Question Everything

The Goal — Episode I: The Basic Requirements

How to Be Human

I'll be using Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as a model for developing the ideas in this series. The theory presented by Maslow and other ‘positive psychologists’ is that each human being requires that these needs be fulfilled at each level before the needs at a higher level can be fulfilled. It is not necessary that the lower level needs be perfectly and completely fulfilled before one can start to pursue higher needs. But one will be stunted in their development as a happy individual unless the needs are settled at lower levels, freeing one to pursue fulfilling needs at the higher levels.

Here I will recap the main points of the hierarchy. Starting at the base:

• Physiological Needs and Drives
  These are the needs of any animal to survive. The primary needs are:
  • Air to breathe (intake of oxygen and output of carbon dioxide produced by metabolism)
  • Water to drink (needed in metabolism and to keep the body in its quasi-fluid state, flushing of wastes)
  • Food to eat (nutrients for building and repairing the body, energy to power the body)
  • Procreation (driven to have sex as an inducement to reproduction)
      Secondary physiological needs arise from living in environments that are not like the one in which humans evolved.
  • Clothing and shelter (provide insulating microenvironments against cold and wet conditions)
  • Fire (source of external warmth and cooking)
• Safety and Security Needs
  These are primarily psychological factors that translate into behavioral modes. There are emotional correlates such as fear or anger associated with threats, and contentment associated with perceptions of safety.
  • A sense of personal security (e.g. adequate nourishment, absence of danger)
  • Resource security (territorial food supply, water catchments)
  • Health and well-being (absence of disease or injury)
  • Safety net (presence of general conditions to guard against accidents/illness/hunger and their adverse impacts)
• Love and belonging
  Positive emotional needs that are experienced cognitively. Also may involve some forms of positive conflict, e.g. sense of being engaged in group decision making.
  • Friendship (having comrades with whom one can cooperate and play)
  • Intimacy (humans have a strong need to mate, more or less monogamously, leading to needs for stronger ties to certain individual others)
  • Family (babies and young children elicit strong positive emotional responses - more complicated emotional milieu when children are older!)
  • Social networking and purpose (most people feel a need to belong to organizations that have some purpose even if only to have fun)
• Esteem
  The need to be viewed by others in a positive light. To have others indicate through their actions and words that they hold a person in regard and enjoy being with that person. Along with the esteem of others one needs to have self esteem, to view one's self as worthy, competent, etc.
  • Recognition (being seen and heard by others in a variety of social and personal situations)
  • Acceptance (being taken for who one is and not feel a need to impress or submit to other's expectations)
  • Respect (acknowledgement of worthiness)
  • Attention (being paid attention to in various ways showing one is a valued member of a network of people)
  • Positive Self Image (cognitive awareness of the receipt of the above from ones social groups)
• Self-actualization
  
  • The need to expand and grow in mind and spirit, to learn much, to perform well, and to better understand life and the world
  • The need to achieve more than has already been achieved

 

Starting with the Basics

The basic physiological needs is the best place to start this discussion. Clearly humans living in a future uncertain world will need to have these needs met in order to have a shot at the higher needs being met. Remember the goal of this exercise is to consider how a future life can be arranged so as to achieve the highest levels of self-actualization. But to do so, we must consider each level starting at the bottom.

Food, water, shelter, warmth, facilities for cleansing and toilets are the basics for physiological needs. The per capita capacities for these needs can fall in a range from subsistence level, in which everyone is barely eking out a living, scrabbling for food and water, to an abundance sufficient to provide buffers against times when environmental contingencies might lessen the capacity. Our objective should be to shoot for the high end of that range because it helps ensure that, on average, the physiological needs of all will be met.

The task, then, is to define what an abundance capacity in fulfilling these needs will look like and set up a plan for achieving that.

As most long-term readers will know I advocate the permaculture approach to designing those capacities. I like to think of permaculture as the application of the principles of systems science, and in particular those of systems ecology, to the human-built environment. That environment needs to integrate smoothly into the natural world in which it is embedded. In a very real sense, the human-built environment should be just another kind of natural environment. It does not violate other ecosystems, it is just a specialized ecosystem constructed and managed to allow humans to achieve their highest status as self-actualized beings. My own feeling is that part of real self actualization is a realization of being a part of nature, not above or outside of it. Just from a whole systems perspective it seems to me that that would be a safe approach. It beats seeing our kind as in battle with nature. We know who would win that battle!

This blog will outline some approaches to planning a future social system based on principles from permaculture and more general information from systems ecology and systems agriculture. But our basic objective is to scale the operation properly in order to achieve true sustainability. Let me emphasize this last point.

True Sustainability

We treat a human-built ecosystem as a semi-permeable bounded system (see Figure 1 below). It receives flows of energy to drive the order-preserving processes within (such as growing food and trees), flows of materials such as nutrients and water, and excretes some high-entropy materials and waste heat to the larger environment. The latter represents a minimum, but unavoidable, recycling of matter at a rate that the larger environment can absorb safely. Low-entropy material goods such as crops, buildings, and human biomass remain bounded in the system and are regenerated by a social form of autopoiesis. This means that every process contributes to the maintenance of every other process in some fashion. For example, the resource production processes (food growing and preparation) supports the educational process, which reciprocates by educating the young in the ways of producing food, among other skills and knowledge. Every process should contribute to the production of energy, either directly or indirectly. It should provide support in a way that maintains its own energy sources and can possibly support some excess for savings, for a rainy day.

There is an optimal scale and degree of complexity that humans can enjoy in their human-built ecosystem. Once that scale is achieved the system cannot and should not grow in size. Similarly, there is a manageable level of complexity in social and physical structures and functions that should not be exceeded, but this speaks more to higher levels of the needs hierarchy, so I will return to it in a later blog. The point taken here is recognition of the scale issue with respect to what an “ideal” sized community would be. For guidance we note from the archeological record that band sizes prior to agriculture rarely got to be more than approximately 100 individuals and, depending on the supporting ecosystem, were often fewer. After the advent of agriculture tribes appear to have grown in numbers until the emergence of villages. This is most likely the result of adopting a sedentary life style. From these bits of evidence and modern psychological investigations, it appears that an optimal village size is between 200 and 500, give or take a few. No one really knows for sure, but below 100 there might not be enough labor or specialization to have a balanced society. At 300-400 you have a stimulating crowd! Above 500 it may be getting too complex for the average human mind to be comfortable. As I said, these issues will be covered in a future installment.

True sustainability means that a system is in very long-term steady state equilibrium with the larger environment of nature. This does not mean that everything is absolutely stationary. There will be natural fluctuations upward and downward. All that it means is that the physical structures will fluctuate around a general mean and the fluctuations will have manageable variances. But there can be no scale or complexity trends unless they are supported by our evolution to a species that can naturally handle higher levels and sizes. We need to exercise self-restraint and wisdom to achieve this.

A steady-state ‘economy’ does not mean that knowledge need stop developing. Quite the contrary. Knowledge is the one thing that needs to grow. But knowledge of what? By knowledge I do not refer to increasing our ability to build better widgets, necessarily (although if the widget is a tool and we can find ways to make that tool more efficient, then that counts). I refer to knowledge as understanding of the world and ourselves — what philosophy used to be before people thought they needed to sound sophisticated to impress others. But again I anticipate myself in future blogs.

Nothing on Earth is truly sustainable forever. We shouldn't expect it to be. There will be ebbs and flows, ups and downs, re-growth and decay. But always there will be evolution. What we should seek is a stable sustainability from which to launch the future evolution of humanity in what will be a wholly new environment. We can neither predict nor control the future. All we can hope for is to stake a claim on a viable future for whatever species we can become. And that we do by building a sustainable human-built ecosystem. Ultimately what I am talking about is having a sustainable capacity for evolution of a human kind. Perhaps we should consider the hierarchy of needs of a genera of sentient beings. Perhaps humanity is seeking to become self-actualized as a species.

The Only Feasible System

Any concept of sustainability has to begin with what is feasibly sustainable in the context of the whole Earth system. From what we know from systems ecology and energy balance (stocks and flows) there is really only one possible systemic design for a human-built ecology. This is depicted in Figure 1.

 

Figure 1. The only “system” that will work for a sustainable future!

 

There are NO choices for humans to make here! Our whole civilization has been based on an anomalous supplemental flow of energy from the sequestered fossil sunlight. And that supplement is about to run out. We are going to HAVE to learn how to live on real-time solar energy input alone. And here is a wake up call for all those who think real-time solar can simply replace the power requirements that we have developed based on fossil sunlight. It won't! We do not have the technology to overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The power contained in fossil solar energy is the collection and magnification of real-time solar from millions of years in the past. No technology in existence or even possible by the laws of physics can substitute for that fact.

What we need to do is design a feasible system for sustainably supporting a population of humans in this natural world. I'm not saying this system cannot include some kinds of appropriate technologies. I am definitely not advocating we live as our ancient ancestors did in Olduvai. My sense of evolution as a progressive process leads me to believe that it is quite appropriate for humans to utilize technologies that, in fact, contribute to true sustainability. Such technologies involving low power electrical energy, for example, might be feasible as long as they can be maintained and replicated over time. This implies low-tech sorts of technologies. Things that can be built in a well-tooled (hand) shop. It also implies that things like metals (esp. copper) be assiduously recycled. I will return to this subject as well in the future.

Engineering the Future

There are several considerations that need to be taken into account for designing a future social system given the ultimate objective of creating a society in which every individual has the opportunity to self-actualize. Architects consider not only the aesthetics of buildings, but also the usability. They consider their clients' needs and desires and the functionality that will fulfill those while making the design pleasing to view. But they also are driven by a need (in the client) for novelty and uniqueness as well as their own need to express creativity. Much of our current design is driven by the kinds of needs and wants of ordinary humans, however, who are somewhat less than ideally sapient! The average client is wowed by novelty and uniqueness. In our present society the focus is on satisfying the perception of needs and wants, rather than a true understanding of needs and wants of a much more sapient user. The latter will be a realist and not a ‘consumerist’. We do not need to consider novelty in aesthetics, for example, as much as functionality. This doesn't mean novelty is to be avoided. After all, the designer wants to achieve self-actualization too! And what better way than to be creative? It just means that isn't what we do to sell products (e.g. Apple Computer's business model to cause us to upgrade at every possible turn).

Another consideration is the dialectic between top-down and bottom-up analysis/design. In the systems science world we use top-down analysis started from and always informed by a strategic vision of what the long-term objectives are. We formulate the abstract view of the ‘final’ product as it fits into the future environment. Then we start to decompose that high-level structure to find out what its components need to be. This is done recursively, decomposing each component into its components right down to the minutest operational level.

But at the same time we analyze each component at each level in terms of what is feasible based on what components go into it! This may sound impossible — how can you know what goes into a component until you've analyzed it from the top down? But in fact it is a simple (in principle) process of iteration. In other words you let top-down analysis tell you what you think you need, and then bottom-up analysis tell you if it is feasible. Depending on the level, this could force you to re-think your top-down assumptions and re-visit the top-down requirements.

In our case the component we are most constrained by is the human being occupying our system. Ultimately we can start with a bottom-up analysis from a real understanding of the human needs and wants that informs all of our top-down analysis. This is not what has been called “social engineering” (see also: applied sociology) per se. Rather this is usability analysis¹ starting with the assumption that human beings do have a nature that cannot be (and should not be) manipulated. The twist is to start with a nature that is valid for more sapient beings than the average human. Put a bit bluntly, I suspect this means people who are not motivated by the desire to keep up with or surpass the Joneses! I doubt that the sapient society will include advertising.

So our approach is to start with the relevant needs of, and self-actualization wants of, more sapient human beings as the basis for designing a future society that is truly sustainable. We then look at the largest scale issues of what is feasible in terms of the environment of Earth, and iteratively bring these two ends of the analysis together. Mankind must fit into the Earth and the portion of the Earth that encapsulates mankind must provide the resources. Mankind must be in natural balance with a world that can support the existence of mankind.

Analysis

Figure 1 already gives us a sense of the strategic vision. We seek a social environment, a human-built world, that is in balance with the rest of the Ecos. At this level of analysis there are already a number of things we can say about what this design will look like. For starters we can assert that the ecological footprint of the human population has got to be proportioned such that humans do not put stresses on the planetary system that it cannot handle. We can start with the primary productivity potential (PPP) of the Earth as a system and what portion of that can be safely directed to human use. This includes that proportion of PPP that can be used to satisfy human food, fiber, and shelter needs. Already at this level we see how the dialectic of top-down and bottom-up analysis mutually inform.

We could start by asking something like: Taking human needs out of the equation, how much slack is there in the Earth's PPP that might allow for human acquisition? What this question is asking is something like, what is the minimal Earth that could sustainably support all life other than human beings? There have been a number of attempts to address this kind of question, not always phrased quite like that, and there are a few preliminary responses. One reasonable approach was to consider the difference between the Earth pre-human (the genus Homo), and post-human but pre-agriculture. Clearly, the argument goes, the Earth could and did support the expansion of the hominids prior to agriculture², so the ‘slack’, i.e. the amount of PPP available to support Homo was precisely that needed to produce the biomass of the genus. This argument takes more unpacking than I could possibly do here. It is complicated by such facts as the possible demise of other species (like giant ground sloths in North America!) as a result of human predation. And there are imponderables such as: had the human population remained stable and agriculture were never invented, would the world have been in effective steady-state? We can't know the answer to that question. But we can use the estimated population of humans pre-agriculture as a reasonable estimate of the amount of human biomass that is supportable without putting stress on the Earth system as a whole³. Also we need to point out that human biomass and human numbers are very different quantities. Today, human numbers represent substantially more biomass (individual weight plus the per capita biomass of pets, ornamental plants, etc.) per captia. In the early days prior to agriculture the average adult individual probably weighed about 80-90 pounds and needed less food to support.

The range of global population numbers for humans at the end of the Paleolithic appear to vary (wildly) but none seem to exceed one hundred million. One reasonably authoritative estimate for global population size at the end of the Paleolithic is about ten million (Keyfitz, 1976). An estimate of the population density at that same time is one individual per square mile (259 hectare) of food producing (not agricultural) land. Taken together these estimates (flawed as they may be) still provide a compelling argument that the slack capacity for PPP for the Earth could not exceed the caloric requirements of a population of human (of modern healthy stature) of more than about fifty to one hundred million. This assumes that humans do have agricultural practices that can increase the caloric yield of usable land and not simply rely on natural hunter-gatherer food support. I will examine this again from a bottom-up approach later. Even if the top end estimate were correct it is a far cry from the seven billion individuals soon to be inhabiting this planet.

Many other ecological footprint analyses, especially those based on energetics (versus carbon footprints), arrive at numbers that are between tens of millions and two billion individuals as a supportable population. Much depends on their assumptions about energy subsidization for agriculture. At the low end, the Earth-slack sorts of arguments are used, in other words, no subsidization at all, and all real-time solar inputs are the only energy factors. At the high end, analysts assume some kind of technology breakthrough in solar energy (wind, photovoltaics, etc.) that supplement and replace fossil fuels in agriculture. I suggest we start with the worst-case scenario, e.g., no supplementation to be ‘safe’.

So we are compelled to pick a number. Assuming a biomass per capita that is what we currently consider healthy (e.g. a typical male adult around 165 pounds, 74.8 kilograms, females around 125 pounds, 56.7 kilograms, so rough average 65.75 kilograms) we choose the fifty million size for our global population. Our argument is that this number is still relatively large in terms of a viable population (for reproductive variability) and still provides us some margin of error (needed because our current estimates vary so wildly!) Note that this population will be distributed in village sizes that still permit lots of cross breeding! If our village sizes reach 500 individuals (about 25% of whom are not adults, but using the adult numbers for safety margins) we get about 100,000 villages spread across the food producing continents.

But at this point problems emerge. Remember global warming? The food production capacities of our planet are already undergoing changes. The draughts in West Africa and the Southwest US are just foretastes of what is to come. The food producing areas of the Earth are likely to shrink considerably in the next several centuries. It is possible that more northern latitudes will become viable food producers over the next several millennia. But, of course, that will take a lot of time compared with the loss rate of arable land. So it is possible that the supportable population of humans will be much less than fifty million. This is nearly an imponderable question. From a planning standpoint we should probably focus on regions where our computer models tell us there will be relative climate stability for the next several centuries and put our resources into those regions. I have done some very preliminary analysis of such possible regions and come up with an even lower number of sustainable population size. The bad news is that (if I am close to right) the population of humans sustainable for many millennia into the future is nearer to original ten million, or one order of magnitude less than the one hundred million some of our current worst-case scenarios allow!

The good news is that if those ten million are primarily of higher average sapience, we Homo just might stand a chance of being represented in the biota one hundred thousand years from now. It is going to take all the wisdom (sapience) we can muster to adapt to a world that will change radically but in unpredictable ways over that time frame.

Biotic Requirements from the Bottom-Up

What will this population of ten million individuals require in terms of caloric support in order to be viable with respect to self-actualization⁴?

Suppose we start with an analysis that conservatively estimates what a population of ten million adult males would require so as to provide a margin of safety. The average adult male of 75 kilograms biomass weight (rounded) requires approximately 3,000 to 4,000 kilocalories (or Calories, kcal) per day to maintain, depending on physical activity level (2,000 basal metabolism + 1,000-2,000 for activity). So lets use 3,500 kcal as a basis for our estimates. If all of the population were average males that means we would need to produce about 3.5 x 10¹⁰ kcals per day for the entire population as an upper limit just to stay alive!

The question I explored in the previous series was: How much land would be required to support one individual in a completely sustainable way? In “Toward a better understanding of a feasible living situation” I concluded, based on work by Pimentel & Pimentel (2008) that between 10 and 50 hectares per person would be required in temperate latitudes. This land area would be of mixed resources, including wooded areas, meadows, water shed with stream, rocky outcrops, and water catchments (lake), as part of a community commons. On considering more the effects of potential climate change this number could be somewhat greater, Combined with the estimate mentioned above of the population density for pre-agriculture humans of one per 259 hectares we can see that our design should start with a land area (including the above mentioned resources) of between 100 and 200 hectare per individual, total. So if we have a community of 200 people, we need an upper bound land area (consider it a territory) of 40,000 hectares, about 154 square miles. This is a lot of land!

Some internal assumptions:

1. It takes about 0.4 hectare of industrial agriculture land (e.g. with irrigation and chemicals) to support a single American individual with food calories and nutrition only.
2. Permaculture can nearly match this PPP, but not for the long run. Crops need to be rotated and at least one quarter of the crop land needs to be left fallow over varying periods in order to replenish it.
3. Due to the higher variability of weather conditions, higher high temperatures and lower lows, and annual variations (cold summers vs. hot) a greater variety of crops need to be planted so that a sufficient number will do well regardless of the growing season conditions.

 

For these reasons much more than 0.4 hectare per person will be needed. Using concepts such as one quarter fallow, three season crop rotation, crop losses to weather variation, etc. I come up with a reasonably safe estimate of four hectares per person for crops and the rest of the land, 196 hectares, for ‘managed’ natural ecosystem.

This basic system should supply all of the food, fiber, water, and waste treatment needs for a community. The management of the larger ecosystem comes in the form of forestry practices (e.g. allowing limited periodic burns of underbrush to prevent major forest fires) and general husbandry of stone and water resources. Nature will do most of the work, but some human involvement will help keep preventable catastrophes at bay. Using permaculture practices will allow the members of the community to raise an adequate amount of food (which can include some amount of animal protein) while not working at a subsistence level. In good years (ideal growing seasons) the amount of work required would be far less than most people realize. There are bursts of long work days during key parts of the season (planting, harvesting, preserving, etc.) but for most of the rest of the year the work hours devoted to food production are just a few per day. During bad years this is going to go up perhaps. But if the crops are managed by the principles of permaculture then people will find, on average, that they are not slaves to growing their food. Keeping animal stocks at a minimum and of the right kind (e.g. goats instead of cows) will also ensure that excessive time spent in food growing is not the case. More time is likely to be spent in meal preparation and clean up than growing. This is a prime example of ‘working smarter not harder’ — a principle that will come up again at the higher needs levels.

The construction of clothing, shelters, and tools (baskets, vases, knives, etc.) are episodic events that can be interspersed with the high demand days of food cultivation. Gathering natural resources like wood and stone, similarly, are episodic and can be planned to mesh with the rest of the work of the community. People will learn the seasonal and weekly rhythms that will even out the work load and amount of time spent doing chores.

Attitudes

Many people enjoy growing their own food. But far many more enjoy letting someone else do it. They even prefer to let others prepare their meals so that they can spend more time in front of their computer screens or TVs, or even at the office! I suspect that one of the attributes of higher sapience is an ability to recognize the value and wisdom in adopting a closer-to-the-natural attitude toward living a truly sustainable lifestyle. A vast majority of the current population would resent having to work in the fields, or haul rocks to line a root cellar. They would not feel the satisfaction of self- and cooperative-reliance that allows a community to live comfortably but simply and directly.

This is why I don't think the majority of humans alive today even need try to establish a sapient society. Only the most sapient will appreciate not just the need for this, but also the actual execution of it. The higher sapient will not think of giving up the consumptive lifestyle for this kind of life as sacrifice. It takes a keen consciousness and systemic thinking to see how everything is so closely and importantly linked together in this kind of community. The sapient not only will enjoy getting dirt under their fingernails, they will understand why they need to do it and why they do enjoy it! Self-awareness is a part of self-actualization after all.

In the next posting in this series I will start looking at the level of the Maslowian hierarchy between basics and self-actualization to see how the community needs to organize to support them.

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Footnotes

 

1. Usability engineering usually refers to making the human-computer interface more accessible to human beings, i.e. making it more user friendly. I have taken the liberty of expanding this notion to that of the usability of a human-built world relative to sustainable living for sapient beings.
2. A reasonable time demarcation might be the end of the Paleolithic Period.
3. Bear in mind that humans occupied every continent except Antarctica as well as Oceania pre-agriculture. An alternative argument holds that we should only consider the biomass of humans before they started immigrating out of Africa. The problem with this argument is that it assumes that we must ignore that shifting biota in the non-African continents was still in balance.
4. There are increasingly compelling reasons to believe that the land area that will actually be habitable in the temperate latitudes may be decreasing due to climate change. Therefore the number of locations that might support the global population might be considerably less. A real bottleneck situation could end up pruning the population down to tens of thousands.

 

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References

 

• Keyfitz, N. (1976). World resources and the world middle class. Scientific American 235: 28-35.
• Pimentel, D. & Pimentel, M. H., (2008). Food, Energy, and Society: Third Edition. CRC Press, New York.

 

How Might Humanity Survive a Radically Changing World?

The Journey Ahead

Every journey starts with the destination. You need to know where you are going before you start working out the trip to get there. Even if the goal is simply to have new experiences you still have something in mind when you set out. This is as true for a journey of the mind as for the body. And it is just as true for the journey of humanity through evolution. Where are we going?

This will be the first in a series of blogs on the consequences of our rapidly changing world with regard to the future of humanity. We are entering a period of dramatic change. Our relation with the environment, the climate, and our access to high-powered fuels is undergoing radical reorganization. Everything about our current civilization is going to radically change as a result. This series is aimed at first establishing a vision of a sustainable future situation for some form of humanity and then providing some travel tips for how to get to that future. It will be an arduous journey for mankind. We will be facing terra incognita. No one has ever been in this environment before. So the uncertainties are legion. All we can do is keep a destination in mind and look for the signs along the way that suggest we are getting to where we want to go.

In this post I want to outline some ideas on where that destination might be. I base these ideas on several factors that are observable about our species today and the emerging clarity we have regarding the environment that is evolving around us.

In fact this is the point. The environment is evolving, to a large extent due to our activities over the last ten to twenty thousand years. A changing environment means that we have to evolve in order to remain fit to exist in whatever that environment turns into. Given the kinds of environments which have existed in the distant past we know that however radical the near future environment will be (e.g. higher sea levels, warmer average temperatures, biodiversity destruction, etc.) life itself will endure in some forms. These will be the seed for distant future speciation and a new efflorescence of the tree of life. That some form of future hominid, derived from genus Homo will exist I take as a given. But it also depends on how the current species of sapiens manages to survive the transition. It is to that issue that I turn.

My starting point is the end point. My inquiry begins with the question about what kind of life should humans expect to have even in a radically changed world. One early vision of the state of humankind subsequent to the depletion of fossil fuels was the Olduvai Theory of Richard C. Duncan, in the early to mid 1990s. Duncan envisioned a reversal of civilization and reversion of humans to the status of primitive humans whose remains are found in Olduvai Gorge in Africa. Aside from being a catchy title, the theory suggests that humanity will regress, possibly even evolutionarily, to a form that can succeed in the more primitive environment with only real-time solar energy to support it.

In other words, our civilization and the species we have become, are mere flashes in geological time. And now, as Richard Heinberg puts it, “The Party Is Over”.

In spite of agreeing with the Malthusian analysis inherent in peak fossil energy, population overshoot, and Homo sapiens' minimal average sapience, and all that those entail for the future of civilization, I am not inclined to think humanity is destined for the Hobbesian view of the human condition as “...nasty, brutish, and short.”

There are two basic reasons for my perverse long-term optimism in spite of my short-term pessimism (of course I would call it realism, but others disagree!) First, we humans have learned one hell of a lot about how things in the world work. Granted we are not good at learning how we ourselves work (mentally). But we have amassed a tremendous amount of knowledge in the sciences and engineering and much of it might be applicable even in a low-power energy future. Our knowledge of systems science and systems ecology alone may make living feasible regardless of what the future world is like (within reason of course, we probably couldn't survive in a runaway warming that would lead to a Venusian climate!). There can be a technological civilization in the future but one that is not driven by frenetic needs to run as fast as we can run. Second, and most basic of all, is evolution. Along with our knowledge of how the world works we also understand the process of change itself. Of course devolution is possible, I don't deny that, but I also don't see it as inevitable. Our understanding of evolution, genetics, and especially the emerging field of Evo-Devo provides us with the potential to become intentional actors in the evolutionary process itself. We are already unintentional actors. We shaped the environment we live in and set in motion the forces that will shape the future environment. We have been embedded in a process of co-evolution, us and our cultures, that has continued to modify our genetics right up to the present. Indeed there is some evidence that our co-evolutionary process is accelerating, not abating. The Homo sapiens sapiens of today is not really the exact same species it was even 10,000 years ago.

Humans can abide as the Earth abides. But it will only be with understanding and intention. The very first question we have to ask has to address what a future human living condition will be like. Will we devolve to Olduvai status, or become something more than we are now?

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

The field of positive psychology is relatively young, focusing on what it means for humans to thrive, be happy, or feel fulfilled. One popular concept in this arena is self actualization, especially as developed in Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory. Maslow posited that humans are motivated by a set of needs that arc from the most basic biological (food, warmth) to social (love, esteem), to a higher self fulfillment or actualization, which includes mental states that permit higher thoughts and concepts, such as love of humanity as opposed to love of self. Several psychologists have considered versions of this sort of needs/drives architecture and a very full literature on subjects like creativity and success (e.g. ‘Flow’ in psychology). The general understanding in Maslow's theory is that as lower level needs are met and remain unthreatened (one has enough food and feels loved) the individual naturally moves into the mental space of actualization where they can be creative and develop positive attitudes toward others and themselves.

What this set of theories tell us about human beings is that they have the mental capacity to be marvelous beings given that their basic needs are being met. My own reading suggests that the happiest people are actually those who are actively participating in meeting their own needs. They are not necessarily individualists, but more generally are being productive members of a group effort that collectively provides for every one's needs in the group (and presumably for the few misfortunates who cannot directly contribute, and for children not yet ready to contribute).

In the modern industrialized/informationalized civilization where one would think all of our basic needs are being taken care of, it is hard to understand why so many people are unhappy and why we have become so unsapient. But the problem is that our materialistic views of what civilization should mean has done a pretty good job of taking care of needs at the lowest levels of the hierarchy (food, shelter, etc.) but has actually been contrary to the middle needs (sexually suggestive advertising and explicit sex scenes in movies are not substitutions for love). Our education and enterprise processes, designed to maximally take care of those material needs, does not address our self esteem needs. We try to compensate by telling our young kids what a great job they did on that drawing, or that they are special, or through grade inflation (don't get me started!) But we run people through the education mill in order that they have the requisite job skills to keep the machinery of commerce going. In my view this is the antithesis of self actualization. The only real higher needs we are supporting is the need for the psychopathic rich to get richer. I take solace in knowing that many of them are still not happy, really.

The bottom line is that humans, in general, really don't need the kind of materialistic world that our high powered energy and lack of wisdom has created to be happy or have the opportunity to self actualize. I think I understand how we got here. Once agriculture was swinging into full gear our societies became focused on managing everything to ensure maximum yield, usually against a very uncertain climate. We worked so hard at producing the basics that we sort of forgot that there is more to life than making a buck. Some so-called primitive tribes, the few left in this world, haven't forgotten, those that have been lucky enough to live in climates that provide the rich biological and hydrological resources they need. But we modern humans have forgotten. In fact, we perversely think that our McMansions and smart phones are the very definition of happiness.

The vast majority of people in the modern world do not seem to be able to grasp the essential difference between being glad to have the latest iPad and being self actualized. The former lets you get the latest updates on gossip, the latter lets you create something of value (even if you do it on an iPad!) I think one of the reasons that we have gotten to this point is that, as I mentioned above, evolution hasn't stopped. As a population we have been co-evolving with our materialistic cultures. We have created those cultures (but recognize that the actual acts of creation are done by very, very few people!) And in turn those cultures have selected for those who only want what those cultures offer - more materialism. And, as I have written before, this latter effect is what has helped select against higher sapience. One does not succeed in this world (either in monetary terms or in procreation) by being wise, only aggressive or lazy. Smarts help some to succeed monetarily, but it really doesn't take smarts to operate a refrigerator (to see a darkly humorous logical extreme watch the movie: “Ideocracy”)

The selection pressure of high powered industrial civilization has, unfortunately, tended to favor lower sapience. I think this also means it has disfavored the drive to self actualization. At the same time, paradoxically, it has provided a platform for the few bright people to discover new knowledge and produce amazing technologies. This was possible because the non-actualized masses provided a demand (as long as energy was available) and an impetus for novelty. It is ironic that, to paraphrase Dickens, ‘the best of times (knowledge) was made possible by the worst of times (unthinking consumption)’. But there you have it. The question is, now that the world is changing and the loss of energy will completely alter the consumption side of the equation, where do we go from here? Can we focus on the fact that some human beings, and especially those that seem to be more sapient than most, do self actualize in spite of the culture we live in? Can we use this knowledge to address the question of what would we like a future to look like given that we will not have the high powered energy sources of today? I think we can.

The Destination

If we start from the premise that what it means to be human is that each individual has the capacity and the opportunity to achieve higher states of awareness and understanding of the world, to become self actualized, then our destination has to be some kind of living condition in which that is made possible. I started writing about a ‘feasible’ living situation starting in Feb. of 2010. The series can be found here:

1. What is a feasible living situation for future humans?,
2. A feasible living situation continued.,
3. What should we fight to save?,
4. More on aesthetics and humanity,
5. and Toward a better understanding of a feasible living situation

In this series I explored what kind of social structure and physical infrastructure would be necessary to provide a group of highly sapient individuals with a reasonable means of living sustainably and that would allow all members of that society to achieve some level of self actualization. I provided some basic ideas about what kind of land might be required under reasonable assumptions about the climate situation several hundred years from now. I have not seen any evidence that would alter my conclusions from that analysis, which are unhappy for the current population. The projected carrying capacity of the planet under extremely modest assumptions about consumption patterns of a sapient society is radically smaller than seven to ten billion people as currently projected by the UN through 2100. Given the reduced biodiversity of the near-term future (say the next 100,000 years or more) that carrying capacity will be greatly reduced even from what we currently project based on, say, ecological footprint analysis. It could be in the low tens of millions world wide.

Thus we are looking at a picture in which a few climatically stable pockets support a few villages containing a psychologically optimal number of individuals each. These might be in communication, even have trade with each other, but nothing like the inter-community commerce we see today. Life will revolve around the education and food growing systems, with construction and its support services on an as needed basis. People will basically do those things that satisfy the spirit. They will, of course, primarily be concerned with raising food. If done right they will have ample time for enjoyable times with family and friends. They will pursue their education, both in how to improve their living skills and how to better understand the world around them and their past. These need not and should not be peasants living just at subsistence. If that were the only option then would it really be worth there being a human species?

Humans are capable of growing mentally long after they finish growing physically. A society, careful to control its population size, can still grow in knowledge even though it is not growing economically (in the way we think of it now). The destination is self actualization for all. If we cannot find a pathway from where we are now to that destination then I'm not sure it is worth even stepping outside to start the journey. On the other hand, I strongly feel there is enough sapience in some members of the current species to find the path.

I have always had an adventurous spirit. And I think that it is likely that humanity will come out of the transition as a better species, that is wiser in the ways to live in balance with the Ecos. With that belief I'm game to explore some possible paths. I hope I don't have to go alone, because then, again, it isn't worth the effort. The future success of humanity will be based, as it always was in the past, on a collective effort of a group. We shall see what develops.

The First Step - Sacrifice in the Now

It is hard to contemplate doing something so radically different tomorrow, given that today things in the world seem almost normal. It is very difficult for anyone, even a very sapient person, to consider going and learning to live off the land with only real-time solar energy inputs while it is still possible to get in your car and run to the grocery store for a loaf of bread and gallon of milk. The question is, do we start now to learn to live more balanced lives, or do we wait until the fan is on high and the fecal pellets are flying to make the move?

The problem with the latter is that we are in a relatively slow transition at present. The fan isn't blowing at maximum and the fecal matter is in such small quantities as to be nearly indiscernible. The danger with waiting is that we have been in an exponential growth mode for so long. The problem with exponential growth is that you can feel like everything is just fine until the crash comes. It is like walking toward a cliff in a pea soup dense fog. You're OK until you step off the edge. And then it is too late. It does no good to wish you had turned right or left instead of going straight while you are hurling toward the bottom.

We are in completely unknown territory now. We know with fairly high certainty that our energy flow is going to be diminished. And unless someone very quickly pulls a massive energy replacement rabbit out of the thermodynamic hat, nothing else we have on the shelf right now can scale up quickly and broadly enough to keep there from being a catastrophic loss when, for example, the oil stops flowing because the producers can no longer make profits, and then the coal stops flowing because it takes a lot of diesel fuel to get coal. Natural gas is still a big question as to the volume we might have to work with, but even with NG there are infrastructure conversion issues that will keep it from being an immediate substitute. The whole problem revolves around the fact that we just do not know how much net energy we have to work with from fossil fuels, but especially oil. If we are, as I have suggested based on my computer modelling, past the peak of net energy production, then we are already screwed.

And here is the main point. We don't know where we are relative to net energy. We can only make educated guesses, but they are still just guesses. If we are past the point of no return, how would be know it? As one of my favorite Brandi Carlile songs says “...there are no warnings, only signs.”

Since I advocate that only the highly sapient need apply, perhaps this provides a means for testing sapience potential without some of the genetic testing I've written about. Only the really sapient will see the practicality of sacrificing a few more years of the comfortable consumer lifestyle to start preparing now. I admit it is a sacrifice. It means finding a location with all the right attributes (you can't just start a permaculture farm nearby where you happen to live if the climate is unstable). It means cashing out your assets to trade for land and off-the-grid capabilities. And, by the way, this does not mean buying solar panels that you will be stuck with in twenty years, not able to get replacements or repairs! It means giving up what you are used to having now without really knowing for certain that this is the best thing to do.

Nor can you do anything like this alone. It will take a community. So not only do you have to make the decision to self-sacrifice now, but you have to convince others that they should do the same. Again this is a test of sapience. If any of your friends balk it probably means they wouldn't be great contributors to the situation anyway.

I see this process as one of self-organization rather than engineering a social group. The sufficiently sapient will recognize the signs and begin to take action, not waiting for warnings (at least from the official powers that be). They will find ways to find one another, especially in these days of social networking media. No one could orchestrate a successful transition. No one could dictate it or ‘run’ the community. It will have to come from a democratic and egalitarian process. It will necessarily be at the only scale in which such a process could ever succeed, a face-to-face community.

Other sacrifices are in the wings. Even if sapient communities become established they will need to be prepared for what will transpire in the rest of civilization. I will save this for another time, however. In the near future I will return to the physical aspects of a feasible living situation and try to explain better why so much land per individual is needed to establish a truly sustainable life. And then we can talk about how to establish it (like financing) and protect it once things start to come unglued. In the mean time it would be nice to know if any of this is helping anyone. I have received a few nice e-mails from folk saying that they get what I am talking about and would like more ideas put out there. This blog is a response to those. But I don't know if my thoughts are really helping.

What is Going On?

Unless you've had your head in the sand you cannot help but be wondering what is going on. Or, if you are like me you may think you understand exactly what the problems are, and more importantly what is the root cause. The last two weeks have been wild WRT the global economy and social unrest. And with the kickoff of the political season for the Republicans, the entertainment value of all of this has skyrocketed.

I've had three or four blog topics in various stages of write up that I have been wanting to get finished and posted. But every day some new extreme event has distracted me. It has been hard enough to keep on task with my book writing with what has been going on in the world. It has been essentially impossible to give any mind time to these blog topics (more on education, judgment, and, of course, biophysical economics principles).

Most of the recent events have actually not surprised me much. They are all in one way or another tied to economics and I have been long suggesting that the net energy decline we are in will cause economic activity to contract with all sorts of consequences. So seeing some of those consequences come to pass is not what bothers me. I think what tends to cause me the greatest distress is the fact that the people who are in front of the cameras and microphones, the ones who purport to be the pundits and experts on politics and economics, have still not got a clue and don't seem inclined to find one. They are all still trying to gen up stories about what is happening based on their conventional wisdom and so completely miss the root problem. They will probably never really understand what is happening because most of them probably never took a college-level physics course in their lives.

In order to take the temperature of the punditry world I do try to listen in on shows like Diane Rehm's and Warren Olney's “To The Point” when they are talking about something I know (or think I do) something about. I read a few opinion columns by people like Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Robert Reich. Occasionally I will catch a commentary by Arianna Huffington. I know this latter group tend to be liberal leaning, but I gave up completely on conservative pundits a long time ago (I do listen to Tony Blankely on “Left, Right, and Center” and always get confirmation of my decision to ignore the right wing). It is a good thing I am a calm man. I could very easily become apoplectic at what I hear Diane's and Warren's guest, as well as the other pundits listed say or write. I have used up a few blogs lambasting Friedman and Krugman here. The left gets no pass from me; they are just as ignorant about the real cause as the right is. They're just not as batshit crazy as the right.

What I have noticed recently is that many of these people are expressing various levels of perplexity at both the kinds of events that are taking place and the sheer scope of the events. Some, like Friedman and Krugman and Reich claim to know how to fix the American economy by government spending to create jobs. They see the future health of the economy in terms of getting back to a consumer-led growing GDP; you know, the way it was before the Great Recession. These are presumably smart men and women. They didn't get to where they are (or were) by being dummies or rhetoric alone. And yet they do not seem to be able to get beyond this neoclassical ideology about growth and consumption. They don't seem to have any sense at all about the real physical limits to economic activity imposed by peak oil and declining EROI.

Moreover, they firmly believe that the US government should borrow more money to pay for jobs programs. It is OK because just like we have always done in the past we will be able to pay back the loans by growing our way into prosperity. They believe this because it has historical precedence and they lack the basic understanding of the relationship between energy and work (and wealth generation). If they think about it at all, and Friedman has, they assume that if we just borrowed the money and gave the right policy incentives to innovation that new wonderful renewable energy sources will take care of all of our needs in the future and so we can just go on with BAU now. They are sincerely and naively puzzled as to why Obama can't see this and put his foot down to start doing something about it.

I am just as sincerely (and most likely naively) puzzled why people with this level of intelligence cannot see reality.

Longtime readers will know that I have a very dim view of the magic of innovation finding some miraculous way around the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And you will also know that I have analyzed the likelihood of scaling up current known technologies such as wind and solar to supply our current and future needs, replacing and supplanting fossil fuels in time to prevent societal collapse, and found it extremely unlikely. All of these pundits are guilty of magical thinking and if they do have a clue, then they are lying through their teeth, telling people what they want to hear, probably just to keep their jobs as pundits.

As long as global net energy is in decline the economy will continue to contract in real wealth terms. We will not be able to generate more net wealth in the future because we don't have the energy to do so. We will not be able to pay back debt created in the recent past nor being created now (both personal and national). We cannot go on pretending that the paper stuff we print or magically create through debt instruments, or appreciate via increasing demand, means that the GDP is growing. The real wealth of nations is declining and sooner or later, such as when we contemplate repairing or building new infrastructure, we are going to come face to face with this reality. The Chinese are currently working furiously to build some kind of infrastructure before the oil runs out. But even they are hitting limits and their mad rush will be unraveling within a decade I suspect, if it isn't already.

The only jobs that will be created in the future will be skills-based, like handymen, working by barter or some more trusted currency. The US economy is falling in shambles. So is the EU. No one knows how to stop this or deal with it because they still think in the old ideological ways of neoclassical economics. They simply haven't the imagination, nor the knowledge, to understand what is really happening so they can't consider plans to mitigate or minimize the pain that people will feel.

Those who do have an inkling of what needs to be done and how to do it are coming to the realization that such programs will never be possible in the US and Europe. Our so-called democracies are incapable of even talking about the problems let alone what the solutions will entail. China may have a shot at doing the right things given that it is an autocratic government but only if they can assuage their people to prevent mass rioting. They oversold the whole consumer-growth society thing (we can have everything the decadent westerners have!) and now their populace has really high expectations that are about to be dashed.

Democracies cannot act fast enough or with enough clout to deal with what we are facing. I expect that once it becomes so blatantly obvious that the economy is tanking for good, the masses will, in desperation, turn to some strongman to take over and do whatever it takes to save them. But we all know how that story plays out don't we? It is just what a fat, stupid, ignorant, spoiled population deserve, I suppose. I would not have it be so. After all, aren't people more like dumb sheep? It isn't their fault. They were led down a primrose lane by smarter people who told them nice stories and promised great fun. Only those smart people outsmarted themselves. They were just as ignorant of reality. They were simply trying to get the masses to do their bidding to help them accumulate what they thought of as wealth. Only it really isn't true wealth.

I will not be surprised to see the US and OECD fall into another, even deeper recession fairly soon. I don't expect it to be as rapid a descent as the last one simply because I don't know of another bubble of the magnitude of the sub-prime/mortgage-backed derivatives market on top of a huge housing price bubble. When the impact of high energy costs hit in 2007-08 it triggered the implosion of that bubble that left the country and the world reeling. Since housing and the attendant financial systems are so core to the American economy, the implosion wreaked havoc on so many other parts of the economy. The higher energy prices channeled more spending on energy and away from consumption and debt service. Ergo job losses and foreclosures. There may be some kinds of similar expectations bubbles left in the markets now. The stock market is certainly primed. But I just don't see the same kind of magnitude in these bubbles, so they may just whimper away, more like popping a bubblegum bubble than popping a hugely overfilled balloon. But I could be surprised.

As things stand now we are just trending downward at a relatively steady pace. There are a few up ticks, like in the stock market, but overall, the long term trend has been down. In many ways we never did actually recover from the Great Recession as economist claim. Most of the growth in GDP has been from a rebound in financialization thanks to the bailouts supplied by government to the banks and Wall Street (and to the car manufacturers). If you subtract all of that phoney money from the equation computed over the last several years you will see that the GDP grew very little or even actually declined. Take out defense spending for the wars and you will see an even bleaker picture.

What won't surprise me is the decline and its social consequences (picture the riots in Greece, Egypt, and now England going on everywhere!). There will be significantly more pain to be felt by everyone. I even expect bankers and Wall Streeters to start feeling it (actually already happening - many employees at Goldman Sachs got laid off!) No one will be immune because all those rich cats' wealth is in paper form and most of that based on debt or betting and will simply disappear into the ether. Let them try to buy real food with pieces of paper no one wants.

What is going on? Simple. The world IS going to HELL in a HANDBASKET. Or maybe more like heading for a brick wall on a roller coaster. I'm not sure which metaphor is more appropriate. Probably none of them since we are dealing with completely unprecedented situations. It really is simple. We are running down on high-power energy available to do truly useful economic work. You do less work, you have less wealth. What on earth more could you have expected? What do our genius pundits expect?

Late breaking: I just learned that Michele Bachman won the Ames Iowa straw poll! This from the people who apparently think eating deep fried butter on a stick is a good idea too. On the other hand, they didn't exactly have much to choose from.

President and Congress, Thanks for Proving My Thesis

Up until now I merely considered our politicos unwise, not particularly sapient. Now they have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are stupid as well.

What that says about the electorate, however, more than proves my point re: sapience. There is no wisdom of the crowd. You, American public, voted these people into office. You have no one to blame but yourselves. The only problem is, you have no idea what I am talking about! What delicious irony!

Long live the king.

Next up. I will continue to describe what the truly sapient can do to prepare for what is coming. Yes it will be on the test.