Humanity's Impending Impasse?

Book Review

Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr.

Reviewed by George Mobus

First I should confess to a strong bias toward the content of this book. As readers of my blog, Question Everything, will realize, I have been moving inexorably toward the same conclusion as the author, so you will perhaps forgive me if you think I may be suffering from a lack of sufficient critical thinking. Put bluntly, I think this is a book every thinking human being should read, and then consider for themselves.

To a growing number of people it is looking more and more like mankind is about to undergo a most unpleasant transition. One might write such views off as being what kooks and apocalyptic religious fanatics hold to, and we know they are crazy. But over the last five years many deep thinking and well respected people have been sounding some alarms that are not as easily put aside. In 2004 Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal in Britain and clearly no intellectual harebrain, wrote Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning, Basic Books. In it he gives humanity about a 50/50 chance of surviving through the century. Not really good chances when you think about it.

Last year James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, wrote a sobering call for a massive revision of capitalism and an end to growth in The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Yale University Press. Like many authors have done, he painted a picture of what was wrong and why, but then pointed to remedies that might presumably fix the problems. That is, if only our leaders and our citizens would see the light and do what is necessary we might avoid total collapse. Most of these authors offer humanity an escape hatch, but point out that we have to be willing to sacrifice substantially, in terms of material wealth, for it to work.

The realization that mankind is damaging its planet is certainly not new. Rachel Carson (The Silent Spring, 1962) may have started the trend in increasing awareness that we are doing things, in our zeal to control nature, that were starting to backfire, threatening to leave us worse off if we didn't change our ways and attitudes. Environmentalism has largely operated on this theme for decades. We've been warned of environmental degradation, global warming, and peak oil, and how these are interlinked. We've been made immanently aware of the dangers we have ourselves created.

Now William R. Catton, Jr., Emeritus Professor of Sociology at my state's other PhD granting institution, Washington State University, brings on the sequel to his first book in this genre, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press, in which he sounded an alarm being heard more frequently. Like Speth, Catton, in that earlier book, pointed out the problems as he saw them, from the viewpoint of a sociologist, and then declared that if we heed these warnings we might yet escape the worst.

In the sequel, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation, he drops the part about we can evade the worst. The subtitle says it all. Now he concludes that it is already too late to mend our ways and somehow avoid the collapse of civilization. Indeed the main title refers to an impending collapse of the human population. An ecological bottleneck (also called an population bottleneck) is where radical changes in the environment of a species causes a die-off of all but the most hardy of the population; hardy, that is, in terms of the selection pressures arising from the change. Of course there may be no sufficiently hardy individuals left or the ones that manage to survive cannot reproduce sufficiently to produce a new population. In that case the species goes extinct.

Catton's arguments for why this is the most likely outcome for humanity boil down to something I have written about in my blog for several years now. It is the rate of change that matters as much as the degree or magnitude of change when it comes to shocking a population. If we look at the rate of climate change due to anthropogenic forcing, or the rate at which our fossil fuel energy sources are depleting, or the rate of aquifer depletion, or the rate of population increase, or the rate of consumption increase per captia in the developed and developing worlds, or... You get the picture. We are changing the world in ways unfavorable to human survivability more rapidly than we can either adapt or mitigate. And we have already passed the point of no return.

As to why we are in this state of affairs, Catton calls on several sociological theories surrounding the evolution of culture and especially the development of over-specialization or 'division of labor'. The latter was touted by Adam Smith as the reason we were so efficient in our manufactures. And Catton, like many authors who deplore modern capitalism and corporatism, recognizes that at a time this was indeed a beneficial capacity. Today, however, he says that we overdid it and that the tendency toward deep specialization has tended to dehumanize and isolate each of us from the benefit of interpersonal relations. He further argues that we have come to think of others as instruments, mere means to our own ends. This he says is the end result of taking the abstraction of money as representing wealth too far in our thinking.

This idea that once things like money and capitalism, etc. fulfilled good purposes and were good for society as a whole, but have simply been overdone in our modern technologically-driven world, is actually one of the common themes sounded by many writers. It is certainly something I have subscribed to in my evaluation of human affairs. Early in mankind's history, these inventions, these institutions, served a purpose to make man more fit as a species, to quell the negative selective forces of nature and allow humans to succeed evolutionarily. But somewhere along the line humans failed to recognize that too much of a good thing is actually bad.

The failure to recognize this is the lack of wisdom, to which I will return in a bit. But to understand how humans got so carried away it is important to recognize, as Catton and others have done, that humans, like all animals, have a biological dictate to maximize their access to energy. For humans this took the shape of learning to control fire, making clothing, building shelters, and later finding additional external energy sources to supplement their bodily abilities. This included the invention of tools and agriculture. And it essentially culminated in the discovery of fossil fuels that allow modern humans incredible power over their environment. Catton renames a subset of Homo sapiens as a 'quasi-species', Homo colossus, those being the people in developed countries who consume massive amounts of fossil fuels to motivate and control machines that do orders of magnitude more work than a human can do with muscle power alone. To achieve this we are combusting carbon to produce CO₂ and returning fossil carbon deposits to the atmosphere and oceans after sequestration for millions of years. And it is the rapidity with which this is happening which leads Catton, and others, to conclude that it is infeasible to put the brakes on for this train. That is, you can try to brake, but you won't stop in time to avoid a crash.

Unfortunately for mankind, there are now far too many of Homo colossus in the global population. And the damage is done. NASA climatologist James Hanson has claimed that the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere should not be over 350 parts per million (ppm) in order to avoid calamitous climate shifts. But we are already at 385ppm and climbing, even though the global recession has slowed the burning of fossil fuels. It just isn't enough to stop let alone reverse the growth in carbon in the air. But beyond the damage done already, and the potential damage to come due to climate changes and sea level rise, Catton sees an impending threat from the fact that we are going to run out of this magical fuel one day. Or at least we will hit a barrier where the cost of extraction exceeds the benefit of having the fuels. When that happens what becomes of Homo colossus? Indeed what happens to Homo sapiens in toto? Even though peoples in developing and underdeveloped nations don't burn the fuels directly, they still rely on the developed world for aid produced by burning those fuels.

Catton bases his analysis on the idea of carrying capacity. Fossil fuels have artificially boosted the carrying capacity of earth for human occupancy (if you ignore the damage we've done to other species). We are in overshoot, the theme of his previous book. We are like the cartoon character, Wile Coyote, who would race off a cliff in futile pursuit of the Roadrunner and would remain suspended in mid air until he realized his predicament; then it was too late and he would fall. When the fossil fuels are effectively used up, what will replace them? As things stand now, there simply is no realistic or viable alternative energy source that could scale up to the level needed by modern civilization in time to take over the job. Once again, it's the rate of change that gets us. In spite of continued pie-in-the-sky thinking by even engineers and scientist who should know better, no one has shown how real time solar energy in all of its many forms (thermal, photovoltaic, wind, even hydroelectric) will ever match the power in fossil fuels. These came from ancient photosynthesis over millions of years compressed and cooked into a convenient package over more millions of years. The scope of concentration is literally unimaginable (apparently) yet very serious people dream of capturing current solar influx and replacing fossil fuels with it. They may be serious but they are also dreamers or delusional. While in theory, the total daily influx of solar energy to the earth would provide many times over what we need to sustain our current civilization and provide development for the lesser developed nations, our systems of capture would have to cover gigantic areas of the planet. Our energy storage and distribution systems would have to be radically redesigned and rebuilt. And all of this comes just as we recognize the impacts of declining net energy from fossil fuels; those fuels being needed to subsidize the building of all that energy infrastructure.

The root cause of humanity's impending impasse, however, is not his lack of will, or cleverness, or even sufficient energy resources. The root cause is his lack of wisdom. Catton points to this on page 190, speaking about his great-grandson:

...by the time surviving members of his generation have emerged from the coming bottleneck, when he may himself have somewhere a great-grandson he will wish to visit, somehow his contemporaries will have attained the wisdom Linneus implied was characteristic of our species when he named us Homo sapiens.

(Emphasis mine)

For several years now I have been pursuing a quest to understand better why our species is not, on average, more wise. With all of the history we have experienced, with all of the science we have learned, with all the cleverness our kind has for solving local (in time and space) problems, you would think that we would have developed greater wisdom than we have in fact. What I came to realize was that the brain capacity for wisdom (which I have boiled down to: good judgment in complex social issues, strategic thinking, highly developed systems thinking, and strong moral sentiment) was a relatively new emergent capacity coupled with symbolic thinking and language and second order consciousness (conscious of being conscious) for early Homo sapiens. But it was evolved, as Catton notes, to meet the needs of the late Pleistocene existence of our species. It is not, on average, up to the task of modern complex society. One of my main conclusions is that our species is simply not sufficiently wise (or I prefer the term sapient to differentiate between a native capacity and an actualized capability) to deal with the world we have created. For a more in-depth treatment of this subject, readers are directed to my working papers at: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Background/seriesIndex.html.

It is this lack of inherent wisdom that will keep us, has kept us, from doing the right things to prevent the impending impasse. Catton's 'Prognosis for Humanity', page 206, is alarming.

...with great reluctance and regret, I am compelled to doubt that we can confidently hope to avoid a serious "crash" as the focal human experience of the 21st century—envisioned also as our species having to pass through an ecological "bottleneck".

This is by far the most explicit statement of what we would call doom of any author in the popular book trade. There have been many writers, especially in the blogosphere, who have expressed similar conclusions. But I have yet to see a writer of some eminence such as Catton go all out and claim that the end is near. Unfortunately, I happen to agree with him.

The question for me is: Will humanity come through this bottleneck with a gene pool competent to meet the challenges of a changed world AND have a stronger native capacity for sapience, for wisdom? Assuming some remnant of humanity does survive, that is no guarantee that our descendants will go on to evolve a better ability to make good, long-term judgments in that future world. Nor are we guaranteed that they will be able to reconstruct anything like modern technology-based society in order to re-achieve a species fitness allowing them to survive and thrive in the very long run.

My only complaint with Catton's thesis is that he didn't go far enough in suggesting what those of us who see this coming might do now to save our genus from extinction or, in the case of my concern, to increase the likelihood that our descendants will inherit genetic components leading to higher sapience. He assumes that some humans may survive and the future environment may select for greater wisdom. I'm not so sure that will be the case. His parting words simply express thankfulness that he lived during the epitome of human achievements in science and understanding as well as freedoms to travel the world. My question is: Now what do we do?

I have to applaud Catton for writing so honestly about what he has concluded. I have contemplated writing a book on the evolution of what I call eusapience, true sapience, as the future of the genus Homo. Necessarily, the species sapiens must go extinct to allow the rise of a new, wiser, species of humans. And an evolutionary bottleneck would be the most likely mechanism for this to happen. But I have hesitated, realizing this is a message no one wants to hear! Every other author of books on end-of-the-world scenarios at least offers that if we would only come to our senses... the world won't end. William Catton does not do this. Sorry for the spoiler but you should know in advance. Thus this probably isn't a book easily digested by everyone, even though I think everyone who believes themselves to be a critical thinker should read it.

The reviewer is an Associate Professor of Computing and Software Systems at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is currently on sabbatical leave studying biophysical economics and energy-related issues at the State University of New York, Environmental Sciences and Forestry in Syracuse NY. His blog is Question Everything at: http://questioneverything.typepad.com

Comments

[Jason]

I've been following Catton for some time but only just discovered you. John Michael Greer, one of Catton's other 'sons' is very interesting too.

What you call 'sapience' is certainly achievable by individual human beings IMO, but there is an inertia in the current trajectory of civilization as a whole.

Personally I think biophysical economics represents one of the best prospective ideas for embedding sapience in any future culture. Sustainability has occurred in some previous cultures but never before has it been seen as a flow of economic energies and theoretically modeled. If an index that could prevent what you call 'getting greedy' in your latest post were to exist, would we follow it?

At least I like the idea that the theory of actual in-practice economic flows could be put in place to some extent, even if the practice can't be. We have some centuries of decline ahead, IMO, to tweak the results and tell everyone we told them so.

Personally I also believe that philosophical and 'spiritual' traditions the world over have been attempting to 'up the sapience level' for a while. Not that any of them is the last word, but some have much of interest.

The other factor at work for me is the level of government involvement in financial sectors, which is huge. Thinkers like Spengler or Toynbee, basing observations on history, would predict dictatorships emerging at a time like this, precisely because the democratic system works by promising wealth to voters, a wealth which it increasingly cannot deliver.

[Pamur]

Interesting thoughts. Catton is the leading edge of scientific, apocalyptic thought for sure.

I don't think you have to worry about the future human race acquiring sufficient wisdom to competently manage their complex affairs. The capacity for wisdom of any homo sapiens that remain, after the reordering that will certainly take place in the wake of all hydrocarbon consumption, will once again be perfectly evolved for their permanent, new, low energy, non-technical world.

[trillium]

So how best to live a fulfilling life in the present, even as we contemplate the rising and converging of so many runaway systems? Are we not like the Zen monk being chased over the cliff by tigers? I would welcome discussion about ways to create respectful,satisfying and aware lives here and now.

[Dr. Susan Krumdieck]

I am a Mechanical Engineer who knows better. I spent 20 years or so becoming an expert in the "next" great alternative energy technologies. (solar, wind, biomass, hydrogen, biofuels...) I love to have politicians or government people tell me that technology will respond when I know that it can't in any way relevant to what they are thinking.

My response to your thoughts on Catton are weirdly sexist. What has gone wrong during the industrial age? We let men run the place. We need men and their "get it, build it now, beat up people who threaten us" approach to the world. We always have. But sustainable societies have always had a balance in their decision-making, a simultaneous female side of the economy. OK, I'm a woman and a scientist and an engineer and an intellectual, and I know that I think about these things totally differently than my male colleagues. I think that our species has already worked out the wisdom problem that Catton talks about, and she's been ignored for 200 years in favor of the male approach.

If Catton is right and we have to wait for MEN to evolve, then yes, we're going to have to kill off most of the species and start over.

[George Mobus]

Jason,

My own view of the role of spiritual and "religious" attempts in the realm of sapience -- the moral compass side -- is that these are the thoughts of women and men who have been trying to explain what is already programmed into our behavior, our natural ingrained sentiments toward altruism, empathy, cooperation, and second-order consciousness (thinking about our own capacity to think!) What religions and spiritual traditions have been doing is trying to grapple with these innate behaviors and explain why we seem to have them (except for 2nd-order consciousness, mistakenly believing that other animals don't, by the way). They have tried to codify what comes naturally to our species as part of in-group solidification (another part of moral sentiments). The details vary from culture to culture, but the universality of moral sentiments is now well established in science.

Today, most people have it backwards, thinking that without some kind of religious code, based on punishment for infractions, people would not be moral creatures. This, as much as anything, is evidence that humans have not quite reached the level of sapience needed to comprehend the world and ourselves.

Pamur,

I don't exactly "worry" about future humanity's sapience. Evolution is simply unpredictable. Rather I hope.

What I do think is feasible, however, is taking some actions now, based on a scientific understanding of the genetic basis of prefrontal lobe development and behavioral correlates with sapience, to assist the survival of a highly sapient subpopulation as breeding stock for that future world. An ark, if you will.

Trillium,

Please feel free to post comments along these lines. I am always interested in what the community has to say about such subjects.

Susan,

It isn't that men are unevolved per se. All humankind is in an intermediate state between the advent of second-order consciousness and nascent sapience and what might be the case if selection conditions were to favor increases in the capacity of the prefrontal cortex, specifically the dorso-lateral prefrontal lobes. Evidence suggests this is what was happening with human evolution, but somewhere along the line, most likely with the advent of agriculture, the selection criteria shifted toward the traits you ascribe to men. And the rest, as they say, is history.

There is some hope in thinking that humans could resume their evolutionary arc toward greater sapience if the selection conditions return to emphasis on group cooperation and expansion of selflessness (altruism). But there is no way to second guess nature when it comes to evolution!

George

[Jason]

Any good references for the universality of human moral sentiment? (Not that I disagree, I just didn't know there was a scientific case which held any water.)

Personally I think there's a little more to spirituality and mysticism than that, too, but it's too big a subject for a comments page I guess. It relates to what Trillium was talking about.

[George Mobus]

Jason,

Here is a partial bibliography. A longer listing can be found on my academic web site: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/TheoryOfSapience/sapienceBibliography.html

De Waal, Frans, (2009).The Age of Empathy, Harmony Books, New York.

De Waal, Frans, (2005). Our Inner Ape, Riverhead Books, New York.

Donald, Merlin, (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Donald, Merlin, (1991). A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, W.W. Norton & Co., New York.

Gazzaniga, Michael S., (2005). Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, HarperCollins, New York.

Gazzaniga, Michael S., (2005). The Ethical Brain, Dana Press, New York.

Hauser, Marc D. (2006). Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, HarperCollins, New York.

Mithen, Steven, (1996). The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science, Thames and Hudson, London.

Morrison, Reg, (1999). The Spirit in the Genes: Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.

Sober, Elliott & Wilson, David Sloan (1998). Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (1990). Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Sternberg, Robert J., (1997). Thinking Styles, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (2002). Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Yale University Press, New Haven.

Sternberg, Robert J. (2003). Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Wright, Robert, (1994). The Moral Animal, Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Vintage Books, New York.

And that is just the short list!

By "...a scientific case that holds any water...", I trust you mean a growing body of evidence in support of a hypothesis and not 'proof'.

Morrison's book offers some insights into the evolution of spirituality in human psychology.

Also, the 6, Nov. issue of Science carries a very interesting article on the Origin of Religion, as part of its year-long series of articles in honor of Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species. If you have other insights you would care to share, feel free to e-mail them to me.

[Jason]

No I don't care about proof! My own background is far from scientific in respect of 'spiritual' concerns.

Many thanks for the list; I'll investigate. I will hold off giving you my 'insights' until I read a bit more background. Are you familiar with John Michael Greer BTW?

[Molly Radke]

Just received Catton's earlier book, Overshoot, and am about a quarter thru it. VERY insightful especially considering the publication date - 1980 - I think. Thanks for turning me on to this remarkable fellow. His stuff isn't "cheery," but it certainly is logical and well-research. Thanks, Molly

[George Mobus]

Molly,

Welcome and you're welcome!

I have been going back through some of the early literature on the subject of limits to growth and the consequences of not paying attention to it before we reached those limits. It is amazing how many very thoughtful people published on this back in the 60s 70s and 80s.

A good review of much of this literature is contained in Odum & Odum, "A Prosperous Way Down", chapt. 2 especially.

George

[George Mobus]

Jason,

I am familiar with JMG and the Archdruid Report. Very thoughtful writer.

George

[generic viagra]

Many christians equate the soul with emotional aspects of humanity, if that is the case, how come emotions....?
can be altered with chemicals, brain injury and surgery?

[tarwater]

"Unfortunately, I happen to agree with him."

Unfortunate is, perhaps, not the best preface to the statement, Perhaps fortunately as clearly you are an engaged academician that understands the "nature of things" and your professions foundation of transferring such nature to others.

[George Mobus]

tarwater,

I meant "unfortunate" in the sense of for the implications for humanity. But I get your point.

George

[hiperion]

Thank you for sharing this.
I think a faint smile can be witnessed on the casing of nuclear warheads these days.

[Puma Shoes]

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