In a previous diary, I sketched a quick outline of how humans have only extremely recently come to dominate the evolutionary landscape so completely, and questioned our ability to deal with our domination of the planet. That is here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
In this diary, I’d like to discuss some further related reasons why human societal collapse is a non-trivial probability requiring urgent attention, and a complete transformation of our political inertia.
First let me offer some well-accepted principles driving human evolution. Darwin appreciated that variation existed in populations and that specific variations were heritable. However, his theory of evolution would languish in the absence of a force that actually actively drove differential reproductive success of particular features until he read Malthus’s essay on population growth.
The cause to which I allude, is the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it. . .upon the whole, that the population is in general so nearly on a level with the average supply of food, that every little deficiency from unfavourable weather or other causes, occasions distress. . .
Robert Malthus, (Of the Checks to Population; An Essay on
the Principle of Population: A View of its Past and Present
Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into Our
Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the
Evils which It Occasions Published: London: John Murray,
- Sixth edition. First published: 1798.)
To summarize Malthus’s views, which have since been observed in all populations from cell cultures to flowering plants to humans, populations first grow exponentially, until they are restrained by limited resources and toxication of the environment, which finally crushes growth up against the limits of carrying capacity, resulting in stress, misery, and even causing the collapse of the population. These principles of population growth are not just well-known; they are, in fact, the defining themes of population growth.
I was just thumbing through Jared Diamond’s latest book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, where he enumerates the causes of previous collapses of human societies that predictably included over-population, resource shortages, and environmental toxication. After presenting his analyses of the societal collapses, such as the collapse of the Easter Island society, to his classes, the same question always came up:
How on earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision to cut down all the trees on which it depended? One of the students asked what I thought the islander who cut down the last palm tree said as he was doing it. For every other society that I treated in subsequent lectures, my students raised essentially the same question.
I’ll save his answers for a later date, and just point out that what seems obvious, you don’t kill your life support system, apparently seems so obvious that no one can believe that it has happened time and again:
This question of why societies end up destroying themselves through disastrous decisions astonishes not only my UCLA undergraduates but also professional historians and archaeologists. For example, perhaps the most cited book on societal collapse is The Collapse of Complex Societies, by the archeologist Joseph Tainter. In assessing explanations for ancient collapses, Tainter remained skeptical of even the possibility that they might have been due to depletion of environmental resources, because that outcome seemed a priori so unlikely to him. Here is his reasoning:
One supposition of this view must be that these societies sit by and watch the encroaching weakness without taking corrective actions. Here is a major difficulty. Complex societies are characterized by centralized decision-making, high information flow, great coordination of parts, formal channels of command, and pooling of resources. Much of this structure seems to have the capability, if not the designed purpose, of countering fluctuations and deficiencies in productivity. With their administrative structure, and capacity to allocate both labor and resources, dealing with adverse environmental conditions may be one of the things that complex societies do best...It is curious that they would collapse when faced with precisely those conditions they are equipped to circumvent...As it becomes apparent to the members or administrators that a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some rational steps are taken toward a resolution. The alternative assumption—of idleness in the face of disaster—requires a leap of faith at which we may rightly hesitate.
Our Current Issues with Carrying Capacity
Here’s approximately where we are at in terms of carrying capacity, from Diamond's list of our worst problems of carrying capacity:
Destruction and Losses of Natural Resources
- At an accelerating rate, we are destroying natural habitats or else converting them to human-made habitats, such as cities and villages, farmlands and pastures, roads, and golf courses...Deforestation was a of the major factor in all the collapses of past societies described in this book.
More than half of the world’s original forests are gone. In addition, an even larger proportion of original wetlands have been converted. About one third of the coral reefs are toast. The ocean bottom, too, is being savaged by fishing methods.
- Wilds foods, especially fish and to a lesser extent shellfish, contribute a huge fraction of the protein consumed by human. In effect, this is protein that we obrain for free (other than the cost of catching and transporting the fish), and that reduces our needs for animal protein that we have to grow ourselves in the form of domestic livestock. About two billion people, most of them poor, depend on the oceans for protein...the great majority of valuable fisheries already either collapsed or are in steep decline.
Aquaculture is a worse alternative to the sustainable fishing of natural populations, for many reasons.
- A significant fraction of wild species, populations, and genetic diversity has already bee lost, and at present rates a large fraction of what remains will be lost within the next half-century..
Some species have obvious immediate value to humans. The other lousy species of unknown value? Diamond suggests randomly knocking the little lousy rivets out of the airplane you’re flying to find the answer. The value is inconceivably immense.
- Soils of farmlands used for growing crops are being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 and 40 times the rates of soil formation, and between 500 and 10,000 times soil erosion rats on forested land. Because those soil erosion rats are so much higher than soil formation rates, that means a net loss of soil.
Half the top-soil in Iowa disappeared in the past 150 years. Some local farmers showed Diamond a old church sitting on a plot of land that was 10 feet higher than the surround farm land. There are many other types of soil damage, as well.
Ceilings on Energy, Freshwater, and Photosynthetic Capacity.
- The world’s major energy sources, especially for industrial societies, are fossil fuels: oil, natural gas, and coal.
I think we are reasonably well aware of the problems associated with these fuels.
- Most of the world’s freshwater in rivers and lakes is already being utilized for irrigation, domestic and industrial water, and in situ uses such as boat transportation corridors, fisheries, and recreation...Throughout the world, freshwater underground aquifers are being depleted at rates faster than they are are being naturally replenished, so that they will eventually dwindle.
Already more than a billion people cannot access safe, reliable drinking.
- It might at first seem that the supply of sunlight is infinite, so one might reason that the Earth’s capacity to grow crops and wild plants is also infinite. Within the last twenty years, it has been appreciated that that is not the case...the first calculation of this photosynthetic ceiling, carried out in 1986, estimated that humans then already used (e.g., for crops, tree plantations, and golf courses) or diverted or wasted (e.g., light falling concrete roads and buildings) about half of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity.
By mid-century, we’ll be using most of sunlight possible to use. The natural aspects of the plant kingdom will suffer.
Harmful Things We Introduce to Nature: Toxic Chemicals, Alien Species, and Atmospheric Gases.
- The chemical industry and many other industries manufactures or release into the air, soil, oceans, lakes, and rivers many toxic chemicals, some of the "unnatural" and synthesized only by humans, others present naturally in tiny concentrations (e.g., mercury) or else synthesized and released by humans inn quantities much larger than natural ones (e.g., hormones).
Insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, arsenic, mercury, growth hormones, fire retardants, coolants, detergents, plastics, PCBs. Birth defects happen and sperm counts are down for a reason. 130,000 U.S. citizens die each year from air pollution alone. That’s more American deaths than 9/11 & IraqNam put together. Air pollution deaths = 22 * (9/11 + IraqNam). Just saying.
- The term "alien species" refers to species that we transfer, intentionally or inadvertently, from a place where they are native to another place where they are not native. [Some are valuable] but others devastate populations of native species with which they come in contact, either by preying on, parasitizing, infecting, or outcompeting them. The aliens cause these big effects because the native species have no previous evolutionary experience of them and are unable to resist them....there are now literally hundreads of cases in which alien species have caused one-time or annually recurring damages of hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars.
Think kudzu, water hyacinth, blighted chestnut and elm trees, rabbits and foxes in Australia, lampreys destroying Great Lakes fish species, small pox, and AIDS.
- Human activities produce gases that excape into the atmosphere, where they either damage the protective ozone layer (as do formerly wide-spread refrigerator coolants) or else act as greenhouse gases that absorb sunlight and thereby lead to global warming. The gases contributing to the global warming include carbon dioxide from combustion and respiration, and methane from fermentation in the intestines of ruminant animals.
If you haven’t seen Gore’s movie, what on God’s Green Earth are you waiting for?
Increases in Human Population Growth
- The world’s human population is growing. More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources...Everybody agrees that the world population is increasing, but that its annual percentage rate of increase is not as high as it was a decade or two ago. However, there is still disagreement about whether the world’s population will stabilize at some value above its present level (double the present population?)...
Part of this slowing may be random, but it may be directly related to issues of asymptotic growth near carrying capacity.
- What really counts is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment...That per-capita impact—the resources consumed, and the wastes put out, by each person—varies greatly around the world, being highest in First World countries and lowest in the Third World countries. On average, each citizen in the U.S., western Europe, and Japan consumes 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and puts out 32 times more wastes than do inhabitants of the Third World.
Globalization, will of course gradually raise the living standards in the Third World countries, such that their impact will also increase.
Paralysis Seizes US
Now, thinking back to the obvious question, How on earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision to cut down all the trees on which it depended?, and the obvious answer to that question, As it becomes apparent to the members or administrators that a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some rational steps are taken toward a resolution. The alternative assumption—of idleness in the face of disaster—requires a leap of faith at which we may rightly hesitate. , let us examine the likelihood of that obvious outcome.
The Executive has abused power to an extent that has rendered him powerless, broken down in a jeep in Iraq without armor, retreating from the Taliban in Afghanistan. He lost two wars and the mid-term elections, including his rubberstamp congress. He has lost all credibility as a world leader, while grossly endangering national and economic security. Though we won the mid-terms, the Legislature still appears frozen in fear, fear of chaos in the Middle East, fear of its own citizenry, and probably continual fear of losing ill-gotten corporate and foreign monies to finance their hold on power. The Supreme Court has been stacked into a position of "defensive fear," such that it refuses to take cases, with both sides fearing that decisions may not "go their way." The Fourth Estate, ranking at about 53rd in the world, babbles incoherently, having given so many previous false narratives that they have now completely lost the true narrative thread. They are in fear of losing readership and advertisers. The truest statement coming out of the press was a statement by Dana Milbank, who wrote: "Political Washington is in a state of suspended animation." For the most part, I’d include the political press in that statement. As for the citizenry, we are either locked in polarized partisan struggles, or sleep-walking unconsciously, completely indifferent to various real impending dooms, with credit cards maxed out, home equity falling, and possibly being out of work. What were once many degrees of freedom to play with have been engineered into very few degrees of freedom remaining, and many sense it. Paralysis has seized us.
Realists versus Transformationalists
Now, there has been ongoing discussion on this site about whether we need to be "realists" who expect to enact change inch-by-inch, vote-by-vote, candidate-by-candidate, or "fantasists" who believe that the game of inches won’t get us where we need to go, but rather that only profound transformation can get the job done.
I’ll let DhinMI, whom I consider an extremely well-informed political realist, provide the metric by which our actions should be judged:
[actions] are ethically responsible only as long as--and this is crucial--other people do not have to bear the risks and potential costs of their actions.
In my view, those favoring gradual transformation of politics over a period of decades are very possibly ignoring threats that we need to act upon now to avoid societal collapse. I would like for them to consider DHinMI’s metric for ethical behavior and their timeline to enact political change in the context of looming causes for collapse. Remember, Iraq is nothing compared to air pollution in terms of sheer (American) deaths, and should matter to political realists.
The entire policy debate is way off kilter. In my view, it’s time to start stiff-arming the ignorant loud-mouths that by virtue of their particular conflicts of interest, are having or encouraging extreme destructive and detrimental effects on the environment and human population at large, those legions of idiots, politicians, pundits, Chief Justices, media owners, and corporate shills who fail to understand the risks and potential costs of their actions. As for our political realists in Washington, (our evolutionary "hopeful monsters"), we read daily of Democratic capitulation, the new "centrist politics," or the Hillary/Lieberman bipartisan agenda to wrassle the video-game menace into submission. Frankly, that is outrageous bullshit for which we don't have time.
Gore/Clark
I think we need a radical, transformational attitude about political change, and have little choice given the fact that we are at or have exceed carrying capacity on this planet, which is obvious from a variety of perspectives, including the collapse of many species, global warming, peak oil, and perhaps most of all, resource wars. The NeoCons did everything exactly wrong. Centrists Democrats simply won’t do anything but try to achieve change, if at all, except inch-by-inch. Military problems will not go away in the future, and could get worse. We need to rebuild our military, which is why I want Clark as Veep, where he can learn the ropes of Washington a bit better, before getting the nod for POTUS. Al Gore is our obvious man for transformational thinking about carrying capacity. There is simply no one else out there who has his credentials and passion. Plus, he is a seasoned politician. That, to me, suggests political realism of a transformational nature.