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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXC–Beyond Collapse: Climate Change and Causality During the Middle Holocene Climatic Transition

November 15, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXC–Beyond Collapse: Climate Change and Causality During the Middle Holocene Climatic Transition

Tulum, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.

This Contemplation comments upon and summarises a paper that considers prehistorical periods of rapid climatic transition and societal-level responses to the resulting environmental changes. I thought it interesting to review this research article given the significant concern many have regarding how humans may respond to current/future climatic shifts and the changes that result from them.

Many variables of significant, possibly existential, importance to human existence will increasingly be impacted by a changing climate, including but not limited to: biodiversity loss, extreme weather events, disease propagation, altered geographies, and resource availability and distribution–especially water and arable land. Whether our species, or any for that matter, will or can adapt to these changes in either the short-term or long-term is unknown–there exist diametrically-opposed views on this, from widespread extinction of all life to a ‘clean’ and ‘sustainable’ techno-utopia in balance with nature.

The research article in question looks at the changes that took place during the Middle Holocene Climatic Transition (MHCT), a glacial-interglacial transition period of rapid climate change, and how human societies of the time responded to the resulting environmental shifts.

As the author makes clear the comparison is not perfect, primarily because of the differences in the nature of the climate shifts and the human population density and distribution dissimilarities. However, he also points out that it is somewhat analogous in that complex societies were in existence during the changes, so we can draw some parallels based upon how past societies responded to unpredictable and chaotic changes in their environment.

What’s interesting to me is that the evidence can be interpreted as hopeful for some form of successful adaptation as our world changes due to a shifting climate. While some groups were forced to disperse and others perished in the face of a rapidly changing climate, the emergence of urbanisation and complex societies as a result of adapting to environmental shifts occurred as well. There are, of course, significant caveats that suggest modern-day complex societies will not be so lucky as to adapt to changes in anything like their present form and/or population densities.

There exist a number of impediments for our present-day societies and their adaptability to environmental shifts in comparison to those of the past. Below are three of these.

First, there is a very large segment of today’s global population that is enormously reliant upon industrial technologies for maintenance of a vast array of complexities, particularly food production and distribution. These technologies, in turn, are dependent upon a finite energy resource (hydrocarbons) up and down their supply chains. Disruptions in the complex array of supports to maintain our energy-intensive technologies put many modern human populations at risk.

Second, there are few resource-rich regions left on the planet for human societies to expand into and exploit relative to the past. The hyper-charged population densities and distribution we currently have (thanks to the significant surplus energy of easy-to-access hydrocarbons) make the successful adaptations that past societies exhibited far less likely–to say little about the increasing loss of fertility of much of our arable land due to excessive use of hydrocarbon-based chemicals upon them. There was much greater capacity for growth during shifts in the past with smaller population densities, more sparsely distributed settlements, minimal complexity, and resource abundance. The latitude available for past societies to adapt to environmental changes is gone for 8+ billion (and growing) of our species. Add to this the reality of having encountered diminishing returns on investments whereby greater and greater resources (especially energy) must be used to meet current needs, let alone growing ones.

Third, there exists for large swaths of our global population a general lack of skills and knowledge to survive without our energy-intensive technologies and various logistical/organisational systems. In the past, the vast majority of people were involved in food production and could support themselves and/or their families without complex societal systems sustaining them. That is certainly not the case today with few within our populations capable of providing anyone with the basic necessities of existence–potable water, food, and/or regional shelter needs.

Overall, things do not bode well for modern-day societies to rely upon the adaptations of the past that proved successful in the face of rapid environmental changes.

I, personally, am as confident as I can be that ‘collapse’ of our global, industrialised complex societies is in our future–many argue that it has already begun. I am unsure, however, of what arises in terms of human existence from this predicament; if anything given the degree to which we appear to be in ecological overshoot.

With our propensity to double down on our pursuit of technological innovation and economic growth in the face of perceived problems (rather than pursuing a simplification and contraction of our lifestyles) we are exacerbating our predicaments and creating a situation whereby the likelihood of adapting to changing conditions is being made significantly more difficult and unlikely by the day.

Only time, of course, will tell what the future holds for humanity…

Below is a summary of the research article. The longer summary notes can be found here.

Beyond Collapse: Climate Change and Causality During the Middle Holocene Climatic Transition, 6400-5000 Years Before Present

Nick Brooks
Geografisk Tidsskrift-Danish Journal of Geography
2013
Vol. 112, No. 2, 93-104
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00167223.2012.741881

Our changing climate is expected to mirror the shift witnessed during glacial-interglacial transitions, only more quickly and possibly reach global average temperatures not seen for millions of years. While changes to our oceanic and atmospheric currents are not precisely known, previous transitions do suggest that the availability and distribution of key resources (especially water and arable land) will be altered and likely affect human societies.

Analogues exist from the past 10,000 years, when cyclical climate disruptions have occurred every 1000-2000 years lasting 100-300 years. These are characterised by cooling at high and middle latitudes, and increased aridity at lower ones–especially in the northern hemisphere. These changes have been linked to warfare and population collapse, and the collapse of several complex societies (e.g., Arkkadian, Egyptian Old Kingdom, Neolithic cultures, and others).

The Middle Holocene Climatic Transition (MHCT, 6500-5000 BP) witnessed a significant environmental reorganisation due to an acceleration of cooling and increasing aridity trends. Some regions experienced sudden arid conditions, others glacial advance. Monsoons weakened with rains moving southward, and El Niño reappeared after a prolonged absence. The global climate system appears to have been impacted by summer solar radiation weakening outside of the tropics due to a rotational axis shift.

The present day is different from the MHCT in several ways: warming vs. cooling, increasing greenhouse gasses vs. a solar insolation shift, and retreat of ice and snow vs. glacial advance. The distribution of changes will be different as well and the present day may experience greater aridity, especially outside of monsoon regions.

The societal contexts are very different (e.g., population densities and distribution) but also similar (e.g., large urban centres and state-level societies with hierarchical structures and political institutions, as well as some small-scale agriculture and pastoralism).

All regions studied exhibited societal shifts that coincided with rapid climate shifts. In Mesopotamia, egalitarian village-level farming communities coalesced into a hierarchical culture and agricultural settlements were abandoned with the rise of urban centres. In Egypt, many migrated to the Nile River Valley, and in some areas cattle herding increased but in a mobile sense with populations seeking appropriate pastures due to an unpredictable environment. In the Indus Valley, pastoral societies arose with cyclical migration.

Migration patterns, livelihoods, and settlement and occupation patterns all changed in light of increased aridity. In particular, increasing aridity led to movement towards reliable water sources and/or arable lands, the rise of nomadic pastoralism in order to follow grazable pastures, and increasing exploitation of riparian environments (ecosystem along the edge of water bodies).

“Worsening environmental conditions may well have altered patterns of productivity, resulting in the abandonment of some areas, the agglomeration of populations in others, increased competition over resources, and widespread social disruption.” (p. 98)

Near the end of the MHCT (5300-5000 BP) some cultures in Mesopotamia (e.g., Uruk) collapsed with nomadic pastoralism arising, while some areas witnessed dispersed populations coming together to form urban centres (e.g., Uruk-Warka). Resource competition between protostates in Egypt resulted in a larger, complex society centred on the Nile River Valley, while some regions experienced settlement abandonment and populations perishing. A shift towards greater transhumance (seasonal pastoralism) in the Indus Valley led to the emergence of urbanisation. Migration towards the Yellow River in China witnessed a shift from early complex societies to larger and more complex ones. The river valleys of coastal Peru also saw the emergence of urbanisation as people gathered in such resource-rich locations.

Aridification appears to have impacted migrations towards reliable water sources, where many gathered and resulted in urbanisation and complexity, including social stratification, class/caste systems, and formal political power.

The archaeological evidence points to some complex societies collapsing as a result of environmental changes due to a changing climate. On the other hand, there is also evidence that some complex societies appear to have emerged as a consequence of climate change. It would appear that different contexts had different, even the opposite, outcome when climate changes occurred in the past.

During the MHCT some regions experienced sudden arid conditions, others glacial advance. Monsoons weakened with rains moving south, El Niño reappeared after a prolonged absence. Summer solar radiation weakening outside the tropics due to a rotational axis shift that impacted the global climate system. The present day is different. Rather than cooling and glacial advances due to a solar insolation shift we are experiencing warming with snow and ice retreat due to greenhouse gasses.

The societal contexts are different in terms of population densities and distribution but similar in terms of large, urban centres and state-level societies with social hierarchies and political institutions along with some small-scale agriculture and pastoralism).

All regions studied exhibit societal shifts that coincide with rapid climate changes. In Mesopotamia, egalitarian village-level farming communities coalesced into a hierarchical culture. Migrations to the Nile River Valley in Egypt occurred alongside a rise in nomadic pastoralism that required movement to follow suitable pastures during a time of unpredictable environments. Meanwhile, in the Indus Valley, pastoral societies emerged defined by seasonal migrations.

Depending where one looks, there is strong evidence to support the interpretation that rapid environmental change led to societal-level changes. Migration patterns, livelihoods, and settlement and occupation patterns all changed in light of increasing aridity. In particular, increasing aridity led to: movement towards reliable water sources and arable lands; increasing nomadic pastoralism to follow suitable pasturelands; increasing exploitation of riparian environments; and the abandonment of settlements.

“The evidence from the Middle Holocene discussed here suggests that rapid climate change played a role in the emergence of complex societies, as well as their collapse, and that similar climatic stresses might result in very different outcomes in different societal contexts.” (p. 100)

In some instances, climate change overwhelmed other drivers of societal change and adaptation was not possible. Depending upon the circumstances, however, other societies adapted.

If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).

Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).

If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.

Costs (Canadian dollars):
Book 1: $2.99
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Book 3: $3.89
Trilogy: $9.99

Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…

https://paypal.me/olduvaitrilogy?country.x=CA&locale.x=en_US

If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.

You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially Catton’s Overshoot and Tainter’s Collapse: see here.

Released September 30, 2024

It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 2

A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.

With a Foreword by Erik Michaels and Afterword by Dr. Guy McPherson, authors include: Dr. Peter A Victor, George Tsakraklides, Charles Hugh Smith, Dr. Tony Povilitis, Jordan Perry, Matt Orsagh, Justin McAffee, Jack Lowe, The Honest Sorcerer, Fast Eddy, Will Falk, Dr. Ugo Bardi, and Steve Bull.

The document is not a guided narrative towards a singular or overarching message; except, perhaps, that we are in a predicament of our own making with a far more chaotic future ahead of us than most imagine–and most certainly than what mainstream media/politics would have us believe.

Click here to access the document as a PDF file, free to download.

We’re Coming Closer to Limits of Adaptation

January 29, 2023

We’re Coming Closer to Limits of Adaptation

Gaia’s Problem Children: Humans

July 25, 2021

Gaia’s Problem Children: Humans

Also discussed during two podcasts: one here and another here.

Ecological engineering, and a keystone role, in any local ecosystem, is the human cultural adaptive niche. Maybe we should call this a “hyper-keystone” niche, since humans have managed their ecosystems by making use of a host of other keystone species like beavers, wolves, bison, and giraffe in the past when living as hunter-gatherers, in addition to reduced wildfire risks and creating ecological mosaics through the use of small controlled burns.The development of domesticates was an intensification of this hyper-keystone role, under conditions of increased seasonal risks and longer term risks of drought or other temporary decline in food supply. Boserup’s model addressed the next step; development of more intensification under conditions of denser population and more limited options to utilize wild species as these become locally extinct.

Boserupian intensification has helped explain land clearing even in the deep past (Ruddiman and Ellis 2009). At present, as human populations are growing and urbanizing, agricultural demand has increased so much that the most intensive agricultural systems are becoming dominant. The good news is that the most intensive systems tend to focus on the most productive land – marginal lands are increasingly abandoned and left to regenerate ( the “forest transition”; eg. Rudel et al. 2009). So even as we go off the end of Boserup’s chart, disaster is not the result and intensification continues- though the planet will never be the same- our agriculture has now transformed the planet for the long-term (Ellis et al. 2010).
http://ecotope.org/blog/saved-by-ester-boserup/?fbclid=IwAR03YMtSeiKNSzNwnH_CDIKfjV6rU6iw8ZrZP8WiSA99ZBIXRaG-ZYHu8aI

So far, Boserup has been right and Malthus and Ehrlich have been wrong. And I would bet that the future will also be Boseruppian (Boserup 3.0). We humans will be around for the long term, adapting the earth to us, and then adapting to the earth we create…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Guest post: Why avoiding climate change ‘maladaptation’ is vital

February 14, 2021

Guest post: Why avoiding climate change ‘maladaptation’ is vital

With the delayed UN climate talks coming up this year, COP26 president Alok Sharma recently launched a “Race to Resilience” to underscore the urgency of adapting to climate change.

However, in our new study – published in the journal World Development – we come to the unsettling conclusion that many adaptation projects can make people more, rather than less, vulnerable to climate change. This is known as “maladaptation”.

Academics and practitioners have spent many years promoting the idea that adaptation can reinforce sustainable development (pdf) and even offer a way to rethink development in light of the changing climate. So, is adaptation at an impasse?

No. In fact, we argue that adaptation is needed more than ever, but that it should be rethought.

Over the past decade, in the justified rush to provide assistance in the face of climate change impacts across the globe, many existing development aid institutions and approaches have been quickly re-purposed for the provision of “adaptation aid”.

But our analysis suggests that the timescales, participants and ultimate purpose of adaptation are often confused – resulting in well-intentioned, but misguided, investments that are backfiring to make climate change worse for many people.

The reality is that it is very difficult to give easy blueprints for “successful adaptation” – or how to measure it. This is because adaptation is a long-term process and is dependent on specific circumstances.

While a clear picture of successful adaptation may be difficult to pin down, our findings suggest that we can identify what it looks like when things go wrong with adaptation planning – and how not to make those mistakes in future.

What is ‘maladaptation’?

Understanding what processes lead to maladaptation and how to avoid it remains the subject of intense discussion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Dr Lisa Schipper, Dr Morgan Scoville-Simonds , Dr Katharine Vincent, Prof Siri Eriksen, climate change, maladaptation, carbon brief, adaptation

Why We’re Doomed: Our Delusional Faith in Incremental Change

October 14, 2020

Why We’re Doomed: Our Delusional Faith in Incremental Change

Better not to risk any radical evolution that might fail, and so failure is thus assured.

When times are good, modest reforms are all that’s needed to maintain the ship’s course. By “good times,” I mean eras of rising prosperity which generate bigger budgets, profits, tax revenues, paychecks, etc., eras characterized by high levels of stability and predictability.

Since stability has been the norm for 75 years, institutions and conventional thinking have both been optimized for incremental change. This is an analog of natural selection in Nature: when the organism’s environment is stable, there’s little pressure to favor random mutations, as these can be risky.

Why risk big changes when everything’s working fine as is?

Absent any big changes in their environment, organisms’ genetic programming remains stable. Unlike natural selection’s process of generating random mutations and testing their efficacy and advantages over the existing programming, human organizations quickly habituate to stable eras by institutionalizing incremental changes as the only available process for reform / change.

Radical reforms are not just frowned on as 1) unneccesary and 2) needlessly risky, there is no institutionalized process to propose, test and adopt radical changes because there is no need for such a process.

Nature has such a process: punctuated equilibrium. When faced with a rapidly changing environment, organisms face intense evolutionary pressure to adapt or die. Mutations which confer a significant advantage in the new environment become part of the species’ genetic programming as those with the adaptation bear offspring who carry the advantageous adaptation. Those without the advantageous adaptation die and those with the adaptation thrive and multiply.

Once the environment stabilizes in “the new normal,” the evolutionary pressure lets up and the species returns to the stability of relatively few changes in its genetic programming.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Recession Will Be Unevenly Distributed

January 10, 2019

The Recession Will Be Unevenly Distributed

Those households, enterprises and organizations that have no debt, a very low cost basis and a highly flexible, adaptable structure will survive and even prosper.

The coming recession will be unevenly distributed, meaning that it will devastate many while leaving others relatively untouched. A few will actually do better in the recession than they did in the so-called “recovery.”

I realize many of the concepts floated here are cryptic and need a fuller explanation: the impact of owning differing kinds of capital, fragmentation, asymmetry, opacity, etc. ( 2019: Fragmented, Unevenly Distributed, Asymmetric, Opaque).

These dynamics guarantee a highly uneven distribution of recessionary consequences and whatever rewards are generated will be reaped by a few.

One aspect of the uneven distribution is that sectors that were relatively protected in recent recessions will finally feel the impact of this one. Large swaths of the tech sector (which is composed of dozens of different industries and services) that were devastated in the dot-com recession of 2000-02 came through the 2008-09 recession relatively unscathed.

This time it will be different. The build-out of mobile telephony merging with the web has been completed, social media has reached the stagnation phase of the S-Curve and many technologies that are widely promoted as around the corner are far from profitability.

Then there’s slumping global demand for mobile phones and other consumer items that require silicon (processors) and other tech components: autos, to name just one major end-user of electronics.

The net result will be mass layoffs globally across much of the tech sector.Research is nice but it doesn’t pay the bills today or quiet the restive shareholders as profits tank.

The public sector is also ripe for uneven distribution of recessionary impacts.Local government and its agencies in boomtowns such as the SF Bay Area, Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC, etc. have feasted on soaring tax revenues and multi-billion dollar municipal bonds.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Big Picture

December 17, 2018

The Big Picture

Humanity has a lot of problems these days. Climate change, increasing economic inequality, crashing biodiversity, political polarization, and a global debt bubble are just a few of our worries. None of these trends can continue indefinitely without leading to a serious failure of our civilization’s ability to maintain itself. Taken together, these metastasizing problems suggest we are headed toward some kind of historic discontinuity.

Serious discontinuities tend to disrupt the timelines of all complex societies (another name for civilizations—that is, societies with cities, writing, money, and full-time division of labor). The ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Mayan civilizations all collapsed. Archaeologists, historians, and systems thinkers have spent decades seeking an explanation for this pattern of failure—a general unified theory of civilizational collapse, if you will. One of the most promising concepts that could serve as the basis for such a theory comes from resilience science, a branch of ecology (the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments).

Why Civilizations Collapse: The Adaptive Cycle

Ecosystems have been observed almost universally to repeatedly pass through four phases of the adaptive cycle: exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization. Imagine, for example, a Ponderosa pine forest. Following a disturbance such as a fire (in which stored carbon is released into the environment), hardy and adaptable “pioneer” species of plants and small animals fill in open niches and reproduce rapidly.

This reorganization phase of the cycle soon transitions to an exploitation phase, in which those species that can take advantage of relationships with other species start to dominate. These relationships make the system more stable, but at the expense of diversity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wayfinder: A resilience guide for navigating towards sustainable futures

September 13, 2018

Wayfinder: A resilience guide for navigating towards sustainable futures

WHAT IS WAYFINDER? WHY IS IT NEEDED? HOW DOES IT WORK?

What is Wayfinder?

Wayfinder is a process guide for resilience assessment, planning and action in social-ecological systems. It represents the frontier in resilience and sustainability science, synthesized into a clear, coherent and hands-on approach. Encouraging a new generation of resilience practice, Wayfinder will help development practitioners, project teams, policymakers and other changemakers navigate towards sustainable, safe and just futures.

Through the Wayfinder process, participants work together to strengthen and refine their understanding about the system in focus, the sustainability challenges they face, and to develop strategies for creating adaptive and transformative change. At the same time, they build their own capacity for creating the change they want to see. At the core of this process is the recognition that sustainable development in the 21st century requires that we, as humans, find a way to reconnect to ecosystems around us, that we become active stewards of Planet Earth and that we foster a sense of connection and reciprocity between people near and far.

Why is it needed?

We live in a new era, the Anthropocene, where humans have become the dominant force of change on our planet. While many parts of the world have seen rapid social, economic and technological development, there are still severe problems of poverty and inequity. At the same time, and linked to this, we face challenges of accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss and growing pressures on natural resources, to the extent that we are approaching critical planetary boundaries. Many places and systems around the planet, in developed and developing contexts require deep, transformative change if we are to achieve a sustainable, safe and just future for all.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mitigation, Adaptation & Suffering

September 22, 2017

Mitigation, Adaptation & Suffering

In this conversation, the Climate Disobedience Center’s Tim DeChristopher looks at how the progressive movement’s strategies need to change in now that climate change’s real impacts are more obvious to the American public. He addresses the focus on carbon mitigation (policies for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions) in light of the now very evident need for climate adaptation (adjusting how we live to deal with the changes that come with a warming planet), and the resulting suffering (the human, material, and environmental costs of warming).

Adaptation and Human Rights

Suren:

Recently you challenged our community organizations and environmental movements to stop acting as if we’re able to forestall climate change and that all we must do is reduce carbon emissions. What’s your general take on this mindset?

Tim:

Yeah. Well, that’s definitely been the focus of the climate movement for a long time, has been mitigating climate change, and there has been increasing discussion in some sort of policy circles about the need to also adapt and deal with impacts that will likely be inevitable at this point. One of the great contributions to the climate discourse that I think John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor, made was emphasizing this point that there are three responses to climate change, mitigation, adaptation and suffering, and that it’ll be some combination of those three that will make our full response to it, and the less mitigation we do, the more of the others we will do.

At this point in 2017, we’ve gone far enough down that road that we know that there’s going to be a significant amount of adaptation and suffering that will need to happen, because we’ve fallen short in a lot of ways on the mitigation front.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Adapt or die: Why you need more skills and less stuff

September 24, 2016

Adapt or die: Why you need more skills and less stuff

adapt or die why you need prepper skills more than gear Preppers have a bad reputation for hoarding gear, stocking up on a year’s-worth (or more) of food, and packing bug out bags that could supply a platoon. In almost all cases, these preppers would be screwed if there were a disaster or SHTF.

Gear and supplies are useless unless you still have it when you need it, and as I’ve experienced several times in the military – in emergency situations, things don’t usually go as planned.

There is an inherent cost associated with collecting stuff that extends past the initial purchase. Buying means researching, storing, protecting, repairing, maintaining, carrying, and several other ‘ings.

The precept of knowledge weighing nothing has been a long-term idea in my thinking. I love learning how to do things and how to adapt my surroundings by adapting what I have available for new purposes.

Also, if something like a regional disaster hits your area, you may be surviving with only what you have on you at that moment and all that stuff you collected will be useless.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t go out and buy stuff in advance of something happening. Starting a fire with something like a magnesium/ferro fire starter is much easier than by rubbing two sticks together, so those things are really good investments. But if you lost that thing, would you still be able to start a fire?

What I am saying though is that sometimes it’s better to learn than to buy. Let’s look at some examples.

Alcohol

In every part of the world and culture, alcohol plays a major part. Sometimes it’s hidden but even while deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was very easy to find it if you wanted it (but you’d pay out the ying-yang for it). During hard times, alcohol gets even more popular.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As We Adapt to Climate Change, Who Gets Left Behind?

December 27, 2015

As We Adapt to Climate Change, Who Gets Left Behind?

A new documentary shows planning options to mitigate a new climate, but questions about the global South are largely ignored.

Climate change is a global process that plays out on the ground in dramatically different ways based on where, and how, we live on that globe. How human communities will adapt to global warming’s effects will depend not only on geography, but also—like so many things in the modern world—on money.

The documentary Weather Gone Wild reports on inventive ways officials and ordinary people are adapting to the predictable unpredictability of the more extreme weather we are experiencing—and will continue to experience, more intensely—due to climate change.

The adaptations, both present and planned, that the Canadian film documents range from the mundane (installing backwater valves to protect homes from sewage backup during floods) to the fantastical (floating cities in which people won’t have to worry about being flooded). The film moves from Canadian cities that have seen record floods in recent years, to New York City and the lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy, to the disappearing beaches of South Florida, with a stop in the Netherlands, ground zero for coping with too much water.

It’s only at the end of the film that the narrator reminds viewers that however threatening the effects of wilder weather in the affluent global North, it will be in the poorer global South that the human suffering will be most dramatic. Flooding in Toronto’s streets is a city planning and engineering problem for which we can imagine solutions, but sea-level rise in Bangladesh means large-scale migration and death that we are afraid to imagine.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VII

November 24, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VII

You have survived your first winter on the land. Congratulations! The worst part of the ordeal is quite possibly over. Gone are whatever addictions and expectations with which you arrived, be they internet access or coffee. Your new world consists of the few people around you, and a huge number of plants and animals. But it is a world that is indisputably yours—to make the best of, and to pass along to your children and grandchildren.

In the beginning some elements of nonnaturelike technology will persist. But as seasons wear on your newfound world will no longer include electricity or electronics, synthetic materials or fabrics, internal combustion engines (no more outboard engines, snowmobiles or chainsaws). Firearms, synthetic pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and much else will quietly fade from memory.

In place of gadgets there will be books: the riverboat that makes its rounds of shoreline settlements exactly once a year—in midsummer—carries a lending library, dropping off books one summer and picking them up the next. It also distributes a set of textbooks made available by the government: language and literature, mathematics, botany, biology, chemistry, physics, geography and geology. Some of the textbooks haven’t changed in many generations; after all, there has been very little new that would be useful to you. Others have needed an update or two; the geography textbook no longer lists countries such as Bangladesh, Kiribati or US states such as Louisiana and Florida, which won’t be around for much longer. Numerous failed states with morbid populations and undefended borders will be given scant mention.

In place of synthetic fabrics or cotton there will be cloth of flax and hemp (cotton goes away along with industrial chemistry, on which it depends for pesticides). Much use will be made of leather, wool and fur, the last of which already essential for your continued survival.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Collaboration, Adaptation and Risk: Innovate or Die

May 5, 2015

Collaboration, Adaptation and Risk: Innovate or Die

Collaboration, innovation and risk are all intrinsic to adaptation. Without adaptation, every system eventually perishes once conditions change.

One feature of capitalism that is rarely discussed is the premium placed on cooperation and collaboration. The Darwinian aspect of competition is widely accepted (and rued) as capitalism’s dominant force, but cooperation and collaboration are just as intrinsic to capitalism as competition. Subcontractors must cooperate to assemble a product, suppliers must cooperate to deliver the various components, distributors must cooperate to get the products to retail outlets, employees and managers must cooperate to reach the goals of the organization, and local governments and communities must cooperate with enterprises to maintain the local economy.

Ideas, techniques and processes which are better and more productive than previous versions will spread quickly; those who refuse to adapt them will be overtaken by those who do. These new ideas, techniques and processes trigger changes in society and the economy that are often difficult to predict.Darwin’s understanding of natural selection is often misapplied. In its basic form, natural selection simply means that the world is constantly changing, and organisms must adapt or they will expire. The same is true of individuals, enterprises, governments, cultures and economies. Darwin wrote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change.”

This creates a dilemma: we want more prosperity and wider opportunities for self-cultivation (personal fulfillment), yet we don’t want our security and culture to be disrupted. But we cannot have it both ways. Those who attempt to preserve their power over the social order while reaping the gains of free markets find their power dissolving before their eyes as unintended consequences of technological and social innovations disrupt their mechanisms of control.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Essentials of Resilience in a World of Growing Chaos

April 14, 2015

The Essentials of Resilience in a World of Growing Chaos

By now, it ought to go without saying that the evidence is in – after all, global warming has been recognized by scientists for decades. The accelerated release of “greenhouse gases” since the dawn of the Industrial Age is now causing accelerated warming of the planet with multiple interacting deleterious effects. We just don’t have time to argue the scientific consensus vs. the propaganda of the growth economists and industrial apologists. It is what it obviously is. Far more important challenges than “climate deniers” lay ahead. Resilience will be the key to meeting those challenges.

The most urgent question today is what must be done now and in the near future to achieve major mitigation of carbon emissions. The second most urgent question is: What can we do to adapt to the inevitable effects of climate disruption already “in the pipeline”?Mitigation and adaptation go hand in hand, although adaptation without mitigation is akin to seeking a more comfortable collective suicide. Without rapidly reducing the release of greenhouse gases, conditions will become so extreme that humans and many other species will be unable to adapt and survive. The species-extinction rate is already extreme by evolutionary measure.

Mitigation and Adaptation

So, resilience must be understood as the ability to both mitigate the sources of climate change and adapt to climate disruption in just the right balance. This must be done in the context of improving knowledge of the climate changes that are already occurring. We know that some of the processes are also accelerating because of interactive positive feedback loops. But the methane and CO2 releases from nascent arctic permafrost melting are not yet accounted for in the current IPCC climate change models. We need to know and immediately act upon the most strategically important climate disrupting factors. We must choose those factors with both the greatest impact on climate and the most potential for rapid and radical mitigation.

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Adjusting the Fifth to a Finite Planet, Part II

March 19, 2015

Adjusting the Fifth to a Finite Planet, Part II

Editor’s Note: This is the second piece of a two-part post. You can read Part 1 here.

Among the avenues by which Takings case law could be adapted to the reality of a finite planet are these three:

One: Change the default by changing the definition of what constitutes a reasonable investment expectation. It is no longer reasonable for an individual to expect to profit from using property in ways that would destroy or diminish the property’s ability to provide ecosystem services to the public at large. Instead of the general public having to pay property owners the going market rate for land burdened by regulation–a rate that reflects the most intensive economic use of the land that can be imagined by infinite-growth-believing, financial-risk-taking optimists–land owners would have to compensate the general public when their acts diminish the flow of ecosystems services.

Two: Change the default by promulgating the notion of an ecological servitude. All property that abuts navigable waters in the U.S. is held under a navigational servitude: the public’s interest in maintaining navigable waters trumps the interests of waterfront property owners. As Justice Jackson put it in United States v. Willow River Power Co., “Rights, property or otherwise, which are absolute against all the world are certainly rare, and water rights are not among them.” Given the legitimate authority of government to pursue the public interest in establishing and maintaining navigable waters, he said, “private interest [in the disposition of waterfront property] must give way to a superior right, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, as against [the public interest represented through] the Government, such private interest is not a right at all.”

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