the strictures and dysfunctions of growth economics and consumer culture. This is now apparent to many people around the world and is far more fundamental than  a public relations campaign to paint a black sky blue. It is a necessary [process to provide a sense of hope and connection to fundamental human values expressed by every traditional culture throughout human history, among them, that the prusuit of materialism is a false god.

No doubt materialism without bounds, as expressed in modern society in unending growth and the development of consumer culture, is a false god; however, I am not sure that an awareness of this has always been present in every traditional culture. Holmgren here seems to betray a romantic view of the past, at odds with the  ecological basis for his work, which is  itself of course fundamentally materialistic. What seems more likely is the insights of anthropology and evolutionary psychology: that we have as a species a fundamental propensity towards getting more stuff, as is evidenced by the ready emergence in traditional societies of cargo cults after  contact with the west.

This weakness is apparent in his assessment of the corresponding ideologies and belief systems that accompany the scenarios: he seems to equate secular humanism with the materialistic ideology of “Brown Tech” and suggests that these beliefs systems are inherently negative, giving rise to dysfunctional behaviours;

While the elites continue to be driven by a commitment to superrationalist beliefs, a sense of hollowness and lack of purpose characterizes the shrinking middle class, while fundamentalist religions and cults play a stronger role in the lives of the working and unemployed classes, partly through genuine reaction to the failures of modern humanism and partly manipulated by the elites to deflect anger and disenchantment.

While this may be very true, he compares this to a shift in values in “Green Tech”:

Civic culture strengthens where further transition toward nonmaterialistic society combines with the maturation of feminism and environmentalism, and a resurgence in indigenous and  traditional cultural values.

It seems to me that there is a contradiction between “traditional values” -many of which may be parochial and overly conservative or reactionary – with post-modern feminist and environmental values; it is far from clear that they would be the same or even compatible.

Similarly, under “Earth Steward” Holmgren suggests that a “simplification in the material domain is seen as the opportunity for growth in the spiritual domain. There is a resurgence in leadership by women and a celebration of the feminine in nature and people”.

But what is the “spiritual” domain? This needs to be defined here becasue there is a vast range of possible interpretations. For the same reasons I have always had some difficulty with Holmgren’s domain of “Health and Spritual well-being” in the Permaculture Flower. I interpret it to mean “Health and Psychological/emotional well-being”. However, it is abundantly apparent that permaculture has become almost synonymous with New Age religion in many quarters, a reactionary and delusional trend that all permaculturalists should challenge strongly. Holmgren’s loose use of the word “spiritual” in this context, and his “celebration of the feminine” will inevitably be seen by many to sanctify pseudo-science and the worship of spirits and nebulous “energies”.

(Again “the feminine” and “feminine values” really needs to be defined: we are presumably not talking about the feminine values of Sex in the City; too often “the feminine” is associated with “the spiritual” in a quite meaningless way which I feel is  rather patronizing to women.)

Here, Holmgren looses an opportunity to call for a celebration of  secular humanism and rationalism- the most important legacy of the modern world, which will need to be protected less we fall back into a new dark age of superstition and delusion with energy descent.

Nor is it necessary to embody any kind of “earth spirituality” in order to foster more sustainable lifestyles- these should come of their own accord, naturally emerging from a scientific understanding of ecology and our place within it, combined with a simple sense of beauty and wonder at the natural world,  unfettered by  ideological presumptions.

There is a great danger within the environmental movement as a whole to replace the delusion of unending growth with the delusion of narcissistic spirituality, part of a wider failure to acknowledge the real gains of modernity through science.

For all this, Holmgren remains one of the most significant of contemporary thinkers, and Future Scenarios is an important contribution to peak oil literature, and one of the clearest assessments of the kind of world that awaits us.

The present world population of 6.7 billion is projected by the United Nations to increase to 9 billion and may rise to as many as 11 billion by 2050. Even if a worldwide policy of two children per couple (instead of the current 2.8 children) were agreed on tomorrow, the world population will continue to expand for about seventy years before stabilizing at about 13 billion people.

The Long Descent- A Users Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

John Michael Greer

New Society Publishers 2008

John Michael Greer has written a fascinating and engaging, but also contradictory and perplexing account of how he sees the industrial age ending.

His primary thesis is that collapse will not come as a sudden, abrupt End Of Days or Die Off scenario- one minute thriving bustling affluent society with the universe at its feet, the next a crumbling pile of rubble with nothing but wisps of smoke to hint of its former glory- but will follow a “catabolic” process of progressive disintegration, over possibly a couple of centuries. In Greer’s scenario, short periods of abrupt and sharp downturns- the beginning of which we are experiencing now- punctuate longer periods of relative stability. Like an organism that begins feeding on itself, society will collapse in a series of stepped-down stages as it becomes progressively unable to meet maintenance charges with income.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the chapter “Tools for the Transition” Greer has a most interesting discussion of the merits of the slide-rule over the pocket calculator, and explains why it is infinitely more suitable to a low-energy world:it is durable- a solid aluminum slde-rule could last nearly geological time-scales-, independent, dependable and perhaps most significant of all its use of transparent- a future archeologist would be able to work out exactly how to use it. I have never actually used a slide-rule, but this discussion has inspired me to get one, and even teach its use on permaculture courses as an example of durable technologies. There are many other insightful observations Greer makes in this chapter, including comments on salvage and organic agriculture, and what will endure into the post-collapse world.

What  sets Greer’s book apart and make it really interesting is his focus on “The Stories we tell Ourselves”. He weaves his discussion of the Long descent around what he sees as two modern myths- the myth of unending progress and technological supremacy on the one hand, and imminent catastrophe and collapse on the other. Both are myths or stories that fail to see the much more likely outcome of catabolic collapse.

His analysis of Peak Oil and other resource depletion are astute and draw on earlier writers such as Catton:

More than 20 years ago, William Catton pointed out in his seminal classic Overshoot that the downslope of industrial society would force human beings to compete against their own machines for dwindling resource stocks. His prediction has become today’s reality.

Falling broadly into the category of ecological writers who see human society as essentially subject to the same natural limits as other animals, our prosthetic habits of tools and technology merely giving us temporary escape, Greer covers a lot of ground you will find elsewhere, and this is the first contradiction, because his stance throughout the book is that he is presenting a radically differnt vision to the one presented by many peak oil writers: but who exactly is he referring to?

Yes, there is Jay Hanson’s Die-off.org; there is Matt Savinar and his bulletins on special offers on survival food; and no doubt in America, Greer will come across far more of the hard-core survivalist types than we might in Europe; but in general, I would place him very much in the tradition of the main Peak Oil writers- Heinberg, Kunstler, Simmonds and co.. These are the voices who have shaped the Peak oil movement in the past few years with their reasoned and measured descriptions of the current evidence and what they see as the likely impacts over the next years and decades. By no means do they paint a rosy picture, but nor do they predict an immediate once-and-for-all end of everything. Indeed, the title Greer uses seems to be even a reference to Kunstler’s main work on the topic- The Long Emergency- as well as Holmgren’s well-known Energy descent scenarios.

So I found it a bit confusing to read on the one hand that “the fallacy that bedeviled the Y2K survivalists was the belief that government, business, and citizens, faced with an imminent threat and presented with a clear, constructive response to it, would sit on their hands and do nothing until collapse overwhelemd them.”(p91)

and then that “Statistics from Russia, where a similar scenario played out in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, suggest that population levels could be halved within this century”

and “One dimension of that context is likely to become the preeminent political fact of the age of peak oil: the impending decline- and, at least potentially, the catastrophic collapse- of America’s world empire.” (P100-101)

I mean, how catastrophic is “catastrophic” exactly? Is there like, the Y2K fallacy-type catastrophic, which is what most people think about peak oil but is wrong, and then the “Long Descent” John Michael Greer-type catastrophic which is really quite different and which only Greer has been perceptive enough to see?!

And it gets worse. Greer points out that one of the more fragile aspects of industrial life is the health system and councils that “It is probably best to assume that by the time the next wave of crisis arrives, your only health care will be what you can provide for yourself” and goes onto say “You probably wont live as long as you expect, and if you need high-tech medical help to stay alive, you’ll have to accept that it may stop being available without warning.”

Well that’s reassuring Michael, I mean for a minute there I thought you might be just another one of those survivalist doomers.

Don’t get me wrong. I happen to agree with this analysis and I also share and welcome Greer’s prescient wise words about acceptance of death and how this is one of the things we need to adress if we are to face the future- any future- with fortitude, but it all seems strangely at odds with his repeated admonitions of whoever he sees as the bulk of Peak Oil commentariat for painting too stark a picture of the impending collapse.

In addition, there are many compelling reasons to feel that our situation at all-time Peak Energy is fundamentally different from past collapses. the higher they climb the harder they fall, as they say, and our dependency on fossil energy and on a functioning economy from day to day is so complete, and our culture so lacking in resilience, and our traditional skills deficit so absolutely vast, that our society seems peculiarly vulnerable.

And then there is climate change, which again will effect people very personally and is already doing so. Overpopulation, species extinction general environmental degradation means that unlike the first character in an earlier collapse, our contemporary urban refugee may have nowhere to go.

Greer is right to emphasize the lessons of past collapses and how they may unfold over lengthy periods of time, and I love his vivid story of two hypothetical characters who live through very different times but who experience collapse in a similar way: the only difference is, in the contemporary scenario, there may be nowhere left for the environmental refugee to flee to.

In this we are given a fresh perspective, but as Orlov has made so vividly clear, collapse will be an essentially personal affair- for many in the developing world, it happened last week with the loss of their job and repossession of their home, and for many more it will happen next week. For some, collapse surely will be indeed a rather abrupt affair, as they suddenly find themselves out on the street unsure of their next meal, their previous life of luxury bought on futures’ markets just a distant dream. For many in this situation- as well as those who suddenly find their life-support systems switched off, or who go hungry because they were unprepared for the supermarket supply-chain disruption,  the historical fate of society as a whole will be largely irrelevant.

Greer continues his exploration of stories and myths with a look at New Age beliefs, and he has some interesting observations about for example the origin of the “create your own reality” myth:

Of course each of us does play a part in creating the reality we experience; subtle factors such as expectations and assumptions have a much more powerful role in the way our lives turn out than most people realise… As the New Age movement gained members and lost focus, though, gimmicks of this sort became the basis for a philosophy of cosmic consumerism that claims the universe is supposedly set up to give people whatever they happen to want, so long as they ask for it in the right way.”

He even gives an analysis of David Icke’s Lizard theory which he sees as a kind of projection of “the shadow” – a way of overcoming the reality of limits: if you cant get everything you want, if the universe isn’t exactly what you want, it must be the fault of those evil shape-shifting lizards.

It seems rather paradoxical though, that while for the most part he takes a “meta-theoretical” perspective on different world views and how they emerge, some of his thinking itself appears to be rather New Age: his recommendations for health care in the future seem rather ill-informed and naive:

…While there is some quackery in the alternative field, there’s also much of value, and the denunciations of alternative health care that come from the medical establishment are mostly just attempts to protect market share.

This itself is surely one of the most pervasive of New Age myths: conventional medicine is mainly just out to make money from your illness and is more likely to make you sick then anything else; “alternative” medicine is more “holistic” and treats the whole person in a “natural” way. In reality, “alternative” medicine is simply treatments that have not been proved; once a treatment has been demonstrated to be effective through double-blind clinical trials, it becomes simply “medicine”. (see for example John Diamond, Snake Oil 2001).  His specific recommendation of acupuncture betrays a sloppiness not apparent elsewhere in the book:

Many of the most effective alternative systems- herbalism and acupuncture come to mind- evolved long before the industrial system came into being and use very modest amounts of sustainable resources to treat illnesses.

As a number of recent publications have shown, there is little evidence that acupuncture works, and what evidence there is, is weak: it could scarcely be confidently considered as an effective remedy, and the suggestion that having been created in pre-industrial times is something in its favour is again a classic New Age absurdity. Systems of health care like acupuncture didnt have the benefit of modern medical science and don’t even recognise the existence of the cardio-vascular system, simply because this had not been discovered at the time. When you read about acupuncture’s recent history- how Mao encouraged it in revolutionary China because there wasn’t the resources to provide modern medicine for the peasants, even though he didn’t believe in it himself, for example, and how “sham” acupuncture- using retractable needles as a placebo achieves just as good results as the traditional methods, it is clear Greer has simply failed to do his homework on this one.

More than that, the multi-million dollar alternative medicine industry is really just an alternative marketing wing of the mainstream drug companies, making good use of the contemporary fashion for anything “natural” and “alternative” to sell its wares to the gullible. (See for example Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science.)

To say “there is some quackery…” is a mind-bogglingly large understatement: the whole alternative healthcare field is rife with the most unbelievable level of manipulation, fraud and deceit. The ignorance and gullibility of large sections of the pblic, and the complicit role the media plays in simply misleading people happens in this area just as much as in the areas of perpetuating the myth of progress. That doesnt mean that science is immune from such aberrations- but it does at least have an internal system of verification quite absent in alternative therapies, and it does actually make real progree using the clinical trial.

By the same token, while Greer’s discussion of the role and future of science in society is valuable and interesting, he makes some big mistakes: his dismissal of Dawkin’s atheism as anthropolatry (the worship of humans) is simply wrong: Dawkins, like most atheists, believes humans are just a clever kind of tool using ape. It is religious and superstitious views- placing humans at the centre of a supposed Creation- that idolise the human.

The reasons for Greer’s blindspots on these matters are  obvious: he is himslef a Druid- an Arch Druid in fact- but in this book tells us little about it, leaving us guessing what he feels makes that spiritual tradition more valid than others, or more valid than the other myths he discusses.

So one gets the impression that he may have wanted his last chapter, “The Spiritual Dimension”, to have been more central to the main thesis than it actually is, and while it raises important points about what the role of religions might be post-collapse, and which ones may come to the fore, it is when he mentions “magic” that he loses me completely.

“There is a rich irony” says Greer “in the common dismissal of the lessons of spirituality as ‘magical thinking’ because magical thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and goals that technical and scientific thinking handle so poorly.”

Is it? I though “magic” was simply what people tend to ascribe to phenomena they dont have an explanation for. This definition would come as a surprise also, I think, to most of the people I know who profess to believe in “magic” which they would probably see more as a way of manipulating the material world through communing with nature spirits and the like.

Greer seems to me to get very muddled here, claiming that Carl Sagan was a “theologian” with his image of “we are stardust” while “magic” is apparently something which has “theoreticians” suggesting it can in fact be studied rationally. This is upside down thinking: science is essentially a method of inquiry which rejects faith-based beliefs; it is not theology when Sagan says we are star dust- Greer misses the point completely- it is fact based on verifiable evidence -which is exactly what sets science apart from myth.

Equally, there is no reason why science cannot handle the realm of “motivations, values and goals” with the same method, and of course there is a large body of scientific literaturee which attempts to do just that. I would refer Mr. Greer to Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell as a good exploration of the issues here.

Greer misses an opportunity to explore the real legacy of scientific thinking, and the likelihood and consequences of a return to pre-rational belief systems in the future.

For all that, The Long Descent is a stimulating and valuable contribution to the Peak Oil literature. I obviously don’t agree with a lot of it, and I find his stance as somehow being more profound than other writers unconvincing, yet he writes well and to some extent does explore the lesser known paths.

I

“Let us act as if we are part of nature’s striving for the next evolutionary way to creatively respond to the recurring cycles of energy ascent and descent that characterise human history and the more ancient history of Gaia, the living planet. Imagine that our decendants and our ancestors are watching us.”

The site contains a wealth of analyses and ideas to help understand the world we live in and prepare for a range of likely scenarios that we can see unfolding as the price of oil climbs and humanity passes the historical point of peak Energy.

See also Permaculture Principles

A few people have pointed me to George Monbiot’s recent article on population in the Guardian. While it is welcome that Monbiot addresses the issue I wanted to reply because I found it really disappointing, failing to join the dots and in some ways misleading.

The main thrust of the article is that some environmentalists complain the issue of population is ignored- perhaps for political reasons- even though it is the “number one environmental problem” and Monbiot sets out to discuss whether this is in fact true. The basic issue in this debate is, can we really give out as it were about the large populations of the developing world when over-consumption in the West is in fact having a bigger environmental impact?

However, this is really a straw dog issue because as Ehrlich (whom he refers to) pointed out in The Population Bomb population and consumption are two sides of the same coin. It is in my opinion quite meaningless to speak about which is the greater issue, like we are dealing with some kind of Top of the Apocalyptic Pops.

Ehrlich’s famous formula- which should be on every high-school curriculum- is:

I (Impact) = P (population) x A (Affluence) x T (Technology)

The issues of consumption and population are quite simply inseparable. If the population increases, there will be less resources to go around, so in theory we can increase the population so long as we reduce per capita consumption- and vice-a-versa.

Monbiot then presents some statistics to demonstrate that economic growth is projected to have a bigger impact than population growth:

“Many economists predict that, occasional recessions notwithstanding, the global economy will grow by about 3% a year this century. Governments will do all they can to prove them right. A steady growth rate of 3% means a doubling of economic activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by about 1,600%.”

Any one who knows about Peak oil can see that this is impossible. Peak oil will end the past 150-year period of growth and lead to a shrinking economy. But Monbiot has never really satisfactorily bitten the Peak oil bullet, although more recently he has been coming closer.

There are a number of issues apart from this that Monbiot has missed:

Firstly, there is hardly as government in the world which does not assume that population growth is an inherently good thing. in other words, in the world of politics, it is not a question of economic OR population growth- they are treated as essentially the same thing, one leading to another. More people means more economic activity, more consumers, a larger pool of workers that can help keep down wages. Population growth is not an alternative to economic growth so much as a requirement for economic growth.

Secondly, in a similar way, it is misleading to treat the low-birth-rate, high-consuming “rich” as separate from the high-birth rate low-consuming (per capita) poor as if they are separate species. This is the “politically correct” excuse that is always used for avoiding or downplaying the population issue, and Monbiot ends his article with this point:

“to suggest… that population growth is largely responsible for the ecological crisis is to blame the poor for the excesses of the rich.”

But it is not simply that there are rich people in the world and then there are poor people; it is more that there are rich people because there are poor people- the one group depends in effect on the other (the poor do low-paid work for the rich). In a sense, the “poor” are simply “that group of people that have failed as yet to become rich”. The rich and the poor of the world are not separate species; wealth is not genetic. It is a one-world system in which the activities of one group effect the activities of the other- and of both groups, the impact on the whole system.

This mistake is the same one that is found in the “diffusion of affluence” theory in mainstream economic theory: “A rising tide will rise all boats”. The argument goes: look at the rich world: they seem to have controlled their birth rates; this is because of education, particularly of women, which leads to economic growth, which leads to falling birth rates. The way to deal with global population is education and development.”

The problem is, as Monbiot is clearly aware, there are not enough resources for everyone to enjoy a western lifestyle, so this diffusion will never happen to any great degree; and poor people generally want to increase their standard of living.

For example, Cuba has been pointed to as representing the kind of standard of living that could be sustainable if it were equally distributed throughout the world- about a quarter of the per capita resource consumption of the average European The problem is, it is not at all clear that Cubans are content with this standard of living; while few in the more affluent world would accept a cut to that level. But even if this was acceptable and achievable, if the worlds’ population continues to grow, this standard will have to be continually lowered.

Thirdly, this kind of debate always tends to ignore processes and the demographic momentum:

Playing around with statistics to show that consumption is the real problem, not population, as Monbiot does, again fails to see that the two issues are inextricably linked. For example, it is often said, if we all become vegetarian, the world could support a bigger population. But what happens then if we achieve this and the population continues to grow?

Presumably, the response to those who try to raise the issue of population control will once again be:

“Ah, yes, but if we all just live on one bowl of rice a day and huddle round a single light bulb the world could support twice the current population! Let’s have 10 billion! Let’s have 20 billion!”

Population growth rates have been declining, but as Stanton has argued, it is the total number of people added each year- currently about 80million- not the rate. In a world already over-populated, any further numerical increase will make things worse.

Another issue that Stanton discusses that is really mentioned is the concept of “aggressive breeding” whereby one ethnic group encourages rapid population growth as a deliberate strategy in order to outnumber a rival group. One of the examples he gives is of Albanians with a high birth rate immigrating to Serbia which ultimately lead to war. The peace-keeping efforts of the west have failed to address the demographic causes of this war and if the peace-keeping forces are ever to leave, the underlying causes are still there.

Underpinning this whole debate is the reality that the world is already in an advanced state of overpopulation, by whatever measure you care to choose, and that this is a result of the cheap fossil fuel era. So whatever we do, whatever our take on the issue, we have to acknowledge that population will fall. Talking about how if food and resources were rearranged we could feed 6.5 billion or more is meaningless when the production of these resources is unsustainable and will surely decline- even as we are committed to another couple of billion people on the planet because of the demographic momentum.

So what we need is a more sophisticated, systemic understanding of these issues, not a kind of competition by different camps competing for “their” issue to take priority. I dont think that those who are writing about population are necessarily doing that; it seems that way because the issue is generally ignored and considered taboo.

Among the many things we need to do to create a sustainable culture is to have a mature approach to our total numbers, as well as and always in the same breath as limiting our personal consumption of resources. The discussion needs to be focussed around “what standard of living for what number of people relative to what degree of availability of sustainable resources”.

Any discussion of an Energy Descent Plan, for example, MUST in my opinion include an analysis of Population- not just the total number of inhabitants in an area today, but what the trend is, what the growth rate is, and include in such a report recommendations for limiting population. It is surely obvious that any measures to address the myriad of environmental issues we face will be easier to implement with fewer numbers.

The environmental crisis is a result of the Total Human Footprint. Any discussion of sustainability that ignores population is going nowhere.