Monday, 30 May 2016

Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 2: BAU and The Religion of Progress

In my last post I talked about our growth and consumer based industrial society (Business as Usual, BAU), the people who are working to oppose it (Crunchies) and the woo (pseudoscience) involved in that sort of binary thinking, on both sides. Having brought up pseudoscience, I went on to discuss science as the only reliable way we have of knowing things about the material world (nature), and looked at the spectrum of ways that people do look at nature, noting that BAU and Crunchiness are at two extremes. I finished up by promising to look deeper into those two positions in future posts. Today I'll be talking about BAU.

On the surface, BAU is very practical and down to earth, interested only in what works—the farthest thing from woo. Its proponents would have us believe that they use exactly those reliable thinking tools I talked about in my last post, and proceed as indicated by science and reason. They have to a great extent co-opted science into their ideology, convincing us that their ideology is not just completely supported by science, but really is science, period. Of course, if you are allowed to pick and choose results, you can make science say anything you want.

They would also have us believe that everything is going fine with BAU and our industrial civilization is the best way to live, really the only way anyone would want to live. While they do acknowledge that there are some minor problems with the way BAU is working at the moment, they are sure that a little tinkering should fix them up in no time. And even if the big problems that I am always going on about are real, technology can no doubt be developed to solve them before it is too late.

Underneath that optimistic wallpaper, though, there are some pretty big cracks. Rather than being purely rational, BAU is based on the religion of progress. Supposedly, humanity is special—not strictly a part of nature like other species. Because of our intelligence, and our ability to evolve culturally as well as genetically, we have a clear destiny which places us on a path from the caves to the stars. Limits are something we are made to transcend via technology, not to live within. And however bad our current situation, we can always trust that things will improve, if not for us, at least for our children.

"What's so bad about that—what's wrong with progress?" you may ask. Or more pointedly, "what have you got against progress, Irv?"

I have nothing particular against things getting better, which must surely be what one means when talking about progress. What I am against is "progress as a religion", which involves several problematical ideas:

  • Progress is predestined.
  • Progress must continue, regardless of the consequences and despite any limits we may encounter.
  • Progress occurs in one direction, along a single path. If you don't like where progress is taking us, the only alternative is to move in the other direction, "backwards".
  • Cultures which are not part of BAU are "undeveloped", and that is a bad thing. Their only option is to start moving forward along the path of progress, to begin "developing" and eventually become "developed".

In the developed and developing world, all of us (even Crunchies) are immersed in a culture that worships progress, where those ideas are so obvious that we aren't even aware of them as such. It's like water to fish. I am no different, and I have to work hard to even consider the idea that progress may not be taking us to a good place. But I have done so and I would invite you to join me for a moment and have a closer look at those ideas and where they lead.

First, predestination.

The thing is that the belief in predestined progress is a religion. In North America, it seems to me that the majority of main stream Christian churches are little more than fronts for the religion of progress. For those folks, I guess that means progress is predestined by God. Health, happiness and success in business/work are the rewards of the faithful.

For those of us that aren't religious, though, the word "predestined" seems to mean that the nature of human beings, or perhaps more precisely, of human societies, is to progress. If you want to remain a true believer in progress, it's probably best not to look too closely at what "progress" means. But it's pretty clear that within BAU, it means that the human population grows and attains an ever higher level of material prosperity, comfort and convenience. Since health these days is maintained by the fruits of modern medical science and happiness consists (or so we are told) of ever increasing material prosperity (the fruit of success in business/work), this isn't very different from how the religious (Christian) folks see things. Not surprising, since we are talking about the religion of progress.

But let's take a more skeptical look at this. Is progress really part of human nature?

This idea is based on our ability to pass on advances via language—to evolve culturally as well as genetically. We've had this ability for two to three million years and during all but the last bit of that period, progress has been very, very slow. Cultural evolution during that period led to a wide variety of fairly stable small scale societies adapted to the many environments we encountered as we spread across the surface of the earth to every continent except Antarctica. About 10,000 years ago agriculture was invented in a handful of societies across the world, and the pace of progress in those societies "picked up" to just very slow (one less very).

Then a few hundred years ago the pace of progress began to accelerate dramatically. Looking back on this, those who believe in the inevitability of progress conclude that we finally got our act together and began to realize our potential. Many would credit much of this to the Enlightenment and the technological advances that came with it. I would say they are confusing cause and effect.

Something changed, for sure, but what? In the period leading up to when the change started, European society had just about run out of empty land to expand into and had maximized its use of the energy available from biomass (mainly firewood). Then the "New World" was discovered with great expanses of "empty land" and vast as yet untapped resources. Not long after this, coal began to replace firewood and heat engines (burning coal) began to replace muscle power.

And yes, a great deal of progress came about as a result of these changes. It probably was in some sense "inevitable" that this would happen, that some culture would eventually undergo the changes that European culture did. But this was progress driven not by destiny or human nature, but by the consumption of finite and non-renewable resources. The Enlightenment (while no doubt a good thing) was an effect of this progress, not the cause.

Now we find ourselves in the position of having already filled up essentially all the empty land on this planet and reaching the point of diminishing returns for fossil fuels. It appears that this period of progress will be of limited duration and is already starting to falter.

This is what makes me say the religion of progress is just woo. And the worst kind of woo, since it holds out the hope of continued progress which distracts us from the reality of our situation and the challenges we need to face up to.

Next, the necessity of continuing progress, regardless of the consequences.

BAU defines progress as increasing material prosperity and equates this to economic growth. This is a wonderful thing since there is money to be made in that business. For the financial industry this is literally true, since this industry creates money as debt to allow rapid economic growth. And growth must continue in order for the loans to be paid back with interest and the businesses involved to continue operating profitably. In order for economic growth to continue natural resources are consumed and pollution and waste (the by-products of the process) are created, both in ever greater quantities.

Unfortunately, we live on a finite planet, with strictly limited natural resources and limited sinks to absorb pollution and waste. BAU propaganda would have us believe that this is not so, that technology will always give us a way to surmount the limits we face. But the fact is that, in BAU, progress must continue because anything else is bad for business in the short run, and what happens in the long run isn't a concern in the short run.

BAU propagandists hold up examples of technology enabling continued growth, such as the success we've had in refining ever more depleted ores to get the metals we need and in getting oil and natural gas from deposits that formerly weren't economically accessible. We are told that when one resource runs out we will always find another to substitute for it.

There is even a movement, "eco-modernism" dedicated to this kind of approach.

Ted Trainer, a de-growth advocate, has this to say in an article debunking eco-modernism:

"Central to this sort of thinking is the claim that the economy can be “decoupled” from nature, from resource demands and ecological impacts. That is, technical advance can enable output and consumption to go on growing, presumably forever, while resource demands and ecological impacts are reduced way down to tolerable levels."

Sometimes all you have to do is hear a program's goals so clearly stated to realize how bizarre they really are and how unlikely their success really is.

Clearly, eco-modernism is more BAU woo. It seems very likely that the consequences of continued economic growth will be more unpleasant than we are willing to accept. But accept them we must, since there is no way to change the direction the BAU is headed. Or so it seems.

Then, the idea that progress is one dimensional.

If we object to any of the negative consequences of progress we are told that we can accept progress and go forward to better things or turn away from progress and go back (presumable to worse things), but those are the only choices. That is why Crunchies are painted as "dirty hippies" who want to go off grid and forego the benefits of modern society. It is even true in many cases, since having grown up in BAU society, it is very hard even for Crunchies to imagine any other alternative. It's no wonder that it is difficult to imagine change in other directions, when we have no clear examples of such and are continually told it is not possible. But this does not mean that such change is truly impossible, just that BAU desperately wants us not to head in any such direction.

Again from the same article by Ted Trainer:

"This world-view fails to grasp several things.... There can be many paths towards many end points, and we might opt for other end points than the one modernization is taking us to. In addition we might deliberately select desirable development goals rather than just accept where modernisation takes us, and with respect to some dimensions we might choose not to develop any further. Ecomodernism has no concept of sufficiency or good enough...."
"... we could opt for a combination of elements from different points on the path. For instance there is no reason why we cannot have both sophisticated modern medicine and the kind of supportive community that humans have enjoyed for millennia, and have both technically astounding aircraft along with small, cheap, humble, fireproof, home made and beautiful mud brick houses, and have modern genetics along with neighbourhood poultry co-ops. Long ago humans had worked out how to make excellent and quite good enough houses, strawberries, furniture, dinners and friendships. We could opt for stable, relaxed, convivial and sufficient ways in some domains while exploring better ways in others, but ecomodernists see only two options; going forward or backward. Modernity is a whole package we move further towards or retreat from and you must take the bad with the good. They seem to have no interest in which elements in modernism are worthwhile and which of them should be dumped. The Frankfurt School saw some of them leading to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Why on earth can’t we design and build societies that embody the good ideas and ways humans have figured out over thousands of years, taking some from high tech arenas and some from hunter-gatherer societies (e.g., that we thrive best in small face-to-face communities)?"

It seems to me that the path a society follows is determined largely by what it does with its surpluses. BAU's path is one dimensional path because in BAU there is only ever one thing to be done with a surplus—invest in more "progress" and make sure the profit from that goes to the investors and those who are in charge of things. But in fact there are many choices, which one we choose is determined by what we think is important and this can lead us in many different directions.

And lastly, cultures outside of BAU are undeveloped and need to progress.

The picture we are given of the remaining non-BAU cultures is a very negative one, focusing on all the things we have that they don't. I can recommend Jared Diamond's book "The World Until Yesterday" for a more balanced treatment of life in traditional societies.

And to borrow some ideas from Daniel Quinn, as expressed in his book Ishmael it seems that during those 2 to 3 million years before the invention of agriculture people were evolving genetically while their societies evolved culturally and the result was something that worked. Of course I am not saying that these societies were perfect or even particularly "nice" from our modern viewpoint, but they did provide their members with just enough of what they needed, both materially and in the more "spiritual" sense of having a "place"—worthwhile work which contributed to the group they lived in, and lifelong security provided by the group they lived in.

Note that I am not talking about the sort of societies that arose with the invention of the state not long after the invention of agriculture. These societies mark the beginning of BAU, and I find there is little good to be said of them. Although the argument can be made that in some ways, even those societies were better that the way most of us live now. If you are a North American, compare the number of days you get off work in year with a serf in medieval Europe. You may be surprised to find yourself on the short end of the comparison, though admittedly, most of his days off were church holidays.

Still, it is very hard to get away from the idea that positive change must be in the direction that BAU defines as progress. Surely, the people in those "primitive" societies would be better off if we could help them to progress.

Well, maybe not. An honest look at BAU makes it clear that the fruits of progress aren't very evenly spread around and that the promise of things getting better is, for the majority of people (or even their children), an empty one. If you don't already have a secure position in the upper levels of BAU, your prospects here in the early twenty first century aren't very good.

But beyond BAU's failure to deliver the fruits of progress as promised, there is the plain fact the BAU's kind of progress may not be what is really needed for us to live happy and fulfilling lives. Yes, it is true that if you are struggling just to get by, some improvement in your material prosperity will make life better for you. But once you have just enough, further increases yield diminishing returns, until eventually we find ourselves officially part of the rat race and begin asking if it is all really worth the effort.

To sum up all this talk about the religion of progress, it is the third religion that I have embraced and then been forced to abandon when confronted with reality.

It turns outs that I have somewhat more to say about what's wrong with BAU, so my next post will cover that, and then I'll finally go on with a closer look at Crunchiness.

Thanks to my youngest child Lidean for ideas and inspiration they have given me.

This is the second post in a series of six:

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Thursday, 12 May 2016

Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 1

I do mean something by that rather oddball title, something quite specific. Which I will explain, eventually. And be aware that the conclusion I reach at the end is not what it's going to seem like I am leading up to, so hang in there. This started out as a single post of over 6000 words, enough to try the patience of even my most loyal readers, so I've divided it into 6 parts, which will appear over the next few weeks.

Much of what I have been talking about on this blog for the last four years has been the damage being caused by our growth and consumer based industrial society (Business as Usual, BAU) and what can be done to cope with it and oppose it. The people who are working on that opposition are what I would call "Crunchy". I intend to cast a wide net when I speak of "Crunchies". Some people when asked to define "Crunchy" will say, "ah, they're just dirty hippies." While I do mean to include hippies (washed and unwashed) in my definition, I mean to include a whole lot of other people as well.

So it would seem that BAU and Crunchiness are two opposing ideologies. Of course, whenever you see binary thinking like this, framing a situation in terms of two opposing sides, you can bet that someone is benefitting from the conflict and is doing everything he can to keep it going. Examples from the industrial workplace, where I spent most of my life, would be management encouraging disputes among factions within the workforce to distract the workers from whatever management is up to, or during contract negotiations when both management negotiators and union negotiators emphasize differences between workers and management, making it more difficult to come to an agreement. In both cases, this is to the detriment of both workers and stock holders, but to benefit of management and the negotiators.

In the case of BAU versus Crunchiness, many of the leaders on both sides benefit from maintaining the conflict, in that it keeps our attention focused away from what might be done to actually change human society into something more sustainable and render that leadership redundant. And almost no one involved, at any level, really wants to make any of the major changes in lifestyle that would be necessary. We have been convinced that such changes would make life "no longer worth living".

That's nonsense, of course, but it is typical of the kind of nonsense that supports such binary thinking. Along with it comes quite a bit of "woo" (magical thinking and pseudoscience), as well as considerable doubt and confusion and some outright lies, all necessary to paper over the holes in the two positions, to avoid admitting there might be some common ground between the two, or a third approach that might work even better.

There is usually a lot to be gained by abandoning the binary thinking and looking past the woo to see what's really behind it all and that is what I hope to do in this series of posts. Originally, I was going to call this post "Save us from the flakes" and talk mainly about the unfortunate flakiness of Crunchy people. But then I was reminded that Business as Usual people are pretty flaky too, just sneakier about it. And of course, as always when one strays into binary thinking, it is important to remember there are many different types of BAU people and many different types of Crunchies. And all of these people are a mixture of various quantities of sound thinking and flakiness. Sorry if this seems complex, but that's the world I live in—nothing here is simple.

I'm using the word "flake" here in the sense of someone who is so fixated on his ideology (his side of the argument) that he will embrace any sort of magical thinking or pseudoscience that seems to support it, regardless of how irrational that may be. Such people end up believing in some very strange stuff. Of course, we are living in a very strange world where much of this stuff is widely accepted.

The Urban Dictionary defines "flake" as someone who is an unreliable person; someone who agrees to do something, but never follows through. That is not the sense that I am using here, but it has been my experience that many who are flakey in the ideological sense are so far out of touch with reality that they are pretty unreliable as well.

I like to think of myself as "Crunchy without the Woo." Many of you will ask, "Is there anything left when you take out the woo?" Others will be concerned that I not come down too hard on their favourite brand of woo. Some (the honest ones) will do both. Anyway, I do think it is not just possible, but necessary, to be Crunchy but without the woo.

Fence sitting is part of my nature—I seem to be pretty good at seeing the pros and cons of both sides of a thing, and I always suspect that there are only two sides to a thing because someone wants it to be seen that way. If anyone who worked for me at Hydro One is reading this they will be chuckling at the moment. I got this way by spending time on both sides of a number of situations, becoming unsatisfied with first one side and then the other, and finally looking for other ways of seeing the situation. There are usually many other ways, and some of them are more accurate and more useful.

I've been lied to on occasion and frequently led astray by genuinely deluded people. As a result of this, I began to question how anyone knows anything for sure. Accepting what the supposed authorities tell you certainly doesn't work. I finally concluded that the scientific method is the best tool we have at present for finding out the facts about the material world.

Here are some links to several good introductions to the scientific method:

What makes this method unique is that it calls for actually testing the ideas we have about the material world, to see if they are supported by the evidence or not, and changing those ideas if the evidence doesn't support them Then it calls for sharing your ideas and the evidence for them with others who will criticize your reasoning, the tests you did and your interpretation of the results and then try to duplicate your tests and see if they can get the same results. Over time this eliminates the sort of bias and fallacies that seem to be built into human thinking, and leads to a body of knowledge that might be called scientific facts, and a set of theories explaining those facts.

I am not suggesting that we should all become scientists, but rather that when a question is raised, we should make ourselves aware of what science sees as the facts in that field of endeavour and base our opinions on this scientific consensus. Here is some links on what the scientific consensus is and why we can trust it:

Of course, scientific knowledge is always provisional in nature, subject to revision as more evidence, and better understandings of it, become available. And we may find that science, especially out at the edges, doesn't have definite answers for us as yet. But the bottom line about science is that it works and you can rely on it. There is a lot of controversy going around these days on subjects where the science is already quite clear. Don't be fooled by this, by people who push pseudoscience to support their ideologies. Have a look at these links and see what I mean:

Many people say they are looking for absolute truth and can't believe in something like science that may change or be proven wrong. For me that is the great advantage of science—being able to adapt as we learn more, which we always do. Anyway, it's not about "belief". For me belief is a last resort to turn to when the currently known facts and the best available explanations of them don't yet answer your questions. And the best thing to do in those situations is not to pick a position and just believe in it, but simply to admit that you don't know, and then keep looking for real answers.

Some people object that science only applies to the material world and can only decide upon testable or falsifiable points. What about things outside the material world? Or that are not testable? Well, I've tried religion (more than once) and my eventual conclusion was that the material world is all there is, propositions that aren't testable are just nonsense and anyone making absolute, final statements about anything is not to be trusted. My statements here are not intended to be absolute— they are subject to modification should evidence to the contrary be found.

Here's a quote from the notable skeptic Michael Shermer that nicely sums up my thinking on the natural versus supernatural worlds: "If one were to argue that God exists outside of our world (or outside of the universe, or outside of nature), and that God’s forces are non-natural (or supernatural) and they can still affect the world but in a non-measurable way (because our scientific nets only catch natural fish), then what’s the difference between an invisible God and a nonexistent God?"

"Thus, it seems to me that once we have carefully defined our terms, it is clear that there really is only the material world, methodological naturalism is the only means to understand it, and science is the only form of reliable knowledge that we have."

Along with the scientific method, a few additional tools are helpful. Although the argument could be made that they are really integral parts of the scientific method....

Literacy is probably the first to consider. There is all kinds of good information out there in books and on the internet, and there is no point in reinventing the wheel. But of course there is also a great deal of nonsense, "woo" if you will, out there as well and you have to learn to sort it out from the good stuff. Because science has a well deserved reputation as a reliable source of knowledge, those who are pushing woo try to make their case sound as scientific as possible. Thus the term "pseudoscience".

Fortunately, there is also a good deal of information, written at a level suitable for the layman, which will help you sort out the science from the woo.

Numeracy is the next tool I would recommend. Math education is so bad in North American schools that people end up asking why they even bother to learn something they will never use. If you learn it badly (or not at all), then of course you won't use it. But a good grasp of high school level math (and even a bit of calculus), along with a good solid gut feeling for how numbers work in the real world is, in my experience, an important life skill—something you will use on a daily basis and which will give you a leg up on those around you, to whom numbers are probably a bit of a mystery. Numeracy is a great help in detecting woo, because the purveyors of woo tend to have a very weak grasp of numbers. This becomes obvious when they try to use numbers to pull the wool over the eyes of the defenseless public, and end up spouting numerical nonsense. It helps, of course, to be able to recognize numerical nonsense when you see it.

One of the reasons that science has done so well in the last few centuries is its use of numbers and the invention of tools which enable us to measure the world around us and express our knowledge about it in numerical terms.

Critical thinking is the next logical step after numeracy. Basically this means becoming familiar with the many biases and logical fallacies that human beings fall prey to, so that you can you can recognize when others are doing so and, perhaps more importantly, prevent yourself from doing so.

Which brings us to skepticism, which is characterized by a questioning attitude towards opinions or beliefs that others state as facts. Simply put, it is based on the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Being familiar with the scientific consensus will help you recognize when someone is making an extraordinary claim. Of course a good skeptic has the scientific method, literacy, numeracy and critical thinking skills in his tool box. For more information check out these links:

I strive to be a good skeptic, but occasionally I stumble and I'm always questioning myself, concerned that I have been taken in by some sort of woo.

This may all seem rather academic. But what I think we should be aiming for here is a good practical understanding of how the natural world works, and where we fit into it. So many of us today live in cities and have very little exposure to anything but a human built environment. This leads to some inaccurate impressions about man's place in the world, and also about the workings of real world (nature) itself.

These ideas run along a spectrum. At one end are those who feel that nature is something to be mastered, conquered and risen above. Part of this is a fear of nature and a conceit that we can render ourselves independent of it. At the other end are those who personify nature, seeing "her" as a benevolent mother, and equating her with all that is good, trusting that by doing things the "natural way", we can live in harmony and prosperity.

Neither of these extremes is a very realistic. We are definitely part of the natural world and completely dependent on it for our survival. We are no different than any other species in that we are not exempt from the rules of ecology and population dynamics (or any other natural law). Nature can be as harsh or gentle as the realities of the situation dictates, but to personify nature, to say that it is either hostile or loving to mankind is to have missed the whole point—which is that nature is not an entity with feelings. As far as the "natural way" of doing things, for humans there hasn't been such a thing since we started taming fire and using tools, 2 to 3 million years ago.

As it happens, those two extreme ways of looking at nature line up rather well with BAU and Crunchiness in its more flakey incarnations. In my next two posts I'll be taking a closer look at both those positions, and using the thinking tools I've been talking about, I'll try to sort the good sense out from the woo.

This the first post in a series of six:
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Friday, 29 January 2016

A Political Fantasy, Part 8: Agriculture -- What Lies Ahead

In my last post I summarized the state of agriculture leading up to the present, and promised that in this post I would talk about where agriculture seems to be going and where it needs to go if we are going to be able to feed humanity. This, of course, brings us back to the "Political Fantasy" theme that I've been riffing on for quite a while now.

That theme leads us to two questions:

1) what can governments do to ensure that enough food is grown in a sustainable way, based on reality, rather than ideology--neither techo-optimism nor technophobia.

2) what can governments do to make sure that food gets to the hungry people of the world--that no one is left undernourished when there is enough food to go around. We have a pretty terrible record in this department--hungry people are almost always poor people with little or no political or economic power and their needs get considered last.

First, let's consider question 1.

If left alone, modern agriculture will no doubt continue on its present course. More automation, better labour efficiency, higher yields and an intensification of the arms race with pests. Some of this will incidentally lead to minor sustainability improvements along the same lines as have already been made. And of course modern agriculture will continue its spread to the developing world, driven by the promise of higher crop yields. There is no doubt whatsoever that in the short run, modern agriculture can produce more food.

All kinds of people believe this is the way to go, based on the assumption that things will stay pretty much as they are today. But to assume that, you have to completely ignore a set of realities that are collectively known as "the limits to growth". A great many people are in denial about those limits, and huge efforts are being expended to treat them as minor problems, which can be solved to allow us to continue with business as usual. But of course, the essence of the limits is that they have no solution as such--we simply have to learn to adapt to life within the limits. The rest of what I have to say here is based on that reality. If you're sure that "they" will come up with a solution any day now, a solution based on technology, which will allow us to continue with our growth based consumer economy, then you're going to find the rest of this pretty unpalatable.

It is clear to me that if modern agriculture does continue on its present course, it will eventually fetch up against the hard limits of resource depletion--running short of fossil fuels (for energy, nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and other synthetic chemicals), potash, phosphorus, water and soil. Not to speak of losing its arms war with pests. All this is inevitable if we don't switch over to more sustainable agricultural techniques.

But even before then, the economic consequences of resource depletion and climate change will make themselves felt and necessitate a change of direction. Indeed they have already begun to do so.

The economy is really about energy--money is just a set of tokens for keeping track of energy. To be more precise, the economy is really about surplus energy. It takes energy to access energy, and what's left over after we do whatever it takes to get that energy is what is available to make our economy work and grow. Surplus energy is quantified as "EROEI", energy returned on energy invested, and you can read about the concept and its consequences elsewhere on this blog. Expressing this idea in monetary rather than energy terms leads to all sort of misunderstandings, but to put it simply, what makes an economy work is cheap energy. Having great quantities of energy available at a higher price does no good.

The growth based economy we've had for the last couple of hundred years was made possible by cheap, abundant fossil fuels, which supplied lots of surplus energy. This started to change in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Up until that point we'd been picking the lowest hanging fruit in the fossil fuel "orchard". Gradually we were forced to start using fossil fuels that afforded us with less surplus energy and our economy started to slow down. And, unfortunately, the alternatives to fossil fuels also deliver disappointing amounts of surplus energy.

As the average EROEI of a country's energy sources begins to drop, economic growth slows, it becomes difficult to raise capital to start new business ventures and eventually even to maintain infrastructure. With real economic growth slowing, investors look desperately for anything that will yield good returns. This results in financial bubbles, where speculation drives up values to extremely unrealistic levels. In the last couple of decades we've had bubbles in tech stocks (2000), real estate (2008) and tight oil and gas (happening currently). It looks like we are headed for another tech bubble, and probably one in renewable energy. The unfortunate thing is that people invest a lot of money when a bubble is being inflated, money that disappears when the bubble bursts.

Already we are seeing these effects of decreasing surplus energy, and because of them, an increased volatility in the markets, including markets for agricultural products. This has made it harder to farm profitably. Some governments have responded with supply management schemes to maintain prices, keep farmers in business and guarantee the supply of food. Even so, farming has not been hugely profitable and we are very fortunate that many farmers love what they are doing and have kept doing it under conditions that would have caused most other businesses to simply shut down. It is very common for farmers to have a job off the farm to put food on the table and enable them to continue farming. And no, these are not hobby farmers.

Since we all have to eat, agriculture is a business that is too important to fail. Based on continually growing unemployment and demand destruction, falling prices for commodities and reductions in the international shipping of goods, it seems the world economy is now in a deflationary spiral, which may well prove to be what I have been calling the "Great Contraction". Efforts to get off fossil fuels (spurred by climate change) by switching to large scale but low EROEI renewables ( grid tied solar and wind, both with storage) are likely to make this much worse, and use up the last financial and energy resources, might have been devoted to smoothing out the period of degrowth that lies ahead of us.

We had a financial crash in 2008, brought about by spiking energy costs and a bubble in real estate markets. It seems very likely that the current deflationary spiral will lead to another financial collapse, or a series of them, despite frantic efforts by governments worldwide to prevent it.

How will this effect agriculture? Because modern agriculture uses a great many inputs which must be purchased from off the farm, farmers are often dependent on credit to get each year's crop in, paying the bank back after the crop is harvested and sold. In the aftermath of a financial crash, banks become very conservative in their lending. If the crash is severe enough, many banks go out of business. Under such conditions, farmers will find it difficult to get the credit they need to get crops in, even though they have the land, the machinery and the will to do so.

Governments can help in such circumstances, guaranteeing farm loans or actually loaning money directly to farmers to keep the agricultural system working.

Of course, farming is not the only business that will be having a hard time after a financial crash. The business environment ahead will not be friendly to any large, industrial scale enterprise. It may become hard to even get many of the supplies needed to put in a crop and even if you do, and manage to harvest it, getting the food to where it is needed may not be possible. I'm not talking about some "Mad Max" apocalypse here. Even a partial and intermittent collapse of financial and commercial services is serious enough because everything is so interconnected, and optimized to the point where it is very brittle. In addition, infrastructure is not being maintained and is already starting to fail randomly. This will continue and increase, making it even more difficult for "business as usual".

A conventional response would be for governments to ration materials needed by agriculture, encourage more efficient use, discourage waste and eventually even ration food. But none of these measures constitute a long term solution. The first thing to do is acknowledge that there isn't a solution in the sense of a way to allow both population and economic growth to continue on in a "business as usual" world.

It seems pretty clear that the human race is an overshoot situation. The planet simply cannot support 7 billion people, much less the 9 billion that we are headed towards. Yes, we are getting fed, more or less, for the moment. But that's primarily because modern agriculture is pretty good at converting non-renewable resources into food. And because we've been using up the existing capital of the environment--soils, fossil water, forests, fish stocks and other wildlife (resources that are potentially renewable)--at a rate faster than they are naturally replenished, the overall carrying capacity of the planet is being reduced. This can't go on forever or, in fact, very much longer at all.

When it comes to agriculture, we don't need another "Green Revolution" which relies on non-renewable resources to increase yields. This would only push us further into overshoot, just like the last one did. We definitely do need a revolution that produces sustainable solutions, but we also need to reduce our population. We can take the first step in this direction by educating and empowering women everywhere, and assisting them with family planning. Beyond that, we face a few very chaotic decades--war, famine and disease will have their way. I am surely not saying that this is a good thing, but the alternatives are even worse. The larger our population gets, the harder it will crash when the time comes, and the worse mess will be left for the survivors to recover from.

So, governments need first to acknowledge the limits to growth. And yes, this is clearly the most fantastical element of my political fantasy. Then they need to change the way agriculture works to match the conditions that we will be facing. And, of course, practically every other aspect of our society as well. At first, governments will need to prop up the modern system of agriculture to prevent needless famine. But they will also have to facilitate a gradual shift over to something that uses fewer inputs and is more sustainable. And this will be particularly true in the developed world where modern agriculture is the primary source of food.

People who are successfully feeding themselves using low input traditional agriculture should be left alone. True, their methods are not 100% sustainable, but we in the developed countries have a very poor record in our attempts to modernise farming in the developing world. When we have converted our own agriculture into a sustainable system, then perhaps we will have something worth sharing with the rest of the world.

Of course, the urban population in the developing world don't feed themselves, and they are in a very precarious situation. I think one promising partial solution is to put the urban poor back on the farms their fathers came from and help them to feed themselves. Land reform will be necessary, but those who are practicing modern agriculture won't be able to continue and the land they are using could certainly be put to better use.

Meanwhile, back in the developed world, we will be busy with our own problems. As time passes, all the inputs that modern agriculture needs will be less reliably available.

Fossil fuels are probably the most important of those inputs. We will start to see shortages long before there is any real shortage of fossil fuels in the ground. It may seem odd to say this at a time when the price of oil have been dropping for over a year, but that is exactly the problem. We are caught in what has been called "the energy-economy trap".

As I was saying earlier, it seems that the great contraction has already started, with the first sign being the dropping prices of commodities, especially oil, coal and natural gas. These low prices are being caused by a glut in fossil fuels, but that glut is largely due to demand destruction. Why has demand fallen off? High prices for oil for the last few years strangled the world economy, which had never really recovered from the crash of 2008. There are lots of unemployed and under-employed people who aren't spending money like they used to, with predictable effects on our consumer economy. While low energy prices are great for consumers in the short run, oil, coal and natural gas are all too cheap to be worthwhile getting out of the ground--you can't make much of a profit at it, certainly not enough to finance the development of new resources.

It may be that when the price of oil gets low enough the economy will take off again. This is less likely than one might think because the oil industry is a major part of our economy and it is in very bad shape because of the low prices. But if the economy does recover and start growing again, the first thing it will need is energy. That demand will drive the price of energy back up again, especially since we are still using fossil fuels and what's left is ever harder to get at. Eventually higher energy prices will strangle the newly revived economy and bring us back to where we are now or perhaps lower. I don't think it is at all clear how many times this cycle will repeat, or even if it will happen more than once. But in any case, the economy will spiral down until it reaches a level that can be supported by the sort of renewable energy that is fairly low tech and high EROEI.

For the present, while commodity prices are going down, prices for necessities are increasing or at least not dropping nearly as much as commodities, because demand for them is much less elastic. Food is an example of this because we have to eat. Gasoline and diesel fuel prices on North America is another--they haven't gone down proportionally to the drop in the price of oil, because our towns and cities are set up so that most people must drive unless they drop out of the economy and the trucks must keep rolling to deliver goods to where they are needed. When necessities stay pricey as the rest of the economy falters, it can be a very serious problem for the poorest people.

Doing modern farming without a reliable supply of diesel fuel and gasoline will be quite a challenge. Bio diesel and alcohol have too low an EROEI to even bother with--we'll be farther ahead to use the land to feed draught animals, or hungry people who need work. A limited amount of power will be available from biomass (firewood), falling water, wind, solar thermal and a few other sources in locations where they are plentiful (tides, waves, geothermal, etc.), but most of that does not come in the form that modern agriculture needs most: liquid fuels with a high energy to weight ratio, suitable for powering heavy machinery.

The agricultural tasks now done by such machinery will mostly have to be done using muscle power. And since we have a surplus of humans and have not yet bred up an adequate supply of draft animals, that will initially mean using mostly human muscle power. Fortunately we do have a surplus of unemployed people. As in the developing world, our urban poor will be needed on the farm. Without powered machinery more people will be involved per acre, probably 20 to 25 percent of the population.

It would also be a good thing if farms were smaller, since it is well established that smaller farms get better yields. I think this is largely because small farms are usually worked by the people who own them, who have a great deal invested in the farm's success. So when moving urban people to farms, it would be better if they ended up as owner/operators rather than as laborers (serfs). Again, some land reform will be needed.

At the moment it would be difficult to get many of the unemployed to take agricultural jobs but after the first winter of shortages and rationing, that will change. People with concave bellies will be more interesting in securing their food supplies by becoming personally involved in farming and even those who don't take farm jobs will be ready to get serious about urban gardening.

Also let's be clear that the switchover to muscle power need not happen all at once. One tractor among several small farms, to be used when fuel is available would be a big help, especially during the transitional stage of this effort.

Long distance shipping of food will be largely impractical. Most food will have to be grown and processed locally. Of course this exposes the local population to famine when there are crop failures. It would be good to set up storage facilities to maintain emergency supplies of food that stores well (primarily grains). Excesses from good years could be held in reserve to see us through bad years. And it would be ideal if there was some small amount of medium to long distance shipping to help move those reserves around to where the need is greatest.

Large cities are probably not viable in a low energy situation, since an awful lot of food needs to be shipped into the city and there may not be adequate farm land nearby. Many cities are currently sited where water is a problem as well, especially without power to pump water in from far away.

The reliable supply of many other industrial products needed for modern farming will also be disrupted because of lack of energy and fossil fuels feed stocks, the effects of financial chaos on business and crumbling infrastructure. Some consequences flow directly from this. We won't be making synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in large quantities, and mining and long distance shipping of the minerals needed to make phosphorous and potash fertilizers will be quite limited. Instead we will have to use composted organic waste, including human and animal "waste".

This may look like going back to traditional agriculture, but that is a deceiving appearance. There is definitely a place for advanced (but appropriate) technology in the agriculture of our future.

Pesticides, natural sourced or synthetic will not be available in large quantities, so we will have to implement integrated pest management techniques, which require a detailed, science based knowledge of the ecology the crops are being grown in and the pests that need to be controlled.

Hybrid seeds will not be reliably available either, because the big seed companies will be in serious difficulty or out of business altogether, and it is not practical to breed hybrid seeds on a small, local basis. It is my opinion that genetic engineering will have an important role to play in providing improved seeds. We can no doubt do without genetically engineered seeds, but not nearly as well. The varieties we need most have not yet been commercialized, but are in the process of being developed at universities and by small companies across the world. The emphasis for modern agriculture has been on high yields under optimum conditions, rather than resilience and adaptations to varying conditions. This means great yields under ideal conditions and very bad yields in bad years. But whatever plant breeding techniques we use to get them, we need crops that can give good yields under less than ideal conditions.

Confined animal feeding operation (CAFOs) are not likely to be workable under these conditions. The land currently being used to grow corn and soy beans to feed animals in CAFOs will be freed up to grow food for people. Our staple foods will once more be grains and there will be much less meat in the average person's diet. Meat, diary and eggs will still be produced, especially in areas where the land is more suited to growing pasture than feeding people directly, instead feeding animals who then feed people.

We will need to do everything we can to minimize the waste of food. The developed world currently wastes more food per capita that the developing world, in both the production and consumption phases. I think that switching to smaller farms and localizing the food supply has a lot of potential for improvements in this area, along with abandoning the current idea that we have lots of food and don't have to worry about waste.

We will also have to cope with and remediate the damage done to the environment during our period of overshoot. This especially means conserving soil and water and restoring wildlife habitats.

The effects of climate change will make all this much harder and we must be prepared to abandon areas spoiled for agriculture by climate change and move into new areas opened up by warming temperatures, even though they are likely to be smaller.

On the other hand, agriculture has a huge potential to sequester carbon and thus start to reverse climate change. Modern farming techniques have reduced the amount of organic matter in the soil. Correcting that deficiency will take a great deal of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Good governments, who have acknowledged the limits to growth, can surely help with all these changes. Among other things they can support the research needed to determine a reality (science) based path to sustainable agriculture, and avoid the many pseudoscientific approaches being advocated by the anti-science, techno-phobic people these days.

These changes will not happen overnight or even in the course of a single year, and there will be ever shrinking areas that go on practicing something more or less like modern agriculture for decades if not longer.

Over time, the contracting economy will leave governments much less powerful than they are now and less centralized. So they need to do what they can sooner rather than later and then pass the torch to more localized governments.

Eventually we will get switched over to a much more sustainable type of agriculture and we'll be able to grow enough food to feed a somewhat reduced population. My guess would be somewhere between one and two billion people, but that is just a guess. The number will largely be determined by how much more damage we do to the environment before we get around to making the transition.

But of course, growing enough food to feed a certain number of people and managing to get that food equitably distributed to those people so that none of them are going hungry are two very different problems. It's time now to consider the second question I posed back at the start of this post.

Despite the fact that we are currently producing adequate amounts of food to feed everyone in the world, hunger is quite common and famines still occur. This is because hunger is an economic/political phenomenon, caused by poverty and powerlessness.

I would argue that people need meaningful physical work, for both physical and mental health, as well as in order to make a living. This work which should allow them to supply themselves with food, clothing and shelter, and the more directly they can be involved in that, the better. Society needs to be set up so that it affords people with such work and a variety of it to suit people with varying amounts of talent. Society also needs to provide (within the limits of its capabilities) for the needs of those who, through illness, accident or age, are not currently able to provide for themselves.

I use the phrase "society needs to" because there are unpleasant consequences, both for individuals and for the society itself, when it does not do these things. While many people claim that capitalism and the free market are the best ways to achieve these ends, I would argue that modern capitalism has had a couple of centuries to prove itself and has failed to do so. Over the last few decades as the energy crisis has deepened, it has done even worse.

During that time neo-liberalism has taken over as the only political party in most countries. Its emphasis on consumerism, individualism and the free market has resulted in ever increasing inequality, with the poor get poorer and even less powerful and the rich get richer and more powerful. There is even a tendency to treat poverty as a moral failing of the affected individual and to make it practically illegal for such individuals to be alive. Certainly many cities take that approach with their homeless.

This needs to change and I think it can change as we transition to smaller communities which are to a great extent self sufficient.

In the developing world localized famines are fairly common. Some natural event such as a drought causes a poor crop in a particular area. It is not bad enough that anyone actually need go hungry, but the price of food on the free market goes up due to dropping supply, creating what amounts to a famine for those who cannot afford the higher prices. This applies not only to those who are consumers of food, but also to the producers whose crops are hardest hit, so hard that they are short of food for themselves and have nothing left to sell in order to buy food. They may be forced to give up their land and go to the city in search of work to feed their families, swelling the ranks of urban poor, whose situation is pretty dire as well. The land left behind may end up in the hands of those practicing modern agriculture, which is great in the short run, but as I've said, has no real future.

Charitable organizations from the developed world have stepped in with food aid in many cases. But that food has to come from somewhere and producers aren't going to grow it unless they can make money at it, at least enough to cover their expenses. The generosity of people in the developed world is dependent those people having some discretionary income to give away, and as our economies continue to contract, there will be less and less of that. Some other mechanism must be found for distributing food more equitably, especially during hard times.

At this point it is challenging to come up with advice for cash strapped governments in developing countries. But borrowing money to modernise and set up a growth based economy is certainly not a good idea, whatever development banks might tell you.

In the developed world things are a little different. We are just emerging from a long period of economic growth that provided lots of jobs. True, our market based economy had the odd glitch and there was more unemployment during depressions and recessions, but for the most part the rising tide lifted all boats. But now that the economic tide is falling things have changed. Labour is seen as an expense and a burden. Business are doing everything they can to automate and reduce the amount of labour they need, even though automation is expensive and energy hungry.

Because the capitalist system is set up to make profits for shareholders, those who are jobless or, worse yet, homeless, have no role to play. The system would just as soon they quietly disappeared. But as unemployment increases, this isn't going to happen and the problem of what to do with these people is going to intensify.

Rehumanisation is the answer, both to the question of what to do with the unemployed and how to run businesses in the face of a growing energy crisis. I've already spoken about the need to switch agriculture over to muscle power, but the same will have to happen in many other sectors of the economy.

This series of political fantasies ends here. In my next post I'll talk about being "Crunchy Without the Woo", and after that I'll start talking about political realities for a change.

I'd like to thank Doug and Linda Peebles and my youngest son Dan Mills for their input to this blog post and their continuing support of my efforts here.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Political Fantasy" posts, here is a complete set of links.

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Monday, 14 December 2015

A Political Fantasy, Part 7, Agriculture: Details

We'll get to the "political fantasy" part of agriculture in my next post, but for now I think it's important to set down a clear idea of what traditional agriculture was like and how it has changed in the last couple of centuries with the emergence of modern agriculture.

As I said in my last post the industrialization of our society, driven by abundant cheap energy from fossil fuels, made possible better nutrition, cleaner water supplies, improved sanitation and medical advances including vaccines which resulted in a quickly growing population, mainly due to reduced infant mortality.

The industrialization of agriculture is the main thing that has allowed us to feed the ever growing human population. But because that industrialization is dependent on non-renewable resources, we find ourselves in an overshoot situation, where the fast approaching depletion of those resources will leave us unable to feed a large portion of humanity.

Let's look at traditional and modern agriculture in greater detail.

Land

In 1750, there were around 750 million people in the world, all of them feeding themselves by various traditional means: hunting and gathering, fishing, nomadic herding, swidden (slash and burn) agriculture or fixed field agriculture. Most civilizations were quite isolated and if they did not practice sustainable agriculture and forestry, they would collapse back to a lower level of energy use and a lower population that the local environment could support sustainably.

Western Europe had been running out of forests for some time. They could have adopted the more rigidly regulated forestry and more sustainable agriculture used in some parts of the far east and got by for a few thousand more years, but instead chose to use coal instead of firewood, and with the invention of the steam engine, to industrialize.

Improved sailing ships opened up large areas of "empty" land in North and South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand to Europeans. The indigenous people in those areas no doubt think we had a strange idea of what "empty" means, but that is another story. Those same sailing ships, and eventually steam ships and railways made it possible to grow food, especially grains (which store and ship well) in these new agricultural areas and ship them to areas of high population density where there was not enough farm land to feed the people.

Eventually, refrigeration and fast transportation made it possible to do the same with more perishable forms of food, even between the north and south hemispheres, enabling us to have fresh produce flown in from half way around the world in the middle of winter.

Of course, in the process of bringing so much new land under the plough, a great many habitats were destroyed along with the species who inhabited them. Despite our supposed mastery of the planet, even the most modern economy relies to a great extend on services provided by the naturally occurring biosphere: fresh air, clean water, fertile soil, forests full of timber and rivers, lakes and oceans full of fish. The cost of providing those services by our own efforts would be crippling. We have already placed so great a burden on the environment that its continued ability to support us is in serious question. If we continue to convert what little is left of the as yet untouched environment into farms and cities, there will be no question left.

Of particular concern is the acidification and heating of the oceans due to increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Ocean phytoplankton (plants) are largely responsible for maintaining the oxygen level of the atmosphere. If conditions reach the point where they start dying off, we will have a serious, well nigh insoluble, problem.

And yet our population still grows. Currently, about 370,000 new hungry mouths are being born every day and only about 150,000 people are dying to make room for them. But those numbers get larger every year, with the margin between births and deaths increasing as well.

Worse still, in the developing world, land is being converted to growing foods to ship to the developed world (at a profit) while poor farmers who had previously been able to feed themselves are left with nowhere to go but the cities, where they become jobless, hungry urban poor. It may be true the that bringing this land under modern cultivation methods enables it to produce more food per acre, but this is of very little help to the people who are in greatest need of the food.

Traditional farms were, and still are quite small, a few acres at most. Modern farms are much larger. It is well established that small farms perform better. There is lots of discussion about why, but the answer is obvious to me: a small farmer can devote more concentrated attention and care to his crops and livestock.

Water

In many parts of the world the supply of water is a limiting factor for agriculture. Irrigation has been the solution to this problem for thousands of years, usually using gravity fed water from rivers that continue to flow during the dry growing season, also by using muscle powered pumps to move water to where it is needed. This has been possible because, at higher elevations where the rivers arise, precipitation falls as snow in the winter, accumulates and then melts gradually during the spring and summer. With climate change, warmer conditions mean more of the water falls as rain and what does fall as snow melts more quickly, reducing the amount of river water available during the dry season when crops need it.

In the last century or so, motor driven pumps have made it possible to tap into underground aquifers for irrigation on a scale that uses up fossil water much faster than it is naturally replaced. Already wells are running dry and soon large areas of highly productive irrigated land will have to be abandoned or switched over to much less productive dry land agriculture.

Soil and Fertility

Soil is much more than an inert medium in which to plant our crops. In addition to providing essential nutrients, good soil has a high content of humus, decaying organic matter that provides nutrients, holds water, resists erosion, and causes soil to clump and form soil aggregates, which improves soil structure. Humus is also a major reservoir of carbon and the reduction of humus content in soil under modern cultivation techniques has been a major source of the atmospheric carbon dioxide which is causing climate change. Farming techniques which increase humus content in soil hold great promise for sequestering CO2. This is one area where "organic" farming does show promise, but those methods could just as easily be applied to conventional farming.

When we grow crops they take up nutrients from the soil, eventually depleting the soil of those nutrients if measures are not taken to replenish them.

Traditional agriculture used several different approaches.

  • When you farm on the flood plan of a river, the soil gets replenished every spring when the river floods.
  • Swiddening involves slashing down an area of vegetation in a forest or jungle, letting the "slash" dry and then burning it. The ashes enrich the soil, the slash and burn clears the area so minimal cultivation is required. After a few years the soil is depleted and you move on, slashing and burning a new plot. Your old plot gets over grown by the forest and after a few decades can again be slashed and burned. This actually works pretty well, provided the population density is low enough.
  • Maintaining fertility in fixed field agriculture is trickier. The main nutrients that are needed are nitrogen, phosphorous and potash (N, P, K), and organic matter to maintain the humus content of the soil. Legumes, working with microbes growing in nodules on their roots can turn nitrogen in the air into nitrogen compounds that can be used by plants. There are minerals that are high in potash and phosphorous, though most traditional farmers did not have access to them. But for the most part the idea was to recycle the nutrients used by the plants. This means that the waste from the animals and people who eat those plants must go back into the soil along with the organic waste (straw) left over when the crops are harvested. Nightsoil was traditionally used directly and in some places it still is. This can contribute to the spread of disease. Or waste can be composted, which if properly done eliminates disease micro organisms, and then applied to the soil. In parts of the Far East land has been under cultivation pretty much continuously for 4000 years. Even with nearly complete recycling of waste, some nutrients are lost, leached into the ground water and carried away, so they must be replaced from elsewhere, but at nothing like the rate we see in modern agriculture.

Modern agriculture uses "fertilizers" which contain the necessary nutrients. Phosphorous and potash come from minerals, which are mined using machinery powered by fossil fuels and shipped (again using fossil fuels) from where there are rich deposits to the farms where they are needed. Nitrogen from the atmosphere is converted to ammonia using the Haber–Bosch process. Fossil fuels (natural gas, specifically) provide energy and hydrogen for this conversion, and then nitrogen fertilizers are made from the ammonia. Using these fertilizers, plant nutrients can be supplied in quantities that ensure excellent yields.

There are, however, some problems with these fertilizers. This is a "once through" use of material resources, which has all the problems you might expect, primarily the depletion of non-renewable resources, and pollution of water courses downstream from the farm.

Modern fertilizers are highly water soluble and as such readily available to be taken up by plants, but also to be dissolved in rain water and washed away into water courses where they are potent polluters, fuelling the explosive growth of algae and eventually leading to dead zones such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico downstream from the Mississippi River. There really isn't a sweet spot where yield is maximized and runoff minimized—to get good yields you have to accept quite a bit of runoff. They also fuel growth of soil micro organisms, leading to more rapid breakdown of organic matter in the soil.

Of course these plant nutrients do not just disappear when they get washed out to sea. The nitrogen rich chemicals mostly end up breaking down and returning to the atmosphere as plain old N2. The phosphorous and potash end up in the sludge on the bottom of the ocean and via plate tectonics will eventually be accessible once more as minerals, but on a time scale of many millions of years.

The use of non-renewable resources to feed the human population and that of our domesticated animals has enabled a population explosion over the last few decades, to the point where we are in an "overshoot" situation. Those non-renewables are being rapidly depleted and the renewable resources that are available are no longer sufficient to support us, indeed they too are being depleted by overuse.

Pests

A farm or garden does not exist in isolation—it is part of an ecology and interacts with it. Organisms from that surrounding ecology see our crops as a wonderful source of food. We tend to see them as pests, especially in modern agriculture.

Traditional agriculture was less susceptible to pests because its crops were more diverse and planted in smaller plots. The pests' predators were allowed to thrive, as well. None of this resulted in a 100% elimination of pests, but it did lead to somewhat fewer problems than we have today.

Modern agriculture has specialized in crops with much less diversity and plants them in much larger fields. Often we have thousands of acres planted to genetically identical plants, and the same plants year after year. This is immensely attractive to pests and once a pest arrives that those identical plants are susceptible to, they may all succumb. This necessitates the use of pesticides.

The way modern agriculture interacts with pests is essentially an arms race. Whether farmers use "natural" pesticides as in organic farming or synthetic ones as in conventional farming, pests adapt, evolving resistance to whatever pesticides are being used. Then new pesticides are developed and work for a while, but eventually the pests develop resistance to them as well. And so it goes.

In the case of insects, insecticides have a tendency to kill not just the pest, but the pest's natural predators, which were keeping the pest somewhat in check. Take the predators away and the pests multiply out of control unless you use even more pesticides. Or in one case, when a very specific pesticide which only kills insects was used, slugs, which are mollusks and not bothered by that pesticide, increased in number, doing as much damage as the insects had been doing.

And of course, pesticides are largely made from fossil fuels and using fossil fuel energy, so the day is coming when we won't be able to use them so generously, if at all. Their availability also depends on modern infrastructure, finance and shipping. And modern labs to keep developing new versions when pest evolve and the old one are no longer effective.

There is something called "integrated pest management" which seems to have potential to control pests without the arms race, but it isn't gaining acceptance very quickly in modern agriculture.. Perhaps because pesticides are so much easier to use in the short run. Wikipedia has an excellent article on IPM, with abundant references for further reading.

Seeds and Breeding

Traditionally farmers saved seed from this year's crop to plant the next year. Such seeds are what is known as a "landrace", well adapted to the local conditions, but still having quite a bit of diversity to cope with varying conditions. They practiced selective breeding—saving seeds from plants with the desired characteristics, so that the landrace improved. Using this technique, domesticated plants underwent some pretty drastic improvements over their wild ancestors. The same can be said of the animals we have domesticated and selectively bred.

Modern plant breeding, developing along with the science of genetics, found new ways to increase variation and select for desired traits.

One of the major advances of the twentieth century was hybrid seed: two inbred strains of a crop are crossed, producing a hybrid with greatly improved characteristics. The large increases in yields during the latter half the last century (the green revolution) were achieved through the use of hybrid seeds.

There are a couple of downsides to hybrid seed:

  • the improved characteristics are not preserved in the next generation of plants, so farmers can't save their own seed and must buy new seed each year, an added cost and off-farm
  • dependence. In the context of modern farming, of course, this is not a major issue.
  • there is very little diversity within any particular strain of hybrid seed—all the plants grown from it are pretty much genetically identical. This means less resistance to pests and less resilience to varying growing conditions, compared to the traditional landraces.

It took only a few decades after the discovery of the molecular basis of genetic inheritance (DNA), before we began to directly engineer genes. Genetically modified crops offer great potential, even though most of the ones developed so far have been an integrated part of the "arms race" against pests. But it is possible to use genetic engineering to introduce almost any trait you might wish.

Genetically modified seeds have usually been welcomed by both modern and traditional farmers, who are a pragmatic lot. Organic farmers have greeted them with fear and loathing, which is largely unjustified. It is important to note that each new genetically modified organism is just that, a new organism, and needs to be to be evaluated on its own merits. But in the years since genetic engineering started our understanding of genetics has grown immensely and we now have a much better idea of what problems can be caused by inserting new genes in an organism. In fact, variations caused inadvertently by genetic engineering are no more than what occurs in conventional breeding techniques. It appears to be time for a relaxation of testing standards for genetically modified crops. The scientific consensus is that the genetically modified organisms that are currently available commercially posed no threat to human health and no more threat to the environment than any other aspect of agriculture. Which one must admit is not zero, but we're hardly going to give up on the whole project of agriculture at this point, not intentionally, anyway.

With all these advances in plant breeding, we have concentrated on producing new strains of crops which produce well when given ideal conditions: adequate water, no pests, and lots of fertilizer. Modern farming has succeeded so far by providing all these conditions. There is good reason to doubt that it can continue to do so, in the face of financial disruption, resource depletion and climate change. That being the case, it is likely time to switch the focus of plant breeding to coping with the challenges that lie ahead.

Meat

Humans are omnivores, and we certainly seem to have a built in love of meat. Traditionally farming included the raising of livestock and provided meat, though in relatively small amounts. Meat is a concentrated source of nutrition, easily digested when cooked, and it provides some nutrients that are hard to get from vegetarian sources.

Modern agriculture has responded to the demand for meat by industrializing its production in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations), making generous portions of meat available to all but the poorest of people in the developed nations. But it takes a lot of inputs, grain and soybeans mainly, and it is not good for the animals, who are grazers and evolved to eat grass, not grain.

Since it takes ten pounds of feed to produce one pound of beef (somewhat less for a pound of pork or poultry) this is a pretty inefficient way to feed people. If the food used to produce meat was used to feed people instead, we could feed a larger population. This is true on the whole and I would agree that we should stop using CAFOs to produce meat, and eat less meat on the whole. But there is considerable land that is not suitable other crops, but can grow pasture for animals. And grassland ecologies need herbivores, so they had might as well be used to feed people. Dairy and eggs can be raised on pasture as well, with only a small amount of grain added to increase production.

And as a the ocean fisheries become more depleted by over fishing, aquaculture offers a way to maintain that high protein food source.

Energy

Traditional farming uses mainly human and animal muscle power and very little in the way of other energy inputs. This is part of what limited the size of farms. My father did not acquire a tractor until the early 1950s, and managed to work a 100 acre farm with a team of 2 horses, but that is close to the limit.

Machinery powered by fossil fuels has greatly increased the amount of land that a farmer can work and freed up the 1/4 to 1/3 of farm land that had been used to grow feed for draught animals. This is what is meant when it is said that the efficiency of modern agriculture has greatly increased.

But labour efficiency is only one measure. if you look at energy efficiency, or EROEI, modern farming is much worse than traditional farming. For every unit of food energy produced, modern farming uses about 10 units of energy, mostly from fossil fuels. That's an EROEI of 0.1 — yes, "point one". This works well enough in a context of expensive labour and abundant and cheap fossil fuels.

But we are in a situation where energy is growing short in supply and we have an excess of people looking for work. It's well established that small farmers get better yields, so I think it's time we reconsidered the wholesale automation of farming. More on that in my next post.

Waste

Currently, about one third of food grown is wasted. When you start looking at different regions of the world, it is somewhat surprising that the less developed areas, where traditional agriculture is still practiced to a greater extent, actually waste less food per capita than the developed parts of the world. And there is a much less waste once food reaches the consumer. I would guess this is because poorer consumers simply can't afford to waste food.

In the developed world where modern agriculture dominates, even with better equipment for harvesting, shipping and storing food, there is still more waste per capita in those stages of the process than in the less developed parts of the world. And consumers in the developed world, who can afford to be lazy about making every crumb of food count, waste even more again.

Tempting as it is to think about eliminating waste altogether, it probably isn't realistic and more important, optimizing for efficiency tends to make a system less resilient. Our food system is going to face a lot of challenges in the next few decades from things like climate change, resource depletion and financial breakdown. It would be a good idea to leave some slack in the system, rather than optimizing it to the point where it is extremely fragile.

Finance

Traditional agriculture was (and still is) mainly a subsistence activity—even when it produces a surplus to support the rest of society, traditional farmers usually eat what they grew and grow much of what they eat. Most of the inputs for traditional farming come from the farm itself and this sort of farming is not highly dependent on the financial system for its continued operation

This is not the case with modern agriculture. Machinery, fuel, seed, fertilizer, pesticides and labour all must be purchased before a crop can go in the ground, and credit from the bank is necessary to get the process going. Farmers also rely on markets which are part of the financial system to sell their crops. When the financial system is not functioning well, modern farming suffers.

Well, I could go on at considerably more length, but I think the information I presented here sets us up nicely for my next post, in which I will discuss what lies ahead for agriculture. And returning to the theme of political fantasy, I'll consider what governments can do to improve the situation.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Political Fantasy" posts, here is a complete set of links.

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Thursday, 3 December 2015

A Political Fantasy, Part 6: Agriculture, an Overview

In this series of "Political Fantasy" posts I've been talking about how enlightened government policy could smooth the upcoming transition to a sustainable, low energy economy. Of course, this is clearly a fantasy, since political realities make it extremely unlikely that governments will do anything but continue to support "business as usual". It's a nice fantasy to play with though, and I find it a good way to discuss the issues that we'll have to deal with ourselves when it finally becomes clear that our governments aren't coping effectively.

Long time readers of this blog are aware that I see climate change, resource depletion and fundamentally flawed economic systems leading to a slow collapse of industrial civilization. This collapse is, in fact, already underway and it is not something we can fix or avoid. We just have to adapt to it as best we can. That's where the "sustainable, low energy economy" comes in.

We'll have to switch over to renewable energy sources and this is going to leave us with a lot less energy to work with, 10 to 20% as much as we are currently using. In my last post I talked about how various sectors of our economy will adapt to use less energy. The big one that I left out, and promised I'd cover soon, was agriculture.

Turns out, I have a lot to say about this subject. Enough, it seems, for 3 posts rather than just one. In this first post of the three, I'll give a quick overview of the subject.

The modern industrial agriculture which dominates food production in the developed world and is currently striving for a similar position in the developing world, is not well suited to adapt to the challenges that lie ahead of us. It is just one more industry doing its best to continue with business as usual and headed directly towards disaster because of it. One expects that, because people do need to eat, governments will make some particularly heroic and misguided efforts to keep industrial agriculture going, when what they need to do is lead the transition to a more sustainable way of feeding ourselves. Unfortunately, the word "sustainable" has seen so much abuse that it's going to take a bit of effort to explain what I mean by that.

The subject of agriculture and food has become very much politicized, with various different ideologies determined to win the argument regardless of what the facts, evidence or reasonable scientific conclusions might indicate. A number of "hot button" issues, false dichotomies, really, have become central to the debate, even though they are not even close to the main things we should be worried about. I firmly believe that whenever you see a situation being described as a conflict between opposing two sides, what you are actually seeing is a set of distortions that do not accurately reflect a much more complex reality. These distortions have been created by people who have chosen up sides and are determined to have their side win, regardless of the consequences.

These ideologies are supported by all sorts of biases and fallacies and by what I call framing errors—focusing on the part of the situation that suits your argument, drawing a frame around it that excludes the inconvenient facts that would favour the other side, or perhaps even discredit both sides. I'll try to avoid such distortions in what follows.

Today's agricultural discussion tends to be framed as industrial versus organic, but this is in itself a distortion. With apologies to many friends, gardeners and farmers, who are practicing sustainable agriculture and calling it "organic" with the best of intentions, the label has been co-opted over the last few decades by a branch of industrial agriculture which uses the positive connotations of the word "organic" to get better prices for their "organically" grown products. In other words, organic food has become little more than a lucrative marketing strategy. Just about the only difference between these people and the rest of industrial agriculture is that the pesticides they use are from a list which is supposedly "naturally sourced". But the chemicals on this list are in many cases more toxic, less specific and more persistent in the environment than the synthetic pesticides used by non-organic farmers. If you take a close look at that list, you'll quickly become confused about what the words "natural" and "organic" actually mean. In their current usage, they don't mean very much. other than what suits the business plans of those "industrial" organic farmers.

The fallacy here is known as an "appeal to nature", and is based on the idea that anything which is "natural" must be good, particularly when it comes to food and the sorts of "chemicals" which are used in agriculture. Of course all matter is made up of chemicals, but what the people who fall for this fallacy mean is "synthetic chemicals". A couple of centuries ago people believed that it wasn't possible to synthesize the chemicals involved in life, but this was soon proved wrong. Today, with sufficient effort, any naturally occurring chemical can be synthesized, so the distinction is largely meaningless. Further, there are many naturally occurring chemicals which are highly toxic and many synthetics which are of low toxicity and considerable utility.

Another fallacy is that there is no safe dose of harmful chemicals, however small. In fact, toxicity is indeed determined by dose. The level of pesticides that one is exposed to via food is so low as to be of no concern—and that is true whether the food is grown conventionally or organically. Exposure of agriculture workers is another matter and one of real concern.

In my experience, the people who are most in love with the idea that "nature is good" are city dwellers who have very little contact with nature. When they think of nature, they are picturing a park, the sort of place they imagine people lived before modern civilization came along and disturbed things. Of course, this is pretty far from the truth. Humans haven't lived naturally since we started to use fire and make tools, around 2 million years ago.

People who have more experience with nature have more respect for it and are well aware that that it can be powerfully destructive. Mankind is definitely part of nature, but the idea that there is a "balance of nature" and that we once lived in harmony with it is in itself a fallacy. Nature is always being disturbed and responds by moving toward a new equilibrium, only to be disturbed again and so on. Today humanity is doing much of the disturbing and it looks we may well come out on the short end of the changes we are causing. But nature doesn't care.

So, I think it would be much better to discuss agriculture as modern versus traditional, since this is where the real conflict is going on in the world today. But even then, we'll see that neither side is really sustainable. What we very much need in order to feed the world's population in the decades and centuries ahead is something new.

According to UN compiled numbers, modern industrial agriculture feeds about 30% of the world's population while consuming 70 percent of the resources used by agriculture. The other 70% are fed by traditional agriculture, using the other 30% of the resources. For these purposes traditional agriculture includes urban gardening, gathering, hunting and fishing. A little arithmetic shows that modern agriculture uses about 5.4 times as many resources as traditional agriculture for each person fed. If we were to completely replace traditional agriculture with modern agriculture, we'd need about 4.5 times as many resources as are currently being used to feed humanity. There simply aren't that many resources available, nowhere near it.

Why then are so many people in favour of expanding modern industrial agriculture and eliminating traditional agriculture? Based on the numbers in that last paragraph, it might seem that we should be doing just the opposite. It's not that simple, of course. Modern agriculture gets higher yields per acre than tradition agriculture, by about 33%. So, doing a little arithmetic again, we see that by these numbers, if we switched over completely to traditional agricultural techniques, we could only feed about 92.5% of our current population. Where modern agriculture, if it were to replace traditional agriculture entirely, could feed about 20% more people than the current population of 7 billion.

That amounts to about 8.6 billion people, still not as many as the 9 billion that the UN predicts we'll have the 2050, but close. And so the business as usual people are keen to expand modern agriculture—they promise that with a few refinements, modern agriculture could feed 9 billion or more people. No doubt it helps that there are profits to be made while doing this. But of course to support this plan requires that you have a complete blind spot for resource depletion and the limits to growth. That you completely ignore sustainability, in other words. And the opposite of sustainable is terminal.

Traditional agriculture isn't fully sustainable either, and neither of these approaches to feeding mankind has the flexibility and resiliency needed to cope with climate change. So, to be honest, we need both fewer people and a new approach to farming that requires much less in the way of inputs and can still function when the climate is much less reliable. I suspect the UN's population predictions are ridiculously optimistic, no doubt based on "all other things being equal". It won't take a lot of ingenuity to get fewer people— war, epidemics and famine will do the trick just fine it we continue on as we are today, though admittedly with much more misery than is really necessary. Educating and empowering women and giving them control of their reproductive lives would be a much better plan, but there is some doubt that it will be applied soon enough.

Fixing our agriculture system is going to be a much taller order. And that's what I'd like to talk about now.

It is important to consider a farm as an integral part of the ecosystem it occurs in. And in order to understand an ecosystem it is useful to be aware of the flows of energy and materials within it. I've talked a great deal about energy and EROEI in this blog already, but I've said relatively little about the role of material resources in the economy. To really understand agriculture, we have to look at how it uses material resources as well as how it uses energy.

Energy flows through a system from higher or more concentrated places to lower or less concentrated places. On the way through, some fraction of that energy can be harnessed to do work, but once it is gone, it's gone. The concept of EROEI applies to the survival of plants and animals just as it does to industries and economies. Every living organism must collect as much or more energy than it needs to live and produce offspring, or it will not manage to survive and reproduce.

Material resources work differently. Materials usually don't flow into an ecosystem in any great quantity and if you don't want to quickly run out of vital resources, it is important that they do not flow out after their initial use, but are reused again and again. I first came upon these ideas about how energy and matter flow in ecosystems in a blog post by John Michael Greer, and I want to give him full credit for introducing me to the concept.

It is interesting to note that modern industrial systems, agriculture included, in addition to being extremely profligate in their use of energy, often take a "once through" approach to the use of materials. Materials come in from what are viewed as bottomless sources and eventually flow out to become waste in what are viewed as infinitely large sinks. Both those views are wrong. Since the most easily accessed resources are used first, when they are depleted we turn to less readily accessible resources, which are more expensive. Eventually, this starts to affect the economic viability of the industries involved. Economists would have us believe we can always find a substitute for any material that is becoming seriously depleted. Sadly, it just isn't so. Nor is it so that there is an infinitely large place called "away", which can just go on forever, absorbing our waste without negative effects.

For millions of years our ancestors fed themselves by hunting and gathering, which worked with an EROEI of around 10. This was a highly skilled way of making one's livelihood and usually fairly low in yield, supporting only very spread out populations which had to move around a lot. It was also at the mercy of weather and variations in the populations of edible plants and prey animals. But hunter/gatherers did succeed in spreading to every continent (except Antarctica) with no more than stone age technology and they did it while working fewer hours per week than most of us do today.

Starting as long ago as 9500 BCE, agriculture was invented independently in half a dozen different areas around the world. Agriculture has a lower EROEI than hunting and gathering because it is more complex, but it does give higher yields in smaller areas, which enabled the development of more complex societies. For many of the people involved this was not necessarily an improvement. But for those in charge, it certainly was.

It is interesting to note that during history, many civilizations that practiced unsustainable agriculture and forestry eventually collapsed. That is, after all, the definition of unsustainability. But regardless of that, we eventually ended up where we were a couple of hundred years ago, just before industrialization started. The EROEI of pre-industrial agricultural systems was around 6. Much of this traditional agriculture was not sustainable and even where it was, it already supported just about the maximum population that it could.

Looking at this situation Thomas Malthus said, "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." He predicted that if the growth of population was not restricted, it would eventually outgrow the means of supporting it. This makes complete sense to me, but two centuries later, we can see that Malthus' predictions have not come true, and we seem to be doing fairly well, even with 7 billion mouths to feed and growing. How can this be so? Well, like most of the changes in our society over the last 200 years, it's mainly down to fossils fuels, and the cheap abundant energy they have provided.

The industrialization of our society, driven by that abundant cheap energy, greatly improved our standard of living. This made possible improved nutrition, cleaner water supplies, better sanitation and medical advances including vaccines which resulted in a quickly growing population, mainly due to reduced infant mortality.

The increased agricultural output which has enabled us to feed that ever growing human population has been due mainly to the industrialization of agriculture. And I want to make it clear here that this is not a rant against farmers. I grew up on a farm and think that farming is a fine way of life. But farming, like every other branch of industry during the last couple of centuries, was caught up in the seemingly endless growth driven by cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels. This growth was effectively an irresistible force—it did no good to talk about limits to growth or sustainability, the individual people caught up in this process had very little choice. And if they did choose not to take part, others were lined up to take their place.

In my next post, I'll be going into considerable detail about the changes that took place in agriculture over the last two centuries and where that leaves us now. In the post after that, I'll talk about what lies ahead for food and farming.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Political Fantasy" posts, here is a complete set of links.

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