On Optimism
by Jason GodeskyRob McMillin, it would seem, is not a fan of my work. He had some choice words concerning my recent piece, “The Opposite of Malthus,” which seems to be enjoying some circulation among the Peak Oil blogs out there. I won’t indulge in the sort of ad hominem sophistry the critique levels against me–my mother taught me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. But, such a response from the “Peak Oil Optimist” has combined with some of the responses I’ve gotten from IshCon to make me consider the nature of “optimism” when dealing with matters of such hefty import.
My boss has been using the quotation, “A pessimist sees challenges in every opportunity whereas an optimist sees opportunity in every challenge.” I consider myself an optimist, but that doesn’t mean seeing the world through rose-colored glasses or pretending the problems we face are less than they are.
No existing energy source can replace our petroleum usage, we know that beyond any doubt. Even if we discover some new energy source tomorrow, it will be decades before it’s been developed to replace oil in all the contexts we’ve come to rely on it, if it ever can at all. As I posted in a major thread on IshCon recently, we don’t just need a magical fairy dust energy source, we also need a time machine to take it back to the 1970s for development.
Nor can there be a “break”; global temperatures have been dropping for millennia, propped up only by the global warming caused by our agriculture. Lately, fossil fuels have tipped that balance, but if that input of heat is interrupted, the Ice Age will return with a vengeance.
And if we do manage to find a replacement for oil–and avoid the Pleistocene–what then? We will save all 6.5 billion humans, so that we can continue our rampage across the planet? Already, we consume 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity, and even the rosiest estimates put that population stabilizing at no less than 8 billion. Will we then consume 50% or more of all the energy on earth? We are already in the midst of the seventh mass extinction in the history of the earth–the Holocene Extinction, worse even than when an asteroid carved out the Yucatan Peninsula and blotted out the sun for months 65 million years ago. Peak Oil, global warming and the other ecological and resource crises we currently face may be our last chance to turn back and cease an ultimately suicidal onslaught, a drastic feedback loop to keep the earth’s ecosystems in balance. We are much more dependent on the rest of the world than our mythology would let on; if we continue in this course, we will only destroy ourselves in the end.
People do not change for ideas alone. The human ability to rationalize and justify is infinite. When their lifestyle no longer becomes viable, most will lay down and die–as did the Vikings of Greenland. A few will change their lifestyle to a more sustainable mode of existence, but only if their current way of life is made utterly impossible. Peak Oil threatens to do just that, and in so doing, giving us one last chance to escape our original sin and undo our most terrible mistake.
In the 1980s, the United States government adopted a strategy of putting out every fire that occurred in our forests. Eventually, they came to understand that those fires had a role to play; by burning off the undergrowth, occasional fires made the forests healthier. By pursuing this strategy, America’s forests have been left as dry tinderboxes ready to go ablaze. The health of our forests have suffered, and they are more prone to fire than ever before. Our short-sighted good intentions could not foresee its terrible end. As I pointed out previously, this is essentially the same as our food aid to the third world. Our short-sighted good intentions have turned Africa into a Malthusian killing ground.
Many call me a pessimist, because I see the collapse of civilization in the next 15 years–whether by Peak Oil, global warming, or simply its increasing fragility–as inevitable, as well as the concommitant death of 99% or more of the current human population. But then, in the future I foresee, after breaking its 10,000-year-old fever in the greatest strife any animal has ever had the misfortune to behold, those who choose to survive by changing their lifestyle will get to live the balance of their days in the peace, freedom and simple joy which has been unknown to our civilized kind for 10 millennia. It’s not a perfect utopia, except in comparison to civilized life. Civilization is all about living today by indebting the future; eventually, that must be paid. In the future I foresee, we pay it all at once and be done with it.
“Optimists,” however, don’t want to see so many people die. That’s laudable, but in exchange for that they would trade the life-long suffering of us all. No way of life save our current civilized hell is up to the task of feeding 6.5 billion human bodies, so to save all those people, civilization must continue. The end result of their rush to save lives will be a direct threat to all life. If we can escape the current crisis, can we continue our rampage until every last species on this planet is dead? Is that “optimism”?
I consider myself an optimist, but I also understand that these are weighty matters where the thing that looks “right” on the surface may be the most terrible choice we can make. Civilization is inherently unsustainable, and inevtiably collapses. The emergence of a single, global civilization merely ensures that humanity will soon regain the freedom that we were born with. The “optimists” tell us there is hope that we can continue living in this hell we’ve made for ourselves indefinitely; I am a “pessimist” for believing that that hell will destroy itself, and give us the opportunity to live free again.
Fortunately, the point is moot. The earth does not need civilization, but we do need the earth, and very soon, it will put an end to this short reign of terror we have exacted, no matter what we think of the situation or how “hopeful” it may be.
Good piece. I wrote up a little something partly in response to our favorite “optimistic” flame thrower - check it out.
http://peake.blogspot.com/2005/04/boy-who-cried-wolf.html
I’ve read Ishmael and Derrick Jensen - I am not specifically pining to dump all aspects of our civilization, but definately the consumption of the earth has got to stop.
We can do it the hard way, or the easy way, or the blindfolded way (hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil, and shop at the freaking supermarket)
Comment by Jon S. — 11 April 2005 @ 9:44 PM
As this piece has attracted some attention from those unfamiliar with my critique of civilization, my statements regarding it may seem somewhat absurd. They do make perfect sense once one understands the true nature of civilization, however. To understand what I’m talking about, either stay tuned for the rest of the Anthropik Canon, or peruse the works of Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, and/or John Zerzan.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 April 2005 @ 9:30 AM
Feeding 9 billion people for 30 years needn’t even be difficult. (You’d only have to do it for about that long, because population will decline after the demographic transition has passed; in the long run and with a sufficiently prosperous world the problem solves itself.)
Take the UNH figures for algae productivity: 5 billion BTU/hectare/year. (5 billion BTU is about 1.26 billion kilocalories, or food Calories [capital C]).
Assume conversion of algae to fish protein by tilapia. This is between 10 and 25 percent efficient. Assuming 10% efficiency, this yields 126 million kcal/ha/year. If you used faster-growing, more efficient “livestock” such as shrimp you might be able to improve significantly on that. For robustness’ sake it would be worthwhile to farm a variety of algae and many different species of edible fish, arthropods (popcorn shrimp and Cajun crawfish, yum!) and perhaps chickens and rabbits; if any segment suffered a loss you could compensate by eating lower on the food chain until the problem was rectified.
If each person requires 3000 kcal/day (1.1 million kcal/year) and this entire amount is met with protein (which it wouldn’t), each hectare would yield enough fish to feed at least 115 people. Feeding 9 billion people could be done using less than 80 million hectares.
Current area in the US devoted to food crops is ~211 million hectares (~450 million acres); another 500 million acres is devoted to grazing. In other words, a world of 9 billion people could be fed on algae-grazing fish from less than 40% of the area currently devoted to corn, wheat, soy and the like in the USA alone, and less than 20% of the total devoted to food production.
If it’s possible to feed more than a hundred people with a hectare of algae pond, most of the cropland which currently feeds those same people would be surplus. Getting more sophisticated has the potential to free up most of the Net Primary Productivity that humans are currently using, letting it be returned to nature. If we assume for the sake of argument that we only reduce our usage to 40% of the current value, the 40% figure that you believe indicates imminent disaster would be reduced to 16% despite supporting a human population 50% greater than today’s. This figure would be made up by radically increasing the productivity of the land actually in use.
This analysis also ignores the potential of seasteading. If you put 6 of those 9 billions into seasteads around the equator, their area devoted to growing algae for food would require a band only 13 kilometers wide (assuming the entire equator) or about 1/16 of the area in a band 200 km wide around the equator. Given that much of the equator is in parts of the ocean where there is no upwelling and which are rather unproductive as a consequence, farming algae would radically increase the total productivity of the oceans (again). This would cut the continental population to 3 billion and slash the demand on land-based NPP to less than 6% of the current total.
Are you still enamored of your dieoff scenario?
If so, consider what desperate, starving people do: they eat anything they can get their hands on. They cut down all their forests (see Haiti) for wood and cropland. They kill everything edible (see numerous examples in Africa). They might eventually starve to death in droves, but before they did they would eliminate most if not all of the food sources that a hunter-gatherer would hope to use afterward.
In all likelihood, all the large animal species (and many of the others dependent upon the destroyed habitats) which supported previous hunter-gatherer societies would be extinct; even if you survived all the people running around with guns, you’d likely be faced with nothing of consequence to eat. In short, your training to be a gatherer would all but certainly come to nothing. You’d become one more statistic, if the world had not become too poor to keep statistics.
Oil can go away without catastrophe, as long as it doesn’t do it sharply. Humanity knows enough to get by without it, and things need not collapse either immediately or eventually; we can make it through. But if you’re salivating over the possibility of billions of dead and preparing your own place in the world afterward, you’re no different from the people reading Tim LaHaye books and sporting “In case of Rapture” bumper stickers on their cars; you just belong to a different sect. If anything, your sect lacks even the bit of morality theirs does: you know (or ought to know) that the end is not inevitable, but you’re willing to cheer it on and even bring it about for your own sick satisfaction.
Comment by Engineer-Poet — 13 April 2005 @ 4:56 PM
The piece you’re responding to was a reply to Rob McMillin’s critique of a previous article of mine, “The Opposite of Malthus.” In that original article–which I’ve taken for granted here–I make the argument that human population is a function of food supply, so Malthus has the whole problem backwards. Feeding an enormous population is not a systemic problem. It can occur if strange things happen that eliminate a previous supply of food–like Peak Oil–but it doesn’t normally happen on its own, because food supply determines population.
So, I’m afraid your impressive statistics are meaningless–feeding people is not the problem at all. The problem is so many people.
Your scenario for world population numbers, while quite common and pulled from reliable sources (I’ve seen them plenty of times before), are utterly bogus. A lowering population from a peak of 9 billion is predicated on the rest of the world becoming like the First World. Besides the fact that this would contradict a basic fact of biology that any species’ food supply determines their population (though you would hardly be the first to suggest that we are so magically exempt, nor the first to fail to come up with a valid mechanism for that exemption), it also neglects another basic fact, namely, that “wealth” is always relative. Having a million dollars just makes you poor if everyone else has a billion, after all. Even in absolute terms, the prosperity of the First World depends on the poverty of the Third. We externalize our cost of living by offloading it onto the Third World. Despotic regimes in the Middle East (like the House of Sa’ud) maintain low energy prices for us. Our consumer goods are manufactured in sweatshops. Our lifestyles–the size of our ecological footprint, and our concomittant low birth rate–rely on the Third World’s poverty (i.e., their small ecological footprint) and their concomittant high birth rate.
This being the case, the Third World can never disappear, unless we accept a lower quality of life, and the entire world submits to a single average. However, that average still requires more resources than the earth has, because humans need more than just food. Your statistics reminded me of the factoid that every person on earth could fit inside Texas, which is true, but meaningless. We have ecological footprints that are much bigger than that, factoring in not only our food, but our food’s food, the space we need to live, the energy we use, et cetera ad infinitum. As an example, try calculating your footprint.
So, the idea that population will peak at 9 billion is based on selectively forgetting some basic, uncomfortable facts. But even if it were true, that wouldn’t make things any better. Again, the problem is not feeding 9 billion people. The problem is that some 200 species are going extinct every day, because we take up 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. At 9 billion, will half of the earth’s total energy be tied up in a single species?
Make no mistake; this is a mass extinction event, the eighth such event in the history of the earth (my previous statements of “seven” neglected the oxygen holocaust). Our current extinction levels are thousands of times the regular background rate, and we are currently tied for the #2 worst such extinction ever. Following the pattern of other mass extinctions named for their geological periods, I have begun referring to this as “the Holocene Extinction,” for our current (fictional1) “Holocene Period.”
For those who might pride human life as somehow more “special” than any other and accept such staggering losses of biodiversity as sad but little more, there is a cultural blind spot in our science. Ecology has revealed the staggering complexity of interrelationships in any ecosystem, and how important biodiversity is for the existence of every species inside of it. However, because of our culture mythology of humans as “higher” and “nobler” than all other forms of life, we have made little effort to understand our own dependencies. That does not mean that we are somehow “special” in lacking them. Even with this systemic bias, we have discovered a whole ecosystem living in and on every human being–and dozens of species of bacteria living in our guts, without which we could eat all day and still starve to death.
We depend for nearly all our food on a few closely related cereal grains and a handful of large herd mammals. Not the kind of robust diversity in one’s diet to ensure survival; this is why farmers so often suffer famine, yet we have so little evidence of malnutrition among foragers. This makes us even more dependent on biodiversity, as we must not only worry about our own vulnerabilities, but those of our domesticates–which we also make weak and unlikely to survive in the process of domestication.
Thus, the Holocene Extinction is a threat to our own survival. Life on this planet will continue regardless; even the Permian Extinction did not end all life. But it may very well end us.
As for your apocalyptic scenario with people “heading for the hills,” many people I respect hold the same opinion. Unfortunately, it is deeply at odds with what we know of human behavior.
For starters, “food” is not the set of edible matter available; it is a culturally constructed subset of edible matter. In our case, a very narrow subset consisting solely of a few dozen closely-related and fragile domesticates. Fear Factor has made a fortune off the mismatch between edible matter and food. Even for a million dollars, most people won’t eat bugs or bull penises, though both are quite edible. In fact, in many cultures, they’re delicacies. In France, one dish is made by force-feeding a goat, so that the liver contracts cirrhosis. Then, the liver is eaten raw.
Even the Irish during the potato famine, desperate as they were, were still surrounded by things to eat. Eating them never occurred to them, though–because it wasn’t food. The Irish routinely used seaweed, but they did not consider it food. Though they harvested tons of seaweed for agricultural use, and were dying of starvation, they never tried eating it. In Collapse, Jared Diamond shows how the same occured to the Vikings in Greenland. They ate the last of their herds, down to the hooves. They ate their dogs. They ate each other. But to the very end, they would not eat the fish teeming right outside their doors. It wasn’t food; even with the Inuit living next to them, fat, dumb and happy, they wouldn’t touch the fish. My favorite example is the Germans in the 1800s who starved to death for lack of bread–while exporting a bumper crop of white bread to France and Britain. White bread wasn’t food, only rye. They knew other people ate it, they were selling it to them. But they starved to death before they would eat white bread.
The examples you cite merely buttress my argument. In each of those examples, people turned to the most desperate foods their culture considered–their pets, each other, anything to survive. But to the end, in almost every case, they never turned to that edible matter that fell outside their cultural construction. It just wasn’t food; it never occurred to them. And so, they died.
But humans are omnivores; we can eat almost anything, if we’re willing to eat it in the first place. That’s the cruel thing about this; almost everyone will die, but each individual who survives will survive because they decide to do so. Those who decide to live will find a bounty of food available to them, food no one else will touch–because it isn’t food to them.
As much as our civilization has tried to rape every last inch of earth, there remains places where a group of 25 people could live with barely a notice of the outside world. I’ve seen them, I’ve been in such places. In those wildernesses, those who choose to survive can do so, if they look at something we call “wilderness” and instead call it “home.”
I’m not cheering on what’s coming. But it is coming, and so I’ve found not only a way to survive it, but a way to find some good in it. Like your own death, accepting it and preparing for it doesn’t mean you’re “cheering it on.” And bringing it about is something I’ve said repeatedly I don’t have the stomach for, and could not bring myself to do.
1 The Holocene is, in fact, a very typical interglacial period of the Pleistocene, a.k.a., “the (last) Ice Age.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 April 2005 @ 5:44 PM
I’m not cheering on what’s coming.
And I quote:
My “cheering on the iceberg” … has to do with ending the 10,000 years of madness and despair that began with the Neolithic.
Sounds like cheering it on to me, pal. You hate industrial civ so much? Haul your sorry carcass down to Cuba. Or sommers upriver in the Amazon. Enjoy. Whatever, get away from these here computers and this Internet-thingy you so despise that you use it alla time. Far as I can tell, you’re full of an adolescent taunting that refuses the seriousness of its positions. You hate industrial civilization as currently practiced, yet you shamelessly use its usufructs. Practice what you preach, that’s all I ask.
Comment by Rob McMillin — 14 April 2005 @ 9:27 AM
Rob - that rhetoric makes no sense. We are in the context of an industrial civilization right now. For as long as that is the case, if one person or twenty leaves the civilization or later comes back to it, it doesn’t affect the overall arc of consumption at all … just ask the boomers who tried out communes … then tried being corporate lawyers.
in fact
Though you are framing it as hypocracy, if you want to “fix” a system you disagree with, it is hard to do it externally. Jason’s position is that our civilization is unsustainable, period. If he were an Africa BushMan, grousing in clicks that these weird white fuckers were strip mining his ancestral hunting grounds, you would never hear his opinion - and I gather you would like that. You may swallow Engineer Poet’s numbers (9 billion for 30 years - a-ok) but the way I flow we’ve fucked things up utterly with ~4-6 billion over 100 years. (Libertarian thought is mostly a product of class. It does little to help the majority of people in the world who live on pennies a day.)
There is no evidence we would do better if more gasoline is poored onto the fire.
Comment by Jon S. — 14 April 2005 @ 10:20 AM
Many primitivists are anti-technology. I am not one of them. Nor is my gripe with industrial civilization; I think we went wrong at the Neolithic. The Industrial Revolution was simply a change in scale, not kind.
Technology itself is simply tool use, the defining criteria of the genus Homo. In and of itself, it is neither good nor bad. Personally, I think telecommunications, the internet, free software and all the rest are very good things. Besides my degree in anthropology, I also have one in computer science. So, I’m not anti-technology by any stretch of the imagination.
Your admonition to move to Cuba is nonsense, as Cuba is no different. I do not differentiate between such minor shades as capitalism, feudalism and communism. They are indistinguishable from one another, especially when compared to the diversity of, say, tribal economies of reciprocity.
Nor does your admonition to journey up the Amazon make any more sense. Besides the fact that its ecology make foraging difficult (nearly all Amazonian tribes are horticulturalist), it is also quickly being encroached by our expanding civilization. Unless that expansion ends–i.e., unless civilization ends–there will be no alternative for those who, like me, value freedom.
This is why I can find a silver lining in a collapse, because civilization is inherently unsustainable. If it were capable of letting others live as they like, I would have no problem returning the favor. It is precisely because it can brook no diversity that it must end.
So, I do practice what I preach. Given that I have spent so much time articulating my position in such painstaking detail, you would do well to review what I actually preach before making such admonishments. I’m not John Zerzan, I’m not the Unabomber, I’m not Hitler, I’m not Stalin, and I’m not Mao Tse Tung. Your comparisons aside, I disagree with each of these individuals on several crucial points, particularly the last three. That I do not follow their prescribed courses of action is not hypocrisy, because I don’t agree with them. So before you admonish me for not “practicing what I preach,” I would invite you to read some of the prodigious text I have produced and find out what I preach, rather than assigning to me the philosophies of others.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 April 2005 @ 10:42 AM
Jason Godesky wrote:
In other words, you reversed the logic of a theory known to be faulty… and got another faulty theory. Human population is limited by food supply, but it is not determined by it; the last century-plus of experience in the developed countries disproves the premises behind both Malthus’ theory and yours.
Reasoning from false premises yields nothing useful. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Why is that the problem? Let me guess your response: so many people cannot be maintained sustainably.
Why can’t so many people be maintained sustainably? I just gave you a sustainable blueprint for their food supply. I think we could use a lot less people in e.g. ecologically sensitive areas, but tragedies
Another fallacy: Truth By Blatant Assertion? You’ve declared the scenario bogus without supporting argument. Consider the implications of such intensive aquaculture: people would have to be educated in the construction and maintenance of algae ponds, the timing of harvests, the processing of the take. Education in general (and education of women specifically) has a strong and consistent effect on population growth: it brings it down rapidly.
Just about everyone on earth wants what the First World has. Let them take up the task of building it; the effort involved requires skilled people rather than masses, and this leads directly to stable or contracting population. The problem of preventing catastrophic destruction of the environment in the mean time looks manageable. Perhaps more than manageable; if it takes the same amount of time for a farmer to deal with one hectare of fish farm as with 15 hectares of grain field, the other 14 hectares are going to go fallow. Soil erosion drops instantly, as does siltation of rivers. Pressure on wildlife eases.
If you wanted to practice a gathering lifestyle, you ought to be all for this. Nothing would let you get there faster than freeing up most of the land currently devoted to agriculture and emptying the hinterlands, the reforestation of Vermont writ large. Many small towns are already dying as corporate farming requires less and less in the way of human services for support, but if you could get intensive algae-fed aquaculture to work you could show results more impressive than the collapse of a gold rush. Managing that would prove that compact nutrient-cycling food chains work and set the stage for the further depopulation of Earth via the colonization of space.
Not that I expect you to. Your weltanschauüng is tied up in catastrophic and deadly collapse, not the beneficial cycle of creative destruction.
You are quite wrong. The Third World has never been richer than it is today, and the poor in the United States have luxuries that kings of 300 years ago would have envied: central heat, telephones, automobiles! Even the third-world poor have radios and television. Finding ways to deliver food, education and luxuries sustainably would improve the world all around.
I notice what you aren’t doing. You’re not only not doing anything yourself, you’re doing your best to convince people that it’s pointless to try.
Your explanation for the current and projected price of oil is…?
You demonstrate a lack of historical perspective. The United States was the largest oil producer in the world for the first half of the 20th century; the shift to the Middle East was begin by European powers (who do you think drew the borders of Iraq? The British.) This political move was driven by technological considerations; oil was the best fuel for the developing technologies, so securing oil was essential for economic and military superiority.
There was a time, not much more than a century ago, when the extant technologies had little use for petroleum; it was this funny goo that bubbled out of the ground, and sometimes got used in patent medicines. Then some fractions of it were found to make good lamp oil, much more readily available than spermaceti; heavier fractions went for candles or lubricants or sealants, lighter ones were dumped if they exceeded the demand for cleaning fluid. And then someone noticed that bottled naptha could fuel the engines used in those newfangled horseless carriages; you can probably fill in most of the rest.
What you are obviously not ready to do is project the future. The hints are all there: oil is going up in price; greens and neocons are getting together to fully electrify their hybrid automobiles; a host of technologies are under development to make ethanol from cellulose, hydrogen from sunlight, or just make the plain-jane photovoltaic cell cheaper and easier to use. You can buy a photovoltaic jacket today and charge your cell phone or iPod as you walk; soon you’ll be able to buy a conversion kit to make your Prius go ten miles or more without gasoline (up to 30 if you’re willing to spring for lithium-ion batteries). And that’s just this year’s stuff.
What happens when petroleum is no more necessary for transport than spermaceti is for light? The “exploitation” (to the immense profit of the House of Saud) of the Arabian Peninsula ends. Riyadh becomes… a ghost town? All those trends you’re decrying suddenly reverse themselves. Where does the energy come from? The sunlight falling on all our roofs is enough to supply it. The means to convert it is steadily coming down in price and embodied energy. The profitability of those converters is at unprecedented heights, and you can bet that more attention is going to be focused on their production and on better and cheaper technologies.
Are you urging these trends on? Are you even paying them the slightest bit of attention? Not that I can see.
Does it? Most of the recent move to source work to the third world has been in pursuit of cheap labor. The alternative is… automation.
It takes more effort to automate a process, but probably less land area to support the machine than the human labor force.
You ignore the productivity one could get from algae ponds, and then you lecture me on the culture of food?
This is downright funny. It proves that you aren’t even listening to the argument you’re claiming to refute, even when its conclusions are drawn partly or totally from your postulates. Reason is irrelevant, faith is everything. If I needed more proof that you’re of the same stripe as the rapture crowd, I couldn’t ask for better.
And the first group of armed and hungry people from the rest of the world to stumble across them would likely kill them.
But it’s not necessary. By your own claims, survival may depend on changing what people see as food. You’ve got existence proofs that there are ways to feed several times Earth’s population on far less land, and those same techniques require education in techniques of construction and management which reproduce the one proven means of reducing human populations. The unravelling of the Gordian knot is right there.
Instead of educating yourself in the harvesting and consumption of beetles and grubs, why aren’t you using what you know to prevent the catastrophe? If you fail to do so, you bear moral responsibility for what happens.
Then Jon S. says:
There is more than a small amount of irony in that, as Jason has specifically called the origin of photosynthetic life (which is essential to his plans for survival) a “catastrophe”. If little anaerobic bugs could have had thoughtful conversations, I can think of an argument around some shallow hydrothermal vent a few billion years ago:
Anaerobic Ultrapaleoconservative: Hey, what do you think you’re doing there?
Proto-bacteriorhodopsin inventor: I’m making oxygen.
AUPC: What are you doing THAT for?
PBI: There’s not enough hydrogen coming from that vent, and I wanted more. So I’m making it from water and throwing away the oxygen.
AUPC: What!? Doesn’t that violate Conservation of Energy?
PBI: Not at all. I’ve found a way to get energy from that “light” stuff.
AUPC: Light! Hmph. Hydrogen sulfide was good enough for my second-generation progenitor, and it was good enough for my progenitor, and it’s good enough for me. And that includes everyone we’ve exchanged plasmids with!
PBI: Well, I just decided to try something new. Besides, there’s a lot more light out there than there is hydrogen sulfide.
AUPC: Bah. And that oxygen you’re giving off… it’s corrosive! Are you going to keep doing that?
PBI: I don’t see how I can avoid it. If you want to get hydrogen from water the oxygen has to go somewhere.
AUPC: Well, fine! But make that “somewhere”, somewhere else. It’s getting very irritating.
PBI: Okay. Now that I don’t need to live near the vent just to eat, I can take advantage of a whole lot of empty space out there. <moves along toward shallower water>
AUPC: Good riddance. I hope I never see another one of those crazy light-eating, oxygen-spitting freaks again!
One of these two had descendants which came to dominate the world’s biomass, either by themselves or in endosymbiotic relationship with later inventors. It wasn’t the anaerobic ultrapaleoconservative, it was the one which invented a way of living which took better advantage of the available resources.
Footprint is a function of technology. The average American may be using 10 hectares at the moment, but a food-production system based on algae culture could cut that to about 0.01 hectare. That’s about the roof area of a smallish ranch house. Other energy needs could be met similarly; the entire energy demand of the United States (losses included) could be met by conversion of perhaps 20% of the sunlight falling on its roofs and pavement.
Photosynthetic autotrophs destroyed the anaerobic ecology which came before them. They closed off thousands of niches; they brook no diversity. They Must Die!
The insects and grubs you’re learning to see as survival food may be “slimy but satisfying”, but they’re a regression to the past just as much as much as all life going back to hydrothermal vents. If you can’t do better than that - if you won’t even make the attempt to build a better future - you deserve to be left behind. Physics allows it, and the technology can be built (as simply as algae ponds full of fish); doing it should be our next imperative. Unfortunately for those such as myself and Rob, you’re going to freeload on the efforts of the people who put forth the effort to understand how to avoid such a crash and steer the right course. Part of this is convincing people that it doesn’t have to happen. You’re trying to convince people the opposite.
If only you could be persuaded to bet actual money on the position you’re taking….
Comment by Engineer-Poet — 17 April 2005 @ 8:58 PM
“Just about everyone on earth wants what the First World has. Let them take up the task of building it; the effort involved requires skilled people rather than masses, and this leads directly to stable or contracting population.”
You’ve stated the problem as the solution to the problem! Everyone on earth *can’t* have what the First World has. The First World can’t continue to have what the First World has–let alone have more of it! Your “stable or contracting” global population doesn’t appear until the entire world industrializes. There are not enough resources for the entire world to industrialize.
“The Third World has never been richer than it is today, and the poor in the United States have luxuries that kings of 300 years ago would have envied: central heat, telephones, automobiles! Even the third-world poor have radios and television. Finding ways to deliver food, education and luxuries sustainably would improve the world all around.”
You are approaching this from a perspective where these things are valuable in-and-of themselves, for tehmselves. In fact central heat, televisions, and automobiles are three of the most disastrous technologies to ever appear on this earth. Just because people in the past didn’t have it, doesn’t mean they wanted or needed it.
“The hints are all there: oil is going up in price; greens and neocons are getting together to fully electrify their hybrid automobiles; a host of technologies are under development to make ethanol from cellulose, hydrogen from sunlight, or just make the plain-jane photovoltaic cell cheaper and easier to use.”
Of all the fairy-tale “God will save us” cop-outs, this one is my absolute favorite. “Every new technology brings with it a new set of problems, increasing in magnitude exponentially, but–Technology Will Save Us!” Let me say it again: Every time we’ve come up with a new innovation to keep this civilization running, we’ve exacerbated the problems it causes. How is your new generation supposed to be different? Answer: It won’t be. Your whiz-bang technology designed to keep this leviathan growing for the next round of the game aren’t going to work for the simple reason that the leviathan already takes up half the damn ocean. There’s nowhere left to expand to; any new technology is only going to make the crash that much worse.
No matter how good we get at utilizing sunlight-energy, there’s still only a finite amount of it.
Your bacterial morality play is amusing, and it’s an interesting point.
One of the problems is, we’re all anaerobic bacteria. The world industrial civilization is creating is simply not inhabitable by human beings.
Garbage-In, Garbage-Out indeed.
Comment by Steve Thomas — 17 April 2005 @ 11:06 PM
(I apologize for how unclean this post is, first time posting on here and no preview. I’m just guessing at most of these tags. oh wells.)
â??Just about everyone on earth wants what the First World has.â??
So, wait, let me guess â?? Truth by Blatant Assertion?
â?¦
â??You are quite wrong. The Third World has never been richer than it is today, and the poor in the United States have luxuries that kings of 300 years ago would have envied: central heat, telephones, automobiles! Even the third-world poor have radios and television.â??
Have you ever been to the Third World? I built houses with Habitat for Humanity in Honduras â?? for the middle class. These are the ones that can afford land. Some of the children there had clothes. Some of them didnâ??t have swollen, distended stomachs and tiny, skinny arms. But only some.
â??You demonstrate a lack of historical perspective. The United States was the largest oil producer in the world for the first half of the 20th century; the shift to the Middle East was begin by European powers (who do you think drew the borders of Iraq? The British.) This political move was driven by technological considerations; oil was the best fuel for the developing technologies, so securing oil was essential for economic and military superiority.â??
You demonstrate at least one missing piece in your historical perspective.
The United States realized that drilling more for oil did not more oil make, and so, in the best interest of keeping valuable resources stockpiled, has since largely relied on foreign oil. Oil production peaked around 1970 in the United States. And what you say is very true, how we use our resources for securing more. What weâ??re struggling to do is to keep gas prices low for as long as we can â?? and donâ??t tell me gas prices arenâ??t low. Compare to Europe.
â??Where does the energy come from? The sunlight falling on all our roofs is enough to supply it. The means to convert it is steadily coming down in price and embodied energy. The profitability of those converters is at unprecedented heights, and you can bet that more attention is going to be focused on their production and on better and cheaper technologies.â??
Err, there are some pretty major issues with scalability of a new energy infrastructure. Where do all those solar panels com from? Air? And as far as profitability goes, the high ERoEI of oil makes it several times more profitable than other alternatives, such as solar.
â??It takes more effort to automate a process, but probably less land area to support the machine than the human labor force.â??
So, the idea is to replace those poor workers in the Third World with robots. Robots that run onâ?¦ something, and come fromâ?¦ somewhere. Where does the money come from? Isnâ??t it a lot cheaper and more efficient to just oppress a human being rather than replace it with a robot? (Yes. Of course.)
â??One of these two had descendants which came to dominate the world’s biomass, either by themselves or in endosymbiotic relationship with later inventors. It wasn’t the anaerobic ultrapaleoconservative, it was the one which invented a way of living which took better advantage of the available resources.â??
Good example, but Iâ??m not sure it illuminates what you intended. Where, exactly, are all of these available resources you talk about? Are they hidden behind the 200 species we make extinct daily? And, just curious, since 90 percent of civilizationâ??s diet is based on a few cereal grains, what do we do when we have the Global Cereal Grain Famine? There are no ships that the globe can get on, to carry them to a new world â?? like the Irish did.
But these are only your arguments weâ??re talking about here. Who said civilization was all that great? Why, exactly, do we want to keep it around? So we can oppress people for another 10,000 years?
And youâ??ve really demonstrated a lack of historical perspective here. Since â??the beginning of timeâ??, also known to the majority of humans as civilization, what â??goodâ?? has civilization brought us? Assuming â??usâ?? = the elite that were born into the right family in the right country, then we have public education, good health care, and the internet, as well as other â??valuableâ?? material goods that really donâ??t bring anyone happiness â?? TV, radio, â??niceâ?? cars, big houses, etc.
I go over this huge mental block people seem to get when discussing civilization, on my livejournal post (on The Dark Side of Civilization), in which I say, truncated slightly â??
So, donâ??t talk to me about compassion, or try to put the responsibility on me to â??save the worldâ?? of which weâ??re apparently the only species that matters. I do not believe that civilization crashing is a good thing, I merely can not count on it lasting long enough for me to be able to change it. Iâ??m so selfish that Iâ??m trying to keep myself alive, and do some good for someone else. Iâ??m so selfish that I want to give other people a choice to live in a world where they can be happy (tribalism, I go over it very inadequatelyhere)… instead of having to work 10-14 hours a day, only to get paid $100 a yearâ?¦ instead of getting murdered along with your entire family and community in a genocide, etc.
And all the while, I am desperately praying to whatever power there is out there to minimize the suffering that both civilization continuing and civilization crashing inevitably cause. I hope you can understand that.
Peace,
Devin
Comment by Devin Hammond — 18 April 2005 @ 12:20 AM
Some wonderful points have been made here and I respect them all. I have to add some technical notes. Assuming we adopted the aquaculture as proposed by Engineer Poet, we have to take into consideration two simple market factors:
(1) In order for the process to be cost effective (and I am referring to it simply in the sense of effort put into the process, not necessarily money), the ‘product’ should have a relatively dense population per area farmed (that is to say, relative to its ‘natural’ environment). So, for example, you don’t want to have to spend time scouring the coastline for a handful of shrimp when you can grow them in a single pond (I think they do the pond method in Thailand, if I remember correctly).
(2) You want to maximize your effeciency by limited your bio-diversity. Keep out prey species (or better yet, eliminate them), produce the most of what is popular (while keeping stocks of stuff that might become popular later on), and finally reduce or eliminate competitive non-edibles.
Now, any kind of agriculture of this kind (for that’s what this is) requires a stable system in order to function effeciently. Given enough resources and a closed system (completely controlled), aquatic agriculture might work.
There’s a problem, though. This isn’t a closed system. Modern civilization, simply by continuing to do what it’s doing will change the environment. Changes in temperature will create fluctuations in weather and that’s bad for agriculture! At the very least it will increase energy expenditures to maintain your stable system.
But hey, let’s give you a break and say, somehow, that the entire aquaculture project is temperature, salinity, and light normalized (most likely through planting in different regions so if one sector dies, another goes on).
Then there’s another problem — it’s called competition. When you systematically eliminate competitive, non-edible species, whatever’s left evolves to become a tougher challenger. Our biggest ‘bogeyman’ (so to speak) is the smallest of all — bacteria and viruses. These things have been a part of the environment for billions of years. They are clever, they are adaptive, and they will out-compete you every time.
Education and science, I’m sure, will be claimed as the ‘key’ to defeated the dreaded biological menace. Nope. Sorry. Did that before with a little ‘gift’ called antibiotics. Now we have antibiotic-resistant strains. Here’s the problem; you can educate everyone you want but as long as someone is on the ‘fringe’ of the culture (regardless of how well-off the culture is), he’ll think “Hm. Today, maybe I can cut costs just a little.” and then lessen the supply of the drug or sell it off or do something equally stupid and then a new mutated strain escapes, aided by the fact that healthy animals have nowhere to escape because you’ve packed them in so densely. For fun, check out the facts on farmed fish. The kind of diseases and parasitic problems started to escape from those places is simply insane.
Most technological revolutions (like the ones serious aquaculture requires) require there to be little technological drift (unintentional side-effects of the use of that technology) and a “better” human being (better educated, more sensible, etc). So far, experience has shown us that people will just be people and technology will always be used in ways that often surprise (and sometimes horrify) us. That’s just the way it is.
So, if you’re going to come up with a new way to fix the future, it needs to (1) enhance biodiversity and (2) deal with the fact that humans can be awfully stupid if they play god (people, give it up already!).
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 18 April 2005 @ 3:00 AM
Engineer Poet:
Tech friendly optimism about the future is a very common belief system, one I share in part. For example, I do not believe Jason’s assertion that 99% of humanity will die without replacing themselves. There are significant green technologies that could be applied to our world.
At the same time, I am in agreement with Jason that at present we are destroying the Earth, and you primarily ignore this. Your statement that “Jason has specifically called the origin of photosynthetic life (which is essential to his plans for survival) a `catastrophe’” seems innaccurate. Jason argued that the onset of agriculture is the problem, alluding to a 10,000 year fever, implying “progress” has been destructive. The cradle of civilization was once forested.
I think that without acknowledging and addressing the root argument that industrial society is destroying our resource base and our world, you are reduced to the easy task of setting up straw men and knocking them down. It is not that I am saying: Agree with Jason, but rather: You must first deal with and dispose of these arguments to put your own arguments in context.
I think your statements reflect a mythology of optimism, fed by personal privilege, a privilege every one of us with an education and a computer shares. You discuss an endless array of ways to save the future, but none of them are in widespread operation now; they represent ideas, many of which at best require significant engineering or contrarian politics to make them workable.
What do we see happening in the world at present?
Peak oil is almost upon us and nothing of substance is being done;
the oceans are warming and becoming acidic;
fish are vanishing;
the most delicate critters (frogs) or DYING OFF NOW, as if canaries;
the third world is used as a toilet; think pyramid scheme;
scientists are scrambling to engineer ways to inter carbon;
(at the EXACT SAME TIME we are releasing massive amounts);
industrial agriculture runoff is poisoning the oceans;
water tables are dropping worldwide;
water supplies are saturated with toxic chemicals / plastic;
cancer is trending upward;
climate change is easily observed, ultimate effect unknown;
etc.
It should be obvious why many people are deeply suspicious of the argument for more technology and people to solve our problems. Arguing the best case scenario which we don’t live up to in the present is ridiculous.
We need to engineer a fix outstanding problems before inventing utopian castles in the sky for 3 billion new humans.
That would be a conservative approach.
Comment by Jon S. — 18 April 2005 @ 3:38 PM
This statement is interesting for several reasons. First of all, you prove Jason’s point about food by instantly jumping to bugs and grubs when you think of wild food. Where exactly do you think raspberries come from? Apples? Pears? Blueberries? Do you think humans invented all forms of plant and animal? Do you really think the only things to eat in a forest are insects? Have you been in a forest? For those who know edible plants - not even to mention hunting and tracking - a forest is a grocery store in which everything’s free.
Secondly, your comment that tribal foraging is somehow a “regression” is based on a fallacy regarding evolution. First of all, evolution is not linear: we are no more evolved than squirrels, nor superior to squirrels for our greater intelligence. We’ve simply found a different niche to occupy. If we tried to fit the squirrels’ niche, we’d fail miserably. There are too few acorns for too large creatures. If evolution WERE linear, and species were competing with each other to see who could be the best, then as soon as the “best” species were rooted out, all life on Earth would instantly be destroyed, because there would be nothing for this superlative species to eat. So “progress” is not an issue in evolution. There is no “regression” to a “lower” form of life, only change based on changes in one’s environment.
So because biological evolution is not linear, what gives you a reason to assume that cultural evolution is linear? Why is civilization better than tribalism because it happened second? More importantly, how can we be “regressing” to tribal foraging when people still practice it - where they’re allowed to? (Think: !Kung bushmen.) Tribalism as a social model is extraordinarily flexible and strong. It worked for humans for millions of years, and it still works now. Civilization, on the other hand, is a horrific disaster. It’s obviously a faulty model. Why assume that because you tried out a certain model recently, it somehow works better than an older model?
They say that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. For the past 10,000 years, we’ve tried civilization over and over again and only ended up destroying more and more of the Earth - and ourselves. Is it so outrageous to look at the 3 million years in which humans were practicing tribalism and NOT oppressing each other or destroying the environment and saying, “Hey, maybe we should try that”? Oh, I’m sorry. That would violate your smug Victorian cultural imperialism.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 18 April 2005 @ 5:06 PM
No, I wasn’t doing anything as elementary as reversing Malthus. Your understanding of this issue seems to be quite basic; I came to my conclusion through careful observation of the facts, and then noted it was the direct opposite of Malthus’ argument. Despite our hubris, humans remain irrevocably animals, and bound by the same biological laws as any other animal. I would strongly advise you to read my previous article on this issue. If you can find some flaw in my reasoning there, by all means comment as such. But your “rebuttals” here, throwing up spurious refutations I answered before you even made your first comment, does not do much to bolster your case, or your appearance.
Because people require more than food. They require space–space to live in, and space to dump their wastes. And space between those two. They require resources for shelter and day-to-day existence. They require oxygen, water, et cetera. In short, as I have said from the beginning, the problem is not feeding so many people. The problem has much more to do with an overall, holistic view than the myopic Malthusian view. Agricultural production per hectare doesn’t mean nearly as much as ecological footprint.
Like sound bites on the evening news, your quote has taken my conclusion and neglected its reasoning. From that snippet, you’re criticizing me for providing no supporting argument? But I already did, in full, both in response to your original comment, and in my previous article. How many times must I make the argument, before you’ll stop saying I never made it? Since that number is obviously at least one more than I’ve currently done, I’ll reiterate.