Fleeing Vesuvius Overcoming the risks of economic and environmental collapse

edited by Richard Douthwaite and Gillian Fallon

Feasta 2010 ppbck 417 pp.

The recent economic collapse is not just a financial and banking issue, not just an economic and political issue, not a result only of bad policies and lack of regulation, but actually precipitated by the passing of peak oil, which sent oil prices spiraling above $150/barrel in 2008 and is essentially sounding the death-knoll for industrial society. Not only will we never be able to return to economic growth, but we are now facing a chaotic period of decline and collapse. The peak of energy availability has passed and we are now staring into the abyss of continual economic contraction which will result in a vastly simplified society where human muscle power will progressively replace fossil energy, and we will return to the technologies of the Middle Ages or before.

Such is the fundamental of the oddly titled new book from Feasta the Irish-based think-tank on sustainable economics: Fleeing Vesuvius is not about responding to a natural catastrophe such as Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in AD79; nor is it about fleeing, for as editor Richard Douthwaite asks rhetorically, “We expect to get any clearer warnings of impending disaster than the people of Pompeii received. There are already financial fires around the economic cone. If we are to survive we need to move out quickly. Now. But which way are we to go? Is there a map? It would be a poor book about an emergency situation which did not provide one. So, for the final chapter, my co-editor and I asked the contributors to suggest actions which readers could take or support at four levels- personal, community, national and global.”

The book is layed out in seven parts: “Energy Availability”; “Innovation in business, money and finance”; “New Ways of using the land”; “Dealing with Climate Change”; “Changing the Way we live”; “Changing the Way we Think”; and “Ideas for Action”;

There are 28 contributors including economist Richard Douthwaite (author of The Growth Illusion and Short Circuit; julian Darley of the Post carbon Institute; Nate Hagens of the Oil Drum; and Reinventing Collapse author Dmitri Orlov; and with an introduction by Eamon Ryan of the Irish Green Party who had been minister for Communication, Energy and Natural Resources in the last government.

While the starting point is the same for each- the financial crisis and its connection to peak oil-, there are several wide differences of opinion expressed by the various contributors: some see a gradual decline which is worth trying to manage through Transition Towns and international treaties on climate change; while arch-doomer Dmitry Orlov for example pokes fun at such ideas, suggesting instead we should be more concerned with getting enough sleep, avoiding drawing attention to ourselves too much less we become a target for marauding gangs, and collecting things that dont lose their value that are easy to store such as bronze nails.

“Is there a reason to think” he asks when considering such community solution, ” that it is possible to achieve this radical simplification in a series of controlled steps? Isn’t that a bit like asking a demolition crew to demolish a building brick by brick instead of what it normally does? Which is, mine it, blow it up, and bulldoze and haul away the debris?”

While there are many worthwhile discussion in the book, I’m going to argue here that the general thesis expressed by all the contributors is based on an outdated and discredited concept of environmentalism rooted more in ideology than rational thought.

The tone is set by our ex-Minister Eamon Ryan in his preface when he invokes the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth when discussing the potential for new technologies:

“Some will argue that new natural gas supplies will allow us to get off the hook. It is true that new shale gas supplies have altered the international gas markets. However, as Dennis Meadows and others showed in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, the challenge this century will be to avoid breaching one of a number of constraints that come with living on a finite planet. “Even if gas is more easily available and even if it has relatively low carbon emissions in comparison with other fossil fuels, the reality is that simply replacing oil with natural gas will see us breach the greenhouse gas limits that the best scientific advice says we have to avoid”. (my emphasis).

To my mind this statement rather well expresses some of the core contradictions and confusion in the environmental movement. Essentially, as regards shale gas or other potential ways of new energy sources, Ryan is arguing they should not be used because we have already past the “limits” of what should be used, with reference to a 40-year old report based on computer models.

Make no mistake: I used to think the same myself. I used to argue that limits had been reached a long time ago and any attempt to extend them further would merely lead to a bigger crash and die-off later. Neo-Malthusians argue the same: dont work to feed the hungry of the world, that will simply lead to them breeding all the more and even more people starving later on. (I personally know individuals who subscribe to this policy.) This vile philosophy fails to understand the essential ways in which humanity differs from other species who are indeed subject to limits of boom-and-bust cycles: language and technology.

Whatever about the “science” of climate change, Ryan fails to explain that the dangers of future climate change need to be balanced against the current benefits of cheap energy now and the future wealth it will foster which, coupled with ongoing technological innovation, will set us in a better position to withstand such future challenges.

There are certainly some interesting chapters. Richard Douthwaite, who has written an earlier book surveying attempts at various models of alternative currencies, and who initiated a L.E.T.S. system that I was briefly involved with in Westport, Co. Mayo, advocates regional Liquidity Exchange Networks to help with the credit crunch. Local councils would open accounts in Quids- the generic name for regional currencies- which could be used for public services, possibly to pay a proportion of tax and some other uses; the supply of currency would be completely transparent and can be automatically increased or decreased according to the needs of the system. It is not clear how well they might work on a regional level however; many local areas in Ireland have so little manufacturing that there might not be enough local economic activity to warrant their introduction. Nevertheless, Feasta is dong important work in researching such initiatives and new currency models of this kind may become essential in the near future as the financial crisis deepens.

None of the authors pick up on the fact that it has been the recession that has proved to be not only the most effective instrument by far in reducing CO2 emissions, but the only effective instrument, while environmental concerns have gone out the window for the same reasons, as evidenced by the annihilation of the Irish Green Party, including the loss of Minister Ryan’s seat, in the elections that followed the publication of this book.

Why on earth would anyone be interested in policies that might increase fuel prices when they are struggling to pay their mortgage or keep their jobs, while at the same time we are being told big international globalised institutions are unlikely to last much longer anyway, so the effort required to develop international climate treaties seems futile. Who would give a damn about small amounts of global average temperature increases that may or may not happen 100 years from now when the same people are telling us the supermarkets might be going to run out of food and we should start stashing cans of beans? These interesting issues are not explored by the contributors.

We are treated however to some rather glaring examples of ideological bias: -Patrick Andrews includes in his table comparing the “old and new mindset” “Giving back to Mother Earth more than we take”- an explicitly religious viewpoint; the idea that we need a new mindset and that Andrews is the one to tell us what it might be is just taken as a given- detractors are suffering from a cognitive dissonance attributable to a human propensity to assume that because everything has been ok so far it will be ok in the future. An alternative view might be that Andrews is the one suffering from cognitive dissonance attributable to the human tendency to spend decades and even lifetimes assuming that the End is Nigh.

-Brian Davey includes in his list of “well-established trends in global food production” – which he recommends “if you really want to be frightened”- the old canard about “terminator seeds”: “Development “terminator” seeds to concentrate all seed sales in the hands of a corporate elite.” Maybe his “peer-reviewed” source for this was The Economics of Happiness. How many times do I have to debunk this? Terminator seeds were never developed or used outside the laboratory, and were originally created only as a safeguard against gene-flow. GE seeds can be saved by farmers in most cases; most farmers however continue to buy their seeds quite happily without needing to invoke 9-11 type conspiracy theories.

-Davey will also raise some eyebrows with his unequivocal statement: “If fossil fuels create climate change they should be banned from sale without a permit. Period.” Which sounds not only quite nutty but a call for the end of debate and even maybe even democracy.

-in a later chapter Davy and Rutledge lament the loss of public trust in science, mentioning Climategate but not even considering the possibility that this might actually represent a good reason for people not to trust activist scientists.

-Anne Ryan in an chapter on “Changing the Way we think” is positioned firmly in the “nature knows best” naturalistic fallacy: “Nature favours cycles because they come to an organic end after a suitable period of growth. They do not go on growing because in nature, that is a cancer.” Maybe someone should explain to Ryan that cancer is nature as well. Cycles don’t come to an end in nature because nature knows better but because other species dont have the ability to innovate their way out of these limits. Give any species- including cancer cells- the ability to overcome the limits of evolution and they will take the chance just as we have done.

This kind of naive blabber about “nature” in the context of this book would really make you wonder whether Feasta is actually a “think tank” at all or merely another branch of the seemingly all-pervasive Church of Gaia.

Maybe it starts with the editor Richard Douthwaite, an excellent writer and economist whose chapter I enjoyed and he makes a lot of very sensible points about the problems with the euro and other aspects of our current economic plight. Douthwaite’s views seem however to be underpinned by a retro-romantic wish to return to the 16th century:

“I argued that the wrong turn was taken in England in the 16th Century as the population began to recover from the balck Death. The increased numbers- a rise from 1.6million to 5.5million in less than 200 years- naturally put pressure on resources and caused communities to have problems living within the limits imposed by their local environments. In 1631, Edmund Howes described how this had forced them to start burning coal…

“That was it. The thin end of the wedge. The slippery slope…” Oh dear. Just as humanity was doing OK and keeping everything nice and simple and civilized without too much technology, someone went and started digging out the smelly black stuff and its been downhill ever since.A few quick centuries later and we have those awful supermarkets stocked with cheap food and 27 types of chocolate rice crispies, Twitter, Lady Gaga and God knows what else. It’s all been a terrible mistake!

Mr. Douthwaite may well prefer to be living in the 16th century, but probably not as one of the vast majority of the population who were landless peasants with pretty much no further prospects from birth to a most likely early death. While he acknowledges that no-one was going to protest then against the shift to coal, he ignores the fact that there is no chance we will voluntarily leave fossil energy until there is a cheaper, better alternative. Thankfully, he at least accepts that individual actions like going off grid are futile and that energy solutions are better done collectively, while Corinna Byrne apparently thinks that “the installation of small wind turbines to power ones home will also help”- no it wont Corinna, dont be daft.

Douthwaite, in common with the other main authors, assume that technology will have little to offer, and hence “collapse is inevitable” as David Korowicz argues. I had the opportunity to ask David how he could be so sure that another energy transition was impossible, siting shale gas; fuel cells and breakthrough solar technology; oil from algae; and thorium reactors as potential candidates for new energy sources. He replied that a)there is no time- peak oil and financial collapse are upon us; and b)none of these (apart from oil from algae) actually replace the convenience of oil as a liquid fuel for transport. In a discussion later he recommended Vaclav Smil’s book Energy Myths and Realities. Apparently Smil does not accept the peak oil hypothesis but empasizes that an energy transition away from fossil fuels will take decades.

Clearly we have enormous challenges, but what the peak oil doomer theorists in this book fail to address is that growth, prosperity and development do not rely only on digging holes in the ground and extracting the goodies until they are all gone and collapse ensues, but also that we are clever monkeys whos defining nature is technology and innovation. This is nothing to do with the quasi-religious New Age beliefs that Davie Philip mentions in his chapter as being off-putting to some in the Transition Towns movement, and which are also clearly expressed in some of the offerings here, of having lost our way, separated from nature, fallen from Eden and having lead to the hubris of thinking we can control nature, but simply that that is what we are as human beings.

I could take the doomer prognosis expressed in this book more seriously if there wasn’t such an apparent rubbing of hands with glee at the prospect of collapse. This is clearest in Orlov’s chapter. Orlov clearly thinks that the enormous successes of the modern world at feeding people are just a huge mistake:

“What piece of technological innovation do we imagine will enable this maize-dependent population to diversify their food sources and learn to feed themselves without the use of fossil inputs?” but ignores the possible but politically incorrect answer of genetic engineering and other new plant breeding techniques which could indeed help lower the resources needed to feed the growing population. He is right of course that there should be more to life than fast food and computer games, but forgets that for the majority of human existence there has been little more to life than a rather brutal struggle for survival.

Korowicz told me he would love to be wrong, and has no wish to lose the benefits of the modern world, but finds it hard to be optimistic. This seems reasonable enough but predicting the future is still really little more than a parlor game. Other contributors seem naive beyond belief in terms of what a low-energy world where we learn to say “enough” will actually be like- not one I think we would ever chose.

While there are valuable ideas on the economy and new ways of organizing businesses and community contained in this book, it unfortunately fails to provide a credible analyses of the predicament we are in, instead providing only a hop-scotch of doomer predictions of the future and new age pap.

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.

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 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

Reinventing Collapse- The Soviet Example and American Prospects

Dmitry Orlov

New Society 2008

When I met Bill Mollison at the International Permaculture Convergence in Croatia three years ago, all he wanted to talk about it seemed was cannibalism. He had traveled in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union and told me that, in Moscow, the joke was, if you go to the provinces, be careful what they serve you up for meat.

There had been widespread hunger and general hardship, resulting in a dramatic decline in life expectancy, an underclass of the homeless and unemployed and those unable to care for themselves, and a loss of hope in the future.

Despite this, things could get much worse in an even more energy dependent USA.

“Reinventing Collapse” is perhaps the most important and disturbing- as well as amusing- peak oil book you will read. A Russian emigre who had the opportunity to observe the collapse of the former Soviet Union from the vantage point of someone living in America, Orlov sees a similar process unfolding in an America all but oblivious to how quickly things may change there. Peak oil will result very soon in the vast nation beginning to fall apart at the seams as the lifeblood of its economy drains away with no backup available. Big systems like agriculture are so energy intensive that they will quickly collapse and there is barely any resilient, self-reliant communities left.

All the ingredients are present: looming oil shortages, severe foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget and ballooning foreign debt. Add to that a humiliating military defeat- Afghanistan for the Soviets, Iraq for America- and fear of crisis- Chernobyl in the East, New Orleans in the West- and collapse does not seem far away.

Written with the satirical wit of modern Voltaire, Orlov goes where few other peak oil writers have dared to go, and his sardonic Russian humor allows a stark look at American prospects through the eyes of someone who has witnessed collapse first hand. Snapshots and stories of what he witnessed in post-Soviet Russia make for colorful reading and help fill in some of the gaps in our imagination in thinking of what may happen as the oil begins to run short.

Dmitry Orlov was born and grew up in Russia before emigrating to the US. He visited the Soviet Union many times and was able to witness both the gradual and sudden changes that occurred there during the collapse of communism. On returning to the US in 1996 he felt he had witnessed enough to see that what had happened in his home country had little to do with the failings of Soviet ideology, but was a result of Superpower overshoot- and that a similar process is likely to occur in the US in the near future:

And so I came back to the United States expecting that the second superpower shoe would be dropping sometime soon, certainly within my lifetime, and the question for me became:How soon?”

Dmitri does not answer this question directly, but instead takes on a journey back and forth between the two political Giants, and compares the standing of each one to face collapse: housing, food, money, employment and transportation are some of the areas he looks at.

The prognosis is not good for the United States: in each of these categories, harsh though it was for the Russians, the US appears to stand worse- much worse. While in Russia, the communist system had provided resilient services in terms of housing and transportation, for example, Americans tend to live in sprawling suburbs which depend entirely on almost universal private car ownership to remain viable; as oil gets scarce driving will become less and less feasible and many people will find themselves stranded.

The public transport system in Russia was reliable and few people had cars; for the most part it continued to function; likewise, most people were able to continue to live in their Soviet-issue apartment blocks, while in the US, personal debt is very high and many will have their houses repossessed as the economy tumbles and unemployment rises. This could happen much quicker than it did in the Soviet Union since Private corporations in the US tend to rely on just- in- time inventories and will liquidate their assets quickly; state bodies would be able to hold out at least in some shape or form a little longer.

In Russia, many people had always gardened to provide some of their own food. while local officials considered bread riots to be career-ending and always kept some basic food stocks; in America, a nation grown obese and addicted to fast food will not be in great shape to start fending for itself when the transcontinental trucking service stops rolling.

A lot of people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared for what is coming next. If they had to start living like Russians they would blow out their knees. Most of them would not even try, but would simply wait, patiently or impatiently, for someone to come and feed them.

Orlov’s analysis of the different societies brings up some very interesting insights. Of particular interest to me as a teacher is his description of the education systems in Russia, and how it compares in the US. In Russia, he says, students were taught general principles which they were able to apply to any situation, and the college process involved learning how to research and learn what they needed to themselves; his experience in America was much different, where they fail to produce in four years what the Soviet system achieves in two:

“They fail to produce graduates who have adequate general knowledge, good command of their native language and the ability to acquire specialist assistance without any further assistance.”

So I feel partially vindicated in my approach to teaching permaculture- emphasize the core design principles and encourage people to use them to think for themselves and work out their own solutions to specific problems while using them.

“Reinventing Collapse” differs from most Peak Oil books not so much in its lack of analysis of the peak issue itself- there is an abundance of literature already available on this- but in the kind of advice he gives to mitigate the problems. Most entertainingly is in the satirical idea of the “Boondoggle”- a solution guaranteed to make the problem worse. Examples include corn-based ethanol, energy efficiency, hydrogen as responses to the fuel crisis. This is the kind of solution we should indeed be advocating, Orlov argues, as

“The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. if it pushes us down far enough, the economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground-floor window”.

Instead of injuncting us to grow more vegetables, learn home-preserving, form a local powerdown group, and starting a car-pool scheme, Orlov takes a distinctly off-beat view of the kinds of “preparations” we might need to take. Clearly based on his own experiences of human behavior during meltdown, Orlov focuses on survival skills such as being useful and helpful to others while successfully hiding anything you may have of value; of perhaps living in two places while convincing the neighbours at each that your permanent residence is the OTHER place; of adapting the body to hardship and through necessary discomfort:

“To eliminate the need for transportation, you need to cover significant distances on foot, carrying loads, until your body adjusts by developing denser bone, thicker cartilage, stronger muscles, and a more powerful cardiovascular system”.

Orlov prepares us for a world of shadows, a world where only the wily and most adaptable can survive, where the most important skills will be to find ways to appear as little as possible in competition with others for limited resources.

Orlov brings a dose of reality to the peak oil debate in a world that has left it too late to adapt without turmoil and conflict. In many parts of the world, it has already happened, and as my neighbour who lived in Belfast in the 1970s has told me, the speed with which civil society can break down and everyone becomes someones else’s’ potential meal ticket can leave even the most prepared reeling.

It happened in Russia and it will happen in America and everywhere else as well, to greater or lesser degrees. After reading this book, only the foolish would assume “It can’t happen here”.

Crash Course- Preparing for Peak Oil

by Zachary Nowak

Green Door Publishing 2008

Peak Oil is upon us, and collective action on a large scale seems unlikely. Technical solutions are chimerical. Each of us must decide what the future may hold and begin working on a plan to face that future.

When Zachary Nowak began drafting this essential resource list oil was pushing $70 a barrel. Now nearly double that, peak oil seems ever more of a reality and its consequences are being felt even in the oil-guzzling west with an growing sense of urgency: the party really is over and all the chickens are coming home to roost (to mix metaphors): food riots, truckers strikes, inflation, rising unemployment, bankruptcies and the looming shadow of global recession.

It increasingly looks as if the time to prepare may have been yesterday, but as the title suggests, a crash course of emergency and more long-term preparation is still possible and Nowak provides an entertaining primer in the basics.

We are on a collision course with a difficult reality, an inconvenient truth that is much more immediate than global warming. Crash Course is an accelerated tutorial, a study-at-a-distance workshop on what you need to know to survive the Peak.

Nowak’s take on peak oil is essentially: prepare for the worst because that is looking most likely; your preparations will still be useful if the world negotiates a successful transition, but this is looking less likely. The book is aimed at the homesteader or would-be -homesteader, but anyone would do well to consider the advice he gives as much of it would be useful in any situation. The author brings six years experience of living the survivalists’ good life to bear onhis subject.

The first part is not so much for peak oil aficionados who might like to skip straight to the resource lists in part two, but is nevertheless well worth a read for the concise and informed perspectives Zachary provides.

Importantly, he takes an ecological perspective of human evolution from hunter gatherer to farmer to industrial consumer, and this helps shape his subsequent responses: the energy return changed as our numbers grew and we had to work harder for our food. Early humans had a considerable impact on their local resources as they migrated across the globe, apparently hunting to extinction most of the mega fauna they encountered and exacting a toll on the resources their environment could supply. This may have resulted in part of the push towards agriculture which allowed more total energy to be harnessed in the form of cultivated crops and storage – but at a cost:

It may come as a surprise, but the average hunter-gatherer, to get his 2000 daily calories, expends about 500 calories, whereas an agriculturalist “spends” about 1200.

Nowak challenges us, therefore, to think again about the romantic idea of growing all our food in a home garden- on its own, it will be too hard; we need permaculture- perennial agriculture with tree crops and fruits- alongside foraging for wild plants to get by.

I would question however the assertion that few people even amongst experienced back-to-the-landers are unlikely to be producing currently more than 2% of their food- I know several people who appear to be growing maybe 90% of their own vegetables for example which I would have thought at a guess could be nearer 15-20% of their total food.

In the second chapter, Nowak outlines the three variables that will effect how the crisis unfolds and define the kind of responses we may need to make: the speed of the onset of crisis; its severity; and duration.

Here he challenges the idea of community powerdown projects like Transition Towns: they may not be able to bring about in time the kind of localised, sustainable future in small communities that we may wish for, nor may they be able to withstand a sharper and more severe collapse:

Most people who share this vision of the future see a near-seamless transition riding on the crest of Permaculture teach-ins and community supported agriculture, but what if the duration is longer? What if a Peak event creates chaos which takes some years to transition from an urban society to sustainable communities? Look at your neighbors and imagine them hoeing weeds and making biodiesel before you answer this question (or imagine them hungry, and scared of the no-more-streetlights dark).

It is a mistake, Zachary points out, to have too much faith in our ability to develop the necessary skills to sustain ourselves when all around us may be chaos.

Belief in progress and the idea that “technology can save us” or that humanity will just come through some how, what with our extraordinary ingenuity and so on, Zachary lists as some of the “dangerous axioms” that pervade especially American society and culture, but are strong elsewhere as well.

This leads to his very interesting observation that rational arguments do not really work that well.

People often ignore incontrovertible evidence and airtight arguments because the result conflicts with their belief systems.

Zachary tells us that his experience of trying to “change people’s minds”- to accept the error of our ways and the inevitability of a collapse of some kind- have been frustrating and perhaps not really time well spent. In many ways I can confirm this from my own experience- three years on from when I first saw “The End of Suburbia” and began film screenings and talks on Peak Oil, along with many others, there has been little to show in terms of any wide-scale awakening of the general populace, much less amongst our politcal leadership. Im not sure that I ever expected any- I always felt that even if one person present in a room was reached, and maybe able to set off on a more appropriate trajectory in terms of their priorities in life, then it was worth it.

Nevertheless, the point is well taken: the time for conferences and committees may be over. It is time to seriously consider much more immediate preparations on a personal and domestic level. These may still have a wider effect in leading by example and putting structures in place to help ride out the collapse.

In the third chapter we are taken through a range of different scenarios that could unfold as we ride down the slope of energy descent: “New Green Revolution”; “Powerdown USA”; “The Great Energy Depression”; and “The Crash”, each one as seen through the eyes of a student, a middle-aged father, and an older woman. This is the most useful and interesting part of the first section and takes us beyond simplistic one-size-fits-all and run-for-your-gun discussions. Collapse will be a very personal, tailor-made event for each of us and our experiences will vary widely according to location and degree of preparations, as well as the way in which the collapse unfolds.

The section finishes with a round-up of the issues so far: Powerdown for a slow transition or Survivalism or Collapse? While Zachary clearly feels the second is the most likely he points to failings in either extreme and advocates a “middle ground” which basically consists of preparing for the worst by focusing on personal preparations and expanding one’s self-reliance skills, while at the same time working with a community wherever possible.

…given my personal set of axioms (severe crisis, difficult to convince people), a summer spent planting fruit trees and experimenting with lactic fermentation is much more valuable.

The second part is essentially a resource list of books and websites worth collecting and researching which provide information you may need in an energy hungry future. .

He freely admits that the premise that you have money and resources for buying a smallholding and building a sustainable shelter is not in the reach of everyone and offers little solace for those who are not in as position to relocate.

It is a fascinating and comprehensive overview of many of the best resources available in the areas of the house; food production; and food preserving; followed by a more brief outline of resources for home medicine and disease prevention, survival skills, and tools, accompanied throughout with good practical advice. It could serve well as an outline for a permaculture course or peak oil survival training, and I found the references very useful even though I have been looking at a lot of the material for years.

The book ends with a discussion on the limits to the idea of preparing a refuge of some kind. As already said, it is not an option open to everyone. In answer to the common criticism that remote places with good supplies are an easy target for marauders, Zachary comments:

I have no response to this other than to say that I hope that it does not get that bad that quickly, or that it gets really bad really quickly, so desperate marauders diminish in numbers. Yes, that’s a horrible thing to say but I will not hide that I have pondered it.

It seems likely to me that the desperate are more likely to flee towards the cities, where there may be some level of organization at least for a while- soup kitchens perhaps. Historically, the country has faired worse that the towns in times of collapse, although parts of the big cities may become truly desperate places. Hungry people who turn up on your doorstep may be far more likely to offer to work for food, and be keen to learn all the skills you have been developing. People who are ahead of the game in terms of preparedness will be very useful to their community- perhaps the most important survival asset of all.

Peak Oil is upon us, and collective action on a large scale seems unlikely. Technical solutions are chimerical. Each of us must decide what the future may hold and begin working on a plan to face that future.

This book is an excellent place to start.

This fascinating and enlightening talk took us through the issue facing the world as the human species runs riot and reaches more than 6.7 billion in numbers- each one needing energy, food, water and other resources.

Beginning with a brief and poignant look at some of the many species which have become extinct in the last generation, Tim then showed us graphically just how extraordinary and recent has been the rise in human numbers since the advent first of farming and then even more dramatically with the harnessing of fossil energy.

A common view is that population will continue to grow albeit at a slower rate, with it leveling out at around 8-9 billion sometime in the next 30-40 years.

The question is, how will this be possible, given that in addition to species extinction on a scale comparable with only a few other pre-human events in earth’s history, the sheer impact of having this many people on just one planet has been so immense that the ability of the planet to sustain even such an inventive creature as the human at such levels has been seriously impaired to the point of collapse. Topsoil, forests, marine resources, fresh water, and the lifeblood of modern society, oil, upon which we depend for most of our food, are in terminal decline worldwide and have been for at least 50 years- and that is the case even without factoring the likely effects of climate change over the next couple of decades. With everything else going down, how will population continue to rise for very much longer?

Taking us deeper into the darker side of human nature and experience, Tim then gave us a history lesson: famines have been a common occurrence throughout human history in most parts of the world. When people go hungry they may begin to act in ways thought barbaric by modern standards, with cannibalism being one common response found in perhaps all human societies when put to the test of starvation or survival.

These were stark reminders of how unusual the lives we in the rich west have lead have been. The past couple of generations of affluence and high energy lifestyles that the minority world has lead has created an illusion that it will continue forever, that this relatively cosseted and at times luxurious lifestyle perhaps is in some way our birthright. We have forgotten that no society is immune from collapse. Our escape from the daily or even seasonal pre-occupation of most of humanity- the daily quest for food and shelter- is but a mirage, a temporary respite from what must sometime be our destiny to contend with once again.

That time may not be far away. The extraordinary rise in oil prices and the possible peaking of world food supplies has lead to an escalation of hunger riots and export bans from around the world and in many cases in countries which the west is dependent on the put bread on our tables. With world food reserves at an all time low and the economy nose-diving, how long before we in West Cork have to deal with shortages or even hunger?

Tim presents us with two possible scenarios: on the one hand, Easter Island- which had devastated its natural resources by the time Europeans arrived in the 16th Century and reverted to a much simpler type of society than that which had been able to create the famous statues after its population had crashed; on the other, the extraordinary society of Tikopia which has retained much of its natural vegetation and biodiversity despite a high population density at least in part because of its unique policy of population control.

The message is clear and Tim left us to discuss the big question: will we have the wisdom, the leadership and the will to control our population- or suffer the fate of Easter Island and the many other socieites which have collapsed after over-shooting their resource base?

A lively discussion followed.

“Hands up who has got a months’ store of food?” “I wouldnt tell you if I had!” “Hands up who has 3 months’ store? 6 months’…? ” “Hands up who’s got a gun!”

One woman stated she had known about this since the 1960s and had made a choice not to have children. Several others seemed convinced that we will be inevitably over-run by millions of urban refugees from neighboring countries and further afield who will make a beeline for the abundant homesteads of west Cork and eat all our veggies.

Not everyone was in complete agreement with Tim’s analyses; for a few at least the information appeared to be new and perhaps shocking.

Some felt Tim should take his message to local politicians, maybe we can still effect change at the government level. Others felt this would be futile- we really have shown no ability historically to control our population and now it is too late.

I am inclined to agree. Community-based actions are of course the ideal; but we have to ensure that individually or on the neighborhood scale we have ourselves emergency provisions. This is something we can do something about for relatively small investment. It is certainly, futile to concern ourselves with the starving masses who may come to steal our food- this is something we have little control over.

Instead, we should discuss ways in which we can support each other in making whatever preparations we can. At this stage, this kind of personal preparation is more important than putting energy into a community where there is little if any appreciation of the extremely vulnerable situation we find ourselves in.

We cannot become like Tikopia any time soon, but Tim should be congratulated in putting together such a challenging presentation delivered with compassion to really make us think more deeply about the reality of the human condition and how it effects us on a very personal level.

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.

The discussion of the “Back to Nature” series has been looking at developmental models of human behaviour, with a view to seeing what light, of any, such approaches can shed on the perplexing question:

Why do so many people seem to be in denial, or to be unable to grasp the reality that the human ecological footprint has far exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth, and that energy depletion, climate change and general environmental degradation will inevitably result in the end of our current way of life?

In this concluding part of the series we will have a look at some of the general implications of this model for achieving sustainabiltiy and try to find an answer to the question: Can we really go Back to nature?

The Dawn of Global Consciousness

To actually perceive as central to ones own fate that of the entire planet is not something we are born doing, but rather something we must evolve into.

For most of human history, the fate of the Earth as a whole has not been of immediate concern to people. Much more important have been to daily tasks of feeding and nurturing within the tribe or community. Often this will have involved competition for survival with both the natural world and other human societies.

In todays’ world, the uneven stratification of groups and individuals displaying different values ensures that, even with sufficient material means to do so, not every one will care enough, or understand enough, the human impact on the planet to do anything about it. Our brains have evolved to deal with the well-being of kith and kin, short-term goals, local, parochial concerns and “traditional” values which, by definition have been held for the longest in human history.

In modern times, many of these values have been swept away with the rapid change in lifestyle caused by the massive influx of cheap fossil energy in the west.

One of the bi-products of this oil age has been the availability of enough surplus wealth to allow millions of people to pursue knowledge. This and the extraordinary new insights brought us by science- the most important being evolution and quantum theory- has opened the doorway to new ways of thinking, new perceptions of the universe and our place in it that had not previously been possible.

What the developmental model shows us is that it is unlikely that everyone in any given culture will share this ecological consciousness, because it represents a novel and highly developed stage. There will always of necessity be people at the earlier stages.

In the early part of the 21st Century, just as we have evolved a consciousness capable of understanding the systemic nature of the earth and the biosphere and how we are intimately connected to this system, so did our awareness that we are in fact destroying the ability of the earth to sustain life- including our own.

But as this reality dawned, so the next stage was already in the making- the understanding of the evolution of this understanding. If we want to understand hoe to respond to the state of the external world of Gaia- the whole Planet System which includes humanity and our impact on it- we will have to understand the inner processes of conscious development. From this standpoint, the question becomes not, “How can we heal the Planet?” but “How can we create the conditions for development so that a greater proportion of the population have the inner motivation to care about the Planet?”

The Rising Sun of Integral Consciousness?

“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, Boomeritis

Whereas all the earlier stages of human consciousness tend to compete with each other and identify with their own beliefs which they hold t be the most appropriate, a dramatic transformation occurs at Yellow, which is the first “meme” to recognize that its perception of the world is a result of a developmental process. It is not just that world views are relative and contextual as is held by the post-modern Green stage, but that they are sequential, each new stage transcending but including the previous ones.

Yellow holds its views less tightly, recognizing that there may be yet deeper stages ahead, that the evolutionary process is not yet finished. Uniquely amongst the memes, Yellow recognizes the importance of all the stages and works to meet the psychological needs of each stage.

Traditionalist (Blue) give priority to family, traditional values, the community, religion. While very resistant to change, sustainability will become an issue for this stage when it sees environmental issues impacting on the health and well-being of its community structures.

Modernists- Orange- are driven more by individualistic priorities of competition and materialism, and may also be swayed by environmental issues if they are perceived to be a threat to those goals;

Post-modernists – Green- very often represent political movements towards sustainability, but often are perceived as a threat to Blue traditions or Orange economic order while at the same time failing to acknowledge that Green Values can only emerge from those two previous stages.

What values do we need to evolve for a Sustainable Future?

One of Wilber’s great insights which I still find useful is ihis conception of the pre/trans fallacy. This refers to the common New Age belief that pre-rational beliefs are in somehow “superior” to post-rational beliefs; that somehow science and rationality are causing the destruction of the world. The confusion arises because, to the post-modern mind, anything “non-rational” can look better than the simplistic, mechanistic application of science that is driving the modern world. Wilber claims however that it is not rationality that is to blame but materialism- the base, primitive obsession with material goods and well-being that continues long after our basic needs have been met. Instead, he urges us to consider the inner world of our own consciousness- the psychological realm, which is the starting point for any motivation for change. What we have seen however that it is the moral stage of development that determines behaviour; “science” is a tool which can be used for good or evil.

“We have become like technological giants and moral pygmies” Einstein.

The difficulty is, science has created a technology which in the wrong hands can be highly destructive; and yet if we want to move on, one thing we will need to take with us is the scientific understanding of the world.

Science and the benefits of science are so taken for granted in todays’ world that it is hard to understand how differently things must have looked in the past.

Carl Sagan has suggested that when the ancient Greeks first flirted with the rationalist method of inquiry, it didn’t have the power to become more influential because they did not know enough- there was not the ability to undergo the research and discoveries that the modern world has achieved at that time; while nowadays, science is misunderstood and treated with suspicion by many of its beneficiaries because we know to much. A lot of the insights of science are complex and seem far removed from our everyday experience.

The role that science has played in consciousness development cannot be underestimated; its revelations are of most significance because they are in many cases counter-intuitive.

Our intuition tells us the sun goes around the earth, that the earth is flat, but science has revealed that theses things are not so. Beyond the perceptions of the senses and of our emotional interpretation of them, science has revealed- particularly through the lenses of evolution and quantum theory- a universe far more bizarre and mysterious that the imagination born by any superstition or religion. In the scientific method, we have a method to inquire into the nature of reality, and to check our perceptions against our own fallibility.

Science has also given us an extraordinarily intricate view of the world and the systems that sustain life. In particular, the recent contribution that climate science has made to understanding earth systems and ecological processes will not be something we should consider leaving behind. We will need to take this understanding with us into a sustainable future.

In addition, we will need to understand a longer timescale than that of our own lifetimes. Understanding our place in space and time through the telling of the universe Story may be one of the important educational devices to help us understand this.

We will also, as Dr. Albert Bartlett has explained, come to comprehend the exponential function: how change can take place and processes be set in motion that may turn our world upside down before we even have had a chance to notice.

Fundamentally, we will need to understand the primary role of energy in driving natural systems, human economies and even human consciousness. While Wilber has given me many valuable insights, he seems to have almost completely missed the primary role that energy has to play in this story. Orange, Green and Yellow values (if they are to emerge) could not have had the influence they have had without the recent period of cheap fossil energy.

To understand the primacy of energy we must turn to Howard Odum, who writings formed one of the precursors to Holmgren’s work and permaculture.

“Only when sources of energy are newly available and rich do people feel free to do what they want as individuals. The freedom to make many choices exists during only a brief period. After that, competition among people and methods limits choices to those that make use of energy most effectively. Americans, along with the rest of the world, are coming out of a century when there was an excess of energy and much freedom of choice was possible. We are moving into a period characterized by less energy” Odum,H.- Energy Basis for Man and Nature 1976

We are left now with an interesting question: will the new forms of consciousness that the oil age have created become influential enough for us to safely navigate the downward curve of energy descent?

What will happen to consciousness as energy becomes scarcer? Will we find new forms of consciousness to help us deal with a low-energy world based on Odum’s understanding? Or will we regress into earlier forms of consciousness based on tribal rivalries and superstition?

One thing is for sure: this new, ecological and scientific understanding of humans and nature demonstrate that we cannot go back to nature. In fact, the very idea is redundant, for we have never separated from the essential energy transactions of nature in the first place. Just like the classic study of hares and lynx’s populations rising and falling in tandem with each other as predator and prey, our populations and behaviours are also determined to a large extent by energy availability.

We are in this fundamental respect no different from any other species. The separation from nature is illusory. Like bacteria in a Petri dish, given enough energy we will keep consuming until demand exceeds supply.

Uniquely amongst species we have developed evolutionary advantages- opposable thumbs and the neo-cortex- that have permitted us to out-compete everything else and enter a state of unprecedented overshoot.

In this respect, the reality of our place in nature becomes clear. We are not destroying the environment because of some separation from nature; rather, we are destroying it because we are a part of nature. Given the same evolutionary advantages, any other species would most likely behave in the same way.

It is this fundamental reality that is what being part of nature really means. The only question is, will our consciousness evolution- our unique ability to understand theses larger processes- be sufficient to lead us into a sustainable future?

from the latest edition of Sustainability Magazine

by Graham Strouts www.zone5.org

“It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.” ~Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Population is a sensitive subject. It is not only political leaders who are reluctant to address it; most environmentalists also feel it is quite beyond their remit in working towards sustainability. It is often seen as an unmentionable subject, something only touched upon by racists and xenophobes –which is exactly why environmentalists need to engage in the debate.

For example, piecemeal responses to climate change which encourage individuals to save energy by changing light-bulbs or turning off appliances will likely be more than outweighed simply by the population increase. Simply stated, more people = more carbon emitters, but this obvious fact is entirely missing from most public debate about the issue.

Global over- population is becoming more and more pressing every day and needs to take centre stage alongside resource depletion and climate change as one of the great issues of our time.

Two Sides of the Human Footprint

The environmental crisis is essentially a result of the total human footprint on the Earth’s systems. This is a combination of both population and consumption rates. There is just one planet, and its ability to sustain life is being sorely tested by both our lifestyle and our numbers.

The world is divided like never before, polarized between an over-consuming Western minority and an over-populated poor majority, including 2 billion on the bread line.

According to the Worldwatch Institute, the 12 percent of the world’s population that lives in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60 percent of private consumption spending, while the one-third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent. At the same time, the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet Report reveals that humans already consume 20 percent more natural resources than the earth can produce.

Conventional environmental wisdom holds that as the poor increase their standards of living, especially the rights and education of females, they will naturally reduce their birth rates, as is happening in the West.

Unfortunately, while in some parts of the world this is happening, in others increased affluence is leading to a baby-boom first- as happened in Saudi Arabia over the last 20 years and is happening in Ireland now as people (perhaps belatedly) respond to the feel-good factor of the Celtic Tiger. Reduction of per capita consumption in some countries has been outweighed by sheer increase in numbers in others.

Immigration from poor to rich countries will naturally lead to those people increasing their consumption levels as they increase their economic opportunities, while in many countries increasing the population is still considered a good thing even if they are already consuming far more resources than is sustainable.

So the debate between those who feel we should challenge the rich world to reduce its pollution and consumption before asking the poor world to reduce its population is a false one: both must happen if we are to reduce the human footprint.

A Rising Tide

It took nearly the whole of human history for the world’s population to reach the first 1 billion human beings. This occurred around 1850, some 50 years after English economist Thomas Robert Malthus first warned that food production could not keep up with population growth.

The second billion was reached soon after the World War I, and by the mid 1950s, there were 3 billion of us. Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968 when world population stood at 3.5 billion. It had risen to over 4.5 billion when China began its policy of one child per family. At the turn of the century, the 6 billion mark was passed. The world’s population now stands at approximately 6.7 billion, and it is forecast to rise to 9.2 billion by 2050. The ecological and human impact of such an increase is almost unimaginable.

Each year, some 80 million more people are added to the planet, each one requiring food, shelter and clothing; each one with a legitimate right to increase their standard of living and seek a better material life; and each one likely themselves to reproduce and thus continue to contribute to the overall human impact on the planet.

Growth through the Oil Age

The role of fossil fuels in the exponential increase in human numbers over the last 150 years cannot be over-stated.

While for most of human history, total numbers had been restricted by much the same effects of nature that prevent the over-expansion of any other species, the exploitation of fossil fuels has let the genie out of the bottle.

In particular, oil has allowed humanity to cheat natural selection. It has fuelled the machinery and farming practices of modern agriculture, dramatically increasing produce yields, temporarily delaying the Malthusian prediction of famine. There are, however, warning signs that this Golden Age may be coming to an end.

As scientists battle to stay one step ahead of pests and viruses that could wipe out the monocultures that industrial farming favours, environmental destruction and climate change is reducing the amount of arable land globally, even as the world’s population continues its inexorable rise.

As we stand at the point of Peak Oil, the prospect of dwindling energy supplies looms. We can only assume that Mother Nature will step in to correct any imbalance in the Earth’s carrying capacity that fossil fuels have created. Our population will certainly peak and decline within the next 50 years, but we may still have a choice as to how this process takes place: -will this be from a series of famines and other catastrophic events? Or will we be able to move towards a truly sustainable culture that is able to regulate its population as well as its consumption?

The Post-modern delusion

The short era of cheap fossil fuels that has emerged in the last 150 years has created whole societies in the West that have been able to rid themselves of many of the worst aspects of hunger and poverty, and provide welfare for all. This has allowed a culture to emerge with a concern for the plight of those less fortunate. This concern, however, has carried with it a tragic and hopeless delusion: that goodwill can bring peace and prosperity to all regardless of the size of the population.

This ideology has fuelled decades of programmes of aid to Africa and other famine-torn regions of the world. This goodwill aid has entirely failed to meet the goal of eradicating hunger. This is partially due to the fact that the population continues to increase in these regions.

According to one UN report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2005, the number of undernourished people in the world declined only slightly from roughly 824 million in 1990-92 to around 815 million in 2000-02. The West must face the bitter reality that the provision of famine relief aid in the absence of population control strategies will only lead to more starving people.

. What Can be Done?

“Mounting population pressure does have a potential safety valve: recognition and rational analysis of the danger, leading to remedial action (birth control worldwide), but for half a century the valve has been tightly closed by a taboo. The subject is so ‘sensitive’ that few people are prepared to face it. Birth control is, however, humankind’s best hope for a less painful future.”
~William Stanton, The Rapid Rise in Human Population 1750-2000

Environmental educators and activists can help create a more sustainable world by addressing the world’s population crisis. Practical actions can be taken. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Start the conversation. Everyone interested in sustainability needs to incorporate the population issue into their work, however challenging this may be. If population is not considered, environmental work in other areas may be futile.

2) Inform and educate others. Increased understanding of the issues surrounding population growth will lead to a culture in which everyone recognises the need to voluntarily limit human numbers by having less children, creating a sustainable population with a reasonable standard of living for all. Coercive population control strategies are not helpful.

3) Support relevant organisations. The Optimum Population Trust (http://www.optimumpopulation.org), for example, offers educational material, and it runs campaigns for greater awareness around sustainable population issues. Those who wish to support charities in the Third World should consider Marie Stopes International (http://www.mariestopes.org.uk/), which works to provide better birth-control options and sexual and reproductive health resources in the developing world.

References

William Catton (1980) Overshoot

Paul and Anne Ehrlich (1990)- The Population Explosion

William Stanton (2000) The Rapid Rise in Human Population 1750-2000