8September2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback; Epistemology.
Excerpt from Chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 6-7
And, furthermore, should civilization begin to decline, wouldn’t the signs be obvious? Especially given the power of our science and the extent of our news media. Wouldn’t our television screens be projecting a steady stream of ghastly images—of famines, pestilence, pandemics and vicious wars over scarce resources? Haven’t scientists for quite some time been predicting the breakdown of the global ecosystem and “the end of civilization as we know it”? And hasn’t the predicted day passed with the earth as resilient as ever ? No, just as the economists and policy makers assure us, the calls of doom have surely been exaggerated. For example, the famous cornucopian economist Julian Simon in 1995 argued:
Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way… Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials - all of them - have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue .
.And Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician from the Netherlands who refers to himself as the skeptical environmentalist, says:
The main reason why the infamous “Limits to Growth” reports got their dire predictions of an imminent world collapse so wrong was because they overlooked the fundamental dynamics of technological progress. Modern societies create a great deal of value without much environmental degradation, as economic welfare has come to rely more on how a material is processed and utilized than on the material itself .
.And yet like a pesky pit bull, the scientists and environmentalists refuse to let up. They’re dogged, and their warnings are turning ever more strident. For example, the writers of the Limits to Growth (disparaged above) returned in 2004 with Limits to Growth: the 30-Year Update, and their predictions, using computer-driven scenarios, were indeed more dire:
Consequently, we are more pessimistic about the global future than we were in 1972. It is a sad fact that humanity has largely squandered the past 30 years in futile debates and well-intentioned, but half-hearted, responses to the global ecological challenge. We do not have another 30 years to dither. Much will have to change if the ongoing overshoot is not to be followed by a collapse during the twenty-first century ..
The 1993 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” by the Union of Concerned Scientists –signed by 1,680 world scientists including 104 Nobel prize laureates—reads in part:
Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage to the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about .
And then there is the Millennium Assessment, prepared in 2005 by 1360 scientists from 95 countries and reviewed by 850 experts and government officials in what has become the largest study on the state of the world’s ecosystems. Excerpted pieces include:
Over the past fifty years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth… Over the past few hundred years, humans have increased the species extinction rate by as much as 1,000 times the background rates typical over the planet’s history… The degradation of ecosystem services is harming many of the world’s poorest people and is sometimes the principal factor causing poverty .
22August2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback.
Excerpt from Chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 5
.Yes, this may all be true, the skeptics say. Societies have come and gone, populations in specific places have boomed and busted. But, curiously, despite this, the number of people who call this planet home has actually increased. Steadily, inexorably. And Civilization (which excludes only those few people living as foragers at the margins of the earth) is arguably now global in extent, encompassing six-and-a-half billion people, and includes a complexity of niches and specializations second only to mother nature, herself. So, even if one were to accept as reality that all that lives must one day die and that even the United States and the European Union cannot escape that logic of mortality, aren’t we now so robust, so powerful, complex and successful, that we will surely be around for many centuries to come? After all, by the standards of civilizations, our modern society has been around only a very short time and has been the most successful society by near every measurement imaginable. Carroll Quigley, a big-picture historian, suggested that, like all our predecessors, our civilization too will “surely pass out of existence” by 2500, but that’s not for another four hundred years yet.
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We’re growing more food than ever before; wars and genocides are generally smaller in scale than in the previous century; there are no barbarians at the gates because there are no gates—we’re global now . Worldwide, people are living longer, making more money, consuming more products . Poverty rates are going down; the very rate of population growth is decreasing for the first time in millennia . There’s more education, less slavery, more democracy . Even the warnings of global warming predict a rise of only a few degrees Fahrenheit by this century’s end . Hardly the stuff of collapses.
7August2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback.
Excerpt from Chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 4
First, let us be clear about the two principal theses of this book: (1) Within the lifetimes of most of us alive today, there will likely be a drastic dieback of the human population. Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people will die through starvation, lack of water and related diseases. (2) Much of the world’s civilization will collapse.
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Although the scope of the collapse and the numbers of people affected will be unprecedented, collapse, itself, is not new to the human experience. History is littered with the collapses of societies, simple and complex . From a cosmic perspective, history can be read as the book of stories chronicling the birth, life and death of humanity’s many societies, states and civilizations. One account after the next in which a group of people became more populous, more diverse and more prosperous. Initially, greater complexity tended to be adaptive, and the societies became stronger. They grew more food, bred effective leaders, built powerful armies. And then eventually, whether it took decades or millennia, the society disintegrated. The people became too many or the soil too exhausted. The neighbors grew too powerful or suffered their own calamities which ended the trade of crucial goods. Or the climate changed. Or the society became too complicated and inflexible to negotiate a world that is always changing .
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The list of those now in the dustbin of history reads like a who’s who of the great civilizations, empires, dynasties and of the small societies, as well: the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Mayan, Hindu, Chou, Han, Minoan, Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Hittite, Harrapan, Khmer, Anasazi, Honakum, Easter Island . These are but some of the most well-known civilizations and societies that have emerged from the background of humanity, flourished and then faded away. Once filled with the lives of people who felt the same mix of emotions, expectations and hopes as you and I do today, they are now but the eroded remains of stone and rubble, inscribed with epic tales in languages long forgotten. They are food for vine and tree or tiny rubble islands drowning in seas of desert sands. And surely the peoples of these now extinct societies expected their lives to continue on much as it had before and for their cities and cultures to live beyond them.
31July2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback.
Excerpt from Chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 3-4.
And on and on we could describe the suffering of our kith and kin and the destruction of our lovely, nurturing, and simultaneously hostile planetary home. Later in this book I will draw a picture of an ideal that we now have the resources, technology, and know-how to create, but probably neither the will nor the wisdom to realize. Instead, the likely outcome of humanity’s experiment with civilization will be some approximation of the above. It may not happen in 2030—that date was picked was for dramatic effect, of course—or by 2050 or 2075, even. However, the younger your age, the more assured you are of witnessing these horrors. I have a daughter, and the long-term prospects of the world our generation will bequeath to her bring me great sorrow. The dieback of human population and the collapse of societies may well be precipitated by a decade of unusually severe weather, or, perhaps less likely, it may involve a global crop failure following the super explosion of a massive volcano that kills a billion people and darkens our summer skies . And, yet, as much as there is evidence in the geological and archeological record for these sorts of devastating phenomena, they will not be required for our demise. We have assured it ourselves. Like a pestilence, we have multiplied and fed upon all the earth until it can no longer sustain us, and ironically, we have done so in a time when it has been most hospitable to our kind.
If this comes off full of “sound and fury” and reminiscent of the dark minds of science fiction and horror writers or of the biblical doomsday prophets, not the stuff of reasonable and modern minds, then you are likely a reasonable, modern person. You are not easily swayed by provocative, stirring prognostications. You are circumspect. You want to see the evidence, and even when presented with persuasive data you’re skeptical, because you know numbers and logical argument can be twisted for one’s ends and, indeed, you know this is done daily.
This introduction was written for you. It describes the methodology of our undertaking and it acknowledges the problems of epistemology (which just means how we come to know what we know) and it suggests how—in the maze of competing ideas and information—we can yet come to an agreement about many of the issues most important to us. You will find criticism of the dominant ideologies of our times—free market economics, Marxism, environmentalism, Christianity, science, materialism, “Spiritualism,” and the New Age. No ideology comes out unscathed, and, at the same time, in the way of our Postmodern times, we will borrow from them all.
29July2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback; Future.
Excerpt from Chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 2-3.
Refugees by the millions stream across borders like the Ganges flooding its banks, for what is a border and the name of a nation when there is no grain for one’s children and no water to slake their thirsts? No one can count the wars there started and the nuclear warheads tossed in the fray. And now there is talk and fear by all those with enough food in their bellies to worry of such things about all the nuclear weapons known and unknown, secured and loose, hydrogen, atomic, suitcase and dirty, and about those who might be desperate and full of hate enough to use them. That most explosive chemical, testosterone—Civilization’s bargain with the devil—now fuels the passion of many young men filled with resentment, greed, fear, rage. For but a few dollars they will hungrily trade a pound of plutonium. And young boys banded in their newly formed clans skitter about the earth with bullets singing from their gun belts. Led by ruthless, psychotic men with guns, jeeps and tanks, or even on horseback and camels, they run across the barren and scorched earth like plagues of ants, eating, plundering, raping and shitting upon all that is true and profane, equally.
But the skies are yet blue and the oceans wide and deep: so how can there be limits to what our species may do? Let us look deeper, then. Let us peer underground where is revealed salt waters where once there was oil and where once there was fresh water to drink. Let us wonder at the great aquifers of the earth, under the American Midwest, under China, India and the Middle East, all these once flush with ancient waters now emptied of their liquids, having been spilled for decades as irrigation onto foods fed on steroids, on oil, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, hormones, antibiotics, their very genes modified in ways nature has never before known. The great rivers—once gods to this race—are now but open sewers. Some never reach the ocean, so drained are they by the billions of thirsty mouths they must pass on their ancient journeys to the coast. And the oceans themselves have become deserts, where no fishing boat will waste its time hunting. The glaciers upon the mountains have all melted to the seas, and there is great fear as to the future of the polar ice sheets.
Although who really has time for such worries? Who but the wealthiest few do not spend their days foraging for their sustenance? A father’s eyes downcast as daughter goes out to give herself, to feed him. The lands of our forbearer’s daily bread, for eons lush and fertile, have become suddenly barren. Or it seemed sudden. Three years ago, in 2027, when the droughts, floods and plagues came upon us—just a natural coincidence of variables, really, any archeologist will tell you this, these things happen and have happened and will happen many times more—the lands cropped for centuries finally died and the forests all about the tropical earth were razed for farmland. From the fires that consumed all this life, smoke roiled up black and thick, as if from a ceremony of massive sacrifices. And still the famines mounted. And the economies came to a screaming halt. There was no wage for a day’s work, and the amnesiac Americans remembered the dust bowl and the depression, and there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. The churches and temples and synagogues were filled with the uplifted cries of, “O God, what have we done?”
23July2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback; Future.
Excerpt from chapter 1, Dieback: The Science and Soul of the Coming Collapse, p. 1-2
Imagine watching the collapse of 2030 unfolding from a cosmic perspective, from God’s omniscient eye. The skeletal figures of women and children mostly, yet many men too, with bellies swollen and eyes empty, languish in the heat and among the flies and in landscapes bleak without end; they drink from streams fetid, viscous and black, from which gases bubble up with a sulfuric stench. Linger upon the mother curled about her lifeless daughter. Gaunt fingers stroke soft cheeks, and memories blur into madness. Hundreds of millions, billions maybe, dying in a swath of land that stretches from the eastern coast of China through Southeast Asia and into Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and from there through the Middle East and yes, of course, into the entire continent of Africa. A global famine from which there is neither respite nor hope—no monsoons that will save them or food aid rock concerts. For Civilization has no food surpluses and nations have emptied their storage granaries.
Three bad years, that’s all it’s been… a drop in any bucket of time’s reckoning. But there are so many of us, and there has always been so little room for error. Even in America, legendary for its vast supermarkets—those enclosed air-conditioned acres with shelves to the ceilings, brimming with cans and boxes and bags of foods processed, sugared, fattened, salted, preserved and dyed—even there in that paradise, the shelves are now empty, and a fear of death hangs about the people where only yesterday, it seems, the brand of toothpaste was the day’s great debate.
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We pause over Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran as immense fires rage over oil fields abandoned by American soldiers, fatigued from decades of fighting, retreating with stoic bewilderment. In the eastern distance, a dust cloudy biblical in proportion billows to the heavens as three million Chinese soldiers march forward to secure the last of the remaining oil. And in terror, the Europeans watch on helplessly, as they remain the only territory left on that miserable Eurasian land mass with fields of grain and mills still grinding the flour for their bread. They are fixed to their televisions, waiting to see if the Mongol hordes of yore will this time not halt at Vienna’s gates.
The Americans, barely holding on to some semblance of a nation, are in an inchoate process of directing the full force of their military onto their own people, for even in this country of the constitution the looting and violence cannot be contained and the rule of law sustained by mere policemen. Isolationism is no longer a luxury, but rather an ominous imperative, for the global economy imploded within weeks of the Refugee Wars. And as in any Ponzi game, everyone who was caught holding the bag has gone under. Hundreds of vast container ships stuffed with the usual bounty of the Third World countries—all the toys and electronics and clothes and every other imaginable thing the indigents made in their factories for pennies—now sit in the harbors of Hamburg and Los Angeles and Newark and hundreds of other cities, with nowhere to go. The stores are still filled with these very things. Objects without value. As if gold, itself, had suddenly mysteriously moldered. No one is buying them and no one will. The whole human economic machine—with the deafening roar of all its valves, pistons and gears—was abruptly switched to OFF, leaving us in an eerie silence. Eerie, because of how fragile the whole thing really was. And the men in the ships wait in the ports, smoking cigarettes, not knowing what to do with themselves, worrying about their loved ones at home, thinking that surely the system will pick up again from where it left off and empty their vessels of these worthless goods onto the dockside platforms, and all will be as it was before. And with this same faith in Civilization, the marines safeguard these ships and the stores and the power stations and everything else that a rich man may yet own.
21June2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Economy; Energy; Global Food; Rich and Poor; Wisdom.
Corn-derived ethanol isn’t dead yet, but it sure smells funny. After decades of intensive scientific research, public financing and commercial promotion, corn as a fuel source has become the most tested of the potential energy alternatives, and it has failed by every measure—economic, environmental, social and moral. Yet, through presidential mandates, billion-dollar subsidies, tax breaks, tariffs, and Department of Energy funding, the United States government has committed itself to greatly expanding its production in the coming years. That is, during this most crucial time—when we’ve finally comprehended the finitude of oil, the absorption capacities of our atmosphere and the demands of an ever growing population, when wisdom is called for in exploring energy alternatives—our tax dollars are enriching the usual big business suspects, not ensuring the security of our nation’s future.
Ethanol cannot even address the two problems it was allegedly intended to alleviate: oil dependency and carbon dioxide emissions. To produce energy requires investment—into research, exploration, exploitation, development, refinement and transportation. At the end of this process, energy output needs to significantly exceed energy input. Today, for example, even as oil becomes more difficult and costly to produce, it still fetches a ten-fold return on energy investment. With corn-derived ethanol, the number is a paltry 1.3—at best. That is, for every calorie of energy invested into it, ethanol yields, at most, 1.3 useable calories. Some analysts, such as David Pimentel at Cornell University, argue that when all the factors are considered, corn-derived ethanol actually comes out in the red. All the tractors and combines, distilleries, pesticides, fertilizers, and transport may actually consume more energy than ethanol returns. Similarly, when all the factors are accounted for in the Green House Gas equation, ethanol production and distribution releases as much or more carbon dioxide than does oil, especially as forests—which are big absorbers of carbon dioxide—are razed for the expanding crops.
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This year, American farmers will plant some nine million of our most fertile acres with corn, not for food, but for fuel. This will produce about six billion gallons of ethanol, which will replace about four billion gallons of gasoline—since, gallon for gallon, ethanol delivers only 67% of oil’s power. At first blush, that seems significant—even more so if we visualize the requisite 1,500,000 fuel tank trucks queued up head to tail, three abreast, stretching from New York City to Los Angeles. Yet this colossal fleet would slake only slightly more than 1% of America’s annual 317 billion gallon thirst. Even were we to attempt the preposterous and devote the country’s entire corn crop (forty percent of all American farmland harvested this year), it would offset but a measly 10% of the country’s annual oil consumption.
Already, we’ve witnessed the social and environmental repercussions of subsidizing just the 1% offset: Corn prices rose 70% last year, sparking protests among the Mexican poor who could not afford the most basic staple of their meager diets—the corn tortilla. Indeed, at least 40 countries experienced riots and demonstrations protesting high fuel and food costs in 2007 and 2008. Fueling our trips to the mall now competes directly with feeding people. For perspective: carpooling, eliminating one car trip a week, or maintaining proper tire pressure would each save more fuel than all nine million of our precious arable acres can provide.
The ripple effect continues. To cash in on the subsidized corn, many American acres usually devoted to soybeans went to growing corn instead. Soy prices therefore shot up, as did beef prices (since soy is a common cattle feed). This, in turn, encouraged Brazilian farmers and ranchers to clear more Amazon rain forests to grow these foods.
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And, like all high-yield hybrids, corn requires enormous quantities of water, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides. Water scarcity and drawdown from the Ogallala aquifer in many of the corn-growing states is an accelerating problem, and oil and natural gas are crucial to the synthesis and application of fertilizers and various biocides, adding to green house gas emissions. Moreover, the nitrogen-based fertilizers are the principle culprits for the growing hypoxic Dead Zones menacing our nation’s coastal waters. Slightly more subtle, mono-cropping (growing one variety on vast tracts of land) is responsible for decreasing biodiversity, and increasing soil erosion and vulnerability to pest epidemics, such as the 1970 southern corn leaf blight and the black stem rust presently spreading across East Africa.
Of course, these ‘side effects” are not unique to ethanol production, but the realities of feeding a growing American and world population will by themselves strain our resources in the coming decades; clearing land for a dual role will only exacerbate all these already accelerating problems and threaten more natural ecosystems, as well.
For many of the same reasons, Brazilian sugar cane and Malaysian palm oil are proving, ultimately, to be highly questionable energy strategies. The jury is still out on numerous other biofuels, such as algae and several of the perennial rhizomatous grasses. As for hydrogen fusion, tar sands, shale oil and methane hydrates, all have their technological difficulties and environmental shortcomings. The various forms of geothermal and solar power (direct sun, wind and wave) will likely prove themselves as our long-term standards. Even so, across the political spectrum, (among those not directly receiving monies for corn production, that is) it has been unanimously agreed that devoting any more time, land and energy to this hopelessly inferior product is gravely unwise.
13May2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Overshoot; Sustainability.
“The growing awareness of the impending disaster cannot, in itself, halt the process.” A quote from E.J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth, p. 97. Even should a farmer who is barely scratching a living from the soil understand that overpopulation and poor farming practices are major contributing factors to our ecological suicide, it will likely not be in his best personal interest to have fewer children or stop tilling the soil. Even if he knows that he is one more drop in the bucket of our collective demise, even if he fully understands the global dimension, he cannot do anything different, except as a completely altruistic gesture. He may need children to insure his survival in later years. He may be too poor to afford fuel to cook his food or heat his home, and therefore he must burn the stubble from the fields and the dung from his animals, the very matter that should feed his soil.
According to a number of analysts, including Dr. Pimentel at Cornell University, humans are destroying farmland at the rate of 10,000,000 hectares a year. That’s 25,400,000 acres a year. That’s an area of fertile land the size of the whole of the United States before the end of the century.
Sir Albert Howard, called the founder of the organic farming movement, noted in his 1947 book, The Soil and Health, that what one takes out of the soil, one must make sure gets put back in. However, as Professor Rattan Lal, director at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center at Ohio State University, says, “Miserable, poor, hungry and desperate, they pass their misery to the land.” In these conditions, one does not have the energy or the means to take care of the land. The soils of Africa, particularly, are fast losing their life-sustaining nutrients. And then the land, in a “positive” feedback loop, passes on its impoverishment back to the farmer.
Some seventy percent of the Third World citizens are farmers. And some 850 million people, according to the U.N., go to bed hungry each day. Two to three billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. They are stunted physically and mentally. They suffer from eye diseases, blindness, and die early from a host of diseases—cancer, malaria, measles, etc. 85 million people suffer acute hunger, and 9 million of these die each year of starvation or disease that their malnourished bodies cannot fight.
Still, even as we degrade the Earth’s soil, there is still plenty of food grown on the planet to feed everyone well. Frances Lappe and several co-authors showed convincingly in World Hunger: Twelve Myths that hunger is greatly a political and economic issue. Europe, the United States and Japan import foods from impoverished nations, food that arguably should stay home and feed the malnourished people there. This has been the story during the abundant decades, the last half of the 20th century when oil, water, grains, fertilizers, pesticides were all relatively cheap. Now, as we reach “peak” in all these, when everything is going to become more expensive, can we expect the First World to become suddenly altruistic by abandoning biofuels, abandoning fishing off the coasts of the Third World countries, forgiving national debts, foregoing subsidizing their farmers in the global market, foregoing the eating of meat grown on tropical lands cleared from forests and the transporting of exotic foods, and blithely paying—that is, without military interventions—top dollar for oil. Can we expect the world’s wealthiest billion people to cut back on consumption, to eat less meat, to eat locally grown foods. Probably not, even though these wealthiest are also the best educated, the most informed about our ecological suicide.
31March2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback; Economy; Sustainability; Uncategorized; Wisdom.
Natural Capitalism, written in 1999 by Paul Hawken and Amory and L. Hunter Lovins, stands as one of the great contributions to the ecological discussion, a masterful synthesis of the specific global problems and of their solutions. With invariable optimism they present economic solutions to ecologic problems, showing us through anecdote that it is being applied somewhere on the Earth and through statistic that we can all benefit. And the answers lie not only in their book, of course. Our minds have become inundated with answers as thoroughly as are bodies are bathed in electromagnetic waves. An impressive, seemingly infinite, array of ecological solutions are scattered throughout our information media, from the great academic journals to the magazines, newspapers, books, radio, television and internet. And what they repeatedly demonstrate is that we already possess the required technology and understand the necessary governmental policies that can provide a sustainable and comfortable existence for all humanity. We may already know all that we need to halt the further degradation of our oceans, forests, atmosphere, land and wildlife. Yet, because of the complex of socioeconomics, politics and biology, we will likely not implement any solution in time to avert our Ecological Suicide. Intelligent as we are, we will allow our animalian instincts to commit mass suicide as surely as any organism with plenty of food and few predators.
In Natural Capitalism, the authors suggest one powerful way government can force business into sustainable behavior: tax behaviors deemed unsustainable and subsidize those considered sustainable. In The Costs of Economic Growth the English economist E.J. Mishan independently agrees that should government undertake such action it could theoretically eliminate all environmental problems. But he finds that the social and cultural complexities are beyond the abilities of our institutions to implement such wise tax laws. Keeping in mind that within our so-called democratic countries, officials must face election every few years, (in Chapter 14: Self-Sustaining Economic Predicaments) Mishan lays out four powerful obstacles to government intervention:
1. The costs of correcting our behaviors are usually perceived as being greater than the benefits.
2. The environmental consequences of our behaviors are imperfectly known and understood. Much is still hidden and the therefore the range of destruction will surely be greater than we now project. So, whatever we do enact will be the very minimum necessary and likely not be enough.
3. That it takes many years (usually decades) for the cumulative effects on the biosphere to be realized, discourages governments from imposing immediate restrictions, taxes, etc.
4. That costs are immediate, but benefits are years (decades) later further discourages government action.
5. As ecological consequences are increasingly global in scale, any one government acting alone will not only have diminished to negligible effect, but it will put them at an economic disadvantage within the sphere of international competition. This leads to the ever more complicated necessity of bringing all the major nations, each with their own needs, problems and social neuroses to work together, but now without the coercive power that each sovereignty, by definition, commands. Whereas the United States can force state compliance, the United Nations enjoys no such power.
The last point (the issue of unfair disadvantage), by the way, is the same argument made by Robert Reich in Supercapitalism with respect not to countries but to companies and the obstacles to corporate responsibility. One cannot expect Walmart, for instance, to provide health care and other labor benefits for its workers unless all businesses do the same. Otherwise, it puts Walmart at a competitive disadvantage, and so will likely lead to its demise (and so the demise of its workers).
Even these objections to an optimistic appraisal of humanity’s fortunes are timid, for they assume an ideal sense of laissez faire economics and our democratic institutions working side-by-side, free of influence. However, even the most idealistic American citizen over the age of ten now accepts certain inadequacies of government, namely, that business has obtained undue power in influencing “democratic” government through the power of lobbyist and campaign finance, to mention the two most obvious. That leaders tend to be drawn from a rather small group of elite goes into a whole other level of debate. Other complications to the ideal include the fact that (1) Not everyone agrees that the environment is in enough peril to sanction sacrifice of economic performance. (2) There is great effort at the ground level among political functionaries and business managers to subvert the imposed laws. Particularly notorious are China and India. However, American and European businesses traffic in illegal fish, arms and shipping on a truly colossal scale. (3) The difficulties in many countries are so extreme as to make environmental concerns existentially meaningless. If you’re being bombed right now, of what consequence are the incremental effects of global warming?
Maintaining agreement on action and individual compliance on tribal scales was difficult enough. Now, with six-and-half billion people covering the earth we are finding the collective action necessary to avert our demise nearly impossible. We have been imminently successful at the animalian—eliminating competition, procuring food, reproducing. Indeed, Adam Smith’s capitalism was a catalyst to our success. With its prescription of individual selfish interest creating a web of collective good, it gelled perfectly well with our reading of the rules of the jungle. But we are finding that the universe is far more nuanced than the lessons we have taken from Adam Smith and Charles Darwin (although they themselves would have been surprised at how we interpreted their ideas). We have found that to live harmoniously (sustainably, if you prefer) with the Earth requires higher order behavior—selflessness, honesty, compassion, humility, and these, we are discovering, are far more difficult to execute than childishly selfish ones. It is these more mature behaviors that will be necessary to hold back our selfish, childish, animal instincts. On a large scale, humanity will have to mature beyond our childish, or perhaps adolescent, level. So far there is little room for optimism.
20March2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Economy; Overshoot; Wisdom.
The March 2, 2008 New York Times Op-Ed page was devoted to eight former presidential candidates from the two principle American parties, allowing each of them highly valued media space to describe an issue important to them that was not receiving its fair attention in the American dialogue. From left-leaning Kucinich, through the Democratic party spokespeople — Richardson, Biden, Dodd – to the representatives of the right – Thompson, Tancredo, Hunter and Brownback, all men, by the way, they thoughtfully wrote on any number of important issues that plague the American landscape—war in Afghanistan, the mortgage crisis and foreclosures, immigration policies, the crumbling infrastructure, the hallowing out of the country’s industrial base, and the rising divorce rate. Not one peep about the global environment, however. Not one word about global warming, extinction rates, water scarcity in America’s Southeast and Southwest, dead zones, three billion malnourished humans, the ethanol hoax…
And The Economist (March 15-21, 2008) notes in “The revolution that wasn’t” that despite European environmental taxes and discussions in England of raising carbon cuts from 60% to 80% by 2050, the actual benefits are nebulous and the governmental efforts likely to decline in the face of economic realities. Rising oil prices and inflation in England are having a chilling effect on environmental consciousness, at least at the level of power.
We cannot expect much more from our political leaders. They are in the awkward position of weighing the public good and the long-term interests of society with their own short-term interests. To keep their jobs, they face re-election every few years before a fickle electorate, and, if they didn’t know it before, all certainly understand now that of all the thousands of issues which any complex society must address, the most important is the economy. “It’s the Economy Stupid” still reverberates through the cultural mindspace. And a thriving economy of three hundred million within a larger global economy of billions, juiced up on fossil fuels and fed through the machinery of industrial agriculture is completely anathema to environmental sustainability.
Technological optimists and “can do” spirit aside, all environmental indicators have increasingly worsened when measured against time. There is little to yet suggest that we as a global community are prepared to scale down our lifestyles to the degree sufficient to even slow down the environmental degradation. Perhaps we are constitutionally incapable of transcending our animalian short-sightedness, or at least quickly enough to prevent our Ecological suicide. Since obviously we cannot voluntarily stop our destructive behaviors, the questions then become how long can life, the soil, water, oil, forests, oceans and air hold out, and with what forces will they compel our compliance?