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[It appears that collapse now has a life of its own, but unpredictable as it may be, each of us has options--CB]
 History is the story of past civilizations that flourished by successfully organizing to meet the challenges of their time. History is also the story of the complete collapse of maladaptive societies.
But our powerful and world-spanning civilization would surely be immune from these laws and lessons of history—right?In fact, today is a time of profound existential crisis for our global civilization. Indeed, so pervasive is this crisis that it may be fairly considered to be a crisis of the very idea and viability of civilization itself.
All civilizations, all complex societies and systems, and indeed all ecologies, depend directly upon their available energy resources. Sunlight, soil and climate determine the possible vegetation and animal ecosystems for geographic regions and, at the highest level, for our entire planet. Nothing can exist for long outside of its energy budget. Plants can support just so many herbivores, which in turn can support a limited number of carnivores. Human settlements—villages, towns, cities, nations—also exist within natural ecosystems and are dependent upon them for survival. Even so, Earth’s natural energy budget from our sun sets an absolute upper limit of perhaps five hundred million to two billion people that can be indefinitely supported. Within this limit, human organizational efficiency in conjunction with improved technology has allowed for increases in either material quality of life or population.
Technology opened up previously unexploited lands and/or allowed for less technologically adept human populations to be displaced and their lands appropriated. This is how Europeans in the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries were able to displace and replace the population of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Pacific and Caribbean islands, and to dominate and exploit the more populous though less technologically adept lands of the world. Expansion in population and wealth for European descendents was achieved at the expense of indigenous peoples and the reallocation of biological resources within their former territories to agriculture. Still, the ultimate natural limit of the planet’s energy budget, as supplemented by technology, had not yet been exceeded.
Beginning in the eighteenth century however, we learned to tap concentrated sources of energy stored within the Earth—coal, oil and natural gas. This had the effect of artificially expanding humanity’s energy budget many times over beyond its naturally-supplied energy budget. But over the next two centuries, the human population has increased rapidly towards the limits of its artificial energy budget. In fact our population is still expanding, towards a projected nine billion by mid-century.
Today we live in a world in which the renewable resources of the natural world along with the stored energy resources of hydrocarbons, sustain nearly seven billions of us. Industrialization, its hydrocarbon energy dependence, and the core values of its pioneers the Europeans, have become global reality.
The core values of this planetary-scale civilization are those of the European Age of Discovery: That we humans exist outside of and above nature; that Nature is a cornucopia of limitless bounty waiting to be exploited and transformed into wealth for humans; that Nature is also a limitless sink into which we can dump our waste products without incurring any significant adverse effects upon ourselves; and that we only need better technology to keep the wealth flowing in ever increasing abundance.
And yet, the energy foundation of our technological civilization, based as it is almost exclusively upon hydrocarbon energy, is fatally insecure. That is because production of conventional oil peaked in the Spring of 2005 and has declined slightly in the three years since that time.
Production of “all liquids,” a catchall term for all hydrocarbon liquids including ethanol and coal derived oil, has recently shown a slight increase. However this is misleading for several reasons. As Mark Twain once observed, there are “lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.” The energy content of liquids such as ethanol is less than two-thirds that of gasoline. So including it in a one-to-one equivalent resource with oil-derived liquids is comparing apples with oranges. Also, the energy required to produce ethanol, from corn at least, is actually greater than the energy obtained by combusting it. Unconventional oil sources such as tar sands require vast amounts of energy from natural gas or other sources, and divert water from vitally-needed agriculture to produce the oil.
Also, demand for energy is now increasing within oil-exporting nations. So each year, less of what is produced in those nations is being exported for the use of other nations. The net amount of energy available from exported hydrocarbon liquids has also peaked.
At the same time that we are reaching the peak of net energy from hydrocarbon liquid production, coal production is approaching its limits as well. Within the next ten to twenty years, coal production too will peak and then decline. In the meantime, its profligate usage is rapidly accelerating the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and is driving an accelerating rate of climate change. Increasing winter temperatures are decreasing the snowpack in many populated areas, which is in turn is causing the long term decrease in water supplies for agriculture to feed the planet’s teeming billions—along with diminishing the available water supply for direct human use.
Our economy has been based for five centuries upon the assumption that material wealth would always increase. From appropriating new lands to developing new energy supplies, this assumption has been fulfilled throughout this half-millennium period. Now however, with hydrocarbon energy about to enter an ever-accelerating decline, and with the environmental consequences of burning hydrocarbons becoming more acute, the assumption of limitless growth must inevitably break down and our economy must collapse.
This collapse is inevitable because capitalist economies are based upon debt. Money lent today for some income-generating activity can be paid back by new wealth created in the future. Investments are based upon the expectation that new wealth will be generated to repay the loans. However, with declining energy supplies, production will decrease and less material wealth will exist in the future than exists today. Once this fundamental change in our reality is widely understood, our whole global economy will collapse.
However, human societies are capable of learning. Societal learning occurs in a manner analogous to how our immune systems “learn.” Such learning is directly encoded in the structure of the system itself. For an immune system, the physical shape of harmful intruders such as viruses or bacteria is imprinted into specialized cells which “recognize” and destroy these pathogens whenever they reappear. For human societies, institutions perform this function. National level institutions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, founded in 1934, seek to incorporate the lessons learned by past disasters—the Great Depression for example—into the behavioral repertoire of government so that whenever conditions such as those that caused the past disaster recur, they will be identified and neutralized before they can cause harm. International level institutions such as the United Nations, founded in 1944, similarly seek to incorporate the lessons learned by past global disasters—World War II, in this instance—so that similar disasters can be prevented.
Unfortunately, as a direct consequence of the core values of our civilization which prioritize endless material acquisition above all else, one form of human organization—the global corporation—has with rapidly increasing effectiveness, subverted all forms of institutional memory along with all methodologies of popular control—democracy for example—over the agendas of governments across the planet. This has occurred not through the action of some nefarious conspiracy but rather through what amounts to faulty programming. Corporations exist solely to make profits—as much profit as possible, in as short a time as possible. This profit obligation is encoded into law which effectively “programs” corporate behavior. Responsible behavior, such as control of their pollution, occurs at the expense of increased profit. For corporations, the institutions which seek to constrain their activities for the “greater good” are impediments to profit maximization, and impediments that must be removed. These “impediments” which obstruct profit maximization unfortunately are also our societal “memory” and the institution of popular democracy itself. Public good and private gain, are generally different things. Thus, the maximization of corporate private gain requires the subversion of the public good.
Once corporations achieved the legal status of “persons” by means of the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, these artificial entities were able to out-compete all other flesh and blood persons such as ourselves. A contest between natural persons and these world-spanning artificial persons is no contest at all. In single minded pursuit of profit maximization, all human institutions along with human control over government itself have been progressively swept aside.
Yet ultimately these cancerous monstrosities are not alien impositions upon our planetary civilization, they are, in fact, nothing but the embodiment of our own individual desires for ever more material wealth. The corporations are our self-centered, materialistic values made tangible, and then subsequently run amok to trample us as they follow their pre-programmed agenda of profit maximization above all else.Thus, at the supreme moment of crisis for our global civilization, at the time when the greatest possible civilizational adaptability and the most rapid possible civilizational learning and capacity for restructuring are required—at this supreme moment of existential crisis for all of humanity—our capability for navigating these crises is declining precipitously towards zero.
Consequently, it is too late to use our existing political system to avert our rapid rendezvous with disaster. It is also too late economically and technologically. We simply cannot quickly replace most of the energy which we are about to lose due to declining supplies of hydrocarbon energy. Indeed, given the reality of corporate dominance of our political processes, attempts to develop technologies to avert the crises will likely turn out to be scams by which wealth is taken from people via taxation and given to corporations—or more specifically—to the wealthy elites who control them.
So if we cannot look to government for our salvation, where can we turn?
We can look to ourselves and to others who see the reality of the present age as we do. We can begin now to improve ourselves—our ability to think clearly and logically, our skills, our basic health. We can network with others locally, regionally and globally. We can each become a nucleus for a self-organizing movement operating at each of these levels of organization. We can become the instigators of a new and sustainable system of human organized complexity which coexists with our biosphere.
We need not revolt directly and forcefully against the present order because this order is inherently doomed. Past revolutions have required force to remove the oppressive presence of a tyrannical old order; but today’s revolution is a struggle for the survival and future of humanity and for the biosphere. However, since our opponent is busily engaged in its very own destruction, we do not have to struggle against it to bring it down. It will fall of its own weight.
We can therefore concentrate upon our new order’s process of self-assembly. The more that we do this, the more we entice others to join us and to defect from the old order. And the more that this occurs, the more the old order is undermined by this process of quiet secession from it.I do not believe that future human societies will entail reversion to a pre-technological, pre-scientific order. Nor is such an order inherently benevolent; for example, there were few to no cities under feudalism, but the few still dominated and oppressed the many to their material enrichment. Needless suffering occurred, where the application of reason could have alleviated such senseless pain.
What is necessary is a fundamental change within us—a change in our values and our understanding of our relationship with our environment. We must understand that we are integral parts of a greater whole, which encompasses all other humans and indeed all other life. We must use available renewable sources of energy with this understanding firmly in mind, and in ways which do not conflict with or undermine this understanding, or harm other life forms upon which our web of life depends.
We must institutionalize the lessons learned from the collapse of our present order in such a manner as to prevent its mistakes from being repeated in future ages. One planetary disaster is more than enough!
I personally believe that we can do these things and still in the fullness of time rise to challenges which we of this present age can only dream. In a very real sense we can look at crises engendered from our present crises of civilization as a learning experience—but only if we actually learn from them.
We are the creators of this future, and we must start with ourselves—right here and right now.
Mike Byron, Ph.D., is a professor of political science in the San Diego area and has published and presented many papers on politics and computer simulation. He was the Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress in California's 49th Congressional District in 2004. Visit his website. Truth To Power recently posted a review of Byron's latest book The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow
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