I’ve been prevented from sharing on the blog recently because of my regimen of finals at University of British Columbia but I had to pass on this talk from Archeologist Sander van Leeuw.  Stewart Brand’s The Long Now Foundation is always posting great talks but this one was my favorite on the podcast feed thus far. (Michael Pollan’s Deep Agriculture was a close second though)

Sander’s talk started by covering the history of innovation. By adapting the environment and the brain to tackle new challenges, humans are one of the greatest success stories in nature’s history, all because we can adapt and innovate. Eventually, humans began focusing their innovation centers in cities. Cities are not more energy efficient but are better innovation engines.

This centralization comes with a requirement: as centralization increases, the rate of innovation that must occur to support the structure has to increase. Food and energy must be brought from further and futher away because the ecological footprint of the city grows. Once fossil resources became harnessed, innovation became fundamentally necessary to support the collapse of society. As more of our society depended on oil for growth, that growth continued because of innovation. Technology has allowed us to harvest more oil faster and from more remote places. This supported more population growth and further innovation. At this point in the talk Sander makes a shocking claim: perhaps innovation is the greatest ponzi scheme of all, the rate of innovation must increase at all times to prevent the collapse of civilization.

And the more I think about it, the more I think he is right. How could I prove him wrong? If we stopped innovating, would we destroy humanity with the state of our current technology? All signs point to yes, especially in the United States.

Sander continues by pointing out two views of humanity and its relation to nature.

1) In the cohesion of nature, strangeness and force are emphasized. That change is attributed to nature but people are passive and resistive to change. Nature and change are viewed as dangerous because they are outside the realm of human control.

The opposing view is that,

2) Humans are overly agressive, forcing change on our environment to support our war-like culture and nature is passive receiver of our exploitation.

These two views interplay to create a critical approach to human decision making: natural dangers are exaggerated, human dangers are underplayed.

This can be seen in the climate change debate. We fear the response of nature to our actions but ignore the many other problems humanity is creating through our technological program.

Sander continues by stating the inevitable result of technological innovation. We intervene more and more in our environment, thinking that we reducing our risks but all we do is change the spectrum of risks, not the overall quantity of risks. The end state is that we lose control because we lose the ability to understand the complex chain of events resulting from our interventions.

Human changes are rapid and shallow attempt to replace and begin to outweigh the natural changes which are slow yet all encompassing. Risk spectrums shift over time with respect to their environments. We tend to overemphasize the frequent risks, try to reduce them and substitue completely unknown risks at larger scale over a longer time period. This accumulation of long term, large scale risks build up and collapse the civilization.

At some point, Sander believes that every social system will go out of control. The system pushes itself into a trap, the cost of problem solving goes up, flexibility goes down, the outcome is included in the way it was started, our exploitation of our environment creates the weaknesses we must contend with at the end.

Oil has provided us a shockingly stable environment but this environment has reduced our ability to adapt. Now, we can only innovate within the structure we create for ourselves, aggravating the situation even further, reducing our ability to break with the overarching problems. Climate change isn’t bad for humanity, it is bad for the status quo, our social structure. The fall of the Roman Empire resulted primarily because they used up all their wood, their primary energy source, shipping it from further and further away. This collapse was not a “solution”, it was simply the inability to maintain innovation at the rate necessary to extract new energy sources. After the fall of Rome people migrated from urban areas to the rural environment. The city was the keeper of information, the archivist was the maintainer of civilization. Perhaps we are in a slightly better position now because the internet helps us maintain our global knowledge, yet is even more dependent on energy than the city.

Sander stated that he thought the urban situation will explode, it is fragile and we invest more and more in our cities and less in a resilient rural environment.

He shared my sentiment: optimistic for humanity, pessimistic for society.

So what if we can accelerate our innovation to maintain the pace required to avoid collapse? Unfortunately that acceleration also rapidly adds up in unintended consequences. Technology must be implemented at faster and faster rates to avoid collapse but prevent the long term viewpoint. Many immediate problems add up and then you can’t focus on the long term problems.

Sander compared our situation to a tribe in the Southern hHghlands that saw deforestation and decided to counter with a ceremony of slaughtered pigs. The tribe raised continually more and pigs to slaughter, converting the entire valley to mud. Eventually the pigs piled up and died of disease. The land was ruined because of the mud and the tribe was left in the mess they’d created.

Hardly a mainstream view, it is much more attractive to spout the promises of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Assuming that rates of technological innovation will continue or exponentially increase as technological determinists like Ray Kurzweil do, is turning a blind eye to the role energy plays in civilization. By considering energy do we have to conclude our industrial civilization will unravel over the next few decades? Perhaps all our 20th century innovation is built on the high energy environment provided to us by cheap oil, if that’s the case it’s going to be an interesting ride down the back side of Hubbert’s peak.