Question Everything

What is the Universe Up To?

In looking back over some of my earliest blog posts it is clear that my thinking has evolved a great deal. By way of a little history, back in 2006 and 2007 I taught a course in our Global Honors program called Global Challenges. I got this assignment because the then director knew I had done some research in several areas such as global warming and resource depletion. My broad background in several disciplines also provided the kind of interdisciplinary approach that the program wanted to foster. This blog, Question Everything, came out of the teaching experience where I worked with exceptionally bright students in a seminar format. It was in those classes that I developed the method of having them bring up good questions that demonstrated their engagement with the subject matter. Good questions are the kind to which the first approximation of an answer is: It depends! That should be followed by consideration of what the dependencies are (critical thinking) and should lead to additional questions. Occasionally one might find an answer, but in issues like global challenges we are more likely to be left with a seemingly unending string of questions.

Like so many others who were pursuing interests in them my understanding of the global challenges at that time was that these represented threats to the future of humanity that we might be able to avoid, or reduce substantially, if only we were to take action. My objective in the course was to motivate those students to go out in the world and teach others, spreading the ideas. My approach in the courses was to use systems science to show how all of the various threats were interrelated. At the time, I, like the writers from whom I had learned about these issues, believed that we still had a chance to do something to “fix” things. We could, I thought, if only we set ourselves to understanding the deeper causes and develop ways to correct our mistakes. The blog idea emerged as a vehicle for me to publicly pose questions derived from my researches and possibly propose some answers based on the science as I understood it.

In parallel with my investigations of the “physical” challenges I had long been investigating the apparent paradox of, “Why, if we are such a smart species, did these challenges exist in the first place?” Systems thinking cannot but help one realize the connection between human behaviors and what was happening to our world.

Through a deep and simultaneously broad investigation into intelligence (a bit of which got me my PhD!), behavioral psychology, neurobiology, and the evolution of these I eventually came to the question of what was lacking that prevented us from learning from our mistakes and especially kept us from using more systems and strategic thinking to guide our collective behavior. I got very interested in the nature of wisdom, and from there, the brain structures that must produce it. The end result of that work was the theory of sapience and, importantly, a theory of why it seems to be so weak, even in very intelligent people. I've come to realize that the reason such an intelligent species has created such a mess and moreover cannot fix the mess is because it lacks the kind of wisdom-guided decision making that it needs.

Over the last few years I have done a similarly deep investigation into the energy dynamics of civilization as seen in biophysical economics. The concept of peak oil got me started down this trail but when I learned more about energy return on energy investment, the basic thermodynamics of society, it didn't take long for me to realize that putting everything together, connecting the dots in the “system”, led to an inescapable conclusion. That conclusion has been reflected in my most recent blog posts; no reason to rehash it here.

My conclusion, though, is not just about the end of civilization and an evolutionary bottleneck. There is something else to it that I have expressed in my last two postings in this thread of thought (Hospice for Humanity and How Will People React). The real conclusion seems counter intuitive (judging by many comments those posts generated). In this post I want to try to wrap up my thinking along these lines a make one last argument about why what is happening is not, in a grander scheme of things, necessarily a bad thing in the same way that the extinction of the dinosaurs was not such a bad thing in that it gave us mammals a shot at evolving further.

Cycles

In systems science ^[1] we look for patterns that are similar across many different kinds of systems. Perhaps this is one of those. Every major philosophical tradition (from which religions spring) has, in one way or another, noted the importance of cycles in nature. Some, such as the Vedic tradition I referred to in the last blog, have very explicit multi-temporal cycles from the Universe as a whole to the smallest observable phenomena. The cycles have similar form. There is a start or birth, a development and growth, a period of stability, and finally decay back to the ground substance that gave rise to the birth. Thus the cycle can start anew. But each time it does, something not seen in the previous cycle emerges.

It cannot be an accident or a fantastic coincidence that the Universe seems to operate by cycles inside of cycles at all scales. By saying it couldn't be an accident, I don't necessarily mean that it is this way by design. I haven't access to any evidence one way or the other in that regard so I offer no opinion (I categorize myself as an agnostic). Even so the ubiquity of the pattern of cycles, and the way in which they interact to produce the phenomena we observe requires some kind of explanation, even if an incomplete one.

There is another pattern that is superimposed over the cyclical nature of everything. And that pattern is the tendency for special little bits of the Universe to produce higher levels of organization and complexity, to concentrate knowledge and capacity to interact in interesting ways with the rest of the Universe. Specifically I refer to the process of a progressive evolution.

As I look out at the Universe I see two major, seemingly competing forces at work. Gravity has brought material bodies into existence, especially stars and, subsequently, planets. The concentration of matter in stars creates the opportunity for nuclear reactions (fusion) that produce heavier elements (star dust), and just as importantly, the production of extremely high potential energy (light). At the same time all physical processes and objects are subject to the law of entropy. Entropy involves the dispersing of energy from concentrated sources to diffuse space. It describes the return of matter and energy to their most disorganized states. It extends from the fact that space is a near vacuum, i.e. vanishingly low density in matter and energy (note: this doesn't include dark energy, whatever that is!)

Yet between these two phenomenal aspects of the Universe something rather wonderful happens. Energy flows from source (star) to sink (space) and on its path, through a planetary system where it drives evolution toward a higher organization, consistent with the potential complexity of that planet^[2]. Clearly all planets and star systems cannot evolve life based on carbon chemistry, but just as clearly some can!

A picture came to my mind that I found interesting and thought I would share it with readers. The picture depicts not just a structural arrangement, but a dynamic one as well. I called it the Universe's cyclical pump — it is pumping up organization in tiny bits of itself.

 

Figure 1. A picture of progressive evolution. Is there an end to it?

 

At the bottom we see the relations between star and planet production and the generation of star light that flows through the planetary system to drive all of the processes above. Without entropy there would be no flow through and no dissipative processes that are what is needed for life to emerge from pre-life chemistry.

Life emerged and evolved to produce consciousness. We have an existence proof on the Earth. Animals evolved increasing capacities for being aware of their environments and, to greater or lesser extents, of themselves until one day very smart apes emerged and eventually gave rise to sapience, a higher and qualitatively different kind of consciousness. With sapience and cleverness humans began to formulate understanding of how their world worked. By encoding knowledge gained through observation and experimentation into written, shared, abstract form the process of extracting and codifying knowledge accelerated. This allowed humans to interact with their environment in ways that prior animals had never been able to achieve. In fact it allowed humans to have the whole planet as their environment. And their interactions began to reshape that environment. Unfortunately, as we now know, that reshaping hasn't always been for the best, at least if humans as we are were the end of the story.

Within some humans the capacity to understand and to engage the world in constructive ways has led to a deep appreciation of the wholeness of it. Some humans, those that were the most evolved sapients, experienced a wonderful emotion for which the only word we seem to have is “love”. Not really like love of another person, or love of your job, or anything quite like that. It is just an unjudging, unfettered feeling of communion with the whole. It is a realization that one is part of that whole and the whole is within one. Hard to describe.

Note that as the pump cycles energy and matter into the higher realms, the space and mass of the bits of the Universe occupied get smaller. This could be represented better by a pyramid structure with a wide base that gets very small at the top (a point?). Which thought leads to another interesting speculation. Is there something yet to evolve? I've never been a fan of Ray Kurzweil's “Singularity” concept — too cornucopian for my taste — but if you think about the shape of this evolutionary pyramid it does make one wonder about the apparent convergence, what the end point might be, if there is one.

As a young man I read Teilhard de Chardin's “The Phenomenon of Man” and something in it profoundly resonated with my understanding of evolution toward a kind of goal state. I did not buy the teleological notion of God pulling life and humankind up toward the “Christ State”^[3]. Nevertheless, the notion that the Universe was on a trajectory toward something very wonderful, and that we humans were just a point along the way, intrigued me mightily.

 

Figure 2. De Chardin's evolution plus the dynamics from Figure 1 produce a structural hierarchy. The sun is the source of high potential energy flow. That flow goes through the Earth system driving the evolution of greater complexity and organization and eventually radiates to deep space. The Earth as a whole system is dissipative. Here knowledge and wisdom emerge from the noosphere, itself an emergent property of the biosphere, etc. Is there more?

 

From what I think I now understand about evolution as a universal physical process I can see that organization is not being pulled but rather being pushed to higher levels. Seeing the pattern that it is smaller and smaller aggregates of matter and energy that organize into increasingly powerful (effective interactions) entities and that these are fewer in number than those below, I cannot help but recall the pattern that de Chardin described. He coined the term “noosphere in recognition of the emergence of “mind space” above the level of the biosphere, just as the latter emerged from the litho-, hydro-, and atmospheres. He reserved the name for the collective consciousness of humanity, I think. I would extend it to include lower animals that have at least first order consciousness in recognition of the continuity of the evolution of brains.

Here is another interesting thought. So far as the metaphysics of a spiritual supreme being having anything to do with this whole process, would it make any difference if the Universe is being pulled (teleological) or pushed (teleonomic)? From the pattern that has emerged we end up with the same structure! The beauty of the latter is that it allows us to have a completely non-spiritualistic explanation for phenomena. Pushing is the result of the laws of nature. But it leaves the door open to asking how those laws got to be what they are in the first place. Well as intriguing as that question has seemed, I don't seem to have enough information to tackle an answer myself. So I'll leave it in the realm of metaphysics and religion. I'm satisfied with understanding the pattern of evolution, its trajectory.

People sometimes ask me how I can write about the end of the current human world and not get deeply depressed. The reason is that I see what is happening to us now as just part of those grand cycles. I don't have any way of knowing what is going to eventually happen to humanity or the future of life on the planet. What I do know is that evolution will continue to work its magic. Perhaps my diagrams above are more wishful thinking than scientifically based. But having a conviction (some might just want to call it faith) that evolution leads to greater structures and complexities, to more understanding and love, makes it possible for me to ask questions about what is really going on in our world. It makes it possible for me to listen to the answers when they manifest without falling into despair.

And even if evolution toward greater organization were to be coming to an end on Earth it is comforting to know that somewhere in the Universe it has gotten further along, or will do so. There are apparently lots of planets out there. From a statistical point of view some species of sentient beings must have evolved higher sapience or will. The Universe is up to something. We will probably never really grasp what it is, but I can't help but feel a sense of serenity and appreciation for having been a tiny part of that agenda and feeling like I can discern a bit of the pattern. I sincerely hope that most of you who are lamenting the fall of Homo sapiens can try to see this much bigger picture; to try to put what we are experiencing into a broader, deeper context. It really does help^[4].

 

This concludes my speculations about the future of humanity. I think I've said everything that I can in developing a feasible scenario about what might happen as humanity faces the challenges ahead. What I have produced is a scenario and should not be treated as a prediction. It is just one possible story. I believe it is a justified story in having tried to consider scientifically known facts woven together into a fabric that maintains consistency. From this point on I will mostly try to chronicle events and trends as they develop. I will continue my investigations in sapience, its brain origins and its evolutionary significance as these may contribute something additional. I will also continue investigating a method for encoding critical knowledge in a way that makes it self-extracting perhaps tens of thousands of years hence. But going forward I think it will mostly be a matter of watching and recording significant events as they unfold, until either I or the Internet give up the ghost.

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Footnotes

[1] Interested readers can bone up on systems science by going to my series index page, here, and going to the last series on that page. It starts with an Overview. This series was actually a preliminary version of the book I am now working on. Also, I highly recommend “Thinking in Systems” by Donella H. Meadows, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT. Donella was one of the authors of the “Limits to Growth” study and book and her writing on the subject is very clear. I am using this book in my general education courses on systems science.

[2] Morowitz, Harold (1968). Energy Flow in Biology, Academic Press, New York. This is an absolute must read (and understand) classic. There are several more recent books that follow the same theme, recognizing the role of energy flow in the evolution of systems.

[3] As I said, I am agnostic, but that is with respect to the notions of deism. Theism, on the other hand, seems totally without a basis and so I would describe myself as a-theistic, or not harboring a belief that there is a theistic god.

[4] Naturally there will be those who see this appeal as something like a sour grape argument. They will argue that I am rationalizing our predicament as a kind of denial. I would argue, however, that they are, instead, rationalizing their need for self-pity. But why argue about anything anymore?

A Fitting Summer Solstice?

I missed my usual solstice posting. Was a little too busy yesterday. The only four holidays I really celebrate are the solstices and the equinoxes. The only thing I can say about this summer solstice is that it is a fitting reminder of the fact that we are on the down slope. The days are now getting shorter. At first it is imperceptible. But it accelerates. Enjoy.

How Will People React to a Collapsing Civilization?

This morning I read an interesting piece in the Arts & Entertainment section of the Sunday New York Times by Terrence Rafferty titled “This is the Way the World Ends”. It was about a number of recent or to-be-released movies dealing with the psychological view of an end-of-the-world scenario. This is as opposed to the typical post apocalyptic (“Mad Max” or “The Road”) or the apocalyptic visions (“The Day After Tomorrow” and just about any movie made by Roland Emmerich). What I found interesting is that it highlighted a shift in the genre away from the violence aspects and toward a deeper psychological probe into how people might react to the impending destruction of the planet. Moreover, the author pointed out how there does seem to be a foreboding angst looming over humanity right now. I have posited that we humans have sensed that something is very different about the way the world is working as compared with our beliefs about how it does and should work. I do think people have sensed that something fundamental has changed, and not for the better.

This post is something I had been working on for a bit when I caught the NYT article.

Even Before a Real Bottleneck Event

The first truly major event that will unfold as we near the bottleneck event will be the collapse of global civilization with concomitant losses of socially provided services such as food and water deliveries. How people in general react to this collapse will largely provide the forces shaping the way in which the bottleneck will be experienced. At one extreme, the one most people seem inclined to envision, we have the horrors of massive fighting and slaughter between groups as aggressive bully-types (war lords) take over governance and organize gangs and even armies. We can look to East Africa for examples of this kind of response. At the other extreme we might imagine (though not take seriously) the vision of masses of people simply lying down on the ground and dying, perhaps having taken a lethal concoction similar to the Jonestown suicides.

In reality we can expect a wide array of reactions but what likely interests us is which kind of reaction will predominate. How will the average human react and what will they do as the significance of this predicament takes hold. One commonly referred model is that of Kübler- Ross' five stages of grief experienced by those who have terminal illnesses. One of the early stages corresponds to the war lord scenario, anger at being made a victim. The last stage is acceptance which might characterize the Jonestown scenario. Many people who have essentially passed through these stages and have come to accept the inevitability of the fate of humanity, but have not succumbed to total helplessness, often characterize the rest of our species as displaying the first stage, if they are at all aware of the significance of peak energy or catastrophic climate change, denial. It does seem that the current frenetic attempt by talking heads and politicians to proclaim the end of US dependence on foreign oil (thanks to shale oil and shale natural gas developments) is little more than a form of denial about the already occurring decline in net energy (from fossil fuels). The big question this model seems to pose is: will everyone pass through the stages, even if the rates of passage may vary, and end up in acceptance? One possible answer might be: Of course not — most won't survive long enough to get out of denial!

I will not attempt to provide a definitive answer to the question posed in the title of this post. The range of human reactions to stress and impending doom can already be seen to be extremely varied and not really predictable. Here I want to just explore some of the factors that might have some relevance to finding an answer to a more general question: How will the average (and hence the majority) person react as collapse precedes?

It might be useful (or at least perhaps intellectually satisfying) to consider some of the basic biological and mental factors that shape behaviors under the kinds of stresses that will ensue. If nothing else, understanding these factors and their possible effects might present a set of useful clues that all of those who are able to understand what is happening can use to motivate their own responses. In other words, being sensitive to possibilities and noting behaviors in the general population might help in planning your escape!

Instincts and Basic Drives

Let's start with some basic biology. We are, after all, animals. And as animals we have inherited the basic instincts and drives that motivate all animal life. Fundamental is the drive to persist, to survive at all costs. So deep in the nature of living systems is this drive that except under the most extreme cases of threat, what I have studied as extreme information overload (the definition of stress), the animal will take any action, some of which may actually be randomly selected, to avoid death. The mandate of life is in the very nature of the process of living. It is biochemical, homeostatic, in origin and, truthfully, is part of what differentiates living systems from non-living ones^[1].

Every cell is programmed to continue with only one exception, as far as we know, that turns out to be an integral part of maintaining the integrity of the whole organism in the case of multicellular forms. And that exception is apoptosis or programmed cell death. Even this seeming deviation from the biological mandate turns out to be a necessary part of that mandate to make multicellular organisms possible. The overarching mandate for the multicellular forms is still survival at all costs.

The second mandate of living systems is actually an offshoot of the primary mandate. All living organisms must reproduce themselves. This is a natural consequence of the dueling aspects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics pitted against the drive toward increasing organization pushed by the flow of high potential energy through organized modules of matter. Entropy is constantly causing destruction (like the Vedic god Shiva in his destroyer role) and energy flow is constantly driving work to maintain and repair the decay (like Agni, god of fire, where Vishnu guides the drive toward organization). Forgive my little divergence toward Vedic lore. My point is that mankind has been observant of the nature of nature for a very long time. We grasp this essential character because we experience it directly. We have just had different names and interpretations over the ages. We are born small. We need food (energy and matter) to grow and develop. We reach maturity and we reproduce, thus expanding the biomass of our kind. At least until there is not enough energy to keep the process going.

It is ironic that these two related mandates, carried out in the extreme, create the very conditions that lead to the demise of living systems. Unfettered reproduction leads to depletion of physically constrained resources that, in turn, leads to destructive competition among living units following their individual mandate to survive. And, like yeast in a wine vat, is exactly where humanity finds itself on Earth today.

Modulation by Higher Brain Functions

Have you ever seen a common fly (or other insect) that finds itself trapped in a space that contains no food opportunities? The fly will zip back and forth in the room seeking an escape. It is doing this not because it realizes it is trapped but because its brain is wired to drive this kind of behavior as its internal energy stores are being drawn down. As its body uses up its energy reserves, its brain is programmed to search more frenetically for an escape. Eventually the energy level in stores can no longer supply the flying muscles with enough fuel to keep up that behavior. The fly lands somewhere and sits there until it expires. There aren't any other choices.

All biological (animal) systems have this same program. The difference between a fly and a human is that the latter has important, more newly evolved, brain structures that can override the instinctive drives and to find more nuanced solutions to problems like finding food. Our cerebral cortices, especially our prefrontal cortices, give us an ability to down-modulate the panic program under certain circumstances. We have the ability to use general knowledge of circumstances (as learned from experience with previous similar circumstances) that might allow us to find escape routes using signposts (general patterns signifying potential escape routes). As humans we would look for a door to open long before we just gave up.

Unfortunately, one such door to open might involve destroying anything that got in our way of finding the escape route. The door might include other people. Humans are no different from the fly in some regards. They are just smarter in terms of working out complex situations. They are smart enough to know how to blast their way out of difficult situations.

While our massive cortices provide us with the ability to modulate our basic drives (to keep us from entering a panic state) in complex threatening situations, in general all that means is we can find more “creatively” destructive ways to solve our own personal biological mandate problems. What we see in the advent of the cerebral cortex is not a substantive difference between all of pre-human biology. It is merely a complexification of how that biology is played out.

It isn't until we examine the nature of a uniquely human mental capability that we see a hint of a more transcendent approach to escaping the dictates of the biological mandates (one and two). Humans evolved a mental capability that, while biological in origin, goes far beyond the ordinary dictates of biology. It expands the spatial and temporal scales of ordinary survival of the individual to include many others over much longer scales of time. That competency is sapience. It is what defines us as biological creatures with a difference.

Sapience and a New Dimension to the Biological Mandate

We humans appear to be the first creatures on Earth to exhibit this new capability. And as evolution tends to be a process of incremental progress, our capabilities in this new dimension are merely emergent and not very well developed. We are a first, hesitant step into a new framework of evolution. We represent evolution becoming aware of itself, but only haltingly. Much more must surely be possible.

For example, sapience and its mental co-phenomenon, second order consciousness, might be found to add a new dimension to the biological mandate(s). Just as apoptosis makes it possible for multicellular organisms to meet the larger scale application of the biological mandate to more complex organisms, I think sapience provides a similar function with respect to sociality and the evolution of a stable social organization in humans (and sentient beings). Sapience may provide the capacity for certain individuals to forego their individual self-centeredness, essentially the ultimate in altruism, for the benefit of the whole society. We know that this is minimally operative when we see individuals sacrifice themselves for their country or their families. The latter is easier to explain from a purely biological perspective. The individual is maximizing his/her chances for their genes to enter the following generation if their children are protected. The former, however, requires something more than mere near-term biological benefit. Then there are stories about individuals who have sacrificed themselves for principles or beliefs. Memeticists might want to explain this as the meme analog of familial sacrifice, but that is highly conjectural. I think there is a biological basis, but one operating on a new level of organization provided by the emergence of sapience. The ability for a higher brain function to override the limbic drives is a signature of sapience. But it is merely nascent in form. How might this dimension further evolve?

I have argued incessantly that we humans are not sufficiently sapient for our own good. Put simply, we have evolved significant cleverness to figure out how to solve local problems of existence — what the biological mandates require. We are too clever. We have solved those problems such that now the inherent clash — overpopulation vs. resource availability — has finally caught up with us. But we are not wise enough to have either prevented this dilemma or to reorganize our behaviors now to compensate for our excesses. We, as a species, are merely nouveau sapient.

Sapience has a ways to go, evolutionarily speaking, to get the genus to a point of being able to deal with the kinds of scales of time and space that our species' cleverness has given us access to. We, meaning humanity, have to learn how to manage our affairs on this planet. We need to learn to live in harmony with the Ecos (Gaia) and not merely live on it and use it as if we owned it — as if it exists only for our good (more subtly it does exist for our good, to support the evolution of sapient sentience, but only so far as that sapience produces beings able to live in harmony with the rest). It will take more evolution of the human brain to get us there. It will take a further expansion of the brain regions responsible for sapience. The central region that seems to provide what sapience we possess, Brodmann area 10 of the prefrontal cortex, may need to undergo further evolution, perhaps in the form of additional expansion relative to the rest of the prefrontal cortex ^[2].

Evolution, however, proceeds when taxa are exposed to conditions for which they are, on average, poorly adapted. In this special case, there needs to be an environmental shift in conditions that would tend to favor (select for) higher sapience. I have considered the impending population bottleneck for which our own cleverness has set the stage as the principal event that will lead to such conditions. Of course we can't know for certain that this will be the case, but some evidence seems to point in the direction that it could be so. This includes the very fact that we can engage in a discourse about the subject and that we mere low sapients have discovered the fundamental mechanisms of inheritance that might make it possible to be active participants in nudging evolution along these lines. For me, this is my form of hope. Seeing no way to alter the trajectory that we humans have set ourselves on, I can only hope that the whole scenario precedes the unfolding of a new (and value-laden ‘better’) level of emergence.

Sapience comes in a range of levels distributed throughout the population just as other traits are. The majority of people have the barely visible level mentioned above. Most people acquire a rudimentary capacity for wisdom if they live a longish and full life. But it is wisdom that is generally circumscribed within a short distance from home and family. It is fairly local in time and space. And this accounts for why the majority of mature people still cannot comprehend what is going on in the world. The normal level of sapience in the world is just barely above threshold, so to speak. Those readers who are familiar with power-law distributions will have a better picture of how the general population looks relative to sapience levels. The vast majority of people, as I said, are low on the sapience measure. A few individuals fall in the middle and a vanishingly small percentage have truly high sapience. Or rather I should say that there should be some non-zero percentage that fit in this category. This is all conjecture on my part but power-law distributions are found quite commonly in nature and observations of the rarity of what one might easily consider as profound wisdom seem to bolster the notion that the distribution of sapience levels is of this sort ^[3].

This explanation sets the stage for a set of key questions. First we might ask if more sapient people will react substantially differently from the less sapient as civilization comes apart at the seams. To wit, will highly sapient people be more able to modulate their animal drives and fears in order to act in wiser ways vis-á-vis finding ways to escape the seemingly closed space? One answer, I have already suggested, is that they will do so by anticipating the closing of the space and avoid getting trapped in the first place. Not only can flies not do this, neither, it seems can the majority of humans!

Another question, with regard to the lesser sapient, is: will they succumb to their animal drives when things get obviously bad? Will we see the frenetic back and forth search for escape (war lords) followed by simply giving up (Jonestown)? Most of us will probably realize that the answer to this is yes. The biological mandate for survival will sooner or later kick in. But here is what I think is an interesting twist. Like the fly that buzzes around searching first for food, not understanding that it is trapped in a closed space, it will have used up a significant amount of its reserve energy before it can switch to the escape search mode. Right now you can see our civilization doing this exact same thing. We are blindly trying to keep the business as usual model going and failing to have noticed the switch from realizable growth mode to a contracting net energy mode. We will overshoot the consumption of resources before anybody realizes what has happened (excluding, of course, those few people who did recognize the situation and tried mightily to warn everyone else). Indeed I believe we have already passed that point. Our frenetic attempts to find usable oil in rocks and under the deep sea beds shows that we are starting to get desperate. Unlike the fly, that cannot experience an emotion like desperation, we have the mental capacity to be conscious of our plight.

Unfortunately that isn't really enough. Like the fly that allows itself to be trapped out of sheer incapacity to be aware, our species seems to be on the same track. The fly that does not succeed in escaping and go on to reproduce, is taking itself out of the gene pool unwittingly. We see individual humans that seem to do dumb things all the time that cause them to take themselves out of the gene pool. We even give those individuals special recognition, called the Darwin Awards. I trust the conferrers of that award will have about seven and a half billion certificates printed up soon, or maybe just one big one for the species as a whole.

In truth, I think the sense of something being fundamentally different has already started building in the general population. Not many can articulate what the problem is, let alone what might be the cause. Talking heads are still pointing fingers at whatever scapegoat their ideology calls for. Liberal-minded ideologues blame bankers and greedy CEOs and the growing disparity in incomes as THE cause of all the problems. Conservative-minded ones point to big government, too many regulations fettering free enterprise, and too much tax as THE cause. They are all convinced that they know what is wrong but the only thing they are both right about is that something IS wrong. Beyond that they haven't a clue.

Watch What People Do

To conclude, keep an eye on what the majority of people are doing. Don't just look at the surface symptoms. Occupy Wall Street was a symptomatic response. So was the Arab Spring. So is the financial debacle that is the Eurozone. So is the jobs situation and wealth loss (on paper) in the US. All of these are mere symptoms. The constellation of symptoms taken together are placing a heavy mental burden on everyone. And they are already reacting. Pay close attention to how this evolves. Cultural differences will tend to mask any similarities initially. Middle Easterners will react differently than Europeans and those from the Far East. Americans will likely start to act like cowboys!

Eventually, however, all people will converge toward the same self-centered mode of survival and life will be extremely dangerous for all. I fully expect that much of the dying that will ensue in the bottleneck will actually be from humans competing with other humans for scarce and diminishing resources. Starvation and slaughter will become the predominant modes, with epidemics taking out the rest as public health systems fail. It won't be pretty.

Each and every person will be responsible for their own decisions and actions. That includes decisions on when to try to avoid the trap, and how to go about it. The only cues you will have are the observations of how the majority of people are reacting. Be sensitive. Be alert. Be wise.

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Footnotes

[1] In part this fact is what led James Lovelock to construct his Gaia Theory about the nature of planets that harbor life. In Gaia Theory it isn't just the living membrane (the biosphere) that defines the planet, but the combination of living systems and the geophysical, hydrophysical, and atmospheric megacycles that cooperate to form an environment conducive to life itself. Hence the whole planet must be considered as living even though the vast majority of mass does not fit into the cell theory paradigm of life.

[2] Brodmann area 10, the frontopolar patch of prefrontal cortex underwent a rapid expansion of area relative to the rest of the prefrontal regions coincident with the emergence of language and abstract thinking. This expansion is also correlated with the capacity of humans to think about the future (plan). The evidence for this comes from what are called endocasts of human skulls from about one to two hundred thousand years ago. See: Is Brodmann Area 10 the Key to Human Evolution.

[3] While a power-law distribution would seem to describe the way sapience is distributed it does not actually provide insights into what may be the case at the low end. The reason is that sapience doesn't start at zero! The actual distribution curve that might better fit would be something like a highly skewed (toward the low end) normal (Gaussian-like) or a Poisson (which is equivalent). It would be extremely interesting to put together a survey database of autopsied brains where Brodmann area 10 had been measured to see if size, density, and composition measures showed this kind of distribution. Consider this as a hypothesis if any neuroscientists are reading this and want to do some investigations!

Hospice For Humanity

The business and economics news has been full of reports and analyses of the jobs situation in the US, which may be signaling a continuing weakening economy. Here is what I had to say way back in October of 2009: Jobs: When Will They Come Back? Answer: Never. The basis of my prognostication was extraordinarily simple. Jobs require that there is work to do. Work requires energy flow. Energy flows are on the decline. Ergo: Jobs are in pretty much permanent decline. At least the kinds of jobs we've been used to.

The neoclassical economists and the talking media heads are still puzzling over what has happened, and haven't got a clue about what is going to happen. They incessantly continue to blame (depending on their political leanings) the banks, government overspending and environmental rules, lazy southern Europeans, schools (well actually that one may be legitimate), greed, you name it. But all of these are really just symptoms of something deeper going wrong. Our civilization is moribund and no one seems to realize it. The jobs situation, the financial crises of various forms, are all just symptoms of the disease that will kill civilization and most of humanity. Other symptoms include stupidity and ignorance. It is a genetic-based disease. It is due to a lack of sapience. [Metaphors aside, the root problem is that our species is no longer fit for its environment since the latter no longer harbors growing supplies of high power energy.]

Contraction and Collapse

The reason I don't write books is because I really don't have anything to sell. Certainly not a plan to resurrect a growth-oriented economy. People aren't really interested in buying a book that doesn't at least provide some kind of hope that things could get better. If you look at the vast majority of books on the subjects of peak-this and that, collapse, etc. they all tend to end with a prescription that, “if only our leaders would do thus and so, we could weather the storm, maybe get a little battered, but basically come out the other end OK.” With one exception, even the most doomerish books assume that somehow our species will go on and one day rebuild some kind of society. William Catton's, Bottleneck, is the only book, and Catton the only author, I've read that simply ends by saying that it is too late. We are past the tipping point, and we are going to face extinction or at very least an evolutionary bottleneck event. In the latter case survivors generally form the seed population that will undergo further selection and lead to the evolution of new species (plural as a rule). Either way, Homo sapiens is destined to extinction.

And that thought does not really sell books. I don't know what number of copies Catton has sold, but I haven't seen the title on the New York Times bestseller list and don't expect to.

My message, playing the role of a modern day Cassandra (and there are actually a few of us doing so, like Catton) is basically the same. Civilization is doomed to collapse on a global scale. Humanity is doomed to contraction simply because it takes our modern kind of civilization, based on cheap, high power energy sources, to support the amount of biomass that the human population represents (which includes food crops and animals, pets, ornamental plants, etc.) Civilization runs on that cheap energy and the availability of that is starting into decline. I know the media and so-called experts are declaring that we are awash in oil. Well, in part that is because many folk are already feeling too poor to buy the fuels that come from oil. In part it is because in our desperation we are turning to much more expensive sources like tar sands and shale oils. Even so, the rate of increase in oil extraction is still decelerating relative to what it was even 20 years ago.

But that isn't the real issue. The issue is net energy available to do physical and physiological work. Net energy is what you have left over after you account for all the energy inputs it took to get the next increment of raw energy out and processed to a usable form. In simple economic terms it is the energy profit that is applied to supporting civilization and that profit has been diminishing at an increasing rate over the last thirty years or more. Moreover, the population has continued to increase meaning that there is less per capita net energy. And that is why there are so many poor people in the world. And that is why so many formerly middle class people are getting poorer every day [1].

So I don't write books because no one would want to buy my message. I do this for free in hopes that some of it will make sense and some people may benefit from anticipating the future I see. As always I hope I am wrong.

The title I've chosen for this piece reflects the above sentiment along with an unreasonable hope that somehow enough people will get it and learn to accept reality and get on with shutting down gracefully. Because that is what we are talking about. When people accept that they are dying and need assistance (if not pain relief) to die in dignity, they turn to hospice care. That is what our species should do — go extinct with dignity. We should provide ourselves with a process of contraction that will minimize the hardships of collapse. We should, but...

If Understanding and Wisdom Prevailed

What would a sufficiently sapient species do if faced with imminent extinction? What would a hospice for humanity look like? Several goals might be set forth regarding the desire that the fewest number of individuals possible would suffer greatly. Society would need to begin organizing around the dynamics of contraction in such a way that the ravages of disease and loss of numerous services would be less impactful than if we just sit around and did nothing (or as is more likely going to happen we start killing each other off). There are a number of focal social processes that would need to be strengthened and become the recipients of all our resources.

In addition, another thought arises from the possibility that there might actually be survivors of a bottleneck event who would form the breeding population that just might keep the genus Homo in the game. And that would be to deconstruct the human built world as parts are no longer needed due to contraction of the population. The pieces still represent low entropy materials (e.g. steel and concrete) that could be salvaged and cached for possible future use. These materials exist because we have expended large amounts of energy doing work to reduce the entropy (e.g. going from iron ore to steel). That “embodied” energy would ultimately go to waste if these materials are simply left to decay as a result of exposure to the natural elements (c.f. Alan Weisman's. World Without Us for an examination of how quickly the natural world would overwhelm and reabsorb mankind's handiworks). Properly preserved (mostly by burying) many materials could be protected from rapid decay, thus making them available for reuse sometime in the distant future. Much of our past and current civilizations' energy expenditures have been on the extraction and entropy reduction work that has produced these materials. A future society might be able to reuse these with a lower energy flow economy, one based on real-time solar vs. fossil sunlight.

In this scenario we would consciously (and conscientiously) deconstruct our complex and unneeded infrastructure, carefully preserving the pieces, and, in a sense knowingly let nature take over the spaces that we abandon. We would be doing both our possible successors and the natural world a huge favor.

How could this kind of activity be accomplished? Through manual labor. I am not talking about massive, fast deconstruction (or demolition and clearing to a landfill!) but rather careful, deliberate taking things apart and storing the components, so to speak, so that they can be accessed with manual labor in the future.

What I am suggesting is that our near future economy would change from a growth orientation to a rational devolution with the intent to salvage low entropy materials and minimize harm to still living individuals.

There Will Be Jobs

The key to understanding this is in recognizing that there will be increasingly less high-power energy sources available to power rapid and massive work, the kind we have become accustomed to in a growth economy fueled by fossil energy and machines doing the heavy lifting. We will have to shift more and more to manual labor to perform critical work that is directed at meeting the kinds of goals we have set up. Put simply, the currently out of work youths and even the underemployed middle agers will find there are plenty of jobs available. Its just that those jobs are not going to be glamorous nor will they produce income levels that allow one to live the high consumption lifestyles promised in the past. Basically, and crassly, if you are able to work you will work or you won't eat! If you do cooperate and do your part, your basic needs, and those of your family, will be taken care of. Nobody is promising it will be fun or enriching. But, neither does it necessarily have to be mere subsistence if we are smart about how we do it.

All I am saying is that as society and the human population contract (preferably through natural deaths rather than mass starvation) those remaining and of able bodies will need to carry out specific work aimed at providing the basic needs of life to the remainder. Below is an outline of what I think would make for a feasible approach.

I've boiled it down to five fundamental work functions that will be needed as the energy flows wind down. There will be many job types and specialties within each of these categories. These are just the foci of what social organization might look like.

One further note. As energy flows diminish the possibility of long distance travel and transport will likewise diminish. Population centers will become increasingly isolated and must work toward local versions of the below activities. I have already written about the use of permaculture as a guide to finding local optimal solutions in the face of climate and other resources.

Food Production

I would not be surprised if fifty years hence more than fifty percent of the able-bodied population, that is all women and men between the ages of, say, ten and fifty-five would be engaged in growing food plants, processing and preserving, and transporting/distributing food products. I won't speculate on what kinds of food are going to be possible. I do suspect there will be a good deal less meat in most diets, but that is likely to be conditioned by regional influences such as range land, etc. The mix of vegetables, grains, and fruits will be based on local climate. Those of us in the Pacific Northwest can essentially kiss winter-time tomatoes goodbye (no plastic greenhouses either since plastic is a product made from petroleum-based feedstock), and with a few exceptions we might be largely without tomatoes all year round. Every region will need to find what grows best and what mix of food plants will provide the maximum yield and balanced nutrition.

The important point is that as me move more into manual labor and local production/consumption a significant percentage of the working population will be needed to provide any kind of sustainable supply. And clearly this is the most important issue that will face future society.

I am lumping the supply of potable water into this category as well. Food and water are the most fundamental essentials for life. And adequate supplies are essential for reasonably comfortable living. I would count this focus of activity as central to everything else. And the sooner communities start organizing around the capability to produce food and water, the better off they will be (absent radical impacts from climate changes).

Critical Infrastructure Maintenance

Next in importance is the maintenance of what we will come to recognize as the TRUE critical infrastructure. I'm not talking about highways and bridges, not even the Internet. I am referring to houses and workshops and local roads. I am referring to soils and water catchments. This also includes clothing supplies, general tools, and anything that is needed to maintain a workable and reasonably comfortable lifestyle for the community.

Entropy is a hard task master. It constantly eats away at organization and structure. Yet organization and structure are the very things that define life and differentiate it as a state of matter far from equilibrium. Work is needed to continually combat entropy in all its forms. Therefore some portion of the population will be spending some or all of their time repairing and rebuilding the infrastructure needed to support the living community. The iconic image is the blacksmith. Another is the potter. These are trade specialties, skilled labor, that will be needed at the most basic level of maintaining a working community. If you don't want to work in the fields all day, learn to shoe a horse! Or, something to that effect.

Carpenters will probably be among the most sought after tradesmen. Maybe plumbers, especially if the number four activity (below and discussed above) is successful.

It might take fifteen to twenty percent of the population engaged in these activities. It is hard to say. Again, climate will have a lot to do with deciding on the needed investment. Harsher climates have a greater impact on the decay of structures and tools.

Health Care and Public Health Maintenance

One area that cannot be overlooked is maintaining some form of health care and public health facilities. This might take a rather small fraction of the population to accomplish but its importance cannot be overstated.

In the energy depleted future we cannot expect anything like the current health care or public health systems. We cannot keep our dying elders alive with medications or operations, or whatever it takes. We will revert to the very basics of health care, basic nursing and doctoring of injuries and minor diseases. There will be no annual flu shots, no magnetic resonance imaging technology; really not much more than stethoscopes and tongue depressors. Medicines will eventually need to be manufactured from naturally occurring compounds, like aspirin. On the plus side, people will be so much more engaged in physical labor that they will not be succumbing to couch potato diseases. And, if enough attention and knowledge is applied to the food issue above, i.e. making sure the nutrition is right, and if the labor done is done smartly so as not to be overly draining on physiques and psyches, general health should be achievable. After all we are animals that evolved to deal many threat factors, especially with immune systems that are fairly resilient (especially after we stop pumping out so many foreign chemicals into the environment).

There will be a need for some small part of the population to engage in jobs that would be maintaining public health in the form of sewage treatment (composting!), drinking water safety, etc. They would monitor the community for signs of diseases that might spread and work to isolate those infected.

In some ways the health care work will resemble that done in the 1800s but with a distinct difference. Medical practitioners today can work from a great deal more knowledge than doctors had back then. Most of what gets done in medicine today isn't about just maintaining health in productive people and children. It is geriatric care. It is emergency room care for drugs and bullet wounds and car accidents. It is performing heroic surgeries to remove brain tumors, etc. In other words, much of our health system is devoted to keeping people alive when their problems are largely caused by living the kinds of lives we live now. The pharmaceutical industry makes a healthy profit (no pun intended) by keeping men capable of sexual congress when their libidos have suffered the stresses of modern society.

As the energy runs down two things will happen together. One, people won't have the resource nor lead the complex lifestyles that result in so much of modern disease. Two, we will lose the ability to treat the diseases and injuries that result from the current form of lifestyle. So there will be no way, nor even incentive, to save the lives of people who do not live in moderation and take care of themselves. We are not a frail species. Most of our current health care needs (or wants) are simply the result of living stupidly (and I mean that in the collective sense as much as the individual sense, e.g. the effects of pollutants on all of us).

The main purpose of health care in the energy depleted world will be to prevent epidemics as much as possible. It will be to treat treatable wounds and diseases so as to prevent the deaths of the able bodied and children who will grow into workers one day. Practicing health care will not be easy, nor will it be easy to get used to the idea of not having modern medicines and tests for diagnosis. It will take a few special people who would have the ability to work under these circumstances.

Deconstruction, Salvage, and Preservation

Cities will be abandoned once people realize the food delivery system is no longer going to function. Electricity and water will vanish and it will no longer be tenable to live in these monuments to man's cleverness. At the same time cities contain a tremendous amount of salvageable materials that could be used by the relocalizing communities. But I think more important still is to look at some of this salvage as investments in the future of humanity.

Up to this point readers of John Michael Greer's work, especially The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age would recognize similarities [2]. In the footnote I supply an explanation of some differences in beliefs about just how bad societal collapse might be. Here I want to point out that one of the reasons for doing the salvage isn't just to keep some semblance of civilization going (as I interpret his thoughts). Rather the main reason I propose it is to preserve low entropy material goods for future generations to have available. Presumably a future society of beings better fit for a real-time solar energy world could at least find advantages in using the low entropy materials. They would not have to extract and refine them if they can just dig them up. They might have enough energy resources to shape the materials into useful forms — tools to make life more comfortable.

So I think that the surviving population owes it to the future of a human species (a hopefully wiser one) to make some sacrifices in order to make these kinds of investments. They would think of it as a sacrifice for their children just as many parents have considered their sacrifices made to benefit their actual children.

Coordination

With four interacting but somewhat distinct work process foci there will be a need for tactical and logistical coordination (I have a whole series of articles on systems science, and sapience, indexed here; go to the bottom of the page. Or you can read the relevant work on coordination and management here). From the standpoint of hierarchical control theory (as outlined in the links above) communities will need some kind of oversight from a council of wise elders (for strategic management). But they will also need specialists who understand how to manage coordination between work processes and organizing resource acquisition activities.

In an ideal (but non-expanding) world the coordinators would be chosen from the most knowledgeable and wisest members of the community. In other words, exactly the opposite of what happens now.

Therein lies the rub. All of the above is a rational species and community response to contraction. Such a response would make the contraction far less painful than it might be otherwise. But...

What Will Be vs. What Could Be

Humanity will need hospice care to ease the suffering. We could provide it to ourselves by following a a regimen such as above. No hospice experience is fun. But wouldn't it be nice to avoid the kinds of horror that the alternative brings? Dying in hospice care is at least peaceful, for the most part. Dying alone and under violent conditions is a sad way to end life. So too, for a species. We are the first species that has literally set in motion the very selection forces that will bring our extinction. And not unlike that of the dinosaurs, ours promises to be violent. That is, unless we were to somehow organize our own species hospice care. We are the first species that could actually do that.

Unfortunately, as I have argued often, the vast majority of human beings are neither wise nor understanding. I imagine they will deny any need to consider this concept until they are already suffering mightily and it is too late. I suffer no illusions that a plan of action such as this will be undertaken. I've largely come to the conclusion that there is not one world leader who has the wherewithal to make it clear to the people what the future will bring. They either don't grasp it, or they just want to hold onto a cushy job as long as they can, so are willing to lie through their teeth. You will have to decide about your own leaders, which they are, dumb idiots or lairs. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that just holding the job as leader today means that you are one or the other. Who in their right mind would want to have the job if they fully understood the consequences?

I have once again indulged in a futile exercise in exploring a feasible future that might actually reduce pain and suffering. The collapse is inevitable. The pain that goes with it certain. The way in which it happens is still a matter of choice. But I have no doubt what the majority of humanity will choose. It is sad.

References/Footnotes

1. I cannot recommend this book too highly. If you really want a comprehensive, scientific view of the economy based on energy please read Hall, C.A.S., and Klitgaard, K. (2012). Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy, Springer, New York.

2. Greer, J.M. (2008). The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, New Society Publishers. Greer and I see many aspects in similar light, certainly the need to relocalize and turn to permaculture and simpler living as a strategy for continued survival. On the other hand, Greer believes in something he calls catabolic collapse by which I think he means a transition to a lower energy life, but not a catastrophic collapse of society. He bases his arguments on the history (or his understanding of it) of prior civilization collapses which have never been outright catastrophic. But what I think he hasn't taken into account is that those prior collapses happened in the context of civilizations that were mostly, if not completely, dependent on real-time solar energy inputs, and were localized to regions surrounded by non-collapsing societies. The latter provided a buffer in the sense of leaking energy into the collapsing civilization, thus keeping the latter from sheer collapse. The situation today is much different. Our world is globalized to the extent that there are no buffers surrounding us. Today it is more of an all-or-none situation. Unfortunately neither he or I will be able to compare notes when events unfold.

The Rollercoaster is Over the Top

Jobs, Again

Do You Suppose Economist Will Ever Get It?

This morning's official jobs report was devastating. Unfortunately it was not surprising for those who get the relation between energy and the economy. Oil prices had been running north of $100 on all markets for some time before the Greek crisis reached the current levels of panic. The whole European situation is untenable. Half of the countries in the Eurozone are in or near recession and all of the members are experiencing the effects of debt in a no growth environment. And they have no real understanding of the role energy plays in fueling the capabilities of an economy.

The Middle East continues to be a hotbed of malcontent, mostly motivated by the cost of living rising in a world where unemployment is already unbelievable (by historical standards). And then, on top of all of that the two economies that the world was pinning its hopes on, China and India, appear to be slowing down. China has been highly dependent on exports to Europe and the US. Both of those markets have slowed significantly so China's continued growth is dependent on internal consumption and that, in turn, depends on the average wages of Chinese workers going up. That might be a possibility for a while, as China learns how to print money(!), but obviously that can only go on for so long before the effects on real income become obvious.

Everyone appears to be doing some kind of in-place jig, trying to keep things together until something like consumer confidence returns to restore the global markets to growth. It is simply beyond the cognitive capabilities of the vast majority of people to grasp that economic growth depends entirely on increasing net energy supplies (of high quality). And they cannot imagine a situation in which the economy doesn't basically grow in the long run. So they go on trying to hang on, using old models of sustaining some acceptable level of economic activity, e.g. using increasing debt — borrowing from the future — to ‘fund’ the present. By stalling in understanding the reality, they are actually making the situation worse. Since the success of borrowing from the future depends entirely on a substantial growth in wealth per capita, in order to pay back both principle and interest in that future time, and since growth depends entirely on more energy per capita being available to do the necessary work, this model simply can't work.

I have little hope that the standard-issue economist will ever grasp this.

Reaching the Global Maximum (Highest Peak) of the World Economy - the Top of the Rollercoaster Track

Evidence of this assertion regarding economists is the “surprise” so many of them expressed at this jobs report. So many economists have been expressing hope that the economy was at least weakly growing, a good sign of eventual recovery. What they seem to be completely oblivious of is that the economy is like a giant rollercoaster with respect to net energy supplies. We've reached the global maximum of the track — the peak of energy supply. And from here on we are going to be heading generally downward. Real rollercoasters have multiple ups and downs, but the trend is always down, back to the level where it started. The chain that has been pulling the economy up the ‘big’ hump is the availability of high power fossil fuel energy. Granted this was accompanied by really impressive improvements in technology, which has been acting like applying lubricating grease to the wheels of the economic car. But the real motive force comes from fossil fuels.

The car is headed down now. We've just gone over the peak. Unless there is a giant find of low EROI fossil fuels soon, we have nowhere to go but generally down on a very dangerous ride. From this point on the decline of net wealth per capita will begin to become painfully obvious. It will hurt everyone, even the so-called one percenters. No one can escape this phenomenon.

No politician can promise anything. No candidate for president can claim to know what to do because this isn't like any previous economic problem humans have ever faced (except in the short-run for previous non-globalized civilizations, which collapsed). So as you hear the candidates make claims about what can be done to get the economy going again, realize that they are just blowing smoke. They haven't got a clue, and even if they did, there is nothing at all they can do about it. This is inevitable.

Make Sure Your Seat Belt is Secure and the Safety Rail is Down!

That doesn't mean there aren't things that you can do to prepare for the ride down. I've been pushing learning permaculture and trying to prepare by finding somewhere off the beaten track to settle and set up a sustainable community. With some luck, the kind of disruptions that we will be experiencing from climate changes won't have too much of an impact for several more decades (then again...). That will give time to make it through the major disruptions in the economy. But it is probably not a long-term solution, as I have been suggesting in my “Goal” and “Path” series. In the longer run, as climate change really starts to bite, and the bottleneck event is well underway, a different strategy will be needed.

But for now, the way to increase one's chances of surviving the collapse of civilization is to give up on civilization now, or at least start making way in that direction. People need to learn to live without the accouterments of modern technological life. They need to secure their food, water, shelter, and community resources in a simplified lifestyle. But do so in a manner that allows mobility flexibility just in case things go faster than we currently expect.

By definition the peak is the point where we are experiencing the maximum level of whatever. We have already passed the peak of civilization and economic gain. Just looking around with limited vision, one could be tempted to think everything is OK. Indeed the vast majority of people unconsciously do limit their perspectives so they see what they want to see. And they want to see the continuation of what they saw in the past. While we were able to exploit cheap and abundant fossil fuel supplies, and the economy was growing, civilization was increasing in complexity and innovative ideas. People were getting increasingly dependent on technology and social supports in complex networks. Increasing energy meant increasing dependence, and loss of autonomy. Now, decreasing energy means decreasing support from society for every individual. It means only simple, functional social organizations will be able to function and be sustainable.

Given the deep disappointment of the US jobs data along with everything else that is going wrong in the global economy, I think it is about time we all considered it time to act. The rollercoaster ride is about to get serious. Strategic planning should be taking an increasing amount of your time.