Archdruid Watch: A Depopulation Explosion?
by Jason GodeskyThis week’s Archdruid Report, “A Depopulation Explosion,” focuses on the same general theme Greer’s been on for the past three weeks: how wrong “apocalyptic narratives” are (by which he generally means primitivists, and not people who actually believe in a coming apocalypse, like Evangelical Christians). If anybody was expecting the collapse of civilization to wipe out every city on earth overnight, then Greer’s article provides a great counter-balance, but since that’s a straw man that no one’s actually espousing, his point is somewhat less compelling. As we’ve seen in the recently-concluded “Unfolding Collapse” series, we’re not at the beginning of collapse, but well into it now. Greer’s viewpoint of the “long decline” isn’t wrong, nearly so much as it’s academic. Historians have the hindsight to trace the trajectory of a long decline; those who live through those events invariably experience them as a sudden crash.
But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. Greer begins this week’s article with the same loopy logic that he generally uses to dismiss primitivism:
I’m old enough to remember when Comet Kohoutek was supposed to cause global devastation and Anwar Sadat was widely identified as the Antichrist, and one thing I’ve learned is that it’s very easy to come up with a worst case scenario and back it up with a bunch of cherrypicked factoids. Another thing I’ve learned is that this sort of exercise is probably the least effective way there is of guessing the shape of the future. When such predictions leap into the pool of time, the reliable result is a thundering bellyflop.
For those who might not remember, David Berg, founder of the cult “Children of God,” and later called “the Famil of Love,” in 1973 predicted that Comet Kohoutek heralded doomsday for the United States in January 1974. The identification of Anwar Sadat with the Antichrist was made on similar grounds. Ergo, Greer concludes, primitivists must also be wrong.
There’s actually not one, but two logical fallacies involved in that argument. The first is the very premise of the argument that because a kind of prediction has proven wrong in the past, that it will continue to be wrong in the future. It’s the same logical fallacy you might commit if you flip a coin twice, get two heads, and then confidently predict that the coin will always show heads forevermore, no matter how many times it’s flipped. The odds here are obviously not 50/50, of course, but past accuracy really is no indicator of future accuracy; it could be that the crazy cult leader might actually be right this time.
Of course, the bigger fallacy is conflating two entirely different kinds of evidence and analysis. Primitivists predict the end of civilization based on observed climate change, soil depletion, ecological impact, anthropological data and ethnographic and historical precedent. Greer’s comparing that to the scrutiny of Bronze Age prophecies by fevered mystics and religious zealots. We expect a lunatic like Berg to be wrong about things like that, too! So in what way does the fact that Sadat never really lived up to Antichristly expectations change soil quality worldwide, or put new metal ores into the ground, or halt global climate change? We don’t look to ancient prophecies like the examples Greer invariably looks to, nor do we even use “cherry-picked factoids.” We look at the broad pattern of civilization’s history, and note that the resources that it requires to exist simply no longer exist. Greer’s comparison ignores that crucial distinction; it is a sloppy, hand-waving dismssal, intellectually lazy and appealing to an irrational equivalence.
The main body of Greer’s post, though, comes back to the one subject he brings up even more often than the silliness/stupidity of primitivists: “the long decline.” As Greer puts it:
The winding down of the industrial age isn’t a fast process. The peak of worldwide conventional oil production may well have already happened – the best figures I’ve seen show that production rates reached in the fall of 2005 have not been equalled since – and the overall peak, including nonconventional sources such as tar sands and natural gas liquids, probably isn’t far away. What too few people seem to have noticed, though, is that the Hubbert curve is shaped like a bell, not like a sawtooth.
That bell-shaped profile means, among other things, that about as much oil will be pumped out of the ground on the downside half of the curve as was pumped on the upside. It also means that production rates along the downside will be roughly commensurable with production rates at points on the upside the same distance from the peak. If peak production comes in 2010, in other words, the amount of oil produced in 2030 will likely not be far from what was produced in 1990; production in 2060 will be somewhere near production in 1960, and production in 2100 will be around production in 1920. Even after the peak comes and goes, in other words, there will still be a great deal of oil in circulation for many years to come. The same will likely be true of most other energy resources, and of energy as a whole.
There are two problems here; firstly, Greer should see some better numbers, because Saudi Arabian oil declined by 8% in 2006, which is awfully close to Stuart Staniford’s hand-waving “guesstimate” of 11% for the collapse threshold, particularly this early on, and consistent with the big drops you’d expect if OPEC countries were lying about their numbers and using water injection or water flood techniques to keep their production up. As Jeff Vail reported a while back:
Shortly after OPEC began linking production quotas to reserve levels, all the major players miraculously doubled their oil reserves. PIW’s report is the smoking gun that finally shows what has been widely understood all along: that OPEC reserves are really only about half what is claimed.
So what does this mean for our ability to produce oil? Well, the classical Hubbert peak takes place when half the oil in the ground has been produced. However, if you discount OPEC reserves by 50%, it becomes clear that we are WELL past that half-way point. So production should have already begun to decline. This suggests that, as widely feared, only the use of water injection and water flood tecniques to keep reservoir pressure artificially high have kept production rates up for the past several years. The problem with this is that when a field who’s production rate has been artificially sustained beyond the half-way point finally does begin to decline, its rate of decline tends to be very, very high. 10-18% has been suggested (by Simmons and others) as the decline rate for fields that have been pressed to the limits with injection technologies. This is critical, because while Peak Oil may be a quite manageable problem at 2% depletion, 10%+ depletion means that world production will fall by half in less than 7 years. That would be absolutely catastrophic. No wonder this story isn’t available on CNN.
And, as Stuart Staniford argued in the article linked above:
Once we are post-peak, the depletion rate is going to be the single most important variable by far. I argue it controls whether peak oil is minor unpleasantness, or Overshoot-style die-off. If we understand these issues, I think it can help to clarify exactly why one might choose to live at one or other end of the peak-oil spectrum—complacency or panic.
Staniford further illustrates how a depletion rate that’s too high will start to drive the depletion rate even higher, specifically referring to Tainter’s theory of diminishing marginal returns on complexity.
In our case, consider a potential investor in a company that is raising capital to open a lead mine to make batteries for anticipated future demand for plug-in hybrids. Let’s say it takes five years to get the thing producing, and then the initial capital will take five more years to repay before it starts to really make money. So this investor has to believe society will hold together well enough over that time for his investment to really be worth it. Otherwise he’s investing in gold instead (or vodka!).
Obviously, if our hypothetical investors do not feel enough confidence to make this investment, now society is in real trouble—the batteries needed to power the plugin hybrids are not going to be there when they are needed. And so on, across a thousand similar decisions across the economy.
Not only that, but the point at which wealthy investors are giving up hope about the future is also probably similar to the point at which the rest of society gives up hope too, and starts looking for alternative ways to survive. One of the leading effects of that is likely to be a loss of law-and-order. Things go downhill very rapidly from there as we have seen in the last week in New Orleans. We also know conflict was a major factor in the decline of Easter Island, Rome, and the Chaco Canyon Anasazi. Human beings can turn into bands of looters, and even cannibals (as at Chaco Canyon), with amazing speed once they lose faith in society.
I don’t really know how to estimate this threshold with precision. But I note that each percentage point of depletion over and above the 4% contraction threshold results in a percentage point of annual economic contraction. By that reason, 11% oil depletion is 7% annual economic contraction which is halving the economy in a decade. That would sure scare the hell out of me from making any investments in anything except fruit trees and vegetable gardens. So my SWAG is the collapse threshold is eleven percent oil depletion.
The 8% depletion noted in Saudi Arabia is less than 11%, but this is an enormous drop for just one year. Even in the most catastrophic scenarios, 8% depletion in the first year would seem like exaggeration. We can expect this number to rise on the whole, and as the remaining pre-peak fields begin to peak, see Saudi Arabia’s overall depletion rate to approach the 10-18% expected for water injection and water flood wells, and probably most of OPEC, as well. That’s going to make the global depletion rate something close to 10-18%. In other words, early indications are consistent with a significant depletion rate, perhaps even greater than some of the most dire predictions.
But beyond that, there is a deeper issue of how collapse works. Even if depletion rates were relatively mild, collapse is very different from growth. On the other side of the downslope, there are more people, as several commenters to Greer’s post have already pointed out. Even if it were true that in 2060 we’ll have as much oil as we did in 1960 (at 8% depletion, it’ll actually be more like 2015), we’ll also have, by the most irrationally rosy U.N. estimates that take the end of poverty and everyone achieving a First World standard of consumption as a given, 9 billion people, three times the 1960 population living on the same amount of energy.
Greer is correct that Hubbert’s Curve is a bell curve, as long on the downslide as it is on the up, but that’s a model of an individual well’s production projected to the global level. Greer points out Alberta tar sands, and the oil wells reopening in Pennsylvania—most of them inside the Allegheny National Forest. It’s literally in my backyard; back in the forest is a leaky oil pipeline, and the first thing I set myself to when we began our permaculture project was to figure out what kind of bioremediation I could use to soak up some of the oil spilling into the soil. (Oyster mushrooms are great for that, if you were wondering.) These options become more attractive as the price of oil goes up; but that eventually translates into higher cost of living, and more expensive food, and the breakdown of the fundamental needs of society. Famines do not occur for lack of food; rather, they more often occur because food becomes too expensive for anyone to afford.
It is ironic that what I learned most from Greer’s work is something that he himself spends so much time denying: that just as civilization’s growth is a self-reinforcing process, so, too, is its collapse. As things become harder and the map opens up, more people take advantage of the opportunity to abandon it; that abandonment means that there’s even less investment in society, so collapse accelerates, creating conditions that convince more people to abandon the civilized way of life. That’s why the historical curve of civilizations has never been an even bell curve, why it has always been, as Greer calls it, “a saw tooth.” The bell curve might describe a single well or even most provinces, but it cannot describe the global pattern, because globally, we essentially reach a race conditon—the last one holding the door, loses. As Jared Diamond put it in “The Ends of the World as We Know Them,” “History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability.”
The Fund for Peace’s failed states index is an excellent proxy of the progress of current collapse, though its criteria overlooks collapse situations in New Orleans, Montana, Australia, and other locations.
Greer suggests that all this simply means that the First World will have a taste of Third World poverty; that kind of statement ignores the fact that it’s the First World that creates the Third World, and that the First World is the only pillar propping up social complexity around the rest of an already-collapsed world. Modern examples of these various collapses, such as the Russian example Greer uses in his article, neglect this fact; as Tainter pointed out, true collapse cannot except occur except in a vaccuum. An isolated civilization can collapse, or a whole system can collapse, but a civilization surrounded by other civilizations cannot collapse; it will simply be absorbed by the civilizations around it. Russia, and to a greater extent the Third World, is held in a horrible limbo where much of the suffering of collapse is an everyday reality, but thanks to First World complexity, it cannot finish, so the suffering cannot end. When the last pillar of complexity collapses, there will be no other civilizations to catch its fall, and global civilization will collapse as one (see “We All Fall Down“).
As we’ve recently seen, collapse is already well along its way; as the map above illustrates, it already grips most of the globe. What we’re waiting for is the tipping point in the last center of complexity. That’s the most basic problem with the “long decline.” Yes, we can see signs of collapse beginning even a century ago. Do any of us right now feel like we’re living in a collapsing civilization? Today, historians chart the history of Rome’s decline and fall, but Romans themselves leave little evidence of any awareness they might have had—and then, Rome was sacked, and Romans everywhere decried the sudden end of the world. Everything after that was experienced as a post-apocalyptic world. We can look back and see the “long decline,” but that’s not what they experienced; what they experienced was a tipping point, an inflection point in the collapse curve that felt like “the end of the world.” Greer’s “long decline” isn’t wrong (though he’s certainly using some rosy projections), it’s simply academic. It’s not how anyone is going to experience events to come, though historians four centuries from now may generally agree with his predictions.
Another common problem with Greer’s analysis is the symmetry of the past and the future as opposing slopes; this view ignores the impact of the past on the future. Consider this argument, for example:
Communities that are economically viable in a global economy awash in cheap fossil fuel energy, in many cases, are not places that will be economically viable in the deindustrial future. This cuts both ways. Sprawling Sun Belt cities with little water and no potential for agriculture will slowly shrivel and die as the energy that keeps them going sputters and goes out, and tourist communities across the continent will pop like bubbles and become ghost towns once travel becomes a luxury, while Rust Belt towns struggling for bare survival today will likely find a new lease on life when adequate rain, workable soil, and access to waterborne transport become the keys to prosperity, as they were in the 18th century.
This neglects an important point: we’ve now lived through the 18th century, and we have to deal with the consequences of the 18th century. That’s something no one in the 18th century had to deal with. Pittsburgh is practically the corroded buckle of the Rust Belt. This was a steel town, and today, we have no steel mills. We have adequate rain, and we have plenty of waterborne transport (it was our three rivers—one of them the Ohio, giving us access to the Mississippi, and thus the Gulf—that originally attracted the steel mills here), but anyone hoping to see post-peak farms across western Pennsylvania has another thing coming. The double-edged sword of the Ohio valley has been how effectively it’s funneled air pollution from Illinois, Missouri, Indiana and Ohio right here. And here it sits. We have some of the worst air quality in the country, but unlike other contenders like Los Angeles, it’s not our own making; the air quality in the western Pennsylvania countryside is no better than it is in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh. Of course, air quality can improve dramatically, and quickly; look at what happened to central Pennsylvania’s air quality just 24 hours into the August 2003 blackout. But the long-term effect has been acid rain, and that has made extremely acidic soil. pH levels in Hazelton, PA, for example, range from 3.9 to 4.9, that is, somewhere between orange juice and tomato juice.
The average rate of soil erosion on cropland in Pennsylvania was 5.1 T/A/yr (11 Mg/ha/yr) in 1997 (the date of the most recent National Resource Inventory). Gauging stations show that the Susquehanna River deposits approximately 1 million tonnes of soil a year in the Chesapeake Bay. Additionally, elevated nitrate and phosphorus levels in rivers and Bay water cause eutrophication, which results in periodic depletion of oxygen in surface water bodies and death of aquatic organisms. Intensive soil tillage is a major contributor to soil degradation, as it exposes the soil to erosion and increased losses of soil organic matter. Tillage is also the major cause of phosphorus losses from cropland: most phosphorus moves from land attached to eroded sediments. Although tillage changes nitrogen dynamics, it does not usually lead to changes in annual nitrate leaching in Pennsylvania. [From]
Our watersheds are terribly degraded. Run-off from Pittsburgh poisons watersheds for miles around; it’s a problem that’s getting a lot more attention in recent months. The toxicity of our three rivers has long been legendary: “My mother always used to warn me,” says [former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom] Murphy. “Make sure you’re home before dark and don’t go near the rivers.” Most states have a problem right now with mercury in the water, but in Pennsylvania, it’s some of the worst. All those old steel mills have left a long and toxic legacy in our soils and waters. And then there’s the wastewater.
According to a report by the National Academies, advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine, the biggest water problem that Pittsburgh faces is badly managed human wastewater. The microbial contamination of the rivers probably comes from runoff and sewer overflows that stem from the regionís relatively frequent flooding. ìIn many tributaries, microbial water quality does not meet standards even in dry weatherî says the report. This implies that the contamination is also due to failing septic systems. Livestock management practices and acid drainage from abandoned coal mines also add pathogens to area streams and rivers.
There’s plenty of agriculture in western Pennsylvania, of course; but they don’t plant it in the soil. They plant in a thick layer of nitrogen fertilizer, courtesy of the Haber-Bosch process and the natural gas industry. Many Pennsylvania farmers are already bowing out, unable to pay for the increasing cost of fertilizer and fuel. It’s happening fastest on the Allegheny Plateau, where farming has always been most difficult; I see a lot of abandoned farmland when I go up to my family’s cabin. Take away those petrochemicals, and the soil underneath is desperately depleted precisely because it was so heavily used in the 18th century. The soil here isn’t workable, and precisely because of how we used it in the 18th century, that is exactly why the 18th century won’t happen again. It’s not quite as drastic as the Great Plains, but anyone who expects to plant rows of corn without nitrogen fertilizer around here today is taking a big gamble. There might be some pockets where it will work, but as a general rule, it’s “workable soil” that we’re lacking. That’s a consideration that’s routinely lacking in Greer’s predictions about the agrarian, deindustrial future. He regularly predicts that it will work in the future just as it worked in the past, with the implicit assumption that the past has no consequences. The Green Revolution did not occur by accident; it took hold precisely because soil degradation, erosion, salinization and desertification (best illustrated in the U.S. by the Dust Bowl), all caused by ten millennia of agricultural practice, had made any further agricultural practice impossible. In 1960, we ran out of naturally arable land to expand into, and the age-old strategy of simply farming new lands that hadn’t yet been devastated ran out. It is no coincidence that the Green Revolution, using techniques developed in the 1930’s and 1940’s, only took hold in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
It is interesting that Greer ends with a look at ibn Khaldun, and his criticism of the nomad rulers who failed to keep up the complexity of Roman civilization. That is precisely the kind of process that makes collapse a self-reinforcing process, and thus, an accelerating process. I have been a great fan of ibn Khaldun for some time, if only because he wrote this:
Civilization needs the tribal values to survive, but these very same values are destroyed by civilization. Specifically, urban civilization destroys tribal values with the luxuries that weaken kinship and community ties and with the artificial wants for new types of cuisine, new fashions in clothing, larger homes, and other novelties of urban life.
John Michael Greer’s “Archdruid Report” comes out every Wednesday, and one of his favorite topics is the failing of primitivism, or “apocalyptic narrative,” as he prefers to pigeon-hole it. Unfortunately, Greer also thinks that actual primitivists stopping by in the comments to defend their “apocalyptic narrative” side-tracks the disucssion of how looney and wrong their narrative is. Primitivists who try to answer Greer’s attacks are eventually censored and banned. Enter “Archdruid Watch,” a weekly response to Greer’s weekly attack, on a forum that encourages discussion and dissenting views, rather than squelches them from the bully pulpit. If you think we’re wrong, by all means say so. It’s not as though we’ll delete what you have to say just because you make a good point—and that’s not something all blogs involved here can say.
- Last Week: “Glimpsing the Deindustrial Age“
- Next Week: Adam’s Morbid Fantasy
It occurs to me, I just wrote 3,811 words in response to a 1,786 word article. I guess it’s true that actually backing up what you say takes more work than hand-waving pontificating. But I’m sure Greer would just call that “cherry-picking factoids.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 June 2007 @ 9:30 AM
Good response. I just found out about the Archdruid Report from a “primitivists are crazy” post over at “Life after the Oil Crash” forum, and I’m glad to see that you’re already on top of it representin’ with the facts and the figures.
That’s not to say I’m a primitivist looking for justification, I just prefer data over “it hasn’t happened before” hand-waving.
PS: Are you guys still going to bring your book to GenCon? I can’t find any events with “5th world, Mythos, etc.” in the title, so I assume you aren’t doing a playtest, but hopefully you’ll still be on the floor?
Comment by valhallan — 14 June 2007 @ 1:01 PM
We had to cancel.
We figured it would be better to cancel and come next year with a solid game, than try to rush it to make it in time for this year.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 June 2007 @ 1:03 PM
If you are right, there will not be any historians 400 years from now
Comment by _Gi — 14 June 2007 @ 1:12 PM
While I doubt an oral society would continue to lay so much emphasis on literacy and written documents as the modern practice of history implies, primitive societies had their own historians, who often kept better track of past events than we have been able to. There will still be “historians” in 400 years, of one kind or another.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 June 2007 @ 2:13 PM
Shucks. I was looking forward to checking it out. Oh well, I guess that just means I’ll have to go to GenCon next year, (that is, if there IS a GenCon next year ….peakoilnuclearwarzombocalypse!)
Comment by valhallan — 14 June 2007 @ 2:49 PM
Nice article, have to agree with your well researched assessment. Many “unknown-unknowns” when the snowball continues to pick up momentum down the other side of the curve, hell it could even get really hot and melt the snowball a bit faster…
Oh there will be at least one more GenCon, but maybe there will be alot more carpooling to that one.
Comment by Bubba — 14 June 2007 @ 4:36 PM
Hey Jason, I agree completely with what you say, my thoughts exactly. I don’t buy into what Greer is trying to convey either, it does’nt fit into what I was taught over 30 years ago.
I invision a die-off, that could be signaled once the electrical grids go down for good in this country and throughtout the industrialized world, almost simultanously, for much the same reasons. When this event occurs, there will be a three to seven day, “pause period”, shortly after this chaos will reign, the die-off will begin in earnest. Like you, I’m suggesting there’s no stopping it, it’ll run it’s course. It’ll do no good even if the whole world came to our aid, as it would’nt be enough or in time. I’m predicting that by the first month a quarter of the population will have expired, in three another quarter, in six months another quarter. Perhaps in a year or two, only 250,000,000 to 300,000,000 will be left.
Naturally, the ratios of decline will not be the same in areas around the globe. This rapid decline, I’m suggesting, I’ll back with scientific evidence. My message is a very bitter pill to swallow. It’s my hope, that people reading on this site will bear with me, listen to what I have say. Perhaps make something of it and make-up their own mind of what action to take, if any at all.
I look foward to sharing my thoughts with others and am interested in what others might be thinking.
Thank you, yooper
Comment by suncatcher@lighthous — 14 June 2007 @ 10:51 PM
” it took hold precisely because soil degradation, erosion, salinization and desertification (best illustrated in the U.S. by the Dust Bowl), all caused by ten millennia of agricultural practice, had made any further agricultural practice impossible.”
I think blanket, absolute statements like this are inviting dismissal. Had there been farming for ten millennia everywhere? Was agricultural practice completely impossible? Everywhere?
Comment by slx — 15 June 2007 @ 4:45 AM
“Suncatcher”, that seems like it goes to the opposite extreme. The whole electrical grid going out at once? Sure, you get rolling blackouts, and even large, regional blackouts like in 2003, but I don’t think you’re going to see that kind of massive outage all at once. Moreover, a quarter of the world’s population gone in just one month? I think people can deal with the electricity being out a little better than that. I’m more than willing to hear out your arguments, but I’m quite skeptical right now. That scenario seems to discount human adaptability far too much.
slx, it’s not a blanket, absolute statement. I didn’t say everywhere. By comparison, take a look at what Hubbert’s Peak says. Is htat a blanket, absolute statement? Does that mean because we’ve now peaked, that every oil well, everywhere, has peaked? Of course not. It just means that most of them have. Much of the world has only been farmed in the past 400 years, and yet, that’s been quite enough for agriculture to take its toll on the soil. North America’s soil is 85% depleted on average; South America, 76%; Asia, 76%; Africa, 74%; Europe, 72%; Australia, 55%. Does that mean every square mile of North American prairie is 85% depleted? No; in fact, I’ve even said quite explicitly that there are almost certainly some pockets where agriculture could still work. But what 85% means is that those pockets will be small and isolated. In situations like that, agriculture depletes the soil even faster, so when your son can’t get crops to grow anymore after just one generation, and there’s nowhere to expand to because you’re surrounded by land that was exhausted before you even started, what’s going to happen? If I had made a blanket, absolute statement like, “Farming will not be possible on any acreage anywhere in the world,” I’d be inviting dismissal. But what I said was that after ten millennia of agricultural practice, soil degradation, erosion, salinization and desertification will make any further agricultural practice impossible. Just like Hubbert’s Peak will make any future petroleum-based society impossible because we have a petroleum-based society now. Doesn’t mean you’ll never find an economical oil well, just like it doesn’t mean you’ll never find an acre of viable farmland. What it means is that those things will become so rare, and so isolated, that they’ll cease to matter to society as a whole, and exist solely as curious exceptions and throwbacks to a former age.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 June 2007 @ 10:30 AM
Jason, don’t count me out quite yet, I’ve just explained this process over at Bull not Bull.com posts for the past four months. Really, I’m going to do this for you, Jason, as I have with your “buddy”, I suspect, over at BNB. Now, I’ll be putting some tools in your box.
Jason, I have lived the primative hunter/gather lifestyle, a good part of my life. I’ve lived in a teepee for the months of Sept., Oct., Nov., and part of Dec., in the middle of nowhere in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula alone, and lived to talk about it. I feel, I can write about such things because, “I’ve been there”. I’ve probably more miles on my snowshoes than anyone alive in the State.
My education is just as fascinating. I was taught by three of the darkest men, I’ve ever known. What were their aspirations for me? You’ll find out, step by step. “Assumptions”, were never part of their arguement, and this arguement has stood the test of time, over thirty years ago. My strong points are natural science and population dynamics. The only assumptions here, will be made by the reader, as I’ll be presenting scientific facts and relating them to my theory.
I look foward to communicating with you on your threads.
Thanks, yooper
Comment by yooper — 15 June 2007 @ 2:52 PM
No one’s counting you out till you’ve made your argument. I’m just skeptical of the position.
Unfortunately, this reply doesn’t do much to bolster my faith. You have no assumptions? Every argument has assumptions and axioms. In my experience, the only people who can tell you they have no assumptions are the ones who’ve never examined theirs.
You may well be an experienced primitive skills type, no doubt more experienced than I am, but if all you can say is that you lived in a teepee from September through December, how can you call yourself a hunter-gatherer? I really don’t think you can call yourself that until you’ve lived at least one year through. So much changes from one season to the next that you’re really nowhere close to experiencing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle over any smaller period of time.
And, why does it matter that your “fascinating” education came from “three of the darkest men [you’ve] ever known”?
As I said, I’m quite willing to hear you’re argument, but I’m quite skeptical. Now I’m even more skeptical.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 June 2007 @ 3:06 PM
Good post, Jason! You’ve made several important points, and I just wanted to highlight and comment on some of them.
First, you say:
[quote]As we’ve seen in the recently-concluded “Unfolding Collapse” series, we’re not at the beginning of collapse, but well into it now. Greer’s viewpoint of the “long decline” isn’t wrong, nearly so much as it’s academic. Historians have the hindsight to trace the trajectory of a long decline; those who live through those events invariably experience them as a sudden crash.[/quote]
Precisely. That’s why I get so annoyed with people who claim that everyone’s always saying ‘the sky is falling! the sky is falling!’ and it never does. It’s from the ivory tower historians’ perspective that the sky never falls. From the perspective of the people living through the events that these historians get to contemplate from the comfort of their offices, the sky really did fall many, many times. Think the plague; think the potato famine; think Rwanda; think the Native American foragers/horticulturalists; think the Romans; think etc. Hell, even Greer’s own predictions: go out into the street, stop a random passer-by, and tell him/her what Greer expects the 21st century to look like. Chances are good that the person would describe this as an apocalyptic vision.
Second:
[quote]This neglects an important point: we’ve now lived through the 18th century, and we have to deal with the consequences of the 18th century. That’s something no one in the 18th century had to deal with.[/quote]
Again, precisely. I have nothing to add here. I’m somewhat amazed how people routinely fail to see this…
And finally, you quote Greer as saying:
[quote]I’m old enough to remember when Comet Kohoutek was supposed to cause global devastation and Anwar Sadat was widely identified as the Antichrist, and one thing I’ve learned is that it’s very easy to come up with a worst case scenario and back it up with a bunch of cherrypicked factoids.[/quote]
Oh, that’s just so brilliant. Indeed. I mean, of course everyone ‘cherrypicks’ his/her facts to support his/her chosen narrative: given that there are infinitely many facts floating around, how could it possibly be otherwise? But if your own narrative is to be anything other than an intellectual exercise to be enjoyed in your fantasy land, then the least you need to be able to do is to show how the ‘factoids’ that someone else ‘cherrypicked’ fit into, can be integrated into, your narrative. If you can’t do this, then that suggests that there’s a problem with your own narrative, and not that the other person’s ‘factoids’ are irrelevant.
Comment by Hasha — 15 June 2007 @ 3:43 PM
Jason , thanks for hearing me out here! I’m getting to know you better and better the more I read here…You are, like me, predicting a sudden collaspe, maybe not the same, but no “long emergency” either. Jason, I want you to know our opinion is not popular. You’re the first personality, I’ve found on the net., to adhere to this, with a site. I really like your site and would like it to become my new home, (if you don’t mind).
I think, what you’re doing here, for those that will listen, is a key to staying alive for the times we’re certain to see ahead. You have my deepest respect for this matter. I, too, want to open some eyes, here.
That being said, John Michael Greer, also has my deepest respect and I consider him, my friend. Even though we do not see eye to eye, on the time line of events to come, I must respect we’re talking about the future, were there are no facts. He is preparing people for collaspe and in that fact alone, I’ve got to admire him for that.
Jason, I’m glad to hear, that your skeptical, no doubt, what I’ve outlined is very hard to believe, let alone accept. This is ok, I look foward to presenting my message in many parts. I’ve got to do it this way, so you and other people that might be listening, will comprehend, where and what, I’m talking about. This is not unlike what Jay Hansen was talking about in his last post, that is not in people’s genes to understand such matters. Most people, can only think, progessively, as our society has ALWAYS progressed. I know you, adhere to this, I’ve read it. I’m also a big fan, of Dave Pollard, and his site,”How to Change the World”. However, I do part company with these two men, as they invision a long collaspe. Also, I do look at human history as “linear”, not “cyclic” as John does. I’ll go further into detail about this latter.
Jason, I’m about to take you on a adventure, that I highly doubt that either you or John would dare take, “not very far, not very long”. It’s real easy to talk about such things, quite different to actually do them, let me assure you. There are very, very few people who have done what I have, it’s like a feat, like climbing Mount Everst, make no mistake about this. I’m an accomplished “woodsman”, that fact, you can take to the bank. No one, in this State, I can be compared with, in my circle, no one disputes this fact. Ok, that puts me in one, in 50, eh? Where are you? Want to take a trip with me? I’ve asked your buddy to go deer hunting with me where the deer have mutated, he politely declined, what about you? Do you even know of such a place? Here you’ll have the chance to see what the hunter/gather lifestyle might be like, under the protection of authorities. Jason, if you’re proposing a tribal thing here, better know what you’re getting into ………………………………………………..
Jason, you’re right about the assumptions, sure, what I’m about to present is assumption, it’s not fact, as it has’nt happened yet. However, I do, back this up facts. Science, that has been “proven” over and over again. Like adding two and two and coming up with four, over and over, again and again.
Jason, in my education, “assumption” was not allowed, unless backed by facts. I have no assumptions of what life might be like after collaspe, I was’nt allowed to this this! The focus of my education, (you’ll get tired of hearing this, as I’ll relate to it over and over again), was perhaps 5% what might lead to collaspe in this country, 45% how to recognize it, 50% how to deal with it…….You think about that for awhile , will you. I don’t know where you got you’re education from, but, is it like mine? Jason, I got this as a young teenager, I’ve devoted much of my life to prepare for this event. Can you even begin to imagine this? It frighten me that much,to motivate what I’ve done to prepare, that was over 30 years ago. How long have you been preparing? I’ve asked the same question to John.
What I’m proposing here Jason, is not some crystal ball, hocus-pocus imaginary type of scenario. Just an alternative to what many might “think” is around the corner, that is all. Think about it, ask anybody about what a collaspe might look like and the first thing that come from most people’s mouths is, “well, the electricity will be out…………” When I start to talk about what this might imply, they look at me, as if maggots are coming from my mouth! See what I mean? I’m sure you do, and if you don’t you soon will…………………………………
Thank you, yooper.
Comment by yooper — 15 June 2007 @ 10:53 PM
“Much of the world has only been farmed in the past 400 years, and yet, that’s been quite enough for agriculture to take its toll on the soil. North America’s soil is 85% depleted on average; South America, 76%; Asia, 76%; Africa, 74%; Europe, 72%; Australia, 55%. […] But what 85% means is that those pockets will be small and isolated.”
For clarification, does depleted here mean without nutrients, without trace elements, without growing medium, or something else?
” In situations like that, agriculture depletes the soil even faster, so when your son can’t get crops to grow anymore after just one generation, and there’s nowhere to expand to because you’re surrounded by land that was exhausted before you even started, what’s going to happen?”
It’s less binary than that.. if only because all that land will not be farmed until only pebbles in a salty crust are left.
Near where I live, the topsoil of a road with lush greens in the middle, and on the sides, had been scraped off, and covered with gravel. Just one year later, it was all green again. Two years later, it was barely distinguishable from the original situation. This anecdote shows that it is at least possible to recover from catastrophic events - even in the middle of a slowly recurring catastrophe, since it was a road among the wheat/beet/maize fields (in an area that has been cultivated for probably 2500 years, and with near absolute certainty for 700 years).
“But what I said was that after ten millennia of agricultural practice, soil degradation, erosion, salinization and desertification will make any further agricultural practice impossible.”
Again, “any” is too absolute. In a given locale, a few forms of agriculture will become impossible. A lot of forms will become difficult. Crop types will change. Yields will dwindle, but not collapse. That will cause a financial, then political, then economic and ultimately a cultural crisis, surely. In those crises it could happen to us to stumble upon a form of settled society with food production that still falls outside your definition of agriculture. But it’s not guaranteed, of course, and it will not be the same everywhere. What is guaranteed that continuous extraction and removal of nutrients from the soil will cease; that doesn’t mean agriculture will cease, humans will kick it until it works. Malnutrition, while unpleasant, is hardly unseen in empires, as you yourself have argued.
And also, your preparing to be a forager in three years is definitely something that makes you look apocalyptic :p. On other occasions you consider The Collapse as starting around 1914. So you might want to clarify your vision on the speed and geografical intensity of the phenomenon known as the collapse around here, as the slow descent, the olduvai gorge or the slow crash elsewhere - in a future article perhaps, given the length it probably requires.
Comment by slx — 16 June 2007 @ 1:52 PM
Yooper, sounds like we read a lot of the same things. Though, you sound an awful lot like you’re grandstanding about your primitive skills. You may well be worlds ahead of me—gods know I’ve got a long road ahead of me—but bragging about it isn’t going to convince me of that. Since you consider yourself a hunter-gatherer of sorts, I’m sure you know how well that kind of behavior goes over in hunter-gatherer societies (i.e., far less well than here). As far as hunting deer, the land of the Tuppeek-hanne is utterly overrun with them. I’ve seen deer aplenty. I haven’t gone hunting yet, but the plan is to change that by year’s end. Deer season in PA is in the autumn, so I’ll let you know how it goes then. As far as assumptions go, we all have them. The only question is whether we deny them (such that they overwhelm us unchecked), or continuously hunt for them (which is a task never completed). But by all means, present whatever argument you alluded to; this preface is unnecessary, unhelpful, and really leads nowhere.
It’s an average of mineral depletion. So 85% in North America means that some soils have 85% of their minerals gone, or others might have 85% of the area completely devoid of minerals, etc. But in general, it means that any given piece of land you try to farm, 85% of the minerals—the mineral wealth of the soil, which determines the nutritional quality of the plants you grow in that soil, which determines your health—will be gone. At those levels, you get sick very easily, and you die fairly quickly; even if you do manage to get crops all the way to harvest, they’ll be so lacking in nutritional value that you’ll still be starving to death.
Of course ecologies recover from catastrophes. If they didn’t, the earth would’ve been left lifeless eons ago. That’s what succession is all about. But the mineral wealth of that soil was still there, underneath the gravel. That’s how the plants grew through it. I’ve seen lots of situations like that myself, and we’ve all seen weeds breaking through the cracks in a parking lot. But a road is not an acre of cropland. Cropland is systematically bleeding the soil until it’s dead. Roads and pavement just cover the soil, and that can be broken through. But cropland takes time to heal. If humans would be willing to just wait and not eat anything for the next century or so, we would be fine, but something tells me that plan won’t work.
There are only a handful of domesticable plants, and they tend to be very fickle, and very closely related. Crop types can’t change very much. Rice vs. corn vs. wheat is about the same diversity as me, my brother and my cousin. Changing one of us for the other doesn’t change much; replacing wheat with barley doesn’t change much, either.
If yields dwindle, people die of starvation. When that happens, people start fighting for what food is left, and then farmers spend more time defending their crops than tending them. Famine always followed war in agrarian societies, because crops were destroyed in the fighting, and dead farmers left untended fields. Which, of course, leads to more famine, which leads to more violence, which leads to more famine. So if they dwindle, yes, they collapse. The two are one and the same. See also “Agriculture or Permaculture: Why Words Matter.”
What is guaranteed is that humans propelling themselves through water with a combination of arm and leg movements will go on, but that doesn’t mean swimming will go on. Agriculture is, by definition, catastrophic. The continuous extraction and removal of nutrients from the soil is a defining element of what agriculture is. If you’re not continuously extracting and removing nutrients from the soil, you’re not practicing agriculture. In all likelihood, you’re practicing horticulture, or “permaculture.”
See “Living in Collapse.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 June 2007 @ 10:32 PM
Yes, you’re quite right about the grandstanding Jason. I’ve nothing to prove to you here or anybody for that matter. This was my introduction to you, who I am. I wanted you to know this, so you know where I’m coming from, is all. I’m not some little kid talking from the side of my mouth, I’ve been there and again I feel, I’ve something to contribute here. Without disclosing this information, what wieght does my message have? I’m sorry, for being being so, “forcefull”. I know, this is perhaps a big turn off to you and others, and I’ll never bring it up again, I’ll assume that you know this about me, and go foward. Jason, it’s one thing to have the practical knowledge, quite another to have practice, and only experience, to become good at it.
I suppose, we both can agree, that we’ll have to be very good at living outside society, in order to survive in the times adhead.
An example of this, I might borrow from Pollard’s, “rats in the box”. I view, society as rats in the box. As more and more food was provided in the box, the rats greatly increased in numbers. As soon, as the food is decreased, well, you know this entails…
The rats that can escape the box, will have a chance and of those, only the ones who can adapt outside the box, will actually survive. The rats must learn to live in this enviroment and adapt to it, also that enviroment must adapt to them, or they will certainly die.
An example of this might be, the white-tailed deer living here, that have been feed corn as a supplement to their diet during summer months, have a much better survival rate than those who do not. This is so, because as the deer winter in yards, when natural food has been depleted, those that can digest the corn that is supplemented at this critical time, are much more likely to survive.
I’m strongly suggesting, that those that experience life outside the box,(the deer that had corn in the summer), will have a much better chance at survival living outside the box,(the deer actually digesting the corn in the winter months)………..
Ok, what I’m suggesting here is yes, one can gather wild edibles, but will it be enough? Will it be digestable? Enough to make it worth while, to be an energy provider and not a “sink”?
Thanks, yooper
Comment by yooper — 17 June 2007 @ 11:55 PM
Yooper, you may have mistaken the way we operate here. You don’t need to prove your “worth” for your words to carry weight. What you say stands or falls all on its own; I’ve trumpeted the ideas of people I thought ill of, and I’ve put down the ideas of people I respect. Who you are doesn’t change the quality of your ideas; that would be the ad hominem fallacy, in either direction.
You are absolutely correct about the difference between knowledge and practice. You can never have too much practice. Fortunately, primitive skills fall into that category of “easy to learn, lifetime to master” skills. Which is useful, because the rest of your primitive life will be spent practicing, except by then you’ll be calling it “getting dinner.”
Of course, there’s enough bounty in the living world to support a lot more people than would ever have the imagination to consider any other kind of life, so how much of a lead will it take to make it ahead of the pack? It’s absolutely vital to learn these skills and practice them whenever possible. Of course, those who are furthest along in that regard tend all too often to most acutely lack the things hunter-gatherers value most: family and land. Primitive technology is simple and easily replaced; it is simple and effective. What they excel at most of all isn’t “technological,” but a matter of relating—to each other, and to the world around them.
Your example seems a little odd, though. We’re omnivores; there’s no shortage of wild edibles that provide plenty of nutrition. I get more vitamin C munching on wood sorrel on my way to work than most people get from their morning O.J.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 June 2007 @ 12:07 AM
Thanks, Jason. The more I read you’re articles, the more I like you. You’ve obviously done you’re home work…I keep wondering, where did you first learn of such things….? For me, it was in grade school over thirty years ago in a class of six students.
I can’t wait to add some pratical points supporting you’re arguements. Also my views will support you’re approach. I suppose, I’ll do this as we go along. It’s a shame my theory of the die-off cannot be viewed over at BNB, perhaps Micheal can restore the archieves of this board. At any rate, I’ll deliever the “Royal Flush in Spades”, here. This basically revolves around theories of water, food, population dynamics of cyclic animal spieces, disease, and dependence of infrastructure in supporting modern societies. It’s really quite short (10 pages?), and delievered in five parts. I’ll likely get into this this next winter, when I have more time and we get to know each other better.
The “rats in the box” idea, I got from Dave Pollard. This really supports your thoughts about being on the fringes of society. I deeply adhere to this, you definitely want to be outside looking in and not the other way around! Like you, I fear for people living in cities when collaspe takes hold. I invision almost a near extinction for this country. As for highly congested islands such as the U.K. and Japan, well…….Natural barriers providing isolation can have adverse effects. Any thoughts of becoming protected in such places for small populations in the long term will also prove fatal, as many times the extinction process begins this way. I hope your reader from the U.K. is getting this……….
I do have some questions Jason, if you will. You’ve predicted collaspe somewhere between 2010 and 2015 or there about. Have you wrote anything about what this may look like in our country? Do you think some cities will actually survive? Do you invision a controled collaspe? Do you have any kind of timeline and percentages of population decline? Oh, also really like you’re collaspe map! Perhaps, you can add Detroit, to the list. There’s a little saying going around Michigan right now, They’re eating each other alive, there”. oh, oh…..
In closing Jason, I just about jumped out of my shoes when I read you’re headline, “The Land Owns You”. I’ve been saying that for yeears!
Comment by yooper — 18 June 2007 @ 9:32 PM
Sounds like you may be interested in the “Shape of Collapse” series. I wish Heinberg’s vision of “Powerdown” were a realistic possibility, but I just can’t see it; “controlled collapse” remains something of an oxymoron. As far as a timeline of declining population, I don’t think predictions with that kind of specificity have any use whatsoever. That’s much too specific for anyone to predict. Sure, there’s enough to suggest a general timeline of something in the neighborhood of 2012-2015, but I think any prediction of how many people will survive or not at any given date is getting way beyond our ability to control for the various parameters.
You may have a point about Detroit. I don’t know about cannibalism, but there’s certainly ruins…
As far as my education, I never had one teacher who sat me down and taught me all of this. My mother taught me to question boldly; my father taught me to stand by whatever was true; Daniel Quinn showed me what a mess civilization is; David Abram showed me what animism really means; the details, I filled in myself. In the early days of this site, I wrote an autobiography of my ideas, just to establish where I was coming from; if you’re that interested in my education, start with “My Catholic Faith,” and there are links to the successive entries at the end.
As far as “the land owns you,” that’s a fairly common sentiment around here. A lot of people have been saying that, for millennia even.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 June 2007 @ 10:03 AM
Just because an area turns “green” does not mean it has recovered. This is just one more indication of just how little people know about the world around then. If you had taken an inventory of the plant species before the scraping and then again after you would have seen a very widely different mix. Some plant species excel as pioneers. These plants tolerate disturbed soils and nutrient deficiencies. By root action they may be able penetrate deeply to bring up nutrients or quick growth may shade soils so more tender plants can start. There is a long step between pioneer ecosystems and climax ecosystems and may take centuries to work out.
Comment by Don — 19 June 2007 @ 1:20 PM
Thanks Jason, for answering my questions. Yes, I agree, that collaspe cannot be controlled, it has a life of it’s own. Sure an event might bring on collaspe but not the actual caving in process. I liken society’s collaspe to a house of cards falling. Suddenly.
When I’m confronted with one who adheres to a slow “hollowing out process”, I like to point out that, this is what leads to collaspe, not collaspe.
My worn out dictionary defines collaspe as:
1.) to fall in or together; cave in suddenly; shrink together abruptly;
2.)to fail utterly and suddenly;
3.)sudden and complete failure.
source: The Winston Dictionary, Advanced Edition, 1946.
Jason, I think you’re absolutely right about predicting the timeline of population decline to be of not much use to most people. Unless there’s a person who needs to be convienced of what I might think will likely happen in the near future. Then, specifics do matter. If collaspe should begin when the power grids have failed in this country, I think, I can be quite specific about population decline timelines. I was quite generous predicting only a quarter die-off during the first month. Here in the U.S., I’d go a much higher/faster rate of decline. Perhaps, knowing these timelines, would actually prepare people of what to expect and how to prepare for it? Just a thought….
Without power Jason, how would you get water in Pittsburg? Got enough for everbody? What about food? Surely, the “meals on wheels program” would immeditely cease? Jason, I want to be bold with you, I’m suggesting most people will die from dehydration,(lack of potable water), not starvation. You deeply think about this, on the assumption the power is out for good throughout the country….
Thanks again, Jason! Now on to your education.
Comment by yooper — 19 June 2007 @ 9:00 PM
Actually, I think that may be the very worst time. Any such prediction is getting far too specific for the data we have, and when your prediction turns out to be wrong (20% or 15% instead of 30%, for example), you’ll be discounted.
Heh, all those times people warned me about not making predictions because they might not pan out in the details, and here I am. How specific you can get with a prediction is related entirely to how much data you have, and how good that data is. To be able to say something even like, “There will be 25% - 50% die-off from 2012-2015″ requires far more data than I have, and probably far more data than actually exists.
The power grid has already started to fail; look at California, and the northeast in 2003. The power grid won’t go down all at once. Outages like those will become more common, rolling blackouts will become more common, we’ll get used to intermittent electricity and then, eventually, the electricity just won’t come on again at all. The power grid’s not the kind of system that just shuts down one day. That’s why I think your predictions are way off. If this were to all happen at one moment, you’d be correct. But there’s almost no way (short of zombie apocalypse, of course) that it could all happen at once. When things happen over time, people have time to adapt.
So, since you picked Pittsburgh … as the electricity starts to become more and more unstable, people will start stocking up on bottled water, and when things start to become apparent, you’re going to see rain catchments all over the city. We get some good rainfall here, so no problems on that front. Except the air pollution makes the rain water quite unhealthy. People start getting sick and dying. Wells are dug to tap underwater aquifiers, which are largely poisoned, but quickly drained anyway. We’ve got three rivers, but drinking from them is a very iffy propo