John Michael Greer's The Ecotechnic Future (New Society, 2009)

If industrial society turns out to have been little more than finding the fastest way possible to turn raw materials into pollution, the status quo won’t be maintained for much longer. We’re running out of those raw materials at a rapid pace and the outputs threaten to bring everything down with just as much certainty. We see the possibility of business as usual slipping further and further away as the world falls deeper into a recession which shows no end in sight. In The Ecotechnic Future, John Michael Greer argues that the reason our globalized civilization faces this catastrophe is because our definition of technology is wholly misguided and counters with a realistic vision of the future.

Since the science fiction writers of the early 19th century, our dreams of advanced technology have been synonymous with “extravagant energy use”. It is this redefinition of what the future and what future technology will look like that is the scope of Greer’s most recent book. Our modern industrial society may be a primitive and vastly inefficient form of the coming ecotechnic society which maximizes the efficiency of its energy resources and obtains raw material inputs sustainably. Of course, at the cost of a more restricted access to goods and services when compared to the globalized supply chains of today.

It seems that Greer is the first to apply the ecological concept of succession to explain the rise and fall of societies. Perhaps our current civilization is just the fast-growing opportunist colonizers of the Earth which will then be replaced by a stable climax community. This is a powerful insight, one that views our many mistakes in the supply chain infrastructure not as immoral (as many environmental groups would have you think) but failed attempts at obtaining a future ecotechnic society. Greer’s analogy breaks down to an extent because modern ecology tends to think climax communities are unattainable because the low probability of obtaining an equilibrium community is hampered, ironically because of climate change. Our species was once a climax community but was driven out of the African canopies as the continent slowly dried.

Greer offers an alternative to the current technological program of modernity which reaches a possible end state in a technological singularity, the development of a true artificial intelligence which imprints our minds on immortal silicon and blasts into space to colonize the universe. The absurdity of this vision is quickly revealed by examining the logic of authors and visionaries pushing this ideal, they’ve completely failed to consider energy inputs and the failure of past civilizations. Once we understand the limits placed on us by our rapid consumption of the very resources driving our goals, we realize that industrial society has been largely a “crackpot realist’s” approach to the world, using rational means to reach irrational goals. Our view of nature is that of a helpless adorable bunny which we can easily transcend or a frontier for conquest on which to impose our will. Greer understands that nature is neither, he likens it to a bear which when roused can easily tear us to shreds. If technology saves us from this possibility, it will do so without historical precedence. Human innovation will clearly play a role, Greer quotes Koestler in that, “creativity arises from the collision of incommensurate realities” But to assume that human innovation will allow business as usual to continue is to cement the outcome of repeating the past all while thinking we’re original.

I didn’t expect Greer to provide the clearest description of science that I’ve yet to read, especially since he is a practicing druid. But it is hard to argue with the difference between Science as a product and science as a process. Everyone agrees on the power of the scientific method, unfortunately we’re too infatuated with the products of current Science which have developed over a limited period of history and are subject to the same problems of energy scarcity as our economics and psychology. Science as a profession is also at risk, with its trained personnel and infrastructure. The scientific method will hopefully always be with us, it just won’t be used in the ways of the present.

The Ecotechnic Future is refreshingly not a book which will neatly lay out the reasons for the possible demise of industrial civilization, this has been done many times before, and by Greer himself in The Long Descent. All that is dealt with in about 18 pages and covers everything from the likelihood of culture death (what we call the United States is disparate regions tied together by cheap fuel for travel and mass media) to the implications of the depopulation explosion (that the “world is round” and solutions to being human will take many different forms). Within this section is his most eloquent passage however, tying the faux culture designed by marketing experts and sold over mass media distribution in its supplanting of regional US cultures and its ability to demonstrate that that people can be bribed by propserity and convinced by advertising into doing the same thing.

While many seem to think that an end to the globalized economy will come in an Armaggedon-esque collapse scenario replete with hordes of the angry urban poor looting the countryside while heroic loners that foresaw the crash pump them full of ammo to defend their homestead, Greer is convincing that empires and societies do not collapse overnight, and in ways that aren’t likely to grace plot-lines of blockbuster films. Our pre-disposition to biblical scale catastrophe pushes us towards the extreme. That the French Revolution appeared to occur so rapidly is mainly because our study of history focuses on key moments. Greer mentions that a teenager on the day of the Etats-General in 1788 would have been a grandmother after Waterloo in 1815. Put simply, we’ll still have lives even if industrial society is unraveling, they’ll just be different lives than we’ve expected. The failure to obtain a 9 to 5 job and a suburban mansion is not necessarily such a bad thing. None of the possible futures are unknown in human history, it is only the current members of our species that have been protected due to the shelter provided by inexpensive oil extraction. Although, I do take some exception with Greer’s idea that were a sudden depopulation to occur, our skills and knowledge would be applicable to the future. Some of the training that prepares us for industrial jobs is completely useless in a post-carbon world. Although Greer must understand this, he just omits it from his illustration of what our transition will look like.

Greer provides the first coherent view I’ve read of a post-industrial future. Regardless of your thoughts on what the future may hold, John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future will challenge you. He steps on everyone’s toes eventually, and that’s what makes his writing so valuable, but far from comfortable. This is the first book written by a member of the peak oil community that I would recommend to someone unfamiliar with its concepts, mainly because Greer is so convincing and eloquent but also because his vision is so well reasoned. The Ecotechnic Future leaves me optimistic about our future as a species, even if it will be a vastly different future than we all thought it would be.

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Post tags: climate change, ecology, future, humanity, peak oil, post-industrial society, sustainability, sustainable development, transition

The Wayfinders by Wade Davis (House of Anansi, 2009)

With the converging crises of imminent energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion and economic insolvency, suddenly I’m recognizing the apogee of our modern civilization may have passed us by a few decades ago. Being on the slope of globalization’s decline as opposed to its ascent or plateau is a precarious position, mainly because the evidence increasingly indicates an ever more bleak definition of the future. But that’s precisely why I found Wade Davis’ 2009 CBC Massey Lectures collected in The Wayfinders so deeply inspiring. The way we define our lives and the meaning of being a human is far from an absolute and objective answer to reality, it has been the result of numerous decisions made in a compounding form over hundreds of years. Because humanity at large expresses itself in the form of modernity is largely a result of the ever growing demand our lifestyle has on ever more hard to reach raw material inputs. Although I listened to this entire series of lectures through the CBC Ideas Podcast, Davis’ presentation hit me with much more gravity the second time around.

The genius and intelligence recognized by modern humanity is only in that of highly advanced technology while the genius of the cultures detailed in The Wayfinders takes many different forms. Each culture is far from trivial but an answer to the questions that come with being human, all of these answers just as impressive as our own. Our tendency is for to look at the naked and painted body of the native as a failed attempt at modernity. A native to be saved by induction into our economic system with all the benefits of employment and monetary exchange. Even until the 1960′s some Australian textbooks included the Aboriginals among, “interesting animals of the country”. To this point Davis quotes from the testimony of a Penan nomad to the UN General Assembly in 1992, “The (Malaysian) government says that it is bringing us development. But the only development that we see is dusty logging roads and relocation camps. For us, their so-called progress means only starvation, dependence, helplessness, the destruction of our culture and the demoralization of our people. The government says it is creating jobs for our people. Why do we need jobs? My father and grandfather did not have t o ask the government for jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the forest. It was a good life. We were never hungry or in need… In ten years all the jobs will be gone and the forest that has sustained us for thousands of years will be gone with them.”

Davis is able to continue his discussion without resorting to the “noble savage” or the Hobbesian, “nasty, brutish and short” dichotomy. For the cultures he touches on from Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia it is clear that a genius is required to flourish in harsh environments, against any odds we would consider possible. And all of this despite harmful environmental degradation brought about by our lifestyle. Denial of climate change is a luxury provided by a temperate environment and disconnection from the natural world. For native peoples, when the glaciers their ancestors have worshiped for generations are disappearing and the Arctic lands they’ve hunted annually for all of history fail to freeze but for a few months there is no ideology, only survival.

I was nearly drawn to tears by the examples of rituals and lifestyles Davis uses to illustrate the depth of beauty of human experience. The Pacific islanders sailing thousands of kilometers between beautiful islands with wind blowing through their hair to complete the Kula gift sharing ring live the lives we can only experience through fictional characters projected onto glowing rectangles. The indigenous have no sense of paid employment, of work as burden as opposed to leisure as recreation. These cultures are the definition of the human experience that we have lost and try to replace through futile substitutes. These people experience pain and suffering along with glory and triumph, but through the full spectrum of being human, as opposed to our path which fails in its attempts to shield us from the realities of death and darkness.

These cultures have disappeared rapidly over the last hundred years, entire ways of life wiped out in less than a generation. Davis wonders why we have a universal rejection of genocide yet the ubiquitous practice of  ethnocide destroys more than individuals but whole solutions to the human experience. We may discredit an indigenous approach to life, but they disdain the fact that so many of our own suffer from abject poverty. A native tribesman from Malaysia when observing the homeless in Canada said, “How can homelessness exist, a poor man shames us all.”

The most important lecture included in this collection was the discussion of sacred geography, of the stewardship shown by indigenous to their land. When the Spanish tore down Incan churches and monuments, building Christian churches and monasteries in their place, the native villagers celebrated because this further confirmed the sacredness of those sites. Likely not the reaction the Spanish intended. If we are to look at cultures in terms of success and failure, wouldn’t the successful culture be the one that has survived for over 50,000 years in the harsh deserts of Australia as opposed to our modern world on the verge of extinction after only 300?  An idea of a sacred connection to land may be dismissed as meaningless superstition, but if it does not draw from an actual spirit world, perhaps it was the technological solution created long ago to ensure our species wouldn’t destroy the earth.

Davis has convinced me that when we talk about threats to our planet such as climate change or peak oil, we’re really talking about the end of our globalized civilization and not the extinction of humanity. Our species can exist in many other forms that live far more meaningful lives than the “modern man”. And for that reason, no matter how bleak the global situation may appear to be, the existence of the indigenous and their ability to maintain ancient wisdom despite all odds is a reason for hope.

Fortunately, to see these ideas and illustrations you don’t have to buy the book, you can listen to Wade Davis’ entire series of 2009 CBC Massey lectures online for free.

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Post tags: climate change, culture, human beings, humanity, indigenous

Peak oil and climate change have epic implications for continuity of the human species. If one of the two possibilities is in our future, as the leading Canadian scientists within Thomas Homer Dixon’s Carbon Shift argue, our lives will change forever. If they both occur (to varying degrees), Homo Sapien Sapien’s role on the Earth will change past the point of familiarity over the next decade.

Carbon Shift is a  must read for forward thinking people. One great example from the book demonstrates how economist Robert Solow tried to predict GDP growth in 1956. Solow argued that because 70% of costs were labor related and 30% of costs were capital related, GDP would grow .7% for every 1% in increased labor and .3% for every 1% increase in capital. But a study of growth shows that GDP has grown much faster. This is the Solow Residual that was later explained by Reiner Kummel. Demonstrated by Kummel, the discrepancy between predicted growth and actual growth was because Solow had left out energy. Kummel modeled energy inputs on a per joule basis and nearly perfectly reproduced the growth curve of the last few decades. A 1% rise in energy inputs led to .5% increases in GDP, but this revelation came with a damning realization. We are paying for energy about a tenth of what it is worth. Eventually the cost and the value will equalize. In Robert Ayers and Benjamin Warr’s recent paper, Economic Growth Models and the Role of Physical Resources, they take it a step farther with the following conclusions,

The first is that exergy is a major factor of production comparable in importance to labour and capital. The second is that the empirical work/exergy ratio f is an important measure of technical progress in the long run. Similarly, and third, the output/work ratio g can be regarded as a useful indicator of the extent to which the economy is “dematerialising” (if it is) or “informatising”⁶⁶ in some sense. Third, it is possible that technical progress as traditionally defined can be approximated reasonably well by mathematical expressions involving ratios of capital, labour and exergy inputs. Source: Ayres and Warr

In a nutshell: Higher oil and gasoline prices whacked the U.S. auto industry, the effects of which cascaded through large swathes of the rest of the economy and helped curtail spending. Energy prices also pummeled consumers’ disposable income and confidence. To the extent that the housing meltdown did play a huge part in the recession, that too can be partially chalked up to higher oil prices: Cheap digs in the distant suburbs went underwater with $4 gasoline. Source: Keith Johnson of the Wall Street Journal

All of the above occurring while we are beginning to understand the role of feedbacks in climate change.

Carbon Shift may be frustrating for someone looking for an absolutist description of our current situation. The scientists within, David Keith, J. David Hughes, Mark Jaccard, Jeff Rubin,William Marsden, and Jeffery Simpson, aren’t necessarily in agreement on our needed course of action. They each advocate differing approaches, each presenting solid cases on why we should be concerned about peak oil and/or climate change with varying degrees of urgency. However, this book serves as an excellent primer to intelligent thought about these issues.  I learned a tremendous amount from spending time with each of these thinkers through Thomas Homer-Dixon’s editing. The only essay that might fall short for some is the discussion of Canadian policy by Jeffery Simpson. I found this intriguing because I’ll soon be a Canadian immigrant and because there are lesson learned for the United States political approaches. Yet, I could see why many would want to skip this one. Every essay is spot on with relevance and importance.

This is the kind of hard hitting, heavy thinking journalism lacking in major media and public space discussions of the issues that will change our lives forever within the next generation.

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Post tags: climate change, economics, peak oil

1. Oxygen has not varied by more than 5% from 21% for the past 200 million years (confirmed through studying ice-core and sedimentary analysis)

2. Boreal and tropical forests are part of global climate regulation (generally accepted)

3. The biological transfer of selenium from the ocean to the land as dimethly selenide (confirmed through direct measurements)

4. Climate regulation through cloud albedo control linked to algal gas emissions (many tests indicate high probability, pollution interferes)

That’s a much  better hit rate than string theory, an idea receiving magnitudes of greater funding. Unfortunately the decades of widespread skepticism has prevented many leading bodies of science and policy groups to ignore the dire implications of a living Earth, most specifically in relation to climate.

Lovelock was the first scientist to invent instrumentation that could accurately demonstrate the accumulation of CFCs in the atmosphere, leading to international action on the hole in the ozone layer. And his work on atmospheric, geological and ecological sciences led him to become the first researcher to link the fields, understanding that the earth’s life regulates the atmosphere, and that the earth’s atmosphere regulates life. How is this so? The original Daisyworld model created by Lovelock (although seemingly common sense to us now but revolutionary for its time) was a convincing demonstration,

Years of added complexity later, Daisyworld still stands up as an accurate model of reality and the most definitive link between climate and biology. Unlike the IPCC projections of a gradual climate change, trending towards warmer temperatures over a long period of time, is not in agreement with historical models of major changes to our planet’s climate. Massive leaps are common as demonstrated by several graphs in the book. Disturbingly, the coldest years are prior to the major warming years, giving a false sense of security. Anthony Watts, through his blog, provides quality commentary on scientific information that disputes the IPCC climate change models, however Anthony doubts that global warming is occurring. Lovelock shares similar skepticism but provides evidence that the IPCC models are not severe enough in their projections of the serious lifestyle changes we’ll need to make to mitigate a changing climate. Scientists have held up the progress of the world for a long time, with their Cartesian deterministic views, perhaps the eminence of a scientist is measured by the length of time he holds up progress. Lovelock quotes Ogden Nash to demonstrate,

‘I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
‘You mean,’he said, ‘a crocodile.’

Lovelock’s perspective is credible and valuable, disputing many claims of the environmental movement, leading me to question some of my own approaches. For one, Lovelock states that nuclear fission is our only hope to avoid poverty and CO2 accumulation. Unfortunately I think we’ve missed the boat on this because the US couldn’t build the political will to dedicate $700 billion dollars for a secure future. Why nuclear? A fission plant has no emissions, other than water vapor, while in operation. Nuclear waste fades away after 600 years. The yearly output of a 1,000MW station is enough to fill a medium sized car. Compared with the ash from coal that no one seems to think about, the CO2 emitted, or the manufacturing that goes into transporting a wind turbine/PV panel the entire process of nuclear fission energy is by far the cleanest. The issue of nuclear waste is no different than dealing with the issue of defunct PV panels or wind turbine components, only the nuclear waste is much lower in volume while needing greater attention and security. Lovelock goes on to give some excellent examples of how nuclear energy is mis-represented, with 27 people having lost their lives in the history of nuclear power accidents, at Chernobyl. Modern nuclear plants include passive control systems, in the event of a failure the plant would simply shut down.

How does the death toll measure up? On December 3rd, 1984 a pesticide plant accident in Bhopal, India instantly killed 3,800 when a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas leaked into the night air. (And many more in the following weeks.) Yes, nuclear energy isn’t perfect but it is as close to perfect as we can get.

Why not renewables? Lovelock argues that the focus on “green” energy is propagated by those seeking to drive new financial bubbles, continuing the manufacturing status quo,  and doing little to actually mitigate climate impacts. We always idealize the wind turbine but forget that a combustion turbine has to be run on-site at a wind farm to keep the frequency of the turbines regulated for use on an electric grid. This simple fact has led some studies to conclude that wind farms are greater contributors to CO2 emissions than a coal plant, with wind farms emitting more than 840 pounds of CO2 per MWh vs 8.8 for nuclear power. Photovoltaics are better, but  land requirements are devastating, 8 acres per megawatt. Whereas a few hundred acres can house a 2,500MW nuclear plant. We need that land for farming and for return to Gaia so that the earth can do what it does best, self regulate. Where I significantly diverge from Lovelock is through is views on farming. On p. 134 of the book he details how synthesized food may be our only hope. If it is count me out. Real food can’t be substituted for and the nutrient model of eating has been proven as flawed.

This book is full of interesting insights and pessimism (or realism?) on how screwed we are. The basis of Lovelock’s argument, and reason for writing the book, is that we’ve outgrown the Earth as a species. Humans must learn to view themselves as equals in the scheme of ecology, not as a domineering species. The massive population we now support is subsidized at the expense of slowly renewing resources like coal and oil and at the cost of a damaged biosphere. As we exceed Gaia’s limits, the climate will adjust to fix the problem. This doesn’t mean the end of humanity but a severe readjustment to population centers and population numbers. James Lovelock has convinced me of this through his analysis of Gaia theory applied to the Earth. Could we avoid massive global warming? Yes. An unexpected minimum of sunspots like we are currently experiencing (see the note below). Massive volcanic eruptions. Successful geoengineering efforts(although highly unlikely, as Lovelock states). These could all bring an end to global warming. But they are highly unlikely. Our only plan as a species should be to adapt and realize our intelligence as human beings. Only then can we ensure our duty to survive and to carry on the legacy of the Earth. The relentless critique of the “green movement” and of environmentalism, a field many credit Lovelock for starting, was cause enough for me to find this book valuable. But the scientific discussion within is of far greater importance as we enter a turbulent time in the existence of the human species. This is a challenging read for the climate change skeptics and the climate change evangelists alike.

Note/Rampant Speculation: The current sunspot minimum can’t be explained by scientists and has been primarily responsible for much of the cold rainy weather my home area this spring, as well as record snows/cold elsewhere. If this is the start of a new Maunder Minimum serious questions have to be asked about the link between solar system bodies. Do feedback loops exist between the Sun and the Earth? Amazingly convenient that as the global temperature trends upward the Sun suddenly makes things cooler. Perhaps we are all linked to much greater things than we currently understand.

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Post tags: climate change, environmental writer

The rise of a new economics. That is what McKibben succeeds in describing through Deep Economy. After years of the ‘Cult of Growth’ dominating modern US politics, the Vermont environmental writer argues that its time we invest in our communities. Perhaps the wonders of globalization argued for by the likes of Friedman, Krugman and countless others are really just creating an illusion of wealth, economic growth that is merely overshoot and and consistent undermining of the communities that build a society.

McKibben comes from the position of a political neutral, stating that Democrats and Republican are handicapped by the obsession with the unrealizable ideal of unlimited growth. But what does a non-growth based economy look like? Maybe it looks a little bit like today with Keynesian theories as our last effort to stave off the collapse of a system built on making money out of nothing but the exchange of personal values and community structures for a few percentage point increases in GDP. Maximizing utility has brought about many changes in the US landscape,a prime example being the consolidation of local media among corporations. When 2-3% is a reasonable return rate on a business operation, especially for news media, the “shareholders” of major news giants like McClatchy and ClearChannel have demanded more, degrading the quality of countless news organizations and damaging the communities we thought our economics were helping. And as cited in Deep Economy when one South Dakota town contacted local radio to help out in an emergency, repeaters for ClearChannel stations don’t really help to get messages out to the public.

The other problem with our society is that consumption reigns king, a key portion of our GDP (oh… only about 70% or so). This consumption is quickly depleting material inputs and releases damaging externalities accelerating climate change and making industry suffer in the long term. Simply put, we get paid too much, work too much and buy too much. There is an alternative and that option is exemplified through the leadership of cities like Curitiba, Brazil, communities that start from the bottom up. The solution is a society that builds cost effective bus rapid transit, values pedestrians over drivers, and the impoverished as citizens instead of degenerates. Societies such as these exist but aren’t as “efficient” as most investors would like. And duly so, even Bhutan has rejected western ways in measuring happiness instead of GDP a method that might have far more actual value.

A point is reached in every society where certain people have enough and more simply doesn’t make them happier. The US has arrived at the point where so much more is making us much unhappier. Becoming unhappier with longer working hours, less time with family and bigger more isolating possession all while the people we sweep under the rug for our societal needs are beginning to lose their jobs, turning into hopeless machinations of society.

Many economists cite the fact that severe economic times result in new theories of economics. Perhaps our rulers will heed the advice of McKibben and begin to invest in communities… communities that are more than just excuses to be shovel ready.

© jritch for a robot, i am not, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: climate change, community structures, deep economy, economic growth, environmental writer, keynesian theories, krugman, percentage point, personal values