Voluntary Argument, Part 4: Smackdown

So like I said, Dimwit presents an opening that I just can't pass up. He starts out by posting a link to an AP article, and adding to it, as an intro:

How do others feel about these thoughts I offered?

One other thought: I think I'd rather die trying and failing to avert a catastrophic collapse than survive under the kinds of conditions you hope to survive. That kind of life might well not be worth living for me. Either way, I'm not most interested in my own survival.

How important is it to you to stay alive, even if the life you're left is one in which most of the people you love have died, maybe horrifically, when there has been a massive dieoff, that's still continuing, when you're struggling from day to day just to feed yourself and provide adequate shelter, to fend off those who are trying to take what you have built up? What kind of life is worth living for you?


The person who originally started the thread made some good points in her response:

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. The life of the people who are the subject of this article doesn't seem bad to me, except in their isolation. I guess that the questions you've asked aren't the relevant ones to me. To me, the reason for surviving the crash is to protect the landbase, and hopefully leave a seed of a sustainable culture for my place. The quote from Derrick Jensen that I use in my signature embodies my view of a role for me in the collapse of civilization. ["What does it mean to dismantle civilization? What it means is: Depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and to destroy the world. I can't give a better definition than that."--Derrick Jensen]

I responded only with a supporting comment that as more people adopt that kind of lifestyle, they'll be less isolated.

I have to say, though, that I think I have a broader view of "people I love" than you do. The list of people I love includes the fish people, the frog people, the tree people, and more, whom I love and depend on. Many of these people are unlikely to continue to survive much longer unless civilization is dismantled.

Getting back to the quote. I think it may offer some guidance. If dismantling civilization means, "Depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and to destroy the world," then it implies an active role in guiding collapse. It means ensuring that the ones to survive are not the ones who are most capable of continuing the destruction.

Have you read The Road by Cormac McCarthy? I didn't find it particularly helpful to my understanding, but it seems to be more in tune with your thoughts on collapse.


Dimwit chimes in again, and finally states explicitly what his problem is. His entire response to her, with my responses to him interleaved:

No, I haven't read The Road. I have quite enough fears about how horrific the future may come to be without that vision in my head, though it's been highly praised. I watched Children of Men last night, and I think that's enough dystopian imagining for me for a while. I thought it was very well done but nothing I really needed to spend 2 hours of my short life on.

I believe this finally makes clear Dimwit's problem. He's still in denial, and can't handle the idea that things might (most likely will) get really bad. It threatens to push him over into the Depression stage. Meanwhile the rest of the world is still Bargaining, trying to hedge and find some way to make things not-quite-as-bad without fundamentally changing anything.


It wasn't the life that the people described in the article are living now that I was referring to, but the life that they imagine themselves to be preparing for. This also ties back into Stableboy's earlier message about making preparations and learning skills to go off into an isolated area and survive the crash. As I recall, he didn't necessarily mean "isolated" in the sense of geographic distance; could also be in the sense of a less-hospitable (for folks like us) ecosystem, such as the desert.

Granted, they "can imagine marauding hordes" of people who don't make such preparations, but they're not envisioning misery either. "Breault said she hopes to someday band together with her neighbors to form a self-sufficient community." What is so bad about that?


I love those other species in the community of life, too, but I doubt I'm abnormal in that I love the human beings in my life that I love--my friends and family--more than those other species, who are less like me and with whom I do not have close personal relationships. I think it's safe to say that Mother Bears love their cubs far more than other species, or other bear species, or even other bears of their own species. This is to be expected because it's what works in evolutionary terms.

That's fuzzy too. Most animals will run off (rarely kill, simply because it means they're likely to sustain some injury themselves) a member of their own species (that's not an immediate prospective mate) in order to protect their territory - which means their food supply. Therefore they put a higher priority on other species than on other members of their own species.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable, then, to say that I value the ecosystem in general and many non-human individuals in it over any given human that I don't know and care about personally.


I don't like that quote from Derrick, though this may be only because I'm seeing it from out of context. It seems to me to imply that "the rich" are the villains of the piece, when I think they have been acculturated to their role in the same way most other people have been acculturated to their role. As long as most people want to be among "the rich," it doesn't really matter who the individuals among "the rich" are.

Well, yeah, the rich are the villains. How they became the villains doesn't make any difference. The rich (and therefore powerful) have the power to take advantage of anyone who's not rich. As long as the system is the way it is, yeah, people are going to want to be rich, because then they'll be in power, and nobody else will be able to keep them down anymore. Which means that the system needs to be pulled apart before people will stop wanting to be "rich". Like I said before, those in power are not going to voluntarily relinquish that power.

And my response to his first question, the "What do you think about my thoughts?" question at the top of this post:

Honestly, those thoughts strike me as faux-noble cowardice. It sounds to me like you're saying, "I find what you describe so distasteful that I'd rather die than stoop to that level."

If you just wait for the civilization to end, then your quality of life is likely to be pretty low. However, if you build shelter, and plant fruit trees, and arrange for armament/defense, then your worries about those things later will be greatly reduced. Not that it'll be easy, but it won't be nearly as hard as you're making it out to be.

As for loved ones dying, I've lost loved ones in the past. I'll lose more in the future. Nothing anyone does will prevent that. Everyone dies. Get over it. But just because they're dead, or going to die at some unknown time in the future doesn't mean that I should roll over and die too. Absolutely not. In fact, I'm going to do what I can to make sure they survive as well. Which means assembling the necessary equipment, paraphernalia, and vegetation to allow for their survival.

He didn't like that. He didn't actually respond to any of the points I made there, he just asked about the alias comprising my e-mail address (and this is just too funny not to repost):

Wherever did you get the appellation "Ribbons the Friendly Viking"?

Could we hear from someone else now? Please?


The woman who started the thread wrote back to me, saying:

I think we have a slightly different perspective on survival, and part of it is probably based on age. At 59, I'm very much aware that I've lived more of my life than I have to come, no matter what happens. You (and my sons) potentially have more of your life yet to come. Mostly, I agree with you.

As for The Road, it's a post apocalyptic novel of a father and son roaming around, living off the remnants of civilization. The only non-human life to appear (well, maybe there were pets) were some morels. The central issue was whether the father would kill his son before he died so that the son wouldn't have to continue without him. For me, not a very useful story.


At this point the thread breaks off in a completely different direction. If it proves interesting/relevant, it'll end up here as well. But for now, this series of posts is done.

Voluntary Argument, Part 3: Further Dimwittery

So we've now completely moved off of the whole "voluntary" thing, and we're now into the real discussion. Continued from the last post:

I almost took offense at your message, but then I reminded myself that you don't know me. I've been a community activist for years, writing and giving talks and having conversations with people and putting out various brochures around town and helping to organize events. Will it work? I dunno, but the only thing I can see that will save us is the very kind of cultural change on a broad scale that Quinn wrote his books to foster. And change is happening all around us, though never quickly enough for my taste.

There is no way to "save us" at large. We're living fundamentally unsustainably. The human population will be reduced. There is no way to avoid that. The trick will be making sure that you're one of the few to survive that culling. And speeches and brochures won't help you there.

The real problem is that, as you say, "change is happening all around us". The problem is that it's not social change, it's contextual change. See below for more on that point.


It seems clear to me that individuals and small groups will have very little survival value in a catastrophic collapse

Individuals and small groups will have a higher survivability than large groups in the event of catastrophic collapse. Of course, that does depend on your definition of "small" relative to "large", but I have no intention of being within easy walking distance of anything larger than a small town, and preferably not even that.


not only because their numbers will be so small compared to the masses of desperate people with weapons but because the civilized are so far from having the skills necessary to live without any of the infrastructure of civilization to support them. I doubt there's enough time to learn what one would need to learn to survive except perhaps in the most favorable of geographic locations, and KC is not one of those, IMO.

Absolutely not, which is why I'm getting the hell out of here. I do also recognize how few of those survival skills I currently possess, which is why I'm trying to learn them. I've also got a handful of other people already on board with my grand delusions, who are also working on picking up other complementary skills. I have no intention of going it alone. The more people I've got working with me, the larger composite skill sets we can accumulate, and the more likely we are to be able to survive collectively. A big part of that is going to rely on isolation from the "masses of desperate people with weapons". Isolation will also contribute to having more available resources, because there will be fewer other people around to compete with (in an ecological sense).


Why are you a member of this group if you don't think voluntary cultural change is possible?

Honestly, I've been wondering about that myself recently. I used to think that Quinn's way, voluntary gradual cultural change, was right. The problem is that there's no time for that anymore. If people had gotten serious about those kinds of changes 30 years ago, after the first oil crisis, when people first started worrying about overpopulation, if the hippies had followed through with any of their ideology, then we might not be in such dire straits now. But as it is, it's too late.

Look around, the End Times are upon us. Armageddon, Apocalypse, Ragnarok, Rapture, the end of the Mayan Long Count, whatever you want to call it. It's not just that, as you note, "we are rapidly running out of time to prevent catastrophic climate disruption", there's also Peak oil, the economy tanking, global politics, everything is hitting right bloody now. If we had the luxury to deal with these problems one at a time, we could probably manage them, but in combination, and as much as they're feeding into each other, it's impossible. The game is over, people just haven't realized it yet. The ones who survive are going to be the ones who learn the rules of the new game quickest.

Who's waiting? I don't know about you, but I'm not waiting, I'm learning and teaching and being compassionate, as best I can. Everyone I know who has become B was once a pretty "normal" American, so I don't see any reason to write off "normal" Americans as being unable to change "until things are so bad that they're unfixable." I think many people would be ready for change--if only they didn't assume, like you, that voluntary change is impossible.

The time scale that we have left to work with is too short for the scope of voluntary change that you're talking about to be possible. The time for talk and education is over, the time for skills and action is here.


And I think we have to change the larger culture (at least in the sense of reducing its destructive impact dramatically) or even the coolest neotribal experiments will almost certainly be dragged down in the crash.

While it's a definite possibility that "even the coolest neotribal experiments will almost certainly be dragged down in the crash", given that it's too late to avoid the impending crash, what other option is there than to do everything possible to weather the crash? Averting the disaster has failed, it's time for the contingency plan.


Someone else jumped in here:

I see the options are: 1) Destroy Civilization (Jensen's idea), 2) Revolt or Reform (Change it), 3) Create Something Better (Make Civilization obsolete). Maybe I'm getting caught up in semantics here. But I heard several things said in this thread that seem to come from a "revolt or reform" point of view. For instance, the need to persuade a large amount of people or power-brokers BEFORE we can have change and take effective action; "taking away" power from powerful people; the need to takeover and stop the system before it kills everything; and our actions and changes being constrained (defined) by the system's limitations.

To which I responded:

I'm not talking about destroying, reforming, or revolting. Civilization will destroy itself in short order, which obviates the possibility or necessity of revolt or reform. I'm talking about option 3, starting over, outside of civilization. The big problem with Quinn's Tribe of the Crow or anything analogous is that it's only viable as long as civilization exists. Once things start seriously deteriorating, there will be plenty of crows around, but progressively less for them to feed off of.


Back to my exchanges with Dimwit:

I think you overestimate your ability to get away from the desperate masses with guns. Any place you could go to that might be far enough away by distance is probably going to be unsurvivable for other reasons--the desert, the arctic, and so on. And, given the likelihood of armed conflict in a collapse, you might not be safe even if you could figure out how to survive in an unfamiliar and challenging ecosystem.

Possibly. Isolation isn't just about distance, though, it's also about environment, and as I said before, I'm getting the hell out of here.

When I referred to KC not being ideal, I wasn't referring to the metropolitan area of KC but to the geographic location with its climatic characteristics. You might do better than me, but I'm not sure I'd survive a single winter without heating.

I agree there too. And survivability will be radically increased by preparations ahead of time.

I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree, though, given how far apart our views are.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that there was no point in trying to convince you. The real reason for a public debate is to sway the people who are still on the fence, the undecided.

[Which is also, obviously, the point of posting all of this here, for you, my three readers.]

One other thought: I think I'd rather die trying and failing to avert a catastrophic collapse than survive under the kinds of conditions you hope to survive. That kind of life might well not be worth living for me. Either way, I'm not most interested in my own survival.

No way to know now, not until you see. It's a lot easier to kill yourself later should you so decide than to decide later that you should have put more energy into living. But if you don't make preparations, that will significantly decrease your quality of life.


The only thing in that entire last e-mail that he responded to was the last paragraph, to which he answered:

I suppose that would matter to me if I thought there was time to become meaningfully prepared, but I don't think there is. We either bring this flying machine in for a crash landing that most survive or there's a massive dieoff, and I'm okay with being among those who die off. Seriously, if there's going to be a dieoff, why would I think I should be among those who survive? Let those who've remained indigenous to their place, those whose ancestors never gave up a sustainable way of life, have the world. And I wouldn't want to live through the death of almost everyone I know and love, either.


I didn't actually respond to that at the time, though Dimwit reposted later asking what people thought of his previous statement, the "I'd rather die trying than survive in those conditions" thing, and I tore him open then. Stay tuned.


One more thing before I break. Another different person chiming in, and my response:

I don't much like [Stableboy's] message; I don't like to think about collapse. But I must admit, I am hard pressed to rationally argue that is not where we are heading. I wish it weren't so. Like Jackson Brown used to sing, "I got this feeling that it's later than it seems."

I don't expect people to like my message. But it doesn't matter if anybody likes it. The appeal of an idea has absolutely nothing to do with how true it is. You can argue with gravity or evolution all you want, that doesn't affect their veracity. You can argue with overpopulation all you want, it won't change the fact that we have way the hell too many people on the planet, and most of them are going to die in the not-too-distant future. You can argue the positive things that civilization has provided for us, that won't change that the system is already coming apart at the seams, and will soon start deteriorating in earnest. Life sucks, get a helmet. :)

Continued, in the final installment.

Voluntary Argument, Part 2: Dimwitted Demonstration

The rest of the discussion was basically Dimwit and I going back and forth. His first response to me, in its entirety:

Hi, [Stableboy]. I'm glad to see someone new chiming in. To be clear, though, I didn't intend for anyone to think that I was saying that "an action becomes involuntary when the person becomes aware of the negative consequences of not changing." To my mind, change remains voluntary unless or until the person is forced to change in a particular way--they have no other option. For example, I've considered living without a car again (I did so for a little over 6 years before buying a Honda Insight Hybrid 3 1/2 years ago) but have never made the voluntary choice to do so even though I've been well aware that by driving I'm contributing to global warming and climate disruption, air and water pollution, the perpetuation of the American empire, repression of indigenous peoples, and more. Tonight I was in a collision that may well have totaled my car (only minor injuries to me and my passenger, though, thankfully) and it's possible that I won't be able to afford to buy a different one, at least not any time soon. If that happens, the once-voluntary choice to not own a car may become involuntary.

I also think you've overestimated the power of the people in power to force change on the masses if the masses aren't ready to change. This hasn't worked easily with air and water pollution and endangered species legislation and regulations, and those changes to our culture's business-as-usual were a lot less challenging than what we need to do to end the ongoing extinction crisis and avoid catastrophic climate disruption. It's really hard for a small number of people to force a large number of people to do things, though it can be done with a large enough armed force. I doubt one could mount a large armed force to require people to do what's necessary to save the world, though.

Finally, I think you underestimate the power of large numbers of ordinary people to change things even if their so-called leaders don't want to change. Those leaders only have power as long as a sufficiently-large percentage of the people are willing to let them have it.


I'm posting all of that here, partially to show what a deluded, self-absorbed twit he is, but also because I cut a bunch of irrelevant bits out when I took it apart and threw it back at him:


To be clear, though, I didn't intend for anyone to think that I was saying that "an action becomes involuntary when the person becomes aware of the negative consequences of not changing." To my mind, change remains voluntary unless or until the person is forced to change in a particular way--they have no other option.

That's a fine line between being practically involuntary and morally/ethically involuntary, and one I don't care enough to argue. For the vast majority of people the ethical side never enters into their considerations, so I'm ignoring it here too, since we are talking about the populace as a whole, rather than our supposedly "enlightened" self-appointed crowd.

Which does lead me to another point, the problem of identifying too strongly with "normal" people, the ones who come home from their nine-to-five and plop down in front of the TV for the next five hours, the ones who aspire to 2.3 kids in a single-family-home on a nicely-manicured lawn in suburbia. If you're on this mailing list, odds are you're not one of those people, and you don't think they way they do. For starters, you're more likely to be thinking at all, in the first place. It's so easy to lose sight of how pathetic, closed-minded, tunnel-visioned, and locked in denial the average person is.


For example, I've considered living without a car again ... and it's possible that I won't be able to afford to buy a different one, at least not any time soon. If that happens, the once-voluntary choice to not own a car may become involuntary.

So what? So you personally will have to do without a car. That's not going to force other people to relinquish their own cars. It's not going to make other people realize that their existence is unsustainable. Only when people start running out of options do they figure out other solutions.


I also think you've overestimated the power of the people in power to force change on the masses if the masses aren't ready to change.

I think you underestimate the power of the government, and the money and media it controls, to influence what people want. We've become a consumeristic society because the government told us that's what we wanted, and the media supported it. We invaded Iraq because the government told us they had WMDs, and the media propagated it. People believe that we're now experiencing a minor recession, and that we'll recover shortly, because that's what the government is telling the media.


This hasn't worked easily with air and water pollution and endangered species legislation and regulations, and those changes to our culture's business-as-usual were a lot less challenging than what we need to do to end the ongoing extinction crisis and avoid catastrophic climate disruption.

Because the government continues to subsidize the industries causing all that destruction.


It's really hard for a small number of people to force a large number of people to do things, though it can be done with a large enough armed force. I doubt one could mount a large armed force to require people to do what's necessary to save the world, though.

It doesn't require any armed force, it just requires the careful and elegant manipulation of (mis)information, to make people think that they want to do things that are against their best interest. For example, the Republican party has historically convinced the religious-but-poor to vote for them using catchphrases like "Protect Marriage", and then proceeded to legislate against the economic interests of the majority of their supporters.


Finally, I think you underestimate the power of large numbers of ordinary people to change things even if their so-called leaders don't want to change. Those leaders only have power as long as a sufficiently-large percentage of the people are willing to let them have it.

There's currently only a very small percentage of people who want to take power away from the system. The vast majority would never think to overhaul, let alone toss the system and replace it with something that actually works. They just want to change who's in charge of the system, to get the results they want. Your hypothetical "sufficiently-large percentage" is not going to materialize until the enveloping context (referred to earlier in the discussion) changes to the point that that many people are miserable, destitute, starving, etc.


He also responded, in a separate post, to something I'd said earlier:

The people in power are not going to voluntarily divest themselves of that power.

with:

If enough minds are ever changed, we'll take the power to destroy the world away from anyone in power whose minds hasn't changed.

Do I really have to say how naïve, idealistic, and system-perpetuating that thought is?

The following few e-mails were fairly short and to the point:

Your hypothetical "sufficiently-large percentage" is not going to materialize until the enveloping context (referred to earlier in the discussion) changes to the point that that many people are miserable, destitute, starving, etc.

Perhaps, but I see no value in being so pessimistic about the prospects for change nor so critical of "normal" people. They are what they've been acculturated to be, but they can change. I was once a very "normal" American myself.

I see no value in being optimistic about waiting for people to change. There is no evidence to support the manifestation your phantom groundswell until things are so bad that they're unfixable. It makes no difference whatsoever why people are now the way they are, except in that it will prevent them from changing in the opposite direction.

Our discussions here aren't making a difference to all those people who need to be woken up. If you really believe things can change, go talk to them, rather than preaching to the choir here. I, on the other hand, am going to go pursue my own plans for survival once the fit hits the shan. I don't even know that I'm going to have enough time for my own preparations, and I've been thinking about this stuff for a good long time. I have no faith that other people who haven't "seen the light" will be able to survive the crash, but if you think so, go help them.

What do you think will cause this grassroots revolution to come about, before it's too late? What are you doing to cause it?

At this point, things start getting lengthier again, so I'm gonna end this post, and start over with the long diatribes.

Voluntary Argument, Part 1

Another debate I got into recently, on another mailing list. One of the early points, before I got into it, was on whether people will change voluntarily. In an attempt to address this question, someone posted the definition of the term:

from the American Heritage Dictionary via dictionary.com
vol·un·tar·y adjective

1. Done or undertaken of one's own free will: a voluntary decision to leave the job.
2. Acting or done willingly and without constraint or expectation of reward: a voluntary hostage; voluntary community work.
3. Normally controlled by or subject to individual volition: voluntary muscle contractions.
4. Capable of making choices; having the faculty of will.
5. Supported by contributions or charitable donations rather than by government appropriations: voluntary hospitals.
6. Law
- 1. Without legal obligation or consideration: a voluntary conveyance of property.
- 2. Done deliberately; intentional: voluntary manslaughter.


The problem was that people still weren’t using it quite the same way. So I chimed in:

One of the biggest issues I see here is semantic, in the application of the word "voluntary". Twenty years ago, someone who renounced the Dominant World Culture, bought some land, built a solar home on it, and started farming it themselves organically would be said to do it voluntarily, by most of the definitions presented (though arguably not #2, since there was definitely an expected reward from making that change).

These days, we (those who see the impending collapse of civilization) would say that making that change is not voluntary, because the only alternative to making that choice (or something similar, complementary, etc) is death when everything goes to hell. Those who aren't "in the know" at this point would still see making that transition as voluntary, because it's not necessary in the immediate sense.

When the crash comes, there will be no viable alternative to small-scale agricultural communities, and therefore that lifestyle will not be voluntary in any sense, but mandatory, because most other options will have evaporated. The changes at each step aren't just the cultural context, but the subject's awareness of it, and evaluation of its consequences.

Granted these are my own views and opinions, but I see no reason to think that the agitating of a relatively few people will overcome the inertia of the culture as a whole. (See above about individual evaluation of consequences.) Dimwit’s point that an action becomes involuntary when the person becomes aware of the negative consequences of not changing is valid, but too black-and-white, and Dimwit actually makes my point for me, though at a larger scale: "The default position is for people to go along with the norms of their culture because this is their best hope to thrive and prosper under most circumstances."

Think of the battered woman who voluntarily stays with her abuser, or the laborer who stays in his low-paying dead-end job his entire life. These people have to see that they'd be better off changing their circumstances, but they don't out of inertia, a fear of change, a fear of losing what little security they've got in exchange for the possibility of an improvement. Though we on the outside would say that it can only get better at that point. Like so many other things, it's a perspective issue. "Freedom" is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Back to one of the other earlier points, accumulating sheer numbers is the slowest way to accomplish change. It's not enough to change a bunch of people's minds, those people have to be in the position to make their mindsets felt by other people. While the average person doesn't do much more than add another ping to the gross number of people with changed minds (#12 on Meadows' list), people in politics and the media (which are horribly and incredibly incestuous) control all 12 of the factors on the list.

While it's kind of a truism that if you change a sufficient number of minds, the culture will change, there's a lot of wiggle room in that "sufficient". You can change over half of the minds in a population, but if those people have no power, it won't do any good. On the other hand, a handful of changed minds in the right places can make all the difference, regardless of the mindsets of everyone else.

Political policy lags public opinion by a large gap. The people who manage to get elected are going to be more likely to hang onto outdated policies rather than risking their positions by making waves. I don't believe (and Dimwit makes this point as well) that we've got the time remaining before the crash for the politicians to come around (or to elect enough new politicians) to get the necessary changes made. I'd love it if I were wrong on this, but I can't make myself believe it. These political changes would also prevent whatever resulting practical cultural changes from qualifying as "voluntary", because then they'd be mandated (or subsidized, or whatever) by the government.

The media is beholden to the politicians (as well as its own corporatocracy), and generally can't take its own stand. (Obviously that's not true on small scales, but when we're talking about the transition from small-scale to large-scale change, with whatever model, we have to look at what's preventing the changes at that large scale.) The mass media may not actually control everything in the second (more powerful) half of Meadows' list, but they at least control the perception thereof, which is at least as powerful. And as long as the vast majority of people pay attention to the mass media and its government-induced obfuscation, the culture as a whole cannot possibly change.

Here we run into the problem of the (relatively) few of us, who have awakened to the desperate need for change fighting against the majority who believe what the media is telling them, that everything will be fine, that the problems we're seeing now are only temporary, that there's a myriad of technofixes on the horizon, etc. What's necessary to jolt these people out of their TV-induced comas is further contextual change.

Ask around, and the vast majority of people will acknowledge that you can't trust politicians and the media, but they still rely on these sources for their information. It's going to take something really significant before people finally quit believing the sources they know to be lying and start believing what they're actually seeing in the world around them.

We all know that part of the trick is showing people what they have to gain, rather than what they're losing, but when it looks like they're losing so much, it's tough not to cling to that. If the policies and the infrastructure were in place now, it would be a lot easier to at least begin to walk away and become a sustainable society at large. But they're not, largely because the politicians have been so beholden to corporate interests and hidebound by their own desire for power.

And people aren't ready to believe that they're going to be losing those comforts regardless. That realization makes it less of a "voluntary" transition, and more of an inevitability, and that it's better to make preparations now rather than to simply hide and wait for the end.


Obviously the guy’s name isn’t really Dimwit, but I had to change it to post here. Keep reading, he’ll show himself dreadfully clearly to deserve the moniker. Another guy, Naïve, responds first, though, and references something else that had come up earlier in the thread, Premise 6 from Derrick Jensen’s Endgame: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Naïve’s post, and my responses:

If I get past my mental stumbles, I hear DJ saying in premise 6 that the majority of people will not change until their way of life becomes completely unworkable, when they have no other choice but to change immediately--when there is no work to go to, no fuel for engines, no way to pipe water to homes or factories, no electricity, no food at the grocery.
...
Those predictions sound pretty dire to me, but I don't agree with them. I think people can change before their current way of life becomes impossible to maintain for one more day. Many people have already reached that point and begun casting about for some other way. Will a majority change? I believe so. It'll take some more time, but it will happen, and happen faster every day. I think it is also a toss up as to whether the environment would fair better in a rapid collapse scenario. A slow descent may be preferable.

Yes, people can change before they're forced to. Yes, many people have already changed. But relatively few people will change before they're forced to, even if it is a large count. As more pressure is brought to bear, more people will convert, either because they'll have to (involuntary, by whatever definition) or because they'll "see the light", but as time goes on, and resources deplete, and fewer options are available (if we don't have the materials and energy to produce solar panels, they won't be available to produce electricity), fewer people will be able to successfully manage the transition.

As for the rapid collapse vs the slow descent, the big question there for me is, on that downslope, will people still be clinging tooth and nail to their old way of life, in which case a rapid collapse would do less damage, or will they be trying to reengineer their lifestyles to a completely new paradigm? In the latter case, it would make life easier if there were a gradual decline, and this is another example of a yawning gulf between what I'm personally hoping for and what I can actually make myself believe will really happen.


I do agree that it will take more than just changing minds. The context does need to shift further. Its doing so now though. We might help it along too: make it harder to profit from destruction of the earth's resource, harder to exploit the poor, make unwanted behaviors more costly. Tax shifting would likely have a hugely beneficial affect.

All things that require having changed minds in positions of power, which is inherently problematic, as I mentioned in my previous epic. As you also said, "the existing system is quite robust". Not that these things can't happen, they just won't, or at least not soon enough on any scale sufficient to make a significant difference. The people in power are not going to voluntarily divest themselves of that power.


This post is getting pretty long, so I’ll break now, and post more separately.

Further discussion

I got a response back from the person on the mailing list, and we’re taking the discussion off the list. We’re going to be meeting next week, and will presumably continue it then. It may continue here as well, we’ll see.


How about less development and a higher standard of living? Most of those preventable deaths were caused, one way or another, by those in power dumping chemicals and such on these people. These people have not always been miserable; it's civilization that has made them that way.

Umm, not so, here are some facts about human lifespan before modernity and chemicals: Average life expectancy before the health transition of the modern era is thought to have varied between about 20 years and 35 years. reference

I’ll grant you the high infant mortality rate, which has always been high relative to the mortality rate once beyond that point – and that’s still true now. But that’s population control (something sorely lacking in modern “civilized” society), and some cultures (I wish I had a reference for this) don’t even name their children until they’re at least a couple years old, or weaned.

I was thinking more of the suffering and deaths caused by toxic chemicals in the drinking water, or by increased disease rates as a result of denser population centers, antibiotic-resistant strains, and pesticide-resistant vectors.

So let’s reduce infant mortality by reducing population. 9% (avg, first two years, source, which is one of those cited from your linked Wiki page) of 5 million people (10K years ago, near the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution) is 450,000 as opposed to 0.7% (source) of 7 billion people is 49,000,000. That’s over 100 times more dead babies. Reducing population and eliminating modern medicine is a win-win.

Modern medicine, what reduces the infant mortality rate, is also one of the major contributors to overpopulation. There are millions of people with ailments like diabetes and Crohn’s that are only alive because technology supports them. Not only that, but they live to pass on those infirmities to their offspring. A simple removal of medicine would do wonders (though not enough, in and of itself) toward solving the problem of overpopulation.

But to go back to the data on that Wiki page, notice that the Pre-Colombian America and Upper Paleolithic (late Stone Age) life expectancies were actually longer than any other time/technology level prior to the 20th century. Given that civilization is falling apart, that sounds like a good enough reason to return to that lifestyle rather than any other that occurred between then and now.

The problem with the rest of the estimates of lifespan is that they still include infant mortality, which drags the average down a lot. Historically, if you could make it past that rough patch, you could be reasonably assured of having a good long (see graph on p 174, or p 19 of the pdf, from the first infant mortality link above).


WTF? Why the hell wouldn't they? The only problem with Eden was that it got paved over by the people who said, "That's not the way you're supposed to live," and forced those people to live by the "civilized" rules that generate more misery, destruction, mass production, and oppression.

Here's why people don't want to live in Eden--because they can but they don't: Because they don't want to. I don't see masses of people moving to rainforests to live in harmony with nature? Do you? If you believe it, why aren't you doing it?

There is so much bullshit packed into those few short sentences, I don’t even know where to start.

What rainforests? The people who continue to live there are consistently killed off so that the trees can be cut down and the oil can be pumped out of the ground they’ve always lived on. As for myself, I’m kinda trapped at the moment, but I’m moving this summer, and this fall fully intend to start “doing it” – making real progress toward a sustainable existence and disconnecting myself from civilization. I’m already making plans and contacts. This is not a pipe dream, this will happen. It will have to, because civilization is fundamentally unsustainable, and anyone who survives will have to live without it.

Derrick Jensen talks extensively (with references, in both Culture of Make Believe and Language Older than Words) about hostage exchanges between American Indians and white settlers:

In Letters From an American Farmer, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crévecoeur noted: “There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.”
Benjamin Franklin was even more to the point: “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.” It was commonly noted that at prisoner exchanges, Indians ran joyously to their relatives while white captives had to be bound hand and foot to not run back to their captors.

No hunter-gatherer tribe that has adopted our “civilized” way of life has done so voluntarily, it has always been at gunpoint (or sword, or bayonet, whatever). A quick survey of colonial history will show that slavery, massacres, and other miscellaneous oppression have always been necessary to “civilize” the “savages”.

So why do they resist it so much? Is it just that they’re so entrenched in their way of thinking that they can’t see the virtues of our system (much the same way that we’re buried in material junk up to our eyeballs, so that we can’t see just how unhappy we are)? Well, possibly. But hunter-gatherers work less and are happier (because of more social and leisure time) than “civilized” people, and manage to live perfectly well, as long as they’re not killed off or displaced off their land by the greedy bastards with guns.

Some notes from Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything:

Hunter-gatherers : 1000 work hours per year
Medieval peasant: 1620 (broken up by frequent rest/food breaks, many holidays)
US, 1850: 3500
US, 1985: 1850
US, now: 2000

Like I said before, we’ve been brainwashed in this culture to believe that #1, our way of living is the best, the only way people should ever live, and therefore #2 that any other way is somehow inferior, that anyone who lives any other way is somehow degenerate, or not as “advanced”. And because of that, we’re eradicating even the possibility of living any other way. Which, because of the unsustainable way we’re living, means that we’re effectively eradicating the possibility of living at all.


The real problem with the "underdeveloped" areas…

Ummm, see above, the historic data for people living without civilization is a lifespan of less than half of what it is today. Eden was human death-trap long before the advent of cash crops, chemicals, and capitalism.

No, again, the people who lived there were doing perfectly well until the capitalists came along and destroyed it. See below about the world population during that time.


No, actually, we've got about 10-12,000 years of sustained human population growth. The previous 200,000 years (if you're counting H. sapiens sapiens, or 4.5 million years, if you count the other human predecessors since they took to the savannas) saw a long-term net growth of effectively zero. They may not have known the theory behind carrying capacity, but they knew the practical implications. If you consume more than the land can produce, you reduce your own future survivability.


The population graph looks sustained to me--I see no flat spots or negative growth from 100,000 bce to 10,000 bce, hence no genetic pressures to limit population growth. reference

First of all, that graph is misleading because it’s on a log-log scale. What the text accompanying it says is that between a million years ago and 10,000 years ago (which is effectively a million-year time span), the population went from 125,000 to 4,000,000, a 32-fold increase. To start with, let’s push that back another 2000 years, to one million people at 12,000 years ago (10K BCE), before the agricultural revolution. That alone reduces the increase to 8-fold.

(Between the end of the last ice age, which opened up much more area to be inhabitable by humans and made the area that had previously been inhabited more fertile, and the gradual adoption of early agricultural practices, I think we can write off that 4-fold increase fairly easily, especially given how quickly the population took off after that. Let me also note that all of these population numbers are estimates with little to no evidence to back them up, since before the 18th century nobody had even made an attempt to count people in the world.)

Now let’s also look at the rest of that million-year span. Homo erectus (the only one around a million years ago) was later replaced by Homo sapiens, and while many of the same rules might apply, it’s not really fair to equate the two. I’ll let that go, though, and just deal with sheer numbers.

The reference that gives a population of 125,000 at a million years ago only has them living in Africa, with a land area of 30,370 sq km (using Wiki land areas), and by 12,000 years ago, we’ve got people occupying Eurasia, North and South America, Australia, and the rest of the Pacific islands, for an additional 105,330 sq km. So when we take the increase in living space into account, what looks like an 8-fold increase drops to less than a doubling. (125K/30,370 = 4.12 people/sq km, vs 1M/135,700 = 7.37/sq km; 7.37/4.12 = 1.79)

Now let me say again that that’s over the course of a million years. If we add in there the better tools and weapons that enabled more food to be collected, it’s no wonder the population increased a bit.

So back to the other points raised. If Eden was a death trap, how could the population have held steady, let alone increased at all?

And the idea of carrying capacity. These early humans were effectively living at their carrying capacity. They knew how many people they could support in their area (with some wiggle room and short-term fluctuations), and if they were at their limit already, they didn’t have kids. Some of that was behavioral – there are plenty of herbal contraceptives and abortifacients all over the world that women have known about all along, but that rarely got written down because it was always the guys doing the writing.

Other physiological factors in the lack of population increase were diet, nutrition, exercise, and breast-feeding. If women are active, they menstruate less often. This is common among female athletes now. A woman who is malnourished, or simply doesn’t have much body fat (anorexics are another textbook example) will also cease menstruation, because she doesn’t have the energy reserves to put into producing a baby.

Nursing also tends to stop menstruation, again as an energy conservation measure. If you’re still providing sustenance for your own body for one child that you’ve already invested a year or two of resources in, it’s counterproductive to start diverting those resources to start fresh on another one, and risk the one you’ve already invested in dying. Even the mammals that pop out a lot of babies quickly won’t mate again until they’ve weaned the previous litter.

While these aren’t “genetic pressures to limit population growth” they are genetically controlled mechanisms by which population growth is limited.

On the other hand, with the advent of civilization, women in particular were more sedentary – meaning both less exercise and more tendency to plump up, both of which contribute to more regular cycles, and therefore more kids being born. Also, with fields to plow and animals to tend, there was a social and practical reason to pop out as many kids as you could, to help with the work. “Work” that didn’t exist for the hunter-gatherers, and so therefore they had no drive to pop out as many kids as they could.


Famine, war, and pestilence all lead to mass death…

Even [if] it was undeniably true, why would you state it that way when it is unpalatable to most people. If you can see the future trends, a more effective strategy is to gently reposition peoples thinking so that they can adjust to it as it develops and becomes apparent. Forecasting doomsday apocalyptic scenarios does not help when most people are only beginning to appreciate the dimensions of the problem. It is more rational to support what awareness there already is, and build on that foundation to prepare people.

What you say is theoretically true, assuming that we have enough lag time before the crunch comes. But we don’t. People with that mindset started trying to make changes thirty years ago, and look what it got them. They failed to change enough minds quickly enough, and it’s screwed us all. I’m not blaming any of them personally, the problem is the inertia of the culture, and the (mis)direction of the media, and the government that controls it.

(Which leads me into another rant about how we don’t actually live in a democracy, that the people don’t really have a say in the laws, that their elected representatives have free reign to do whatever the hell they want, and that that’s exactly the way the Founding Fathers intended it.)

If people had started making any significant progress 30 years ago, we might be able to make a smooth transition to something sustainable now, but we’ve eaten up our buffer. It’s now too late to stop the train. It’s going to crash. The vast majority of people are already dead, they just don’t know it yet. We don’t have time to slowly, gradually, comfortably change peoples’ minds. They need a clue-by-four upside the head, they need to wake up and smell the armageddon or they’re going to become more roadkill.


It's not. It's too late. "The American way of life is not negotiable"…

If it is too late, why waste your time and energy on discussing the inevitable? Why waste of your time on the predetermined? This is a democracy. The American people can and will change.

Oh, I don’t argue that. They will change, but it won’t be by their own choice. The people who are left in 100 years (I’d bet closer to 50), won’t be living the way we’re living now, because anybody who tries to hang onto this lifestyle is going to die. I’m not wasting my time trying to change the world, I’m trying to get to a few more people who don’t have their heads too far up the media’s ass.

I’m not trying to save the world. I’m trying to point out to a few people that might be able to prepare and survive that they need to get started on it. I will say that the only way to save the world at this point is for people to start following this track en masse, immediately. But it won’t happen soon enough or on a large enough scale to prevent the crash. Regardless, that’s my plan and I’m sticking to it, because it’s the only hope anyone has.


As long as some humans survive and subsist, civilizations will re-emerge. Civilizations are spontaneous human phenomena.

Not if there are no resources left. We’ve depleted all of the easily accessible fossil fuels; what’s left is requiring more and more energy input to get any energy out of it. Meaning cheap energy, the basis of what we think of as “civilization” is a thing of the past. In the future, anything that passes as civilization will be based on slave labor – as was everything that passed for “civilization” before the industrial revolution. The Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, they all had large numbers of slaves to do the work for them.

It also assumes the presence of other resources, like metals to work into tools. Most of the easily/cheaply accessible metals have been depleted as well, so they’re going to be left with whatever scraps they can find lying around, which will eventually be depleted as well. As the remnants of civilization disappear, the few people that are left will gradually (over several generations, possibly centuries) revert to a stone-age existence. That part will be a more gentle transition, but we’re in for a hell of a shock when the changeover starts.

Also, about civilization being spontaneous human phenomena, see the end of this post about civilization and cancer.


[I wrote in my e-mail response, but didn’t post here previously:]

I don't mean to be picking on [the person] specifically, you just happened to voice a lot of the standard bullshit lines. :)

No offense taken!
I don't think these are standard lines. The standard line is if we are all a little greener it will all work out. I don't think it will improve until there is population decline. But beginning by building awareness of what it is to try to be greener is a great place to start.

The things you’re saying are slightly more sophisticated elaborations on that “recycle and change your light bulbs and everything will work out” kind of half-assed green mentality. They’re still arguments that have been produced and batted around independently and repeatedly by people still in denial, still coming to terms with just how bad off we really are. :)

People need to think outside the box. We can’t just tweak our current lifestyle to make it sustainable, or even suffice with a general overhaul. We need to start over from scratch. A lower population with our current lifestyle still will not be sustainable, it’ll just last longer before it crashes and burns.


I just don't see any purpose or rational basis for a relentlessly grim apocalyptic viewpoint when it is obvious that food shortages are self-limiting phenomena in terms of population growth. Droughts, famines, Ice age, whatever... civilizations rise and fall. Always will.

Yes, food shortages are self-limiting, because when the food is short, the population will decrease. That’s the way it’s always happened. It’s just never happened on this scale before, with this caliber of widespread consequences. Isn’t that enough for an apocalyptic attitude towards it?

The real problem is that it’s not just the food. It’s the oil, and the economy, and the environment, and the politics, and everything else. If we could deal with one of these problems at a time, we might be able to muddle our way through it, but they’re all hitting right bloody now, and the system is already starting to collapse.

Argumentation

These bits of argument were really written to an e-mail list that I'm on, and of course I had to respond, in my (possibly misguided) borderline obsessive need to straighten out people who might actually come around. There are plenty of other people on whom it's not worth wasting my breath (or electrons, or whatever). In any event, they were significant enough, and covered some ground I hadn't hit here yet, so I'm reposting them.

If you spend time in the undeveloped world, you see first hand the infant mortality and preventable deaths and diseases that would be avoided with more development and a higher standard of living.

How about less development and a higher standard of living? Most of those preventable deaths were caused, one way or another, by those in power dumping chemicals and such on these people. These people have not always been miserable; it's civilization that has made them that way.

I think that we all wish that there was a self-sustaining Eden-like existence widely available, but the truth is that most humans don't want that life.

WTF? Why the hell wouldn't they? The only problem with Eden was that it got paved over by the people who said, "That's not the way you're supposed to live," and forced those people to live by the "civilized" rules that generate more misery, destruction, mass production, and oppression.

Unfortunately, in underdeveloped areas, human populations grow until they are limited by resources and the result is death and suffering.

The real problem with the "underdeveloped" areas is that they've had any "development" forced upon them at all. The aboriginals of whatever location you want to point to lived there perfectly well and sustainably until civilization moved in and started developing (read: enslaving and/or killing) them and their area. The native people would never have cut down their low-maintenance trees, plowed up their meadows, and otherwise destroyed the naturally thriving ecological community and planted labor-intensive cash crops unless they were forced to. That same force is what keeps the people impoverished while their leaders are wealthy. And it is the failure of those cash crop monocultures that has plunged them into starvation. A more diversified land/food base will be more resilient, more able to resist minor annual perturbations, with a lessened dearth of sustenance for the people living there.

Cash crops are also a contributor to starvation by other routes, in that the excess food produced during plentiful times allows for increased population. Then when crops fail, and they have no local food, and can't afford to buy any from elsewhere, they starve, and we see their sunken eyes and swollen bellies on TV, pleading for food.

Another reason for crop failure is that continuous monoculture depletes the soil, to the point that it can't grow anything anymore. Of course, the quick fix for that is chemical fertilizer, but that's expensive, and if they had money they'd just buy the food for their own immediate consumption - you can't plan for the future if you can't eat NOW.

...absent any major technology breakthrough...

Ah, yes, the fabled Technofix. If you actually look at the history of technological "advances", they have a horrible track record in terms of waste production/disposal. So we switch from fossil fuel burning cars to electric. That's not solving the problem, that's just displacing it. Is the electricity coming from a coal-fired power plant? Obvious problem there.

How about a nuclear plant? That puts out lots of heat, which consistently destroys the viability of whatever water source it's attached to, and that completely ignores the actual toxic waste, which usually gets shipped off to some storage facility and buried - but it's still there, it's still being produced, even if it's not out in front for everyone to see.

Hydropower? Destroys the watershed, prevents migration of fish, floods areas above and starves areas below.

Solar or wind? Where do you think the materials to build them came from? They had to be mined, which means #1, they're unrenewable, and will eventually run out - and quicker, given the huge increase in demand. #2, The mining processes use up lots of other fuel sources, usually oil, to extract and purify the materials. The same series of arguments can be applied to any proposed technofix. You trace them back, and you see that the problems aren't really getting solved, they're just getting swept under a different rug.

Of course, we have 150,000 years of sustained human population growth...

No, actually, we've got about 10,000 years of sustained human population growth. The previous 200,000 years (if you're counting H. sapiens sapiens, or 4.5 million years, if you count the other human predecessors since they took to the savannas) saw a long-term net growth of effectively zero. They may not have known the theory behind carrying capacity, but they knew the practical implications. If you consume more than the land can produce, you reduce your own future survivability.

It is inevitable that either nature will correct this through pandemics, or humans through wars and policies that increase starvation, or least likely but most reasonable: Negative population growth.

Famine, war, and pestilence all lead to mass death, which is another form of "negative population growth". Usually when people use that term, what they're really talking about is a reduction in birth rates, because they don't want to think about increasing mortality rates. Well, get over it and open your eyes, because people are going to start dying en masse. One way or another, the world population is going to be reduced, and there's not a bloody thing anybody can do about it. We have radically exceeded our carrying capacity for so long, we've reduced our future survivability so far, that we're up shit creek without a paddle, in a wire canoe, petting the dog backwards, herding cats, and many more increasingly obscure and less relevant idioms.

Green is good and in my opinion the most ethical choice, but even if widely adopted I doubt that impact is sufficient to reverse current trends.

It's not. It's too late. "The American way of life is not negotiable" - the first Bush, June 1992, at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and later quoted by Cheney. The people in power are going to fight tooth and nail to hold on to that power, no matter how circumstances change to make their position untenable, and even self-destructive.

Really, the best strategy for the planet is fewer people and the sooner people realize this, the better. We can then move on to the question of how to ethically encourage this goal.

Not just fewer people, but lower energy requirements. Neither of the two can possibly be successful without the other. And regarding ethically depopulating the planet, again, it's too late. Maybe if we had started on that fifty years ago, it could have made a difference in where we are now, but we've hit critical mass. There are so many people consuming so much energy and causing so much damage that the vast majority of people alive now will not live out what they'd like to think of as their "natural lives" - they're going to be unceremoniously done away with as civilization continues in its death throes.

US Food Riot Prognostication

An inside scoop on the functionings (such as they are) of the agricorporations. Some excerpts:

1% of the US population grows all of the food for all Americans.

The bulk of the food we eat comes from grain. ... Half of what a meat animal is raised on is grain so when you eat meat you are really eating grain.

One day grain travels (by rail) from Kansas to Seattle to a flour mill. The next day the flour mill makes the flour and sends it to a bakery. The next day the bakery makes it into bread (and other baked things) and the next day it is at the store where it is purchased that day. Nobody stores anything.

At one time, a whole year's harvest of grain was stored that way. But since taxpayers were paying to store it, certain urban politicians engineered the movement of that money from providing a safety net or backup for their own food supply in order to give the money to various other social welfare things. So now, nothing is stored. We produce what we consume each year and store practically none of it. There is no contingency plan.

In order for riots to break out the whole food supply doesn't have to be wiped out. It just has to be threatened sufficiently. When people realize their vulnerability and the fact that there is no short term solution to a severe enough drought in the Midwest they will have no clue as to what they should do. Other nations can't make up the difference

International Trade, or lack thereof

So last night Derrick Jensen talked at Ottawa University (in Kansas, not Canada), which was the first time I’d seen him in person (I hadn’t even heard of him six months ago). During the Q&A, I asked about something he wrote in Culture of Make Believe (scroll down a bit): he quotes a friend as saying that stopping international trade would be necessary for life on Earth to survive, but that “The politicians of the world aren’t about to ban international trade.” Well, they’re now starting to, specifically banning export of oil and food from many countries, and I wanted his comments, thoughts, whatever.

He hadn’t heard about that, saying, “I don’t believe it’s happening on a large scale, ExxonMobil wouldn’t allow it. It would be good for developing countries, but the IMF would kill them. (Salvador Allende didn’t last very long because of that, he didn’t want to be a colony.) Then the US military will move in.” He then qualified it by saying that he wasn’t dismissing me and what I was saying, but that he didn’t know anything about it, and asked me to send him more information. After poking through my previous links here, I realized I don’t have anything on that posted, so here it is.

[I’ll admit, I’d conflated edible oils and petroleum oil, and coal, and so myself overestimated the amount of embargo going on, but it’s still fairly significant, and likely to continue growing as things get uglier.]

I did post a bit previously on food shortages and rising prices, but things have progressed since then. As the supplier countries produce less, they eventually get to the point where they’re not producing enough for their own people, let alone to export. It’s also an attempt to slow domestic inflation, as in Vietnam.

India briefly banned edible oil exports, but then selectively lifted the ban in favor of the rice export ban: “India was one of the first countries to take measures to protect its domestic supplies by halting exports of all but basmati, which sells at a premium.”

Indonesia also bans rice exports, and Kazakhstan bans wheat exports.

"...export curbs imposed by China and Vietnam will spread as importing nations struggle to meet their needs. India and Egypt have curbed sales this year to safeguard local supplies."

And the ripples propagate. Pakistan hasn't banned exports yet, but they're scaling back, and upsetting the Afghans.

Thailand is now under pressure to limit its own rice exports, which is likely to have a huge impact, given that Thailand is the single biggest rice exporter. "The more countries impose export constraints, the stronger the pressures become for Thailand to do the same."

Though ostensibly temporary, China banned coal exports.

What else is coming?

Party in Jacksonville

I’d intended to attach this to the previous post, but forgot about it at the time, and it’s now grown well beyond the original scope, so it’s getting its own post.

The arguments about the amount of incident sunlight on the planet (grossly overexaggerating what’s actually recoverable) are suspiciously similar to the arguments you occasionally hear against overpopulation to the effect that the entire world population could fit within the city limits of Jacksonville, Florida.

Jacksonville, at 757.7 square miles, is the second largest city in the US by land area, which most people would never guess, so we start off with a misdirection.

At a world population of 6.7 billion people, that gives everyone just over 3 square feet of living space. Not even enough to sit comfortably, let alone lie down.

If we were to expand that out to the entire state of Florida (including the Everglades, which aren’t really viable living area, but for the sake of argument), that still would give people about 244 square feet each – not quite 16 feet square, and still not enough space for anyone to actually voluntarily occupy for any length of time, and probably on the same order as most jail cells.

And I do recognize that these estimates can be increased by vertical stacking – ie, apartments and such, but that still doesn’t solve the root problems (aside from a slight lessening of the claustrophobia).

The real problem with any of these estimates is that they don’t include food production, waste disposal, air recycling, or any of the other ancillary functions that are necessary to support life, let alone business, industry, power, transportation, and all of the other ancillary functions that are necessary to support civilization.

Cramming many people into a small space means that more resources have to be moved farther, which inherently increases the energy needed to transport them (until we develop some kind of clean, cheap, easy teleportation). That’s an inefficient use of resources; it’s much more efficient to have more people more dispersed, closer to their resource base, to decrease costs of transportation, of food in particular, since it’s so fundamental, and can’t just be piped through conduits like water and petroleum.

That means that to reduce the amount of energy (read: oil) required to move food, people need to decentralize, and ideally even grow their own, in small self-contained communities, if not isolated households. The less resources that need to be imported from any significant distance, the richer that community will be.

Which then begs the question of sneakers, coffee, chocolate, soda, hairspray, jewelry, pharmaceuticals, home exercise equipment, massage chairs, air purifiers, sandwich makers, video game systems, computers, waterproof digital camcorders, iPod earphone charms, banana protectors, and all the other silly crap that modern consumeristic society has convinced you that you need to have.

Huston Smith, professor of philosophy and religious studies, said, “You can never get enough of what you do not really want.” We keep blowing money on material crap because we think it’ll make us feel better, but it never does, so we keep buying, continuously chasing the high, and it never occurs to anyone that maybe they’re on the wrong track to begin with. What people are really looking for is a personal connection, a sense of belonging, a community, some true social security (as opposed to the bullshit that the government tries to feed you), to placate the rampant feelings of insecurity.

And now I’ve wandered kinda far afield, to something that really deserves its own post, and which I’ll come back to another time.

Solar fallacy

The argument that enough sunlight falls on the Earth to power everything we need many times over (two examples) is inherently flawed, and obnoxiously disingenuous. Sure, that much light hits the surface (or whatever we’ve built on the surface), but that doesn’t mean it’s not going for any purpose. If we were to coat all buildings with solar panels, that would be good, but I’ve got my doubts as to whether that would be enough to replace all of the industrial, commercial, agricultural, etc. requirements that are currently filled by fossil fuels. (It’s beside the point, and I don’t really care enough to figure it out for myself, but if you’re feeling ambitious, go for it.)

That leaves all of the rest of the surface area that’s not collecting sunlight to generate power. Most of that area is covered by ocean, which grows plankton and other things which kinda need that light input for their own purposes – like soaking up CO2. So no, that’s not available. That leaves the land area, most of which is covered by green vegetation (wild or cultivated), which is similarly off-limits. Then there’s also the roads, which we can’t get any kind of good, permanent, durable cover on, let alone a photovoltaic one, so that’s a complete loss.

I’d like to see someone do an accurate estimate of how much usable solar energy (after conversion losses) hits the parts of the Earth that it can reasonably be harvested from.

Interesting revelations

Maybe that's too strong a word, but these things came to me as I was writing an e-mail a couple days ago, and I figured I'd post them:

Everything is selfishly motivated - there's really no such thing as altruism. Things we do to or for other people create feelings (reflections of sorts) in ourselves too. We act such that those reflected feelings are positive for ourselves, such that we feel good. (This gets a little contorted with sadism, masochism, and all those kinds of things, but the net reflection is still positive, or else people wouldn't engage in those activities. Even self-mutilation is often described as the physical pain reducing or eliminating emotional pain.) We've evolved to be social, "altruistic" animals, meaning the default is to get those positive feelings from positive actions toward other people. It's not much of a stretch to extend that to other animals, the environment, anything that we can perceive as having a "spirit" - hence animism.

...

That sort of pragmatism is the missing link between native traditions with their spirituality and "civilized" exploitation - if you've got plenty of something, you can afford to waste it. If you value individual plants and animals, and don't take any more than is actually necessary, you won't waste any, because that would disrespect the spirit of whatever it is that you're wasting.

"New" oil field

Two links

With improving technology and increasing cost of foreign oil, the big companies are finally reexamining domestic reserves that were previously deemed too expensive to extract, and therefore ignored. Back in 1951 the Bakken formation was discovered, but fell into that "not worth it" category, because oil was so cheap back then. Now with horizontal drilling capabilities and oil well over $100 a barrel, this field could start producing at a cost of about a 15-20% of that.

This presents several problems, but first, the silver lining: Gas prices might go back down for a while. Might. The oil companies are already gouging us for as much as we'll pay, simply because they can. As evidence, I point to the posted profits from 2007. ExxonMobil alone admitted to a profit of over $40 billion last year. Assuming 300 million people in the US, that's over $130 for every single person. And that's profit, not gross. (That's also what they admitted to, who knows how much more they're not admitting to.) That's what was left over after all of their operating expenses, advertising, distribution, payroll, etc. So what's to say that decreased oil costs (to them) will mean lower prices for the consumer? Sure, it'll drop a bit, but I guarantee they'll post record profits again.

It will also help alleviate the impending recession/depression, though by the time the oil wells come online in any significant quantity, it may well be too late. It'll also likely postpone, for a little while anyway, the country imploding on itself.

So the down side.

There's the obvious environmental impact: The more oil that comes out of the ground, the more oil ends up in the atmosphere and in the oceans.

The longer we put off the crash, the more severe it's likely to be. This oil boom will lull people into thinking that everything will be OK, that these times of shortage were only temporary, and that when they start up again the next time we'll just find something else to keep ourselves going. But these resources are by definition finite. The world situation in general and the domestic economy in particular are progressively getting worse (which is part of what's now making the Bakken oil field profitable), and it can only go so far. The fact that most people are oblivious to it just means that they won't see the end coming.

I'm also curious to see what this means for the Lakota. Though it wasn't widely publicized by the corporate media (I believe USA Today was the only major paper to carry the story), a lot of attention was garnered from independent bloggers and other sources for the Lakota seceding from the US, based on the UN's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The territory they're claiming covers parts of Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and both Dakotas. Now compare that map to the one on the second link at the top of this entry.

Given the extent of the oil field, I can write off one of my initial responses, that this was concocted as an excuse to charge into Lakota territory and commandeer it for the sake of the all-powerful economy. Not that that won't happen anyway, but I can't still believe that that's the reason for making the story up. What I foresee happening is that the corporations will unofficially start pumping in the new Republic of Lakotah, which will eventually lead to war. It'll be interesting to see, regardless.

Survivalism...

It's not just for whack-jobs anymore.

Partial excerpt:

Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: April 6, 2008

THE traditional face of survivalism is that of a shaggy loner in camouflage, holed up in a cabin in the wilderness and surrounded by cases of canned goods and ammunition.

It is not that of Barton M. Biggs, the former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley. Yet in Mr. Biggs’s new book, “Wealth, War and Wisdom,” he says people should “assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.”

“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food,” Mr. Biggs writes. “It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.”

Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore.

Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

They stockpile or grow food in case of a supply breakdown, or buy precious metals in case of economic collapse. Some try to take their houses off the electricity grid, or plan safe houses far away. The point is not to drop out of society, but to be prepared in case the future turns out like something out of “An Inconvenient Truth,” if not “Mad Max.”

“I’m not a gun-nut, camo-wearing skinhead. I don’t even hunt or fish,” said Bill Marcom, 53, a construction executive in Dallas.

Still, motivated by a belief that the credit crunch and a bursting housing bubble might spark widespread economic chaos — “the Greater Depression,” as he put it — Mr. Marcom began to take measures to prepare for the unknown over the last few years: buying old silver coins to use as currency; buying G.P.S. units, a satellite telephone and a hydroponic kit; and building a simple cabin in a remote West Texas desert.

This is what's coming here...

Just because we're affluent doesn't mean we're immune to the problems that are now facing the rest of the world. Already urbanites elsewhere in the world are starving, not because there isn't any food, but because they can't afford it.

Food is scarcer, because of weather problems and biofuel initiatives, and it costs more to transport it from where it's grown, to where it's processed, to where it's consumed, all of which means that by the time it hits the shelves, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be. We're already seeing that here, but we're not thinking about where it will lead. More and more people can't afford rent/mortgage, car payment, gas, and food, and so are sloughing off one thing after another. It's only a matter of time, though, before it hits you personally, and things start getting seriously uncomfortable.

Of course, if you were to ditch your car, that would solve a bunch of financial problems.

Americans think that they're safe from the crises and upheavals going on in the rest of the world, because we're so much better off. It won't last. And it'll be worse if we don't start making preparations, based on what we're seeing in the rest of the world. The average person learns from their own mistakes. The wise person learns from others' mistakes. The fool never learns. Which are you going to be?

Environmental Exhortations

From p 162-169 of A Language Older than Words, by Derrick Jensen
An interview with Bruce Stewart, Maori writer:

If we are to survive, each of us must become kaitiaki, which to me is the most important concept in my own Maori culture. We must become caretakers, guardians, trustees, nurturers. In the old days each whanau, or family, used to look after a specific piece of terrain. One family might look after a river from a certain rock down to the next bend. And they were the kaitiaki of the birds and fish and plants. They knew when it was time to take them to eat, and when it was not. When the birds needed to be protected, the people put a rahui on them, which means the birds were temporarily sacred. And some birds were permanently tapu, which means they were full-time protected. This protection was so strong that people would die if they broke it. It’s that simple. It needed no policing. In their eagerness to unsavage my ancestors Christian missionaries killed the concept of tapu along with many others.

To be kaitiaki is crucial to our existence. So while I am in agony for the whole planet, what I can do is become kaitiaki right here. This can spread, as people see this and say, ‘We can do that back at home.’ Perhaps then everyone can, as was true in our Maori culture, become caretakers of their own homes. Children will say to their parents, or to others, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t do that here.’

I’m more of a practical man, so rather than write papers about being kaitiaki, I just do it. I don’t trust words. I’m frightened of the intellectualism that can insulate us from action and turn the problems and solutions into puzzles or fantasies. As Maori we already have the words, the concepts. But we can’t rest on what our ancestors gave us. The work has got to be done.

Part of this work must be done by artists, philosophers, educators, and others who can articulate and perpetuate the Maori way of living, people who can help us untangle ourselves from the pakeha, the Europeans. And as a pakeha yourself there are many important things that you, too, can articulate. From your knowledge and from where you live. But I hope to think any piece of art spurs us into action. I want to believe in sustainability. Now. Not in the future. Not some distant day. Now.
...
We also need patches of native bush full of native birds and animals, cathedrals where man is not as important as he makes himself out to be, where he instead recognizes himself as a small part of the big family. If we were to make those spaces of harmony available within walking distance from every house, so everybody was a kaitiaki, we would change the world. That’s the plan I’m working on. If everyone nurtured a seedling and planted it they would be building their new church. And I’m in a rush.
...
Little nurseries like this are springing up everywhere. And they’re done not by the government but by ordinary people. That’s why they work. People come here when we’re planting, to get their little seedlings. And you see the children come back. The children are more aware than their parents, and the younger children know more than the older ones.
...
We are suffering from a great illness, and the way to get better is to serve others. We should all be in service. It makes us well. I serve the birds and trees, the earth, the water.

Anybody can do it. They can do it in their way. It’s action time.

What strikes me about this is that unlike a lot of native traditions (and I'm not knocking the groups that take this stance) where the people look down on the white, new-age, trippy-hippy, flakes who are trying to adopt trappings of a culture they have no deep understanding of, what Stewart is doing is explaining the Maori history and philosophy, and saying, "Go, take it, run with it, make it your own." Which is really the only hope for any given patch of greenery. As long as anyone remains who does not adopt the mentality of kaitiaki, what little natural resources that are left are in mortal danger. Stake out your patch and defend it.