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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXXXVIX–Problem Solving: Complexity, History, Sustainability

November 4, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXXXVIX–Problem Solving: Complexity, History, Sustainability

Tulum, Mexico (1986). Photo by author.

This Contemplation shares my thoughts on and a summary of an article by archaeologist Joseph Tainter that discusses societal problem solving’s complexity, history, and prospects for sustaining a society. It follows nicely from the four-part series I just completed regarding societal ‘collapse’ being primarily the result of stress surges following a prolonged period of diminishing returns in problem solving (See here: Part 1 (Website; Medium; Substack), 2 (Website; Medium; Substack), 3 (Website; Medium; Substack), and 4 (Website; Medium; Substack)).

Tainter’s focus in the paper is to better understand the problem-solving process so that societal ‘collapse’ is avoided. His goal is to identify problem-solving strategies that provide sustainable existence. One of the issues discussed is the human tendency to simplify complex issues and depend upon decision-making processes that minimise or ignore complexities. This results in a ‘solution’ that has only a tenuous connection to the ‘problem’ and eventually leads to system-wide consequences that may appear years/decades after the ‘solution’ is put into place.

While during and after reading the article (summarised below) I had some of the following thoughts.

It’s a common assertion by some that it is our ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ that invariably lead to further problems that, in turn, require more problem solving.

This is perhaps a consequence of the fact that our solutions are often in terms of furthering societal complexity and as a result of implementing them create secondary and tertiary issues that require their own problem solving.

It is likely also the outcome of the fact that our solutions tend to be focused on short-term/immediate results and we are less worried (if at all) about the longer-term consequences that arise from our problem solving. It doesn’t help this limited thinking that the ‘benefits’ of the solution are highlighted by those with a vested interest in seeing the solution implemented, and the possible negative qualities downplayed or ignored. This leads not only to the acceptance of the proposed solution by most but contributes to the belief that the problem has been solved and our problem-solving approach is always successful. Solutions work!

When later negative consequences arise as a result of the solution put in place, they are not easily attributed to the earlier action/policy. Lag times between solutions and problems contribute to this perception as well, with supposed benefits occurring ‘immediately’ and some consequences not appearing for long periods of time–sometimes years/decades.

As Tainter points out in the article summarised below, it’s also often the case that solutions are only tenuously connected to the perceived problem they are supposedly addressing and thus not only are more problems created but the impacts of the problem persist, requiring further redress via more problem solving.

In addition to the above, it’s my belief that part of this exponential proliferation of societal problems occurs because the solutions used to address them are not only increasing complexity, tenuously connected to the problem, and focused upon short-term results, but often (if not always) a repercussion of the ruling elite taking advantage of the problem-/crisis-at-hand and leveraging it to support other agendas–especially the control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige. This ultimately ends up in creating more problems as the solutions offered and carried out are only marginally addressing the issue-at-hand, as Tainter asserts.

It is primarily in the marketing/spin of the solution by the mass media, governments, and associated businesses/industries (all the benefactors of the ‘solution’ put in place) that any policies/actions are fully and completely related to the problem. But in reality the solution is fundamentally the creation/expansion of a ‘racket’ that further enriches those who sit atop a society’s power and wealth structures. If the problem were actually solved, the monetary enrichment and the increase in social control often garnered by the elite via their ‘solutions’ would be stymied. And this is not what the ruling caste wishes to see happen.

There are of course a variety of additional reasons why any particular solution to a perceived problem leads to other problems that require other solutions. System complexity. Incomplete data/knowledge. Biased perspective. Blind spots. Groupthink. Etc..

Regardless of why solutions lead to even more problems, the issue for Tainter is that there appear to be three fundamental societal-level consequences/results of human problem solving:

Simplification;
Further complexity;
‘Collapse’.

It would appear that the most often pursued problem-solving strategy of furthering complexity to address issues tends to result in new problems that require even more complexity leading to a positive feedback loop:

NEW PROBLEM(S)
↓ ↑
PROBLEM → SOLUTION(S) OF MORE COMPLEXITY

This pursuit of further complexity, however, requires evermore energy-resource subsidies. Of course (at least for those who acknowledge biogeophysical reality), this furtherance of complexity that relies upon continually increasing energy and other resources is a distinct issue on a planet with finite resources.

In the past, solutions of increased complexity had relatively minor impacts upon ecological systems and society–especially when their scale was relatively small. For example, riverine irrigation or the burning of biomass at a small scale did not result in massive ecological systems destruction, the overloading of planetary sinks, or major societal shifts. However, increasing the scale of even these basic ‘solutions’ can become problematic.

From an environmental perspective, sinks may become overloaded resulting in planetary/regional boundaries being overshot–something we are witnessing in modern times as 8+ billion humans (and especially those in so-called ‘advanced’ economic societies) strive to exist and depend upon complex industrial technologies that require finite resources, especially hydrocarbons. From a sociopolitical perspective, large-scale irrigation projects require significant labour organisation, communication, and surplus-distribution institutions that can lead to increases in societal-level bureaucracies and increasing inequality.

Homo sapiens’ original lifestyle of nomadic hunting and gathering consisted of relatively limited complexity requiring minimal energy/resource subsidies to support it. It could be supported quite well with local, natural resources and human labour. It was a successful strategy for the overwhelming majority of our species’ existence. Environmental challenges and/or population pressures were met with minimal increases in technological and/or social complexity, and/or migration to un/underexploited regions–perhaps even the breaking off of small groups.

However, for the past 6000-12000 years, the primary problem-solving strategy of our species has become one of increasing complexity. This strategy unfortunately leads in the long run to negative impacts upon ‘sustainability’. In the moment of addressing immediate problems, long-term consequences tend to be ignored/denied as they are not of relevance in the here-and-now. Our default has become that because of our ingenuity and technological prowess, at some future time some technological ‘breakthrough’ will ‘solve’ any new problems/issues that may arise.

With a population performing at about minimal or close to basic sufficiency needs (e.g., hunting gathering), there existed a massive capacity to increase productivity with just human labour. Innovations (e.g., irrigation, draught animals, organisational institutions) attributed to human ingenuity could push productivity even higher and expansion over a number of years/decades/centuries could create a sense of such increases in complexity and technological ‘improvements’ being forever possible. Infinite growth on a finite planet IS entirely possible and not unreasonable from this perspective due to human ingenuity and technology.

Any ‘problems’ are also completely ‘solvable’ and not anything to be concerned about. We are the ‘wise human’ or ‘thinking man’. We can do any and everything we can imagine. Look at us, we’re great! [NOTE: from a psychological perspective our self-serving bias (part of attribution theory) tends to always attribute success to something internal–in this situation, our uniquely human ingenuity–while failures are the result of external factors.]

An important insight by Tainter that demonstrates a disconnect between our seeming self-congratulatory hubris that we can solve any problem is that: “with every victory over nature, the difficulty of achieving breakthroughs which lie ahead is increased”–classic diminishing returns on investments in complexity. I was reminded here of the ‘faith’ by so many in the energy transition sphere where almost all the success of shifting away from hydrocarbons to ‘renewables’ of some type rests on as-yet-to-be-hatched technological chickens and/or the scaling up of some current technologies that would require energy/resources beyond the capacity of our finite planet to provide.

This faith almost invariably ignores the impacts upon ecological systems of the continued resource extraction and processing needed for our complex, materials-based technologies. Some provide passing acknowledgement with the proviso that they are less problematic than hydrocarbons but this, in turn, ignores the significant hydrocarbon (and other finite resource) inputs required for scaling up the industrial technologies they are advocating and is blind to the multitude of variables (i.e., complexity) of the problem (actually predicament) at hand–this being almost always due to carbon tunnel vision: we just have to address carbon emissions and our complex society is ‘saved’.

The Byzantine ‘simplification’ that Tainter discusses is one of the rare instances of a society ‘voluntarily’ contracting–but its simplification was perhaps not truly voluntary/managed but demonstrated some adaptive responses to general ‘collapse’. An approach that some argue is the typical response of a society to issues rather than actual collapse: complex societies don’t ‘collapse’, they simplify in response to circumstances. This seems to me to be somewhat of a semantic argument and one I discussed in my previous Contemplation series.

As I stated near the end of my last Contemplation: “…I wish to highlight the primary response typically pursued by the elite and that we are already bearing witness to, and will likely see much more of in the years ahead: opting to pursue increased complexity to address perceived problems.”

As Tainter points out in the article summarised below: a society pursuing a problem-solving strategy of increased complexity ends in ‘collapse’ if there is no energy subsidy available to sustain it.

At this point in time, there is not only no scalable and ecologically-neutral energy subsidy waiting in the wings to save us and our complex societies from ourselves, but we have blown past the natural environmental carrying capacity of our planet thanks to the subsidies provided by hydrocarbons and rocketed into ecological overshoot where most of the planetary boundaries for sustainable living have been left far behind in the dust.

This has but one inevitable near-term ending: societal ‘collapse’ (or ‘simplification’, if it makes you feel better to call it that). Only time will tell whether extinction accompanies our plight.

Problem Solving: Complexity, History, Sustainability
Joseph A. Tainter
Population and Environment, Sep., 2000, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 3-41

This article by archaeologist Joseph Tainter follows from his general thesis that human societies are at their basic functioning a problem-solving organisation which primarily uses the strategy of increasing complexity to address issues that arise. He argues that while such an approach can be quite successful in the short term, it is cumulatively detrimental to the sustainability of the society resulting eventually in ‘collapse’, simplification, or the pursuit of increasing complexity via increasing energy subsidies.

His goal is to better understand the development of our problem-solving strategies by studying examples through pre/history so that modern society can choose ‘solutions’ to problems that are ‘sustainable’ in nature.

After outlining a variety of constraints to the effectiveness and durability of institutional problem solving (e.g., environmental; structural–including other institutions; internal transaction efficiency; human cognition limits), he suggest that ‘solutions’ may often have only a tenuous connection with the problem and result in system-wide consequences that may appear years/decades after implemented.

Our societies tend to become more complex (more parts, types of parts, and integration of parts), especially so over the past 12,000 years (5000-6000 for state-level societies). There is a cost (in terms of resources, labour, etc.) to this but it has also provided utility in problem solving.

As an adaptive, problem-solving strategy, complexity investments can be effective initially when the easiest/cheapest solutions are used but this approach loses effectiveness over time as more difficult/expensive solutions are necessary–this is diminishing returns. As return on investments decrease, society becomes more vulnerable to collapse.

A great example arises in resource production where the easiest-to-acquire/-process/-distribute/-consume resources are initially used. As consumption increases and/or resource availability decreases, greater costs/effort must be used with non increase in returns.

The same is true for knowledge production where productivity declines over time; i.e., each additional year of education past the first couple results in decreasing increases in productivity. Investments in more complex research, for example, grows exponentially while ‘progress’ rates do not, with each subsequent ‘breakthrough’ taking longer, costing more, and being less likely.

While the ‘solutions’ being pursued appear rational in the moment, mostly because costs and complexity are only slightly incremental, the cumulative and long-term impacts irreparably harm the systems involved.It is the cumulative nature of small increases in complexity and costs that cause negative impacts in the long term. As Tainter stresses, “[t]his is the key to understanding the development of unsupportable complexity: it grows by small steps , each necessary, each a reasonable solution to a problem.” (p. 19)

In using the Western Roman Empire as an example, Tainter points out that the economies of imperialism are such that initial subjugation provides the best returns (appropriated surpluses) but once governing costs are assumed such returns decline. These increased costs lead eventually to the need to devalue the currency to cover the growing shortfalls. This currency debasement led to insolvency and military funding issues, which resulted in military contraction and foreign invasion success. Domestic unrest also rose as living standards fell.

The response from the elites was to increase complexity by growing the governing bureaucracies, doubling the size of the military, increasing taxes, conscripting labour, and dictating occupations. The empire “became a coercive, omnipresent state that tabulated and amassed all resources for its own survival.” (p. 22)

As taxes became more burdensome, lands were abandoned with peasants seeking protection from wealthy landowners. Eventually negative feedback loops arose where lost provinces led to lost revenue that hurt military funding leading to more lost regions. The Roman military eventually disbanded, and the Germanic tribes the emperor was using overthrew him when they were not paid, In 476 A.D. the Western Roman Empire was officially no more.

Tainter also discusses the Early Byzantine Recovery episode where it was able to come back from near total collapse (at least until the Turks took Constantinople in 1453. Where the West’s emperors of the 3rd and 4th centuries responded to the crises via increased complexity, those of the East’s 7th and 8th centuries found a period of ‘simplification’ extended their society’s existence.

Civic and military administrations were merged, cities contracted to fortified hilltops, education and literacy were scaled back to basics, and a class of peasant-soldiers arose–paid with land rather than a debased currency so long as they and their eldest male (and so on) provided military service.

Finally, Tainter holds up the centuries-long military arms race of modern Europe as a classic example of diminishing returns on complexity (focusing upon the 1400-1815 time frame). For example, siege guns laid waste to the advantage of stone castles. This led to the development of defensive canons and fortified walls. These changes were expensive and prevented large militaries from forming but also led to more expensive siege methods. Despite such ongoing changes, the outcome was usually a stalemate.

The most significant constraint was funding as complexity via technological innovations grew faster than revenue and the necessary resources to support it. To sustain this arms race, European states ended up drawing upon ever-larger segments of society, eventually using trade wealth and colonisation (via their resources) to fund their military adventures.

The three examples Tainter draws upon show the basic outcomes to societal problem-solving: collapse (Western Roman Empire); simplification (Early Byzantine Recovery); and, growing complexity alongside energy subsidy growth (modern Europe).

Tainter concludes that for state-level sustainability to be successful, research needs to focus upon complexity and attempts to identify problem-solving strategies that are sustainable. Modern societies have become increasingly complex the past couple of centuries and especially since the discovery of hydrocarbon energy subsidies. But this subsidy is waning and will come to an end in the near future and it is our understanding of problem-solving systems and the three outcomes that might help to inform how we respond.

We can continue to grow complexity while experiencing diminishing returns, and proceed towards collapse. We can simplify our existence and extend our societies. Or, we can grow our complexities while hoping we discover an energy subsidy…

The longer summary notes of the article can be found here.

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
Book 2: $3.89
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.

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXXXIII–Complexity and Sustainability

July 30, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXXXIII–Complexity and Sustainability

I believe that in many ways the past is a prologue to our future. Every experiment our species has attempted in the development of complex societies (from small to large ones) has eventually ‘failed’ to sustain the systems that make them complex and simplification/decline/collapse has followed.

Regardless of this pre/history and the lessons inherent in it, our species seems to make the same unsustainable choices with each and every iteration of complex societies. An argument can be made that such repetitive behaviour is unavoidable as our ‘successes’ cannot help but lead to our ‘failures’. It is our ‘nature’ (as it is perhaps for virtually every species) to grow in numbers and, if the circumstances ‘permit’ (i.e., fundamental resources are present), to exceed the natural carrying capacity of its habitat and proceed into ecological overshoot (see William Catton Jr.’s Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change)

Our longest lasting and perhaps most ‘sustainable’ living arrangements were when our species followed a somewhat nomadic, hunting and gathering existence that relied upon living within the restraints imposed by local natural resources. When population pressures arose due to human reproductive success, groups could split up with some moving to adjacent, unexploited lands. Eventually, however, this process bumped up against limits to such expansion and it was through technological ‘innovations’ that population pressures were addressed.

While there are many theories regarding the reason for a society’s ‘collapse/simplification’, it would appear that part of the answer is that the organisational structures (i.e., sociopolitical and/or socioeconomic) that share important information and goods to maintain themselves, experience declining returns on the investments necessary to keep them active–particularly if an unexpected crisis erupts after a prolonged period of diminishing returns.

Eventually, when the ‘costs’ outweigh the ‘benefits’, support from the masses is withdrawn resulting in a much more simplified world where small, local groups develop that are primarily dependent upon the immediate environment’s carrying capacity and significantly less so on widespread energy-averaging systems (i.e., trade, especially long-distance forms) and the complex organisational structures necessary to sustain these systems.

In general, the article (Complexity and Sustainability: Perspectives From the Ancient Maya and the Modern Balinese) summarised below–comparing a ‘technotasking’ approach to a ‘labourtasking’ one–concludes that it is our technological innovations that have served to sustain our species growth but that these same innovations lead invariably to the ‘collapse’ of a complex society that employs them. This is due to technologies expediting the drawdown of finite resources (leading to diminishing returns on investments in resource extraction and thus complexity) and the overloading of various compensatory sinks. The authors emphasise that social stresses are increased by the implementation of new technologies but that because such innovations disproportionately benefit those at the top of societal political and economic structures (primarily via the control of key resources), they are employed regardless of the negative impacts that arise–social and/or environmental.

While reading through the article, I had a variety of thoughts relating to my understanding of the ‘collapse’ process and our modern trend towards that somewhat inevitable outcome.

First, it is a net surplus of resources (especially energy) that is perhaps the key result of human adaptations (see Dr. Tim Morgan’s Surplus Energy Economics for more on this). This surplus allows for expansion. No surplus means no expansion and/or use of ‘savings’ to sustain society, leading to a more vulnerable situation when/if crisis erupts as per archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s thesis regarding how and why complex societies ‘collapse’ (see The Collapse of Complex Societies). It would seem that ‘stability’ appears when new energy is NOT harnessed and growth/expansion curtailed. This possibility now appears unachievable (without a severe disruption to current complexities) because of the creation of a world predicated upon such growth and increasingly ‘necessary’ due to its dependence upon the extraordinary expansion of debt-/credit-based fiat currency that has allowed us to pull growth from the future–but that requires payback of both principal and interest.

Second, technological innovations (what the authors refer to as ‘technotasking’) appear to create jumps in complexity and are limited by immediately available resources. If resource demands cannot be met, collapse or simplification is the most likely outcome. A ‘labourtasking’ path (one that depends primarily upon manual labour), however, displays only small, incremental increases in complexity and costs. This alternative pathway is far more ‘sustainable’ than one that employs technologies; it can still result, eventually, in collapse/simplification just taking much longer to get to that endgame.

Third, today’s energy-averaging systems (i.e., trade) is a global, complex industrial product-reliant enterprise fundamentally based upon hydrocarbon extraction and refinement. The fragility and complexity of such a system has led to enormous reliance upon finite resources (especially hydrocarbons, and most located far away) and led to a significant loss of skill/knowledge in self-sufficiency for most of our species. The need for resources to maintain our societies’ complexities and the movement of them has led to massive militaries and ongoing geopolitical brinkmanship.

Fourth, our modern societies are similarly following the collapse trajectory of the Maya as we accept a top-down strategy and employ a technotasking approach in offsetting production deficiencies and countering population pressures. In fact, we have accelerated this approach in a number of ways, including the use of technology to make more technology and are now contemplating using technology (artificial intelligence) to guide our decision-making far more than practised to date. (see Erik Michaels’ Problems, Predicaments, and Technology for more on the issues surrounding technology use and the predicament it has led our species into)

Fifth, we can see in the Maya a faltering of technological innovations and their maintenance as a result of organisational communications breaking down. This eventually led to a degradation of important complexities, especially pertaining to food production. This occurred as the elite consolidated resources for themselves to offset the limits society was encountering. Elite self interest resulted in more and more resources being directed towards this ruling minority and less towards the systems necessary to support the societal complexities needed for everyone.

Sixth, despite assurances in modern times by the priesthood of economic ‘science’ that resource limits are meaningless in a world of ‘free’ market economies where human ingenuity and technology can counter deficiencies in resource supplies, hard biogeophysical limits to infinite growth exist. These real limits lead to massive issues for the technotasking pathway but it is almost always chosen to be pursued because it can accommodate rapid growth and the consolidation of social/economic power for the ruling elite to whom most of the benefits accrue. This occurs without much thought or concern, if any, about sustainability.

Finally, it may only be with the fall of nation states and other forms of large, complex societies (and the caste of elite that accompany such social organisations) that more sustainable forms of human existence can be pursued. This depends on a number of important factors not least of which are: the number of our species that survive the fall of the current industrial-based, globalised complex society; the state of the planet’s ecological systems once all mass, extractive enterprises are curtailed; the survivability of our planet due to our overshooting of various planetary boundaries; the availability of certain, important natural resources (especially potable water, food sources, and regional shelter needs); and the ability of any remaining human populations to live within the capacity of their local natural resources/environment.

A handful of previous Contemplations looking at how the past informs the possible future…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXXIX–Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse May 24, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXVI–Societal Collapse: The Past is Prologue November 27, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXLVIII–What Do Previous Experiments in Societal Complexity Suggest About ‘Managing’ Our Future September 1, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse cometh CXLIII–Ruling Caste Responses to Societal Breakdown/Decline August 3, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXLI–Declining Returns, Societal Surpluses, and Collapse July 19, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXXXIX–Our Deep Future: Techno-Utopia Or A Return To the Distant Past July 10, 2023

Complexity and Sustainability: Perspectives From the Ancient Maya and the Modern Balinese

V.L. Scarborough and W.R. Burnside

American Antiquity, April 2010. Vol. 75 No. 2, pp. 327-363

Scarborough and Burnside argue that there exists several different pathways for societal complexity to emerge in human populations (where complexity is defined “as the nonlinear escalation of costs and emergent infrastructure with rising energy use and concentrated power as societies develop.” (p. 327)) Using examples drawn from the ancient Maya and modern Balinese, two of the pathways are compared highlighting “their relative costs, benefits, and potential for long-term sustainability.” (p. 327)

After a brief discussion of how best to conceptualise societal complexity for the purposes of their research, the authors concentrate upon socioenvironmental relationships, especially around water management for their compare/contrast analysis with the complexity resulting from increasing ‘throughput’.

Human groups self-organise within their biophysical environment with their culture altering the environment. New cultural systems can be highly adaptable but they are also more fragile and can lead to relatively quick ‘collapse’. Social modifications usually lead to stressed living conditions with increased costs and three possible futures if harmful conditions cannot be absorbed by the biophysical and/or sociocultural systems: “(1) the cultural system cuts its exaggerated and mounting social costs by lessening its intensity of resource use resulting in a partial reversion to an earlier lifeway of reduced costs and relative simplicity; (2) the system suffers from relatively abrupt social collapse; or (3) the system cultivates and focuses its energy and social capital on greater “complexity” associated with an evolved set of institutional structures–an emergent organizer of information and resources.” (pp. 329-330)

Research suggests that societies follow a labourtasking or technotasking path (or combination) to incorporate new resources or reset old ones.

Technotasking offsets production deficiencies by investing in ‘technological innovation’ that can help establish surpluses. In an early/primary state, ‘canalisation’ (i.e., riverine drainage system) was a commonly employed innovation as it could be adopted relatively quickly. The resource concentration such adaptations resulted in led to the emergent phenomenon of urbanisation and organisational structures, with those in ‘control’ of these economic/political structures benefitting disproportionately–“…those profiting most from the newly invented technologies accrued greater quantities, concentrations, and control of key resources.” (p. 332).

Deployment of a new technology is costly in terms of society and its environment but even after costs ‘level-out’ time and entropy can begin to increase costs. These increased costs can lead to a slowing of growth, collapse, or, with a new technology, a restart of the process. Transitions to greater complexity seem to be triggered by these rapid reorganisations. Successful and long-term shifts are limited by immediately available resources. Such change creates vulnerability if the new structural complexity cannot adjust to resource use/demand “If the new structure and the necessary resources are not synchronized and compatible, then the social system will collapse or at least slip back to an earlier, less complex social order.” (p. 335)

Labourtasking relies upon trained labour pools to help modify the landscape rather than a technological ‘breakthrough’. Here, the resulting change is incremental, long lasting, monitored, promoted generationally, and refined according to local conditions. Complexity and its social costs increase over time but in a smooth, uninterrupted manner. There are no abrupt transitions preceded by breakthrough technologies. Complexity costs increase but at a smaller ratio than in technotasking societies.

The ancient Maya and modern Balinese both have tended to employ labourtasking to aid in their adaptation to their somewhat similar semitropical settings whereby heavy seasonal rains were followed by prolonged dry periods. Both developed microwatershed adaptations but via different ‘technologies’.

The Maya would take advantage of natural drainage catchments and enhance them via landscape modifications (channel systems and reservoir) with household and monumental architecture mound volume equivalent to drainage volume. “[T]he system was likely a communitywide effort monitored by a collective interested in sustaining the entire group.” (p. 338) Although labourtasking was their primary economic means for some time, the Maya shifted into and out of technotasking as needs required. Innovations, however, would hasten resource drawdown and quicken negative impacts (e.g., erosion and sediment accumulation).

It appears that the Mayan success led to its eventual demise. Turmoil within large centres disrupted community communication beginning in the west. Information exchange faltered and the elite succumbed to immediate self-interest and became less responsive to other needs investing fewer resources in the many and more to the few; a scramble for hegemonic control between the large centres ensued. Written records suggest a governing council was implemented at Chichen Itza as depopulation hit its southern contemporaries but rather than adjust social networks (i.e.., economic and political) the elite chose to seek greater control. During the Terminal Classic demise phase there is evidence that the cost-complicated landscapes suffered the most from this, In particular, was the impact upon irrigation channels and reservoirs that show massive sediment/silt buildup; impacts that can still be seen today.

Mayan ‘collapse’ appears to have ensued once the environment and its natural resources could no longer support societal complexities. While several major centres and their hinterlands experienced ‘collapse’ (especially acute depopulation and the overshoot of local resources), some smaller communities were resilient and avoided the fate of the large ones–mostly by specialising in local resources and establishing trade with nearby populations. Those populations that shifted towards labourtasking-based adaptations were able to sustain themselves for a period of time beyond those that depended upon technotasking. “Generally speaking, the more long-term time and energy invested in the system, the greater the degree of collapse if the fields or related surfaces are neglected or abandoned for even a short period.” (p. 349)

The modern Balinese, in comparison, have oriented towards a labourtasking pathway after having their initial attempts (circa 11-12th century) to recreate their Javanese roots fail due to significant geographical differences. Its highly-dissected, steep-sided valleys with little in the way of natural resources required more decentralised structures. Indigenous farming populations managed their own affairs avoiding centralised bureaucracies and their demands. Groups self organised within their unique ecological circumstances. This approach proved productive and shaped the social system. “Balinese social institutions remain responsive to the complex adaptive system they have spawned, providing the flexibility to accommodate and locally manage accretional landscape change.” (p. 353)

The Balinese, with their labourtasking approach that focuses upon decentralisation (as opposed to the hypercentralisaiton characterised by the Late Classic Maya), have so far avoided collapse and suggests a path forward for sustainability. Resilience and long-lived stability would appear to be the result of small, incremental adjustments in a labourtasking approach as opposed to the frequent and rapid shifts that result from a technotasking one. However, near the end of an extended run, labourtasking systems may still result in extreme social ‘collapse’.

“A key difference between the two systems is the expectations for grand collapse…Because of the ever-changing, nonlinear interdependencies within and between groups and their environments, labortasking leads to a set of ‘phase transitions’ that produce adaptive forms of social organization and built environments. This process is long-lasting, resilient, and generally well-adjusted to resource limitations, making it relatively sustainable. However, acute vulnerability or collapse can occur if drastic external and/or social structural change is unleashed.” (pp. 355-356)

Technological innovations that tend to buffer humans from the environment but negatively impact it are often chosen because they accommodate rapid growth and the consolidation of social/economic power without much thought or concern about sustainability. While improvements in human health and welfare can be attributed to technotasking these need to be evaluated in terms of the costs, especially upon the environment whose ‘health’ human societies depend on.

The longer summary notes of the article can be found here.

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
Book 2: $3.89
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.

It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 1

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

With a Foreword and Afterword by Michael Dowd, authors include: Max Wilbert; Tim Watkins; Mike Stasse; Dr. Bill Rees; Dr. Tim Morgan; Rob Mielcarski; Dr. Simon Michaux; Erik Michaels; Just Collapse’s Tristan Sykes & Dr. Kate Booth; Kevin Hester; Alice Friedemann; David Casey; and, Steve Bull.

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

Humans: the Movie

April 17, 2024

Humans: the Movie

What follows is a story involving a movie watched by animals. The pacing of the movie to be described might seem like a very odd choice, but it simply mirrors the pacing of human life on the planet. A vivid visual imagination on your part will help to bring the story to life. So, put on your creative cap and let’s dive in!

Picture a small-town movie theater on a street so quiet and unimposing that the surrounding prairie and forest sidle right up to the back of the theater. The marquee advertises a feature film called The Human Saga.

As the afternoon shadows lengthen, a trickle of woodland creatures start to emerge from the forest, mosey up to the theater, pay for tickets, and go in. You notice rabbits, a fox, a group of turkeys, a band of raccoons, some stoats, newts, a skunk (who will be lucky enough to sit next to it?), a hoppy group of frogs, some chittering squirrels, a family of porcupines, a pair of doves, an ancient looking tortoise, a doe and her two fawns, and even a mama bear with cubs. They and many others have all come to absorb a tale of what these humans are all about. It’s a long movie: almost three hours chronicling the almost 3 million years of humans on Earth. But it’s fine: no one is in a big hurry.

The animals amicably settle into their seats, enjoying candy, popcorn, and a hot dog here and there. They’re relaxed, but wide-eyed with excitement for this special treat.

Opening Scene

The curtains rise, and the opening scene dazzles the crowd, bathing them in orange light as a bright sunrise radiates from the screen…

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

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVI–Energy Future, Part 2: Competing Polities and Geopolitical Stress

March 29, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVI

December 28, 2022 (original posting date)

Chitchen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.

Energy Future, Part 2: Competing Polities and Geopolitical Stress

Part 2 of my multi-part contemplation on our energy future.

It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
-various attributions (e.g., Niels Bohr, Samuel Goldwyn, Yogi Berra, Mark Twain, Nostradamus)

As I argued in Part 1, energy underpins everything including human societal complexities. And the more energy humans have at their disposal, the greater the complexities and their concomitant ‘quality of life’ (not for all, but for those with greatest access/exposure)[1]. Being a ‘finite’ resource, the difficulty (impossibility?) in sustaining this ‘prosperity’ is self-evident — or at least it should be[2].

As walking, talking apes that communicate via stories we have weaved many tales of how we will sustain our complex living arrangements and the energy ‘slaves’ that make this possible[3]. In our quest to reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts we have, for the most part, ignored/denied the implications of dwindling resources — especially energy — and the implications of this for our future[4].

The more dominant and mainstream narratives argue we can or will transition to low-/zero-carbon technologies with nary a hiccup[5]. Our ingenuity guarantees this — or at least the snake oil salesmen marketing their wares and standing to profit handsomely from these tales do[6].

While I believe we will indeed attempt this (primarily because the ruling caste that guides/influences the narratives that we tend to believe in and allocates our society’s resources towards actions/efforts that helps to meet their overarching goal — the control/expansion of the wealth-/extraction-generating systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power/prestige — will make it so), all it will likely accomplish (besides creating some comforting stories to share and huge profits for our already insanely wealthy few) will be the exacerbation of our fundamental predicament: ecological overshoot[7].

This means the speeding up of the drawdown of our resources (both ‘non-renewable’ and ‘renewable’) and the magnification of the concomitant ecological systems destruction[8] — more on this in a future post.

Speeding up the drawdown of resources (especially some that are only or primarily found in far-off locations from the sociopolitical centres that ‘require’ them to support their complexities, and ‘controlled’ by others) feeds into another unfortunate propensity of human complex societies: competition between polities.

In their detailed computer analyses of how a species that pursues growth on a finite planet might fair in a future of biogeochemical limitations, Meadows et al. highlight that two of the symptoms of overshooting the natural environmental carrying capacity are increasing conflicts over resources/sinks and declining respect for government as it uses its ‘power’ to maintain/increase the share of declining ‘wealth’ for the ruling elite — primarily by disproportionately allocating resources towards its military and industry, and away from the majority of its citizens[9].

And while his focus is upon pre/historical sociopolitical collapse, as opposed to ecological systems collapse (although ecological breakdown certainly has contributed to past societal collapses), archaeologist Joseph Tainter argues in his text The Collapse of Complex Societies that past collapses have occurred in two different political situations: a dominant state in isolation or as part of a cluster of peer polities[10]. With global travel and communication, the isolated dominant state has disappeared and only competitive peer polities now exist.

Such polities tend to get caught up in spiralling competitive investments as they seek to outmaneuver each other in their quest for control/influence and evolve greater complexity together. The polities caught up in this competition increasingly experience declining marginal returns on their investments in this strategy and must divert ever-increasing amounts of energy/resources leading to increasing economic weakness — especially for those outside of the ruling caste.

Withdrawing from this spiral or collapsing is not an option without risking being subsumed by a competitor. It is this trap of competition that will continue to drive the pursuit of complexity regardless of human/environmental costs and the impact upon dwindling resources. Incentives and economic reserves can support this situation for a lengthy period, as witnessed by the Roman and Mayan experiences where centuries of diminishing returns were endured, but not forever.

Ever-increasing costs and ever-decreasing marginal returns typify peer polities in competition. This ends in either domination by one state and a new energy subsidy, or collapse of all. As Tainter concludes:

“Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.” (p. 214)

It would seem one of the consequences of our diminished energy future will be increased tension between competing polities. And this competition will be primarily about energy/resource reserves. In fact, a number of analysts have predicted that the globe is heading for (or is already engaged in) significant geopolitical stressors, if not resource wars[11].

William Catton Jr. also discusses this trajectory towards increasing geopolitical tension in Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change[12]. He argues that we are fated to continue our self-destructive proclivities as long as we fail to understand them. While we have learned to be civil over the centuries, particularly since the leveraging of fossil fuels began and net surplus energy has led to an explosion of growth and ‘wealth’, the concomitant population irruption and the pressure compounded by technology have led to a degradation of these relationships and have become increasingly competitive.

Humans have reacted in pressure-increasing ways that has created a further diminishing of carrying capacity making our overshoot situation even worse. War-like rhetoric has increased as population pressures have. Wars are a useful leverage point for the ruling caste to target the ‘other’ as redundant, as opposed to ourselves who ‘deserve’ our energy-intensive way of life and the resources required to maintain it.

“In a habitat that was not growing any larger, the continuing increase in either our numbers, our activities, or our equipment would ultimately induce more and more antagonism. Our routine pursuit of legitimate aspirations as individual human beings, as breathing, eating, drinking, traveling, working, playing and reproducing organisms, would increasingly entail mutual interference.” (p. 224)

Here we have competition over finite resources that is leading to a quickening of the drawdown of these resources. These diminishing resources are being allocated to this spiralling pursuit of competition while the consequences — both economic deterioration for the majority of humans and ecological destruction of the planet — are ignored/denied and/or rationalised away by way of narratives that argue the very instruments of our demise (increasingly complex and resource-dependent technologies) must be pursued with all the expediency we can muster.

Our conundrum is becoming ever-more wicked in its complexity.

In Part 3 I will explore some of the issues for human societies of this increasing geopolitical competition.

[1] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[2] Fossil fuels are finite in the sense that the flow from the existing stocks in the form of extraction far, far exceeds their replenishment rate which is estimated at millions of years. See this.

[3] See this, this, and/or this.

[4] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[5] See this, this, this, and/or this.

[6] See this, this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[7] See this, this, this, and/or this.

[8] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[9] See this and/or this.

[10] See this and/or this.

[11] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[12] See this and/or this.

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXV–Energy Future, Part 1

March 29, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXV

December 21, 2022 (original posting date)

Energy Future, Part 1

A short introductory contemplation to a multipart one on our energy future[1].

It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
-various attributions (e.g., Niels Bohr, Yogi Berra, Mark Twain)

Energy[2]. It is the fundamental component necessary for all physical, chemical, and biological processes. So life…hell, the universe appears impossible without it[3].

While all forms of energy are ultimately important to human life, it is the bioenergetic and food energy aspects that are perhaps most salient[4]. For human complex societies that require energy inputs to ‘power’/support the organisational structures that help to create and sustain our varied and numerous complexities, it is the transformation of various energy sources into ‘usable’ forms that is vital[5].

As Vaclav Smil writes at the beginning of his 2017 text, Energy and Civilization: A History:

“Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done. Universal manifestations of these transformations range from the enormous rotations of galaxies to thermo- nuclear reactions in stars. On Earth they range from the terra-forming forces of plate tectonics that part ocean floors and raise new mountain ranges to the cumulative erosive impacts of tiny raindrops (as the Romans knew, gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo — A drop of water hollows a stone not by force but by continually dripping). Life on Earth — despite decades of attempts to catch a meaningful extraterrestrial signal, still the only life in the universe we know of — would be impossible without the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into phytomass (plant biomass). Humans depend on this transformation for their survival, and on many more energy flows for their civilized existence. As Richard Adams (1982, 27) put it,

We can think thoughts wildly, but if we do not have the wherewithal to convert them into action, they will remain thoughts. … History acts in unpredictable ways. Events in history, however, necessarily take on a structure or organization that must accord with their energetic components.

The evolution of human societies has resulted in larger populations, a growing complexity of social and productive arrangements, and a higher quality of life for a growing number of people. From a fundamental biophysical perspective, both prehistoric human evolution and the course of history can be seen as the quest for controlling greater stores and flows of more concentrated and more versatile forms of energy and converting them, in more affordable ways at lower costs and with higher efficiencies, into heat, light, and motion.”

In this energy-transforming quest, fossil fuels have become the most critical and fundamental energy source to our modern, industrialised and exceedingly complex global society. As can be seen in the graph below, it is estimated that fossil fuel-based energy (i.e., coal, oil, and natural gas) is responsible for 80+% of our current energy needs that support our many varied complexities from transportation and food production to industrial production and communications.

Evidence suggests there is no current substitute — at density or scale — for the energy provided by fossil fuels[6]. We continue to be exposed to countless promises and potential technological ‘breakthroughs’ to replace them (especially when it comes to ‘clean/green’ energy sources, or should I say non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies), but the cold hard fact is that our dependence upon fossil fuels continues and is actually increasing, even when one zooms in on the past twenty years when ‘renewables’ have been pursued with ‘gusto’ as shown in the following graph (although not as much fervor as some would like and argue for — ignoring/rationalising away the ecological systems destruction that would accompany such a ‘war effort-like’ push).

All of the ‘renewables’ we have adopted have been additive to our fossil fuel dependency. They have not supplanted any — or at least minimally — fossil fuel extraction or use[7]. In fact, it could be argued that they have increased it due to their dependency upon fossil fuel-based industrial processes[8].

Add to this that there is convincing evidence that we have encountered significant diminishing returns in our extraction of fossil fuels[9]. This can be seen in our need to increase continually the energy and resource inputs towards accessing and extracting these fuels (e.g., deep sea drilling, hydraulic fracturing, bitumen refinement).

This necessity necessarily has an impact on the net energy that we have for supporting our complexities. We are increasingly having to put more and more energy/resources into fossil fuel extraction and refinement resulting in less and less energy/resources leftover to maintain our complex systems, let alone have any leftover to pursue growth as we have the past century or more[10].

So, we have a finite resource that is requiring greater energy/resource inputs to access and retrieve but that we depend significantly upon with no comparable replacement — to say little about the ecological systems destruction accompanying all of this (‘renewables’ and fossil fuels alike).

This is an obvious conundrum. Where do we go from here is what a number of people want to know…and I will explore this further in Part 2.

[1] Please note that I am not an ‘expert/academic/researcher/etc.’ in the topics discussed but an avid ‘student’ of them as I try to make sense of how and why events are unfolding the way they are. This is why I have included quite a number of references (to those who may be considered ‘experts) to my thoughts. Declaring this, I am also wary of the term ‘expert’ in light of criticisms such as those expressed by Philip Tetlock, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and others: see this, this, this, this, and/or this. The views expressed, therefore, are part of my personal journey of understanding; they could be accurate but they might not be…in the end, I believe we all believe what we want to believe.

[2] See this.

[3] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[4] See this and this.

[5] See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[6] See this, this, this, and/or this.

[7] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[8] See this, this, and/or this.

[9] See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[10] See this, this, this, this, this, this, and/or this.

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXI–Diminishing Returns On Investments In Complexity

March 26, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXI

December 4, 2022 (original posting date)

Diminishing Returns On Investments In Complexity

Another very brief contemplation prompted by The Honest Sorcerer’s latest writing regarding our energy predicament.

What you have described so well is perhaps the conundrum faced by every complex society throughout history: diminishing returns on investments in complexity.

This phenomenon appears to apply to almost everything in the human realm but most importantly resource extraction and use as you suggest.

We do tend to put into action the easier and cheaper solutions to our perceived problems with those, in turn, adding to our complexity and creating even more problems that need even more attention (i.e., energy and other resources).

I have argued before and continue to believe that the ‘best’ use of our remaining energy resources would be to encourage local communities to become self-sufficient (especially in terms of potable water procurement, food production, and regional shelter needs) but perhaps even more importantly decommission those complexities that pose significant risk to present and future species.

As I wrote some time ago: “Three of the more problematic [complexities] include: nuclear power plants and their waste products; chemical production and storage facilities; and, biosafety labs and their dangerous pathogens. The products and waste of these complex creations are not going to be ‘contained’ when the energy to do so is no longer available. And loss of this containment will create some hazardous conditions for human existence in their immediate surroundings at the very least — in fact, multiple nuclear facility meltdowns could potentially put the entire planet at risk for all species.”)

I believe ‘simplification’ is coming but am highly doubtful it will be through much if any ‘coordinated’ effort by our ruling caste. As many who have studied our predicament have argued, it will be Nature that imposes the ‘solution’ to this conundrum that is humanity and we will have little to say about it.

As walking, talking apes that tend to deny reality and believe in ‘magic’, we will continue to weave comforting narratives that our human ingenuity and concomitant technological prowess can save us from ourselves.

Imagination, however, is not reality and while we can think up all sorts of possibilities the starkness of physical laws and biological principles stand firmly in the path ahead preventing our magic from having any real impact — except, perhaps, to exacerbate our predicament.

How We Fail: Framing the Problem to be Fixable with an Existing Solution

March 24, 2024

How We Fail: Framing the Problem to be Fixable with an Existing Solution

We say we want solutions, but we actually want a specific subset of solutions: those that already meet with our approval.

The possibility that none of these pre-approved solutions will actually resolve the problem is rejected because we are wedded to the solutions that we want to work.

The sources of our resistance to admitting that our solution is now the problem are self-evident: holding fast to an ideological certainty gives us inner security, as it provides a simplified, easy-to-grasp frame of reference, an explanation of how the world works and a wellspring of our identity.

Our ideological certainties also serve as our moral compass: we believe what we believe because it is correct and therefore the best guide to solving all problems faced by humanity.

If we frame all problems ideologically (i.e. politically), then there is always an ideological “solution” to every problem.

If we frame all problems as solvable with technology, then there is always a technological “solution” to every problem.

If we frame all problems as solvable with finance, then there is always a financial “solution” to every problem.

In each of these cases, we’re starting with the solution and then framing the problem so it aligns with our solution. This is not actually problem-solving, and so the solutions–all blunt instruments–fail to actually resolve the complex, knotty problems generated by dynamic open systems with interconnected feedback loops.

Self-interest also plays a role, of course, as self-interest is core to human nature, along with an innate desire to serve the best interests of our family, group, tribe, neighborhood, community enterprise, class and nation. That we prefer solutions that maintain or enhance our current financial and social position in the status quo is no surprise.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXVII–Those Dangerous Complexities of Human ‘Progress’

March 3, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXVII

(originally posted September 16, 2022)

Those Dangerous Complexities of Human ‘Progress’

Today’s contemplation is a short reflection (and reiteration) on where I believe human ‘energies’ should be focused as we stumble into an unknowable future in light of an article on the topic that was shared to one of the Facebook groups I am a member of via a compilation of related articles periodically distributed by The Collapse Chronicle…

‘Peak humanity’ would appear to have been a direct result of our leveraging of a one-time cache of ancient carbon energy that has afforded us the ability to expand our numbers and environmental impact for quite some time but has, unfortunately, placed us firmly into ecological overshoot — a significant growth far beyond our environment’s ability to support on a continuing basis our numbers and material demands.

Virtually every species that enters such a predicament experiences the ‘collapse’ that inevitably follows once the fundamental resource that has allowed it to blast past its natural carrying capacity is ‘exhausted’ (in the case of fossil fuels, it’s about a declining energy-return-on-energy-invested and the hyper-exploitation of the resource — and others, as well as an overloading of natural sinks — via debt/credit expansion to reduce significantly its future availability).

This impending ‘collapse’ is problematic on a number of fronts but I would contend that it is particularly so because of some very dangerous complexities we have created and distributed around our planet, placing our long-term future and that of many other (all?) species in great peril.

Energy is ‘everything’ to life and the surplus energy we garnered from our exploitation of fossil fuels has led to our hyper-complex and globalised industrial society. Along the way the vast majority of humans have lost the knowledge and skills to be self-sufficient and adapt to a life without fossil fuel energy and its long list of ‘conveniences’. Of particular note should be our dependence upon long-distance supply chains for virtually all our most important needs: food, potable water, and regional shelter materials.

While relocalising these necessary aspects of our existence should be a priority for every community that wishes to weather the coming transition to a post-carbon world, we should be considering quite seriously the safe decommissioning of some significantly dangerous creations.

Three of the more problematic ones include: nuclear power plants and their waste products; chemical production and storage facilities; and, biosafety labs and their dangerous pathogens. The products and waste of these complex creations are not going to be ‘contained’ when the energy to do so is no longer available. And loss of this containment will create some hazardous conditions for human existence in their immediate surroundings at the very least — in fact, multiple nuclear facility meltdowns could potentially put the entire planet at risk for all species[1].

As of today’s date, some 438 nuclear reactors (with another 56 under construction) are spread throughout 32 nation-states[2].

Finding the actual number of chemical production and storage facilities that exist is next to impossible but a proxy of their existence can be imagined via their economics and global spread of the industry[3], and it is massive.

As for biosafety labs, the total number is also virtually impossible to nail down due to the various ‘levels’ assigned, but as for those ‘studying’ the most dangerous pathogens, currently 59 are spread around the globe[4].

These facilities, even with today’s high-energy inputs and safety protocols, have experienced catastrophic ‘accidents’ — at least for the immediate environment/ecological systems, residents of the area, and/or employees.

From Chernobyl and Fukushima[5], to Bhopal and Beirut[6], to numerous lab failures[7] and ‘accidental’ infections and deaths of lab employees[8] (to say little of the recent possibility of Covid-19 having escaped from a lab[9]), the dangers posed by them have periodically been quite obvious.

As our surplus energy to minimise these dangers falls, our ability to protect ourselves from them also declines increasing the risks that they pose substantially. It seems only prudent to decommission and ‘safely’ eliminate the dangers while we still have the energetic-ability and resources to do so.

There is little in our current thinking about this situation that leads me to believe we will address these potential catastrophes, however. In fact, I see significant hubris and denial on a daily basis as we surge headlong in the opposite direction expanding on these complexities for the most part rather than reducing them — to say little of our continuing pursuit of the infinite growth chalice on a finite planet.

The fact that we seem to be doing the exact opposite of what seems prudent and forward-thinking does not instill a lot of confidence in me for our long-term prospects. Our failure to address the potential lethal consequences — primarily, it would seem, because of our continuing belief that we can both predict and control complex systems, and because these pursuits further enrich the ruling elite — raises the stakes significantly for both current and future generations, as well as all other life on the planet.

[1] Here I am reminded of the television series The 100 where the fourth season is centred around the devastation wreaked by a wave of fire and radiation that sweeps across the planet as a result of several dozen of the globe’s nuclear plants melting down; their ongoing maintenance was impossible after a complex AI launches the world’s nuclear weapons arsenal in an effort to address human overpopulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_chemical_producers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_industry; https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/industries/top-10-chemical-producing-countries-of-the-world/25394; https://chempedia.info/info/chemical_production_facilities/

[4] https://theconversation.com/fifty-nine-labs-around-world-handle-the-deadliest-pathogens-only-a-quarter-score-high-on-safety-161777;

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_accident

[7] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/06/02/newly-disclosed-cdc-lab-incidents-fuel-concerns-safety-transparency/84978860/; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340402767_Laboratory_accidents_and_breaches_in_biosafety_-_they_do_occur

[8] https://www.torontomu.ca/content/dam/facilities-management-development/environmental-health-safety/docs/2-biological-hazard-classification.pdf

[9] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656; https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-covid-katherine-eban/

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LIX–Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong? Part One

February 10, 2024

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LIX

July 13, 2022 (original posting date)

Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong? Part One

Today’s contemplation (a two-parter) was begun a few months ago but I’m just now getting around to completing and posting it. As often happens with me and my ADHD, I get thinking about/reflecting upon a topic or idea, record some thoughts while having my morning coffee and the ideas are flowing, and then move on to something else before finishing the task completely (this habit, unfortunately, also impacts my various house ‘projects’ and drives my wife crazy…but after 36 years together she’s aware I just need the ‘occasional’ reminder about the unfinished work — I had forgotten about this writing until coming across it as I was cleaning up some computer files due to ‘extra’ time on my hands given the loss of Internet with the several-day shut-down of one of Canada’s largest providers recently; a blessing, really, as it reduced my screen-time).

A question posed to me recently was: “What does the path forward look like when we say we have to live within our means on a finite planet?”

The answer to such a question is as varied as the people answering it[1]. I am hesitant to provide a definitive answer about what the transition to ‘sustainable’ circumstances might look like given the uncertainty that abounds. I am inclined to believe that any ‘guess’ about the future[2], regardless of the amount of data/evidence one has or the sophistication of the model or the computing power used, is probably about as accurate as reading tea leaves or a bird’s entrails. Not one of us has a clear picture as to what will unfold in the future, for as a few people have been credited with stating (including physicist Niels Bohr, writer Mark Twain, and baseballer Yogi Berra): “Prediction is hard, especially if it’s about the future.”

I’ve long held that complex systems can neither be controlled nor predicted with their non-linear feedback loops and emergent phenomena[3], so predicting complex systems with any degree of ‘certainty’ is a fools’ errand — especially once human actions/behaviours are involved. On top of this, no matter how sincere our attempts at objectivity in such prognostications, personal biases always impact our processing of information as does the paradigm[4] through which we interpret events and project into the future (and we tend to do so linearly since non-linear systems befuddle our primate brains); and, then, of course there are the Black Swans[5] that are persistently circling overhead — those unknown, unknowns that we can’t even contemplate because they’re outside of our personally-confining and -blinding worldview.

When we read about the future we are confronted with a potpourri of thoughts about how it might unfold — most of them, of course, presented with ‘certitude’. We tend to cling to some over others even if the one we tend to gravitate towards holds little in common with observed reality or experience. For as Dan Gardner argues in Future Babble[6], humans do not like uncertainty and despite so-called ‘experts’ being horrible at predicting the future, human psychology compels us to listen and take them seriously — even if we know the prognosticator to have been wrong on countless occasions (I still look at the long-range weather forecasts even though I know quite well that any outside of about 12–24 hours are bound to be incorrect, some drastically so — something that drives me ‘mad’ when my food gardens are in desperate need of rain and the weather forecasters are calling for rain right up until that actual day/hour it is supposed to rain and then change the prediction to no rain, and I am forced to spend a few hours watering my beds — a tendency that seems to be increasing in frequency the past couple of growing seasons; this year, April and May were great for precipitation in my area north of Toronto but as has been happening, it seems, June and so far in July has been way too dry and the 4000 litres of rainwater I have collected in my 20 rain barrels was getting precariously low up until a very recent overnight rain).

I like what Gardner states near the end of his book about discussing the future:

It is informed by the past, it is revealing about the present, and it surveys a wide array of futures. It is infused with metacognition…It offers hopeful visions of what could be; it warns against dangers that also could be. It explores our values by asking us what we want to happen and what we don’t. And it goes no further. It raises issues, questions, and choices, and it suggests possibilities and probabilities. But it does not peddle certainties, and it does not predict.[7]

Where are we on our path into the future given such uncertainty? Well, we have our choice of competing narratives to believe in.

There are some who argue that it matters little or not at all what we do with respect to the existential predicaments we face, for the future is one where we are all FUBAR. For example, 5–10 degrees of average global temperature increase is quite certainly baked into the cake and will in all likelihood lead to the extinction of most species on the planet, perhaps all with the end result being a ‘hothouse’ Earth with an environment similar to Venus. Responses to this eventuality then also range, mostly dependent on whether one holds that the impact will be sudden or drag itself out over millennia. Dystopia, even widespread extinction, is on the horizon and there is no avoiding it.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who believe strongly that we can transition somewhat seamlessly to ‘alternative’ forms of energy (or just continue extracting fossil fuels whose ‘scarcity’ is a concerted psy-ops by the ‘powers-that-be’) to keep-on-keeping-on with our status quo complexities and energy-intensive living standards. For most ‘clean/green’ energy aficionados, nuclear fusion or some other as-yet-to-be-discovered technology will provide us with cheap, safe energy; and/or we can mine passing asteroids for any needed finite resources we’ve exhausted, including water. In fact, one day we are bound to leave this over-used rock and colonise other worlds. Perhaps a little bit of tweaking here or there might be needed but given human ingenuity and technological prowess we will solve any and everything thrown our way so there is no need to worry about any ecological system breakdown or resource scarcity ‘problems’ for very long at all. The future is one of unlimited possibilities and utopian dreams, especially if we also redistribute all the wealth tied up in the off-shore bank accounts of the world’s billionaires and slay that evil monster capitalism; then, without a doubt, all eight billion (or much more) of us can live happily-ever-after, holding hands, and singing Kumbayah around the ‘carbon-free’ campfire.

These are perhaps the two extremes of the gamut of possibilities for our future. Where each of us ends up on this continuum of beliefs depends on the worldview we hold and how we process information through that narrow keyhole we necessarily each peer through. And I would argue that what we believe also very much relies upon our personal biases and what we wish to happen, not necessarily upon any ‘factual’ evidence. We are constantly seeking out confirmatory evidence for our beliefs and ignoring or denying counterfactual data or rationalising it to fit into our preconceived notions. There exist very strong psychological mechanisms to ensure ‘facts’ seldom, if ever, alter firmly held beliefs.

So, before I lay out my personal thoughts on what our future may or may not look like (and I am in no way ‘certain’ about any of this, although I do lean towards the more ‘dystopian’ possibilities), let me provide some cognitive context for why I believe what I believe. The paradigm through which I view the world, as it were, and necessarily impacts my perception of this crazy and totally unpredictable world.

I find that pre/history demonstrates pretty clearly that every complex sociopolitical organisation (i.e., complex society) before us has eventually ‘declined’ to a point that it can no longer be considered a ‘society’[8]. The social fabric that held the population together became frayed and people opted out, leading to its eventual ‘collapse’.

In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies[9] archaeologist Joseph Tainter argues that a human society is a problem-solving organisation. This organisation requires energy inputs for its maintenance with increasing complexity necessitating increased energy inputs. These inputs eventually encounter the law of marginal utility or diminishing returns because the solutions we adopt in dealing with problems that arise tend to be the easiest-to-implement and cheapest-to-maintain, but eventually more difficult and costly approaches must be pursued as the ‘easy’ ones have been exhausted. People are attracted to participating in a sociopolitical organisation (i.e., society) so long as the benefits accrued are at least — but preferably better — than the costs incurred. Once the costs exceed the perceived benefits, people choose to withdraw their participation. When a tipping point of participants have opted out, the organisational structures that have held complexities in place ‘collapses’.

It’s obviously much more difficult to abandon the sociopolitical sphere and organisational structures one is born into today than it was in the past. There is not only limited to no space left to flee to as every portion of the planet has been claimed by some nation state or another, but the vast majority of people lack the skills/knowledge to survive without their society’s supports. Self-sufficiency has been ‘bred’ out of us in just a few generations as we have embraced a future based upon different imperatives but especially complex centralised-systems and technology.

This shift has been afforded us by our leveraging of a one-time, finite cache of fossil fuel energy; a cache that has encountered significant and world-altering diminishing returns.

On top of this leveraging of fossil fuel energy and the paradigm shift it has led to in how we perceive the world — and create organisational structures and knowledge within in — we have the very real prospect that we are in the midst of ecological overshoot because we have significantly surpassed the planet’s human carrying capacity[10].

In the past we could overcome carrying capacity limits by migrating to a region as yet unexploited or underexploited by others (wars and colonisation are pretty well always about resources/economics; see U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler’s essay War is a Racket[11] for more on this perspective). When we pushed up against or exceeded the biophysical limits imposed by our environment in the past, this ‘takeover method’ (taking over from other species and eventually other humans) allowed us to expand for many millennia. We spread into virtually every niche across the globe.

More recently, however, we have depended upon a different means of procuring our needed resources termed the ‘drawdown method’, where we have extracted finite resources to supplement our existence. We have pushed human carrying capacity well past its natural limit by relying upon various resources drawn from our environment. The past couple of centuries has seen this approach focused primarily upon limited resources that have been extracted far, far faster than their renewal rate. Such use could only be limited in scope and temporary in time.

As William Catton argues in Overshoot[12], any species that overshoots its carrying capacity experiences a ‘rebalancing’ of its population eventually. Where the takeover method is precluded, a loss of necessary resources (usually food) results in a massive die-off to bring population numbers down to a level where the environment can recover. Sometimes a species experiences physiological changes that reduces fertility. Either way, population is reduced dramatically from its peak and often to a level far below the natural upper limit of ‘sustainability’ because of the damage to the environment that overshoot has caused.

Given our reliance upon fossil fuels, their finite nature, and the diminishing returns we have encountered because of this — and the way in which their use and the industrial processes they have ‘powered’ have overwhelmed the various planetary sinks that normally help to filter and purify the waste products we produce — it is increasingly clear that we have overshot our carrying capacity and have but the negative consequence of that to experience (or as many argue, are already experiencing).

In Part Two of this ‘essay’ I will paint a somewhat blurry picture of our possible future…

[1] Here I am reminded of a statement by a visiting psychology professor at a lecture on human ‘intelligence’ I attended at Western University when I was an undergrad. During his introductory remarks, with a goal of defining what we would be discussing, he stated (and I am paraphrasing given it’s been about 40 years): “Ask a hundred psychologists the definition of intelligence and you are bound to get a hundred different answers, perhaps more.”

[2] See this recent article by Charles Hugh Smith on the difference between a forecast and a guess: https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun22/forecast-guess6-22.html.

[3] I highly recommend some reading on complexity and complex systems. A good beginning text is Donella Meadows’s Thinking In Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. (ISBN 978–1–60358–055–7).

[4] For an introduction to the concept of paradigms see Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1962. (ISBN 978–0–22645–811–3)

[5] See Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Improbable. Random House, 2010/2007. (ISBN 978–0–8129–7381–5)

[6] Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail–And Why We Believe Them Anyway. McClelland & Stewart, 2010. (ISBN 978–0–7710–3513–5)

[7] Ibid. p. 266–267.

[8] My graduate degree was concentrated in archaeology (Master of Arts, 1988, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario).

[9] The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988. (ISBN 978–0–521–38673–9)

[10] Note that my first university degree was primarily concentrated in biology/physiology (Bachelor of Arts, 1984, Western University, London, Ontario).

[11] War is a Racket. https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.pdf

[12] Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois Press, 1980. (ISBN 978–0–252–00988–4)

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXIV–Energy-Averaging Systems and Complexity: A Recipe For Collapse

December 2, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXIV

November 28, 2021

Energy-Averaging Systems and Complexity: A Recipe For Collapse

Supply chain disruptions and the product shortages that result have become a growing concern over the past couple of years and the reasons for these are as varied as the people providing the ‘analysis’. Production delays. Covid-19 pandemic. Pent-up consumer demand. Central bank monetary policy. Government economic stimulus. Consumer hoarding. Supply versus demand basics. Labour woes. Vaccination mandates. Union strikes. The number and variety of competing narratives is almost endless.

I have been once again reminded of the vagaries of our supply chains, the disruptions that can result, and our increasing dependence upon them with the unprecedented torrential rain and flood damage across many parts of British Columbia, Canada; and, of course, similar disruptions have occurred across the planet.

Instead of a recognition that perhaps a rethinking is needed of the complexities of our current systems and the dependencies that result from them, particularly in light of this increasingly problematic supply situation, we have politicians (and many in the media) doubling-down on the very systems that have helped to put us in the various predicaments we are encountering.

Our growing reliance on intensive-energy and other resource systems is not viewed as any type of dependency that places us in the crosshairs of ecological overshoot and unforeseen circumstances, but as a supply and demand conundrum that can be best addressed via our ingenuity and technology. Once again the primacy of a political and/or economic worldview, as opposed to an ecological one, shines through in our interpretation of world events; and of course the subsequent ‘solutions’ proposed.

Our dependence upon complex and thus fragile long-distance supply chains (over which we may have little control whatsoever) is not perceived as a consequence of resource constraints manifesting themselves on a finite planet with a growing population and concomitant resource requirements but as a result of ‘organisational’ weaknesses that can be overcome with the right political and/or economic ‘solutions’. Greater centralisation. More money ‘printing’. Increased taxes. Significant investment in ‘green’ energy. Massive wealth ‘redistribution’. Expansive infrastructure construction. Higher wages. Rationing. Forced vaccinations. The proposed ‘solutions’ are almost endless in nature and scope.

All of these ‘solutions’ have one thing in common: they attempt to ‘tweak’ our current economic/political systems. They fail to recognise that perhaps the weakness or ‘problem’ is with the system itself. A system that has built-in constraints that pre/history, and population biology, would suggest result in eventual failure.

Archaeologist Joseph Tainter discusses the benefits and vulnerabilities of ‘energy averaging systems’ (i.e., trade) that contributed to the collapse of the Chacoan society in his seminal text The Collapse of Complex Societies.

He argued that the energy averaging system employed early on took advantage of the Chacoan Basin’s diversity, distributing environmental vagaries of food production in a mutually-supportive network that increased subsistence security and accommodated population growth. At the beginning, this system was improved by adding more participants and increasing diversity but as time passed duplication of resource bases increased and less productive areas were added causing the buffering effect to decline.

This fits entirely with Tainter’s basic thesis that as problem-solving organisations, complex societies gravitate towards the easiest-to-implement and most beneficial ‘solutions’ to begin with. As time passes, the ‘solutions’ become more costly to society in terms of ‘investments’ (e.g., time, energy, resources, etc.) and the beneficial returns accrued diminish. This is the law of marginal utility, or diminishing returns, in action.

As return on investment dropped for those in the Chacoan Basin that were involved in the agricultural trade system, communities began to withdraw their participation in it. The collapse of the Chacoan society was not due primarily to environmental deterioration (although that did influence behaviour) but because the population choose to disengage when the challenge of another drought raised the costs of participation to a level that was more than the benefits of remaining. In other words, the benefits amassed by participation in the system declined over time and environmental inconsistencies finally pushed regions to remove themselves from a system that no longer provided them security of supplies; participants either moved out of the area or relocalised their economies. The return to a more simplified and local dependence emerged as supply chains could no longer provide security.

Having just completed rereading William Catton Jr.’s Overshoot, I can’t help but take a slightly different perspective than the mainstream ones that are being offered through our various media; what Catton terms an ecological perspective. And one that is influenced by Tainter’s thesis: our supply chain disruptions are increasingly coming under strain from our being in overshoot and encountering diminishing returns on our investments in them (and this is particularly true for one of the most fundamental resources that underpin our global industrial societies: fossil fuels).

What should we do? It’s one of the things I’ve stressed for some years in my local community (not that it seems to be having much impact, if any): we need to use what dwindling resources remain to relocalise as much as possible but particularly food production, procurement of potable water, and supplies of shelter needs for the regional climate so that supply disruptions do not result in a massive ‘collapse’ (an additional priority should also be to ‘decommission’ some of our more ‘dangerous’ creations such as nuclear power plants and biosafety labs).

Pre/history shows that relocalisation is going to happen eventually anyways, and in order to avert a sudden loss of important supplies that would have devastating consequences (especially food, water, and shelter), we should prepare ourselves now while we have the opportunity and resources to do so.

Instead, what I’ve observed is a doubling-down as it were of the processes that have created our predicament: pursuit of perpetual growth on a finite planet, using political/economic mechanisms along with hopes of future technologies to rationalise/justify this approach. While such a path may help to reduce the stress of growing cognitive dissonance, it does nothing to help mitigate the coming ‘storms’ that will increasingly disrupt supply chains.

The inability of our ‘leaders’ to view the world through anything but a political/economic paradigm and its built-in short-term focus has blinded them to the reality that we do not stand above and outside of nature or its biological principles and systems. We are as prone to overshoot and the consequences that come with it as any other species. And because of their blindness (and most people’s uncritical acceptance of their narratives) we are rushing towards a cliff that is directly ahead. In fact, perhaps we’ve already left solid ground but just haven’t realised it yet because, after all, denial is an extremely powerful drug.

Vancouver is now completely cut off from the rest of Canada by road
There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada. The Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley are…www.kelownanow.com

Weather whiplash in Canada: extreme rains hit wildfire-devastated British Columbia ” Yale Climate…
An intense low-pressure system brought an atmospheric river of water vapor and torrential rains to southern British…yaleclimateconnections.org

Product shortage at Okanagan grocery stores, due to highway closures – Williams Lake Tribune
It’s been a busy two days at FreshCo in Kelowna. Customers are stocking up on various products after access between the…www.wltribune.com

Supply Chain Disruptions Will Continue – Daily Reckoning
Forty percent of all the cargo into the United States comes through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Offshore…dailyreckoning.com

The Cost of Waiting | The Tyee
“Push a complex system too far, and it will not come back.” – Joe Norman, founder and chief scientist at Applied…thetyee.ca

How Much of the Worsening Energy Crisis is Due to Depletion?
Coal and natural gas spot prices have recently soared to record levels internationally, while oil is trading at over…www.resilience.org

Our fossil fuel energy predicament, including why the correct story is rarely told
The article explains why the energy story told by main street media is biased, to make the situation appear like a “too…ourfiniteworld.com

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLVI–Peak Oil, Complexity, Psychology, Magical Thinking, and War

October 26, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLVI

Peak Oil, Complexity, Psychology, Magical Thinking, and War

Again, some sharing of my comments and others’ on a couple of recent FB Group posts.

First, a post from the Peak Oil Group I am a member of where some great conversations happen. In this particular situation, the comments were in response to my last Contemplation.

SH: I was with a group of technical people recently, engaged in conversation about a very wide range of issues, and when I pointed out that almost no one among engineers and entrepreneurs are striving to address future energy and resource needs, rather, the vast majority exhibit a myopic fixation toward devising increasingly complex ways to use up fossil hydrocarbons. Well… Some folks interrupted and pretty much drowned me out with a kind of “hear no evil” mantra, extolling the virtues of technology and human ingenuity. I don’t even think it was a conscious response, but a kind of unconscious impulse, an eruption of vocal energy resulting from cognitive dissonance. It seems apparent that humans are not psychologically equipped to handle large scale existential threats or crises. I guess what I’m suggesting is that it isn’t just elites who will kick the can down the road to maintain their status quo, but that pretty much everyone will respond to things like Peak Oil in a way that’s unquestionably irrational or egocentric in relation to the magnitude of the challenge. That’s my take on it anyway…

Me: SH, I completely agree. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I find the impact of our innate psychological mechanisms/processes so fascinating to explore and try to understand. I think a big part of our blindness to limits and the consequences of chasing the perpetual growth chalice is our ‘trust/faith’ in our various complex systems (and those who ‘control’ them). This has us engaging in significant magical thinking and believing that we can ‘adapt’ (via our technology and ingenuity) to the various predicaments we face. We cannot fathom that recent adaptations have run their course and we are on a dead-end trajectory. Psychology suggests our minds protect us from such anxiety-provoking thoughts regardless of the evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t matter what reality/facts/evidence demonstrates; it’s what we believe that rules.

PW: Steve Bull, Yes, extreme compartmentalism.

JR: Steve Bull, I started listening to a Derrick Jensen interview last night (suggested by a post here by Alice Friedman.) What I took from it is that it’s not human psychology in a vacuum. Different technologies have their own built-in ideologies that influence human ideologies. It was a bit esoteric, but it sort of made sense. Very interesting.

PW: JR, Yep, they have their religion, their science, their family, their whatever.

SH2: SH, what I’m wondering now is why is it possible (for governments, or anyone) to convince people en masse that it’s necessary to go off to war and likely be maimed and/or killed, and endure all the other hardships of war………… but it seems completely impossible (for governments, or anyone) to convince people en masse to put up with seemingly much milder forms of deprivation (like less luxurious lifestyles) in order to stave off collapse (and famine/death and eventually war leading to more famine, death, etc). ?

Me: SH2, The State profits from the war racket (and all the other growth rackets) but not economic contraction. They have no interest in convincing the masses to live more ‘sustainably’ since that would kill their golden geese.

SH2: Steve Bull, Agreed, but I think it must go deeper than that. Do soldiers signing up (not counting conscripts) not have any idea of what war is like? Assuming they do, why does the motive of sacrifice for the good of their society/country not apply in anywhere near the same level of commitment to non-war actions?

Me: SH2, It’s obviously very complex but perhaps part of it is the State’s ability to leverage our innate tribal instincts (i.e., sense of patriotism) and ramping up of the ‘othering’ that goes hand-in-hand with that, which influences a sense of ‘sacrifice for God and country’ that gets most to support war and the atrocities of it. When times are ‘tough’ there’s always some ‘other’ that can be dragged out to blame for things and our in-group versus out-group instincts drown out the critical aspects of such manipulations.

As for ‘sacrificing’ for the planet’s health and our long-term survival, these are minimised via the mainstream narratives about human ingenuity and technology being capable of countering such degradation, you know — we can ‘science’ our way out of any ‘problems’.

The forces of propaganda/marketing by the ruling elite are significant and impactful. They profit from war and from continued economic growth. They have zero interest in curtailing either of these insane and destructive pursuits and perhaps even less concern for our ecological systems — greenwashing everything to give the appearance of concern.

The ‘average’ person’s tendency to defer to authority/expertise leaves most following whatever trajectory a society’s ‘rulers’ set, and for the 10,000+ years of complex societies, these ‘influencers’ have prioritised that which sustains their revenue streams…war and expansion.

And to minimise the cognitive dissonance of the significant machinations and manipulations we are constantly exposed to, most go along to get along and parrot back the stories and help to cheerlead us over the impending cliff…

PW: Steve Bull, Very well stated Steve. I copied two sentences because of the clarity and preciseness of the logic. ……you know — we can ‘science’ our way out of any ‘problems.

PW: SH2, Part of it is the play on their testosterone, their need to be a hero outweighs many other considerations. I think that, yeah, they don’t know what they are doing.

PW: One play of the recruiters ‘they can sign up and join with their friends, they can all serve in the same unit. Well, no, as soon as they join they are split up with some never seeing their friends again. I watched one video of recruiters trying to sign some guys up and implying they could be like their favorite musical artist who had served in the military. They could join the musical military band like he did. The recruiters will lie about anything to get the signature on the line.

LM: SH, I’ve come across the same as this. Maybe it’s their fight mechanism in their brain. I suppose if you don’t know how to mitigate it with nature and low fuel consumption, you use the tools you think you have, even if you don’t really understand those tools. It’s laziness, ignorance and fear. Problem is, those responses adversely impact my daughters and their futures, along with all other children’s futures. So what are we to do? The only two ways to mitigate all this, infiltrate the political system or revolt against the existing system.

We don’t seem to be able to get past the leaders and elite. The ones that openly advertise that going back to a low fuel economy would take us back to the dark ages. Well yeah, maybe we’d have to go to bed the same time as birds mostly because of low fuel, there’s nothing dark about that, other than the dark night!

So so distant from nature. Crazy

Second, is this question/statement posed in the Degrowth Group I am a member of. I include it as it relates to issues raised above:

PJ: Do you think the worlds ‘elite’ might view climate change as being caused by having far too many slaves consuming ‘their’ planet’s resources? ( It seems strange how they really seem to be promoting world war three rather than attempting to promote peace) I bet most of them have their own nuclear bunkers. Do any of the worlds ‘leaders’ and elites actually see themselves as being ‘enemies’ or is it something they like to pretend to the people? To maintain their ‘system’ and their positions? They certainly like to keep telling us how other countries and people are our ‘enemies’.

Me: I don’t pretend to know what our ‘elite’ think or believe. I can only guess based upon some statements, their behaviours, and pre/historical evidence as to what others in their place seem to have done.

They don’t seem to agree on much and oftentimes disagree vehemently on things. This often makes them more concerned with their in-group and how to manipulate events amongst that restricted population as opposed to the masses. This is perhaps especially so across borders, and particularly with respect to regions rich in resources (mineral, labour, and capital).

They don’t appear to be overly concerned with the symptoms of ecological overshoot (anthropogenic climate impacts being one) except to leverage them in expanding their revenue streams and societal control mechanisms.

They appear to believe in the magical thinking weaved by ‘free’ market economists and infinite substitutability for declining resources, and that technology and human ingenuity can solve any pressing issue.

They do not appear to give two shits for the unwashed masses except as tax donkeys and labourers, but do attempt to appease them somewhat with bread, circuses, and soothing narratives (despite having the various protective services of private and public police/security/military, they do still fear reprisals from possible revolution by the masses — thus increasing mass surveillance and narrative management).

Perhaps they do fear a nuclear exchange, but many certainly (at least amongst the higher ups of the political and military classes, and possibly some other very influential individuals) have access to safe spaces where they believe they could avoid the worst of such an outcome.

But we need to also consider that war is a VERY profitable racket as Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler reminded us. And THE primary motivation of these people probably since the beginning of complex societies 10,000+ years ago has been control and expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige.

Again and again throughout human pre/history our ruling elite have sacrificed their citizens and the environment to meet this important motivation. I see little evidence that our current iteration of elite is any different than the many that have preceded them and expedited their society’s collapse, especially through overreach in many areas.

And when haven’t the weapons of the day ever sat idle once things have gone sideways?

Homo sapiens are very intelligent story-telling apes, just not very wise.

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XIX–Fossil Fuels: Contributing to Complexity and Ecological Overshoot

October 23, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XIX

June 7, 2021

Fossil Fuels: Contributing to Complexity and Ecological Overshoot

Andrew Nikiforuk is an author and contributing editor of the online media site The Tyee. He has been writing about the oil and gas industry for close to 20 years. In his most recent article he writes about the lies being told by the Canadian government regarding its attempts to reduce carbon emissions. The Canadian government is certainly not alone in its misinformation (propaganda?) and one of the issues I believe is contributing to the lies is a (purposeful?) misidentification of our planet’s fundamental existential dilemma. Below is my comment on Andrew’s excellent discussion.

Thank you, Andrew. You’ve laid out the case for some very, very difficult decisions/choices/discussions that lay ahead of us.

I’m not convinced we will make what I consider to be the correct choices or even engage in some meaningful and productive dialogue since the changes that I believe are needed (degrowth) would be viewed as exceedingly painful to many as it challenges not only some core beliefs but what could be considered rights/entitlements/expectations regarding living standards (and it doesn’t help that we are genetically predisposed to avoid pain and seek pleasure). The brakes that need to be applied to some social practices/policies (perhaps most? all?) would also be challenged by some because I would contend the fundamental dilemma we are having to address is not necessarily carbon emissions, which I would argue is one of the consequences of the underlying issue, which is ecological overshoot.

The finite, one-time cache of easy-to-retrieve and cheap-to-access energy provided by fossil fuels has ‘fuelled’ an explosion in human numbers and sociopolitical/cultural/economic complexities unlike any other time in human pre/history. With this energy resource at our disposal we have constructed a complex, global, and industrialised world with technological wonders that would certainly appear magical to past generations.

Perhaps one of the most important consequences of this finite energy reserve has been our creation of exceedingly complex, fragile, and energy-intensive long-distance supply chains, especially for food, that have allowed us to expand and occupy quite marginal lands and completely ignore consideration of a land’s carrying capacity and ability to ‘sustain’ a local population; but also created a complete dependency by many on these systems. I use my home province of Ontario as an example. We have a population of about 15 million (and growing) but less than 9 million acres of arable farmland (and lessening), suggesting (based upon an estimate of the need of 1 acre of food production per person to supply adequate caloric intake) we are well past our natural environmental carrying capacity. It’s even worse than these numbers suggest since about 70+% of our ‘food’ production is dedicated to corn and soybean for animal feed and ethanol production. As a result we import about 80+% of our food. And many, many regions of the world are in a similar (or worse) predicament.

One of the ‘memes’ I have often used over the past few years has been ‘Infinite growth on a finite planet, what could possibly go wrong?’ We live on a finite planet with biophysical limits. These limits impact what we can and cannot do. Human ingenuity (i.e., science and technology) has allowed us to push on the boundaries of some of these limits to a certain extent but physics and biology can only be ‘delayed’, not vanquished. The energy-averaging systems we have in place (i.e., long-distance trade) to support occupation of marginal lands and expand beyond a region’s carrying capacity require huge amounts of energy to sustain. This has been possible via fossil fuels. In fact, fossil fuels have allowed us to push the apparent carrying capacity of the planet well beyond the biophysical limits imposed by a finite planet.

So what happens when this finite energy source begins to decline in not only actual physical quantities but in the amount of surplus energy it can supply us with due to diminishing returns?

The two extreme and relatively polar-opposite responses are simple. We could curtail our dependency on this resource and greatly reduce our complexities (something that was probably needed to begin decades ago). Or, we could create stories about how our ingenuity will provide us with a scientific/technological solution to avoid the tough path of degrowth — primarily through the magical thinking necessary to believe that there is a ‘green/clean’ energy source that we can tap into to sustain our energy-intensive living standards and global complexities.

I am increasingly convinced we need to take the first path but it seems quite apparent we are taking the second, a path that not only avoids the ‘pain’ that would be perceived by many as we reduce our complexities but one that weaves comforting myths to reduce our cognitive dissonance. The unfortunate thing is the easier path also puts us further into overshoot leading to an eventual steeper and calamitous decline that we cannot mitigate or manage at all. It is well past time to have the tough discussion (especially about how to do it equitably), if we are to have any hope of avoiding a future that will be much, much more challenging if we don’t.

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh VII–Science: It May Not Be All You Think It Is

October 5, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh VII

Oct 12, 2020

Science: It May Not Be All You Think It Is

Ha! It’s poetry in motion
Now she’s making love to me
The spheres are in commotion
The elements in harmony
She blinded me with science
(She blinded me with science!)
And hit me with technology
-Thomas Dolby, 1982 (She Blinded Me With Science)

Science, it turns outs, is a process not an answer. And, it usually has many answers from various sciences, each having their own methods and standards. When someone tells you, “the science says,” be skeptical. They are usually being paid to say what they are about to say or at least have been thoroughly indoctrinated by others who are paid. There is never just one answer to any supposedly scientific question.
-Kurt Cobb (Why am I feeling so anxious? The end of modernism arrives)

Unfortunately, there are many other misconceptions about science. One of the most common misconceptions concerns the so-called “scientific proofs.” Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as a scientific proof…all scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, and nothing is final. There is no such thing as final proven knowledge in science. The currently accepted theory of a phenomenon is simply the best explanation for it among all available alternatives. Its status as the accepted theory is contingent on what other theories are available and might suddenly change tomorrow if there appears a better theory or new evidence that might challenge the accepted theory. No knowledge or theory (which embodies scientific knowledge) is final.
-Satoshi Kanazawa (Common Misconceptions About Science I: “Scientific Proof”)

In short, we can never be 100% that our perception of reality is accurate, and scientific experiments are virtually impossible to totally and completely control. Further, science often uses inductive logic, and it relies on probabilities to draw conclusions. All of this prevents science from ever proving anything with absolute certainty. That does not, however, mean that science is untrustworthy, or that you can reject it whenever you like. Science tells us what is most likely true given the current evidence, but it is a skeptical process that always acknowledges the possibility of being wrong.
-Fallacy Man (Science doesn’t prove anything, and that’s a good thing)

The answers you get depend on the questions you ask…What man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conception experience has taught him to see…Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time…Because scientists are reasonable men, one or another argument will ultimately persuade many of them. But there is no single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances…The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.
-Thomas S. Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)

Science! That is the refrain from some to argue for what IS and what IS NOT ‘true’ or ‘factual’ in this world of social media edicts and memes (and associated self-created echo chambers), especially regarding fake news, climate change/global warming, pandemics, politics, and life in general.

The idea that science provides us with ‘objective proof’ about issues is a common error I’ve encountered time and time again. It is held for many reasons, primary among them may be the ‘politicisation’ of the notion; that is, the use of ‘science’ by politicians and others to reinforce what are for all intents and purposes desired goals/policies/actions/narratives/etc., and their insistence about science providing definitive support. We are certainly seeing this more and more with competing narratives regarding Covid-19 and what should and should not be done to address certain concerns.

My enlightenment, as it were, regarding scientific ‘proof’ and associated beliefs came in two parts during my university education. First was a poignant discussion with a professor providing feedback on a paper I had written and used the idea of science proving something to support my conclusion. He stated rather bluntly that “‘proof’ is only relevant in mathematics and jurisprudence, not science.” He then went on to explain the concept in greater detail, but it was that short statement that has stuck with me and altered my view of ‘objective science’ as ‘proof’ of various beliefs.

The second tipping point for me was during a presentation on human intelligence by the psychology department of the university (I had become interested in the subject as I explored human evolution via physical anthropology classes and sat in on a presentation by a guest speaker). As I recall, the visiting professor asked somewhat rhetorically what was the definition of intelligence we could use to explore the concept. After entertaining a few responses (all of which were different) he stressed that if we were to ask 100 psychologists such a question, we would get back 100 different answers: there was no agreed upon definition. One’s particular perspective ‘coloured’ what was important and observed.

There were also a handful of texts I read that impacted my beliefs. Some of the most pertinent ones were: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Mismeasure of Man, Ever Since Darwin, The Interpretation of Cultures.

The two experiences described above and the books I read impacted my interests at the time and I set off exploring other ideas and perspectives, getting into deconstructivism, philology, hermeneutics, dialectics, epistemology, objectivity versus subjectivity, and skepticism. More recently I’ve explored the somewhat related subjects of complexity and cognition.

All of these ‘colour’ my belief system and my arguments regarding ‘collapse’. Do I know for certain some of the things I pontificate about. Absolutely not. And I hope I couch my rhetoric in words such as ‘likely’, ‘evidence’, ‘probably’, etc. to demonstrate my uncertainty. Because when we get right down to it, not one of us can be certain about the future and our beliefs about it. As several people have been credited with stating: It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. We live within complex systems made up of complex systems that, because of the nonlinear feedback loops that exist and emergent phenomena that arise from them, can neither be predicted nor controlled. Of this, I am fairly certain.

Do I believe ‘collapse’ of our current globalised, industrial world will occur? Yes. The evidence, to me, seems overwhelming; particularly all the experiments involving complex societies that have been carried out before us and ended with decline/collapse (see Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies and Diamond’s Collapse) and the ‘fact’ that we live on a world with finite resources but are pursuing perpetual growth (see Meadows et al’s The Limits to Growth and Catton’s Overshoot).

Will, as some argue, our technology and human ingenuity save us in this current trial in complex societies? I’m doubtful; in fact, I’m fairly certain these things will simply expedite the fall as we rush into them to try and solve the problems we have created, bumping up against the real biophysical limits imposed by a finite world in the process and creating even more problems and dilemmas.

Of course, because I cannot predict the future with certainty, only time will tell…

Feedback Loops and Unsustainable Systems

June 1, 2023

Feedback Loops and Unsustainable Systems

Mountains as seen from Tennessee Welcome Center

I have brought up feedback loops (both positive and negative) many times in this space. I’ve also brought up unsustainable systems in one way or another in practically every article, since they are endemic in human society and at the root of every predicament. It would be very simple for me to tell you that if we just eliminated every unsustainable system and replaced them with sustainable ones that most all our troubles would be resolved. Aaahhh, if only it were that simple. While there is much truth to that statement, the physical realities of replacing these systems would be a massive transformation that is prevented by the Limits to Growth – not enough energy and resources to accomplish the job due to self-reinforcing positive feedback loops which would only add fuel to the fire of the existing ecological overshoot that we are already in. Understanding how we got to this point is key in comprehending why
options on dealing with overshoot are so limited. Several different ideas revolve around the same concept of creating a “new civilization” that humans could embark on to reduce overshoot and live happily ever after. I’ve pointed out one concept known as The Venus Project which is really nothing more than pure hopium. I’ve spent the last several articles detailing the Degrowth Movement and why degrowth in and of itself isn’t enough to actually accomplish much, mainly due to a lack of acceptance from corporations and governments, which would suffer greatly as a result. Of course, we’re all going to suffer from the implications of overshoot anyway, which makes that fact more or less irrelevant in the first place. I’ve pointed out why the MEER concept is unrealistic and more fantasy than reality…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Ramping up wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles can’t solve our energy problem

February 13, 2023

Ramping up wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles can’t solve our energy problem

Many people believe that installing more wind turbines and solar panels and manufacturing more electric vehicles can solve our energy problem, but I don’t agree with them. These devices, plus the batteries, charging stations, transmission lines and many other structures necessary to make them work represent a high level of complexity.

A relatively low level of complexity, such as the complexity embodied in a new hydroelectric dam, can sometimes be used to solve energy problems, but we cannot expect ever-higher levels of complexity to always be achievable.

According to the anthropologist Joseph Tainter, in his well-known book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, there are diminishing returns to added complexity. In other words, the most beneficial innovations tend to be found first. Later innovations tend to be less helpful. Eventually the energy cost of added complexity becomes too high, relative to the benefit provided.

In this post, I will discuss complexity further. I will also present evidence that the world economy may already have hit complexity limits. Furthermore, the popular measure, “Energy Return on Energy Investment” (EROEI) pertains to direct use of energy, rather than energy embodied in added complexity. As a result, EROEI indications tend to suggest that innovations such as wind turbines, solar panels and EVs are more helpful than they really are. Other measures similar to EROEI make a similar mistake.

[1] In this video with Nate Hagens, Joseph Tainter explains how energy and complexity tend to grow simultaneously, in what Tainter calls the Energy-Complexity Spiral.

Figure 1. The Energy-Complexity Spiral from 2010 presentation called *The Energy-Complexity Spiral* by Joseph Tainter.

According to Tainter, energy and complexity build on each other. At first, growing complexity can be helpful to a growing economy by encouraging the uptake of available energy products…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVI

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