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No, We Can't Have It All
An Excerpt from 'Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization'
We all face choices. We can have ice caps and polar bears, or we can have automobiles. We can have dams or we can have salmon. We can have irrigated wine from Mendocino and Sonoma counties, or we can have the Russian and Eel Rivers. We can have oil from beneath the oceans, or we can have whales. We can have cardboard boxes or we can have living forests. We can have computers and cancer clusters from the manufacture of those computers, or we can have neither. We can have electricity and a world devastated by mining, or we can have neither (and don't give me any nonsense about solar: you'll need copper for wiring, silicon for photovoltaics, metals and plastics for appliances, which need to be manufactured and then transported to your home, and so on. Even solar electrical energy can never be sustainable because electricity and all its accoutrements require an industrial infrastructure). We can have fruits, vegetables, and coffee brought to the U.S. from Latin America, or we can have at least somewhat intact human and nonhuman communities throughout that region. (I don't think I need to remind readers that, to take one not atypical example among far too many, the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala was overthrown by the United States to support the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, leading to thirty years of U.S.-backed dictatorships and death squads. Also, a few years ago I asked a member of the revolutionary tupacamaristas what they wanted for the people of Peru, and he said something that cuts to the heart of the current discussion [and to the heart of every struggle that has ever taken place against civilization]: "We need to produce and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so.") We can have international trade, inevitably and by definition as well as by function dominated by distant and huge economic/governmental entities which do not (and cannot) act in the best interest of communities, or we can have local control of local economies, which cannot happen so long as cities require the importation (read: theft) of resources from ever-greater distances. We can have civilization -- too often called the highest form of social organization -- that spreads (I would say metastasizes) to all parts of the globe, or we can have a multiplicity of autonomous cultures each uniquely adapted to the land from which it springs. We can have cities and all they imply, or we can have a livable planet. We can have "progress" and history, or we can have sustainability. We can have civilization, or we can have at least the possibility of a way of life not based on the violent theft of resources.
This is in no way abstract. It is physical. In a finite world, the forced and routine importation of resources is unsustainable. Duh.
Show me how car culture can coexist with wild nature, and more specifically, show me how anthropogenic global warming can coexist with ice caps and polar bears. And any fixes such as solar electric cars would present problems at least equally severe. For example, the electricity still needs to be generated, batteries are extraordinarily toxic, and in any case, driving is not the main way a car pollutes: far more pollution is emitted through its manufacture than through its exhaust pipe. We can perform the same exercise for any product of industrial civilization.
We can't have it all. The belief that we can is one of the things that has driven us to this awful place. If insanity could be defined as having lost functional connection with physical reality, to believe we can have it all -- to believe we can simultaneously dismantle a world and live on it; to believe we can perpetually use more energy than arrives from the sun; to believe we can take more than the world gives willingly; to believe a finite world can support infinite growth,much less infinite economic growth, where economic growth consists of converting ever larger numbers of living beings to dead objects (industrial production, at core, is the conversion of the living -- trees or mountains -- into the dead -- two-by-fours and beer cans) -- is grotesquely insane. This insanity manifests partly as a potent disrespect for limits and for justice. It manifests in the pretension that neither limits nor justice exist. To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation. And it is to have paid absolutely no attention to the past six thousand years.
One of the reasons we fail to perceive all of this is that we -- the civilized -- have been inculcated to believe that belongings are more important than belonging, and that relationships are based on dominance -- violence and exploitation. Having come to believe that, and having come to believe the acquisition of material possessions is good (or even more abstractly, that the accumulation of money is good) and in fact the primary goal of life, we then have come to perceive ourselves as the primary beneficiaries of all of this insanity and injustice.
Right now I'm sitting in front of a space heater, and all other things being equal, I'd rather my toes were toasty than otherwise. But all other things aren't equal, and destroying runs of salmon by constructing dams for hydropower is a really stupid (and immoral) way to warm my feet. It's an extraordinarily bad trade.
And it's not just space heaters. No amount of comforts or elegancies, what that nineteenth-century slave owner called the characteristics of civilization, are worth killing the planet. What's more, even if we do perceive it in our best interest to take these comforts or elegancies at the expense of the enslavement, impoverishment, or murder of others and their landbases, we have no right to do so. And no amount of rationalization nor overwhelming force -- not even "full-spectrum domination" -- will suffice to give us that right.
Yet we have been systematically taught to ignore these trade-offs, to pretend if we don't see them (even when they're right in front of our faces) they do not exist. Yesterday, I received this email: "We all face the future unsure if our own grandchildren will know what a tree is or ever taste salmon or even know what a clean glass of water tastes like. It is crucial, especially for those of us who see the world as a living being, to remember. I've realized that outside of radical activist circles and certain indigenous peoples, the majority has completely forgotten about the passenger pigeon, completely forgotten about salmon so abundant you could fish with baskets. I've met many people who think if we could just stop destroying the planet right now, that we'll be left with a beautiful world. It makes me wonder if the same type of people would say the same thing in the future even if they had to put on a protective suit in order to go outside and see the one tree left standing in their town. Would they also have forgotten? Would it still be a part of mainstream consciousness that there used to be whole forests teeming with life? I think you and I agree that as long as this culture continues with its preferred methods of perception, then it would not be widely known to the majority. I used to think environmental activists would at least get to say, ‘I told you so' to everyone else once civilization finally succeeded in creating a wasteland, but now I'm not convinced that anyone will even remember. Perhaps the worst nightmare visions of activists a few hundred years ago match exactly the world we have outside our windows today, yet nobody is saying, ‘I told you so.'"
I think he's right. I've long had a nightmare/fantasy of standing on a desolate plain with a CEO or politician or capitalist journalist, shaking him by the shoulders and shouting, "Don't you see? Don't you see it was all a waste?" But after ruminating on this fellow's email, the nightmare has gotten even worse. Now I no longer have even the extraordinarily hollow satisfaction of seeing recognition of a massive mistake on this other's face. Now he merely looks at me, his eyes flashing a combination of arrogance, hatred, and willful incomprehension, and says, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
And he isn't even entirely lying.
Except of course to himself.
144 Comments so far
Show All"...the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala was overthrown by the United States to support the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita..."
The same has happened, far more recently, to Zelaya's government in Honduras. I find it impossible to believe otherwise.
"Show me how car culture can coexist with wild nature..."
We can't even stop with cars. We MUST have snowmobiles for our sporting fun, and the most ignorant on this planet have the most power to make the rules. We can't stop with snowmobiles either. We live in an era when people on three continents can conduct a meeting online and even see each other, but most airline travel is business travel.
It is the ability to forget the lost beauty of the landscape, and the latest revision of the landscape that becomes the standard for each new generation, that will allow mankind to finish his final acting out of his perceived dominion over the earth. Then finally mother earth will shake us off like fleas, and life on this planet will move forward without us. It's the final millennium that concerns me, the time when only the most wealthy will have access to clean water and pure food. Those elite few will probably still have air conditioners and heaters too.
Nah- they will live in prisons where any venture outside of the walls of their own confinement will result in swift and painful death.
That delusion is necessary for the maintenance of the status quo. "Bring America back" is a notion that encapsulates the views of many liberals and progressives who post on this site. The 1954 coup against Arbenz for United Fruit or the '53 coup against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran for British Petroleum for that matter, seriously challenge the notion that the US was a democracy back then - let alone now. There is no "back" to go to. The "union of state and corporate power"( Mussolini's definition of fascism) was operative then as well as before* in the "world's greatest democracy". The (undemocratic) systems of power in our country and the world treat other human beings just as badly as they do nature. Derrick Jensen is a radical; he connects the dots. I may not agree with all of his solutions, but he raises questions that we should consider seriously. If the delusions that most Americans have about their country could be overcome, we would be a long way towards creating a better future for nature and ourselves within her.
*(see "War is a Racket" by Gen. Smedley Butler)
"America isn't what it once was, and in fact never has been..."
The overcrowded lifeboat analogy is definitely interesting, but I think that it is a more complex issue.
We already decide who should live and who should die. As mentioned in the article, we convert living beings into dead objects as a fundamental part of industry - so we have been making that decision all along. Even if this analogy only refers to human life - then those at the top of civilization's hierarchy do indeed decide who lives and who dies. The knowledge of who should live and who should die is something that humans claimed as part of civilization a few thousand years ago - and portions of the human population have exercised that knowledge ever since.
I don't think that anyone on a lifeboat would deny that it is essential to take care of the boat itself. To destroy the boat is to destroy those who depend on it to survive. Civilization destroys the boat. The issue is not simply deciding who gets to stay on the boat. The issue is that we must realize that we are the boat. If we don't take care of the boat, then we don't take care of ourselves.
By Mr. Jensen's definition we either go live in caves or we go extinct. There has to be some comfortable median between the two extremes. I know people who, given the choice, WOULD choose extinction. I might be one of them. I'm not sure I could survive in Mr. Jensen's Stone-Age habitat.
I agree Joe (visiting professor's post was also very good)
Though Mr. Jensen's nightmare is mine as well, I think his argument suffers from the fallacy of the excluded middle. It is impossible enough to get human consensus or collective action on small things, let alone drastic either/or choices such as he describes. If solutions are not hippie delusions, as well they may be, mine is population control, which would automatically handle most of what plagues us today and what Jensen fears for the future. The human animal would be vastly less toxic if our numbers were, say 10% of today's population blight. Imagine your town or city 10% it's size, connected to other towns by modest strips of pavement and small. energy efficient conveyances. A small, continent species embedded in nature without giving up our electric guitars and cell phones. We could have it all if we weren't such pigs, if we weren't so driven by ambition and the chimera that progress = more and bigger.
I am no optimist. I think the root problem is that we are incapable of devising a universal regulatory agency to get everybody on the planet to act in concert to accomplish even one small thing, be it recycling or boycotting polluters or conserving resources or the peaceful resolution of disputes. Solutions abound, but to imagine we possess the power or wisdom to implement any of them globally is to give ourselves airs. Just the mindset alone that would follow from population reduction would reverse every other destructive trend in a single generation. It would be so easy to do if only we all understood it together.
But the practical argument always leads in a circle. We'd be smarter if only we were smarter. I'm already nostalgic for the human race, as also for the beautiful planet we infect. We produced some great fiddle players, some brilliant thinkers, some knockout women and even some pretty cars. We were a wonderful experiment. It's a shame our inventor can't recall us for a quick fix of our engineering flaws before we ... I want to say "foul our nest" but really, the idea that it's "ours" is part of the problem isn't it?
While I agree with your vision (except for the electric guitars--what would be the need for them in a world of healthy, attuned people and the quiet of nature?) I believe in it for several hundred years from now at the earliest. I could be wrong, but you seem to be implying population solutions are the answer. While our problems are clearly a combination of population and consumption (both driven by psychological problems) our solutions must mostly address consumption and forget hope of any near-term progress on population, beyond the slight possibility of peaking at something less than the expected 10 or 11 billion.
Two reasons:
Our climate problems must be solved in the next 20 years, or very likely half that. Any attempt to reduce population that fast(say, to 3 billion, let alone your dream of 10%, (about 700 million) is absolutely certain to fail, except possibly by the most immense social disruption in human history, and the most vicious wars for national, ethnic, and religious survival ever. Such wars would inevitably go nuclear, making the rest of the discussion moot. Meeting your goal of reducing the 2050 population by 6 billion or so would involve something on the order of 100! World War II-sized conflicts in the next 20 years or so--a mind-boggling concept to say the least. To reach the level of justification required to send young people to be killed and killers, even inconsequential wars take on overriding priority, (US in Vietnam, El Salvador...) so these desperate real wars would burn so much fossil fuel that whatever else we did would lose all significance. Atmospheric CO2 would be driven far above the level needed for any human survival. The prospects of reduction by disease, starvation or thirst are not much happier.
Two,
consumption solutions must start with technical fixes: efficiency, solar, (including passive heating and cooling, water heating, etc. not just PV), wind, rail, permaculture, etc. but we will not likely save ourselves without big changes in the way we live. These must include radically increasing localization, equality and democracy, renouncing industrial growth society, etc. They will effect consumption, but they will also begin to fix our population problem at a rate we can handle without traumatization--like I said, several hundred years.
If the root problem "is that we are incapable of devising a universal regulatory agency..." that seems to be essentially a cognitive problem. Being "smart enough" to devise this would solve it. Maybe you don't mean this, but it needs to be clear that our root problems are psychological--that is, somato-emotional, and only secondarily cognitive. We can't figure our way out of this; like those other technical fixes it can help to be smart but what keeps us from being smart is what I call SISS---Psychologically-Induced Stupidity Syndrome--a body-based emotional problem. Your argument leads in a circle because it's NOT practical, because it doesn't seem to recognize the real problem.
To think that some wonderful problem-solving mindset would follow from population reduction is baffling to me, doesn't take into account the devastation of rapid pop. reduction, and misses the problem again. Solving the psychological problems that contribute to pop. growth would change things, but that's clearly different. The solutions to psychological problems are many and varied: literal and metaphorical, individual and group psychotherapy, institutional and structural changes, (the increased contact with nature and real time that would be engendered by a solar economy could be immensely healing)... We should give figuring and feeling them out priority while we still have hope of implementing them.
Wars have not, so far, ever reduced population size. Each has resulted in a population spike. A reduction in population will not CAUSE a reconsideration of philosophical/ethical position, but it might well give the opportunity for one to happen, particularly if enough thinking homo sapiens survived.
The question of course is, What are they thinking? and even more important, What are they feeling?
Ever-spreading PTSD has been the main result of even the infinitely quieter wars of the ancients and the pseudo-genteel wars of the misnamed Age of Reason. PTSD multiplies over time and generational transmission into many forms of unreality and disconnection, but untreated by medicine or culture (as the overwhelming majority of it always has been and continues to be) it gets deeper, more serious, more pernicious and more destructive over time. It slowly slowly washes away our humanity, our animal nature and our ability to feel and connect. There are always reactions to war but the main thrust throughout history has been for war to beget war, and atrocity to beget atrocity. After World War I there was a strong back-to-nature/human potential movement in Germany, but it was overwhelmed and annihilated by the counter-impulse of PTSD-driven rage- and revenge-obsessed Nazism. The US New Age movement traces its roots to a small number of German women and men who came here fleeing that horror, and despite the progress and genius and inspiration of a few narrow lineages of wisdom, has mostly been corrupted by the war-and-naturelessness-corrupted "American" psyche into the shards we see in television and magazine ads. The New Age has become a sort of war.
Everything becomes war. Agriculture is War on the Earth, medicine is War on the Body, engineering and architecture are War on the Landscape, school is War on Individual's Wisdom, ethics and philosophy are War on intuitive, emotional, embodied Knowing. While some interesting tangents may emerge from such trauma, we don't need them. We already know what to do, how to live, and what to get rid of and need to get in touch with the part of us that knows. War won't help with that and I'm absolutely astounded to hear even the vaguest hint that it might.
Wars obviously do cause a brief reduction in population, but local wars have simply been overwhelmed by global population growth. Until the US civil war---the first industrial war---armies, weapons and war and human numbers in general were so tiny and ineffective they involved small numbers compared to now(although what research I've done shows they were remarkably constant in percentage of people involved and killed.) And the PTSD-driven addiction and destruction has probably turned out to increase population by removing people from the sacred cultural contexts that could limit it.
But it's unclear what new ones do, since we turned the corner during WWI. Before that, combatants were the main casualties of war, since then, civilians have been, in ever-increasing proportion. Wars specifically (though not necessarily consciously) over population may be another big step in that direction.
Umm , NO.
PTSD doesn't make a person act against their own principles and it doesn't change who a person fundamentally is. It can't make a person do anything other than feel fear. How a person acts on the feeling of fear is up to them
I know this, I have PTSD.
Further , your whole premise of societies being driven by PTSD is weird and unfounded.
Morticia,
When you get past the insurance-company mandated definitions of the DSMs, PTSD is a varied and difficult to categorize phenomenon. It can be mild and narrowly constrained or profound and pervasive. It can be multigenerational, although that may come under other diagnoses. It certainly can warp a personality into an almost unrecognizable form, turning, for example, a happy outgoing and intelligent person into a depressed, antisocial, confused and unresponsive person. When it happens early enough there is not so much a change as a deep, systemic and permanent effect on the formation of the person. I’m glad it hasn’t had that effect on you. On many people, it does.
See Judith Lewis Herman, MD on some small hint of this, what she calls complex PTSD in her classic book, Trauma and Recovery, p 119-122. I use PTSD in this context in a broader way and probably should come up with a new name to keep it from being confused with the current understanding. But our understanding constantly changes. PTSD has been called Soldier’s Heart (US civil war) Shell Shock, Combat Fatigue, etc. and under each name has been understood very differently. For a better understanding of what I’m talking about read also Paul Shepard’s Nature and Madness, Saharasia by James DeMeo and the work of Wilhelm Reich.
And look around. Observe and extrapolate. How do you explain what is happening in the world?
I commute by bike—well over 150,000 miles mostly in major metropolitan areas in the last 30 years—and have survived by developing the sort of finely-tuned sense of driver’s intentions, states of mind, etc. that is just normal for experienced cyclists. I’m more conscious of it than most I’ve talked to, and I’ve noticed that car drivers got considerably more “squirrelly” (technical psychological term) in their driving on September 12, 2001, in March, 2003, when US forces invaded Iraq, and at other similar times. After these events, there’s a gradual return to more “normal” behavior but it never goes back completely. There’s been a noticeable increase in expressions of anger, confusion, nervousness and even exaggerated ‘niceness’ on the road in that time. (One effect of trauma is to split reactions—to both extremes of behavior.) Certainly there are other causes to this and our other troubles., but I believe some systemic PTSD-related syndrome is an accurate and useful way of looking at our behavior. Call it weird and unfounded if you want, based only on your personal experience, but it might be useful for you to consider the possibility of it being true as well. Coming to understand my own PTSD in this larger context has helped me greatly, and the knowledge has been useful with clients.
J4
Let me say again I am not an optimist, and I suspect neither are you. I do not propose a world in which we are only 10% of our numbers. The vision is not a goal, only a fantasy. Frankly, I think we are toast.
Root problem-wise - I stand corrected. Our inability to concur globally is not a root problem, but is a significant symptom. My assertion was that any solution assuming the possibility of human consensus is doomed to failure, i.e. impracticable. I could be wrong, but the search for do-able solutions seems to me to require some paradigm other than that. I'm a big fan of cognition, but I don't think global rationality is going to pull our fat out of this fire.
What I suggested was that population control is at least simple and understandable. If there were fewer of us we would not automatically become wiser, but the problems facing us would be fewer and less overwhelming, so whereas overpopulation is not the root problem it is perhaps the most addressable problem world wide. An array of complex technological and energy problems looms in our faces. But clearly to the extent that we can reduce our numbers, a lot of those problems will recede and not even require solutions.
I completely agree that our collective psychology is closer to the root of our ills than population control. And vastly more interesting to contemplate. But getting the whole human race onto a psychiatrist's couch is also a non-starter. The average Pashtun or Congolese or North Korean or American does not live in the world of Freud or Fromme or Maslow. Making us sane is a pretty tall order, but the science of getting population under control is fairly well along. Choices vary from contraceptive pills and devices to following the Chinese example and just putting a state cap on how many children you get to have. Do-able, one way or another, in increments, as you say. But not very likely, due to lack of global jurisdiction or consensus.
I also live in the country, in nature, where (in the romantic tradition of Thoreau) I luxuriate in quail time. How does a Malaysian farmer's picture of nature in real time differ from mine? Considerably I think. I agree also about the electric guitars, but I live with two macaws (infinitely more abrasive, take my word for it, than Twisted Sister) and without necessarily liking it, I believe it is the right of all species (and bloggers) to make irritating noises.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply
vox
vox,
Well, now I see we're mostly together on a lot. Sort of.
I think both Jensen and Rebecca Solnit (and a thousand Buddhist writers) have said useful and wise things on hope... particularly, don't have any. But that is not to say be hopeless, either. Both are conditions which rob us of our ability to act. I am neither an optimist or a pessimist; I am a realist, which is to say I DO NOT KNOW how things are going to turn out. That is not a simple thing... the overwhelming tendency is to say I do not know... but what I think will happen is... or it looks like what will happen is... or some other variation on it. What we have to do is increase our tolerance for uncertainty (aka anxiety) to the point where we can really truly say I do not know what will happen. Period. Then, we can do the right thing--the morally right thing, the practical thing, the thing that brings us into integration with ourselves and other wise, compassionate people as well as the collective shadow.
The world is full of examples of things turning out exactly the way you'd think; it is also full of examples of completely unexpected, miraculous last-minute turns and astounding victories. (Often they are afterwards made to seem inevitable by some who want to seem smart and others who want to reduce the chance of more of that stuff happening.) The fall of Apartheid and the Shah, Poland and Czechoslovakia, Agincourt, Crecy and Poitiers, Concord and Lexington, the rise of this movement with no name that emerged first in Seattle and had 30 million people in the streets the week the latest invasion of Iraq started...
Paradigms are supported by beliefs. At a certain point---just a few days, sometimes---a slight shift of a few percentage points in beliefs expressed but not strongly held by one particular subgroup can utterly destroy the foundation of a paradigm and lead to its replacement with something else... There are no red states or blue states in the US; every state is purple, with a big green shadow. Everything could go any way at any moment.
This kind of paradigm shift is not mainly accomplished by psychotherapists sitting in rooms with people already near agreement with everything said. It's done by the modern equivalents of contraries, court jesters and shamans. In primitive societies shamanic cure of a single person's disease often involves a public play of a sort, and an acted-out or told journey to the underworld or land of the dead to confront the spirits causing the illness. Thus it involves not just physical disease (responded to with effective herbs) but family dynamics reflected in internal psychology. It is in some ways a much more accurate and sophisticated view of illness than ours, and affects not just the patient but the witnesses and the society as a whole, which are likely to share the same dynamics. As above, so below, that is, as inside, so outside. This is a movement of artists, comedians, thinkers, homesteaders, cyclists and Tim DeChristophers. It is a movement of integrated and unified symbols, words and actions.
Our climate and life-as-war-on-everything problems have to be solved in that realm above all. Everything else--beliefs of right wing cranks (which after all reflect just another aspect of shadow shared by all of us), political action, cumulative tiny actions by millions, etc. flow from the underlying beliefs that can shift with the psychic wind. Of course there will never be conscious consensus. We all hold each others' shadow--liberals for conservatives and vice versa, rich for poor, races, religions... and as long as we remain unconscious of the shadow there will be no agreement, like the blind guys feeling the elephant parts. That doesn't mean we can't come up with solutions that answer and reassure the fears of the right while proceeding with solutions that connect us (which is exactly what their deepest fear is).
And all that is besides the point I make over and over and over and over, which seems to be in invisible writing to population control advocates: while we certainly have a population problem, it is impossible for population solutions to have an effect in time to solve this current crisis. I would say you just have to do the math but what population solutionists actually have to do is stop projecting onto poor people of color the problems that rich people of white have and continue to cause.
Do not let yourself be distracted by the shiny bauble of the apparently simple. Yes, "population solutions" can help some. We need to do the things anyway that will eventually get us to ZPG--equality, education, etc. But without vast, unspeakable, monumentally and utterly destructive wars and savagery---which will by themselves doom us to extinction---we are only talking about the difference between a peak population of say, 8.5 vs. 11 billion---in 2060 or after, decades after we have to reduce GHG emissions to zero if not negative numbers. That is not enough. The solution is here, in the US, and is about reducing consumption and the harmful products of consumption. By whatever means necessary.
Our population would have to be a bit less than 10 percent of its present level. We were doing serious damage at six hundred million. And for us to get down to, say, six million instead, you could no longer have your electric guitar because we would not have the huge population necessary to inculcate enough economic inequality to make enough people desperate enough to do that kind of useless work.
Gadgets do not grow on gadget trees from whence they are picked and then sold in storefronts. Human labor is involved all along the manufacturing chain. Even when a factory's thrown into the mix, someone had to build the factory and they have yet to invent robot machines that will mine all the metals and chop down all the forests. Thank Gaia for that. We're in enough trouble.
If you'd really give up on a future for the Earth AND for humanity because you might not be able to play the solo for "All Along The Watchtower" then no wonder we're in trouble. Please, get a set of real priorities.
Human beings survived a Stone Age habitat for at least three million years. If European reports of American Indians and other natives around the world are to be believed, and if they were good examples of what all of us once lived, we didn't just survive, we thrived.
And no, we didn't all live in caves. You can build a house (or a tipi, or a yurt, etc.) and still not be "civilized."
Please expect better for yourself than to just sit back expecting someone else to feed all the answers to you. I've completed exactly one quarter in college and I am still able to read and research.
I appreciate Jensen's gut honesty. I have watched the desensitization to the destruction of a once great region called Florida. Year after year, as newcomers arrive, it all looks fabulous to them, away from the snow and cold, away from failed states. Those who grew up in Florida seem not to notice the death of all life in exchange for more so-called civilization. More jobs and continued economic growth are the highest political priorities. I fear the choices have been made for us. The chances that we will now, all of a sudden pay heed to the voices of reason is very far from likely. Even if we were to recognize our colossal and fatal blunder, the machinery in place to prevent a populous uprising has been in the works for decades. The financial/military industrial complex has organized the world according to it's own self-serving and greedy interests. It's all about power. Power must be held by the people. When the time comes that all reasonable people recognize that we are on a dead end road, who will oppose our voices?
Will it be our own kids, in our own military, pointing the guns to our heads?
I fear it will be so.
Changing lifestyles will do nothing as long as the population continues to expand. When my father was born, the global population was approximately 1.5 billion. My grandchildren live in a world of 6+ billion. A quadrupling in only 4 generations. And yet the so-called moral leaders in the clergy and elsewhere oppose anything that would disrupt this growth.
The Earth clearly cannot support the current population that is continuing to expand. Until the population declines to sustainable levels that are in balance with nature we can only expect things to get worse. Nothing we can do in terms of conservation and technology can avert the coming disaster.
Not to worry, the population will eventually decline. Not because we have enough common sense to choose intelligent policies, but because the changes we are inflicting on the planet will inevitably result in famine and resource wars.
Caleb,
See my previous post, please.
I'm always amazed at the apparent breeziness with which population problem-solution advocates throw out the population reduction idea, as if we could possibly survive the rapid murder of between 3 and 7 Billion people! with any tiny vestige of sanity left intact.
World War One combined with the flu pandemic that followed killed 40-60 million people and left an emotionally devastated world, the world of the Lost Generation, (in France called the Generation du Feu--the Generation in Flames), and led directly to 75 million+ killed by the rageful machinery of World War II and the Final Solution, and to US adoption of almost every horrible impulse and technique we fought against in that modern 30-years war. The horrific effects on society of population reduction by wars and plagues, like the Black Death, are so deeply embedded in our psyche it's hard for us to even tease it out enough to recognize it. But the gradual erosion of sanity and connection caused by those events has driven the downward spiral of retreat of nature, technological "innovation" (actually perpetually unsuccessful compensation) and further wars and plagues, ad extinctum.
Yes, population is part of the problem. But
We will not solve our current problems with population changes or policies or considerations. Only by first, reducing the harmful effects of what we consume, and then by reducing how much we consume, will we see our way through the current climate-resource-toxic waste crisis.
You, too, are seeing a dichotomy that doesn't exist. No "rapid murder" is needed.
Impose a 0.5 live-birth limit on every single person on Earth, after which mandatory sterilisation. Any man who gets more than one woman pregnant at the same time loses his dangly bits. If he commits rape, he's killed outright.
Run the numbers. You can make some simplifying assumptions, such as everyone having their kid at age 20 and dying at age 80. It works. We'd have to work our butts off cooperatively the world around, but it would work.
The "nice" thing about it is that if we don't reduce our numbers humanely, Earth will do it arbitrarily before the century is out. So, either way, in 2100 our numbers will be much lower than now. Our only choice is the method.
Oh, Mairead,
Do you honestly believe your "solution" could or would be imposed equally on everyone on Earth without corruption, privilege, nationalism, racism, ethnic, religious, class and other bias? Do you believe it could be imposed without resistance? I can't imagine a majority of the world' people approving it, which means either failure or tyranny, and the tyrannical approach would inevitably lead to terrorism and war--not just run-of-the-mill political war but desperate war for national, ethnic, racial, religious and class survival. War takes priority over more rational goals so fossil fuel use would increase, not decrease. And the last resort of any group about to be annihilated would be nuclear war. A draconian population "solution" like this would doom us.
It's not about total numbers of humans but the cumulative effects of the total number AND EACH SUBGROUP on the Earth. Reducing the numbers of those not causing the problem, while NOT reducing the effect of the ones who ARE causing it is a dumb way to not solve a problem, beacuse it's barbaric and inhumane as well as doomed. That's true of either your voluntary or Earth-run "solution" so it's fortunate you're just as wrong about it being the only choice.
Since it would be horrible and leave us with the problem anyway it's not a choice at all. We can, on the other hand, reduce the harmful effects of consumption by moving toward ecological alternatives--renewable energy, (solar, wind, cogeneration, some geothermal and tidal, etc.) benign biomimicing industrial processes, efficiency, rail, sail, smart grid EVs, bikes, dietary changes, permaculture, reforestation...
while we work on equalizing economic well-being, and reducing consumption by those who are doing most of it. Please look at the whole picture, and stop projecting the problems we cause onto poor people of color.
You imagine that we have time to do things slowly, and that certain choices will be resisted but others embraced. You can't possibly support those notions by reference to science and history.
The science is that WE ARE OUT OF TIME. We no longer have the luxury of try this try that try something else.
Population reduction is the *only* solution that is 100% certain to solve the problem. Doing it via post-partum sterilisation is the only way guaranteed to reduce population without killing anyone.
The simplest thought experiment demonstrates that it will solve the problem: imagine the ecological load of a total human population of, say, 1000. The load on Earth? Unmeasurably small. Noise.
The question is not whether some other method would work in some less desperate world, but do we have time even for this method to work in the actual world we live in right at this moment.
You say it will be resisted. History tells us ALL changes are resisted, no matter how small or benign. Doesn't everything happening today tell you that? If not, then you're not watching.
The privileged will always resist, claiming exemptions based on their privilege. The only way to get past that is to declare that NO privilege is sufficient to evade the knife. 100% fairness, across the board. People support fairness. It's the one universal desideratum across all cultures.
Of course, we could always let the ruling class solve the problem. Do you think you'd like that?
Mairead,
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal bread." Anatole France
I'm mystified by what it is exactly in some people that clings to this racist, classist religionist 'solution' that can't possibly work?
I'm not talking about the rich and privileged resisting. The rich and privileged are the ones who would make the sterilization rule you're advocating. Absolutely integral to it--that is, completely inextricable from it from its formation on--would be the exceptions and skewing and directions and qualifications... like crack vs powder cocaine penalties only a thousand time moreso because it involves group survival... Who's going to declare 'no exceptions'? Anyone with that much power will make exceptions---for themselves and whoever has the money or connections to control media, direct the projections and thus skew the rules. And don't give me any crap about democracy--democracy would not try this solution and couldn't do it if it existed, which it really doesn't any more. (Except in South America a little and that's temporary.)
And yet again, as it has been every time I have brought up this point, the math is ignored. To make the difference you're talking about would mean billions of people---a huge percentage of the global population---either sterilized against their will or killed within the next 20 years at the most--the most phenomenally horrific event in human history by a factor of hundreds or thousands of times. You're talking about the carbon-intensive wars that are one form the resistance would take that all by themselves would doom us.
There have been horrific local plagues, wars, etc. but the localness has always meant there were places for people to go to escape--the more sensitive, the ones who could recognize systems, etc. The nature of your solution would mean nowhere for anyone to go, (except those very richest and most powerful of the right religion, race, etc. which would only make it worse.) This is as sure a recipe for species insanity as you could possibly invent.
I'm utterly baffled by yours and other intelligent, compassionate peoples' continued belief that this could happen or that it would be anything less than our ultimate destruction if it could. The essence of your 'solution' is projection and the discrimination that follows it, and that is always manipulated, consciously and not, by the elite. It is what caused the African slave trade, genocide of the First Americans, The Holocaust and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
We need to avoid such horrors and concentrate on real solutions.
Sorry, but mandatory, no-exceptions post-partum sterilisation is the *only* solution that prospectively avoids billions of deaths in all high-order species.
That's just reality. The major alternatives are: ruling-class obfuscation of homicide-by-'neglect' of the powerless, 'letting' them die of famines and plagues; ruling-class fomentation of worldwide atomic war; the open reimposition of full-on fascism and labor/death camps worldwide; or the extinction of all life via a shift into Venus mode through ruling-class stupidity.
You can say fairness is impossible if you like, but since I don't like the prospect of uncountable billions of premature deaths in agony, I'm going to carry on advocating for it and for the political and economic democracy to underpin it.
or we could just stop using fossil fuels and switch to benign technologies.
Who said people believe this is sustainable?
I don't think people believe in all these things or that the choice is between cities and death or civilization or progress and death...
Death is inevitable no matter how many toxins you can avoid and if you can feel your feet warm by an electric heater you are better off than the vast majority of life on Earth.
The system is huge and nobody is in control.... nobody has the power to stop cities or manufacturing.... sure we can warn about eventual death, but people already accept death and it doesn't stop life evolving in this mix of chaos and order.
The mixed big system goes on and the people go on because it has evolved in this way. It is not a planned system or planned economy by the majority but by the result of the competing and common interests of the most powerful and even that kind of "planning" is the result of the forces of organized economic power and authority taking advantage of every opportunity to profit and exploit the chaotic side and nature of evolution.
Rather than "Belief", I see it is more Group Think or going along with the crowd which is more a result of the impulse to survive rather than any "belief"... people go along or try to adapt with the reality they are living in.
Making products and electricity is not going to go away... and if people believe anything I don't think they doubt that.
I agree with most of the problems presented here but belief is not what is driving the system or the laws of nature.
It is much more the instinct and drive to survive and get along now in this life, rather than any "belief".
How many things can we agree to believe in, and after we took that poll, would civilization just keep evolving in the mixed way it always does?
Maybe we need a global poll of what the people of the planet really believe.
In fact, every war should end with the latest poll.
Good comment. Another problem with the piece is that the vast majority out there, who do not see themselves as leftists, will think, if they do read it, that the choices are (1) continuing corporate capitalism and the comfortable lifestyle it holds for many as long as possible; or (2) going back to a Hobbesian world where life is brutish, nasty, and short. I believe the great majority would choose alternative (1). So, I find his approach unhelpful and believe he suffers from a lack of imagination. I still believe, as I have to believe, that other forms of human organization are possible where humans can maintain a high quality of life in an environmentally sustainable way. The odds may be long against developing those other forms before it is too late, but I cannot see anything more worth striving for.
Best comment I've seen on this site for quite a while. We don't know what the odds are for or against us. We just have to believe we have a chance and try to do the right thing.
As a former anthropology major I can say with some certainty that the only Hobbesian world is industrial society. So-called "primitive" people typically worked 20 hours a week and spent most of their time productively lounging, doing art, and in social activities like drinking beer, telling stories and jokes and singing. Their mental health, connection to deep and broad networks and to nature made them, as far as we can tell, happier than most people in industrial and "advanced"/unequal agricultural societies.
Maybe that IS a high quality of life. Maybe we can in fact, live essentially stone age lives with just a few advances held over from the carnage of industrial growth society to make life even better. It's not going to happen overnight--or if it does, it will accompanied by so much trauma the world would be better off without the few numbed, hateful hatefilled survivors. But if we start with giving up coal for solar and wind and efficiency (75% reduction just by living like the Japanese) who knows where it would end, 20 generations from now?
I agree that physical solutions have to be preceded by consensus. But how daunting, even getting that poll. A bush pygmy might take a global poll to see how many people believe we should give more respect to forest spirits. North Korea might think we should recognize the divinity of glorious leader whatzisname and the dialectical inevitability of communism, and certainly faith in the revealed will of Allah would make the poll meaningful to folks in Pashtunville, and let's not leave out the visionaries at Shell Oil. Universal intelligibility, some common language or reality. There's the trick.
Music Works... peace is the highest form of love and song is the language.
but please don't get me started on the music biz.
While I understand Mr. Jensen's concerns and share his love of this planet, I don't see him offering solutions, other than the implication that we (as a species) give up all industry, manufacturing and return to life without electricity and other modern inventions. Science and technology will not solve our social justice and economic problems, that is clear enough to me. But it is equally clear to me that science and technology will play a large role in developing sustainable energy, most of which will come directly from the sun. I have heard that the sun puts out enough energy in one hour to energize the entire planet for a year--if we can find a way to harness that energy.
I didn't read any mention in this article about overpopulation and what it is doing to stress out our world. In fact, almost nobody speaks of our out-of-control human population problem and how it is greatly exacerbating every other environmental, social and economic problem we face. I think we humans are capable of creating a sustainable civilization without going back to primitive times without technology. Locally grown food is a great idea, renouncing technology is not. We can and probably will find a way to develop technologies that are much more in harmony with nature and the planet as a living organism. While I have deep respect for farmers and farming, not everyone should or wants to be a farmer. I think Mr. Jensen expresses a Luddite point of view and, as I said at the outset, these are legitimate grievances and concerns but without offering solutions. Mr. Jensen's article begins with either/or scenarios, we can have either this or that. This is a kind of black-and-white, dualistic thinking and is not helpful in solving the difficult problems our civilization faces.
Jerry Gerber
I've listened to Jensen talk and he mainly raises questions with few solutions. At first I was annoyed by that, but then, really, who has answers? What he seems to be saying is "just stop". That is the most difficult thing and seems impossible, but as a fellow anarchist, I say, "demand the impossible".
this is a good summation of the article.
Mister Jensen shows simply (and he HAS mentioned it near the end with his frustration) - what many already know: how it is our own industrializations and their root: our desire to have MORe and MORe and MORE - that is destroying our very planet and the source of our own lives and existence.
at the very least - if it is a solution at all - he has mentioned that there should be a move everywhere to heed what the natives in south america had said:
"WE ALREADY KNOW" how to live with the planet , how to "feed ourselves" -- (and feeding ourselves IS the only real reason that binds us to this planet, no different from animals, regardless of our great civilization achievements) ..."we just need to be ALLOWED to do it".
if one thinks about it - great as our human achievemtns have been : who can really deny that our species has produced such beautiful things also that define our "species?" --
what are our achievements if not extensions of the most BASIC relationship we have to our Mother Earth, which is to LIVE and to LIVE means
to partake of what Mother Earth GIVES us to NOURISH US and replenish us -- and - if a creature were indeed capable of GRATITUDE - that no matter what our greatest and highest "desires" (philosophical, questions about existence, meaning, being "more") --
simply being able to BE nourished from the fruits of the earth, if we take care of her -
should REALLY be enough to give us MEANING.
and that Meaning is
our sense and awareness - nothing ELSE - of our GRATITUDE and joy in being ALIVE because that is what the Mother Earth gives us.
gratitude simply to be able to eat a piece of fruit..to catch fish and share it with our community and take no more than need and take care that we do not destroy that source, as freely as it is given to us..just like it does with animals.
I will never forget that youtube video about a leader mother Lioness of a pack of lions.
they just finished their hunt and were resting in the shade among trees and fallen logs and bushes, satiated with their day's work...the head Lioness , clearly the matriarch of the tribe, rested on a fallen tree trunk to survey her family and the surroundings ...beside her on the ground was the left-over carcass of the Gazelle they had just hunted....
then the mother lioness notices, for the first time, a BABY gazelle a few feet away just under the fallen tree the lioness was resting on. the lioness walked to the baby gazelle and sniffed her...then ...started to lick her clean of her birth-wrappings and fluids...it turns out THAT baby gazelle was the offspring of the dead gazelle...and it was struggling to stand up, obviously just a few minutes old.
the mother lioness basically adopted the baby gazelle and would not permit the bigger older lions to rough it up...only allowing the baby lions to play with it...she also let the gazelle suckle on her milk actually.
another day comes and the she leads her pack to hunt again and that is when the Male Lion of the Tribe ate the gazelle...when the lioness comes back - she lets out loud grunts - calling for the gazelle....
the point? they only took what they needed...even when "food" was proferred again in the form of a defenseless baby gazelle...she did not eat it. but instead nurtured it.
we are not like that - our needs are our needs and don't end with just "eating"...but our basic function IS that of eating to survive....CONSUMPTION civilization is an extension of "eating" BEYOND what we really need.
to "eat" in order to AGGRANDIZE ourselves , such as a capitalist or king will "eat" others to be the "master"..or a country will rape and exploit another to make itself "rich" and be Lord and master....even if there is really NO NEED to do so and to do so is to disrespect not JUST other people and cultures - BUT the places where they live and therefore also the planet.
I AGREE with the idea that in time - our POPULATION will become far too large , if not already, for our planet to sustain us. that is SIMPLY PHYSICS and mathematics.
even the idea of "prolonging" life itself has consequences no matter how attached WE are emotionally and morally to keeping "loved ones" alive - or because "they are still productive and functional and/or fighting"...
to say otherwise would be "inhumane" and cruel . and we do not know how else to say it.
BUT - the bottom line - EVEN THAT is part of our problem and challenge of populating the earth beyond its capacity - EVEN were it limited ONLY to "basic sustenance" and did not involve our technological and industrial demands on its resources.
put these two together and the capacity of our civilization to prolong what is already an exploding population - and EXTEND its DEMANDS some more
and what do we have?
in the end it will be the SAME MORAL and ETHICAL questions.
part of this is of course our sense of "selfperpetuation" no different from animals by creating families , making babies because it's the "expected" thing..and we feel each has as much right to leave a "legacy" as others..compounding the challenge some more. ...until those individual desires for self-perpetuation CLASH in terms of populations demanding from the planet.
whatever the eventual decisions about that particular challenge...ONE challenge which is WITHIN civilizations' power to influence is our CHOICES on how MUCH we allow ourselves to be TIED to the demands of our civilization.
what does one do with one's CAR -- should one drive to school, or to the corner foodmarket since everyone ELSE does it?...should one flick on the television for yet another evening of "faux news?" or Obama talking about "the environment?" should one gas up the car while the price is lower than yesterday?
should one build another HOUSE in the catskills to spend WEEKENDS in or rent out during the summer for a profit to buy yet another car?
in each of these we are all culpable - a person EATS something of the planet's resources....far beyond the need to survive but with more and more removed relationship to the source of it all, the planet......unlike the way a farmer has to grow his crop to feed his children or community in the andes...who must dig with his own hands and carry water on his shoulders - and one day, he will grow old and die , and others will have taken over his responsibilities to those around him...but ALL - always acknowledging that everything, EVERYTHING
comes from the mother earth.
What allows us to live comes from mother earth and from father sun. The sun, which has provided over the eons virtually all the energy we live by, is often forgotten in discussions such as this. We are a child of the sun as much as we are a child of the earth.
excellent...
Yep, and the Sun the child of the milky way and the milky way a child of the universe and the big bang ain't bangin anymore.
We are so connected to infinity, it is amazing.
Sorry, there are no solutions. People hear stories with happy endings all their lives, and that affects their expectations, but there are no guaranteed happy endings in life. It's a near-religious assumption, not a certain fact about the world, that there even IS "sustainable energy" in the sense that we'd get to keep our modern conveniences.
I think everyone understands on an intellectual level that industrial society is unsustainable. People seem not to REALLY grasp that "unsustainable" means that IT WILL STOP. Yes, there will be an end to industrial civilization, and we'll be living a more "primitive" lifestyle in the future no matter what we do.
"Solar energy will save us" is a lazy response, for the reasons listed in the the original article. Yes, lots of energy from the Sun reaches the Earth. That energy is also so spread out that it's not practically useful for things like running a microwave oven. Concentrating solar energy TAKES energy. Solar panels aren't free. Where do you think the energy comes from to melt silicon and make solar panels out of it? It isn't solar panels. That solar panel would have to run for a LONG time to pay for the energy required to manufacture it.
People don't seem to grasp that modern technology is MADE OF THINGS. The lithium mines and steel factories that produce a Prius are not good for the environment. The rare earth metals needed for "green energy solutions" are mostly (95%) in China, at least the currently accessible sources. Do you think it's likely, in a geopolitical sense, that everyone will get as much neodymium as they need to build whatever they want? If not, give up your hopes of high tech wind turbines saving the day.
There's no solution to the overpopulation problem, because people will continue to think that babies are SOOOO PRECIOUS until the end of time. We'll reproduce until the food runs out. Then we'll starve. Malthus was right. He didn't anticipate that we'd make the die-off exponentially worse with the Green Revolution, but population still increases geometrically while food production still increases in a straight line.
The answer to the problems created by short-sighted optimism about technology is not short-sighted optimism about technology. Humans will do a lot of dying, and after that it'd probably be a good idea not to rebuild industrial civilization. We won't be able to, anyway, since our fossil fuel subsidy will have run out by then.
What you call "black and white, dualistic thinking" is actually "mature acceptance of physical reality and actual limitations." Everybody cannot, in fact, have a pony.
The right has plenty of hate to go around, but they seem to reserve an inordinate share of it for windmills. Without good reason. And I keep hearing the silly argument that solar can't blah blah blah, from deniers and naysayers, but if any of them looked up the most simple facts and did the math they'd see that it can in fact be perfectly "self-reproducible" and that their argument is blatantly and stupidly false. Efficiency advances and reduction in toxicity are happening every week, and will come faster with proper funding. Adjustments will be made as necessary with this essentially good technology. Whether high tech solar and wind can power us for 10,000 years is not something we can or need to know. It is the only right direction for now, and future generations will have to decide the right direction for them, one generation at a time.
You seem to leap from the ability to do what's necessary to doing "whatever you want" without a pause for thought or sense. As anyone with sense could say, they're not the same, and while there's every chance we have enough to get what we need (feel free to start humming the Rolling Stones tune)...
Civilization doesn't have to go through horrible times. There is enough food produced in every country of the world to feed its people; with reasonable investment the same could soon be said for energy. We probably will, just the same, go through horrible times, because of the systemic psychological illness that effects us, but if enough of us relentlessly and progressively demand something different it will be different. Nothing is inevitable, and you should go to therapy to tell your tale of personal woe disguised as philosophy, inverse, because it's not helping out here in the world.
Skepticism about windmills isn't "without good reason." I already told you the reason: the sourcing of rare earth metals. Please explain why you think that this is not a problem. Point me to anything that suggests we can build these things without rare earth metals, or point me to something that suggests we'll have an alternate source up and running soon.
Regarding solar: you haven't addressed the point raised by me or the original article. Nobody denies that you can get electricity from solar panels with some efficiency. The issue is that such calculations ignore the fossil fuel dependence of manufacturing, installing, and maintaining the panels. Will solar-powered semi trucks be delivering the panels, as well? "Doing the math" requires taking all of these things into consideration, not just looking at the finished product. The more high-tech and advanced the panels are, the more energy-intensive it is to make them.
There is enough food to feed the world right now only because there's enough OIL to go around. That will soon stop being the case. Massive amounts of oil are used to plant, fertilize, and harvest crops, and controlling pests also uses large amounts of oil. That's what the "Green Revolution" is all about.
Energy and technology are two different things. A computer is technologically advanced, but it doesn't do anything if the power's out. You can use energy to build increasingly complicated gadgets, but doing so does not increase the amount of energy available.
Some things are, in fact, inevitable. For example, the population was around a billion when the Industrial Revolution happened. The population exploded to nearly 7 billion, because of oil. The availability of cheap oil will end, because that's what happens when you consume a nonrenewable resource. We are unlikely to grow as much food as we do without oil. Don't you think we would have figured out how, in the last 10,000 years? Nobody has proposed a way of feeding ourselves without oil. Organic agriculture is oil-dependent, too. Because of all this, the population will have to decrease along with the supply of oil. That means that a completely unprecedented die-off MUST take place, short of a miracle.
It's really time for the techno-optimists to put up or shut up. We are rapidly running out of time. Demand will permanently exceed supply within the next 5 years or less. Remember, technological miracles must be deployed before the supply crunch. As oil gets more expensive, research becomes unaffordable, especially given the realities of all government's budgets right now. It's so bad that even the military anticipates having to shrink for lack of money (see Joint Operating Environment 2010 report). Bottom line: we are faced with an engineering problem that's probably insurmountable. Avoiding catastrophe requires finding and implementing a solution in less than a decade. If that's going to happen, show me the issue of Science or Nature I missed where the techno-fix is announced.
What's "not helping out here in the world" is people burying their head in the sand and worshiping gadgets instead of making preparations for the re-localized, low-energy circumstance we're about to face. Life is not a movie with a guaranteed happy ending. There have always been tragedies, and they happened to people just like us.
The bonds in oil store solar energy that reached Earth over 500 million years. It's a huge reservoir of energy. "Renewable energy" technologies rely on present-day sunlight (wind is caused by the Sun, too). 1 year of sunlight is a lot less than millions of years of sunlight. Oil is orders of magnitude larger than renewable sources, in terms of energy. Techno-optimists can't seem to get their heads around this. We could build renewable energy infrastructure on an epic scale, and it wouldn't come close to supplying us with the amount of energy we're getting from oil. A radical downsizing of our lifestyle is inevitable, unless we kill the majority of the world's population to make room for ourselves.
The "Green Economy" and "sustainable growth" are just propaganda for Toyota and General Electric. Exxon's fooled a lot of conservative people into denying global warming, and other companies have fooled a lot of liberal people into worshiping technology. Together, the industrialists laugh all the way to the bank. Do you think the PR people just forgot liberals exist and don't try to make us act against our own interests, too? They got Obama elected, so I'm pretty sure they know a thing or two about manipulating "progressives."
Yes, every technology has problems. Maybe we can’t solve them and we are all doomed. I’ll tell you what: let’s all decide on that now so there’s absolutely no possibility of it coming out any other way. For example if there were other sources or recycling or prioritizing could work or types of wind and solar without those particular problems could be found by the time it became a crises. There. Feel better now, with the certainty of doom?
I don’t; I prefer to try the best possible solutions even if I don’t know for certain they’ll work. Efficiency and renewables are among the best answers. We need to proceed with them and let go of results. They are not under our control.
and duh, yes, the TRAINS would run on wind and solar as well as whatever other vehicles were needed. Why does this seem so impossible to you? Recent new technologies have tended to get more energy intensive because we thought we had the energy to spare but computers and cars have gone just the other way, getting better and more efficient at the same time. A new type of thin solar film was just invented. Why do you insist this is impossible?
Good organic agriculture can produce the same or even more food (over the long run) as chemical ag. on a given amount of land. Relocalized permaculture is even more efficient, though more labor intensive at first, which is perfectly aligned with our needs to provide jobs. Easy? Of course not. Extraordinarily hard. We may fail. Again, want to just go with that or should we maybe try anyway? Things are going to get worse because of climate change, that much is clear. How much worse is still up to us. It’s obvious from simple math that we could get enough from either solar or wind alone to provide all our energy needs many times over. I’m not saying we should, or that the ecological and social-political costs of this wouldn’t be huge, but with efficiency, varied energy sources, some changes in the way we live (not nearly as much as I’d prefer, I’m sure) and some small beginning of population reduction, we could probably do this just fine. Further reductions in GHGs can be made with reforestation, the increase in soil organic matter (thus carbon sequestration) from organic permaculture, etc.
“It's really time for the techno-optimists... “
There are so many mistakes and wrong assumptions in this and the following paragraphs I can’t even begin to correct them all. It’s a Gish Gallop of nonsense but I do have to say one thing: take your defeatist attitude and peddle it somewhere else. Whatever your intent, it’s a crime almost as bad as Exxon’s and Koch’s.
Please address the issue of rare earth metal supply.
Please address the energy costs associated with manufacturing the miraculous solar panels.
Please address the fossil fuel dependence of even organic agriculture. I'm talking about tractors, harvesting equipment, bringing the food to market, etc.
Please provide an estimate of how much time we have to solve our energy problems.
If these concerns are nonsense, it should only take a few minutes to explain why.
Energy efficiency will only ensure that we deplete our energy supply even faster. Do you burn more gas when it's cheap or when it's expensive?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Chasing technological solutions to our environmental problems is just as foolish as paying off your Visa bill with Mastercard. Reverting to simpler, more primitive ways of living everyday life directly reduces the harm we do to the environment. Investing in green technology only theoretically helps the environment, in the same way that lowering rates increases tax revenue by stimulating the economy. Radical simplification is only "defeatist" if you think doing without your car and your cell phone is the end of the world.
The basic problem is that you're totally wrong in any practical sense when you say "It’s obvious from simple math that we could get enough from either solar or wind alone to provide all our energy needs many times over."
This is the clearest explanation I can think of that explains what's wrong with that statement:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/02/energy-follows-its-bliss.html
What matters is not the QUANTITY of energy, but the CONCENTRATION of that energy. The issue is the second law of thermodynamics. It's true that the amount of energy reaching Earth from the Sun is astronomical, but that energy is spread across the entire surface of the Earth. It's too spread out to do much useful work. Concentrating that energy (e.g., solar panels and batteries) TAKES energy, because you're working against entropy. This means the NET energy from a solar setup isn't amazing.
Oil is special because it stores solar energy that's been concentrated for many millions of years by living organisms. That work was done before humans existed, so we don't pay that energy cost when we burn oil. This argument isn't about the merits of optimism vs. pessimism. It's about physics and engineering. It's not "defeatist" to operate within the bounds of physical reality. You WILL be defeated if your operating assumptions include things that are physically impossible.
Solar and wind power can do a lot for us, but they can't allow us to continue our present, energy-intensive lifestyles. It's more optimistic to take practical steps toward thriving in a low-energy environment than it is to close your eyes and repeat loudly that the magic science people will let us all keep our iPhones.
People are missing historical context as well as basic science backgrounds. We lived as hunter-gatherers for 1000 times as long as we've lived in industrial society. It's NOT NORMAL that this many people live as comfortably as pharaohs and emperors used to. It's NOT NORMAL that the future is consistently better than the past for multiple generations. Things are so abnormal that we're in the 6th great mass extinction event right now. Industrial civilization is at least as bad as the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs. That's not defeatist doomsaying. It's the conclusion of ecologists and Earth scientists.
We can't stop the apocalypse at this point, mostly because the people in charge had your attitude 30 or 40 years ago.
You’re a trip, aggie. Apparently, for one thing, you jump to completely erroneous conclusions about me. Apparently you want me to write a 20-volume encyclopedia on all aspects of the transition to a solar economy and ecological civilization here. Apparently your life experience has convinced you, intellectually and somato-emotionally, that all is hopeless. I understand that, but that is only your experience, not universal truth. Get into therapy for that with someone good and you’ll be much happier and more useful to the world.
1. Rare earth supply is the newest talking point in the Gish Gallop of conservatives’ anti-wind diatribes. NdFeB and other similar metals are used in some wind generators, not all. It is more common than you make it sound; we can build generators with it or without it, not much problem either way although the currently most efficient ones use some. Improvement happens.
Conservative attitudes toward wind continue to be a source of amazement, and if the consequences of believing such nonsense weren’t so serious would be as funny as the Daily Show as well. People who have boundless optimism for the technical abilities and the market to improve on the dirtiest and most death-dealing fuels ever invented, coal and nuclear, suddenly get paralyzed with fear that windmills won’t be able to improve in even the tiniest ways. People who have cheered on the frenzied slashing of 90% of every ecosystem and species on Earth suddenly get choked up with boundless love for birds when they find out that some fly into windmills. Granted, the programs and structures they love kill 96,000 times as many birds every year (an extremely conservative estimate that doesn’t even include the main sources of bird death—deforestation, agriculture/ pesticides and the toxins of modern industrial living) and switching to wind power would SAVE millions of birds every year, but that doesn’t seem to matter; they just throw it into the mix and then move on to the next 5 or 10 equally ridiculous points. Stop spreading toxic waste on the field. Stop projecting and focusing your tiny heart on such politically-specific examples.
2. “Does solar energy-specifically photovoltaic (PV) panels-ever produce as much energy as the energy that was initially invested in their manufacture? Industry, academia, and government all seem to be in agreement that the answer is “yes.” The consensus seems to be that PV produces as much energy as was used in its creation in a time period of 1-5 years, allowing PV to produce between 6 and 30 times more energy over its life than was used in its creation.”
www.energybulletin.net/node/22275
The summary goes on to say there are questions about the methodology but refers to another study that concludes:
“…thus the range of payback is between 2-8 years. Thus small-scale roof mounted PV systems have a positive energy payback and are capable of contributing to a sustainable energy future.”
www.energybulletin.net/node/17219
3. What’s your point exactly about industrial pseudo-organic ag? That we do it badly? That it’s in transition? That as it gets more common it’s being taken over by rapacious corporations that do it the same way they do everything—with no regard for human or nature, morality, decency or the American way? Hey, no kidding. Once oil goes away, that system will be replaced by local organic permaculture, providing more food/acre than the best chemical ag. Of course if we had sense, a more rational political-economic system and a lack of deniers/delayers and Exxon-funded intellectual brownshirts we could make it happen in time to drastically reduce the suffering. But such is life. Some people are psychopaths and make the rest f us pay for it.
4. Jevon’s paradox: maybe. not if we’re smart. As price goes up (as it would even more surely with a tax on energy or carbon, which conservatives rabidly oppose) people will save more; as people become aware of the monumental crisis we face they will probably respond with Jevon’s-proof efficiency advances (We’d be there already if corporate and far right conservatives hadn’t been spewing lies and confusion for years, denying science and reality and opposing intelligent, ecological improvements for the sake of short-term profits for a few and because of their relentless rage.)
5. “[Solar energy is] too spread out to do much useful work.” I’m astounded by the level of either blatant lying, psychotic lack of touch with reality or just plain stupidity that must exist for one to make a statement so clearly at odds with millions of examples of useful work being done by solar-generated electricity in every country in the world. Please come back to reality and stop this absurd nonsense. Help us solve the world’s problems instead of interfering with the solutions. Do the math. Do your own damn research, as I have, over years. What seems to be happening is that you’ve read something with a small bit of general truth and then assumed mountains of math not in evidence and jumped to the conclusion your hopelessness tells you is the only possibility. So stop doing that. Get the attitude adjusted, and then do the math.
Part 2 follows
Part 2
Any idiot could tell that both quantity and concentration of energy matter. But the math and the experience of millions of scientists, citizens, consumers, companies and even fools like us show that wind and solar do just fine with both.
You think I have a crystal ball? Whether we are going to make it or not is unknown at this time. Is that a reason to just give up as it seems you have? Have you read once in any of my posts that I think we can or should continue living as we do? We can’t. We must and will change our lives and become more ecological in every way. This will be good for us; we have the possibility of greater happiness and fulfillment than we ever did with addiction-driven industrial growth society. Maybe we’ll take advantage of the opportunity, maybe not. some are, some aren’t, and the exact numbers of each are what will determine how much suffering and death happens over the transition. We know what direction to go. How far is not up to us but to future generations who must decide based on what they see around them—the wreckage or investment of what we leave them.
I produce a fair amount of my own food right here, getting supplies and delivering the excess almost entirely by bike. The amount goes up every year as the forest garden matures and I learn more and accumulate invested labor (mine and nature’s). Will society do that? I don’t know. I’ve been pushing it to for 30 years, so I don’t know what attitude you’re talking about in your last line. The direction and the solutions are clear, with a little vagueness at the edges to be determined as we go, but efficiency, solar, wind, some geothermal and tidal, reforestation, local organic permaculture, relocalization of government and production, are the answers. Rail, sail, bikes, walking, horses, some small biofuels, etc. can also help. Those technical fixes are clear; the solution to our individual and collective psychological problems (the cause of our more obvious political problems) are less known and far more difficult but are also clear. We just have to do them. Stop interfering with that, please.
All empirical evidence points to the fact that socially and financially empowered women, as part of the general economic development of a country, are the key to population stabilization. But as Frances Moore Lappé notes, the overpopulation leading to hunger argument has it backwards. Higher population growth rates are a product of hunger, not its cause:
Despite the evidence, many people see high birth rates and hunger in the Global South and arrive at what seems like commonsense: just too many mouths to feed. But scanning the globe, no correlation between people density and undernourishment is to be found. High birth rates are best understood not as a cause of hunger but as a symptom. Along with hunger, they are a symptom of powerlessness, especially of women denied control over their fertility. Mounting evidence from around the world suggests that as people, especially women, gain education and income, fertility rates decline.
Excerpted from “Are there too many people? “ By CHRIS WILLIAMS
The major problems of overpopulation are not only food shortages and pollution. They also include the insanity that comes with over crowding. When personal space is gone, so is sanity. Look at the growth of violence in our life times.
I encourage you to read the whole article. However, the quote and the entire article argue the opposite of your "food shortages and pollution" being caused by overpopulation. Pollution is caused most by the rich or first world countries. Today in fact we often ship our toxic waste to poor countries. It is not the "overpopulated" poor that are generating the pollution. If you can't buy much you don't have much to throw away. Pollution is indeed caused by industries owned by the first world but operated in the third world. But that is not a population problem. Nonetheless the poor of those countries must suffer the consequences of that pollution.
Food shortages are not a result of overpopulation but have been caused by first world trade agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA GATT) and organizations like the WTO and IMF who all serve the interest of first world capitalists. The food shortages (and riots) last year in Haiti were caused by the decimation of local farming (rice production) caused by the "structural adjustments" required by the IMF. Imported rice from the US (subsidized by the US taxpayer) was priced so low that Haitian farmers were driven out of business. (Incidentally, those out of work farmers then moved to the urban area shanty towns that were so devastated by the earthquake.) Later, speculation on grain prices (by Wall Street et al) drives up the price of rice too high for the impoverished Haitians to import. There was not a food shortage problem but rather a food distribution problem caused by the exigencies of global capitalism. Poverty (especially among women) is the single most important cause of "overpopulation" and it is well documented.
Seems to be these people chiming in on overpopulation are hyprocrits, they want everyone else to go away without offering up themselvs or their familys to get out of the way first and show the rest of us how.
A working title Suicide is Fun/Theres too many of YOU!, or GO AWAY you are blocking my Sun!
>^^<
Overpopulation was caused by civilization. Population is a function of food supply, unfortunately. Hunter-gatherers almost never run into a genuine famine such as is suffered by agriculturalists, but they cannot store large amounts of it, and the food availability is such that it affects fertility cycles in human women.
Another piece of the puzzle is that a sedentary society has a place to put the kids so that Mom can work with both her hands. H-Gs don't have that luxury; babies must be carried everywhere. So women were less fertile for part of the year, and babies had to be carried until they could walk well, so there was incentive to only have babies once every three or four years.
Yet another piece of the puzzle is that even when groups settle down and become hunter-fisher-gardeners, as we've seen with some indigenous cultures, fertility is still kept low because the people have observed that babies turn out better when they're spaced farther apart. There is less mortality of mother and child, and the children are better developed and less likely to be sickly.
On the other hand a society turning to full-blown agriculture and the building of cities tends to be a lot less gender-equitable, does not pay attention to the nutritional needs of its women, aims to churn out as many children as possible to help on the farm, and thus also needs to make up for child mortality. The advent of industrialism addressed the child mortality but there was no cultural reset switch that reverted us all back to spacing our children wisely. With fewer children dying we had the explosion we're suffering through now.
You don't have to renounce technology. Human beings have been utilizing technology for as long as we've known how to make tools. *Chimpanzees* utilize technology, for Pete's sake. But how much of what we use now is something we actually need?
By the way, we already harness the sun's energy. Or, more properly, plants do.