Why Civilizations Collapse

SUBHEAD: They fail to make the difficult decisions necessary for survival. image above: Author of "Collapse", and "Guns, Steel & Germs", Jared Diamond From http://www.claremontconservative.com/2008/10/jared-diamond-is-coming-to-hmc-on-oct.html By Prof. Peter Saunders on 29 July 2009 in Instute of Science in Society http://www.i-sis.org.uk/whyCivilisationsCollapse.php Surviving environmental disasters As the world faces the challenge of climate change, it is instructive to recall that this is by no means the first time humans have had to cope with similar problems. Many societies have found themselves in serious trouble because of an unwelcome change in their environment. It may have been something over which they had no control, like the onset of the Little Ice Age in the 15th century, or they may have brought it upon themselves, all too often by clearing forests, or perhaps a combination of the two. Some societies survived, others did not. Long before the Spanish arrived, the Mayans of Central America had already abandoned their magnificent cities because of drought. Deforestation destroyed the Easter Island society that erected the famous statues, though a very much reduced population continued to live on the island. Others, like the Norwegian settlers in Greenland, and the original inhabitants of Pitcairn Island, died out completely. On the other hand, the Inuit who arrived in Greenland while the Norse settlements were flourishing are still there. The 18th century Tokugawa Japanese reversed the deforestation that had threatened their way of life. The inhabitants of Tikopia, a tiny island in the Pacific, have adopted a whole series of measures that allow them to survive in a difficult environment; one of the most striking 400 years ago was to kill all their pigs - high status animals in Melanesia and at one time a major source of protein on Tikopia - because they were too inefficient for feeding humans. Societies collapse through failing to take decisive action In his fascinating book Collapse [1] Jared Diamond describes and analyses these and other examples and looks for common features that would help explain why some civilisations survived environmental challenges and others did not. There are many reasons why societies have failed to cope. They may not have anticipated the problem, and so neither tried to head it off, nor made sure they were ready when it came. The Mayans might have been better able to deal with the great drought of the 9th century if they had known such things could happen in their part of the world. Unfortunately, the last great drought was in the 3rd century, and had been forgotten. The Mayans did keep careful records, but only of things they considered important such as the exploits of their kings, not trivia like climate data. A society may not even be aware of a serious problem when it is actually upon them, especially if the effect is slow. An increase in mean temperature of a degree or two per century can easily be masked by annual fluctuations or dismissed as part of some cycle. It may also be that the problem is just too difficult. If you live an already marginal existence on an isolated island in the South Pacific and the rainfall decreases even further, there is not much you can do.

Diamond found that in the many societies he studied, the most common reason for their collapse was none of the above, but the failure to take decisive action that could have saved them. Surprisingly, even when it had become obvious that there was a serious problem, little or nothing was done to address it. Why do societies fail to save themselves? Why would a society that knows it is in danger not do all it can to survive? There are a number of possible reasons, most of which arise from the fact that a society is not an individual but a collection of human beings. There can be significant conflicts of interests, and these often lead to decisions that suit one faction but are not in the best interests of the society as a whole. The most obvious source of conflict is that the interests of the ruler or the elite are not always the same as those of the rest. It is easy to think of examples, from the chiefs who devoted so much of Easter Island’s resources to building the famous statues (squandering large amounts on prestige projects is a common failing of rulers) to the owners of the companies that are clearing the rain forests and the politicians who are allowing that to happen. Even a group that does not have much intrinsic power may be given what it wants because it is more determined to get it than the majority are to refuse it. That is essentially why we continue to subsidise fishermen when the seas are already overfished. There is also the “tragedy of the commons”: a fisherman lands more fish than he knows he ought to because he fears that if he holds back in the hope of preserving stocks, others will take them instead. [2]. Societies also have deeply held values and find it very difficult to take any action that conflicts with them. The obvious example is religious taboos, but values do not have to be expressed in terms of a religion. The Greenland Norse, for example, reduced their chances of survival by keeping as close as they could to Norwegian customs and farming practices [3], and refusing to learn from the Inuit. Will we survive climate change? If collapses were usually due to one of the first three reasons that Diamond identifies - failure to anticipate the problem, failure to be aware of it when it materialises, and lack of the technology to cope - we could be quite confident about our prospects. It is more than a century since Arrhenius showed that if we burned too much fossil fuel the Earth would get warmer, so this isn’t coming as a complete surprise. Meteorologists and climatologists have been measuring the upward trend in the mean temperature and comparing it with the greenhouse gas concentration, so we know the scale of the problem. We already have the technologies to limit climate change and mitigate its effects (see Which Energy? [4] and Food Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free [5]), and more are being developed (see SiS 31-43). The crucial question is whether we have the ability to take the right decisions; and it is not at all obvious that we are any better placed to do that than earlier societies. The problem that faces us is planet-wide, and to solve it we need cooperation at an unprecedented global level. Any agreement to limit climate change will have to take into account the quite different interests of the developed countries and developing countries. The tragedy of the commons operates in the same way whether we are talking about individual fishermen or national fishing fleets. Worse, it can act at both levels simultaneously. There are two serious obstacles in trying to resolve such conflicts. First, any society has some form of government, from an autocratic ruler to an informal congress of the entire community, or something in between. The form of government obviously affects the decision-making. Diamond argues that those near one end of the spectrum of government or the other are more able to cope with environmental challenges than those in the middle. As there is no world government of any kind, formal or informal, we find ourselves having to make difficult choices with no framework for reaching decisions and no means of enforcing the decisions that are taken. Second, attempts to overcome conflicts of interests among states have to take account at the same time of those within states. Because the consequences of any agreement will impact differently on different groups, a country may be unable to make a concession to which an influential minority is strongly opposed. Most of the 44 Democrats in the US House of Representatives who almost defeated the recent climate change bill were from states that either produce coal or are heavily dependent on it [6]. It is too soon to know how much the struggle to get the bill through Congress will affect the US negotiating position, but it shows there can be a multiplier effect. A small but determined group within one society can have a significant effect on the whole world, even though on that scale they are very small indeed. Thus what Diamond identified as the greatest obstacle to success has become double layered and even more difficult to overcome. We must not give in to pessimism, but neither should we underestimate the size of the challenge that faces us. How we can save ourselves It is easy to delude ourselves into thinking either that climate change will not happen or that if it does, those of us who live in the developed world will be immune from its consequences. Climate change is happening, and the consequences will be global; if we don’t do something soon they will be much worse. And if we do not act quickly and effectively, our society may well collapse. The human species will probably not go extinct, but we may suffer the same fate as the Mayans: reduced to a much smaller, marginal agrarian population. If you find that an ultimately attractive prospect, think of the social unrest, wars, famines and other disasters that would happen along the way. We have all the science and technology we need to avert the catastrophe. What is more, as the Stern Report [7] has shown (The Economics of Climate Change, SiS 33 [8]), we can do it at a price we can easily afford. The question is whether we have the will, and an early test of this will be whether we can preserve the world’s remaining forests. Deforestation has been a key factor in many collapses because trees serve many vital purposes, such as holding the soil in place on slopes, providing timber for housing and boats, sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and above all helping to stabilise the climate. Unfortunately they grow very slowly. Once a forest has been cleared it takes a long time to replace, if it can be replaced at all. Our society, like so many before us, is squandering this resource. We seem unable to stop the destruction of the Amazonian and Indonesian rain forests even though the Stern Report has shown that this would be by far the most cost effective contribution we can make towards mitigating climate change. The second most effective is reforesting areas already cleared (see also Saving and Restoring Forests Saves Far More Carbon Emissions than Biofuels, SiS 37 [9]). It needs international cooperation because the forests that have to be preserved lie largely in developing countries, those in the developed world having been cleared long ago (Old Growth Forests Are Carbon Sinks and Must Be Protected, SiS 40 [10]). If we cannot find a way of working together even on this, it is hard to see how we can cooperate on the more difficult problems like reducing the use of fossil fuels while allowing developing countries to raise their standards of living. The danger is not that we won’t do anything about climate change, especially now that the USA and China are on board. It is that what we do will be too little and too late. The effects are cumulative, and the longer we delay, the harder our task will be. It is already too late to begin with symbolic acts and good intentions. We need to make real changes, and we need to start making them now. References 1. Diamond J,. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking Penguin, New York, 2005. 2. Hardin G., The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162, 1243-1248, 1968. 3. Twentieth century examples of a society refusing to learn how to live in a different environment are provided by Noel Coward in his song Mad Dogs and Englishmen, e.g., “In the Malay States there are hats like plates, which the Britishers won’t wear.” 4. Ho MW, Bunyard P, Saunders PT, Bravo E and Gala R., Which Energy? Institute of Science in Society, London, 2006, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/which_energy.php 5. Ho MW, Burcher S, Lim LC et al., Food Futures Now: *Organic, *Sustainable, *Fossil Fuel Free. Institute of Science in Society, London, 2008, ISBN 0-954-44923-4-X, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/foodFutures.php 6. “House passes bill to address threat of climate change”, Jim Broder, New York Times, 26 June, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/us/politics/27climate.html 7. Stern N., The Economics of Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, ISBN 0-521-70080-9. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm 8. Saunders P.T., The economics of climate change. Science in Society 33, 20-23, 2007. 9. Ho MW., Saving and restoring forests saves far more carbon emissions that biofuels. Science in Society 37, 17, 2008. 10. Ho MW., Old growth forests are carbon sinks and must be protected. Science in Society 40, 29-30, 2008. see also: Ea O Ka Aina: Jared Diamond Predicts 2/21/09

Nobel Economics Prize & Kauai

SUBHEAD: Two women view the Commons with different eyes - Elinor Ostrom and Linda Lingle. image above: Economist and Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom. Ffrom http://www.pnas.org/content/103/51/19221/F1.expansion.html By Juan Wilson on 26 October 2009 - This year the Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to a woman for the first time in history - American Elinor Ostrom. The importance of her work is that it indicates that the local management of shared resources may be the best way to preserve them. This has important implications here in Hawaii. Ostrom's work focused on the Tragedy of the Commons. The Tragedy of the Commons This refers to a dilemma that was first described in an influential article by Garrett Hardin and published in the journal Science in 1968. The article describes a dilemma in which a group of people acting independently in their own self-interest will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to occur. Central to Hardin's article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd), of a hypothetical and simplified situation from medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put all his cows onto the common land, even if the carrying capacity of the common is exceeded and it is temporarily or permanently damaged as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits for his cows, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed to the detriment of all. As a result Hardin asks for a strict management of common goods via increased topdown government involvement and strict regulations. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons) Elinor Ostrom's Pleasant Discovery Elinor Ostrom is considered one of the leading scholars in the study of common pool resources. In particular, Ostrom's work emphasizes how humans interact with ecosystems to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields. Common pool resources include forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems. Ostrom's work has considered how societies have developed diverse institutional arrangements for managing natural resources and avoiding ecosystem collapse in many cases, even though some arrangements have failed to prevent resource exhaustion. Her work emphasized the multifaceted nature of human–ecosystem interaction and argued against any singular "panacea" for individual social-ecological system problems. Ostrom discovered that there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate the Commons does not have to be a tragedy. She identified eight "design principles" of stable local Commons resource management. They are: 1. Clearly defined boundaries and effective exclusion of external unentitled parties. 2. Rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources are adapted to local conditions. 3. Collective-choice arrangements allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process. 4. Effective monitoring by those who are part of (or accountable to) the appropriators. 5. There is a scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules. 6. Mechanisms of conflict resolution are cheap and of easy access. 7. The self-determination of the community is recognized by higher-level authorities. 8. In the case of larger common-pool resources there needs to be organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with smaller local common-pool resources at the base level. The Nobel organization said Ostrom's research brought this topic from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention, by showing how common resources - forests, fisheries, oil fields or grazing lands, can be managed successfully by the people who use them. Ostrom's work in this regard challenged conventional wisdom, showing that common resources can be successfully managed without government regulation or privatization. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom) Traditional Hawaiian Land Management Before contact with the British and Americans, Hawaii was self-sufficient and self-sustaining. Land and resources were managed for a millennium from the smallest ahupuaa upward (micro-bioregional level roughly translated to watershed). Each ahupuaa was a community unto itself with shared and private resources. Local chiefs (konohiki) and wise elders (kahuna) used kapu (roughly taboos) and other techniques to implement rules that were found to work in preserving the ahupuaa resources of forest, valley, stream and reef. At a higher level, moku (roughly island bioregion climatic divisions) were managed with techniques appropriate to their scale and needs. Historically each Hawaiian island (or group such as Kauai/Niihau) had its own sovereignty and organization. This nested level of resource management fits tightly to Ostrom's eight design principles for the Commons. Let ours in Hawaii not be a tragedy. For those interested in more on this subject visit: www.ahakiole.org, www.kumupono.com/land.htm, and http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/czm/initiative/wec/html/descrip/management.htm image above: Governor Linda Lingle at the 2009 National Governor's Association Convention. From http://www.nga.org 2009 photo gallery. The Lingle Touch There are many examples of how Hawaii, under Governor Linda Lingle, has been moving in the wrong direction concerning the Tragedy of the Commons. I will briefly mention three cases involving Kauai. The Hawaii Superferry The Superferry was a nonviable pipe dream until the U.S. Navy and private military investors took an interest. Under Lingle, with a Bush administration OK, the Hawaii state Department of Transportation partnered up with the U.S. government and committed $40 million to the Superferry. Lingle's DOT skipped doing a state required environmental assessment. They ignored the Maui and Kauai County Council resolutions banning the Superferry without a full Environmental Impact Statement. They challenged Kauai residents who refused to allow the ferry to dock in their harbor and fought a Maui court decision to scuttle the project. They pushed their agenda ahead without regard to the wishes of the outer islands. Lingle's fiasco with the establishment of this military-industrial enterprise was a great cost to all in Hawaii. The Master Plan for Kokee Central planning by Lingle's Department of Land & Natural Resources has ignored the wishes of the residents of Kauai. Their master plan is to privatize and commercialize a state park to maximize the flow of money from the park. They plan to add a gate and charge a fee to enter the public park. The DLNR claims to be saving Kokee's resources from overuse by island residents, and funding repairs and improvements to the park. In fact, the gate fees and other income sources will go to DLNR general funds, and not stay on Kauai. Moreover, much of the the improvement money will be to widen roads and add more parking for additional tourist traffic. Lingle, like many Republicans, do not understand that public parks are part of the commons and not state business enterprises. School Furlough Days Hawaii is the only state in America to have a totally centralized school district management. Under Lingle the Department of Education has dictated all schools be on the same schedule of a year round calendar. This does not work well. For example, in Kekaha the elementary school was on a full time schedule in some of the summer months in non air-conditioned classrooms in sizzling westside temperatures. By state dictate all schools will "save money" by closing schools on seventeen "furlough" Fridays through this school year. Hawaii already has the fewest instructional days per year in the nation and is on the lowest rung of student performance records. Lingle took this course without consideration of the costs to working couples who have no place for their children to go, and without plans to meet the strict educational goals required by state and federal mandates. We could have used that Superferry $40 million for the DOE. Now Lingle is asking to the office of the governor to have even greater control of the centralized education department. Wrong direction Linda! You won't be getting any Nobel Prize. The DOE should break education supervision down to the county (island) level with separate school districts on each island as needed. Then it won't matter if the state goes belly up investing in the wrong future. See also: Ea O Ka Aina: TheTriumph of the Commons 8/26/09

350 Day in Portland

SUBHEAD: 350 Day drew just 200-500 people to Portland's Pioneer Square. Later that afternoon 3,000 Halloween celebrating zombies replaced them. image above: KATU says day of climate action drew an estimated 1000 people to downtown Portland. From http://www.katu.com/news/local/65919412.html By Jan Lundberg on 25 October 2009 in Culture Change - http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=535&Itemid=1 "I went down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse." - the Rolling Stones from You Can't Always Get What You Want It was as nice a day as Portland, Oregon, could hope for for a rally, and there was no abuse. This movement threatens no one. One reason is that the size of the crowd coming out for the well-orchestrated "350" climate protection global day of protest was minimal, considering the scope of the threat we're addressing. Estimates ranged from just 200-500 people in downtown Pioneer Square.

As the day progressed, the same square was taken over by around 3,000 zombies -- Halloween revelers trying to look freshly killed. The question is begged, what really are people's priorities here in Hipster Land? Judge not, I told myself, for Yea these zombies are less zombie-like in their daily lives than the rest of the normal population.

A more precise question of the hour: How many people in either event were really committed to the idea of bettering the climate-change agenda -- say, from that of the technofix, which some believe can get the planet down to 350 parts per million atmospheric CO2, to the more audacious and safer Luddite level of 280 ppm of pre-industrial civilization?

On the square, a Food Not Bombs activist advised me of a related event later on, a City Repair get-together at their new digs at St. Francis Church in SE Portland. She said Gaia University spokespersons were showing up. Their appearance cinched it for me, and off I pedaled. Once there in the park-like church grounds, after new friends put up the famous Tea Horse (a mobile living room) and enjoyed a pot luck dinner, a couple of dozen people filed into the Church's Che Guevara Room for a presentation around a circle of couches and chairs.

The purpose of Gaia University runs counter to the system that gave rise to today's university as we know it. When the founders of Gaia University were rebuffed several years ago at the gates of academia for trying to get Permaculture included in curricula, this revealed that Permaculture ideals of doing minimum work for maximum natural gain, and seeing problems as solutions, ran smack into the top-down regimentation that the ruling elite insists on. It seems clear that Permaculture (and common sense in general) has to be suppressed -- if just ignoring it first does not suffice.

As a somewhat jaded activist, I was truly excited to learn about Gaia University. The idea of setting up a global educational collective based on the principles of Permaculture and Ecovillages, for sustainability and regeneration, appeals to me greatly. Andrew Langford and Liora Adler are the dynamic duo in this endeavor, with cohorts in such places as the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm, Tennessee. Andrew and Liora have not only got their "Small Is Beautiful"-like system figured out; they are solidly up and running. Turning upside down the prevailing notions of learning and education, in favor of learning what's truly useful for the better world we are trying to build, is the enlightened, practical purpose of Gaia University.

Just a few years old, accredited in the U.K., Gaia U. is moving forward with a new, flexible model beyond borders -- taking the advice of Buckminster Fuller who questioned whether fixing the old broken model is worthwhile. The circle-crowd in the Che room also could relate to Adler's and Langford's position of uncovering and teaching what has been subjugated for the sake of corporate profits and suppression of the mass psyche's hurts. "Fasting," I chimed in. At the end of the evening, it was icing on the cake for me to learn that Gaia University is keenly interested in a floating campus that fits right in with the concept of Sail Transport Network.

Short of the U.S. having a college as radical as the Earth University, in Chiapas -- Universidad de la Tierra, outside San Cristobal de las Casas, an autonomous zone in rebellion within Mexico -- Gaia University is one of the most promising models for organizing and moving forward. Please check out the program and community at Gaia U, and get your degree for the Earth while you keep up your good work.

see also: Ea O Ka Aina: 350 Rally in Waimea, Kauai 10/24/09

Self Jiving Nation

SUBHEAD: The Cabinet takes a well earned intermission to find Washington DC has been burning down during Act One. image above: An Obama administration cabinet meeting in the White House. From http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Obama_cabinet_meeting.jpg By James Howard Kunstler on 26 October 2009 in Kunstler.com - http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/10/self-jiving-nation.html The scene in the White House these days must be a sort of Opera Bouffe (productions known for elements of comedy, satire, parody and farce), in which an earnest and rather grave young man moves from one roomful of lesser officials to another in which all agree to pretend that they have prevented the nation from falling into something they call "the abyss." At the end of Act I, a young deputy FDIC commissioner in the Little Mary Sunshine mold gets down on one knee, belts out a show-stopper about the glories of a bright and shining "tomorrow," and the audience goes out for intermission to discover that the city has been burning down around the theater all night.

Out in America-the-Real, Halloween time in this year of 2009 has an interesting "Day of the Locust" flavor. There's more than a whiff of smoke in the air, along with an odor of dead carp wafting out of all the the offices and institutions we depend on to define reality. Like the Hollywood of Nathaniel West's dark 1939 novel, America today seems poised in the gate of some harsh judgment. When the historians look back at this era - especially at the time between January 20th and the holiday season of 2009 - won't they marvel at how well-understood our predicament actually was, by so many parties to it, and the gulf between that comprehension and the story we told ourselves: that we were "recovering."

Like a lot of other observer-interlocutors, I'd like to know what folks imagine we are recovering to. To a renewed orgy of credit-card spending? To yet another round of suburban expansion, with the boys in the yellow hard-hats driving stakes out in the sagebrush for another new thousand-unit pop-up "community?" For a next generation of super-cars built to look like medieval war wagons? That's the "hope" that our officials seem to pretend to offer. It's completely inconsistent with any reality-based trend-lines, by the way.

Perhaps it's time to redefine "hope" in the greater social sense of the word. To me, hope is not synonymous with "wishes fulfilled." In fact, hope should not be about wishing at all. Hope should be based on confidence that the individual or group is reliably competent enough to meet the challenges that circumstances present. Hope is justified when people demonstrate to themselves that they can behave ably and bravely. Hope is not really possible in the face of patent untruthfulness. It is derived from a clear-eyed and courageous view of what is really going on. I don't think that defines any of the behavior in the United States these days. We've become a self-jiving nation intent on playing shell games, running Ponzi schemes, and working Polish blanket tricks on ourselves.

It begins to look now as if the Obama team is determined to run this creaking vessel right over the falls. We could have bravely faced the structural perversities in banking the past year, but we decided not to. So far only a tiny minority of the public - unfortunately the "tea-bagging" race-baiters - have been the only ones to squawk. I look around at my fellow baby-boomer ex-hippie, ex-political radical age-cohorts and I see a sad-ass claque of passive, played-out, defeated dreamers too depressed to form a coherent thought about what's really going on... lost in sentimental fantasies about "world peace," or free heart-transplants-for-everybody as they, the boomers themselves, lurch toward the graveyard.

Obama was not a boomer, not one of "us," so I had expectations that he'd rise above the fog of wishful thinking. But he begins to look more like Millard Fillmore and less like an earlier president from Illinois who got elected on the eve of a terrible national political convulsion. I think about Lincoln a lot these days, about how circumstances shoved him to act when Southern secessionists fired on Fort Sumter barely a month after the new president took the oath of office (which was done in March back then). There was no spinning the news on it, no wiggling away from reality: an organized insurrection led by rogue U.S. military officers fired on their fellow officers... and that was that. The issue, as the saying goes, was joined.

If you think we have been in a crisis of finance and economy for the past year or so, consider that we have also been sunk in a comprehensive crisis of leadership. Nobody in authority is willing to face the truth, state the truth, and offer a reality-based idea about how to meet the truth, This is a leadership failure not just in politics and government, but also in business, in the university faculties, in the editorial and production offices of the news media, and even among a barely-breathing clergy.

Americans look around and see nobody standing up for their interests. Their greatest interest is a vision of a fruitful society that they can help build and be a part of beyond the current wreckage of revolving-debt consumerism. It will have to be a vision based on fewer resources and on new arrangements for daily living. It will have to recognize losses frankly, and enable us to let go of things whose time is over, whether that is Happy Motoring, college-for-everybody, vast industries devoted to vanished leisure, or procedures geared to getting something-for-nothing.

For now, I still see the inflection point as coming by the holiday season, when the masters-of-the-universe on Wall Street will have to publicly post their Christmas bonuses (and as publicly held corporations, they will have to). It is also well within the realm of possibility that a Black Swan the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile will swoop through the stock markets to breath fire on the computer terminals and melt the glorious rally of 09 away. In the meantime, I wonder about that man in the White House, and those ever more comical meetings he attends every day. He must emerge from them spinning like a nine dollar gyroscope. Nobody wants to imagine what happens to him when the spinning stops

Global Land Use Crisis

SUBHEAD: With agricultural practices already causing massive ecological impact, the world must now find new ways to feed itself. image above: Potential biomax limit og the continent of Africa. From http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ndp055/africa_biomax.html By Jonathan Foley on 5 October 2009 in Yale Environment 360 - http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2196 It’s taken a long time, but the issue of global climate change is finally getting the attention it deserves. While enormous technical, policy, and economic issues remain to be solved, there is now widespread acceptance of the need to confront the twin challenges of energy security and climate change. Collectively, we are beginning to acknowledge that our long addiction to fossil fuels — which has been harming our national security, our economy and our environment for decades — must end. The question today is no longer why, but how. The die is cast, and our relationship to energy will never be the same. Unfortunately, this positive shift in the national zeitgeist has had an unintended downside. In the rush to portray the perils of climate change, many other serious issues have been largely ignored. Climate change has become the poster child of environmental crises, complete with its own celebrities and campaigners. But is it so serious that we can afford to overlook the rise of infectious disease, the collapse of fisheries, the ongoing loss of forests and biodiversity, and the depletion of global water supplies? Although I’m a climate scientist by training, I worry about this collective fixation on global warming as the mother of all environmental problems. Learning from the research my colleagues and I have done over the past decade, I fear we are neglecting another, equally inconvenient truth: that we now face a global crisis in land use and agriculture that could undermine the health, security, and sustainability of our civilization. Our use of land, particularly for agriculture, is absolutely essential to the success of the human race. We depend on agriculture to supply us with food, feed, fiber, and, increasingly, biofuels. Without a highly efficient, productive, and resilient agricultural system, our society would collapse almost overnight. But we are demanding more and more from our global agricultural systems, pushing them to their very limits. Continued population growth (adding more than 70 million people to the world every year), changing dietary preferences (including more meat and dairy consumption), rising energy prices, and increasing needs for bioenergy sources are putting tremendous pressure on the world’s resources. And, if we want any hope of keeping up with these demands, we’ll need to double, perhaps triple, the agricultural production of the planet in the next 30 to 40 years. Meeting these huge new agricultural demands will be one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. At present, it is completely unclear how (and if) we can do it. If this wasn’t enough, we must also address the massive environmental impacts of our current agricultural practices, which new evidence indicates rival the impacts of climate change. Consider the following: Freshwater decline. Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Of this, 70 percent is used for irrigation, the single biggest use of water, by far, on the globe. As a result, many large rivers have greatly reduced flows and some routinely dry up. Just look at the Aral Sea, now turned to desert, or the mighty Colorado River, which no longer sends any water to the ocean, for living proof. And the extraction of water from deep groundwater reserves is almost universally unsustainable, and has resulted in rapidly declining water tables in many regions of the world. Future water demands from increasing population and agricultural consumption will likely climb between 4,500 and 6,200 cubic kilometers per year, hugely compounding the impacts of climate change, especially in arid regions. Widespread pollution. Agriculture, particularly the use of industrial fertilizers and other chemicals, has fundamentally upset the chemistry of the entire planet. Already, the use of fertilizers has more than doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds in the environment, resulting in widespread water pollution and the massive degradation of lakes and rivers. Excess nutrient pollution is now so widespread, it is even contributing to the disruption of coastal oceans and fishing grounds by creating hypoxic “dead zones,” including one in the Gulf of Mexico. Given our current practices, future increases in food demand will dramatically increase water pollution and ecosystem destruction through agricultural effluent. Ironically, the fertilizer runoff from farmlands compromises another crucial source of food: coastal fishing grounds. Greenhouse gas emissions. Last, but certainly not least, land use is also one of the biggest contributors to global warming. Of the three most important man-made greenhouse gasses — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — land use and agricultural practices, including tropical deforestation, emit 30 percent of the total. That’s more than the emissions from all the world’s passenger cars, trucks, trains and planes, or the emissions from all electricity generation or manufacturing. Compared to any other human activity, land use and agriculture are the greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses. The vast majority comes from deforestation, methane emissions from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide emissions from heavily fertilized fields. Yet, for some reason, agriculture has been largely able to avoid the attention of emissions reductions policies. The list of environmental impacts from agricultural land use goes on and on — and clearly threatens human well-being and the health of the biosphere as much as global warming. In fact, in a recent paper in Nature, a number of us documented “planetary boundaries" where large-scale environmental changes could result in catastrophic tipping points. Of those changes, an equal number were tied to climate change and CO2 emissions as were connected to land-use and agriculture. From these newly revealed facts, it’s clear that we must consider multiple inconvenient truths. The future of our civilization and our planet requires that we simultaneously address the grand challenges of climate change and land use, ultimately finding new ways to meet the needs of our economy, our security and the environment. Anything less will be a complete catastrophe. So, what are the solutions to the global land crisis? Here are just a few to start with:

• First, acknowledge the problem. Even in circles of well-informed scientists and agricultural experts, the notion that our land use and agricultural practices rival climate change as a global environmental threat comes as a big surprise. Clearly we need to have a larger international conversation about this issue, on par with the recent efforts of the climate change community and Al Gore, to give it the attention it deserves. • Invest in revolutionary agricultural solutions. The Obama administration has invested billions of dollars into new energy technology, research and infrastructure, and aggressive plans for new climate mitigation policies are being developed. These strategies are important, but I wonder where the stimulus funding for new “out of the box” agricultural research is? • Where are we investing public dollars in revolutionary approaches to feeding the world, while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture? These might include the development of new hybrid crops, designed to use water and nitrogen more efficiently, or the invention of perennial crops that don't need to be planted every year. Don’t such ideas count as national priorities, too? Can’t we afford to launch a “Greener” Revolution? • Bridge the artificial divide between production agriculture and environmental conservation. We cannot solve these problems by boosting agricultural production at the expense of the environment, nor can we ignore the growing need for food in the name of preserving natural ecosystems. Instead, we must find ways to simultaneously increase production of our agricultural systems while greatly reducing their environmental impacts. This is not going to be easy. Yet, drawing on the lessons from recent research, including the successes and failures of local organic practice, combined with the efficiency and scalability of commercial agriculture, will be crucial.

In recent years, for example, U.S. farmers — working with agricultural experts — have dramatically improved practices in the corn and soybean belt, cutting down on erosion, nutrient loss, and groundwater pollution, even as yields have continued to increase. As a first step, advocates of environmental conservation, organic farming and commercial agriculture all need to put down their guns and work toward solving the problems of food security and the environment — with everyone at the table. Providing for the basic needs of nine-billion-plus people, without ruining the biosphere in the process, will be one of the greatest challenges our species has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world, embarked on one of the noblest causes in history. But the first step is admitting we have more than one problem.

350 Rally in Waimea, Kauai

SUBHEAD: The last and most western 350 demonstration in the world was held in Waimea, Kauai, Hawaii.

By Juan Wilson on 24 October 2009 for Island Breath -
(http://www.islandbreath.blogspot.com/2009/10/350-in-waimea-kauai.html)

 
Image above: Tiana Kamen explains impact of one-meter sea rise on Waimea Town, Kauai. All photos courtesy of Juan Wilson.  

There were to be worldwide demonstrations expressing resistance to global warming by CO2 emissions on October 24th. The idea was to achieve a goal 350part-per-million (or less) of CO2 in our atmosphere to avoid run-away global warming - raising seas and desertifying the land.

  image above: some participants hold Waimea "flood" map up for a rally portrait. (l. to r.) Tiana Kamie, Linda Harmon, Linda Pascatore, and Helene Kamen.

We had heard of no announcement of a scheduled event by the www.350.org rally for the westside of Kauai until October 20th. Living in Hanapepe we delighted when we heard about a planned event in Waimea today. That meant we would not have to burn too much gas driving around the island to protest adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

The Waimea 350 event was held in the park with Captains Cook's statue across the street from Ishihara's Market. It was organized by Francois Rogers (on Oahu) and Ivory McClintock, of The Blue Line Project (www.bluelineproject.org). Kauai native Tiana Kamen and her mother Helene were on the ground in Waimea with blue 350 T-shirts, handout material, and a map of Waimea that illustrated what the coastline of the town would be with a one- meter rise in sea level. It wasn't pretty if you owned a home in the area.

 
Image above: A local resident is the first to draw a blue line down the sidewalk of his town.

One of the rally activities was to draw a blue line ( (a line in the sand, so to speak) down the sidewalk in the middle of town to demonstrate our concern and resolve about not letting global warming come to the point of sinking our towns.

Only a small number of people gathered over the two hours of the rally, but they were concerned and dedicated folks. One claim to fame they had was being the most western and last place for a 350 gathering in the world on 2 October 2009.

   
Image above: Juan Wilson add some yardage to Waimea's blue line.

One thing seems clear, the scientific community and the progressive activists involved with social justice and the environment are in agreement. A disaster is unfolding that can only be stopped by political will and courage that is in too short supply. The Obama administration is sending veiled signals that it won't be possible to go to Copenhagen in seven weeks with a US agreement to stop destroying the planet.

 If we won't agree to wash our hands of oil and coal in the near future, why should China or anyone else in in the back of the world bus - as it plunges over the cliff. The 350.org founder Bill McKibbon thinks the United Nations climate meeting in Copenhagen will be the most important gathering of human leaders in our history. To me it will demonstrate if money is more important than life, and whether we really are more intelligent than dinosaurs.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: A Breakthrough Moment 8/26/09
Ea O Ka Aina: 350 Fun Action Alert 10/20/09
Ea O Ka Aina: None Like It Hot 10/23/09

Sustainable Agriculture

SUBHEAD: Sustainable farms employ productivity systems inspired by nature.


By Jason Bradford & Craig Wichner 1 May 2009 Energy Bulletin -  
(http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50484) 

 
Image above: Restored taro loi at Limahuli Garden & Preserve of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens on Kauai, Hawaii. Visit http://www.ntbg.org/gardens/limahuli.php. Photo by Juan Wilson.
 Framing the Discussion: Sustainable Agriculture = Sustainable Society
Developing a sustainable agriculture is a necessary part of creating a sustainable society. The root of the word sustainable is the verb, to sustain, which means to nourish and prolong. In social and environmental contexts we say something is sustainable when we believe it can persist indefinitely without exhausting resources or causing lasting damage.

The actions we take as individuals are at the core of both the problems and the solutions. Just by purchasing conventional goods at your local supermarket, you cause 4 lbs of pesticides to be put into the environment each year. The food supply chain averages of 4200 miles to reach your plate, when it could come from local farms and use a fraction of the transportation fuels. And the 2.6 acres of U.S. farmland (your pro-rata share) have lost 50% of the carbon in the soil since 1907, the equivalent CO2 of burning 90 barrels of oil – on top of your normal carbon emissions.

Cumulatively, agriculture impacts our society at a scope and scale that few appreciate, far beyond the initial realms of our food safety, quality, and the local environment. Due to the scale of natural resources required to provide food, fiber and fuel to 6.7 billion people, agriculture requires continued global-scale supplies of fertile land, clean water, fossil fuels, fertilizers, pesticides, and transportation infrastructure. These issues underpin our civilization’s energy security, population distribution and capacity, national security, and cause agriculture to be a key player, for good and bad, in the fate of our planet’s climate.

A 2008 article in the popular journal New Scientist titled “How our economy is killing the Earth” included a number of graphics showing the exponential growth in consumption of planetary resources…leading to an exponential growth in problems. Agriculture, both directly or indirectly, contributes to resource consumption and pollution, and can be used to benefit or aggravate the situation.

...Exponential growth is by definition unsustainable, and signs such as fishery collapses, forest loss and species extinctions, and melted glaciers and other evidence of climate change all are warning signs at best…trip-wires at worst.

Discussions of an alternative path, or sustainable development, often begin by reviewing a schematic of development that balances social, economic and environmental parameters, which are often called the “three pillars”.

Ecological Economists would produce a different schematic that places the economy and all social systems as a subsets of the environment to reflect that humans are a part of and totally dependent upon the environment. In other words, these are not three parts in a balanced relationship but a nested set of parts with a clear hierarchy.

Both views of sustainability, however, establish criteria for understanding the long-term viability of related environmental, social and economic systems. This white paper will do so for agriculture.

The Impetus for Change
Our modern agricultural system, the so-called “green revolution,” has enabled tremendous productivity gains from the land, enabling us to grow from 2 billion to 6.7 billion people on the planet over the past 100 years.

Modern farming methods are designed to generate maximum financial and production returns, and they do this well over the short and even medium term. For example, conventional farmers usually grow a single crop over large acreage; use herbicides to sterilize the soil prior to planting, then add artificial fertilizers to stimulate crop growth and pesticides to treat overpopulated pests (caused by monocropping); all the while decreasing the productivity of the soil over time.

However, such practices have been shown to reduce returns (net of fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide costs) by 25% to 30% in as few as five years4, while requiring increasing amounts of costly and toxic artificial inputs. Unfortunately, once started, the system is very difficult to escape.

Even with its history of yield improvements, agricultural production today is no longer keeping up with current demands. For example, from 1998 to 2008 the global consumption of grain has outpaced total production in most years, leading to low carry-over stocks.

Achieving expected growth is daunting as well. If demographic trends continue, agricultural output will need to nearly double by 20506, yet the available fertile farmland per person will be one-third the levels in 1950. Demand for farmland production is increasing due to rising population, greater consumption of meat (requiring additional grains to feed the animals), and new biofuel mandates consuming corn and oil-seed crops. Meanwhile farmland acreage worldwide is decreasing due to land development, soil and water depletion, increasing soil salinity, and other factors.

Furthermore, these farm practices are environmentally unsustainable on a global level, as they:

1. Degrade soil, air and water quality from tillage, chemical applications, and concentrated wastes. Topsoil with low organic matter content and little biological activity is unable to hold onto the added chemicals, with the runoff causing algal blooms and then “dead zones” in fresh water and oceans.
   
2. Consume and deplete non-renewable resources such as ancient aquifers, natural gas and petroleum-based fuels, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, and use mined minerals such as rock phosphate to promote productivity.
   
3. Put 5 billion pounds of potentially harmful chemicals into the environment each year through pesticide use (includes herbicides, insecticides and fungicides), with over a billion pounds in the U.S. alone. This goes directly into our food, with 77% of the food consumed in the U.S. containing pesticide residue, and 47% containing residue from multiple pesticides.
   
4. Contribute to greenhouse gas emissions from the direct use of fossil fuels, and indirectly through the breakdown of soil carbon and the conversion of natural ecosystems such as forests and wetlands. About 16% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from food production, distribution and retail.

Climate change and water supply issues are likely to significantly affect agricultural production. About 70-90% of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agricultural irrigation. Globally, crop models show a general decline in the yields of major food crops and livestock, with the carbon dioxide fertilization effect being overwhelmed by extreme events and trends in temperature, water availability and pest pressures.

For example, over the course of this century climate models show California's water supply declining overall, but especially during the spring and summer months when irrigation use is critical.

A recent study from a University of California agricultural economist projected that the productivity and value of California farmland could drop by about 50% (range 13% to 67% across several models) due to higher temperatures and reduced water availability.

In summary, demographic momentum is pushing the human population into a predicament where more and more food is expected to come from less and less land and water, all the while requiring full and growing production and keeping no reserve. While food today is still generally plentiful and inexpensive, the trends suggest we are nearing system limits. At the same time, most agricultural practices degrade key ecological assets, including topsoil, fresh water, and the climate system.

Unfortunately agriculture today cannot be easily relocated due to climate change, loss of topsoil or water – the loss of growing regions or growing capacity due to a degraded environment will have a direct affect on us.

Defining Sustainable Agriculture
With respect to the environment, society and economics, sustainable agriculture would:

1. Not harm the environment from pollution,
   
2. Not be reliant on non-renewable inputs or degrade renewable ones,
   
3. Nourish people with non-toxic, healthy food and other useful feed stocks, and
   
4. Provide a fair, steady, return on effective investment in labor and capital.

How can these goals be achieved?

Sustainable farms employ productivity systems inspired by nature to deliver high yields through ecological synergy, diversity and resilience. Sustainable farms are managed as fully-integrated ecosystems, where knowledge of soils, macro and microscopic organisms such as bacteria and fungi, water, crops, weeds, pests, equipment and techniques are used to maximize the long-term health, productivity and economic profitability of the farm.

To know if a farm is sustainable we should be able to measure its impact on the environment, society, and its finances. Does the balance of farm activities emit or sequester carbon dioxide? Is topsoil being lost or built? Is the runoff of water from the farm clean or a burden to local rivers?

 Metrics can be developed for a number of important sustainability indicators, including:

1. No build-up of persistent pollutants into the environment,
    
2. Development of soil carbon and a balanced soil food web
    
3. Enhancement of regional biodiversity and ecosystem services,
    
4. Use of renewable energy and recycled mineral resources,
    
5. Humane care of farm animals,
    
6. Food quality and health,
    
7. Worker fairness and safety, and
    
8. Economic viability.

For example, an idealized sustainable farm wouldn’t use non-renewable fossil fuels and would store at least as much greenhouse gasses as it emits. Energy use is a major area where “sustainable” goes beyond the soil management, pesticide and herbicide regulations of “organic” farming.

Farms are ideal places to deploy renewable energy systems, as they typically have abundant sunshine and may include significant wind or moving water resources. Liquid fuels are highly valued in farming because they can be used in machines to perform highly time sensitive work, such as planting and harvesting. Perhaps 20% of farmland would need to be set aside for biofuel crops for on-farm use. Some are exploring options to electrify tractors.

...What a Sustainable Agricultural System Will Look Like
Many terms are used to describe alternatives to conventional, industrial agriculture. Organic, local, and sustainable come to mind. Less often used is “agro ecology,” which views the agrarian landscape the same way an ecologist views the natural landscape. Farms also can’t exist in isolation from the broader society.

A truly sustainable farm is an integral part of the local community. There are biophysical reasons for this, as plants and animals essentially draw nutrients from the soil that in a closed-loop system must be returned. When food is exported across the globe, soils and water are being exported too. In ecosystems nutrient cycling is predominantly local, and this is why sustainable food systems must be locally oriented.

Because humans are omnivores, our normal diets tend to draw upon diverse agro ecosystems. Tree fruits and nuts are a type of forest. Pasture is a type of mature grassland that can raise meat. Fields of grains and legumes are immature grasslands. And vegetables and root crops represent very early successional plant communities. We evolved from people who combined hunting and gathering across fields and into forests with garden-scale plots. Sustainable farm landscapes reflect the omnivory of human diets.

...In summary, a transition to organic and sustainable farming is required for environmental, social and economic reasons. Fortunately, organic farming is a robust business model, delivering superior economics over conventional farming on a wide variety of metrics such as crop yields, gross and net income per acre, cost of inputs, per farm income and more.

As society provides the financial and organizational capital to re-create agriculture, the living soils, plants and animals will respond, over time, to support us. Each acre converted to organic, sustainable methods is one acre closer to a societal tipping point for sustainability – or at least one less acre as a source of harm.

Original PDF white paper available here

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Food For Thought 10/18/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Opportunities for a New Agriculture 10/20/09

 .

Assured Aggregated Destruction

SUBHEAD: Our alleged leadership class continues to believe that human cultural constructs trump physical reality. image above: American problem solving often results is useless compromise or worse. From http://www.thewisdomjournal.com/Blog/10-reasons-i-wont-accept-a-job-counter-offer By Christopher Ryan on 23 October 2009 in The Localizer Blog http://thelocalizer.blogspot.com/2009/10/agenda-setting-for-assured-aggregated.html A good example of how the concept of agenda setting can drive process can be gleaned by following the health care issue in American politics. While the fundamental need is universal care for all citizens, the discussion has been limited to revising health insurance and ensuring that all citizens purchase it regardless of their circumstances. John Michael Greer nails it when he says that "most of the plans being discussed in Congress just now deal with the fact that half the American people can't afford health insurance by forcing them to buy it anyway under penalty of law..." In this sense, the health insurance industry, big medical, and big pharma have set the agenda and placed specific limits on the breadth and scope of the discussion while keeping a lid on the definition of the problem ("Is there a problem? Why exactly are we doing this?"). Again, universal public healthcare is what should be the goal. But a public option plan would be an unfortunate yet nominally acceptable compromise. Yet even when various public option plans are debated, which is infrequently, the best of these options aren't even in consideration. This type of agenda setting by vested interests is not unique in American politics and in fact it is standard operating procedure. The prima facie result of this arrangement is that some useless compromise (or worse) will be hammered out so that all participants can save face and many people will die due to lack of an ability to seek the care they need when they need it. Many others will declare bankruptcy or befall some other tragic end due to the lack of the ability of our system to address the power of these types of special interests and their paid hack public relations and propaganda firms, think tanks, industry groups, and legal arms. So while this isn't the end of the world or even western civilization, the likely outcome will maintain or enhance the devastation of the poor. Moving on to the issue that could end western civilization, peak oil and its manifestations has a remarkably good shot at tipping our society into one of several alternative arrangements that will probably not include iPods, stainless steel professional grade stoves, or Dodge Chargers. While there are others who write well and at length about the alternative scenarios (e.g. Holmgren, Kunstler, Orlov), the point to take away is that without cheap, plentiful oil and its derivatives, the growth-based global economy is a cinch to fold up like a poorly staked tent in a desert sandstorm. The basis of the peak oil postulate is grounded in geology, physics, and some economics. Given the hard science basis for a good measure of the principle, there is little basis in which to argue or compromise. It is what it is and the only variable or uncertainty relates to timing due largely to the obfuscation of those in possession of the resource. Hence the agenda here is owned by the energy elites and public discussion and media coverage generally address issues like drilling, new finds, environmental regulations as obstacles, and alternatives owned by the very same companies. Finally, we come to the ultimate science-based threat or issue facing humanity today--climate change or global heating. The foundation of climate change science is rooted in physics, chemistry, meteorology, and climatology. The bulk of the scientific community working on this issue consists of governmental or academic researchers with little or no financial connection to industries who are the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses. Most of their work is published in peer-reviewed journals which adds further to their credibility although some may still be constrained from revealing the full extent of the evidence or conclusions due to internal or external political pressures. In other words, it's likely even far more grave than these generally forthright scientists even claim. Yet even with this overwhelming body of evidence that is receiving more detailed and ominous confirmation daily, the fossil fuel industries and water carriers for much of the rest of the growth-based culture and economy have erected a multifaceted set of arguments in denial of these basic facts of climate change. Of course we all know why this is done and how it's generally implemented. The vested interests at stake here are unprecedented and the very form of economic system we're engaged in would be a certain casualty of any effective climate change policy. And of course that's not a likely scenario from a policy perspective. Thus, the same think tanks, public relations firms, and other industry shills that are trying to defuse health care reform are working around the clock to ensure that climate change policy discussion takes place within a narrow frame of appropriate discussion and that the agenda is set in their favor. The problem here, as David Spratt so well articulates, is that "solving the climate crisis cannot be treated like any other issue, with the demands of each side balanced somewhere in the middle. It is not possible to negotiate with the laws of physics and chemistry. The planet cannot be bought off." But our alleged leadership class continues to believe that human cultural constructs trump physical reality. Why else would the field of classical economics be considered a science? Until physical reality provides incontrovertible evidence in the form of some apocalyptic event, my bet is on this scenario unfolding in a trends extended manner.

New School of Thought

SUBHEAD: The neoclassical mantra of constant economic growth is ignoring the world's diminishing supply of energy at humanity's peril. Image above: Detail of "Perpetual Motion" by Norman Rockwell (1920). From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Perpetual_Motion_by_Norman_Rockwell.jpg By Nathanial Gronewold on 23 October 2009 in The New York Times - (http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/10/23/23greenwire-new-school-of-thought-brings-energy-to-the-dis-63367.html)

The financial crisis and subsequent global recession have led to much soul-searching among economists, the vast majority of whom never saw it coming. But were their assumptions and models wrong only because of minor errors or because today's dominant economic thinking violates the laws of physics?

A small but growing group of academics believe the latter is true, and they are out to prove it. These thinkers say that the neoclassical mantra of constant economic growth is ignoring the world's diminishing supply of energy at humanity's peril, failing to take account of the principle of net energy return on energy invested (ERoEV). They hope that a set of theories they call "biophysical economics" will improve upon neoclassical theory, or even replace it altogether.

But even this nascent field finds itself divided, as evidenced by the vigorous and candid back-and-forth debate last week over where to go next. One camp says its models prove the world is headed toward a dramatic economic collapse as energy scarcity takes hold, while another camp believes there is still time to turn the ship around. Still, all biophysical economists see only very bleak prospects for the future of modern civilization, putting a whole new spin on the phrase "the dismal science."

Last week, about fifty scholars in economics, ecology, engineering and other fields met at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry for their second annual conference on biophysical economics. The new field shares features with ecological economics, a much more established discipline with conferences boasting hundreds of attendees, but the relatively smaller number of practitioners of biophysical economics believe theirs is a much more fundamental and truer form of economic reasoning.

"Real economics is the study of how people transform nature to meet their needs," said Charles Hall, professor of systems ecology at SUNY-ESF and organizer of both gatherings in Syracuse. "Neoclassical economics is inconsistent with the laws of thermodynamics."

Like Hall, many biophysical economic thinkers are trained in ecology and evolutionary biology, fields that do well at breaking down the natural world into a few fundamental laws and rules, just like physicists do. Though not all proponents of the new energy-centric academic study have been formally trained in economics, scholars coming in from other fields, especially ecology, say their skills allow them to see the global economy in a way that mainstream economists ignore.

Central to their argument is an understanding that the survival of all living creatures is limited by the concept of energy return on investment (EROI): that any living thing or living societies can survive only so long as they are capable of getting more net energy from any activity than they expend during the performance of that activity.

For instance, if a squirrel burns energy eating nuts, those nuts had better give the squirrel more energy back then it expended, or the squirrel will inevitably die. It is a rule that lies at the core of studying animal and plant behavior, and human society should be looked at no differently, as even technologically complex societies are still governed by EROI.

"The basic issue is very fundamental: Why should economics be a social science, because it's about stuff?" Hall said.

'Peak oil' embraced

The modern biophysical economics movement may be relatively young, but the ideas at its roots are not.

In 1926, Frederick Soddy, a chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize just a few weeks before, published "Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt," one of the first books to argue that energy should lie at the heart of economics and not supply-demand curves.

Soddy also criticized traditional monetary policy theories for seemingly ignoring the fact that "real wealth" is derived from using energy to transform physical objects, and that these physical objects are inescapably subject to the laws of entropy, or inevitable decline and disintegration.

The sharpest difference between biophysical economics and the more widely held "Chicago School" approach is that biophysical economists readily accept the peak oil hypothesis: that society is fast approaching the point where global oil production will peak and then steadily decline.

The United States is held as the prime example. Though the United States is still the world's third-largest producer of oil, its oil production stopped growing more than a decade ago and has flatlined or steadily fallen ever since. Other once-robust oil-producing countries have experienced similar production curves.

But the more important indicator, biophysical economists say, is the fact that the U.S. oil industry's energy return on investment has been steadily sliding since the beginning of the century.

Through analyzing historical production data, experts say the petroleum sector's EROI in this country was about 100-to-1 in 1930, meaning one had to burn approximately 1 barrel of oil's worth of energy to get 100 barrels out of the ground. By the 1990s, it is thought, that number slid to less than 36-to-1, and further down to 19-to-1 by 2006.

"If you go from using a 20-to-1 energy return fuel down to a 3-to-1 fuel, economic collapse is guaranteed," as nothing is left for other economic activity, said Nate Hagens, editor of the popular peak oil blog "The Oil Drum."

"The main problem with neoclassical economics is that it treats energy as the same as any other commodity input into the production function," Hagens said. "They parse it into dollar terms and treat it the same as they would mittens or earmuffs or eggs ... but without energy, you can't have any of that other stuff."

Nor is conservation or energy efficiency the answer. In his presentation, Henshaw noted that the International Energy Agency's own data show that energy use is doubling every 37 years or so, while energy productivity takes about 56 years to double.

In fact, the small world of biophysical economists seems to agree that energy and resource conservation is pointless in the economic system as it is now construed, contrary to what one might expect. Such efforts are noteworthy as it buys the world a bit more time, but the destination is inevitably the same -- a gallon of gasoline not burned by an American will be burned by someone else anyway.

Other peaks?

Though not as closely studied, biophysical economists theorize that the peak oil phenomenon holds true for all non-renewable resources, especially energy commodities. Proponents of the field say they are moving closer to understanding "peak gas" and "peak coal." Consumption of many of the world's most valuable minerals could likewise see those resources nearing exhaustion, as well, they say.

And no amount of technology can fix the problem. Hagens points out that oil extraction has evolved by leaps and bounds since the early 1900s, and yet companies must expend much more energy to get less and less oil than they did back then.

"It isn't that there's no technology," Hall said. "The question is, technology is in a race with depletion, and that's a whole different concept. And we think that we can show empirically that depletion is winning, because the energy return on investment keeps dropping for gas and oil."

The most pessimistic of the biophysical economics camp sees the oil-fueled world economy grinding to a halt soon, possibly within 10 years. They are all working to get the message out, but not all of them believe their peers in other professions will listen.

"Of course I'm trying to send a message," said Joseph Tainter, chairman of Utah State University's Department of Environment and Society. "I just don't expect there's anyone out there to receive it."

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Economics of Entropy 7/29/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Financial Crisis Called Off 8/24/09

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None Like It Hot

SUBHEAD: 350 Activist Bill McKibben thinks you should know that global warming isn't coming--it's already here. Iimage above: Painting "Just Like Living on Mars" by Phillippine artist Von C. Caberte. From http://www.blackcommentator.com/297/297_art_living_on_mars_caberte.html By Gretchen Giles on 21 October 2009 in Metro Santa Cruz - (http://www.metrosantacruz.com/metro-santa-cruz/10.21.09/coverbillmckibben-0942.html)

Some six-hundred people, many with gray ponytails, fill the auditorium at the Sonoma Country Day School. Their earnest metal water bottles clank as they settle into their seats. A short film plays, featuring ugly potato puppets portraying John and Yoko in bed. Instead of protesting the Vietnam War, the two are protesting climate change. Even as a tuber, Yoko remains a fresh object of derision to boomers. Her little potato mouth promises to "scream a song to Mother Nature." The audience howls delightedly. They remember John and Yoko. A short documentary screens, showing area high school students working for climate change. The audience claps heartily. They're proud of their grandchildren. An elderly musician in Birkenstocks is ushered on. Dreary songs about the earth's demise commence, the musician exhorting the dutiful audience to sing along.

Sitting in the front row, author and climate change activist Bill McKibben is game. "Save some trees for me," he mouths, his head bobbing. The musician thankfully finishes and, after a brief introduction, McKibben quickly mounts the stage steps.

The feeling in the room changes instantly. Having flown down from Alaska that morning, McKibben has been on five continents during the last nine days. "If the planet isn't warming up," he jokes, "it's not for lack of me trying."

But the planet is warming up. Unable to stop it personally, McKibben is instead the relentless messenger of its alteration.

Like food activist Michael Pollan, McKibben is tall, lean, ascetic, ridiculously well educated and somewhat ill at ease in his role of scientific soothsayer. Like Pollan, he'd rather be in his home office writing than lecturing on our imminent demise. Unlike Pollan, he's still stuck--on this night at least--with the earnest, the gray ponytails, the activists who remember John and Yoko. He's preaching to the converted, as the Prius-packed parking lot attests. He's telling educated, concerned citizens what they already know. Nothing, other than the plain dire facts of his humor-laced presentation, is new to them. His message couldn't be more important, yet he's not a household name. Not yet, at least.

While Pollan's meme can be memorized like a short poem--eat food, not too much, mostly plants--McKibben's is even easier. It's simply a number: 350. Three hundred and fifty, the amount of carbon parts per million in the atmosphere that NASA's top climate scientist Jim Hansen has counseled will most closely support the earth upon which human civilization arose. McKibben has organized an international day of action in countries as disparate as Yemen and Croatia slated for Oct. 24 and known as 350 Day to highlight the number because 350 parts per million (ppm) is 37 numbers lower than the 387 ppm level that the atmosphere is currently at. In other words, we've already crossed what McKibben calls "the red line" for succoring the climate upon which human civilization arose. By a lot.

Missionary Man The author of 12 books, including the seminal 1989 global-warming text The End of Nature, McKibben, 49, is the kind of easy intellectual who joined the staff at The New Yorker magazine just after graduating from Harvard. He has written about subjects ranging from Hundred Dollar Holiday, in which he outlines spending just that amount on winter festivities, to Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families, which advocates having just one child, as he and his wife, the novelist Sue Halpern, have done with their daughter, Sophie. But all is not simply an orange stuck in a stocking for the lonely Christmas of an only child with McKibben. His relentless sense of humor and his indefatigable energy make him a fascinating magnet.

A religious man who teaches Sunday school at the Methodist church near his Vermont home, McKibben needs that energy to survive the task he has set himself this year, one in which he will have spent 355 of the annum's 365 days on the road, away from his wife and daughter, spreading the word about climate change. For McKibben, it is a moral necessity. He knows the truth about global warming--he's seen it firsthand from Bangladesh to Pakistan to Phuket to Mongolia to China. Global warming and climate change are not coming, he counsels: they're here. The 10 feet--feet--of water that fell last month on Taiwan is just one of an alarming number of natural calamities that attest to that.

McKibben has had dengue fever in Bangladesh, seen a rock new to human eyes suddenly emerge from a Mongolian glacier and knows that rising sea levels are already salinating the fresh Ganges River. If he doesn't personally deliver this truth to every person he can possibly grab by the lapels, he will have failed himself. He will have, in fact, harmed his own soul. And so, with red-rimmed eyes and a practiced presentation, McKibben finds himself on yet another stage in yet another town in yet another country trying to convince some 600 people at a time that this is something they should be concerned about.

Broken Chain As comfortable in front of the microphone as at the dinner table, McKibben has told his tale hundreds of times, changing it only to include the newest natural tragedy briefly grabbing international headlines--all of it, save Katrina, in far-off nations that, he passionately declares, "did nothing to deserve it!"

But even with an audience of the Prius-driving graybeards reasonably versed in the actual way of the world, McKibben must explain the petty basics of the earth's ecology. A plant that has for the millennia flowered at a certain week in April when the light and heat conspire perfectly and has been a fecund food source for an insect whose life cycle is keyed to the plant and is itself a delicious meal for an amphibian which awakens from the mud just as the insect is at its plumpest, which is itself a gorgeous lump of protein for a bird whose migration pattern is in part set by the availability of frogs in the area and whose eggs are a yummy treat for a mammal that has come to live year-round there due to the certainty on the eggs for its own breeding, and which is in turn eaten by another mammal larger and more adept. Its remains are ravaged by scavengers, its gristle dissolved by bugs (which in turn are eaten by the migrating birds whose excrement nourishes the April-blooming plant).

All of this rapacious blooming and pollinating and eating and excreting and reproducing and dying has eventually led humans, we of the big brains, to the establishment of such unnatural wealth as is found within any provincial supermarket. It is a cycle so seemingly robust that we simply take it for granted. But this life chain can be--and already has been--enormously upset by something as seemingly simple as a Fahrenheit degree, by an extra centimeter's worth of water, by a wind that should never have been whipped.

"The thing I am doing today is the single most important thing I can be doing," McKibben says. "We're going to find out in the next few years whether this big brain [that humans have] was a good idea and if it's linked with a big enough heart."

Arctic Alarm A scholar-in-residence at Vermont's Middlebury College, McKibben has plenty of access to young people and their sturdy energy. In 2006, he led a group of students and colleagues on a five-day walk through the Vermont woods that began at the poet Robert Frost's cabin ("'The road not taken' seemed apropos," he says) to make a global-warming statement that would end in Burlington. There, his group was joined by others until its ranks swelled to a thousand people marching upon Burlington's city hall. It was, he realized sadly, the largest public protest for climate change ever yet staged.

Astonished that the plight of the globe was so little remarked by its inhabitants, McKibben formed Step It Up in 2007. Using his student team from Middlebury and the endless swathe of the Internet, Step It Up promoted some 1,400 climate-change actions worldwide in April of 2007. McKibben was feeling pretty good about his work. And then the summer came, and then the Arctic melted.

"The Arctic sea was slowly melting, and then it suddenly fell off a cliff," he says. "We were losing ice sheets the size of California every month, at a rate 200 percent above what was predicted. My scientist friends panicked. This was on, and not just Arctic ice; there is 25 percent less sea ice than ever before. Satellite photos revealed that there was a lot less ice up top. Glacial ice is the most unsettling loss of all."

McKibben estimates that 300,000 people will die annually from global warming with just a one-degree temperature rise. "But we expect the planet to warm by five to six degrees more in this century if we do nothing.

"We have the technology to imagine what the future will look like," he continues. "The scientific method has worked, but so far the political method has utterly failed. We've had a 20-year bipartisan effort to do nothing, and it's succeeded brilliantly."

Chill for a Day Asher Miller, executive director of the Post-Carbon Institute, a global think tank that counts McKibben and peak oil theorist Richard Heinberg among its fellows, looks at fossil fuels almost fondly, as in thoughtful reminiscence. "The big human story is that we won the lottery," Miller says. "We found this amazing energy source that fueled our society and changed it completely, giving us luxuries and altering the course of human history entirely. Can you blame us for going nuts over it?

"But it's now a moot point. We're living in a difficult time. We're changing, and it's being dictated by climate. We have to be realistic, and we can't live the way we've been living."

Perhaps the most sobering part of McKibben's work is that those worried about climate change can swap out all the light bulbs they like, grow every bit of lettuce that they'll ever eat themselves, ride their bikes everywhere--and none of it will mean a thing unless our political leaders act. "How do we muster the will to get a global agreement that puts a price on carbon?" he asks. "We can't solve it one bulb at a time, not one state at a time, not even one country at a time. We have to deal with it one planet at a time.

"How do we muster the political power to make it happen? We have to build a movement. I say that as if I know what I'm talking about. I don't. No one really knows how we're going to muster it." 350 Day is his latest idea, a creative, almost joyful attempt to unite people the world over in protest against the lethargy of large, First World governments to alter policies, agreements, coal and oil consumption.

Miller isn't pessimistic--exactly. "The environmental movement has failed," he says. "Guilting people, talking about abstractions like polar bears. Boiling down complex stuff into a simple number like 350 is a good way to use what otherwise has become a battle of data and talking points.

"It would be great if people take to the streets on Oct. 24," he says. "But that's just one day. This is going to be every day. And it's already started."

McKibben could be said to agree. "There are no guarantees that any of this will work," he tells the Sonoma Country Day School audience. "There are scientists who think that the machination we've put in process is unstoppable. But the best science says that we still have a window. Because we have that window, we have to fight. For 20 years, I wondered what this fight would look like--and it's very beautiful. We're an amateur movement. This is a homemade operation, and that's the best thing about it."

McKibben's next focus after 350 Day is the December climate-change conference planned in Copenhagen. The United States will attend, as will other powerful and polluting countries. "Whatever we do at Copenhagen isn't enough. We know what the bottom line is, and we have to keep at it. The negotiations are occurring between human beings and physics and chemistry. Physics and chemistry have stated their bottom line: '350 is our demand.'"

Where There's a Wallet, There's a Way The most promising bit of national legislation, according to Ann Hancock, executive director of the Climate Protection Campaign, is something called "cap and dividend."

"It means putting a cap on carbon and every year reducing that cap so that every year, and rapidly, we meet the scientific imperative," she explains. So-called gross polluters--think Exxon and its ilk--will have the option to purchase rights to use fossil fuels. Cap and dividend will raise energy prices, it's true, but the current proposal, put forward by Democratic Rep. Christopher Van Hollen of Maryland, would also offer customer rebates on energy use. Those who use less fossil fuel would receive more money back; those who use more, less.

"I think that cap and dividend is the most powerful solution we need to have and that's worldwide," Hancock says. "I think that ['60s activist] Sal Alinsky said that most people will do the right thing for the wrong reasons. We're more concerned with our comfort and mortgage than we are with the climate. Pricing is the way to do it. The option of the right to pollute will generate perhaps trillions of dollars," Hancock says. "It will torque the whole economy in a green direction. If people have to pay more money for fossil fuel and they aren't made whole, they won't reelect those people."

Passing the Torch Bill McKibben is exhausted. After rallying the audience for an hour of passionate speech, his voice drops. "We set out to organize the world, a ludicrous proposition. Only McDonald's and Coca-Cola have succeeded. The only part of the climate change movement that's been left out is the movement part." But the key, he stresses, is the newest generation. "The real leaders of the moment are young people," he tells the sea of gray ponytails. A handful of students on the top tier applaud.

Asher Miller agrees. "There's this generational gap in the larger environmental movement," he says, "and Bill is helping to close that."

The next generation has every reason to be involved, as it's their adult lives, their children and probable grandchildren that are most affected. Climate change is here, and even if every coal facility in the world stopped production today, McKibben estimates that it will take two generations before we can return the earth's atmosphere to 350 ppm.

Miller, who has a toddler, chooses to be sanguine. "I fully expect that the next 10 years will be significantly different than the last 10 years," he says. "Things are different, and the sooner we can internalize that, the sooner we can make changes.

"The world is going to be different, but it may not be all bad."

see also: Ea O Ka Aina: Fun Action Alert 10/20/09

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