Question Everything

The Hardest Moral Dilemma of All

The Hardest Moral Dilemma of All

Global Population Speak Out

This blog is to fulfill my pledge to the GPSO effort to speak out in February regarding the overpopulation issue that many of us feel is at the heart of most of our global challenges. To see what many other scientists and citizens are doing for this effort, visit the GPSO Web site.

Damned If We Do and Damned If We Don't

If we don't limit global population there is a non-zero chance that all of humanity will go extinct! At the very least we can expect that human life will become mean and brutish as a consequence of unfettered reproduction leading to population sizes unsupportable by the resources of our finite planet. There is considerable evidence mounting that indicates that we humans have exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the planet for our species, given our resource usage patterns. We have come to rely on fossil fuel inputs to our food supply (see: the Green Revolution) and our industrial agriculture methods of modern farming. This has given the illusion (one that is fondly defended as reality by neoclassical economists) of increasing the carrying capacity of the planet. But, sadly, it is based entirely on the formerly abundant flows of high energy return on energy invested (EROI, also EROEI) fossil fuels, which have now begun to reach their peak of extraction (c.f. Peak Oil as an example).

After the peak of high powered energy production from fossil fuels, we can expect a long decline in net energy flows into the economy with constrictions being felt in the food supply. For example, as natural gas supplies suffer decline we will see the production of fertilizers decline as well. This is significant because many, perhaps most of our agricultural soils have been depleted of nutrients and absolutely require repeated applications of artificially manufactured fertilizers to maintain any semblance of productivity. Additionally, chemical pesticides and herbicides, which are synthesized from petroleum, are needed to maintain food production at these levels. Antibiotics, some of which are also based on petroleum, are needed to keep industrial production of animals sustained.

When oil goes into decline it will impact the production of all other forms of energy. For example, it takes a substantial amount of diesel fuel to extract and transport coal (used to produce electricity). Today all of manufacturing (with some exceptions in the Pacific Northwest where hydroelectric is still the predominant non-transportation energy source) is based on fossil fuel inputs. That means wind turbines and solar panels require fossil fuels to be built and installed (as well as maintained). Thus the carrying capacity, artificially elevated in the oil-rich age, is going to be brought back to what it was before the advent of our oil-based approach to agriculture.

All of this is by way of explaining an incredibly difficult moral dilemma that we, as a species, are soon going to face. The horns of this dilemma we are going to have to choose between are: certain starvation for huge segments of the population, or forced population control via sterilization. There will be no middle ground between these two, equally reprehensible choices. Less food will be produced as energy flows decline. Even if every man, woman, and child were to devote themselves to farming and/or hunter-gatherer lifestyles, there simply won't be enough land and bio-stock production possible to feed everybody. We have already depleted major fisheries (though it won't matter given that the fuel needed to run a fishing fleet will be so expensive no one would be able to afford fish as a source of protein). This means that we will no longer be able to support even the current population, let alone the 9+ billion individuals projected by the UN for the middle of this century if current trends were to continue. And the point is, those trends can't continue without sufficient energy!

This is difficult, actually nearly impossible, to consider. There is already ample denial going around, especially from politicians and neoclassical economists who are simply not capable of processing the factual data, building the models, doing the arithmetic, and interpreting the results. Most people are not able to fathom the predicament in terms of the scales involved. Even among those who do understand the basic nature of the problem there is a tendency to believe that just limiting ourselves to zero population growth (ZPG¹), with the usual nod to humane methods, should be enough to solve the problem. The more radical thinkers call for negative population growth (NPG) but still try to maintain that there are humane approaches to accomplishing this. Noting the demographic transition effect in Japan, Italy, and other OECD countries (though not the US!) many advocates of population control are hopeful that if we just supported economic development for the high birth rate countries, education and economic opportunities for women in these countries, that somehow everything would work out. The argument goes that when women have more control over their lives and more opportunity to choose careers other than motherhood, they tend to have fewer children. Who knows? Perhaps it might have worked this way if we had all the energy in the world to expand economic development in the way envisioned by the UN Millennium Development Goals. But we don't. And no amount and combination of technology, alternative energy sources, conservation and elimination of wastage, or efficiency gains will compensate for the loss of fossil fuel inputs². This too is an extremely hard pill to swallow and there is no dirth of denial on this front either. People want to believe in a future that is better than the present and they are unwilling to do the math to determine what the reality might be. Reality doesn't always match desires and sometimes you just have to give up those desires when they are not feasible.

The sad bottom line is that this planet will not be able to support the population at its current level in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, given the degree to which we have devoured and degraded resources like water, air, and soil, as well as general bio-diversity, it is possible that within a few generations we will find that the number of people actually supportable is even fewer than any of us are ready to believe!

Thus we are damned if we do nothing more proactive in population reduction than just hoping it will happen naturally with the demographic transition effect. And we are damned if we do what it will actually take to mitigate the impending disaster.

Our moral compasses point in an entirely different direction. From Wikipedia's page on Reproductive Rights:

The World Health Organization defines reproductive rights as follows:

Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.

The operative terms have been highlighted.

The number of people who would question the notion that people have a natural right to reproduce as they see fit is probably very small. In general, the right to procreation is considered, universally, God given, or at least inalienable. Thus it would be morally reprehensible to consider any methods for population control that interfere with those rights.

At the same time, if the above projections of nature-forced population decline due to the effects of overshoot are correct, then the pain and suffering of literally billions of people is a certainty (see: Catton, William R., Jr. (1982). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL. and his latest book, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation. See also my review of this last book).

Between the Proverbial "Rock and A Hard Place"

This, then, is our moral dilemma. If many others like Catton and I, are right, we are faced with making a choice that comes from understanding the true (and I suppose cruel) nature of this world. We can choose to allow billions of people to starve, dehydrate, or succumb to diseases from population density effects. They will live lives of squalor and despair until the end (mercifully) comes. The model for this is already at play in places like Darfur in Africa. Or we can choose to do something quite drastic in terms of proactive population control, such as mass sterilization. These two choices are extreme evils but I suspect they reflect the reality of the corner we've painted ourselves into. We failed to heed the warnings of people like Paul Ehrlich and the Meadows (see footnote 1 below). Most of our economists derided their warnings as the work of pessimists. Had we taken them more seriously back in the latter half of the 20^th century, we might have less of a problem today. But it probably wouldn't have been much less.

Of course I suspect that we will choose the former by choosing to do nothing but hope for the demographic transition. We've already essentially made that choice as we watch situations in Darfur play out. In actuality we watched something akin play out in New Orleans. Thousands of people died in that city because we (or one can argue the Bush administration) chose to do nothing. That may have been an economic/political calculation, but I suspect that is exactly what it will look like when we abandon formerly developing country after country just as we abandoned our own in this country and let the consequences play out as they will. You know, survival of the fittest!

Ironically, we actually know a great deal about the brain basis of moral choices today. Marc Hauser's book, Moral Minds, (2006, HarperCollins, New York), presents a clear story of how the brain (mind) deals with moral dilemmas. People do make choices in situations that appear on the surface to be between two equally bad actions. They do it by fooling themselves (subconsciously) into seeing one of the choices as less bad and therefore OK. It works even better when they think they can execute the choice with some intervening instrument so that it doesn't seem like it is them doing the bad thing. For those in the western world we probably thought it was a good thing when China implemented its one-child policy even though it was coercive. The Chinese government, not us, was responsible. We were just indirectly benefited since this would check the rapid growth of the Chinese population. We, in the west, would probably think similarly if India, or Indonesia, or Saudi Arabia were to implement something along these lines. But, of course, in the western world, where freedom is the watchword, this would be inappropriate (and the rationalizations for why will flood forth).

We, too, will likely fool ourselves into believing the do-nothing option is the lesser evil. We will put out of our minds the impending tragedy of mass deaths, possibly rationalizing our choice by thinking that, after all, something miraculous might happen to save us.

It isn't certain that mass sterilization would even help at this late date. We do not, for example, yet have a scientific handle on the rate of energy flow decline that we face. We only know that that decline is certain. So if the decline rate is high enough, even sterilization would not suffice (though it might help lessen the pain a bit). In theory, sterilization of half of the population (along with a one-child policy for the non-sterilized half) could bring the population down rapidly without resorting to death panels. A sterilization approach doesn't involve deciding who will live and who will die (whereas a do-nothing approach does this by default), only who will procreate and who won't. How rapidly the decline would be would need to be modeled. But it is possible that the population would decline by half in 30-50 years or so. With fewer mouths to feed, the likelihood of feeding the remaining population increases, but is not assured. A core problem with this kind of scenario is that the remaining population would tend to be comprised of aging folk. Who would do all the work needed to support them?

A sterilization program brings with it so many imponderable choices that it boggles the mind to even think about it. Who would be sterilized? How many would be needed to have an effect? What would be the consequences of a shrinking population on all sorts of economic, political, and social dimensions? And, of course, who would decide? Any takers???? I thought not. Yet if the decline in energy is anything like we think it might be, either we will choose to do this, or nature will make the choices for us. I just don't see any other options given a) the reality of declining energy flow; and b) no apparent miracles on the horizon.

We are faced with a classic Catch-22. We are damned if we do nothing and we are damned if we do what is necessary to avoid massive suffering (because our moral compasses tell us this is wrong). I usually shy away from black-or-white scenarios. I don't like simplistic arguments. But for the life of me I cannot find a middle ground here that makes any sense. Not being a praying man I still find myself hoping and wishing for some kind of energy miracle that will obviate this whole mess. Believe me I am actively engaged in seeking such a miracle because I want desperately to be wrong. I'm old enough and well enough off, for the time being, that I could live out my life without worrying my head about such things. But I also suffer from a moral dilemma. If I think I see reality, am I not obligated to give voice to my vision? If my thoughts could help save even one human life, should I nevertheless be silent and pretend I don't see this?

Morality is such a bitch sometimes!

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Footnotes

¹ To be clear about my own situation, I had a vasectomy after my second child was born. I have been an advocate of ZPG since reading Paul R. Ehrlich's, The Population Bomb and Dennis and Donnela Meadow's The Limits to Growth. That was back when I thought ZPG was the solution.

² Given all of the media hype and cheerleading ra-ras by the green crowd, it is really hard to get this case heard. Even formerly august media organs like Scientific American have fallen prey to unrealistic claims of late (c.f. A Solar Grand Plan - warning pay wall). The main line of evidence for why these alternative forms of energy will not cut the mustard is the generally low EROI that most of them have when all of the necessary energy inputs are taken into account. Most published EROI numbers have come from industry and green advocate groups. These 'studies' suggest EROI's in the teens and twenties (e.g. 20+ for wind). But on close examination most of these studies fail to include some of the more important energy inputs (up front costs) and so overstate EROI, perhaps by several times. A good case study on this problem is that of corn ethanol (CE). In the early years advocates produced studies that gave it a favorable (though not high) EROI and so, with impetus from the midwest agriculture lobby, the Congress saw fit to mandate CE be combined with gasoline (E10) everywhere in the US. The problem is that it is turning out that CE has an exceedingly low EROI (< 2) and some studies have shown less than one, meaning that it takes more total energy to produce than is in the ethanol itself. This produces a net negative energy gain which is totally unsustainable. Since EROI numbers for the alternatives (and nuclear as well when decommisioning and other relevant energy costs are included) are already very low (as compared with oil in its early years), bringing in additional relevant energy costs will only make them much less. Coupled with the sheer ramp-up scale (that will have to be subsidized by fossil fuels!) that would be required to even come close to 50% of todays energy consumption, this claim that we will be able to carry on with something like our current economy is no more than wishful thinking. For a really good summation and analysis of the alternative (renewable) energy problem see: Smil, Vaclav, (2008). Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom. Not Again!

My Favorite Kicking Boy Asks For It Again!

What is now a long time ago I used to marvel at New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's observational skills. He seemed to pick up important new shifts and trends before most of the other pundits realized anything was happening. But over the years he has consistently failed to properly interpret his observations because he lets his ideology (or is it now a religious belief for him) blind him to the deeper realities, either of causes or coming effects. His observations re: globalization were spot on in terms of what then was starting to rev up. Similarly, in more recent years he has recognized that the world if 'flat, hot, and crowded'. He has not shied away from bringing attention to global warming or population pressures. He has even noted the energy problem and correctly stated that the energy problem is related to the global warming problem. But for him the issue has always been energy security. More recently he has promoted green technology, what he calls energy technology or ET as being the new engine of prosperity.

I'm not saying Tom was among the earliest observers to note these and warn us about them. Far from it. But as a significant (famous) pundit working for a world leading newspaper, the New York Times, he was in front of his peers, often enough to warrant praise for his efforts.

But then he has to go and spoil it by drawing completely erroneous conclusions. Take for example his column today in the Sunday Times (The Fat Lady Has Sung). After correctly noting that the economy has entered "lean years" and lamenting the foibles that led us here (both by G.W. Bush & co, and Obama & friends), he then concludes that we are in the mess we are because of the loss of 'greatness' by our leaders.

Yes, sir, we've just had our 70 fat years in America, thanks to the Greatest Generation and the bounty of freedom and prosperity they built for us. And in these past 70 years, leadership — whether of the country, a university, a company, a state, a charity, or a township — has largely been about giving things away, building things from scratch, lowering taxes or making grants.

He then points out that things have changed. Leaders now are compelled to take things away. He correctly identifies the problem we face as one of retrenchment. Good so far.

Then out of the blue this:

Let’s just hope our lean years will only number seven. That will depend a lot on us and whether we rise to the economic challenges of this moment. Our parents truly were the Greatest Generation. We, alas, in too many ways, have been what the writer Kurt Andersen called "The Grasshopper Generation," eating through the prosperity that was bequeathed us like hungry locusts. Now we and our kids together need to be "The Regeneration" — the generation that renews, refreshes, re-energizes and rebuilds America for the 21st century.

Emphasis added.

What I get out of this is that Tom continues to think that the right spirit, entrepreneurism, free market capitalism, energy technology (his ET), and the American way can somehow do all of those things. All it takes is the right leadership. Now I could be mistaken. His missive seems aimed more at prodding Obama to 'do the right thing'. At the very end he says, "It comes back to us: We have to demand the truth from our politicians and be ready to accept it ourselves." But what truth is he referring to?

When will Tom Friedman and many of the other great observer/pundits finally figure out the truth for themselves, and then tell us what it is? The truth is that no 'spirit' is going to change the lean years into fat years again. The problem isn't lack of spirit, it is lack of energy. And by energy I mean physical energy, not moral. Obama can no more change the laws of physics than he can change the Republicans' minds. The simple fact is that we are in lean years because some years back the cost of getting new energy, mostly in the form of oil, started going up dramatically. The marginal return on energy investment started to decline and eventually, net energy returned translates into real wealth creation. Lower the net energy and you lower wealth production. It really is that simple. Moreover, lower wealth production translates eventually into higher costs and fewer jobs. This isn't rocket science, though it is physics.

When real wealth production started to fail to increase year after year the financial world turned to making it easy for everyone to bet on the future by borrowing and playing the stock market like a casino. They needed to borrow time, they thought, until things somehow magically turned around. Little did they know that there was a fundamental physical reason why the American economy, as well as most OECD nations' economies, were going lean. They assumed things would turn around and in the mean time they would coax more cash out of the completely unsuspecting middle class with all kinds of gimmicks. One way or another, and with the collusion of government accounting they were trapped into creating the illusion of growth (and seeming prosperity) by making the GDP numbers inflate.

What has happened is simple. The Ponzi scheme that has been market finance has finally come to an end, though the financial folk pretend it hasn't and are still robbing the rest of us blind. We've come to that point when the pyramid can no longer be supported by a new round of foolishness. What used to be based on honest wealth production fueled by increasing energy flows is now supported by wishes.

It was the increasing flow of cheap (high energy return on energy investment) petroleum (esp. oil) that allowed our WWII generation to achieve the greatness that Tom so admires. They did it because it was possible, not because it was a particularly good idea to pell mell burn through that stored wealth of energy as fast as they (and we) could. Indeed we now realize that we were screwing up the environment by doing so. We were killing off species by destroying habitat in our zeal for more wealth and growth. Too many results of our wonderful technologies have ended up contributing to damaging our health and well being in the long run. Do you know what strange chemicals they are finding in our bodies? We and our parents were fools in this way.

So, Tom, tell me. When will you wake up to the real reality and understand what is really feasible in this physically constrained (not psychically constrained) world of ours? When will you get that neither Obama nor any other politician is able to deal with the real 'truth'? The reason I ask, and continue to read your column for hints that maybe at last you are getting it, is that what you write is taken to heart by millions of people world-wide. If you started telling the truth maybe both the people and the politicians would start to wake up. Of course the NYT might not like it since they live on advertising and it probably wouldn't be good to go against the grain on this, decidedly, anti-capitalistic reality. But for a little while you could stand tall and make a difference.

A Feasible Living Situation - Continued

How Will People Live in the Future (assuming they are wise)?

In my last blog, "What Is A Feasible Living Situation for Future Humans?" I introduced my intent to analyze the feasible solution for human life in a severely energy-constrained world. I started with the proposition that a reasonable goal for human life is to provide an environment in which every person can achieve self-actualization. I do not propose that it would be possible to guarantee that a person will achieve this state, but the nature of the living situation should permit and support that goal.

The analysis I propose is based on the idea that people will be living in an agrarian-type of community, the size of which would be constrained to a number that is roughly what ancient tribes might have reached at their upper limits. I started with the notion that psychological health is optimal when there are not too many people around and yet enough to provide a sense of stability and safety in numbers. At that size, we then need to ask what sort of environment would be condusive to supporting, say, about five hundred individuals in perpetuity (sustainably) over the generations. I provided a basic framework for conducting the analysis.

The picture that emerges is one of a small farming community roughly resembling those of two hundred to four hundred years ago. But the resemblance is largely superficial for the simple reason that modern people have much more knowledge than did people of old. We should be able to construct a more culturally rich and technically advanced society as a result. Additionally, we seek to have a self-sustaining social organization because the interactions between communities may actually be much less than we saw several centuries ago. Self-sufficiency means that a community would be able to function and thrive in an essentially closed system if need be. Travel depends on energy. If people did travel they would likely do it by horse and buggy. But horses eat food that would take photosynthetically-fixed energy away from the community along with soil nutrients that would be dropped on the road!

By technically advanced I do not mean technological in the sense of our current technology-dependent age. We are as dependent on energy guzzling machines as we are on food. And that is part of our undoing. Technical, as I mean it, is having understanding of simple machines, perhaps mostly motivated by human effort, so as to maximize our work efforts and minimize our personal energy expenditures. We have metals (possibly they will need to have been scavenged from abandoned cities) and knowledge of metallurgy that did not exist in prior civilizations. We will know how to make fine plows that should last for many generations once built. We posses much more knowledge of how nature works and with that the simple machines we employ can be far more effective in doing work. Rather than overpowering nature with big, loud machines, we can work with nature to produce our living environment. A simple example is the methods of building our homes in a way that takes advantage of passive solar energy and prevailing wind patterns for heating and cooling. Our knowledge of environments and ecology will help us choose suitable sites for communities. Our knowledge of biology will allow us to build soils instead of depleting them for monetary profit.

We also have knowledge of public health and medical care that, even if practiced without modern medicines, would still be far superior in outcomes than was achieved by even the most caring country doctor of yore.

All of this presupposes that this knowledge I allude to exists in some accessible form that can be used as the basis for education in this future community. That will be a problem that needs anticipation and preemptive action. The Internet will be a distant memory. You won't be able to Google what you need to know. Wikipedia will be relegated to the annals of once-upon-a-time. Therefore the only way to prevent an all out Dark Ages will be to collect and preserve the necessary knowledge in book forms in some kind of library. There is a global effort now to preserve seeds of plants from all over in the event that some global cataclysm wipes out vegetation (see: Wikipedia article and the official Web site of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault). An effort to preserve knowledge of how to do all of the things suggested here would be needed. Instead of a central vault, however, I would think it best to have this knowledge preserved in many locales so that when transportation is no longer possible it could be found locally.

I should probably make something clear here. I do not believe for a moment that the kind of isolated, community based, civilization that I am describing will be the final version for humanity until the sun dies. That isn't man's nature to just go into stasis and that be the end of it. I do suspect that we will live in this situation for many generations until someone, somewhere manages to grapple with the energy issue vis á vis, finding new sources of highly powerful energy flows. If we can maintain some semblance of education and knowledge (perhaps a community devoted to maintaining a library or being a University of Noesis) I would not be at all surprised if one day in the far future, an Einstein of the day were to discover a way to tap into a kind of fusion reaction we have not yet thought about. Or perhaps there is another approach to extracting energy from wind or solar that has a much higher EROI than anyone has yet conceived. You see I am still hopeful that in the long run, we humans will find ways to exploit the better aspects of our technological knowledge. I am also hopeful that by that time nature will have done a lot toward selecting for higher average sapience than is the case for our species today.

That factor will be crucial because unless mankind has achieved some greater collective and individual wisdom capacity, it is likely to end up re-doing all the mistakes that our current form has made with the use of petroleum and coal (and esp. nuclear). However, I do feel, still, that the bottleneck situation that will give rise to the need for the kinds of communities I am picturing will also work to select for individuals who even now have the genetic makeup to produce higher sapience.In any case, I do think there will once again, eventually be something like our high-energy society, but hopefully without the foolishness of believing in infinite growth (among other foolishnesses).

Energy Balance

A community, as envisioned here, is essentially like a single living organism, as opposed to how our current societies tend to be more like ecosystems — very 'porous' and constantly subject to changes in composition. Organisms thrive by maintaining their structural integrity and having a steady, controlled throughput of material and energy flows. In the case of materials organisms can develop ways to recycle much of what they need, especially if they have the energy to reconstitute the natural decay or breakdown materials into usable forms. The model for this kind of recycling is photosynthesis itself. But over the really long lifetime of an organism, new material resources are needed and that is why our community has to have a sufficiently large territory so that nature's capacity to renew vital resources (like water) have to come into play.

The figure below is a systems diagram of a community as a single organism. The importation of resources is controlled as is the influx of energy and its conversion to usable form. All converted energy (also called exergy in physics) is used to perform work to produce and maintain the asset stocks, essentially everything humans need and use, but also including their own biomass. Work results in energy being dissipated as waste heat. Also as assets are used, or consumables are consumed, or as time and entropy take their due, material assets break down to wastes that must be disposed of or recycled. Longer term readers may recognize this diagram as what I have also called an 'abstract economy' elsewhere. A steady-state economy obtains when the asset stocks maintain a given level within some range. Our ideal community will have asset stocks sufficient to allow all individuals, over the long-term, to achieve self-actualization, all other things being equal. Note that whatever that level is, it depends in turn on the extent of the external territory of the sources and sinks. An insufficiently large territory will result in unsustainable stock levels. Once an asset stock level is achieved that is in balance with the natural flows of material, and especially energy, then it must stay within the boundaries of its range thereafter. In other words, the system can grow only up to the point of balance with the carrying capacity of the territory and then remain stable thereafter (see: Steady State Economy).

Figure 1. This is a systems diagram depicting a stable (steady-state) abstract economy such as a single organism or the future community described here. The open rectangles represent the sources and sinks that are part of the environment and not under direct control of the community, e.g. the forests and watershed areas from the prior blog diagram.

Energy cannot be recycled and needs to enter the system from outside more or less continuously or in regular pulses such as the diurnal cycle of day and night and the seasonal intensity of sunlight, It will be used to do useful work as it flows through, and is released as waste heat to the environment where it is carried away. For the communities envisioned that means, fundamentally, capturing solar energy in a variety of low-tech ways and harnessing it to do the work of maintaining the community in health. A substantial amount of the work (though by no means all of it) will be devoted to maintaining the systems of capture and conversion themselves. For the most part this means the growing of food that will provide the basic motive power for everything else. It will take much manual (human and animal) work to maintain the food system. But also work directed at maintaining the standing capital assets (houses and barns, etc.), acquiring raw resources from the field (e.g. building materials such as rocks and wood) will need doing. Most important, for the purposes of maintaining the potential for self-actualization is providing education, entertainment, and aesthetics.

Appropriate Technology

The work of maintenance need not be back breaking as it probably was 200 years ago. As I said, we are much more knowledgeable today thanks to the industrial age we have lived in, and we can find ways to work smarter rather than harder. However, a really important key to this succeeding is finding a site for the community where natural inflows of energy are easy to capture. For example, in my previous blog I mentioned a stream or river running downhill from an elevated watershed. This is actually essential. The community will be able to exploit the gravitational potential energy in such a stream. Water wheels will do much to provide power to simple machines, like lathes and looms. These will have to be constructed from sturdy materials, such as the scavenged metals mentioned above, to have a multi-generational life time. Another source of potential mechanical energy is wind, but this is much more intermittent than a running stream. It could be used to power water pumps that would return some downstream water back up to a reservoir as a way of storing this energy. Or to pump water into water towers that supply running water for the community living and working spaces.

It is even conceivable that these flows of energy might power low voltage electrical generation. This one is a bit more tricky, of course, as it implies a need to maintain more complex machines (generators and such). One rule that will have to be observed is this: every power generating or power using machine must produce enough work to not only support their on-going purpose but to also provide for their own maintenance. This rule applies to the extraction of any raw materials needed to repair or remake the machines. Electrical lighting might be nice, and convenient. But having the ability to keep generators running means that some additional energy must be captured somewhere else in order to work whatever materials are available to construct the new machine that replaces the one that wears out. Our industrial age was possible only because we always found more energy (in oil, etc) to go get the next increments of metals and other materials, work them to the shapes they needed to be to serve, and then repair or replace them when they wore out. In an energy-constrained world, one of low power inputs, that won't really be an option.

What you won't see, for certain, are photovoltaic panels and wind turbines powering television sets and computers! No matter how you arrange it, those devices cannot provide the energy needed to replace themselves when they eventually wear out. Even if a community started with them in good working order, within twenty to thirty years they would be useful only for scavenging bits of metal and such. It would probably be better to forgo any attempts to set the community up with these sources because one day they would be gone, forever.

The food system will be the biggest single subsystem of work and energy capture in the community. In all likelihood every member of the community will be engaged in some activities supporting this subsystem. Even the blacksmith would be part of this effort. And the school teacher would no doubt help out at peak work load times, like harvest. With what we now know about plant nutrient requirements, permaculture balancing of production, consumption, and recycling, we should be able to develop highly productive cultivated lands. One needs ample acreage to provide buffers and excess production for storage against bad weather conditions. Additionally, the management of seed will be quite important as a sub-specialty of the endeavor.

Many different artisan skills will be needed in the community as in days of old. But the level of specialization will be far less than we've grown used to. Everybody will have to have some general skills in food production, maintenance of equipment and animals. There is some evidence that people who are less specialized and engage in a wider variety of work activities tend to be happier and more fulfilled by their work. This would, in my mind, contribute a great deal to the achievement of self-actualization — the ultimate goal of all of this!

Of course providing for health needs and possibly dentistry will require specialized knowledge that would necessitate individuals taking on these roles (the town doctor, etc.)

Education may become more a matter of home-schooling and on-the-job training with a smattering of formal education in mathematics, literature, etc. being carried on at other times. Since there would no longer be a mandate from society to learn math so that you can get a better job, people should find education more enjoyable and fulfilling for its own sake, rather than just another chore they are expected to do.

Now we get to one of the more delicate issues with community life and that is the management of affairs of the community, what we might be tempted to call governance. I suspect every community of this kind will find what works for them in terms of who they decide should provide management oversight, how they decide such, and what level of authority/responsibility they give them. However, given the lessons we hopefully have learned about politics, I would hope that between elevated sapience and awareness of the role of wisdom in managing the social process people would tend to look to the wise elders for leadership (see my series Sapient Governance linked from the series index page).

It might not be a problem since the community would be seeking to maintain a steady-state condition and NOT grow in any particular way. It is the decisions about what, when, and how to grow that complicate life for us all. And as long as we have this belief that growth is good pounded into our head and impinging on our psyches (as a replacement for self-actualization, I might add) we are slaves to the necessity to channel precious resources into the fools game. The community needs to remember that it is more like a single adult organism than a cancer or wild population. The wise elders are more like custodians of the balance than directors of new projects. By not growing, the elders can focus more on resolving the complex social issues that arise between people who have differing views (think about Solomon settling the dispute over motherhood of a baby). Even in the wisest of communities I imagine differences of opinion will emerge. There is also always the affairs of the heart that can complicate life and impede progress toward self-actualization!

Engagement in Development of the Mind and Consciousness

The society will be in balance when everyone in it has sufficient freedom to pursue education (formal or self) and gaining better understanding of themselves and their world, including their neighbors. A community that actually values the development of the inner life, knowledge, the mind and one's consciousness, is the community that will thrive in the future, even with energy constraints. This isn't something that must be done in a certain number of years. Given the balance between work, play, and pursuit of self-actualization, it becomes a lifetime endeavor. There are so many ways that people can engage in mental activities that exercise their brains. These should come to the fore in a future sapient society. Without the mind numbing din of television game shows and spectator (couch potato) sports or a life-sucking useless 'job' people should be free to grow and mature in harmony with their environment and their own psyches.

Even though this vision of a society in which everyone has to be a part of growing their own food, and they will not be able to download the newest cute ringtone for the iPhone^TM I don't see it as going backwards so much as learning to integrate what humans experienced in the past with what we know is possible today. We don't need to abandon everything and become slaves of the land as long as we are smart in how we go about creating these communities. A huge part of that trick is taking into consideration the lay of the landscape that will provide the maximum of flow of free energies. There probably aren't that many truly good sites available, unfortunately. But at the same time, after our current civilization crashes I don't imagine there will be all that much competition for what there is.

Despite the fact that much of this may seem to be an attempt to lay out a blueprint for a future social order, it really isn't. I am more concerned with understanding the requirements and constraints for something we might call 'true sustainability' for human life in this world. I started from the assumption that to be human means achieving the highest level of mental life or self-actualization. Unless a human-built environment can successfully provide that milieu it is not worthy of our potential as a species. The question then becomes what framework of community would be able to support this objective in a severely energy-constrained world, since that is what we are going to end up with? In one sense the analysis will provide some guidance to those who want to pursue such communities proactively, before the presumptive crash. But this in no way suggests that there are some set of rules, other than the laws of nature, that dictate that it should be done in some proscribed manner. The only rule that might be implied is that human communities will need to forgo their tendency to try to grow in population and consumption. But I think if the people of tomorrow are at all wise, they will recognize this and live in balance with whatever the world has to offer them.

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I received several e-mails from readers who wondered how my ideas were different from communes and other idealized communities that have come and gone with the ages. For one thing, those communes were never really based on biophysical economics in the sense I've been describing it here. They did not consider the energy balance needed to sustain for the long term. Many of the ones I've reviewed were dependent on trade of some kind with the outside world. The most successful introverted communities have had some shared doctrine, e.g. a set of religious beliefs that bound them to a lifestyle and to one another from within. The Old Order Amish come to mind.

To a large degree I imagine the communities I describe as being bound by something akin to religious belief, but belief in the benefits of self-actualization and development of the mind. I think whatever purpose is given for the formation of a community it has to foremost balance the need of the community with the needs of individuals in the way that I think religion does. Our current world pays lip service to individualism and entrepreneurship while entirely enslaving us to the economics of profit. Not a good fit to my way of thinking.

What is a Feasible Living Situation for Future Humans?

How Do We Establish Feasible Sustainable Living?

The peaking of oil extraction and refining appears to be upon humanity. The evidence is quite strong (if you want to follow this story I recommend you regularly read The Oil Drum for news and updates as well as technical reports). Because the cost of oil reflects to a large degree the imbalance between supply and demand, and has been pushing higher for the last several years, this has had a dampening effect on demand and a depressing effect on the economy. Thus, instead of an actual peak due to geophysical issues alone (the basis of the original peak oil theories) and subsequent decline, we are witnessing a bumpy plateau. Demand destruction leads to lower production in response and that means some oil is not being pumped out of the ground that would have been otherwise. But the overall trend is basically the same. Oil production will go down leading to upward pressure on the price we pay for each unit that is pumped. The feedback between the economy and oil production will mean that the process of decline will be stretched out a bit longer.

Nevertheless, oil is now on a depleting slope and however long it takes there is only one direction it can go. Just as problematic for civilization is that oil is the "king pin" energy source for modern industrial society. It takes oil to produce diesel fuel and gasoline, both needed to drive the equipment required for the extraction of other fossil fuels and all other natural resources. Oil is required for agriculture, transportation, and some heating. Natural gas, methane, comes closest to oil in terms of being able to replace oil derivatives for these purposes, but not without extensive retrofitting of the prime movers. That probably isn't going to happen overnight simply because it will take a significant amount of oil-based energy and materials (lubricants and plastics) to produce the retrofits.

The crux of humanity's predicament is this: as oil depletes we will find it increasingly necessary to reduce and abandon most of our economic activities as time goes on. Let me be clear about one thing in particular: Even though solar energy and wind, and even nuclear may be ramped up to diversify our energy portfolio, the fact is that none of these can begin to replace fossil fuels as primary energy sources to the degree needed to serve modern society. And that will even be true after we have cut back on all the wastage, discretionary consumption and made the most gains physically possible for efficiency. I realize that the political parties, the pundits, the general press, and just about everybody in the "green" movement (environmentalists and businesses) believe this is possible but they are guilty of wishful thinking. They do not begin to understand the scale of the problem, nor do they grasp that our current fossil fuel basis for industrialization would be needed to subsidize the build-out of all the alternative infrastructure needed. In order to accomplish this in a short enough time frame to make a difference we would have to devote as much as 10-20% of our net energy flow toward that end, not to mention the redirection of other resources and labor. We would more or less have to suspend many of our current economic activities to mount a WWII+ effort in that direction. One has to honestly ask how realistic or feasible is that? Not that we might not try it, when it is obvious that TSHHTF (has hit). But I rather suspect we will probably bring too little, too late, to the effort and end up failing even as we use up precious resources for naught.

Unless some miracle breakthrough in fusion (or some obscure way to do fission without the technical hassles — like radioactive wastes!) comes very soon, the likelihood that humanity will have an energy rich future is practically nil. And here is the real trouble. The current population of humanity on this planet is possible only because of the abundant availability of oil and other fossil fuels. Nothing else can enable so much high powered work to be accomplished in order to produce the abundant food and conveniences of life that OECD countries have been enjoying and developing countries have benefited from secondarily. An end to the flow of oil is an end to modern society. And the decline of the flow of oil is the decline of modern society over the same time scale. It is even possible that social collapse will come sooner due to human's, who have been spoiled by the riches of oil, freaking out and doing something stupid. What are the chances of that, one might ask?

The simple truth of life is that it takes energy to do work and it takes high powered energy to do work quickly. And it takes a lot of it to do the amount of work we've grown used to. It is the work that we have done over the ages when energy flows were increasing that has given us this high-tech society in the OECD nations and that oozes into the developing countries. No energy, no work, no riches. Pretty simple really.

So what will we do? How will we adapt? What kind of society will we be able to have as the energy depletes and work slows down? Those are extraordinarily difficult questions to ponder. More difficult still to answer.

What I propose is to work backward from what an actually sustainable society might look like in some distant time after the adaptation has proceeded. What I will do is start with what we might call a 'base case' in which a tribe (village) subsists with non-mechanical technology in a reasonably comfortable life using ancient wisdom to achieve sustainability. Then we will start adding in other forms of energy subsidies from what many people believe, today, will be the salvation of humanity — wind and solar energies.

The Base Case: Low Tech

What might be the minimal requirements for human life that reflects some semblance of civil society and individual dignity? The reason for this question is that we need to start with some minimal acceptable condition as a base case. If we can establish a truly sustainable situation with this base case, we can then start to ask what else, especially in the way of adding back technologically-based conveniences, we can add to the mix. A year ago I wrote a post, "Our Energy Cocoon", in which I described the exosomatic work that gets done in making our modern lives what they are in terms of a set of concentric rings of energy transformations. The inner ring involved the energies we use individually such as gasoline and home heating. As we progress outward the energies are used by others to provide the infrastructures of our lives, our work places, our grocery stores, etc. Further out still we find the hidden energy flows, the things that happen behind the scenes that we don't tend to give much thought to but use considerable energies to keep our lives safe and untroubled (generally) by things like the Second Law of Thermodynamics! In the current approach I will start from the very core of the cocoon model and then see what can be added outward from that core.

What does an individual need to live? Certainly adequate food and water intake. A person needs to maintain a fairly narrow band of body temperature, so for any but the equatorial tropics, this means shelter and clothing. These constitute what Abraham Maslow calls the physiological needs (see: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs). But next up on the hierarchy comes 'safety', that is the security of knowing where sustenance is coming from, of having others around to provide backup and help provision where the individual might not be able to do for himself. So basic needs involve more than eating and drinking. Something like a tribe is needed to provide a social framework. Well that is exactly the situation that Homo sapiens evolved within so it isn't surprising to learn that "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe..." (John Donne, Meditation XVII).

Maslow's hierarchy continues upward with 'love and belonging' needs. It isn't enough that we are surrounded by other competent humans that can help us out. We need to have feelings for them and know that they have feelings for us. Perhaps this is a more evolved version of safety, but it is a definite felt need. Next above love comes 'esteem'. We need to feel good about ourselves. We need to think that we are worthy and that others see us as worthy. We need to see ourselves as contributing usefully to our social group. We need to be needed. And at the apex of the hierarchy we find the need to 'self-actualize', to realize a sense of freedom to create and explore, a spiritual wholeness that is the basis for happiness.

So if we are to construct a base case in which human needs are fulfilled, where life is worth living, we must start with these as the minimum requirements.

Note that nowhere in this description of human needs do we see something like the need for Monday Night Football, or a Mercedes. We don't find caviar in the list. Nor, importantly, do we run into iPods^TM or iPads^TM. You won't even find the Internet or the World Wide Web in this hierarchy. In other words, we humans can actually achieve self-actualization without these things. There is no question that all of these kinds of things have made life for many more enjoyable, at times. But then, the other side of the coin is that many of those same people found themselves working harder and longer hours at less than satisfying jobs so as to be able to afford them. In the long run, probably not a great trade-off.

Thus we arrive at a basis for starting our analysis. Tribes, in prehistoric times, may have generally consisted of between 100 and 150 individuals in extended families (perhaps several somewhat related families). Later villages may have extended this number to around 300 to 400 but rarely more than that. It becomes impossible for an individual to have close personal relations (good or bad) with a large number of other individuals. It wasn't until the advent of agriculture that we start seeing larger villages, say over 1,000 in population. So let us assume that a workable base case would be to support 500 individuals, each of whom has the opportunity to reach self-actualization for an extended period of life. Like good physicists we will ignore extraneous factors for the moment. We will hold climate reasonably constant for this analysis.

What will it take to sustain 500 individuals in a manner that will allow them to achieve self-actualization, to fulfill their basic human needs?

Territory

Life is based on the influx of solar energy over an extended area of land. The food chain (of which we will assume humans to be the top consumer) is based on photosynthesis at the base. Assuming a moderate climate, adequate water, soils rich in nutrients, and a reasonable growing season, with photosynthesis generally running around not much more than 3-6% efficient the total amount of biomass produced per unit of time, the net primary productivity (NPP), will be the constraining factor in determining land requirements at local levels of solar insolation. In order to provide a diversity of NPP forms, food, wood, fiber, etc. the territory will need to be large and varied in composition.

Energy

As indicated above, the principal form of energy influx will be real-time solar energy. By real-time I mean the daily insolation that contributes to primary productivity. Humans have to eat daily to keep living and acting in the world, but plants grow slowly and not all biomass is edible. Therefore, large territorial regions are needed to support even small populations of humans without degrading the environment. Trees, a source of building materials as well as extrasomatic fuel are required in the territory to supplement heating needs. The basic problem is to trace the conversion of sunlight into usable food and other biomass resources for a specific locale to work backward to see how much land is needed to collect that much solar energy for five hundred, or so, people.

But it isn't just the cultivated land area that we have to consider. Humans need to have water in a regularly flowing, cleansed form. This is accomplished in nature through the hydrological cycle powered by the sun producing rain in highland areas that are covered with trees and understory plants. An ideal human settlement will be at the base of an elevated region acting as a watershed and providing cleansed water flow. Moreover, the flow of a stream or river from elevation is another source of energy that might be used directly for human purposes. More later on this.

Soils

The cultivatable areas require soils of a high quality capable of sustained permaculture practices. To maintain soil in its optimal state requires either the import of organic and nutrient materials (e.g. nitrogen in a form that can be taken up by plants) or recycling of these systemically. Soil management is one of the first forms of technology and knowledge that needs to be understood and used. The most conservative approach is to assume the need for recylcling of nutrients locally. This is not easy to accomplish in practice so careful thought is required to ensure its achievement.

Climate and Rainfall

As noted, the territory must be situated in a region with stable climate and adequate rainfall in the watershed. The former requirement is being complicated by the fact of climate change due to global warming. I have some thoughts on how to enjoy some stability but it will need further research to realize. The latter requirement is, of course, complicated by the former situation. To some degree these unknown variables might be mitigated by adjustment of the territory size, assuming the other considerations (requirements) have been met.

Building Materials and Fibers

To live comfortably means adequate shelter and protection from the elements. The local natural (endemic) species of trees and grasses will need to supply these. They will need to be endemic because support for non-native species often requires extensive artificial inputs because those species are not well adapted to the local conditions.

Building materials will also include local clays and rocks. This is another reason for locating a territory at the base of a mountainous region.

Animal Biodiversity

As a complement to and backup for permaculture-based food production, the territory should have a relatively high biodiversity in animal life

The Layout

This figure summarizes some of the above considerations for the conditions needed to support a small society sustainably. It represents what amounts to necessary and sufficient conditions for life that provides opportunities for all members of the community to achieve self-actualization (and meet all of the lower needs) and is sustainable for an indefinite period (until the environment shifts so badly as to make life difficult or invaders arrive).

That is, life will be sustainable as long as the population is maintained at the relatively constant average of, say, 500 individuals. This is the most difficult condition. We humans, as constituted, are not very good at exercising controls over our sexual and, hence, reproductive urges. And unless we were to learn to do so, this potential for long-term sustainability will remain elusive.

Primitive (but more "advanced") Technologies

By primitive I mean that the principles come from very ancient times. That does not mean that the technologies have to be primitive in form, they may be updated in realization based on our more advanced knowledge. For example, I indicate in the figure that there is a built reservoir of water by assuming that a dam structure has been built downstream from a more elevated watershed. We know a lot about effective dam building these days. We also know how to use materials more effectively. I suspect that a very effective dam could be built to contain a reservoir of water for many purposes, including running water in the homes and "factories", perhaps even flushing toilets!

One of the earliest technologies of agriculture was water management, not just the irrigation canals themselves, but the organization of how they should be laid out, constructed, and maintained. Management is a form of technology, knowledge as technology. We know a lot about what needs to be done and how to do it, even without fossil fuels. Much of this knowledge is currently being implemented in developing countries to boost agricultural output.

Similarly we know a huge amount today about how to design a village of living quarters, shops, factories, and schools — a village. We can borrow a lot from many European and Asian villages. But we know a great deal today about sanitation and public health that could help develop livable communities near enough to all resources that transportation could be accomplished with animal and human resources alone. We know a tremendous amount about building construction and thermodynamics to produce optimal structures from local building materials as long as we are modest in our desires.

Regarding factories, the models are the early 19^th century blacksmith shops and weaving factories (with a potter's wheel thrown in for good measure). It is altogether likely that most of our material goods will need to be manufactured locally from locally obtained raw materials. The situation for blacksmithing is problematic. Where will the metals come from?

Metal is a problem. It is highly unlikely that every tribe will have access to metal ores. It is even unlikely that any tribe will! Therefore, I assume that a certain quantity of metal has been imported at the start from scavenges of metal products left over from our current metal-rich civilization. Metal is not verboten in the base case. But it must be recognized that whatever metal is available to a tribe at the outset pretty much constitutes its total allotment and must be recycled assiduously (more on this later).

The picture I am trying to develop here is one of a civilization not unlike some of our ancestral ones, before fossil fuels, but with the advantage of knowledge (both scientific and practical) that we have developed since those societies existed. We (in the US) may live like our pre-Columbian predecessors (I claim a 1/100 ancestry of Native American blood!) but with a lot of advantages of hard-won scientific knowledge. For example we know about climate shifts and their consequences. We know about soil health and how to maintain it. We know about metals and the principle of leverage in machines. Take the best of the Native American cultures, the pre-Industrial Revolution European cultures, the Asian cultures of wisdom, the ancient civilizations of the Mid-East, etc. and combine them along with modern scientific understanding and you have a formula for good living, in my opinion.

Those people were not unhappy! They may have been unsatisfied in some regards. They were constantly challenged by all sorts of factors from invaders to climate changes. But they lived. They were productive. Were it otherwise we would not be here. We need to learn from their experiences and shape our future based on their successes along with the reality of energy flow declines in our world.

The real trick is to find a satisfying existence with knowledge of what is possible, what is feasible, and what is good for us in the long run. That, unfortunately is a real trick because the majority of humans today are incompetent when it comes to good judgements (see my series on sapience, Series Index, to get my thoughts on why this is so). Ergo, the kind of living situation I have been describing is not necessarily available to the average human today. Ah well, that is perhaps left to a future blog post.

In Harmony With the Ecos

The key will be understanding the Ecos as a system and our place in it. This is not easy. We have a heritage of belief that we humans have somehow transcended ordinary physics and biology. This is deeply engrained within our psyches and so it won't be easy to expunge. But it is essential to do so for there to be any future for something we would recognize as humanity.

How should we think about so-called "advanced technology" and its role in our societies in post-fossil fuel powering of our future? Consider the village described above. What would it take to support something like hydroelectric power? Clearly, if the society in this scenario has built a dam they have the potential to include hydroelectric generation. Say, for example, that such a community, before the rest of civilization broke down, had the presence of mind to install a small hydro-driven turbine and generator. Then after civilization collapsed how would they maintain the generator and replace it when it finally gave up the ghost? They would have to have some capacity for metallurgy, for shaping and forming metals, for constructing other electric components, etc. A blacksmith shop is not going to fill the bill.

This raises the main problem with keeping an extrasomatic technology going after fossil fuels are no longer available. Rebuilding a hydro-turbine and generator (not to mention the general infrastructure for distribution) at some future time is not a trivial problem. We might be able to preserve the knowledge of how to do it, but keeping the capabilities for doing so is another thing. Such capabilities will require maintaining metallurgics that are, themselves, complex and need dedicated skills and facilities. What are the possibilities for having more advanced technologies?

Technology

Here we meet the real conundrum for humanity. We have defined ourselves in terms of our capacity to solve problems with ever increasing technologies. For the majority of our existence this has been our experience and has come to represent our deepest beliefs about ourselves. Unfortunately, this belief is based on something entirely different from our cleverness at the root. We have been the unsuspecting recipients of the benefits of the increasing flow of high powered energy from fossil fuels. We are beneficiaries of expanding energy flow, not from some magical ability to conquer the universe with cleverness. But being basically self-indulgent beings, we told ourselves the story of progress based on our own superior intelligence. We were kind of dumb as it turns out.

What technology is possible with no real extrasomatic energies than water power and solar energy? That is a real problem for us. Suppose we were to introduce wind power into our model community. Suppose that we install wind turbines that can take advantage of the prevailing winds (see figure). Suppose we install electricity distribution infrastructure (based on DC current to be very efficient). How will our community produce the needed materials for repairs of those generators (and turbines)? More importantly, how will they provide for replacements? That is the crux of technological capabilities. It requires energy flux to support maintenance and replacement. If our model society were to install a hydroelectric generator how would it maintain and replace it when the time came, as it would? The support for technology requires high powered energy flows. That is what we have enjoyed for most of humanity's experience. But that is not what we are going to have in the near future.

Preserving Knowledge

The fact that it might be impossible for future societies as conceived above to actually take advantage of technology as it has been developed by modern high-energy society doesn't mean that such technological knowledge is worthless for all time. In fact, one of the critical purposes of society after the decline and loss of fossil fuels will be to preserve knowledge of what is possible with high through-put energy fluxes. We have fought hard to acquire this knowledge and I don't want to believe it was in vain.

The world of humanity is a history of advancement and decline. Golden ages followed by Dark Ages in which some seed of enlightenment was preserved by diligence. I hope the future will have that same characteristic. Those of us who see what needs to be done in terms of preserving some kind of civilized culture (even if not high tech in nature) have a duty to future generations of what I think will be a more sapient form of humanity. We need to transmit knowledge that was gained by our kind. Even if life seemingly devolves to more primitive social forms we need to fulfill the role of the monks in the Dark Ages, faithfully copying the understanding of this age to some future eusapient generation able to pick up where we left off, but without the weaknesses that we have displayed. Let's prepare and hope.

More Complex Societies and the Future of Mankind

It is nearly certain that the time of complex societies is at an end, at least for a long time into the future. Until there is some form of energy flux that can replace fossil fuels in such a way as to replace the high power and support a technologially advanced civilization again, I think we should have the wisdom to accept simpler and more sustainable societies along the lines described above. It is possible that if humans can achieve a more eusapient future and survive the coming challenges, then we might yet produce a high technology civiilization, complete with travel to space and the stars and all the dreams that we have given voice to over tha last milenium. There is nothing wrong with those dreams. The only problem is with our eagerness to achieve them and the consequent loss of understanding of what it takes to do so. There are energies that we, as a species, have yet to tap into. The universe is still full of promise. But all things in their own time and ways. It is not yet our genus' time. We have lessons yet to learn. If we succeed the future species evolved from our seed may yet reach the stars.

What Institution Is Working?

Toyota Goes Down

OK, I know, it isn't buying American, but for the past nearly thirty years I have been very happy with Toyota cars. The largest vehicle I've bought from them was their moon buggy van in the mid 1990's. Otherwise they've all been compacts. My current car is a Corolla that got me 35+ MPG on my trip to New York and back, and that was doing 70+ MPH on significant stretches. I've been happy with these cars because Toyota's quality has been superb, along with excellent engineering. So what has happened?

I just finished reading Profit Beyond Measure: Extraordinary Results through Attention to Work and People by H. Thomas Johnson & Anders Broms, in which the authors laud Toyota's manufacturing management approach, contrasting it with American auto makers, and demonstrating why it has been superior in all respects. Indeed many people have thought Toyota was something of an iconic institution, standing for quality and value. Now the shine is off. The latest revelations about its quality and design issues, along with the behavior of the CEO not becoming of the family name, Toyoda, show that even this former paragon of virtue can no longer be counted on.

Which leads me to ask the question: Are any long standing institutions in our societies working?

A Who's Who of Formerly Trusted Names

Let's start at the top. Congress? Both the Senate and the House are mired in such partisan political maneuvering that they are failing to enact any meaningful legislation. Look at the recent situation in the Senate with one senator holding up all of the presidential nominees for government jobs. Does this really sound like a functional government? And what about the 60-vote rule to avoid a filibuster? Now it seems to apply to everything. The irony is that not one of those senators or congressmen think they are doing anything wrong. I wonder how many of them actually think at all.

And then there is the Supreme Court. The decision to allow corporate monies to flow into political campaigns (or close enough for effect) is outrageous. Free speech by a legal person entity??? And wasn't it Chief Justice Roberts who promised not to be an activist judge? We see how far that got.

Finally (at the top) we have the President of the United States (POTUS). Look how effective the health care reform has been. What did he accomplish in Copenhagen (at the climate conference not the Nobel awards)? Just mentioning his financial advisory appointees is enough to tell you how well that institution is holding up. Summers, Geithner, Bernanke (all right he already had the job, but he got re-upped), do I need to go on? Look at the mess they have made of the financial bailouts. Anyone know where the money went? Goldman-Sachs gave theirs back? That is what they claim anyway.

Speaking of banks and Wall Street, how do you think those venerable institutions are doing? Supposedly, profit-wise, some of them are doing OK, the ones the Feds haven't closed down for insolvency. But are they doing what they were supposed to have done with the bailout money? You know, make loans? It appears not. Businesses are still struggling to make payroll let alone contemplate creating new jobs because they can't get loans. And Wall Street has been on a roller coaster ride. Right now they are down (the DOW closed below 10,000 the other day). They almost recovered from the slide in 2008 before starting a long descent. Hope you cashed out your 401K while they were flying high(er).

Education and schools are descending into the pits of despair. Ever since society implicitly decided that education was all about jobs, and high paying ones at that, the whole American education system has been declining in producing truly educated citizens who can think critically. Indeed, I would argue that this decline in critical thinking skills in the general populace is what is at the base of the dysfunctional political process that has lead inexorably to the conditions I mentioned above. Now the arguments heard from high and low, from both right and left, decry our pathetic math and science education because our "leaders" see us as not being able to compete in the global marketplace since we don't have as many scientists as, say, the Chinese. More of the same pathetic thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. It never has occurred to anyone that more is not better, Better is better. Not every human being is cut out to be a scientist or even be mathematically inclined. And yet we force students from an early age on to conform to those expectations. We now have a country of mostly unhappy people who struggled with the technical courses in the name of mammon and never really learned much about life and living. What a tragedy.

Let's see. Democracy on the slide because we have a less than well informed and educated citizenry. Oh yes, why are they less than well informed? Could it be the press has fallen down on the job? Do the mainstream media actually inform us or do they merely entertain those who, since they haven't learned to think critically, actually believe they are watching "the news", and are grateful that it happens to be titillating?

Well, surely the wealth production engine of this great country is intact. Surely free enterprise, capitalism, and the economic system are in good shape.

If you think so, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. We seem to have entered an era when companies like Enron are more the rule than the exception. CEO pay has gone through the roof compared with the average worker, even when those same CEOs are driving their firms into the ground. How does that sound functional?

The most pernicious thing about capitalism and the economic thinking behind it is the way in which its practice is raping the natural world, producing pollutants and CO₂ and persists with beliefs that endless growth and greed are good things. I mean, and this always drives me nuts to think about it, these people actually do believe this! It doesn't matter how much evidence you put before them, they persist in their cherished beliefs. Oh, I forgot, they went to the same school system I was just complaining about. Well, no wonder.

Seriously, though, what has capitalism done for you lately? We shipped the high paying jobs off to other countries. Today it takes two breadwinners working extra hours just to keep even with adjusted income levels from the mid 20^th century. The middle class is rapidly disappearing and the proportion of the population, in the US, that has to get food stamps to survive has gone way up. What happened to the promises (I can still hear Ronald Reagan talking about 'morning in America')? Why aren't we all truly rich? Don't think the cheap knock-offs from China you bought in WallMart counts as showing how rich you are.

As I sit here this morning, enjoying one of the warmest Februaries on record in the Pacific Northwest while folks on the east coast are digging out of record snows (global warming isn't just about warmer mean temperatures, it is also about increasing anomalous weather patterns), I really wonder what institutions are actually working as intended. Have the environmental NGOs been successful? I used to give contributions, for example to the World Wildlife Fund, to help save the world, or maybe at least the whales. But as I read the articles on species extinctions and the fallout from them, I wonder. Have the climate NGOs influenced the governments to really do something about CO₂ emissions? They have succeeded in getting the leaders to flap their lips, but so far no real action.

What is working?

To be honest, I cannot see anything that we would recognize as an institutional part of the US (and many other OECD countries) as working as intended, or as we always thought they did. The whole globe is in decline because we are running out of net energy to power those very institutions that comprised our global societies. The only thing I think we can count on as working is our human bonds with a small group of others, our communities insofar as they actually exist. I live in a neighborhood, not a community. I envy those who have opted for small, intentional communities based on sharing and caring for one another ala the small towns of yesteryear. No they were not perfect. People get into squabbles and don't behave well some times. But overall, the small community is the kind of social environment that we humans evolved within. We actually do work best in that environment, on average.

In the end, that is what will save those of us fortunate enough to be a part of a community situated in the right geographical location (climate and isolated from climate refugees, etc.) focused on food growing and light manufacture of essentials (like candles for light at night!) As far as I can see that kind of arrangement is the only institution that will work in the long run.

[EDIT: Thanks to a reader, Rudy, I fixed the egregious number for the DOW stock price. I had said 9,000, but, of course, meant 10,000. Freudian slip? I wonder.]

Energy Flow, Emergent Complexity, and Collapse

Civilizations grow in complexity given the right circumstances. And all too often they end up collapsing. History is replete with examples. Joseph Tainter, among others, has examined collapse from the standpoint of decreasing marginal return on investment in increasing complexity, which he posits is the most common factor in collapsed societies. The key question one must ask is: What critical circumstance (if there is one factor above all others) enables a society to grow in complexity in the first place? If we find an answer to that question we may also find what causes the decrease in marginal returns as complexity increases. This is certainly a growing concern for our modern civilizations. I advance a systems theoretical and principled thesis, below, that puts the increased flow of energy as the key enabler of increases in complexity. And I examine what we might expect from declines in that flow rate when sources are depleted.

Joseph A. Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies

If you haven't read Tainter's 1988 (some would say prescient) book, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press), or if you haven't read it recently, you would do well to do so at your earliest convenience. [Also see a speech he gave the 94th Annual Meeting of Ecological Society of America, posted on The Oil Drum, here.]

I had the great good fortune to meet Joe at the Second Annual Biophysical Economics Meeting in Syracuse, NY this last October. He came to give the plenary talk in which he connected energy return on energy investment with his theory of how evolving complexity in societies figures into collapses, when they occur. I then stopped over in Logan Utah on my way home to Washington state and spent some quality time talking with him that evening over a single malt scotch (a label I had never heard of before - very smokey!)

So I thought I'd dig out my copy of Collapse when I got home and re-read it. I remembered not being quite as interested in the details of Roman and Mayan societies in the way an archeologist would be (Joe's credentials) and had probably skimmed too much. His lecture at Syracuse piqued my interest now that I know a bit more about what seems to be going on in our modern societies in the post-peak oil world. Much to my chagrin I couldn't find my copy. Actually I vaguely remembered having borrowed it from the library (I wasn't rich enough in 1988 to have much of a personal library), so I quickly got it from Amazon, along with a few other classics on the topic, and read it again. This time with more informed, if not fresher eyes.

Joe's thesis boils down to this: Societies evolve greater organizational and technical complexity to solve social problems that arise due to external forces or population pressures or overuse of natural resources, etc., and at some point, the marginal beneficial returns (problems solved) begin to decline leading to lowered margins of error for dealing with possible catastrophic impacts. Societies collapse when increasing complexity no longer has a payoff and something else bad happens.

As I read this anew I thought about other areas that I have been developing some expertise in, namely the evolution of complexity in dynamical systems (from general systems science) under the influence of the flow of high potential energy. I felt inspired to write more about that since I think there are some general principles that we could use to decipher what is going on in the world today and have some sense of what to expect from tomorrow.

Energy Flow and the Evolution of Internal Complexity

The term complexity has become somewhat problematic over the last several decades because of the difficulty researchers and authors have had in coming to some kind of consensus on its meaning. Of course it is like pornography, right? We know it when we see it. I have attempted to provide a more concrete treatment of the subjects of complexity and its evolution elsewhere, so I won't go into that in detail here. Readers who want a more precise definition should take a look at those works. For our purposes a brief summary follows.

There are really two kinds of complexity, potential and realized. Potential complexity comes from the a priori existence in a semi-closed system of myriad raw components, both in absolute numbers and in types. Types, here, refers to components that have different personalities or interaction potentials with other component types. The more different types and interaction potentials there are, the more realized complexity might obtain within the boundaries of the system.

Realized complexity is what most of us think about when we come across something that already has organization and appears to be functioning through myriad actual interactions among the components. When we see multiple kinds of arrangements of components that appear to be regular and strongly interacting, we apprehend the system as complex. We can view a system from outside, say when we run into a complex piece of machinery (perhaps looking inside to see the workings), or from the inside, as when we try to grasp the complex nature of our own society. Either way, realized complexity is characterized by organization, stability of interactions, many kinds of interactions and often recognizable subsystems, which may be, themselves, complex. A good example of a complex system with complex subsystems is a living cell, especially a protist such as a Paramecium.

A central question of the evolution of organization asks: How does an unorganized collection of components (potential complexity) actually develop over time into an organized, functioning (realized complexity) system?

This question lies at the heart of the still somewhat mysterious (though not mystical) issue of the origin of life on Earth. Life emerged from non-living components perhaps some 2 to 3 billion years ago. And once the basic formula of complex metabolism in cells developed, life proceeded to evolve further, eventually producing simple multi-cellular organisms, and then, in a much shorter time frame, to us.

Harold Morowitz (Energy Flow in Biology, 1968, Academic Press), following closely on the heels of Erwin Schrödinger, who famously asked the seminal question, "What is life?", provided an important insight into the nature of evolution of organization in semi-closed systems. He demonstrated that when energy of the right kind flows from a source of high potential, through the system, and exits at a lower potential (heat), that work is accomplished within the component milieu and structures obtain. He coined the phrase made famous by Stuart Brand on the back cover of the Last Whole Earth Catalog, below the famous picture of the Earth taken from the moon: "The flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system."

Morowitz was working on molecular organization in an attempt to be more precise about the origin of that organization in natural processes. He detailed quite nicely the way in which photons of the right frequency could enter at one point in a semi-closed system (being closed to material inputs or outputs), be absorbed by simple molecular or atomic components in which electrons were thus excited and new bonding arrangements could occur. Energy that ended up in thermal modes would tend to excite molecules at the entry end of the system and cause material cycling (convection) to organize the molecules dynamically. Thus both structure and motion ensue from the influx of the right photons. He went on to analyze things like the information flow due to changes in structure and function, important to our understanding of life.

As any good disciplinarian scientist, he felt uncomfortable with too much generalization from his basic insights (personal communication). But I am not constrained by good disciplinarian constraints since I like to find generalizations that do seem to apply across disciplinary boundaries. In this case I argue that the energy flow principle is, indeed, quite general and a good explanation for the evolution of organization and complexity in all systems, not just molecular in nature.

When Morowitz says "acts to organize a system" I would amend this to "enables the organization of a system to emerge". The energy flow doesn't so much cause a specific organization to evolve as it is simply a necessary condition for any organization to emerge. In fact any given system of some nominal potential complexity might evolve in any number of ways toward higher realized complexity. The energy flow supplies the needed potential for work to be accomplished. Here, by work, I mean all manner of reconfiguration of matter as new associations and movements are enacted. Work is what energy enables, but exactly what work depends on what materials are in the neighborhood at the same time the energy is available.

For that we have to rely on something that resembles chance but in fact is itself inherently organized, and that is chaos. Ilya Prigogine, at about the same time that Morowitz was wrestling with the internal mechanics of organization evolution, had an equally useful insight into the nature of systems in which there was no apparent organization of components, but tended to evolve organization over time. He called these (what I have labeled potentially complex) systems as chaotic. On close examination one finds that such systems are not truly random. They actually do have some kind of structure, like a waterfall; the pathway of the falling water, in bulk, is readily predicted, or the boundaries of the waterfall are observable, but the fate of any given molecule of water as it approaches the fall is completely unpredictable. Turbulence in a stream is another example of chaotic systems. If you ever stare at a rushing stream you will see that eddies appear quite regularly at certain points due to the underlying rock formations. But you can't predict with any accuracy when an eddy will appear (or even exactly where within some general boundary).

Chaos in a semi-closed system imposes some kind of overarching organization, generally limiting the kinds of interactions that can happen. It is inherent in Morowitz's convective cycles; organization of flows and possible sorting (say by weight differences) of components lead to higher probabilities of certain interactions over just any arbitrary ones, a concept touched on by Dan Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, (1995, Simon & Schuster) which he called "forced moves". Thus, the argument that order (or I prefer organization) can emerge from chaos (the concept led Prigogine to get a Nobel Prize in Physics!)

The key, however, remains the flow of the right kinds and amounts of energy through the system. Solar influx through the Earth's atmosphere and hydrosphere power a large majority of organizing work on the surface of the planet, with contributions from geothermal and tidal forces. And the Earth went from a hot ball with poisonous gasses swirling around it to the blue green dot that graced the back of the Last Whole Earth Catalog.

Realized complexity obtains from the on-going pumping of energy flows through the system. Over a sufficiently long time, and assuming there is a steady-state flow of those energies, components tend to organize and reorganize generating increasing complexity at a given level. Evolution is the emergence of some new subsystem, at that level, followed by active selection for or against that subsystem by the rest of the whole system. After a while, the fittest subsystems come to dominate even while chaotic variations still give rise to new variants. Occasionally a new variant is 'more' fit under the general circumstances and it survives. When these subsystems are, themselves, capable of replication, as a living system is, then the newer variety will displace the older ones.

And then, at times, with the continuing flow of energy in which there are energies not completely used for work processes (they just pass through as it were), the subsystems will have a tendency to discover yet new interactions with one another that give rise to a new level of organization. This is exactly the case when single celled organisms evolved into multi-cellular ones. New econiches are just organizational gaps where new energies are made available and a new subsystem can exploit those energies to develop new structures. In one sense we see complexity at a given level go down when this happens. Individual cells in a multi-cellular organism can begin to specialize, thus not needing to maintain all of the internal metabolic mechanisms for doing everything themselves. They can get some of what they need from nearby cells that have specialized to produce that particular product. Cells became simpler while organisms became more complex. This process gives rise to hierarchies of organization. In general, the net realized complexity of the whole goes up. More energies that formerly may have escaped untransformed by work to heat are now used for new work. Some of those previously unused energies end up captured in new structures (conformational energy) as the whole system develops greater realized complexity.

Multi-cellular organisms continued to evolve up the phylogenetic tree of life and way out on one of the newest branches of that tree sits an ape that has a spectacular brain and something we call second order consciousness. They are conscious of being conscious. They have abstract communications both spoken and written. And they start to exploit all kinds of previously inaccessible energies to supplement their normal biological food. They evolve complex social interactions because they have an increasing wealth of energy from these external sources. The potential complexity for these beasts is staggering. And they proceeded to evolve as many as they could given the chaotic constraints on their clustering.

A new level of organization appeared as societies. Culture captures the degree of complexity, but look at what happens for individuals. Just as cells in multi-cellular organisms could become 'simpler' by specializing, individual humans could simplify by specializing in the work that they performed. As they did so the total realized complexity of society increased but the life of an individual tended to become less complex. At least for a while.

This brings us full circle to Joe Tainter's point. At any given flow rate of energy available to do work, a social system reaches the maximum complexity that solves problems for the system as a whole.

In Morowitz's model, we need to ask, what happens when you reduce the flow of energy through an organized system? The reason this question is crucial is that that is exactly what is happening to our human societies. The peak of oil production represents something even more pernicious to society, the peak of net energy to do useful work in our economy (see: "Economic Dynamics and the Real Danger"). What happens to Morowitz's systems when energy flow declines? The simple answer is they go back to chaos.

Tainter documents how societies that reach the limits of marginal returns on increased complexity and then something bad happens. They collapse. What about a world in which we have 'artificially' increased the flow of energy by using fossil fuels (far above real-time solar influx) so that we can evolve much higher orders of realized complexity than can be sustained once those fossil fuels start to decline? Have we not reached our point of maximum complexity where every investment in more complexity brings less actual return in benefits? And might it not be due to the fact that we have reached some kind of maximum flow of energy?

That is the problem we face as a global civilization. We are running short on oil and as a consequence we are going to find it harder to extract other energy and mineral resources. Our net energy is already in decline and that is at the root of the global economic problems we are seeing. The simple truth is that you cannot have a growing economy when the basis of all economic wealth production is in decline. You cannot make up the difference with efficiency gains (and in reality there really aren't many actual efficiency gains to be made). The scope of energy flow due to fossil sunlight is just unbelievably huge. Neither will we make up the difference with alternative, sustainable sources (like real-time solar influx) because we can't build out the scale of infrastructure that would be required in any reasonable time frame. We can only start simplifying our societies and giving up the many discretionary expenditures of energy that we currently enjoy without much thought. We can learn to once again live on real-time solar influx via our food raising systems. And even then we are talking about an ability to support only a small fraction of the current population. Ironically the simplification of society involves the increasing complexity of individual lives. What this means in practice is that each individual must start to become more of a generalist in terms of the functions that support life. Everyone will have to become a food grower! Believe it or not that isn't simple! Knowing how to grow your own nutrients is actually quite complicated and will demand a whole new set of cognitive skills.

I suppose it will be hard to see the similarities in the dynamics of molecules, or cells, and those of human societies for many people. It is a very abstract viewpoint. It might seem inhuman! But if there really is a correspondence, a general law of complexity evolution based on energy flow then we might be wise to pay attention.