Chicken Little Meets the Ostrich
by Jason GodeskyToby Hemenway is a full-blown permaculture guru, and an Anthropik reader, but I really have to take issue with his latest essay, posted to the Energy Bulletin today, “Apocalypse, Not.” I’m not sure how much of it is a response to Anthropik specifically, but it would be pure hubris for me to suggest that we’re alone in our belief that peak oil is, if not the sole assurance of our civilization’s end, at least a contributor to the “perfect storm” brewing in the near future. Hemenway makes the argument that collapse is neither imminent, nor even terribly likely, because we’ve weathered such problems before. With all due respect, I think the problems we face are being underestimated in this analysis, and the problems we have solved, overestimated. I think the basis of Hemenway’s analysis is to misunderstand the classes of problems we face–in short, there are problems, and then, there are problems.
Hemenway tries to sum up my case for collapse with this:
Catastrophists often point to all the other incipient disasters we face besides Peak Oil—global warming, aquifer depletion, soil loss, active volcanoes near cities, killer storms—and say “Take your pick; one of them is bound to get us.�
This is only a partially fair summary. In fact, the real cornerstone of my argument was presented in theses #14 and #15. At the end of thesis #14, I wrote:
At point B1C1, the marginal returns of complexity reach an inflection point as they near the point of diminishing returns (B2C2). Between B1C1 and B1C3, a complex society is at increasing risk of collapse. It is at B1C3 that collapse actually occurs. The costs of complexity relative to its benefits are simply too high, and substantial numbers across the society begin to see benefits to “dropping out” of the complexity of that society. In ancient Rome, we might see the baugaudae or the Allamanni as examples of this trend among the lower classes; various landlords who essentially “seceeded” from Rome as their wealthier analogues. In the contemporary United States, we might see the first stirrings of such signs among the Hippies; currently, we might see echoes of it among permaculture enthusiasts, voluntary simplicity advocates, and of course, primitvists. We might even see the open source movement itself as a reaction, trying to maintain the investments in technological complexity by creating greater simplicity in administration and information processing. We might find an upper-class echo of this behavior in the kind of elite resignment that Peggy Noonan discusses in her 27 October 2005 editorial for the Wall Street Journal, “A Seperate Peace.”
It is at this point that collapse occurs, because the costs of complexity have become so high that the society is no longer willing to put forward any further investment in it. Tainter discusses the effect of energy subsidies–such as fossil fuels–which can extend the curve, heighten the curve, or even allow one curve to follow another. But these merely modify the situation; they do not change the basic fact that complexity is subject to diminishing marginal returns, and thus, any society that pursues greater complexity as the answer to every stress–that is, any civilization (see thesis #13)–must eventually collapse. The question is not if, but when.
Every society faces problems, and as an adaptive system, societies develop means of answering those problems. When a society structures itself to maximize greater complexity as such a problem-solving response, to the exclusion of all other strategies (i.e., when that society becomes a civilization–see thesis #13), it locks itself into a pattern that ultimately can only end in collapse. Once its level of complexity passes the point of diminishing returns, its ability to answer problems becomes weaker and weaker. The pace and intensity of these problems do not increase; it is our ability to solve these problems that begins to decrease. The barbarian horde that swept over the Rhine and conquered an enormous swath of the Western empire in 409 CE was smaller than many of the barbarian forces that the Roman Empire had, in previous centuries, contained with relative ease. Though dealing with drought was one of the primary râison d’etre for the Maya cities, it was ultimately a prolonged drought that did them in. Though one can deterministically predict collapse within a given timeframe due simply to the marginal returns curve of complexity, predicting the specific problem that may prove to be the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back is almost impossible, as I said at the beginning of thesis #19:
Predicting the proximate cause of collapse is impossible, though, as we have seen, both environmental problems and peak oil present serious threats–precisely the kind of threat that has toppled civilizations in the past. On their own, however, such proximate causes are probabilistic. Peak oil may mean the end of civilization; or, perhaps we will be able to transition to some alternative. Environmental problems may destroy the most basic necessities of civilized life, or perhaps we will solve them, instead. What makes collapse a certainty, rather than a probability, is, ironically, the very thing that defines civilization in the first place: complexity.
Complexity is a function of energy, and this is where peak oil becomes so important. As John Michael Greer points out in “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse,” [PDF] catabolic collapse, like anabolic growth, is a self-reinforcing process.
A society that uses resources beyond replenishment rate (d(R)/r(R) > 1), when production of new capital falls short of maintenance needs, risks a depletion crisis in which key features of a maintenance crisis are amplified by the impact of depletion on production. As M(p) exceeds C(p) and capital can no longer be maintained, it is converted to waste and unavailable for use. Since depletion requires progressively greater investments of capital in production, the loss of capital affects production more seriously than in an equivalent maintenance crisis. Meanwhile further production, even at a diminished rate, requires further use of depleted resources, exacerbating the impact of depletion and the need for increased capital to maintain production. With demand for capital rising as the supply of capital falls, C(p) tends to decrease faster than M(p) and perpetuate the crisis. The result is a catabolic cycle, a self-reinforcing process in which C(p) stays below M(p) while both decline. Catabolic cycles may occur in maintenance crises if the gap between C(p) and M(p) is large enough, but tend to be self-limiting in such cases. In depletion crises, by contrast, catabolic cycles can proceed to catabolic collapse, in which C(p) approaches zero and most of a society’s capital is converted to waste.
In other words, it’s not enough to just “break even” with a steady state. A steady state is not possible. Any significant lack of growth is sufficient to initiate a self-reinforcing process of collapse. It is our commitment to complexity–our investment in it–that keeps civilization afloat more than anything else. If our confidence flags and people begin to withdraw their commitment–their investment–then the situation proceeds very quickly from the status quo to “apocalypse.” The long decline of the Roman and Byzantine Empires was due to the slow attrition of diminishing marginal returns; the model of catabolic collapse is not to be found in Rome, but in New York. On 24 October 1929, the “roaring twenties” were still roaring. By 29 October, the Great Depression had begun. Keynesian, Monetarist, and Austrian economists blame the Great Crash on “overspeculation.” Investors put more into the stock than it was actually worth. As some investors sold their stocks, the value of the stocks went down, and it became evident to even more that they were not getting a good return. A trickle became a mad rush, as everyone struggled to not be the last one out. Such is the nature of catabolic collapse, as well. It’s hard to say which problem we’ll encounter first that our diminished problem-solving capacity will be incapable of solving (though it seems increasingly likely that Katrina may have been the first; we may be too far beyond the point of diminishing returns to ever rebuild New Orleans, however vital it may be as our primary Mississippian port), but whenever and wherever it occurs, we do know one thing: everything is in place for a catabolic collapse. Sit on a powder keg long enough, and eventually, it will explode.
But Hemenway’s argument rests on two major fallacies. He claims that the problems we face now are no worse than the problems we have faced in the past. The first fallacy is the most obvious: that statement is simply not true. He confuses classes of problems. The second fallacy is what we have just addressed: that the problems need not be any worse than anything in the past–in fact, they can be even less of a problem–if our capacity to answer them has diminished.
Hemenway opens with an example that never ceases to irritate me, regardless of who uses it: Y2K. Used now to paint anyone as a “chicken little,” invariably such use neglects the largely unknown history of the problem. It is now the poster-child of needless scares. As Hemenway puts it, “the most unnecessary ’sky is falling’ panic in my lifetime.” Others have complained of the enormous cost “wasted” on the “non-issue” due to sheer fear-mongering. As a computer scientist, this is a slight to my profession, ignoring one of our greatest achievements. Y2K was every bit the crisis we presented it as; it was because of all that money spent, and more importantly, the years of frantic labor on the part of my fellow techie brethren, that made Y2K a “non-event.” The reward for our effort is the popular perception that it was all a false alarm. It’s a thankless job; when we succeed, you don’t even know we did anything. It’s only our screw-ups that warrant your attention.
Y2K is an excellent example to open with, because it belongs to a class of problems we are most familiar with. These problems have technical solutions. That solution may be difficult, but it is possible. Throw enough manpower at it, and you’ll have an answer. The usual retort of, “People used to say we’d never be able to fly, either!” is another example. Throw enough manpower at it, and you’ll have an answer. These are not the class of problems we’re talking about.
The problem of Peak Oil is not one of oil disappearing overnight, or even completely. It is a problem of scale. Hemenway points out the many ways in which we adapt, and of course he’s right. That is not the question; the question is, will we adapt in time? Can we? Hemenway points out that humans are a “just-in-time” species:
Humans are activated by crisis, and often do little until it arrives. We waffle and deny as a bad situation builds, such as during Hitler’s repeated aggression in Europe in the late 1930s. Then we pass a trigger point and leap into all-out efforts; we are galvanized into war or its equivalent. Look at aircraft production in World War Two: In 1939, the US built 180 airplanes per month.(8) In 1940 we made 1600 each month, and by 1944, 8000. That’s a 4500% increase in 5 years. I’ve not heard any White House statements about “the war on oil dependence,� but when they come, I am certain we’ll make a similar effort, even if it is one of learning to make less rather than more.
I have no doubt he’s right. The question is, will our reluctance to do anything until it reaches the crisis level lead us to wait until it’s too little, too late? Once again, Hemenway points to easy, technical problems by comparison, as we simply threw all our effort behind a specific cause. It is also significant that WWII was an era of increasing, rather than decreasing energy. This is one of the key ingredients of the looming crisis–not only the scale of mobilization required, but the fact that if we wait until it is a crisis (we already have, as one would easily predict), we will have to do so with less energy every day. That is the problem of peak oil; not whether or not we’ll eventually mobilize, but whether it will be too little, too late.
It would be hubris to suggest that such a crisis could not possible destroy our civilization, when it has already destroyed so many civilizations before us. As I explained in a previous article, “Peak Wood,” we are by no means the first civilization to face a crisis like this. It is a regular killer of complex civilizations. Its victims include Cahokia, the Hohokam, and the Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean. As I wrote in that piece:
Every civilization eventually falls prey to diminishing returns. The problem of Peak Oil–like “Peak Wood”–is just one dimension of this much larger, intractable problem, inherent to the nature of any complex society. What separates extant civilizations from extinct ones is whether or not a less attractive alternative existed, which could become the basic strategy for a new iteration in the cycle of expansion and exploitation. But eventually, miracles run out. Eventually, the deus ex machina leaves us to sink or swim on our own merit. The crisis of Peak Oil is precisely the kind of crisis that has always collapsed civilizations, and if history is any guide, then it seems very likely that we have finally run out of luck, and the time has finally come to pay back 10,000 years of debt.
So, the thought that Peak Oil may result in collapse does not rest on the six premises Hemenway outlines at all; that is, in fact, a straw man. One need only believe that depletion will rise higher than our society’s adaptibility is capable of keeping up with.
Hemenway makes an argument about demand, and points out the basic economic fact that price is not only set by supply, but also by demand. This is the common Cornucopian reply to the question of Peak Oil: as supply contracts, prices will rise, which will simply extinguish demand. This entails a distinct lack of imagination, in my opinion, as to what “extinguishing demand” might entail. With a human population far beyond its carrying capacity already that can only be fed with petroleum-fueled, industrial agrictulre, a rise in the price of oil must be carried over into a rise in the price of food. That will increase the percentage of the population that cannot afford food, and that increases the desperation of a society very quickly. Because of the unequal distribution of wealth in modern civilization, the percentage of the population that starves from rises in the price of food rises much more quickly than the price itself, as the largest numbers of people are to be found in the lowest levels of affluence. Rise in violent crime, or even riots, would be an effective way of extinguishing demand–by lowering the population, violently. Carry this trend on long enough, and one begins to see the familiar scenario of collapse emerge. As John Robb pointed out, the existence of the state is predicated on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
In Maslow’s view, people must meet basic needs first, before they can consider more esoteric needs. This makes sense. You can’t worry about job advancement if you spend your entire day on the hunt for fuel to heat your home or food for your table. … The ongoing assaults on basic services (physiological and safety) has collapsed the legitimacy of the Iraqi government. People ultimately blame the government and the US for the lack of services and not the guerrillas.
The legitimacy of the state–the existence of civilization–is predicated on its ability to provide for the most basic needs of its citizens. As an anonymous proverb puts it, “Every society is only three meals away from revolution.” This would successfully extinguish demand–by setting off the self-reinforcing process of catabolic collapse described above. If the system of civilization is incapable of providing for basic needs, increasing numbers of people will look outside the system for those needs. This encourages still more to do the same, rather than continue their dependence on a failing system–a system that now fails more and more, as more and more people abandon it. It escalates–just like a run on an over-valued stock.
Hemenway is absolutely right that as Peak Oil progresses, we will become more efficient and waste more, but waste does not constitue nearly so large a proportion of our energy use as so many people think. Efficiency will buy us a few years, no doubt, but our need to continue growing or risk collapse in an age of declining energy makes for an inevitable rendezvous where, no matter how efficient we become, our complexity will have to go down. When that happens, the process of catabolic collapse begins.
Hemenway also mentions a point that deserves more explicit coverage here, though it is an unspoken assumption in all of my writing: culture is adaptive. It is itself an evolutionary adaptation, and forms a system unto itself that adapts to changes in the world, and changes within itself. A change in one part of a culture will cause cascading changes throughout the whole culture: a kind of memetic ecosystem. Culture will try to adapt to the changing energy landscape of the post-peak reality. That is not in question. The question is, will it be able to? Hemenway rests his argument on the premise that the depletion rate will be relatively mild, and if he’s correct in that, then I’m certain that culture will adapt. But what if that premise proves untrue? What if depletion is very high–say, 10% or more? In that case, we may be looking at half as much oil in just a decade. Will culture have enough time to adapt in that circumstance? Probably not.
Here, again, we run into the wall of the ultimate cause of collapse: diminishing marginal returns. For us, cultural adaptation means invention, or bureaucracy, or some other incarnation of greater complexity. Yet, our ability to do so is exactly what’s diminishing. Its effectiveness as a strategy is diminishing, and since it is a function of energy, even our ability to implement an increasingly useless strategy is diminishing.
I am not convinced that Peak Oil will certainly mean the end of civilization–but I do believe it is a possibility, a possibility that needs to be considered. What ensures collapse is not peak oil, but the diminishing marginal returns of complexty. The proximate cause is nearly impossible to predict, but peak oil is a prime candidate. Hemenway has his facts right (for the most part), but assembles them in almost the opposite argument from mine. Hemenway concludes with this:
High unemployment could be transformed into fewer people making, buying, and needing to earn money for unnecessary widgets; spending less time at jobs they hate; and producing, alone and in community, a larger share of what they actually need—which does not take 40 or more hours a week. It is an opportunity for the role of economics in our lives to shrink, and for an expansion of time for the many things money cannot, or should not, buy.
Humanity has reached the stage, finally, where basic survival is not in doubt for many people. We have not yet grasped that the struggle for survival is essentially over, and we have overshot. Instead of noticing that as a species we no longer need to labor all our waking hours for the basics of food and safe shelter, and to fight off disease and predators, we cannot get off the survival treadmill. So we just keep making more stuff, rather than looking up, taking a breath, and enjoying all the wonders possible from being a conscious, intelligent animal that has mastered survival. Perhaps Peak Oil, and a return to a time when resources are dear and labor is abundant, will remind us that there is much more to life than the manufactured desire to have more toys. Perhaps we can lose our small-minded obsession with getting and spending, and finally grow into maturity as a species.
Aside from perpetuating the patently false, Hobbesian vision of prehistoric human life, what Hemenway describes as “not apocalyptic” is something I might have written myself–as a description of what collapse ultimately accomplishes. All Hemenway’s analysis really lacks is an understanding of how unlikely we are to bridge that process without suffering a great deal along the way.
“Hemenway is absolutely right that as Peak Oil progresses, we will become more efficient and waste more,”
shouldn’t the more be “less” ?? Or is there some aspect of efficiency I’m not following here?
Comment by neighbor — 7 April 2006 @ 4:10 PM
You’re right, that’s a typo. Seeing all the buzz around Hemenway’s article put me in too much of a rush to get it out.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 April 2006 @ 4:15 PM
Leave it to me to whack a hornet’s nest and then disappear. I’ll be in Poughkeepsie with Giuli all next week and won’t be back until after Easter, so don’t expect much in the way of, well, any evidence that I’m still alive during the interrim. The rest of the tribe will be around to hopefully hold down the fort while I’m gone.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 April 2006 @ 4:36 PM
Your flaw is in the equivocations and partitions of ideas underlying your concept of complexity.
Forcibly imposed and over-extended structure is different from dynamicism. Technology (and even infrastructure to a much lesser extent) can be used dynamically or/and as a conduit for the nihilistic social idiocy of hierarchy.
A dynamically adaptable society/civilization can be infinitely more complex than the intractable blunt structures within an entrenched society. That constant dynamic complexity, like the ecosystem’s dynamic complexity, is sustainable. Simplistic social mechanization is, of course, unsustainable because it functions by putting restraints on complexity and thus adaptability.
Comment by wil — 7 April 2006 @ 5:10 PM
I don’t think you’re understanding what is meant by “complexity” here. If you don’t want to read Tainter’s whole book (Collapse of Complex Societies), then there’s a fair enough synopsis (I think) in thesis #14, linked above.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 April 2006 @ 5:15 PM
G’day from Oz,
(Not Jason Godesky)
Toby Hemenway has been missing some critical things - Jamie once a permaculture activist has moved on to the higher philosophical standard of Nature Farming of ç¦?岡æ£ä¿¡ Fukuoka, Masanobu. Here in this group message copied at the bottom below is one of many examples from that group of Jamie articulating clearly himself why we need clearer philosophical starting points than Hemenway apparently has ever provided. Jamie has been a professional philospher at Oxford if i remember rightly his earlier posts about himself, he focused on continental philosophy such as Heidegger, knows better than to be seduced by mechanistic ‘western’ so called philosophy derived from Descartes or Copernicus, and came to Fukuoka Masanobu through that philosophical angle. Thus he is an authoritative critic of philosophy of any less standard than Fukuoka Masanobu or Heidegger, etc.
For a fine writing more recently than quoted below by Jamie see:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/5317
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/5339
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/5353
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/5369
ç¦?岡æ£ä¿¡ Fukuoka Masanobu himself articulates very clearly that Permaculture is just a feelgood mistaken continuation of the false Copernican, Cartesian, etc. based western philosophy(s), in his books and in USA conferences he was keynote speaker at over the last 30 years, with Permaculture’s Bill Mollison and with Wes Jackson. In his book “自然ã?«é‚„ã‚‹”(Shizen ni kaeru) “The Road back to Nature” by ç¦?岡æ£ä¿¡ Fukuoka Masanobu also clearly points out a much more important disasterous problem & mistake with projects such as Permaculture and mechanistic ecological science - that they are the Alibi - the barely funded tokenistic attention to the problem - the so called democratic western establishments’s superficial allowance of dissent such as amongst academics, farmers & indigenous peoples - The ALIBI by which the status quo rolls on - The status quo of depraved decadence, of unnecessary wars which the minority in power have started to impress their power & intimidate their victims both internally and in external countries - the juggernaut self-destructive ‘western’ establishment - The fatalists - The burn-(itself)-out ‘western’ culture(s) (slow or fast burn-out depending on which case - which country).
Please be opening eyes in the USA by reading and sharing these crucial exposes:
Yale Bonesmen engaged in macabre business.
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1065807370
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1086105944
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096412153
The Christain bible, i forget the full quote and context (please respond with help here), says and my friends and network often repeat this example amongst our group to keep the faith: “Speak truth to power” doing so is liberating while from without doing this it may seem too risky and daunting, but it isn’t - what can the powers that be do when mass population speak the truth to them - there is always a tipping point at which the minority in power yield to the truth when enough of the majority voices speak that truth out.
There is a chapter there in “The Road back to Nature” by ç¦?岡æ£ä¿¡ Fukuoka Masanobu called ‘Organic Farming and Ecology are Self-Defeating’:
From “自然ã?«é‚„ã‚‹”(Shizen ni kaeru) “The Road back to Nature” by Fukuoka Masanobu.
”
Organic Farming and Ecology are Self-Defeating
If mistaken agricultural methods are responsible for the decay in European land, then unless those errors are rectified, both the rapidly declining nature and culture of Europe will be beyond help. It is generally thought that adequate measures are being taken to stem this decline, but is this in fact so?
In Japan as well, the issue of environmental conservation came to the fore in the early 1970’s. With this, word of natural farming and organic gardening spread. But in spite of the high expectations made of it, organic gardening is not very different from scientific agriculture. In its present form, organic gardening is simply a return to animal-based farming and to the use of manure and compost. Because organic methods are essentially the same as those traditionally used in Japan, these can be of little help in restoring true nature. Not only that, if anything, such methods assist in the destruction of nature. True, organic farming does act as a brake, but since the brake is acting upon a broken wheel, this only compounds the danger.
If I may be quite frank about it, although organic farming appears to serve the cause of natural conservation, on reviewing these developments over the past decade or so, this has not been the case. I began by selling my mandarins directly to consumer cooperatives in Tokyo about ten years ago; maybe another ten years before that, some people i know got together and organised an organic farming association. Compared to back then when things were just getting started, it would seem as if the natural food and direct distribution movements have made some progress. But this has really caught on only among a small number of people. During the past decade, instead of moving toward the preservation of nature, the world and society at large has - just as i feared it would - continued on a course of relentless destruction. Nothing has been stopped. People living in Tokyo have not approached closer to a natural diet; if anything, their diet has become more unnatural - even anti-natural. In the space of these ten years, the assault on nature has proceeded at an accelerated pace, producing wanton destruction of the land and further debasement in the quality of man’s diet. We can afford to wait no longer.
I think that the problem lies in people’s willingness to believe that, with the clamour over natural diet, the development of organic gardening, and the slowing - however small - in scientific agriculture, things have been getting better. It is my belief that the arrogance - and failing - of scholars lies in their thinking: “If there is a right and a left, then a balance can be achieved and things worked out; as long as ecology exists and we have ecologists around, it will be possible to save nature.” This is precisely what I mean when I say that halfway measures won’t do.
I had an opportunity once to meet Professor Akira Miyawaki of Yokohama National University at a general meeting of the agricultural cooperative associations in Japan. Professor Miyawaki reported on pollution damage in Cryptomerias along hiking trails at the base of Mount Fuji, stressing again and again that “nature must be protected.”
After his talk, I spoke up: “Professor, if you think that the plant ecologists can protect the ecology of Japan’s mountains and forests, you’re sadly mistaken. It’s not the plant ecologists who created sacred groves of the local village shrines, you know.”
The professor had a strange look on his face. I learned why later when I had a chance to read a book he had written; I found that he makes frequent mention of these shrine groves. I suppose that he expounds on ecology knowing full well the limits of plant ecologists and argues strongly for a revival of those groves. The problem is that the general public, taking false comfort in the thought that the professor and his colleagues will protect nature for them, becomes an unconcerned bystander in the destruction of nature.
Let me illustrate with an example. People who are told: “There’s no one around to treat you if you get injured - there are no doctors on this island,” are bound to take care of themselves. But try telling them: “We’ve got a surgeon and an internist on the island, so you can rest assured that you’ll be well taken care of should anything happen.” Do that, and people will cease to look after themselves. The more they hear talk of plant ecologists and conservation groups protecting nature and the environment, the less concerned people become about destroying nature. Now that we have environmental conservation groups in Japan and a national Environment Agency, it is as if people were saying, “Leave the fire up to the firemen and the arsonist up to the police.” With its fixation on tourism and leisure, the public is calling for more high-speed rods and bridges. It looks as if the natural destruction of Japan will continue yet for some time to come.
Riving the earth, halting the growth of deserts, and conserving the environment all can be achieved not by doing something, but by seizing an opportunity for restoring nature that requires nothing [more accurately translated: requires only becoming natural people and ‘doing’ natural living] to be done.
The sacred groves of Japanese village shrines grew into natural woods only because, calling the rocks and trees there gods, someone attached sacred straw festoons to these, saving them from the ax. The ax and saw are the worst; their appearance marked the start of the destruction of nature.
”
For example see from the following:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/3009
”
> Does anyone have at hand “The Road back to Nature” by Fukuoka?
> Please find the section near the back of the book were Fukuoka talks
> about ‘Permaculture’ and Bill Mollison and write it up as a quote
> here so we can all get straight to the point!
i just reread the paragraph ” the 3 don quixotes” and he doesn’t say much about permaculture apart from his drawing at the end depicting bill mollison the blind and wes jackson the deaf riding backwards on don quixote donkey while masanobu is hanging on the tail and swinging back and forth .
all trying to stop that donkey from running widly over the cliff by returning to nature , but their efforts are all in vain.
he asked the audience :
then he drew President Reagan standing on the donkey neck and dangling a carrot in front of its nose .
one person replied:….
are you refering to something else than this paragraph ?.
What i am deducting is that Masanobu do stop trying to ride the donkey especially backward while the carrot is still hanging in front and attracting this crazy donkey to its own sabotage. he still try to stop it but without conviction and it doesn’t seem a confortable way of doing it (at least Bill Mollison made its place confortable
Comment by Jase — 7 April 2006 @ 9:06 PM
From Jase
Fixing the omitted parts (because of angled brackets in the original - Sorry!) of that last quoted message from wonderful natural food-growing practitioner & writer Jean-Claude. Again From:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/3007
”
> Does anyone have at hand “The Road back to Nature” by Fukuoka?
> Please find the section near the back of the book were Fukuoka talks
> about ‘Permaculture’ and Bill Mollison and write it up as a quote
> here so we can all get straight to the point!
i just reread the paragraph ” the 3 don quixotes” and he doesn’t say much about permaculture apart from his drawing at the end depicting bill mollison the blind and wes jackson the death riding backwards don quixote
donkey while masanobu is hanging on the tail and swinguing back and forth .
all trying to stop that donkey from running widly over the cliff by returning to nature , but their efforts are all in vain.
he asked the audience : “what would you do ?”
then he drew President Reagan standing on the donkey neck and dangling a carrot in front of its nose .
” what is this carrot?.”
one person replied:” Money”….
are you refering to something else than this paragraph ?.
What i am deducting is that Masanobu do stop trying to ride the donkey especially backward while the carrot is still hanging in front and attracting this crazy donkey to its own sabotage. he still try to stop it but without conviction and it doesn’t seem a confortable way of doing it (at least Bill Mollison made its place confortable “raising quite a
following among organic farmers advocates thoughout Australia and the US”.
I have observed so often this phenomenon in many fields , somebody being in touch with a potentially revolutionary approach and washing it down to make
it honorable and acceptable ……
permaculture seems to me an attempt to makes scientific agriculture less obviouslly against nature but doesn’t touch the fundamental : the “need ”
for control.
IMO that is why Masanobu is into direct contact with the hopeless.
the bible said something about the meeks …..
we in australia or americas are way to confortable to renounce totally to the thrill of being in control.
and we have good conscience, we created permaculture as an alibi to continue the madness….
jean-claude
“
Comment by Jase — 7 April 2006 @ 9:19 PM
It doesn’t come from the Bible, it apparently comes from the Quakers.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 April 2006 @ 12:30 AM
With respect, I stand by my assertion. You’re defining the term to fit the use you want it to serve.
The entrenching of extended structures (informational, socialogical, material) is what’s being addressed but, by defining it instead as “complexity,” you’re using a two-definition trick to passively expand your dismissal of definition #1 to implicitly dismiss the broader definition #2.
So long as the complexity of consciously created structures are not entrenched but instead fluid, dynamic and organic they are sustainable. But you’re dismissing the choice/possibility of organically applying technological complexity. Un-entrenching complexity rather than abolishing it thus gets written off.
Comment by wil — 8 April 2006 @ 2:42 AM
I haven’t read Jase’s comments yet, so this is just to wil:
Technology is one facet of complexity, as I explained in thesis #14. I do not believe it can be seperated out from the others, since they are bound together, and none can rise or fall without the others close behind. I don’t think I’m lumping them together, rather, I think you’re splitting them too much. Whereas I have a lengthy defense of my position, and you have so far only asserted yours, and as my understanding is that shared by anthropologists who study cultural complexity (my understanding comes directly from Tainter, which is probably the most authoritative study of the matter so far produced) it seems to me that it is my argument that should be preferred, unless and until you can elaborate on why technology does not count as cultural complexity. Since that is the basis of your criticism, without a full defense, I’m afraid I have little option but to consider it dismissed.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 April 2006 @ 4:11 AM
It’s an interesting suggestion tucked in at the end there, that mass unemployment will lead to utopia as everyone realises that they’re screwed.
I remember once seeing a documentary from the 1950s, one of the ones about how by the 80s we’d all be living in moon towns and eating little pills. They said something very similar. They said that, as the need for labour decreased, we’d all have more “leisure time”. We do, of course; we just call it unemployment. If you’re working full-time, you don’t have time left for much else.
What do we do with our “leisure time”? We sit around, in poverty, getting sick, turning to crime, living miserable, short, brutish lives, you might say. Those who aren’t completely demoralised yet live in hope that this week, this month, things will be different; this will be the month we find work and become a real person again.
There’s nothing stopping the unemployed and otherwise excluded from putting together their own alternative systems now, growing more food, gathering more food, taking themselves outside the system, but they don’t - they’re hopelessly tied into the mainstream system and its vision. After the peak, I suspect it won’t be any different. A lot of people will die still waiting for the system to save them.
Comment by Vashti — 8 April 2006 @ 5:49 AM
The imagery of Chicken Little (CL) confronting Mr. Ostrich Head (MOH) is a great one. Couldn’t resiste and posted it to my site here
One thing not really discussed by either side is the risk versus reward equation. You know, multiply probability of outcome times values of the gain or loss. Let’s say for pure argument sake that it is 50-50 as to whether the Cornucopians are right (they’re not) or the Doomers are right (actually, it won’t be equally bad for everyone). If the Corny guys are right, we will have wasted D dollars trying to fix a problem that is not there. If the Doomers are right, we will suffer N x D in losses where N is multiplier effect for how bad the outcome will be relaltive to what it takes to try to fix it (an ounce of prevention). So which loss is the bigger one?
Comment by step back — 8 April 2006 @ 12:55 PM
Expected value. Or, if you prefer, an application of Pascal’s Wager? I tend to agree with you.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 April 2006 @ 1:02 PM
I’m not trying to seperate technology from complexity.
Rather I’m arguing that you’re using ‘entrenched extended structure’ as the definition of complexity and then, because technology is implicitly tied to complexity, you can simply define away any fluid, dynamic and organic nature to complexity/technology.
You admirably critique the first but it doesn’t follow that technology is only covered under that limited definition when the popular perception of complexity (ie #2) includes both.
…You’re right that I’m going to have to expand on this, of course. It’s just that it’s probably going to take a while before I can find the time to officially write out a thesis.
Comment by wil — 8 April 2006 @ 3:54 PM
Hey Jason. Just wondered if you ever read Thomas Homer-Dixon’s Ingenuity Gap. His basic question is do we have the ingenuity in society to solve what are becoming more complex problems in a world where people are becoming less inclined to believe we even have problems. Interesting read. You should check it out if you haven’t already.
Comment by Peter D — 9 April 2006 @ 10:57 AM
I guess I had higher hopes for a permaculture expert than I got from Hemenway in his latest article. His argument was incoherent, although I agreed with certain of his paragraphs, out of context.
Comment by Jon S. — 9 April 2006 @ 2:57 PM
This site seems to be in sympathy with the arguments I have posted at “The Oil Drum.” TOD seems to primarily be a techie haven where the tech fairy is alive and well.
Entropy wins. Either now, or later entropy wins.
I will continue to read this site and will probably post little because I do not like to be a “me tooer.”
Otherwise, great stuff.
Comment by Cherenkov — 9 April 2006 @ 4:31 PM
Either I’m learning to comprehend your language, or your writing skill has improved marketly.
Comment by Rick Larson — 9 April 2006 @ 8:59 PM
Peter D,
Something you said that is very intriguing:
Do we have sufficient ingenuity in our society to save society?
From my perspective, the biggest challenge that the “ingenuity” part of our society faces is how to organize human society so that it can detect the “real” problems and then overcome them. Clearly, too few a people see Peak Oil or Global Warming or other perils (population bomb) as being something worthy enough to make it onto the “Radar Screen”.
Karl Marx was a very smart guy in that he saw the shortcomings of capitalism and proposed communism as a possible solution. Communism failed big time. But the shortcomings of capitalism continue to remain unresolved. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and limited resources continue to be depleted at alarming and “growth-based” rates. Our profit-chasing capitalist machine simply continues racing toward the cliff even as Cassandra scientists cry out over the perils of Global Warming, Peak Oil, etc. Despite the knowledge of catastrophe a coming, no one seems to be able to steer the machine (the ship Titanic) towards a safer course.
I personally don’t see a better system than capitalism for organizing human behavior & have not seen alternate proposals that might work, given human nature is what it is. Scholars have looked at all sorts of government systems and found nothing that has the “answer” buried in it (how to establisg checks and balances that do the most good for the most people rather than the most good for the elite few). Until we humans come up with an ingenius way of organizing ourselves so that truth wins out over power, our ship of state will continue to steer itself for the iceberg.
Comment by step back — 9 April 2006 @ 9:01 PM
The reasons I find Hemenway’s argument more persuasive are two: 1. he has history on his side. Despite all the examples of societies collapsing that everyone here cites over and over again, history has largely been one of increasing material wealth and greater individual freedoms for larger numbers of people (before you jump down my throat, I didn’t say everyone, or even most people — I said larger numbers of people.) I know that’s part of the reason why you all think we’re on the path to overshoot and die off, etc., but if the past is any guide, Hemenway’s right: humanity as a species will figure it out, and overcome it. 2: the point you all never explain is, even if your b1, c1 - b1, c3 curve at the top is right, you have no way of knowing, really, where we are on that curve. You have a hunch that we’re either on the downslope or approaching it. And you can point to a lot of current events that seem to support your hunch. But people living at any point in history could probably point to developments that in their minds indicated that “the end is near.” Miniskirts, teaching evolution in the schools, etc. My point is, it’s ultimately an article of faith with you people. All the “theses” posted on this site have not convinced me that anyone knows what the highest level of ‘complexity’ for us is globally. Yes, we certainly are complex. But it seems to me that the true hubris is claiming that one knows that we can go this far, and no further. While you may well be right that we’re on the verge of the upper limits of complexity (I certainly can’t predict the future either), history points to the opposite.
Comment by Anonymous — 9 April 2006 @ 9:01 PM
A tribal system allows a group to organize itself without dependance on those with material wealth having power over those without. In a tribal system no one person owns the majority of the tribe’s output. That output is owned by the whole of the tribe.
I fail to see how old celbate men thinking that miniskirts are the work of the devil is in anyway relevant. The arguement in favor of collapse is manifold, and not reliant on a new fad. The lack of oil as an energy source without a viable replacement is a huge problem. The lacking of potable water is a huge problem. Shifting climate zones are a huge problem. The diminishing returns of our investments are a huge problem. That they are all happing at once makes it impossible to overcome. We have overcome problems before, but not on this scale. We overcame the Great Depression by the skin of our teeth, but we still had easy access to fossil fuels. We don’t anymore. Without that oil that could have been the end. Without oil and without sufficent water it would have been the end. Without oil or water, and with a population 3 times larger and a change in weather patterns it would have been unassailable. This is the situation we find ourselves in now. The argument is simple: Throw enough baseballs at a guy and one of them is going to hit him in the nuts.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 9 April 2006 @ 9:17 PM
G’day from Jase in Oz,
Well, excuse me the primary quote from Jamie that i built up in my first post to this thread got cut aswell - i’m re-reading my writing & replies 2 days later today. So it’s posted below with the intro - build up - repeated aswell.
Cheers,
Jase
**********************************
>”Speak truth to power”
>It doesn’t come from the Bible, it apparently comes from the Quakers.
Thanks Jason Godesky for that.
************************************
G’day from Oz,
(Not Jason Godesky)
Toby Hemenway has been missing some critical things - Jamie once a permaculture activist has moved on to the higher philosophical standard of Nature Farming of ç¦?岡æ£ä¿¡ Fukuoka, Masanobu. Here in this group message copied at the bottom below is one of many examples from that group of Jamie articulating clearly himself why we need clearer philosophical starting points than Hemenway apparently has ever provided. Jamie has been a professional philospher at Oxford if i remember rightly his earlier posts about himself, he focused on continental philosophy such as Heidegger, knows better than to be seduced by mechanistic ‘western’ so called philosophy derived from Descartes or Copernicus, and came to Fukuoka Masanobu through that philosophical angle. Thus he is an authoritative critic of philosophy of any less standard than Fukuoka Masanobu or Heidegger, etc.
From:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/1888
Jamie
Fri Jan 31, 2003
RE: [fukuoka_farming] We need clear information.
”
Hello glObe, I have not read Gaia’s Garden, though every reference to it
that has come my way has been positive, so my comments here should be
understood with this proviso. However, I have been fortunate enough to
listen to Toby Hemenway (through email) on another forum and a few personal
email’s and believe him to be a filled with good common sense.
However, (and I just bet that you knew there was going to be an however!)
Toby, like Permaculture, is not Natural Farming. This is not to denigrate PC
or Toby, but to try and draw the comparison between the two due to the often
(perfectly reasonable) misapprehension that the two are interchangeable.
Fukuoka’s NF is an agriculture, PC is a design process. Yet, I do not wish
to suggest that PC is not also involved in agriculture, it is, intimately
so. But if one were to read Permaculture One and Permaculture Two, The
Introduction to Permaculture and Permaculture: The Designers Manual (which
someone has recently done) you will discover that nothing is said about how
to grow your own vegetables.
Let me try and explain the significance of this. Permaculturalists recognize
the importance of growing the maximum amount of food from perennial plants
in permanent places. They also recognize the importance of ‘perennializing’
annuals by allowing self-seeding whenever possible. Yet, for the vast
majority of vegetable and cereal crops eaten, that must be seeded or
transplanted annually, Permaculture has almost nothing to say on how they
should be grown and Permaculturalists are left to choose from one of the
many organic techniques. However, if we are truly committed to permanent
agriculture, then this home and commercial production is every bit as
important as perennial planting.
Fukuoka’s NF is a way of working with the soil to maintain its fertility
without any amendments at all. By simply timing the process of seeding, by
choosing a nitrogen fixing cover crop and by returning all straw back to the
field (in essence by closely observing how the seasons and plants revolved
on the land of his farm) he has achieved a no-input (do-nothing) agriculture
that mimics nature. PC has not adopted this revolutionary approach and is
thus, for all its important sustainable ambitions, not Natural Farming.
PC is still embroiled in what I would characterise as the conventional
western mindset, where the soil is seen as a profit and loss ledger, debit
(crops) must be balanced by credits (soil amendments in whatever form they
take, be they labelled organic or not), rather than the understanding that
soil and plants work together (not excluding the millions/billions of
microorganisms that make up every gram of healthy soil) to maintain a soil’s
fertility. To break this down into ‘hard’ numbers (not something I like
doing but it makes the point): if a plant is made up of 75% water and 20% of
a plants dry matter is of hydrocarbons produced through photosynthesis, then
there is only 5% that must come from the soil. 2.5% of this comes in the
form of Nitrogen fixed on the nodules of nitrogen fixing plants by bacterial
symbionts, leaving only 2.5% to come from the soil in the form of other
elements such as Phosphorus, Potassium, Calcium, Sulphur, Magnesium and Iron
and trace elements such as Silica, Copper, Boron, Zinc, Manganese, Cobalt
and Molybdenum.
Therefore I doubt “…Gaia’s Garden is a good starter book for those getting
into permaculture and natural farming”, well not NF anyway. And from the
philosophical discussions that have passed between Toby and me, I doubt “It
will give you a good philosophical and practical starter’s took kit to work
with”, well not the philosophical part anyway.
Jamie
Souscayrous
”
For fine writing more recently than quoted above by Jamie, see:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/5317
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/5339
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/5353
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fukuoka_farming/message/5369
Comment by Jase — 9 April 2006 @ 10:14 PM
“history points to the opposite.”
you mean His-tory? the history written by the victors?
Comment by Scott — 9 April 2006 @ 11:50 PM
In the 3 days that “Apocalypse Not� has been on the web, I’ve gotten over 80 emails about it, and the article has generated over 300 comments on only 3 of the many websites it’s been posted on. Needless to say I’m overwhelmed, but Anthropik is one place that is, to me, well worth spending a little time responding. The article was written last November, long before I’d discovered Anthropik, (those lengthy print publication leadtimes) so this site had no influence on the article. Anthropik has had a significant influence on my thinking since then.
I look at my article now as a draft. I tried to cover far, far too much ground and gave short shrift to too many ideas (that’s why there’s something in it for everyone to love, and to hate). The curse of being a generalist and ecologist is that everything does feel connected to everything else, so staying focused on a narrow topic is a challenge. Jason’s used up 30 theses and many, many thousand words on the same topics I touched on in 2500. So I’ll try to stick to one or two points here, and maybe get to others later.
Of course civilizations collapse, and this one will too. I suspect the agrarian/industrial experiment will turn out to be 10,000-year blind alley and humanity will need to try something else. I’ve never been a cornucopian, and the 30 theses have recently moved me from giving collapse in my lifetime about a 15% chance to more like 30%. For most of my life I was an utter doomer. And that’s the problem. I turn 54 in a few days, and since my early teens I have heard literally hundreds of predictions that the world is going to end. This has been status quo for over 2000 years. The apocalyptic Judeo-Christian view, whether you consciously believe in it or not, is deeply rooted in every westerner. You can’t escape it; we need to believe in the end of the world because only that will allow the transformation from this miserable life into a better one (and clearly Anthropik believes this is a miserable world). There were many in the year 999 who believed just as fervently in the end of the world at the millenium, and with just as compelling reasoning, for that day, as Jason’s. In every year since then each apocalypt had his unshakeable reasons. For the last couple of centuries, since science has rivaled religion as our faith, the reasons have been replete with graphs, tables, and formulae to prove that, no really, this time is different because we never had condition X before, and here’s the math (instead of the visions, or faith, or plague) to prove it. I spent decades believing in collapse, and I’ve simply grown tired of it. I’ve seen too many changes over a lifetime to believe in extending trends to zero or infinity or even into tipping points. I’m not saying collapse can’t or won’t happen. I’m saying a high level of certainty about its near-term occurrence strikes me as insupportable. People react, and that changes things fast.
Predictions are almost always wrong. There are thousands of discarded graphs out there similar to Jason’s complexity curve, tossed out because initial or boundary conditions changed, some variable wasn’t taken into account, or somebody just had a new idea and the whole ballgame shifted. Maybe the complexity curve is right. Maybe not. One big flaw is that increasing complexity does not require increasing “costs� or energy to manage. Diminishing returns do not apply. Stuart Kauffman (Santa Fe Institute) and colleagues have shown how “order for free� works and how complexity favors stability. In a later post I can discuss it. See Kauffman’s “The Origins of Order� or the simple version, “At Home in the Universe.� Portions are on the web. Uh-oh, I’m veering. Back to the point.
I used Y2k as an example not because it posed no problem. It did, and it was serious, which supports my point. But its real relevance is because even after it was clear that we’d reacted to it and were likely to fix it in time, a large number of people remained wedded to the certainly of collapse. “Everything was different nowâ€? because we’d never been dependent on computers before, so it was a much more formidable class of problem, of unparalleled complexity. Or, in contrast, take the dot.com bust of 2000. It was a new economy, and the boom would never end because it was a whole different class of business and the rules were different now. We always believe we’re headed for a new world; that’s our signature myth. And that belief is 999 out of 1000 times wrong. I’m a biologist, and catastrophism is a rejected system. Change happens either continuously, or not at all for years and then suddenly and briefly–but even then most changes are very small. A few are big, but those are very, very rare. And there’s another topic for later.
Y2k had a terribly short timeline, but we reacted systemically to solve it (no other culture has had that option, but that’s another essay). Peak oil is a more complex problem, but the timeline is much longer, we have begun to respond, and each response extends the timeline (the right side of Hubbert’s Curve) further. Contrary to Jason’s denial, it is not in a new class. We’ve faced critical resource depletion often before and only rarely with collapse—the end of whale oil was feared to be the end of lighting and thus a new Dark Age—and we now face, indeed, primarily technical problems. We need to stop dumping shit in our water. (But Benjamin, there’s a lot of potable water out there; it falls from the sky!) We need to cut oil use. Most of the oil we burn is consumed in stupid, unnecessary ways: we don’t need cars; we don’t need oil to grow food (human waste can replace 80% of our fertilizer, or as Jamie says, plants can, and Jason forgets that buying food is not the only way to get it. Oil prices don’t much effect food you grow yourself with homegrown fertility, as much of the world still does). We don’t need most of what we use oil for. Amory Lovins and others illustrate clearly that we could use 80-90% less energy if we did things differently, but still at no loss of living standard. And I’d like to see “living standardâ€? for the West descend quite a bit.
Ah, but there’s the population problem. Yes, population is going to have to come way down. Will there be a crash? Most crashes in animal populations are not from starvation; they are from drastically reduced birthrates in response to scarce resources. We’re doing that now. It’s not hard to cut population in half in 2 generations from a dropped birthrate; Europe could more than do it given today’s rate, discounting immigration (see http://www.junkscience.com/news/eberstad.html ). Can the rest of the world? You won’t hear me predicting. But look at how wrong the doomers around population have been to date. Paul Ehrlich, no fool, predicted that in the 1980s overpopulation would cause worldwide famine. Oil bought us out of that one; no one thought you could eat oil (a whole new class of answer!). That’s about to decline, but the input variables are changing in many other ways. In 1990 the UN predicted that world population would peak in 2050 at 12 billion. We’re all gonna starve! In 2000 they saw that birthrates were dropping precipitously in the developed world and revised downward to a 9 billion peak. That’s a staggering