The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon
A review 70
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Posted 12:46 PM on 24 Jul 2007
by John McGrath -
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John McGrath is an intinerant student and sometimes reporter currently living in Toronto, Canada. He mainly writes about Canadian and International Politics from an energy and climate perspective
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Matt G Posted 5:24 am
24 Jul 2007
It's all about complexity and complex adaptive systems, and I think it should dovetail wonderfully with the book you just described.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:39 am
24 Jul 2007
However, the peculiar problem we have, which was explored at length as long ago as 1981 by William Catton in his book "Overshoot", is that we have used fossil fuels to create something close to a algae "bloom", that is, something that grows at a furious pace, uses up it's resources, then collapses; in other words, it is completely unsustainable.
So it's not just that we overextend, which I think is Homer-Dixon's point, we have been using up a nonreplaceable source, fossil fuels. So this particular civilization could not go through a resilience cycle, as a forest can; it would have to turn into something fundamentally different, that is, a sustainable civilization. Hopefully this can be done without world wars and die-offs.
Part of the logic of "relocalization", even though it involves reduncancy in agriculture and manufacturing and energy, is exactly that it makes the civilization more resilient, because a part of the system can collapse or slow down and it won't bring the rest down with it, another concept Homer-Dixon explores. But the sheer volume of goods will be smaller than currently, although I think that the quality can be much better, in fact the quality could be so much better that a sustainable civilization could be "richer", by many metrics, than the current one.
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wiscidea Posted 6:02 am
24 Jul 2007
"It would be nice if our current global civilization was "resilient", in that it could suffer a large breakdown, wipe out the underbrush, if you will, and then regrow."
Please tell us more about the "underbrush".
I'm more concerned about the aging trees that shade and smother new ideas so they cannot survive long enough to bear fruit. Do we really want resilency? Wouldn't it be better to break free of the cycle leading to the same climax community over and over and over... and replace the mature forest with a new and diverse ecosystem, the members of which can ebb and flow with the availabilty of resources?
Just babbling...
Forward!
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:24 am
24 Jul 2007
I actually don't particularly like using the idea of "complexity" as the measure, because I think the system you are describing,
a new and diverse ecosystem, the members of which can ebb and flow with the availabilty of resources
is actually also very complex, but it is much more flexible. Any system such as ours, in which the continuing operation depends on an ever-increasing use of the resource base, will eventually self-destruct.
Perhaps a more resilient civilization would experience destruction in the form of the replacement of one set of sustainable technologies with another set of technologies; it might also be able to move around as the planet's climate/continents move, in the very long-term; in any case, if we manage to change the climate prematurely, the civilization will have to become more resilient simply because it will occasionally lose a set of cities to rising sea levels or drought or both.
So keep babbling so I can babble.
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odograph Posted 6:36 am
24 Jul 2007
The real problem with the scenario is that exactly our society has never before reached the limit. We have to look for parallels therefore in societies that are arguably similar or arguably not.
FWIW, I am big on noticing the continual evolution around us these days ... and taking that evolution as disproof that we have reached a static (and fragile) break-point.
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wiscidea Posted 6:46 am
24 Jul 2007
What about "redundancy"? Did you mention that already?
Is there a way to add redundancy to our civilization in key areas? And what would those areas be?
There are at least two benefits:
(1) Flexibility to respond to changing conditions.
I think this one of the major flaws of our current conservative politicians. They want everything stripped to a minimum... just enough infrastructure, just enough medical care, just enough energy, just enough jobs, just enough food... doesn't leave room for the unexpected.
(2) Facilitates evolution.
If you want to babble on, consider babbling about this...
Duplication of genes facilitates evolution. Once there is an extra copy of a gene, one copy is free to undergo mutation and perhaps acquire a new and useful function. The other can carry on the original function and ensure the organism does not die. If the new gene -- altered copy -- eventually works better in a given environment, the old gene can erode away... though it might hang around for quite a while.
Just free associating...
Forward!
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pcarbo Posted 7:07 am
24 Jul 2007
The Ingenuity Gap hits the nail on the head on our environmental problems as well as any other book.
While the idea of an "ingenuity gap" isn't particularly new in substance, and most of his arguments are anecdotal, his breadth is utterly captivating, along with the way he is able to synthesize so many different problems (public policy, understanding ecosystems, financial economics) under a common perspective.
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:26 am
24 Jul 2007
The idea of "slack" is an important one in both ecology and engineering -- you don't push the system to the limit because there is eventually going to be a shock to the system, and you need some reserves -- but in a purely free market system, if you leave slack, somebody isn't making money, and so they will push the system to the limit. The biggest "slack" is what is called the "commons", like the atmosphere or the oceans or rivers, those areas that individuals/companies can make a lot of money destroying, but which are necessary buffers (as well as life supporters).
So it becomes necessary for "the people", hopefully through their governments, to set aside enough slack -- Central Park in NYC would never have happened if the city had not planned ahead and set it aside.
If we had each major city area with its own manufacturing base, agricultural base, and energy base, the level of innovation would be much greater than it is now, because, like an evolutionary ecosystem, the system would be creating a constant stream of variations.
So, yeah, I think redundancy is a good idea.
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justlou Posted 8:03 am
24 Jul 2007
The question seems to be whether we want to pursue the ultimate outcome to the end of this maladaptive global civilization, or to resist its centripetal pull toward uniformity and total dependence on the empire and resink our roots into local cultures which are better adapted to local environments.
This discussion is almost biblical in nature from the myths of founders to the tower of Babel to the story of Noah. My interest in this lies mainly in saving enough of the earth's natural diversity and resources to allow local Noah's to survive and carry on, to create their arc with the natural world and preserve it for future generations.
The global economy has temporarily erased or masked many of the environmental obstacles that held local populations in check. The feedback mechanisms that cultures paid heed to avoid overshooting their local resource base have been erased by trade and technology. It is highly unlikely that a reversion to local economies would support 9 billion people on earth.
We are approaching a spore stage of our civilization. The main question I ask is how much seed can we put through the gauntlet while preserving as much of the natural world as possible.
This discussion is really getting to the heart of what I perceive to be the major conflict arising -- the conflict between those who wish to preserve and grow the maladaptive global beast and those who strive toward a diversification via readaptive radiation in the natural community. My friends, this is truly epic.
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odograph Posted 8:21 am
24 Jul 2007
When we say "global civilization" I take us to mean those things that are common throughout the world.
At the same time we think we have a very different culture than people across town, let alone in another state, or country.
I think my middle moderate view is that there are a lot of things we have in common, that we could also do better.
That said, I think an oversimplification to genuine uniformity is often an element of disaster scenarios.
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GliderGuider Posted 4:37 am
25 Jul 2007
There is no question that modern industrial civilization is the largest, most complex, most interconnected, most productive system yet seen on the planet. If the resilience theorists are correct, it is therefore axiomatically the least resilient.
Per capita energy consumption is a good proxy for overall consumption, and its change over time will, if anything, understate the level of overall consumption as the energy intensity of the global economy declines. Unfortunately, per capita primary energy consumption is again rising following its plateau during the 1980s and 1990s. When you combine that fact with a population growth rate of 75 million people per year, it's obvious that we are continuing to increase our pressure on the global ecosystem. That means that all the stresses THD mentions continue to climb, as does the risk that some perturbation may eventually prove too great for the system to absorb.
When people speculate what might cause such a perturbation, the usual suspects include nuclear wars, pandemics and climate change. I maintain that the likeliest suspect is none of these. Climate change is too slow and gradual, and while wars or pandemics could be candidates, there is one other factor that is both strong enough cause a problem, and absolutely inevitable. The clue is in the first phrase in the previous paragraph. The more I have learned about it, the more it seems obvious to me that the energy disruptions prouced by declining global oil production have a high probability of triggering a precipitous release of system organization in the near future.
"Oh no, not another peak oil doomer!" Well, actually yes.
We know that oil is a finite resource. We know that global oil production has been on a plateau for two years. We know that oil is intrinsic to the transportation networks that bind the web of ultra-efficient (and correspondingly low resilience) world industry and trade. We know that production is declining in almost three quarters of the world's oil producing nations. We know that production in some oil provinces and fields is declining at near double-digit percentage rates. We know that all but one of the 14 oil fields that have ever produced over one million barrels per day is in decline, and there is significant evidence that the last one - Ghawar - is now entering decline.
The Hirsch Report has made a convincing case that mitigation efforts need to begin ten to twenty years before the decline begins in order to avoid significant social and economic disruptions. Evidence is mounting that the beginning of the decline is now five years or less away. Not everyone agrees with this time line , of course, but several serious analyses of planned oil projects (known as bottom up analyses) have pointed to this possibility.
If the decline begins in 5 years, we will have by then added over a third of a billion people to the world's population. At our present energy consumption rate that hints at a rise of over 5% in demand just at a time when our crucial energy source is going into decline. And this situation will continue to worsen as the world's population continues to grow.
Now, if the effects of such resource depletion were uniform, we might not have to worry too much. After all, a demand growth of 1% per year could easily be dealt with through conservation measures. Unfortunately the growing disparities between rich and poor nations guarantee that the effects will not be uniform - some regions will face calamitous effects, while others will fare much better. Here is where the problem of resilience (or rather the lack of it) rears its ugly head. The highly interconnected nature of our civilization guarantee that local failures from system shocks like the sudden disruption of national oil supplies will have repercussions far beyond their origins, and in sectors of the civilization not obviously related to the original cause.
I claim that such failures are inevitable precisely because a rising population with rising material expectations will collide with a declining oil supply within such a short time frame that mitigation efforts will not have a chance to work. Population and time scale are the confounding factors for any foreseeable avoidance strategy. Combine that with the natural tendency of nations to try an ensure their own advantage and the reluctance of people to voluntarily impoverish themselves, and you have a sure-fire recipe for a stew of hard times.
And of course all this is playing out against the backdrop of the other stresses that THD mentions. Soil fertility depletion, fresh water depletion, the death of the oceans, deforestation, desertification, pervasive chemical pollution, accelerating rates of species extinctions, global economic instability and accelerating climate change merge to generate a rising drumbeat of ecological stress. We have set ourselves up for a Tragedy of the Commons of truly epic proportions.
While we may not be able to avoid the fate that appears to be looming over us, I maintain that there is in fact hope - though coming from an unexpected direction and not without cost. Here's what I see, excerpted from my article Population Decline - Red Herrings and Hope:
Start from these three realizations:
The genetic imperatives that drive our reproduction, consumption and competition guarantees that we will not change our civilization's value set voluntarily or preemptively.
Humanity is like yeast. We reproduce and consume until our ecological niche is stripped of resources and poisoned by waste, then we die off.
Humanity is like cockroaches. We are resourceful, adaptive and hardy, and you can't kill us all.
These three facts mean that although we are heading for a bottleneck, some portion of humanity will survive to regroup and rebuild in a massively damaged, resource-poor world. On our way through the bottleneck we will lose much of our physical and social capital. The one and only good thing about this, from a species, biosphere and planetary perspective, is that the existing socioeconomic structures will be forcibly and involuntarily stripped away, leaving room for new structures to take their place.
The change in perspective involves not looking forward from our current situation into the decline. Rather, step forward a couple of hundred years and look back. what I believe you will see is the rebirth of the next cycle of civilization.
The question for me has become, "How do we ensure that the seeds are in place for a value set that will survive through and bloom after the bottleneck, a value set that will ensure that the next cycle of civilization has a chance at sustainability even in such a badly damaged, resource-poor world?" How will we ensure that our descendants will eventually inherit a sustainable world, even though our current situation is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination?
I've become convinced over the last couple of months that the seeds for such a transformation have already been planted. They are even resilient enough to make it through the bottleneck, and they carry the correct values for the rebirth I suggest.
American activist Paul Hawken has just written a tremendously important book called "Blessed Unrest" in which he describes a set of one to two million local, independent, citizen-run environmental and social justice groups. These groups exist world-wide, and each is acting on local problems of its own choosing. There is no overarching ideology beyond "making the world a better place", there is no unifying organization, no white male vertebrate leader setting the agenda. As a result the movement is extremely resilient - no government action anywhere can shut it down, even though individual groups may be suppressed. These groups make up the largest (though unrecognized) social movement the world has ever seen. For a glimpse of some of these organizations, take a look at the web site WiserEarth.org.
Hawken sees this movement as part of humanity's immune system. While I like the metaphor and think it is exactly correct, I believe the importance of these groups is much greater than just their efforts to mitigate an unavoidable collapse. These groups have been called into existence by the world's dis-ease, and do two things: they work to fix local problems now (which will mitigate some local effects of the collapse), but more importantly they act as carriers for the values of cooperation, consensus, nurturing, recognition of interdependence, acceptance of limits, universal justice and the respect for other life. Those are precisely the values that a civilization will need to achieve stability and sustainability. To top it all off, many of these groups are led by women or espouse specifically matriarchal values, one attribute I see as essential for any sustainable civilization.
At the risk of sounding sentimental, I call these groups "the antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream".
I am convinced we will not save this civilization, and will lose a large fraction of humanity in the process. But I'm equally convinced that thanks to the seeds that have already been planted in these groups we have a shot at a much better one in a couple of hundred years. The crucial change in perspective required to see the hope in this is to stop looking from here forward into the decline, and instead look backward from a position out two hundred years and imagine what it will take to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization from the ashes of this one. The values required are already embodied in a resilient organization, enough of whose elements will survive to transmit a sustainable value set into the ecologically damaged, resource-depleted world we will bequeath to the future.
Good luck to us all,
Paul Chefurka
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odograph Posted 5:35 am
25 Jul 2007
This did not match my recollection, so I went and looked. From XI. Summary and Concluding Remarks:
2. Oil Peaking Could Cost the U.S. Economy Dearly
Over the past century the development of the U.S. economy and lifestyle has been fundamentally shaped by the availability of abundant, low-cost oil. Oil scarcity and several-fold oil price increases due to world oil production peaking could have dramatic impacts. The decade after the onset of world oil peaking may resemble the period after the 1973-74 oil embargo, and the economic loss to the United States could be measured on a trillion-dollar scale. Aggressive, appropriately timed fuel efficiency and substitute fuel production could provide substantial mitigation.
I would not try to sweep an economic loss that may resemble the period after the 1973-74 oil embargo ... but I think you suggest they mean more.
(Note again that I've already got my Prius, and as I look around me I see more and more people getting theirs. This cuts my fuel demand in half without a reduction in miles driven. It is part of the conservation/efficiency 'wedge')
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odograph Posted 5:38 am
25 Jul 2007
9. Economic Upheaval is Not Inevitable
Without mitigation, the peaking of world oil production will almost certainly cause major economic upheaval. However, given enough lead-time, the problems are soluble with existing technologies. New technologies are certain to help but on a longer time scale. Appropriately executed risk management could dramatically minimize the damages that might otherwise occur.
"Not Inevitable"
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:57 am
25 Jul 2007
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GliderGuider Posted 5:58 am
25 Jul 2007
* Waiting until world oil production peaks before taking crash program action
leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades.
Initiating a mitigation crash program 10 years before world oil peaking helps considerably but still leaves a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.
Initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking appears to offer the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall for the forecast period.
In section K he says,
* On the other hand, if peaking is imminent, failure to initiate mitigation
quickly will have significant economic and social costs to the U.S. and the world.
and
* Late initiation of mitigation may result in severe consequences.
I base my expectations of trouble on the following foundations:
We don't have 10 years left, the peak is here NOW.
Hirsch works from the assumption of a crash program of mitigation being undertaken in advance of the peak. I see no evidence of a such a crash program.
I maintain that we are now living in Hirsch's first scenario, and that the brittle social system we have created will not be able to fully withstand "a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades."
I could be wrong. I doubt I am, though.
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odograph Posted 6:02 am
25 Jul 2007
The most concrete statement I can find is the one I quoted:
The decade after the onset of world oil peaking may resemble the period after the 1973-74 oil embargo, and the economic loss to the United States could be measured on a trillion-dollar scale.
I lived through that. I remember that it hit some industries harder than others, and that we had a few years to a decade of "high unemployment" ... but only by US standards (10%)
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:08 am
25 Jul 2007
2) it's not really so much a problem of overpopulation, as how the population uses the ecosystems. If the population could use the ecosystems in a sustainable way, without fossil fuels -- tall order! -- then we could concentrate on how that might occur. That doesn't necessarily just mean technological fixes, but would also involve changing social structure, say by having employee-ownership-and-control as the main organizing principal of the economy. At any rate, as you say, the problem is "burgeoning consumption and waste production".
Here's to a more resilient civilization.
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GliderGuider Posted 6:09 am
25 Jul 2007
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odograph Posted 6:11 am
25 Jul 2007
They are not particularly creative either. But they are constrained to answer a question which might not be obvious at first sight: "how do we continue our current use patterns?"
Hirsch answers that with coal-to-oil and such ... but I don't think we particularly need to continue our current use patterns. That is not the creative solution.
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odograph Posted 6:20 am
25 Jul 2007
It's easy to mistake "potential for disruption" with "odds of disruption" don't you think?
It is one of the fundamental characteristics of the human mind, that we cannot gauge long odds when it comes to risk. That of course does not stop us from trying, or stop some of us from being more sure than we should be.
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GliderGuider Posted 6:32 am
25 Jul 2007
My position is that the Earth's sustainable carrying capacity after oil will be on the order of one billion people, with an overall average consumption similar to today - i.e. a Portuguese standard of living, a bit higher in some places, somewhat lower in others. I disagree with those who peg the carrying capacity at 2 to 3 billion because I think the ecosystem degradation caused by our prolonged overshoot has reduced it significantly.
I also take the Deep Ecology position that higher numbers than that would radically short-change the other species we live with and depend on, to the point that a long term sustainable living arrangement would not be possible.
I'm convinced we will be able to establish a sustainable civilization, but not with our current value system. High population levels make it much less likely that we might overcome our biologically supported urges for competition, consumption and reproduction. We'd have a much better chance if there are fewer of us. In addition, we would need to strip away the interlocking mass of social structures we have created that support and reinforce those urges. Fortunately (for some extremely small value of good fortune) the coming bottleneck will provide us with the perfect opportunity to prune both our numbers and our structures.
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GliderGuider Posted 6:37 am
25 Jul 2007
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odograph Posted 6:42 am
25 Jul 2007
The rude fact is that we (as an aggregate population) will be wrong about most risks, and some lucky soul out there through sheer odds will be right. Maybe it will be a comet, maybe it will be a pandemic, maybe it will be a superquake, maybe it will be a civil war ...
Now, your risks are the best risks? How exactly do you leap from "a hyperbolic discount function" to "my risks are the real ones?"
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:42 am
25 Jul 2007
I write articles at SandersResearch.com, and my latest one seemed to elicit some strong reactions to the effect that the planet simply cannot handle several billion people. I think it is important to separate out the problem of oil from the rest of it, because oil is mainly used for cars, trucks, and planes, which I think could be "relatively" easily be done without -- the problem being that everyone wants cars, trucks, and airplanes, setting up massive conflict. But anyway, I still prefer to soldier on and see if a different kind of civilization could work in this time epoch and save the billions that are alive today.
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odograph Posted 6:45 am
25 Jul 2007
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odograph Posted 6:50 am
25 Jul 2007
And future problems, even when phrased as uncertain risks, argue for insurance.
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Colin Wright Posted 5:19 pm
25 Jul 2007
it sends shivers up my spine. Now, from your web page you seem like a kind and decent sort, but as an acolyte of deep ecology you surely are aware that other deep ecologists have advocated "letting nature take its course" with respect to the AIDS epidemic and famine.
Could you be more explicit in what you mean by the opportunity to "prune our numbers"? I'm hoping you have a more humane outlook and are not advocating some kind of Final Solution.
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GliderGuider Posted 9:05 pm
25 Jul 2007
In that line above, a more precise rendering of my position would have been "the coming bottleneck will provide Mother Nature with the perfect opportunity to prune both our numbers and our structures."
In my writing I am trying like the devil to stay away from any prescriptive formulas, to deal only with what I think will happen as opposed to what I think should happen. We have no shortage of helpful proposals these days. You can't click a link without tripping over a list of suggestions for making the world a better place. On the other hand, we do have a dramatic shortage of people who are willing to paint a picture of what is likely to happen despite all our best efforts.
I've discovered that it's very difficult to say the things I do and not be misinterpreted. For instance as soon as one says something as innocuous as "IMO the carrying capacity of the Earth in the absence of oil is about one billion people," the accusations of genocidal intentions begin to fly. I assure you I am trying only to describe what I see as the most probable directions for humanity, while keeping my personal preferences out of it.
As an example of my personal preferences, though, I do give heavily to organizations like the Stephen Lewis Foundation. I take the position that while the dieoff I talk about may be inevitable, and I understand intellectually the position of those who wish to lighten the lifeboat by any means possible, I must be able to live with my conscience between now and then. An acquaintance of mine, for example, is implacably opposed to micro-credit because in his opinion anything that encourages the survival of the doomed reduces humanity's chances overall. I find his position utterly repugnant. If altruistic actions now were to save just a few thousand of the right people during the coming hard times, it could make a huge difference to humanity's long term prospects.
The point is, we really don't know what's going to happen, so we must continue doing what we are doing, especially the good, moral, ethical, uplifting bits. Planning the destruction of others (whether humans or any other species) is profoundly immoral. While I don't believe we have souls I do believe we have spirits (I use the word advisedly in a purely secular sense), and such actions are profoundly damaging to our spirit.
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:00 am
26 Jul 2007
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GliderGuider Posted 1:19 am
26 Jul 2007
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Colin Wright Posted 5:48 pm
26 Jul 2007
Die-off is something I have a hard time even thinking about. It's just somewhere I don't want to go in my thoughts. But that also serves to wake me up, to push me to be doing what ever little I can to avert upcoming disasters.
But with that caveat, let me just say I don't believe that mass die-off is inevitable. What we have going for us is that the energy depletion will be gradual over many decades, which gives us at least a hope that we could turn around the direction that things are going in (including population) We just don't know how people will respond. (Though the results are hardly encouraging so far.)
Perhaps there will be enlightened groups like you suggest, which reminds me of the Irish monks who kept Christianity alive during the Dark Ages. Maybe it will be more like the Cuban model. Who knows? More likely a mixture of responses, old and new.
But if we don't at least try to come up with new social arrangements, then there is practically zero chance that our current course will not lead to disaster. (And if the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets go, all bets are off.)
Anyway, I appreciate that you are out there thinking, writing and lecturing, trying to wake people up. And feel free to argue with me on this, of course.
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odograph Posted 1:00 am
27 Jul 2007
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odograph Posted 1:03 am
27 Jul 2007
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GliderGuider Posted 1:10 am
27 Jul 2007
While my thinking leads me to somewhat different places than yours, we end up in violent agreement that there are urgent things that need to be done, and probably even in broad agreement on the kinds of things that need to be done. The main difference is that I expect these things to help mainly after the collapse rather than before it. If they do help before it so much the better, but I don't expect them to be able to forestall it.
The Irish monks you mention bring to mind the greatest piece of post-apocalyptic fiction ever written, "A Canticle for Liebowitz" by Walter Miller Jr. written in 1956. If you haven't read it, or if it's been a while since the last time you did, pick it up now. The resonances with our current situation will send shivers up your spine.
Reading it a year ago reminded me why I think that widely distributed knowledge retention projects might be so critically important in the years to come.
Paul Chefurka
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:27 am
27 Jul 2007
The individuals in this civilization have evolved to fill niches in their ecosystem. There is the engineer, the farmer, the warrior, the diplomat and on and on. The engineers have one extremely powerful arm to hold things like a vice while they work on them. Wish I had one of those. The warriors are just plain scary. The diplomats are empathetic to the point of self-destruction.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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odograph Posted 1:47 am
27 Jul 2007
I agree that there are obvious problems around us, and plenty of things to work on ... but to be honest I don't like them bound to irrational fears.
The big hole in "overshoot" or "peak oil" collapse arguments is that they advance a fixed conclusion by a weakly inductive argument.
Deep thinkers on logic and prediction will tell you ... you can't do that (shallow thinkers will disagree and try to sell you a book).
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:19 am
27 Jul 2007
Collapse is not going to happen so no need to worry about it (a conservative world view).
Collapse is the historical norm and we should try to break the cycle (a liberal world view).
We are heading for collapse and there is nothing we can do about it (pessimist or realist world view, depending).
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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odograph Posted 2:23 am
27 Jul 2007
I also never said that collapse was not a possibility.
In fact, I think the rational position is one recognizing uncertainty and such possibilities.
That out of the way, I don't think you took away what you could have from my link. You say:
"All past civilizations have collapsed. It's not like this is science fiction."
The link says:
"However, the link between the premise and the inductive conclusion is weak. No reason exists to believe that just because one person hangs pictures on nails that there are no other ways for pictures to be hung, or that other people cannot do other things with pictures. Indeed, not all pictures are hung from nails; moreover, not all pictures are hung. The conclusion cannot be strongly inductively made from the premise."
The fact of the matter is no, not all past civilizations have collapsed ... and proponents are loathe to discuss civilizations that did not collapse.
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GliderGuider Posted 2:24 am
27 Jul 2007
I talk about collapse because the Precautionary Principle hints that somebody should be talking about it. I think the possibility is being given short shrift in public discourse. Since the consequences could be so severe, the idea that some sort of larger-than-expected disruption to civilization (no matter what the mechanism) ought to at least be considered.
One difference between your reaction and mine is that you see fears of collapse as irrational, while I see them as being supported both by evidence and reasonable theories. You may see the inductive argument as weak, but as I said before, the Precautionary Principle urges that we pay at least some attention to it.
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odograph Posted 2:25 am
27 Jul 2007
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odograph Posted 2:27 am
27 Jul 2007
"The main difference is that I expect these things to help mainly after the collapse rather than before it. If they do help before it so much the better, but I don't expect them to be able to forestall it."
If you expect collapse you are doing more than batting around possibilities.
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:30 am
27 Jul 2007
"The fact of the matter is no, not all past civilizations have collapsed ... and proponents are loathe to discuss civilizations that did not collapse."
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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odograph Posted 2:31 am
27 Jul 2007
It's been there 500 years, man.
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GliderGuider Posted 2:57 am
27 Jul 2007
Disruptions of significant human structures and institutions, possibly including the global economy.
An unevenly distributed decline in human numbers that accelerates over time due to rising mortality.
I've chosen to talk about significant social disruptions and significant population declines because of the Precautionary Principle, but I have no idea how moderate or severe such events might become. We might experience nothing worse than a world-wide depression and the stabilization of our population at 6 billion people. I haven't found any convincing evidence to support such an optimistic outcome, though, so I'll stick with my scenario for now.
I'm glad you disagree with my position, because we need people working this one from all points of the compass.
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:57 am
27 Jul 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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GliderGuider Posted 3:06 am
27 Jul 2007
Civilizations have collapsed in the past, in the sense that they have undergone disruption, release and decline. Of course civilization has usually reappeared subsequently in the same geographic area with genetically similar people. Does that mean it's the same civilization as before? Or that the original civilization didn't collapse? I claim the answer to both those questions is "No."
Paul Chefurka
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:15 am
27 Jul 2007
The "Limits to Growth" group tried to model the future. Certainly, their "business-as-usual" models lead to collapse, however defined. And they were fairly optimistic.
We have the following three problems (at least):
Global warming
Peak oil
General ecosystem collapse (oceans, forests, mass extinction, etc.)
Plus in the U.S., a declining manufacturing base and huge trade and other deficits. What's to like?
So, any straight-line business-as-usual model of this mess will lead to collapse. But of course, we can't anticipate what preventive or other actions people will take -- say, if lots and lots of people start reading Grist, for instance. So we know (hope) something will intervene. But there is certainly use in modeling "business-as-usual".
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sunflower Posted 3:50 am
27 Jul 2007
An evolutionary event is beyond collapse. Who will evolve?
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odograph Posted 3:58 am
27 Jul 2007
I'm sure "Romans living in Rome, Egyptians living in Egypt" went through a lot of changes.
People living in a place evolve over time, adapt, and change. Historians group people/place/time into a label, especially when the are focusing on a "collapse" ;-)
What we are interested in now are people/places/times that don't make it into a collapse book.
(I'm quite sure that if Euro-Mexican culture had collapsed it would have been given a name.)
... so what about Scandinavia?
Modern Scandinavians seem to have a model for happy and sustainable lives. And I can't think of any past Scandinavian collapses at the moment ... ?
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odograph Posted 4:03 am
27 Jul 2007
I've hung with many who tried ... or suffered from a certain cognitive dissonance, in which at once the admit something cannot be proven but still think it is "most likely."
Put another way, if someone says "we face great and uncertain risks" I'll be on board. On the other hand, if someone presumes to name our "most likely" future, I might just speak up.
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odograph Posted 4:04 am
27 Jul 2007
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odograph Posted 4:08 am
27 Jul 2007
You really need to read the first "Fooled by Randomness" book by Nassim Taleb.
The only good model is the one that was right, for the right reason.
Unfortunately it is difficult for us mere humans to understand when our models are right, let alone when they are right for the right reasons.
And so we take as "best" models we know fall short of that real measure.
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:35 am
27 Jul 2007
At any rate, I think we're probably much closer on this than at first it seems. In physics, for a nonchaotic systems, you tend to want very precise prediction. For just about everything else, certainly ecosystems, social systems, or what we're dealing with, the interaction of the two, it's impossible to be very precise.
In fact, the idea of resiliency and building slack into a system is to have some leeway precisely because you know that it is hard to predict what will happen -- which is where this thread more or less started. In other words, the fact that we can't predict precisely leads to the conclusion that a different kind of civilization is needed, one that can survive shocks, and one that does not assume that there will not be shocks. In fact, one of our biggest problems is that the mainstream view depends on weak induction, the view that things are going a certain way now, so they will be going that way into perpetuity.
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odograph Posted 6:02 am
27 Jul 2007
I'll endorse most of that.
(I suspect that the mainstream view might include some expectation of adaptation. Some of that might be justified, but I'd take exception with folks from far on the other side as well ... those who believe success or adaptation is certain ... a different sort of precisely predicted future.)
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:07 am
27 Jul 2007
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Biodiversivist Posted 6:52 am
27 Jul 2007
Which is an example mentioned in Collapse. If you can draw on trading partners from around the earth, not everyone will be having a drought at the same time. Instead of counting only on what you have within your own boundaries, you have a whole planet for redundancy. There may be limits even to this, however, as we head for nine billion. And global warming is global.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Biodiversivist Posted 7:01 am
27 Jul 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:09 am
27 Jul 2007
I think economies work better at continental or subcontinental levels anyway, I don't think globalization helps the world economy along.
As for Scandanavia, they had two big advantages -- first, noone ever conquered them (except perhaps very briefly), and second, they tended to have a democratic society, even when they had kings.
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wiscidea Posted 8:02 am
27 Jul 2007
"Our cultures go all out. We keep nothing in reserve."
Sort of like annual weeds. Go all out and chances are that a few seeds will land on fertile soil somewhere. Doesn't matter if 99% don't succeed for one reason or another. "Civilization" will continue.
Forward!
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wiscidea Posted 8:04 am
27 Jul 2007
Just an observation... I'm as guilty as anyone else.
Forward!
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odograph Posted 8:05 am
27 Jul 2007
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odograph Posted 8:27 am
27 Jul 2007
The Minoan civilization was a bronze age civilization which arose on Crete, an island in the Aegean Sea. The Minoan culture flourished from approximately 2700 to 1450 BC; afterwards, Mycenaean Greek culture became dominant on Crete.
What's important in a situation like this? The 1250 years of success, or the few of change?
The historical perspective is funny. Our eye is drawn to the discontinuity ... probably for the reasons outlined in that Time magazine article above.
And of course that distorts our perspective.
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odograph Posted 8:29 am
27 Jul 2007
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Ron Steenblik Posted 1:15 pm
27 Jul 2007
The enormous eruption of the submarine volcano at the Greek island of Thera (Santorini) during the Bronze Age, around 1500 BC, is such a natural hazard. The tsunami generated by the eruption, literally wiped out the peace-loving Minoan civilization who inhabited the island of Crete. After the sea subsided, the configuration of the area was altered, and the decline of the Minoan principality on the Archipelago began.
For a more recent article (courtesy of the BBC), click here.
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odograph Posted 11:32 pm
27 Jul 2007
If you are telling me that Minoans did not "collapse" for "because it badly managed its environment" I'm going to take that as reinforcement of my point.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 8:20 am
28 Jul 2007
Who knows how long it would have continued had that calamity not befallen it.
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odograph Posted 9:08 am
28 Jul 2007
I understand that we face risks, that survival requires constant work and continual reallocation of resources, but I disagree with those who presuppose an outcome.
Further up the thread I was contesting predictions or expectations of our own collapse. One foundation of such claims is (as above) that all foundations collapse. I named a few that did not. I named the Minoans for the length of their civilization. In fact, I don't think that anyone has a handle on the useful figure for this discussion (the mean time between collapses) for human civilizations.
Collapse arguments are often weak induction, saying that we are "like" this culture that collapsed, leaving as missing data how much we are "like" those cultures which did not. It's often left unsaid why we are more like the crashing cultures now in 200x than we were in 190x and so on.
I actually find much to agree with from Thomas Homer-Dixon when I read his interviews (I have not yet read his books). I pulled this bit from one of his interviews last year as something I could buy into:
Yes, although I'm persuaded enough by complexity theory and so forth that, as I say in my book, I think our capacity for prediction is very limited. But you can certainly define a rough boundary between plausible and implausible.
On the surface that is holding some distance between reasonable expectation of uncertainty, and less reasonable expectation or prediction of some specific outcome.
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Biodiversivist Posted 10:23 am
28 Jul 2007
Societies collapse for all kinds of reasons. Volcanoes, weather, pestilence, resource depletion, meteors, inquisitions, earth quakes, and especially war, which can be kicked off by any of the above. Given time, large shifts in living standards and population levels are inevitable. The sun won't always shine. Like many other complex problems (weather, turbulent flow, the uncertainty principle) a society's longevity is a probability problem. All we can do is try to improve the odds for finite periods of time by seeking solutions to potential show stoppers, like global warming, peak oil, biodiversity loss, disease, war.
We also don't want to come out on the other side of whatever the next bottleneck entails into a biologically unraveled planet, one we didn't evolve to live on>? Or am I kidding myself?
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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odograph Posted 10:34 am
28 Jul 2007
Such is life. We all get up in the morning to do something. If we are clever enough we survive the day and get to do it again tomorrow.
... and then a thousand years later some smart-alec historian groups us into a "civilization" and buries our threescore and ten into a generalization of some century or another.
So in terms of problems, let's do what we always do, get up and work on the most pressing (the marketing of environmentalism is to "pop" a few issues into the mainstream mind as pressing).
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 6:28 am
29 Jul 2007
Of all things, are wome scientists ignoring good science? Of all people, are some scientists remaining electively mute and, instead, choosing to cater to that which is not other than economically expedient and politically convenient? To do so would be tantamount to pandering, I would like to suppose, to the patently unsustainable habits of conspicuous consumption by a governing elite and their gold rush culture.
The unwillingness of scientists to see, to hear and to speak of good scientific evidence is an incomprehensible omission of incalculable import for the future of life and the maintenance of the integrity of Earth.
Science enjoins scientists to discharge their duties to it and not capitulate to the powerbrokers of the global political economy, does it not? According to the best available scientific evidence, whatsoever is is, is it not? If people everywhere are to see and hear what God's gift of science provides us about how the world we inhabit works as well as about a more adequate placement of humankind within the natural order of living things, then I suppose scientists will have to speak out often and more clearly, so that the daunting global challenges potentially posed to humanity by the unbridled growth of the human species and human enterprise in Century XXI are acknowledged, addressed and overcome.
On the other hand, for scientists to remain silent and in denial, in response to the apparently unforeseen new science of human population dynamics and absolute global human population numbers, could soon result in humankind inadvertently laying waste to that which many too many leaders in my not-so-great generation of elders vociferously claim to be protecting, sustaining and preserving.
Sincerely,
Steve
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