Showing posts with label overpopulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label overpopulation. Show all posts

Wednesday, 22 June 2022

Time for Change, Part 4—Conclusions

Weavers Creek Falls
Harrison Park, Owen Sound, Ontario

This is the fourth of several posts that I would have preferred to publish all at once, were it not for the extreme length of such a piece. It will make more sense if you go back and read the whole series, starting with the first one, if you have not already done so. Maybe even if you have already done so, since it has been months between each of the posts. For those who don't want to re-read the whole series, and since this is the last post, I'll summarize somewhat less briefly than I did in earlier posts. If you want to skip it, click here.

Overpopulation and overconsumption (and their consequences) are the most serious problems that we face today. Overpopulation is going to take decades to solve, while overconsumption could be addressed quite quickly if certain obstacles could be gotten out of the way. By reducing our level of consumption, we could reduce our impact on the planet and give ourselves time to reduce our population.

The blame for overconsumption can be laid squarely at the feet of capitalism, with its insatiable hunger to accumulate wealth, its inescapable need for endless growth, its inability to tackle any problem that can't be solved by making a profit and its endlessly blaring marketing machine which convinces us that we must consume, consume, consume. It is important to note that the majority of that consumption is done by a minority of people, the top ten to twenty percent of the richest people in the world. Sadly, I am part of that group and I suspect that many of my readers are as well, even though we wouldn't call ourselves "rich".

Many would lay the blame at the feet of individual people who are greedy, weak and undisciplined. I would say that if you take away the influence of capitalism, you would hardly recognize those people, and they would no longer be causing consumption problems. Solving them, more likely.

In a previous post where I looked at the problems with industrialization, I promised to have a more detailed look at our financial systems and our governments.

In this new series (Time for Change) I am finally doing that.

In Part 1 we looked at our financial system and saw that money is a tool that facilitates the accumulation of wealth by capitalists, and a mechanism by which they control the rest of us. It does this by making it possible to keep score in the complex game that is our economy, and pretty much guarantees that the wealthy win. Unfortunately, our financial system creates money as debt, which must be paid back with interest. In order to do that, the economy must continually grow or it will collapse. At the same time, the inevitable consequence of continued growth on a finite planet is also collapse.

But we can do without money and more importantly without keeping score. We need to get rid of money, the financial system and capitalism, and replace them with a system where each of us contributes according to our abilities and receives according to our needs, without keeping track of who is ahead or behind.

If this sounds like some sort of communism, you are right and that is exactly what we need. But anarchistic communism, rather than the autoritarian communism of the twentieth century.

In Part 2 I discussed the problems with hierarchies, especially with capitalism co-opting governments. The point being that hierarchies and capitalism are potent, and mutually reinforcing, agents of overconsumption.

For my purposes here, a hierarchy is an organization divided into different levels, with direction and co-ordination flowing down from above and wealth flowing up from below. A hierarchy is built like a pyramid, with many people at the bottom and only a very few at the top. There are serious problems with this way of organizing a society.

Like money, hierarchy is a tool designed for the benefit of certain people (those at the top), to be used by them to secure their power, wealth and privileges, and to keep the rest of us in the position where we "belong"—lower down in the hierarchy. In the process, we are prevented from ever realizing that there is any viable alternative. Our civilization is so big and complex only because it has to support hierarchies. If we didn't have to maintain hierarchies for the benefit of those at the top of them, we could adequately take care of ourselves with much simpler organizations, in smaller groups, at less expense—in other words, with less consumption. I usually refer to this phenomenon as the "diseconomies" of scale—the opposite of economies of scale. Economies of scale do exist, of course, but beyond a certain point the organizational costs swamp out the advantages of size. And that point is surprisingly small.

In Part 3 I asked three questions:

1) Are human beings naturally hierarchical? Are we doomed to drift back into a hierarchical organization even if we successfully get rid of today's hierarchies?

In brief, while it is easy for human societies to fall into the hierarchy trap and suffer for it, we evolved living in small egalitarian groups and have many adaptations which make us good at that way of life and also make it good for us.

2) Are there viable alternatives? That is, are hierarchies necessary when we organize ourselves into large groups and take on large projects, or are there others ways?

Hierarchies exist mostly for their own benefit, justified without really being justifiable, and the size of many of our endeavours is more a result of hierarchical organization than the needs of the actual work. There are other perfectly workable ways of organizing our efforts without hierarchies.

The owners, at the top of hierarchies, contribute very little that is of any real use, and most undertakings would work much better if owned by the workers and/or the people who consume their products. On the next level(s) down from the top, people are doing "coordinating work", and I'll admit that much of it is necessary. But it could just as easily be done by the actual working people, as part of their jobs. This sort of self-management would work better, and result in a greater sense of ownership and empowerment for the workers.

I left my third question for today.

3) Given the strengths of today's hierarchies and capitalism, and their success at propaganda, is there any hope that we can get rid of them?

Now that we are aware that hierarchies and capitalism cause more trouble than they are worth and indeed are the main obstacles to solving our most serious problems, we are left with the task of getting rid of them. In other words, removing the people who are running the world today, and who are highly skilled at convincing us that this is the best possible world and that making any major changes would be a mistake. This appears, at first glance, to be a pretty tall order.

After thinking about this question for quite some time, I reminded myself that this blog is about the collapse of our global industrial civilization, or "Business as Usual" (which I will shorten to BAU in what follows). The hierarchies and capitalism I have been talking about are essential parts of BAU, and are collapsing along with it. Only in the context of that collapse is it possible to see what we should do about hierarchies and capitalism. It seems that collapse is going to take care of some of the heavy lifting for us. The devil, of course, is in the details.

The Collapse of BAU

It is critical to remember that collapse is not a singular event, but an on-going process. I have said it before, but it bears repeating—what we face is a continued slow, uneven, unsteady and unequal collapse with occasional recoveries along the way, similar to what we have experienced over the last few decades, but getting worse as we go along. This collapse has been going on since the early 1970s, and has a way to go yet.

By uneven, I mean geographically. This is a large planet and despite the interconnectedness of our current system, it is not all going to fall apart at once. Even today, we can see that some areas are suffering greatly, while others continue on as if nothing much is wrong. Of course, as time passes, more areas will suffer and fewer will be left untouched.

By unsteady, I mean chronologically. Collapse goes in fits and starts, with periods where nothing much changes and even occasional partial recoveries.

By unequal, I mean that collapse affects those of different social classes differently. For the most part this means that the lower classes will suffer more from collapse, but it is not always necessarily so. The lower classes have lots of experience in dealing with difficulties—collapse is really just more of the same old shit for them. For the upper classes, such difficulties are new and they are lacking in the skills and mental preparation to cope.

Many people are in a state of denial about collapse. As the process continues, more people will have the opportunity to experience it personally or at least see it taking place nearby, and realize that it really is happening. Many will gain experience coping with temporary failures of infrastructure, supply chains and the financial sector. This will provide motivation to prepare not just by stocking up on supplies and tools, but by networking and starting to build the communities that can eventually replace the current system.

It might seem that the easiest way to get rid of hierarchies and capitalism would be to just let the present system collapse and then step in to build a better one. It's not quite that simple, though. Currently, BAU supplies us with the necessities of life, not because that is a good thing to do, but because it has been a good way to make a profit. It is certain that as the system continues to collapse, this business sector will become less profitable even as prices increase beyond what most people can afford. Capitalism will gradually abandon it, leaving more and more people to their own devices. If we just wait for BAU to collapse, we'll likely starve and freeze in the dark while we wait.

What to do about collapse

Clearly, that is to be avoided. What you want to do is to wait until the local system has collapsed far enough that it doesn't have the wherewithal to successfully oppose you, but you still have the resources to build something to replace it. Of course, you'll want to replace it with something that can function autonomously from the system that is falling apart around it, and works "better" than that system. In some cases, your local government will actually be helpful and support a smoother transition. In other cases, they will hinder you and may even have to be opposed violently.

In any case, while you are waiting you shouldn't be idle—there are many useful things you can do.

A while back I wrote a whole series of posts on preparing for/responding to collapse. Naturally, I would suggest that you read it, but there are some specific elements of such preparation that I want to look at in more detail here.

The first is to get a head start on building the community that you'll need to replace BAU. By that, I mean the organizations like solidarity networks, mutual aid societies and so forth. A large part of that will be learning how to make them work and how to function as an individual within them. We currently live in a society where toxic individualism is rampant and we have been brainwashed to think that no other way of life is possible.

Whatever they have told you, things like co-operation, mutual aid and direct democracy are all powerful ways for people to organize themselves and reduce their dependency on BAU. In groups that practice mutual aid, everyone ends up doing better than they could have individually. Even the strong and skillful, who do not perhaps need as much help as others, still end up better off than they would have without the group. Yes, they will likely end up doing more than some of the other people involved—but still less than what they would have had to do by themselves.

And yes, there will be a few who will take advantage and arrange an easy ride for themselves, but in the small groups where mutual aid works best, it is pretty obvious when someone is slacking off. Shame is an effective tool to encourage them to contribute and most will either mend their ways or leave. The cost of supporting the very few who don't is not nearly enough to outweigh the benefits of being part of the group.

To succeed, such community building efforts need to be based on clear and present needs. If you're living in an area where collapse has not yet struck, where BAU is still "working" fairly well, then trying to put a community together because you think it will be needed someday isn't going to work. Those involved (including you) simply won't have the motivation to make it work, to stay together, when there are easier alternatives all around you. Especially when that community is made up of people who haven't yet had much practice at such things. A quick look at the history of intentional communities will show how hard it is to succeed at this.

So first, take every opportunity to work, and play, with people in your community. Build a network of friends and acquaintances. Get a reputation for contributing, reciprocating and carrying your weight. Then, when the need arises, you can get together with people you already know and respond more effectively.

Many kollapsniks recommend withdrawing from our present society, but I would suggest just the opposite. You should be socially and politically active. Ideally, you want to live in a society which will collapse as gently as possible, providing a solid social safety net and encouraging and supporting your community building efforts. You need to work to ensure that the society you are living in is as much like that as possible.

In my opinion, such societies are on the left side of center politically. An example would be the contrast between Pierre Trudeau's government back in the day here in Canada encouraging and actually subsidizing housing co-ops versus the red state city in the U.S. that has recently made having roommates illegal. My point being that better governments will welcome efforts by people to be self sufficient, and will set things up to make it easier to do so.

Progressive social democracies do their best to help oppressed minorities and will do a better job of supporting all their citizens as things get worse. They will be easier places to practice mutual aid. They will also be more willing to abandon BAU to at least some extent as it malfunctions more and more. This will include reducing the burning fossil fuels, reducing carbon emissions, reducing the amount of damage we are doing to the biosphere and changing the way we use materials to conserve dwindling non-renewable resources as much as possible.

Societies on the right side of center will do everything they can to keep BAU working for as long as possible, regardless of the consequences, and to maintain capitalism's control over working class people, preventing us from gaining any degree of independence and from building our own organizations. These regressive, conservative societies are much easier to fall out the bottom of and will actively discourage groups coming together to practice mutual aid. And because they will also stick rigidly to BAU for as long as possible, they will do a good bit of damage in the process, ensuring that collapse is deeper and harder than it needs to be.

Such societies promote the traditional working class to the petit bourgeoisie, so that they come to identify with the upper classes, seeing themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" who are not interested in solidarity with other working class people. This results in behaviors that are clearly against their own best interests, especially when it comes time to vote. They are willing to go as far to the right as it takes to protect their perceived entitlements. Ironically, modern business unions are also part of this regressive effort.

The result is an almost universal drift to the right politically—exactly the opposite direction from what we would prefer. A big part of our work will be to oppose that drift.

As times get worse, people look for politicians who can promise them some relief. Right wing politicians are always ready to do this, and as their promises do not involve giving up on BAU, or even any change in our lifestyles, they are popular at election time. I predict that we will go through a few more decades of rightward drift, ending up with outright fascism in many cases. Indeed this trend will be a major part of the collapse of our societies, since those right wing politicians won't be able to keep their promises, if they ever intended to do so in the first place. We need to be very suspicious of politicians offering easy solutions.

Of course, we have already tried fascism—really tried it—and it really didn't work. Read up on the history of Germany, Italy and Spain in the twentieth century. I don't expect it will work any better this time around when the underlying problems are considerably worse than they were a century ago. The right wing regimes will weaken and people will eventually rise up to get rid of them. Sadly, there will be a lot of suffering involved in this process. However, when it is over, another generation will have seen up close what's wrong with right wing politics and fascism in particular and will refuse to give such ideologies even a moment of their time. Really though, we could save ourselves a lot of trouble if we could avoid being fooled by the "rightists" in the first place.

Collapse will be less destructive in those places that started out further to the left, and managed, at least to some extent, to stay that way. Based on what I've just said about right and left wing governments, it is tempting to look ahead to a future consisting of one of two extremes:

1) People become more aware of what is happening and insist on change, leading to a soft and controlled decline, with a smaller population and a lower rate of consumption that is within the planet's carrying capacity. Not much more damage would be done to the biosphere than we have already done and not too many more non-renewable resources would be used up, leaving the world a more survivable place. Unfortunately, this seems improbable, as most of the people who are currently running things will fight it every step of the way.

2) We refuse to accept that the system isn't working and put every effort into keeping BAU going until the very last possible moment, resulting in a deep, hard collapse which will wipe out most of mankind, do far more damage to the biosphere than option 1 and use up even more of the remaining non-renewable resources. This sort of collapse would be much harder for any survivors. Sadly, it seems quite likely.

I am always suspicious, though, when situations are framed in terms of two irreconcilable extremes. This sort of polarized thinking blinds you to many other possibilities. A great many (and more realistic) futures lay on spectrum ranging between those two extremes, and even on spectrums that run between different points altogether and in different directions.

Not all people are helpless (far from it), nor are they incapable of imagining different and better ways of living. I think it is important to allow dissensus, letting people hold different opinions and try different things. We should agree to disagree, and wish each other well along the way, even offering to help when it is to our mutual advantage. Then we can observe what does and does not work. Realistically, many people will get their timing or their organizations (or both) wrong, and will have a much harder time of it than needs be. Others will do better, and in the process, they will learn a great deal. That is, perhaps, the best we can hope for.

Some people, of course, won't be willing to go along with dissensus, and will try to force the rest of us to see things their way and do what they want. Such folks, if they take their shenanigans far enough, are worthy of our active opposition. Even so, the fast and violent collapse you read about in collapse fiction is just that, fiction. While it certainly makes for thrilling stories, it's not very realistic. We just won't have the resources available to spend on extensive conflict.

What I've been try to point out in these last few posts is there are many things that we have tried repeatedly and that just don't work—hierarchies, capitalism and money to mention just a few. We'd be best to leave them on the junk heap of the past and carry on with things that we know do work—solidarity, co-operation, mutual aid, direct democracy, self management and community ownership of resources.

Some people would suggest taking action to help speed up collapse. I do NOT think this is a good idea. It would mean doing actual harm, and that harm will be felt most acutely by those at the bottom of the heap, who are already suffering more than the rest of us.

There is always more to say, but I think this would be a good place to wrap up this set of posts. At one point I promised to talk about the third item in the I=PAT equation—technology. When I finally get inspired to write about that, it can go in a standalone post and doesn't need to be tacked onto the end of this series.

The other thing I have been thinking about is writing some fiction. I have not written any fiction since I was in high school (50 plus years ago), so it would be nice to give it a go again. Story telling is a big part of human communication, and might serve as a better way of getting across some of the ideas that I'd like to share.  

During the last couple of years I've been reading a number of very interesting books and websites, which bear upon what we are discussing. Here is a list of these, along with a few that I've read previously, but that also have been a help.

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), by Dean Spade

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.

Fascism Today: What It Is and How To End It, by Shane Burley

A detailed map of the far right and a game plan for building the mass movement that will stop it.

We can no longer ignore the fact that fascism is on the rise in the United States. What was once a fringe movement has been gaining cultural acceptance and political power for years. Rebranding itself as "alt-right" and riding the waves of both Donald Trump's hate-fueled populism and the anxiety of an abandoned working class, they have created a social force that has the ability to win elections and inspire racist street violence in equal measure.

Fascism Today looks at the changing world of the far right in Donald Trump's America. Examining the modern fascist movement's various strains, Shane Burley has written an accessible primer about what its adherents believe, how they organize, and what future they have in the United States. The ascension of Trump has introduced a whole new vocabulary into our political lexicon—white nationalism, race realism, Identitarianism, and a slew of others. Burley breaks it all down. From the tech-savvy trolls of the alt-right to esoteric Aryan mystics, from full-fledged Nazis to well-groomed neofascists like Richard Spencer, he shows how these racists and authoritarians have reinvented themselves in order to recruit new members and grow.

Just as importantly, Fascism Today shows how they can be fought and beaten. It highlights groups that have successfully opposed these twisted forces and outlines the elements needed to build powerful mass movements to confront the institutionalization of fascist ideas, protect marginalized communities, and ultimately stop the fascist threat.

Debt, The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber

Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, by Christopher Boehm

The Art of Not Being Governed, by James C. Scott

Against the Grain, a deep history of the earliest states, by James C. Scott

Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid, by Andrej Grubacic

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World, by Michael Albert

Balancing Two Worlds: Jean-Baptiste Assiginack and the Odawa Nation, 1768-1866, by Cecil King

Websites


Links to the rest of this series of posts:
Collapse, you say? / Time for Change

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Wednesday, 5 January 2022

Collapse You Say, Part 10/Time for Change, Part 1: Money

Waves, rocks and ice on the Lake Huron shore

Earlier in this series (Parts 5 and 6) I looked at overpopulation and overconsumption and concluded that while both are serious problems, overpopulation is going to take decades to solve, while overconsumption could be addressed quite quickly. By reducing our level of consumption, we would reduce our impact on the planet and give ourselves time to reduce our population.

In my last post I looked at some of the unintended and negative consequences of the industrialization we've experienced over the last few centuries. I concluded that most of the blame for overconsumption can be laid squarely at the feet of capitalism, with its insatiable hunger to accumulate wealth, its inescapable need for endless growth, and its inability to tackle any problem that can't be solved by making a profit. These days some people are calling capitalism a "death cult", based on those characteristics and the fact that we live on a finite planet. I think they are quite right to do so.

Clearly, the blame for overconsumption should not fall on the supposed innate greed and materialism of individual, ordinary people. The upper classes (mainly capitalists) are superlative consumers and do a great deal of harm themselves. And their marketing efforts have turned the rest of us into pretty good consumers, too. Turn off their incessantly blaring marketing machine and things would be quite different—reducing consumption would look at lot more doable. We'd have a real chance of solving both of our major problems (overpopulation and overconsumption), getting ourselves out of overshoot and avoiding at least part of the die-off that is currently looming ahead of us.

It seems that at this point in this series of posts I am done trying to show that collapse is real and I'm ready to look at what we can do about it. And that is why I am changing the name of this series in the middle of it. It is, indeed "time for change". In truth, I probably should have made the name change starting at Part 7, but it's too late for that now.

Of course, many people in the "collapse sphere" will tell you that what we face is a predicament, not a problem—in the sense that it can't be solved, only adapted to. To those folks I would say, relax—I agree. My idea of a solution to the problems facing us is for us to adapt to them, and that adaptation will probably look a lot like collapse to many of you. We need to have fewer people, all consuming at lower levels that can be sustained by the biosphere, and we must start using up non-renewable resources at a drastically lower rate, until we can manage to replace them with renewables. To quote John Michael Greer, we need to get by with LESS—less energy, less stuff, less stimulation (entertainment). If we choose to do nothing, we'll get there via a brutally hard and deep collapse. But if we deliberately work at adapting instead of trying to save "business as usual", we can get there by a much gentler route, with a lot less grief, and with a better outcome at the end. Still involving major changes to our supposedly "non-negotiable" lifestyles, though.

At the end of my last post (months ago) I promised to tie up a couple of loose ends in my discussion of finance and government, and to talk about how to solve our overconsumption problem by getting rid of capitalism. Over these last few months, I've come up with a wealth of material on these topics and so what was to have been a single post will now be broken up into at least three: I'll be talking about money (finance) today, hierarchies (government) in my next post and what to do about capitalism in the one after that.

Money

Money is a tool and, like all technology, it is not neutral but is designed to be used by certain people for a certain purpose. Money is used by rich people to make more money—to accumulate wealth, and to control poor people. Sure, it can be adapted to other purposes, but I don't believe we can ever stop it from being used for those basic, inherent purposes.

If you study basic economics, you'll be told that money has three primary uses: as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. All three of those really just amount to keeping score in the complex game that is our economy. That score keeping is done in ways that facilitate the business of accumulating wealth. This helps those with lots of money get more of it, and works against those with little. We are told that not keeping score would be even worse, but the more I look into it, the less reason I see to believe that.

Capitalism started out with capitalists using their own money to build infrastructure (factories, mines, railways, etc.) to build stuff, which could then be sold for a profit. This soon changed to using borrowed money to do the same. The banks did very well on that, and before long the other capitalists saw that it is possible to use money directly to make more money, dispensing with factories and production of physical goods. This is known as "financialization" and while there are still lots of factories, making lots of stuff (much of it unnecessary), the financial sector is in some ways the business success story of the last century.

Unfortunately, our financial system creates money as debt, which must be paid back with interest. In order to do that, the economy must continually grow. If growth stops or even slows down, it collapses. At the same time, the eventual consequence of growth is also collapse.

The other primary use of money is as a tool for social control. Everything we need has been monetized—the only way to obtain the necessities of life (and much else) is to pay for them with money. Only a very few people live self-sufficiently today, outside of this system. The rest of us need money to live, and a job to obtain that money. In capitalist societies, most of the value created by your work goes to the capitalists, with as little as possible going to you as wages. This makes it challenging to get ahead.

During my lifetime, it stopped being possible to save up enough money to buy large ticket items like an education, a car, a house and so forth. For most people, especially those without rich parents, such things are necessities and can only be had by going into debt to get the required money up front. And it is getting harder and harder to pay back that debt. But that debt must be paid back is a strong value in our culture. To declare bankruptcy and effectively have your debts forgiven means losing essentially everything you have worked for. This leaves us in a position of being under the control of the banks, with very little that we can do about it.

If you look closely, though, you'll see that while not paying debts has nasty consequences for the lower classes, people in the upper classes can often come to some other arrangement if their debts become too onerous. In particular, capitalists whose businesses fail often walk away with little or no consequences since those businesses are set up as corporations with "limited liability".

So, it's pretty clear that in any society that uses money (keeps score) and makes accumulation of wealth a goal, the result will be ever growing inequality between the upper classes and everyone else. In the past, many societies that used money and debt, even without capitalism in the modern sense of the word, found that for the lower classes debt grew over the years until it crippled society. That was because the lower classes played an important part in those societies and when they were crushed under a mountain of debt, the whole society was negatively affected. It was necessary to have a "jubilee" every so often and forgive debts in order to get things working again.

But under modern capitalism, that's never going to happen—the lower classes are, to an ever greater extent, seen as not having an important role to play. Much of traditional work has been replaced by automation. If we are crippled by debt, it doesn't immediately bring our whole society to a halt. Indeed, much of that debt is held by the upper classes, who see it as a benefit. For the rest of us, debt offers a means to allow us to continue consuming, borrowing money just to give it back to the capitalists, with little time for thought about long term consequences.

Most of us are like fish swimming in a sea of money and monetary concerns, unaware that there is any alternative. We are certainly told that there is not. But we need to ask ourselves if money and this whole "keeping score" thing is beneficial or even necessary? Is there any way we could manage to get by without money?

Economists will tell you that money was invented to get away from the inconveniences of barter. But anthropologists who have actually studied pre-monetary societies, would tell you that that is nonsense—barter was used rarely, mainly for trading with strangers. Inside a community, among people who know each other, there are ways of living without money or barter. We'll go into more detail on that in a bit.

Conservative moralists, who have a great deal of influence these days, are concerned about "moral hazard"—telling us that keeping score using money is necessary to maintain fairness, and make sure that people don't take advantage of each other. In fact, very few people do take advantage. And keeping score mostly leads to growing inequality, which is in itself unfair.

And, of course, accountants would have us believe that the whole of modern civilization would grind to a halt if their ledgers didn't balance.

That's all very convenient for those at the top who actually do benefit, but most of these things could be eliminated without hurting the rest of us. And what's really necessary could be rearranged to benefit us and not just the rich.

If we turn to the study of anthropology again, we find that quite frequently during our prehistory we lived in small egalitarian bands who did just fine without money and largely without keeping score. What little score keeping there was, was informal and aimed at censuring people who didn't share well, to prevent accumulation rather than facilitating it.

For such hunter gatherers getting an adequate supply of protein was often challenging and that is one reason why hunting larger game was done enthusiastically, even though it was often not very successful. Hunters were expected to share the meat when they did make a kill, and generally did so, without expecting thanks or any special treatment for making this contribution.

Scientists studying such societies have observed that altruism (sharing) is a strong part of the culture, and have been puzzled about how altruism could be selected for on an evolutionary basis. It would seem that any individual with an inclination to share would inevitably be taken advantage of by less altruistic people, and individuals with innate altruistic impulses would soon be selected out of the gene pool. And indeed they would have been, if selection was acting solely on individuals. But selection also acted on the level of bands, and bands whose members shared well did better and were selected for strongly enough that such behaviour was eventually evolved into human beings. Mutual aid is a powerful tool for achieving success in groups and a major factor in the evolution of many species, certainly including our own.

Even today one can observe that there is a great deal of benefit to acting on a basis of mutual aid, working together altruistically in groups. In societies such as ours where there seems to be an ethos against altruism (a la Ayn Rand), people still do act altruistically, often as if compelled to do so. This tends to reduce the effectiveness of money as a control mechanism, and so it is not popular with those in power, but it still happens. And even in large capitalistic companies, in those cases where people are still working together in groups, you will find a co-operative, egalitarian culture, because it is the best way of getting the work done. Of course, management prefers to isolate workers, so as to better control them. Solidarity is a dangerous thing, from management's viewpoint.

Hunter gatherers had very little in the way of possessions—their nomadic lifestyle didn't allow for much in the way of accumulation. So you might say that money would have been of little use to them anyway.

But many tribal societies practicing herding or even sedentary agriculture, who had more in the way of possessions, and more opportunity to accumulate wealth, often got along without money or score keeping as well. In some such cultures, when you compliment another's possession, the owner is obligated to give you that possession. Strange as it seems to us, this is the basis of exchange in these societies and it works just fine for them. Since everyone is subject to the same rules, being greedy backfires very quickly.

It has become clear to me that the concept of fairness is quite different between monetary and non-monetary cultures. Diametrically opposite, in fact.

In our monetary society, fairness means playing by the rules, rules that are intended to facilitate accumulation. Successful people are expected to accumulate wealth. Indeed that is our definition of success—we are taught to admire such people, and to aspire to be like them.

In pre-monetary societies, fairness meant behaving altruistically—sharing, being generous and serving the other people in your community rather than taking advantage of them. Because the groups were small, it was obvious to everyone when an individual failed to share and do their part, and such individuals faced censure from their fellows.

If they had kept score you would see that, over time, the rest of the community came to be more and more indebted to skilled people. To our modern eyes, it might seem like the less skilled were taking advantage of the more highly skilled, but they didn't see it that way. Indeed it was frowned upon for successful people to put on airs in such cultures, or to use their skills to accumulate wealth. They considered it their responsibility to support their community. It was seen as just what human beings do, to the extent of their abilities. And everyone expected that their needs would be seen to by their community, to the extent that was possible. The result of all this was strongly beneficial to the community as a whole, including those we might see as being taken advantage of.

If that sounds like communism to you —from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs—you're right. That is exactly what it was, and a good thing, too.

Occasionally, in our lengthy pre-historic past, the idea of money (or at least the concept of credit) was adopted by various cultures. It caught on pretty quickly because it could be used for all the "advantages" we've been discussing here. In some cases there were also built in mechanisms for redistributing wealth—things like potlatches, funeral feasts and so forth, so that inequality didn't grow destructively, and runaway growth didn't have its inevitable environmental effects.

In other cases where inequality was allowed to accumulated across generations, the mass of people soon caught on and rebelled, reverting to more equitable ways of organizing things. In still other cases, societal collapse resulted. And finally, in cases where neither of those things happened, you ended up with the societies that eventually developed into to our modern capitalist civilization. Sadly, by the time those who were on the losing end of such arrangements realized what was going on, it was too late—those at the top of the organization were firmly in control, and not interested in changes that would impinge negatively on them. We were stuck in the sort of societies we currently have. Which brings us to the subject of hierarchies, which I will get to in my next post.

What I am intending to suggest here is that there are ways of supplying the needs of a society without causing inequality to grow. And without needing the economy to grow endlessly beyond the capacity of the planet to support. The sort of examples I've mentioned here are only a very few of the ways this might be done and I believe we may yet come up with new ideas that work even better.

In closing, I should probably (for the sake of completeness, but with little hope of achieving it) make a few comments on markets and property.

Markets

At the most basic level, markets exist to place a value on goods and services. But never forget—the value of goods only needs to be determined because we are keeping score, and using money to do it. In any case, the supposed magic of the "free market" is largely theoretical. At best, it can only work when all the players involved have roughly equal power. In capitalism, the capitalists have considerably more power than workers and consumers, and love markets because they are open to manipulation and control. Being able to game the market actually creates many of the problems inherent to capitalism.

Property and Ownership

The concept of private property is central to enabling the accumulation of wealth. The strong take what they wish, have the power to hold onto it, and use it to generate further wealth. Civilization consists largely of having laws to protect the private property of the rich and a police force to enforce them.

In such a system, owners have the right to abuse their property and deplete its resources, with consequences that are currently beginning to come due the world over (climate change, habitat destruction, resource depletion). In a sustainable society, land and resources would be the property of the community as a whole and that ownership would be about stewardship not exploitation.

We should also be clear that there is a distinction here between private and personal property. Personal property consists of items that you use in daily life (like your toothbrush, and your shoes and clothes). A community might elect to extend personal property rights to tools, homes and garden plots. But if you take property rights much further, you end up with individuals having the right to exploit land and resources to their own benefit and the detriment of the community and planet as a whole. Which is exactly what we want to avoid.

During the last few months while I've been dragging my feet about writing for this blog, I've been reading a number of very interesting books, which bear upon what we are discussing. Here is a list of those books, along with a few that I've read previously, but that also have been a help.

Debt, The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber

Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, by Christopher Boehm

The Art of Not Being Governed, by James C. Scott

Against the Grain, a deep history of the earliest states, by James C. Scott

Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid, by Andrej Grubacic

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow


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Sunday, 21 February 2021

Collapse you say? Part 6, overpopulation and overconsumption

We've had a lot of snow
recently in Kincardine

In this series of posts I've been talking about why I think our industrial civilization has been slowly collapsing since the 1970s, and is likely to continue to do so until circumstances have forced us to adopt a sustainable lifestyle. In the light of the issues I'll be talking about in this post, I should make it clear that I don't think of collapse as a problem to be solved, but rather as a predicament to which we must adapt. And there is a lot of room for different opinions as to what exactly those adaptations should be.

My last few posts have sparked some discussion on a couple of issues that I think are worth devoting the entirety of this post to, before I go on with scheduled programming, so to speak.

Footprints

The first is what "footprint" actually means. The best source I can recommend for this is the Global Footprint Network and their Ecological Footprint measure. I found their FAQ page answered most of my questions. Interestingly, the most surprising things I found out are about what the Ecological Footprint isn't. Which lead me to the Water Footprint Network and the concept of Carbon Footprints. For the issues of dwindling non-renewables like fossil fuels and minerals it was harder to find anything like "footprints", but Wikipedia does have an article on resource depletion which may serve as a good jumping off point if you want to do further reading.

What footprint definitely does not mean is "square miles per person". This is clearly a confused approach to the subject, since hunter-gatherers who have a very low impact on the ecosystem use a lot of square miles per person, but step very lightly wherever they go. While modern humans occupy a relatively small area of land each, but have a very heavy impact on the planet.

The Ecological Footprint uses a measure of "global hectares per person" where "one global hectare is the world's annual amount of biological production for human use and human waste assimilation, per hectare of biologically productive land and fisheries."

"In 2012 there were approximately 12.2 billion global hectares of production and waste assimilation, averaging 1.7 global hectares per person. Consumption totaled 20.1 billion global hectares or 2.8 global hectares per person, meaning about 65% more was consumed than produced. This is possible because there are natural reserves all around the globe that function as backup food, material and energy supplies, although only for a relatively short period of time."

Those quotes are from Wikipedia's short article on "global hectares", which may serve to clarify what I am talking about here.

Overpopulation or Overconsumption?

The second issue was a disagreement about whether overpopulation or overconsumption is the main problem contributing to the overshoot situation we are facing. Opinions on this seem to lie on a spectrum, interestingly coinciding somewhat with the left to right political spectrum. In my discussion of this below, I'll be disregarding the people who don't think there is a problem to worry about at all, who don't believe that we are or ever will be in overshoot. They are either in denial or have immense and unjustified faith in progress and technology. But that is a whole different story.

First I should note that the problem is not just that there are too many people or that they are consuming too much, but also that both our population and our consumption are growing. Even if we didn't have a problem yet, growth means that we soon would have. Of course, we clearly do have a problem and have had since the 1980s when our impact went above the carrying capacity of the planet. Growth just means it's getting continual worse.

My friends on the left aren't terribly concerned about overpopulation. What they are concerned about is excessive consumption by the upper class. If that can be eliminated, and the lot of the poor improved accordingly, they believe that the demographic transition will continue and population will peak out at a level that the planet can support. They also speak about reducing waste in the food production system, which would be a good idea. And they have quite a bit of faith that technology will assist with all of this. If you suggest that we should be actively trying to reduce our population, they may well label you as an "eco-fascist".

Which brings us to the other end of the spectrum, where there actually are some eco-fascists. But most of the people I know who are saying that overpopulation is the source of our problems also acknowledge that over-consumption is a big concern. They mention overpopulation first because they are concerned that it doesn't get enough attention.

There are some people, though, who focus entirely on overpopulation and believe the overconsumption is solely the result of overpopulation. Worse yet, they take the fact that an abundance of food facilitates population growth and then jump to the conclusion that having less food available is the only effective way to get our population to decrease. The problem with that idea is that it doesn't fit the facts.

First, these folks will tell you that we are continually increasing the food supply and because of this the population is growing at a steady 1.4% per year. In fact, while the level of food production has been increasing, the population growth rate peaked in the 1960s at around 2% and has been decreasing since then, to around 1.05% in 2020.

In the developed nations the population growth rate has decreased to below the replacement level in many cases. And that is with an excess of food.

In the developing world, fertility and the population growth rate are still high. This despite the fact that many people are suffering from malnutrition—around eight hundred million globally, most of them in the developing world.

The eco-fascists say that if the food supply was gradually decreased, gradually increasing malnutrition would cause a reduction in fertility and with it falling population growth rates, and without causing undue hardship. But while severe malnutrition does reduce fertility, the response of fertility to minor levels of malnutrition is much more complex.

As for avoiding hardship, in the real world of markets where we ration by price, if there is a shortage of food then the price of food goes up, and the poorest people in the affected area experience what amounts to famine driven by economics. In many cultures this is more likely to spark a revolution than to decrease fertility, as it did in several countries when food prices spiked at the start of what has been called the "Arab Spring". This was less a matter of a sudden desire for democracy than a reaction to an increase in the price of food.

The negative effects of a plan to control population growth rate by reducing the food supply would fall disproportionally on poor, brown people, and this is where the term "eco-fascist" arises. Labels aside, oppressing the poor and weak seems to me like a pretty despicable thing to do. Especially since it would not, as we'll see in a moment, achieve the desired result of reducing our degree of overshoot.

Even though my politics are pretty far left, my ideas on overpopulation versus overconsumption lay somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I've been looking at humanity's impact on the planet using the I=PAT approach, which considers the effects of population, affluence (consumption) and technology. It's pretty clear that our impact is already greater than the carrying capacity of the planet (about 165%), with both population and consumption contributing to this, and both continuing to grow. It is clear that the per capita level of consumption is increasing, so that something beyond just population growth is driving growth of consumption. You mighty characterize this as "increasing affluence", which gives the problem a name, but doesn't do much to solve it.

It is also important to keep in mind that where ever our impact is greater than the carrying capacity, the ecosystem is being damaged, and carrying capacity decreases. This makes our situation even worse.

Much of our current consumption relies on non-renewable resources. As these resources become depleted, it costs more and requires more energy to access them. This takes us further into overshoot in a way that I don't think is adequately represented by footprint or impact measures. The depletion of resources we rely on, and don't have adequate substitutes for, is a major driver of collapse.

For a long lived species such as ours, there is a lengthy delay between reducing the rate at which our population grows, and actually reducing the population. At best, if the demographic transition keeps spreading in the developing world, and the population growth rate continues to decrease, it will be many decades before our population stops growing. During that time our impact will almost certainly exceed the carrying capacity of the planet by a much greater extent than it does at present. I would expect this will result in a significant dieoff of the human population.

So, I believe we should still do everything we can to reduce population growth, including educating women, striving to give them more control over their lives, and making birth control more readily available. We should not do anything that would be morally abhorrent, lest the solution be worse than the problem.

We also need to look elsewhere for something that can be done to reduce our impact in the short run, before overshoot catches up with us.

In the decades since Paul Erlich proposed the I=PAT approach, many have turned to technology as the most promising way to reduce our impact. It is the only approach that doesn't call for significant changes in lifestyle, especially for rich people. Sadly, no real technological solutions have been forth coming. The oft promised "decoupling" hasn't happened, and there is good reason to think that it won't ever. Many new technologies actually consume more, especially more energy—take bit coin, for example. I'll go into that in more detail in an upcoming post.

The only remaining alternative to reduce our impact would be to reduce consumption. This is something most people are unwilling to do, but I believe we that must, and that we can. While overpopulation will take a long time to address, overconsumption can be reduced almost immediately, as we have seen during the current pandemic.

Consider the graph below, which charts world income deciles against consumption.

Figure 1

I guess it's no surprise that richer people consume more, but how much more is pretty shocking.

Based on this graph, 59% of consumption is done by the top 10% of the richest people in the world. The bottom 50% of the people, the poorest people in the world, do only 7.2% of the consumption. If we were to get rid of the bottom 50% of our population, it would have very little effect, leaving our impact at 153% of carrying capacity( .928 times 1.65 = 1.53). On the other hand, if we were to get rid of the richest 10%, it would reduce our impact to 68% of carrying capacity(.41 times 1.65 = .68). Of course, I am not proposing that we set out to "get rid" of anybody, but this does show why I think that we should be looking at reducing consumption as well as population. And why I think people who want to stop poor folks from breeding are barking up the wrong tree.

Before we can take a close look at what drives consumption, and the growth of consumption, I think we need to look at several touchy subjects—human nature, our needs and wants, and politics. I'll do that in my next post.

Here is some additional reading on the subject of population growth and malnutrition: https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/4523


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Friday, 8 January 2021

Collapse you say? Part 5, Over Population

Geese and Gulls on Lake Huron

Last time I talked about growth, overshoot and dieoff, and promised to continue with a look at human over population in this post. So here we go.

Figure 1: Human Population level and growth rate 1700 CE to 2100 CE (Current Era)

The diagram above is helpful since it charts not just total population (the green areas), but also the yearly rate of growth (the red line). I believe that, by referring to the various sections of this graph, I can make most of the points I want to make here.

Over on the left side you will note this statement, perhaps not readable on your screen, ".04% was the average growth rate between 10,000 BCE and 1700 CE." From some of the reading I have been doing lately it seems that the growth rate for hunter gatherers before 10,000 BCE was similar.

It turns out that humans are like other species—our population grows when there an abundance of food and shrinks when there is a shortage. For typical species, ways of getting more food include expanding their range, successfully competing with other species and evolving to occupy new niches. This sort of change, based on genetic evolution, tends to happen very slowly. But, unlike other species, we have evolved the ability to have a culture, which acts as a medium for change, and language as a way of passing that change on to future generations. During our approximately 2 million years as hunter gatherers we developed many new ways to access more food and get more good out of it. And we spread to all the continents except Antarctica.

I suspect that by about 10,000 years ago we had just about filled up the world, given the amount of food that was available to hunter-gatherers. Only a few islands, mostly in the Pacific, remained to be discovered and settled. It was not too long after that, in various places around the world, that we began to practice agriculture.

It surprises me that the extra food available from even pre-industrial agriculture didn't cause an increase in our growth rate. Apparently it didn't, but it did allow our population to continue growing at about .04% per year, increasing the population density in areas that were suited to agriculture.

In the millennia that followed the invention of agriculture, we went on to develop irrigation, draft animals, animal and plant breeding, using manure and compost to improve fertility and so forth, all of which increased yields and increased the areas where we could practice agriculture, enabling further population growth.

With a growth rate of .04% per year, a population doubles about every 1700 years. This sounds pretty slow, but give it a couple of million years with no interruption and that population will have doubled nearly 1200 times. No, that's not increased by a factor of 1200, but doubled 1200 times. It would only have to double 10 times to increase by a factor of more than 1000, or 30 times to increase by a factor of more than a billion.

The population around 10,000 BCE was only somewhere between a million and 10 million. It is clear that our past population growth was interrupted frequently, when we exceeded the local carrying capacity, when natural disasters reduced that carrying capacity, or perhaps when diseases reduced our fertility rate. For concrete examples, read Chapter 3 of Jared Diamond's Collapse, which details complete dieoffs on Pitcairn and Henderson Islands in the Pacific and a partial dieoff on the neighbouring Mangareva Island.

This is one of the points I want to make—even with only pre-industrial technology and a relatively small growth rate, the eventual result is that we exceed the carrying capacity of the region where we are living and experience dieoff. The only long term solution is to aim for a steady population with no growth. Again, referring to Diamond's Collapse, read Chapter 9 on sustainable societies in the New Guinea highlands, the island of Tikopia and in Japan during the Tokugawa period. It has been done and without modern technology.

But, with those few exceptions, what actually happened is that around 1700 CE our population growth rate began to increase. I am not certain exactly what caused this, but two things happened at around that time that I suspect had something to do with it. First, we started using fossil fuels to industrialize our economies, greatly increasing the per capita amount of energy available, which drove what we think of as "modernization". Second, Europeans expanded into the so-called "empty" continents of the New World (including Australian, Oceania and parts of Africa). For the indigenous peoples this was not a pleasant experience, with a 90% death rate in many areas after the arrival of Europeans. But it did allow the people of Europe to spread out into new areas, accessing new resources and space to grow. And grow we did.

Around 1900 the growth rate started to increase even more and kept it up with only a couple of bumps until 1968.

A number of advances drove this increased rate of growth. Heat engines burning fossil fuels replaced much of the muscle power used in agriculture, and meant that we no longer had to grow food for draft animals. The invention of processes for converting atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia made synthetic nitrogen fertilizers available in large quantities. Before that nitrogen in a form accessible to plants was created only by bacteria and this was a serious limitation on the amount of food that could be grown. And advances in medical care significantly reduced infant and child mortality.

By the 1960's essentially all the land suitable for agriculture was already in use and a food supply problem was looming on the horizon. The green revolution "solved" this problem by developing varieties of the major cereal grains whose yields respond very well to irrigation and fertilization, and by using pesticides to control competition from weeds and crop damage by insects and fungi.

The people responsible for the Green Revolution saw it as a temporary solution that would allow us to get our population growth problem under control without a major dieoff. In the years since then it has actually been used a means to support an ever growing population with little serious thought of getting it under control.

All this leads to another of the points I wanted to make. Looking at the human race's history with food and population growth, a trend starts to become pretty obvious. Again and again we have increased our food supply, which has led to an increase in population, which required an increase in the food supply, which once provided led to a further increase in our population. That population currently (January 2021) stands close to eight billion, and the majority of people still believe that we'll be able to pull more rabbits out of the hat as needed, using technology to feed an ever growing population, into and beyond the foreseeable future.

To me this seems unlikely. We are using ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce a single calorie of food these days. This includes large amounts of natural gas for the production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. The other two primary plant nutrients, potash and phosphorous, are non-renewable mineral resources. And much of the water used for irrigation is pumped from fossil aquifers that are essentially non-renewable. So, modern agriculture is critically dependent on resources which are becoming depleted as we speak, and for which there is no renewable substitute. Further, climate change threatens to put an end to the mild and predictable weather that has made agriculture easier to do for the last few millennia.

The good news is that the growth rate of our population peaked out at 2% per year in 1968, and has been declining since then. But population growth itself, as opposed to the rate of growth, is still a long way from stopping. For a long lived species such as ours there is a big delay built into the process—our population has continued to get bigger and will continue to do so before it finally peaks out. There are a lot of people alive today who have quite a few years left to live, and our population cannot significantly decrease until they have died. And there are a great many women of child bearing age, who could bear more children and increase our growth rate if circumstances encouraged them to do so.

The right-most section of the graph, covering from 2019 to 2100, is seen by many as pointing to a solution.

This solution comes in the form of the "demographic transition", which according to Wikipedia is: "a phenomenon and theory which refers to the historical shift from high birth rates and high infant death rates in societies with minimal technology, education (especially of women) and economic development, to low birth rates and low death rates in societies with advanced technology, education and economic development, as well as the stages between these two scenarios."

This phenomenon is largely due to the affluence made possible by fossil fuels and the fact that in modern, rich societies children are more of a burden than a blessing, encouraging smaller family sizes. The graph's authors make the assumption that affluence will continue to spread to the developing areas of the world and the rate of population growth will continue to drop, causing our population to peak out at almost 11 billion by the turn on the century. While the graph doesn't show it, those who support this optimistic scenario assume that our population will actually decrease and settle out at a more manageable level in the next century. Our population growth rate would have to go below zero to achieve this. Admittedly, in many developed nations it already has done so.

Many people embrace this scenario enthusiastically, assuming it means that "business as usual" can continue on with no problems. It is especially attractive to the rich and powerful, who are looking for a "guarantee" that they won't have to give up their privileges to get us through the problems that lie ahead.

As you can no doubt imagine by now, I am not convinced. The trouble with this graph is that it is based on the assumption that there will always be adequate resources to support the existing population and to continue with the development that drives the demographic transition.

So many of the resources we rely on are non-renewable and are already becoming depleted, but even if we could somehow manage to switch over to renewable resources, things don't look good.

We are at around 165% of carrying capacity with a population of 7.7 billion (in 2019). With 10 billion people and no increase in average levels of consumption, we would be at 214% of carrying capacity in 2100. But in order for the demographic transition to happen in the developing nations, their level of affluence must increase significantly, taking us even further into overshoot. This is a bottleneck that is going to be very difficult to get through. I expect that we will experience a significant dieoff long before 2100. That dieoff will serve to correct our over population and over consumption problems, but it will not be a process that we have any control over, nor any wish to take part in.

Has anyone done a study which took into account resource and pollution limits along with population growth? Well yes, actually, just such a study was done in the early 1970s, and repeated twice since then: The Limits to Growth. This study used a computerized simulation of our world which produced results in its base run (Business as Usual) that have turned out to be pretty accurate.

Figure 2, The Limit to Growth: Business as Usual version

I did a series of posts about The Limits to Growth a few years ago if you want more details without having to read the book. But the main thing to note here is that the population grows until around the middle of this century then decreases dramatically , along with the food supply and our industrial output, with resources becoming depleted and pollution spiking just before population drops off.

Unfortunately, very few people have taken The Limits to Growth seriously. Criticisms generally take the form of, well, if we just do this or that, it will nicely get us around those limits. This makes me think most people stopped reading after the chapter that describe the "Business as Usual" run of the simulation. I say this because the authors anticipated what people would suggest and did many more runs of the simulation that tried those solutions to see if they would help. They did not. What did help was reducing our level of consumption and living within the limits imposed by the planet and its ecosystems. But of course almost no one wants to do that, so we have continued to head deeper into overshoot and closer to dieoff.

To see in more detail how this dieoff may happen, we need to be aware that thus far we have been discussing the situation in global averages. But we live on a large planet, with many different regions that experience change at different rates.

Resource depletion and climate change, the driving forces behind the coming dieoff, are just getting underway in many parts of the world, and it is still easy to ignore their effects. But in others areas—the Middle East, sub-Saharan African and Central America certainly come to mind—they are already disrupting human habitation patterns. The economy suffers first, with volatile energy prices and increases in prices of food and water. Many people are left unemployed and governments are less capable of supporting social safety nets. Agriculture suffers due to some combination of droughts, floods and heat waves. People from farming communities are forced to pack up and move to the cities, where more people looking for jobs and food are not welcome. Civil strife and sometimes outright war ensues and refugees start to stream out of the areas affected. Most of the refugees are absorbed in nearby countries who are not themselves in the best of shape.

In the past when a society collapsed, it's members had little choice but to tough it out with no outside help. Today, in our smaller, more connected world, some help is usually available from outside an area that is experiencing trouble. And it may be possible to move to an area that is not yet affected. That's good, but it also means that trouble in one area is more likely to spread to others in a domino effect. I expect that this will intensify during the coming decades and gradually lead to the almost complete collapse of our industrial civilization.

So, this has been a lot of information. What conclusions do I reach from it?

Is overpopulation the main problem we should be trying to solve? I would say no, but it is certainly part of the problem. Increasing the size of our population makes coping with over consumption harder, and vice versa. The thing to remember about trying to control overpopulation is that, because of the large delay between reducing population growth rates and eventually reducing our population, this project is not likely to bear fruit in time to get us through the bottleneck we face. Unless we tackle consumption at the same time.

As a successful species we have the built in tendency to multiply if resources are available and to expand until we overuse the resources. Can anything be done about this? The demographic transition is tied to affluence in many ways, so it seems likely to make things worse by increasing consumption. Greater awareness of our situation could lead to cultural influences which would make smaller families more desirable in areas where the growth rate is still high. Educating women can do much to help with that, without requiring excessive consumption. Like so many of the problems we face, the solution is probably doable, but not likely to be implemented in a timely fashion for ideological and political reasons.

Reducing the food supply would definitely reduce our population, and this is likely to be what happens in the event of dieoff, whether we want it to or not. But to deliberately quit feeding people should be morally repugnant. Especially if forced on poor people by rich people who are exempt. The term "eco-fascist" has been coined for people who are in favour of this sort of thing.

I am not one of those people, and I should make it clear that I am not blaming the problems I've been talking about here on the poorer and more heavily populated areas of the world. Indeed, the high level of affluence in the developed nations is directly supported by their exploitation of the developing nations. And the ridiculously high level of consumption by the rich everywhere is a major factor in the overshoot that I've been talking about. Ten percent of the population of the world does over 50% of the consumption.

Next time we'll take a closer look at affluence, the "A" term in the I=PAT equation, and the way our world is organized to drive the continued growth of consumption.


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Sunday, 17 May 2020

What I've Been Reading, April 2020

Links

Above the Fold

  • Bypass paywalls on popular online publications for free, by 7 Labs.
    There is a lot of important information out there that is behind paywalls, many requiring expensive subscription to overcome.
  • Economic growth is an unnecessary evil, Jacinda Ardern is right to deprioritise it, by Jack Peat, The London Economic
    I can't help wondering how far Ms. Ardern can go in this direction before running afoul of some very powerful people.
  • Sam Harris Has a Problem, by Johnathan Rash, Medium —ARC
    "This is what it looks like when a public intellectual doesn’t know what he’s talking about."
  • Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam, by Douglas Rushkoff, Medium —Basic Income
    "As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It’s the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they’ve sexually harassed. It’s hush money."
    "Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need. A weekly handout doesn’t promote economic equality — much less empowerment. The only meaningful change we can make to the economic operating system is to distribute ownership, control, and governance of the real world to the people who live in it."
  • Overpopulation, by Jason Godesky, Medium
    "This is the true response to eco-fascists: not that overpopulation isn’t real, but that they have utterly failed to understand the problem, and they’ve leapt to the most cruel and awful conclusions purely out of their shocking lack of imagination. Overpopulation is the crisis of civilization itself: of agriculture and the hierarchies and elites it allows for, of the connected systems of exploitation that it is made of. Fascism seeks to create even more of those things, the very things that created the problem in the first place. While the food race goes on, mass murder is just another step along the track. Overpopulation is a problem, perhaps even the problem — and fascism makes it worse."
    But read the whole article, the author has a lot of things right, maybe a few wrong, but on the balance it's pretty good stuff.
  • The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months , by Rutger Bregman, The Guardian
    "When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman"
    I am not surprised. The idea that humans are selfish has been spread to justify the selfish behaviour of the elites, and simply isn't based on reality.
  • Just Because It’s Natural Doesn’t Mean It’s Moral: A Conversation With Alan Levinovitz, by Alex Ronan, The Nation
  • The Best Solution to Capitalism in One Word: Subsistence, by Wyatt Edward Gates, Medium

Miscellaneous

  • A Love Letter to My Curmudgeonly Big Brother, by Steve Friedman, Outdoors
    "A Pessimist and an Optimist Hike 28 Miles in the Woods Together"
  • The Evolution of Grand Parents, by Rachel Caspari, Scientific American
    "Elders play critical roles in human societies around the globe, conveying wisdom and providing social and economic support for the families of their children and larger kin groups.... Research my colleagues and I have been conducting indicates that grandparent-aged individuals became common relatively recently in human prehistory and that this change came at about the same time as cultural shifts toward distinctly modern behaviors—including a dependence on sophisticated symbol-based communication of the kind that underpins art and language. These findings suggest that living to an older age had profound effects on the population sizes, social interactions and genetics of early modern human groups and may explain why they were more successful than archaic humans, such as the Neandertals."
    "...have shown in their studies of several modern-day hunter-gatherer groups, grandparents routinely contribute economic and social resources to their descendants, increasing both the number of offspring their children can have and the survivorship of their grandchildren. Grandparents also reinforce complex social connections..."
    Note: for the purposes of this article, "modern" starts about 30,000 years ago.
  • Grandparents 'give humans evolutionary edge', The Telegraph
    "After examining a large body of evidence from traditional human societies the evidence suggested that the presence of some grandparents can substantially increase the chances of a child surviving during the high risk period of infancy and childhood."

Coronavirus

The New Fascism, and Antifa

I hear a lot of well educated people saying that the people some of us are calling fascists don't meet all the criteria for being "real" fascists. Others have even accused us of calling anyone we disagree with a fascist. I predict that a few decades from now those same people will be saying they wish they hadn't been quite so fussy with their definitions, and had acted sooner to oppose these "new fascists", even if they weren't identical to the fascists of the twentieth century.

Resource Depletion, formerly (and still including) Peak Oil

The change in title stems from the fact that it's not just oil that is peaking.

Economic Contraction and Growing Inequality

Energy

Hazard and Risk

Gardening

  • The Secret World of Radishes, by Karen Bertelsen, Lee Valley Tools
    I tried this articles recommendation of planting radishes one inch deep, fully expecting to have them not come up. A week and a half later and they are up and doing well.

Recipes and Cooking

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely substainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series by Nathanael Johnson
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs. I plan to include one article from this series here each month.
  • Genetically engineered food: Allergic to regulations? , by Nathanael Johnson, Grist

Practical Skills

  • How To Make Your Own Sugar, by Stephanie Dayle, The Home Front
    This is a pretty crunchy article, as shown by the author's concern about GMO seeds.
    I have actually tried this, and I would say that there is no need to cut the beets so fine, but I would put the cooked mush in a bag and press it to get more of the liquid out. If you boil it too long, it goes from a thick syrup to a burnt mess very quickly. 40 to 45 degrees above boiling sounds way to high to me.
    The article is full of what I have often called "mother Earth News enthusiasm". Actually you will find the syrup is quite bitter and has pretty rustic flavour. It could hardly be called sugar at all, but if you had no other sweetener, you'd still be glad for it. The syrup can be treated to get rid of the compounds causing the bitter flavour, but that would probably be going beyond "kitchen chemistry".

Linguistics

  • Chomsky, Wolfe and me, by Daniel Everett, Aeon
    "I took on Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language and unleashed a decade of debate and ridicule. But is my argument wrong?"

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Lacking an Owner's Manual

The human body/mind/spirit doesn't come with an owner's manual, and we continually struggle to figure out how best to operate them.

Intelligence and Consciousness

Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

Humour

These are great times for political satire.

Books

Fiction

Non-Fiction

  • Behind the Urals, by John Scott
    "An American worker in Russia's City of Steel"
  • The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Benjamin Friedman
    Finally finished this. Written by a conventional economist who doesn't even seem to know what causes economic growth, or what its consequences really are, it is pretty tough going. Important to know how the other side thinks, though, I guess.
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