7 Billion Minds, 7 Billion Hearts

Saturday’s conference was entitled “Can Ireland Feed Itself?” and included an interesting mix of speakers on a variety of (mainly) food related topics:

The conference was opened by Lord Puttnam, who quoted Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest and placed great emphasis on technology and education which would be needed to rejuvenate a world which had seen incomes reduced all over the world for the past two decades, and to reverse two centuries of self- destructive behaviour.

That seemed a bit extreme to me. For many, incomes have certainly been increasing up until a couple of years ago; I moved to Ireland around then soon after the start of the “Celtic Tiger”. It’s all over now of course but from an income point of view, much of Asia and elsewhere also seems to have done rather well.

As for the past two centuries, a section of humanity has been enriching itself partly through the exploitation of fossil fuels, and in many ways things have improved for humanity, with gains in medicine for example; I dont think you could call it all self-destructive- unless of course you are expecting imminent global collapse.

In this paper called Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade? the authors Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, et al show clearly that human well-being has been increasing in the past generation or more, the question being whether it is at the cost of long-term sustainability of the environment.

Next up was Swithin Goodbody of the Food and Agriculture of the United Nations. Swithin is an agricultural scientist originally from near Schull. He was the most interesting of the speaker for me, discussing a lot of issues I have been reading about lately, especially hunger in Africa.

He pointed out, in contrast to Puttnam, that until the 19th Century most people were poor; since then large numbers of the world’s population have experienced unprecedented wealth and levels of choice. Apart from parts of Africa, where crop yields can be as little as 10% that achieved in the US, in the case of maize for example, or only a quarter in the case of Africa’s best crop, sorghum.

Swithin emphasized the need to get improved technology to the poor, the barriers being corruption and in some areas conflict, but also often inappropriate technology and poor infrastructure. He also emphasized the need to increase the farm size- most peasant farms are less than 1 hectare in size, which he said were too small to cope with set-backs. This is echoed in this article in which the writer argues:

The root problem is this: The world’s poorest countries remain attached to the small, subsistence-level family farm. At a moment when African and Asian countries should be consolidating their land holdings into sustainable, high-yield agricultural businesses, there is a persistent hold on the least effective form of farming. Governments, such as India’s Congress Party, are devoted to keeping people on the land. A wide range of misguided aid organizations and ecological groups sustains the myth that small is good. It isn’t: In farming, small is deadly.

Apparently many NGOs work to keep farms small by adopting a policy of only helping the “poorest of the poor” which keeps small farmers on the land, but without improving their productivity or helping them out of poverty.

Goodbody also spoke about population pressure, which he saw as still a serious problem, with fertility rates of 2.6 in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, which would lead to a doubling by 2035, and he argued that food aid and and increasing the food supply would only serve to increase the population further.

This view I found surprising. I put it to him after the event that more investment in science in agriculture was needed, as Paalberg argues, but he was not convinced that was the issue; Pearce claims fertility rates in Africa also are trending downwards and expects the working age population in Ethiopia for example to peak soon after 2040.

Kamal Mouzawak, chef and food visionary from Beirut was next, unfortunately I have no notes from his talk;

Ian Dempsey CEO of the West Cork Development Partnership spoke next, mainly about supporting local food producers and the West Cork Fuschia brand;

then came Carlow cattle and sheep farmer Derek Deane, who spoke of how Europe has behaved since WW2 as if famine will never come here again, but, referring to the sharp rise in the price of wheat following the drought in Ukraine, the danger now returns.

He was highly critical of GATT and the WTO, arguing they should take agriculture out of the WTO, and Ireland should grow food for itself. He also lambasted supermarkets, claiming they were “taking over the world” and that only the primary producer should be able to label their own food. Very little Irish food is consumed here he said because of confusion – food is being labeled “Irish” even if it has been produced somewhere else but processed here for example. Deane strongly argued for a more self-reliant Ireland, and felt multi-nationals also have a strangle hold on the developing world.

An alternative view is given by Matt Ridley who writes here that

“Today, by contrast, a poor harvest in Russia is going to lead to imports, not starvation, and you can already feel the impact of that demand for imports in world wheat prices. If speculators are guessing that there is more of this to come and are bidding up wheat prices further, then good for them. They are accelerating the planting of more wheat, the substitution of other grains and so on — they are thus lowering the eventual peak in prices.”

Most countries keep back enough grain for themselves and relatively little is actually traded internationally anyway; price spikes because of regional effects like droughts tend to be temporary. That is of course the downside of localising and self-sufficiency: Ridley would argue such a strategy would create far more food insecurity.

Local food artisan Giana Ferguson, Director of Gubbeen Farmhouse Products,and a Founder of Slow Food Ireland spoke next, about the struggle they had as small cheese makers to meet all the new regulations that were being imposed on dairy products soon after they started.

Gubbeen is a wonderful example of a small family business of artisan food producers, very much playing a role in keeping West Cork as a region of gourmet excellence and showing how to live well from a small farm, but I dont see them as really about localisation of local food self-sufficiency; rather, they run a serious business and would certainly not wish to see a decline in their overseas sales, especially to America where Irish speciality cheeses are extremely popular.

Next was the CEO of Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM) Whooley who began by clearly stating his message that we should eat more fish. Well he would say that wouldnt he, but he made a strong case that there is huge scope for increasing the fishing industry in Ireland, although much of the growth would be in farmed fish. This caused some controversy, as he was asked about the sustainability of fish farming in general, and the wisdom of pursuing an industry in which wild stocks are crashing so badly, but he claimed that there are still many viable species which allow room for growth.

One thing he mentioned that will be if interest to permaculturalists was the potential he sees in small-scale perch farming which can be done easily in ponds dug out of poor boggy land.

The final speaker was Rob Heyland, actor turned script writer, who has of late taken it upon himself to give talks on the state of the economy and the failure of capitalism Heyland argues the only way out of the banking crisis is complete default and the reversion to self-sufficiency. I found his arguments leas than convincing however, especially as he seems to have lifted several of his quotes about how the money system works from Zeitgeist or similar conspiracy-type film. You can read the whole of Zeitgeist debunked line by line here if you are interested.

All in all an enjoyable and well-organised event which generated some interesting discussions. I’m not sure it really addressed its own topic however; no doubt Ireland could feed itself if we all reverted to subsistence farmers, but it will probably be much easier if we keep trading, which was clearly the agenda of half the speakers at least. Whatever changes may be needed to the financial system are another matter.

In any case, I hardly see us starving over here, we are just too wealthy. If you want to know what slow food is really like, probably best to ask an African peasant. There is nothing wrong with moving or living in West Cork and growing your own food, or some of it, and the artisan food industry- now worth $75billion according to Giana Ferguson (can that be true?!)- is great for small farmers with niche markets, and is a great way of promoting traditional skills, a sense of place and regional identity, and building community, but I dont think retreating into parochial self-sufficiency is the answer to anything, not is it really what anyone wants.

We wont run out of food here. You can always get chips and garlic mayo at Julie’s Diner in Bantry, and they are open late at weekends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malthus was wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blood and Soil and the Rise of the Greens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demographic Patterns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review: Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand

Atlantic Books 2009 316pp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Bell

Luath Press 2009

Hardback 208 pp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For an alternative view, Dmitri Orlov, author of the acclaimed Reinventing Collapse puts the case for sudden collapse very well in his recent post The Slope of Dysfunction

What, then, of our canonical Peak Oil scenario, which is that global crude oil (and natural gas condensate) production will rise to a lofty peak sometime soon, and then gently waft down, over several decades, until, by the year 2050 or some other distant date, less than half as much oil will be produced globally? Ever eager to present a hopeful vision, I will say here and now that I believe this scenario to be entirely plausible… but it requires alien intervention. As Russian oil production was saved by foreigners, so Earthling oil production must be be saved by aliens from outer space.

Orlov’s basic premise is that sudden collapse can only be mitigated once a country’s indigenous oil has peaked by making up the difference with increased imports, something that will not be possible after global oil peak.

The Soviet Union provides a historical model for this-

“There, production declined 43% between 1987 and 1996. The decline was arrested and reversed by the introduction of foreign investment and technology”.

It could be argued that the Soviet Union is not a good model because of other reasons such as its political system, but in fact, as he shows in his book, parts of the West, especially North America, are much less well placed to withstand abrupt declines in oil supply.

If Orlov is correct, our efforts at creating Energy Descent Plans and Transition Strategies would be better spent flashing SOS signals up into the night sky or hanging around those crop circles in the hope their alien authors will return with a few barrels of crude.

It will be very hard to mitigate any such sudden collapse, but Orlov links oil peak directly with financial collapse, which he predicts will be followed by political collapse, and then social collapse; these scenarios could be just around the corner, judging by the gathering speed of financial and political decline.

All is not lost however, and to read Orlov’s unique and side-ways look at how we might prepare (and how we might not) essential reading is here in his adress to last month’s Feasta Conference in Dublin Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation.

See especially slide no. 19 on this post “Collapse” or “Transition” ? for his sardonic view of the Transition movement.

Slide no. 2 helps explain why I take issue with Chamberlin’s views on population in my review of The Transition Timeline. On paper of course it may be possible to argue as he does that if we all did the right thing and reduced our consumption to, say, half of what it is now- the level of energy consumption of Cuba- reducing population might not be so urgent; in reality, it is incredibly difficult for us to voluntarily reduce our energy consumption. Most people living at the level of Cubans would love to increase their consumption and have an easier life!

I probably have a lower energy cosumption thatn average for ireland (not by much, mind you) and earn my living teaching how to reduce consumption, but the one thing I could do right now that would make a significant difference would be to get rid of the van, something that is not currently an option for financial reasons.

See also the comment from Andy Wilson at the end of the Transition Timeline review -we may be heading for just of 1/10 energy availability by 2040 which would be closer to the per capita consumption of India, not Cuba. Great for a gap year back-packing trip, but not something most of us would choose voluntarily no matter how motivated we are.

Book Review:

The Transition Timeline

for  a local, resilient future

Shaun Chamberlin

Forward by Rob Hopkins

190 pp pbk

Chelsea Green 2009

The follow-up to Rob Hopkins’ seminal The Transition Handbook uses the method of “backcasting” from an envisioned  future from which we create a timeline of how the transition to a more local, resilient world unfolded.

The first part goes through four different scenarios presented as “cultural stories” roughly along the same lines as the scenarios we are familiar with from Holmgren’s Future Scenarios, this time under the headings:

-Denial

-Hitting the Wall

-The Impossible Dream

-The Transition Vision

The transition approach is to look at these possible futures in terms of the cultural stories that we tell ourselves, the idea being that we have the power to make our own cultural stories and thereby empower ouselves to guide the future to a more desirable outcome:

Human Nature is the ability to choose our own path

The second part of the book takes a deeper look at the Transition Vision in the five areas of population and demographics; Food and Water; Electricity and Energy; travel and transport; Health and Medicine.

Each of these sections presents a thorough and well-researched overview of the current situation, ending with a Timeline of how we reached a more desirable situation by 2027.

At the back of the book Chamberlin states that “This book has not attempted to quantify the energy/emissions footprint of each aspect of the Transition Vision, but this represents a critical avenue for further work.”

Unfortunatley, this lack of analysis seriously compromises the usefulness of the book, as the projected scenarios may be widely implausible or purely aspirational.

Many other authors have put work into this already, which could have been drawn from, a recent example being the Mayo Energy Audit, which also uses a scenario format, but successfully puts values and figures on the scenarios.

The population chapter, is to be lauded for highlighting an issue often neglected in the environmental movement; however, the author falls into the same trap that others tend to by visiting the “population or consumption” debate over which is the bigger issues:

…population is not (as some claim) the single most crucial environmental issue. It is clearly has a significant effect as a multiplier, but our chosen way of life and ecological footprint are bigger contributors to climate change, energy resource depletion and the other challenges facing us today and in the near future

As I have written previously

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-verse.

The difficulty I have with making population/consumption an either/or issue is that it simplifies the challenges we have have as a species; I believe we are disposed by our evolution to increase both our population AND our consumption- see the recent discussion by Nate Hagens on environmental psychology.

It is the interplay between demographics and the natural impulse to increase our standard of living that needs to be explored here.

What would be essential to make this section work would be some kind of analysis of what a reasonable standard of living might be- it is not much use talking vaguely of reducing population without some assessment of what a sustainable level would be, which must be gauged against an acceptable level of consumption (I suggested Cuba, at about half the per capita energy use of Europe as a starting point in the above post.)

The food section gives an excellent analysis of the predicament, importantly drawing our attention to issues such as the huge “water footprint” of our food, particularly in meat and dairy- Fred Pierce in “When the Rivers Run Dry” calculates that the equivalent of 20 Nile rivers  move from developing to developed countries each year- a stunning image of the sustainability of our food production at present.

The transport section proposes a lift-Hiker system using GPS and mobile phone technology, similar to that of “the Smart Jitney” proposed by Pat Murphy in Plan C.

I particularly like the notion  of “hypermiling” which by 2018 has become a fashionable trend as it becomes socially unacceptable to waste resources.

The Health and Medicine section begins well by highlighting the oil dependency of the NHS, and presents the astonishing fact that while by far the largest cost of treating injuries is road accident related, the NHS itself generates as much as 5% of all UK transport!

Issues such as the challenge new diseases being brought by climate change, the inefficiency of big scale health services, and even euthanasia are mentioned; as well as a comparison with Cuba, which appears to have at least as healthy a population as the UK’s but with far less energy dependence.

But then, in the Timeline section, we read:

What used to be known as ‘alternative’ medicines were embraced, as practices like herbalism, acupuncture, massage and osteopathy became core pillars [my emphases] of public healthcare, with a big investment in teaching these skills leading to a blossoming of independent regulated practitioners in most communities.

Oh nooooo! Quackery! This paragraph is deeply concerning, betraying the New Age and pseudoscientific influences in the transition movement.

What is known as “alternative” medicine is simply medicine for which there is no good evidence of effectiveness; certainly, not all “conventional” medicine is evidence-based either, but new-Agers tend to use this as an excuse for throwing out the need for  evidence altogether. Often these therapies are based on dubious or discredited “ancient wisdom” which simply has not been born out by the discoveries of modern science. It is modern medical research and science which has lead to an increase in life expectancy, a decline in infant mortality etc..

Now, certainly the problems with modern medicine are manifold, in particular the over-dependence on oil, horrific levels of waste and a level of corruption amongst Big Pharma. None of this is evidence that alternatives like acupuncture work, while many repeated, verifiable blind trials indicate they do no better than placebo.

All these issues and their many nuances are discussed brilliantly in Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science and I urge you to read it if you are of an alternative disposition when it comes to health care.

The fact is, some remedies work, some don’t; some herbs work, some dont; there is absolutely no way of knowing for sure without large scale clinical trials of the sort the medical establishment does routinely, and which the alternative sector has apparently no knowledge nor interest in.

The curious thing here is that the whole basis of the Transition Movement is based on the verifiable science of Climate Change and Peak Oil; but when it comes to quack medicine, the evidence offered is as useless as that offered by climate change deniers- personal anecdotes along the “it worked for me” kind and pseudoscience.

Transition founder Rob Hopkins provides some startling examples of this on recent comments to Zone5.

In the discussion after this post for example, he comments:

“I have had a great deal of acupuncture in my life, I think it is extraordinary. Had some on a painful back the other week, worked a treat. Acupuncture is based on many centuries of the observation of subtle phenomena.”

Many will say the same or similar, but anecdotes do not constitute evidence; if they did we would have to accept that global warming is not happening on the basis of it being rather cool today for the time of year. I’m only slightly exaggerating – climate change deniers do routinely use the same kind of reasoning to dismiss the science of anthropogenic climate change; and even more so, they point out the failings of Big Science in general terms as a way of discrediting evidence- it is corrupt, in the pockets of the government and corporations etc. “therefore we can dismiss the evidence.”

Even more worrying, Rob goes on to say:

“None of my children have ever been vaccinated, nor have they ever had any antibiotics. They are strong and healthy (touch wood).”

The irresponsibility and naivete of this statement is shocking- the reason his kids have not got measles is likely to be either just luck, or because everyone else’s kids have been vaccinated. (Unvaccinated children may also put at risk certain categories of children who cannot safely be vaccinated for medical reasons, or who may be more susceptible in the event of catching measles.)

Let’s be clear here: the evidence for the safety and effectiveness of the MMR vaccine is just as clear as the evidence for man-made climate change; the kind of thinking that refutes one is pretty much the same as that which is used to discredit the other. By throwing in “alternative medicine” in such an uncritical way Chamberlin panders to the  reactionary and retarded element of the New Age meme which believes mainstream medicine is all a con designed to make money and poison us, and alternatives can be uncritically accepted as “safe, holistic alternatives”.

In fact, they are expensive lifestyle products which can in no way replace modern medicine other than as being different forms of TLC- Tender Loving Care. Nothing wrong with that, but they need to be seen as such and drop the false claims of being able to cure specific diseases.

And God help us if they are to become a “core pillar” of public healthcare.

Partly as a result of the kind of delusional thinking expressed by Rob in the above comment, the UK is now facing the worst measles epidemic in decades. It is about time the Transition Movement took a stand on this and put out good information on the subject.

Not only that, but by promoting alternative medicine in this way, Chamberlin is actually undermining his arguments for understanding climate change and Peak Oil. This is all the more ironic since the book covers the need for evidence on these two issues very thoroughly, plenty of graphs and stats and quotes such as that of Daniel Moynihan who said “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts” – a thought that proponents of alternative therapies would do well to meditate on for some time.

The Cuban example is really useful but although their state health service has embraced complimentary therapies including Homeopathy, there is little indication that this has become anything like a core pillar, the success of the Cuban situation being more likely a result of following evidence-based medicine to a high standard, putting in sufficient resources, and focussing on community care and prevention.

Energy Descent Planning

Rob Hopkins  writes the next section, Timelines and Energy Descent Plans which is an account of community planning tools and “visioning” processes for changing the communities’ cultural story to the more agreeable Transtion Vision.

An EDAP (Energy Descent Action Plan) is, he says “as much as anything, a new story for the community…

We often stress in Transition that we need to create visions of a post-carbon world so enticing, so compelling and attractive that people leap out of bed in the morning determined to dedicate their lives to its implementation. An EDAP is an embodiment of this.

“Determined to dedicate their lives” does sound a bit cultish and scary to me, and not a little evangelical; however, this chapter concerns itself only with the visioning processes, again with barely a mention of the need to actually count and quantify energy demand and supply; I understand that the movement is working on a more detailed follow-up to the Timeline on how to write an Energy Descent Plan, but it is a little disappointing that after two publications and several years, Transition has not even produced a few pages on basic energy literacy or how to do a simple domestic energy audit, all of which would make this book much more useful.

Rob writes as if this is all that is involved in writing an EDAP, while these visioning processes, useful and inspirational as they are, surely do not provide the meat of a true EDAP, which would start with an audit, and then assess local available resources and then assess how best to use them.

The last section of the book gives more detailed explanation of Peak Oil and then Climate Change; the Peak Oil section is fine, but adds little to existing literature; but the Climate Change section I found really excellent, surprisingly learning plenty of new things, for example about how different measures of greenhouse gas concentrations are used in public discourse which are little understood and distort the picture.

In conclusion, the Transition Timeline has plenty of useful information and some great ideas, but fails to really move the work of transition on in a way we might expect at this stage; and, perhaps inevitably, tends to paint a rather rosy picture of how the transition will play out. Personally, I would hope to see a more realistic view, which includes more on emergency planning and a future which may not be able to deliver the kind of smart technology envisioned for some of the areas explored.

(Andy Wilson of the Sustainability Institute has suggested to me that Peak Car use has probably already passed, while the Timeline puts it as not happening until 2016- a very pessimistic (sic) view!)

Predictably(!), I am highly critical- and will continue to be- of the New Age influence in the Health section,which will feed the suspicion in some quarters that transition is adopting some cultish attributes, and insist on the promotion of evidence-based medicine; and I feel, the lack of detailed energy auditing just means that the Transition Vision will tend to move further away from the observed reality.

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

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”.

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.