That is, in itself, unsustainable, because humans do not live in isolation. We depend on the rest of the life on this planet, so in destroying that life, we also destroy ourselves.

The Green Revolution raised our carrying capacity to–essentially, wherever we want it to be. Human population jumped up in response, with growth slowing only now as we begin to approach a new asymptote somewhere near 9 billion. There are, at the time of this writing, only 6.5 billion people on earth, yet just that many requires 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. That is how much energy is required to support so many people, and the food that so many people require–and, as is often the case, the food that food requires. 40% of the total energy available to the entire planet is wrapped up in a single species; only 60% is currently portioned out among all the other millions of species on earth.

This is the essential reason for the Holocene extinction. Deforestation, desertification, climate change and other climatological and ecological disasters are often the immediate causes, but these are themselves symptoms of the ultimate cause–that we are, essentially, starving the world out. We are taking everything for ourselves, and laying siege to all life on earth.

How is this, in itself, unsustainable?

All horticultural techniques are extremely efficient. Calorie for calorie, horticulture is the most efficient mode of subsistence available. But there is an absolute limit of possible calories, and thus an absolute limit to population, that they impose. Go beyond that, and you pass the point of diminishing returns, and you’re no longer practicing horticulture–you’re practicing agriculture. Techniques need to change to reach those absolute calorie goals, and as the scale increases, efficiency drops like a rock.

For tech stats, try the “Natural Way of Farming” for seedballs. Also, according to Fukuoka, the seedballs trick has been tried to great success by Native Americans; it has better success with horticulture rather than agriculture, since it relies more on a diverse spread of growth rather than the rows prefered by agriculturists. I guess, to put it in context of the current argument, it has to do with scale. I think seedballs would be great for smaller collectives and lousy to try and build a civilization the size of our current one.

What’s interesting to me is that you contradict yourself - you say that civilization won’t be able to rebuild itself, and then you say that there are perhaps a dozen pockets in the world where civilizations CAN rebuild themselves, and even survive for a few centuries. Not to nitpick, but it seems that civilization will be able to continue to exist…

OK, let me refine that, then. After the crash, if you want to live in a civilization, you might be able to pull that off. However, after the crash, those of us who don’t want to live in civilization will have no problem avoiding it. There will be few civilizations, and they will be very tightly circumscribed into very small areas. No civilization, and no group of civilizations, will be capable of dominating the globe for at least the next 50 million years. How’s that?

Regardless, the premise that the land that is arable only because of petrochemicals seems to hold up today… but what happens in 200-300 years (or more) after the land has laid fallow?

Then 200-300 years have passed, living memory is gone, all the old equipment and all the old knowledge is gone, our domesticates have rewilded, and anyone who wants to take up the agricultural lifestyle has to do so, essentially, from scratch. So, the prospects for starting up agriculture are essentially the same as they were in the Mesolithic.

Except all the places that once had the climate to support autochthonous agriculture are now deserts, thanks to the first go-around. We burned all our bridges the first time through, and wheat doesn’t grow very well in sand.

So, what can support agriculture in 200-300 years? The same places that supported them in the Mesolithic: river flood plains between 40 degrees north, and 40 degrees south latitude, in grassland ecosystems, with ready access to some subset of the dozen or so domesticable cereal grains. With that many restrictions, there’s really not a very wide field of contenders. And without metals or fossil fuels, the size of those kingdoms are very circumscribed indeed.

There are a number of possibilities for soil fertilization, as well… petrochemicals are just the cheapest way. Animals fertilize well, and so does mulch.

The problem is not ability. The problem is scale. There are lots of things that we can do. We could send a person to Mars right now. You poo-poo petrochemicals because they’re simply the easiest way, but that’s the whole point. Animal manure is not as cheap, and not as effective. Yields per acre decrease, which limits population density. At the same time that density is dropped, absolute size is limited by the lack of motorized vehicles. You now have very small populations (at least by modern standards), which can field very small armies. Logistics becomes even more of a nightmare, thanks to both the lack of motorized transport, and the smaller yields. This limits the range of armies severely, just as they limited the size of Teotihuacan’s empire. There will doubtless be innovations to overcome this–just as the Teotihuacanos invented the tortilla to overcome their problem–but such innovations can only go so far. These post-crash civilizations will be circumscribed the same way that the Mesoamerican civilizations were: not by ideology, nor even by their absolute technological ability, but by the inability of the resources available to them to scale.

People will be able to grow food still… and if the yields obtained through seedballs are any indication, civilization can continue to expand.

Still can’t find any reliable information on seedballs; all I can find is some gushing propaganda from the permaculture corners that always gush over the hottest new thing. Do you have any technical information on these seedballs that I could look over? If it doesn’t take an industrial infrastructure to make them, why did no one do so for the first million or so years of our evolution, even as we tinkered with the most unlikely combinations of everything else?

Your claim to foresee the future is hubris, Jason.

I’m no more foreseeing the future than if I were to claim a falling ball will hit the ground. I don’t know how exactly it’s going to play out, I just know it’s going to happen. There’s no crystal ball involved here, it’s simply deterministic. Just like a falling ball hitting the ground.

Civilization might never be able to reach the “glory” it has reached today, because of the lack of fossil fuels and metal (accepting your premise that there is NO way to rework metal, which I’m not convinced of at the moment), but there is a strong potential for its regrowth to (and even perhaps continuation at) smaller levels. And if you don’t believe me, then you might believe Cuba.

Perhaps we’re speaking past each other here. I’m beginning to suspect we actually agree. There will be pockets of civilization that may continue, but they will never again be able to conquer the world. They will not be able to conspire together to conquer the world. Natural resources don’t care if it’s one global civilization or ten thousand tiny ones, there is insufficient resources for such a thing to ever exist again. The surviving civilizations will have a certain, tiny percentage of the earth’s resources they’ll be free to abuse any way they like, or dole out amongst themselves any which way they like. But the vast majority of the earth’s resources will never be available to them again; they’ll be left to us, the tribes of foragers and perhaps the villages of horticulturalists who leave civilization behind.

Don’t forget the Yucatan. Its lesson is extremely valuable, in that the Maya are still there, and the place is still forested. Moreover, the Mayans who are still there are still farming–using a system which very strongly resembles what we’d call permaculture.

I was speaking of the autochthonous zones of agricultural production. Didn’t the Mayans pick their dirty habits up from a little further north, with the Mesoamerican triad?

With the notable exception of the Andes, they’re all deserts now.

Don’t forget the Yucatan. Its lesson is extremely valuable, in that the Maya are still there, and the place is still forested. Moreover, the Mayans who are still there are still farming–using a system which very strongly resembles what we’d call permaculture.

One way any post-crash civilizations might be able to provide for themselves for a time is by mining landfills. And wouldn’t that be strange.

Devin: You could look at the Valley of Mexico civilizations as doing something sort of like following your sine-curve, in that after the Classic collapse civilization expanded and contracted, amalgamated and disintegrated, at a pretty rapid rate. So the closest you’re going to get to a steady-state is steady turmoil. This might continue in the valley of Mexico after we’re gone. Mexico City is going to be a very un-fun place during the Collapse, but chinampa agriculture (very, very productive–10 crops a year) is still being practiced there, and could continue to be in the future. It would still suck.