C4CC (7): The accumulating crises of our time (3)
Last bit of chapter 2 - widening out the lens again, so that it becomes obvious that the principal problem isn’t a particular resource limit but the absence of wisdom.
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Energy is fundamental to everything that we do, which is why Chapter 1 looked at the most salient of energy limits, but there are many others. Consider water: a third of the population of the planet is now in the condition of what is called “water stress”, which is one level above water scarcity. Consider the Ogallala aquifer in the United States, which is being used up four times faster than it is being replenished. In the southern areas it is being used up a hundred times more quickly than it is being replenished and it is responsible for irrigating six million hectares in the States, their bread basket. When that water supply is used up, what will happen to the production of wheat in the United States? Then there is the Middle East. Of the 14 Middle Eastern countries, 11 are now in a position of water scarcity and Saudi Arabia obtains three-quarters of its water needs from its own ground water stocks. In effect, Saudi Arabia is mining the water and that physical resource will soon run dry – which has geopolitical implications. Some have already started – the Saudi government has announced that it will cease growing wheat, as they don't have the water to make it happen.
Water is the most essential human need, but the next is food. Per person, world wide, food production peaked in 1985. One in eight world wide are considered malnourished (they don’t get enough food to grow properly), which is 30% of the sub-Sahara and African population (UN figures). 40 million a year die of absolute starvation. The Limits to Growth predicted an absolute peak of food production before 2020 (gross tonnage, not per person). The production of food can continue to increase for a time, but that increase is outpaced by the rise of population. Despite all the false alarms it really is possible that Malthus will have the last word. One area of hope is that the Western world is massively over-consuming of food – as Gandhi said, “There’s enough for people’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”
Where does food come from? Mostly, it is grown in the ground, so the next relevant limit might be topsoil. In 1900 the amount of topsoil per person was four thousand tons and now it is less than one thousand. This is exponential growth in reverse, as a result of the population explosion and the amount of topsoil being driven off by erosion and pollution. Cultivatable land per person world wide is now less than half what it was in 1950.
Then there is pollution. The Limits to Growth model doubled the amount of energy available to be exploited by the human system and they then found that the next limit to prevent economic growth was pollution: the world became too toxic to support the right number of people. We can see this beginning in terms of disease: Asian flu, mad cow disease, MRSA. This is why we can talk about the accumulating crises of our time, and the accelerating crises of our time. Wherever we look, we can see problems developing.
The crucial issue, however, is not about any one problem, or any particular time scale or prediction from any single problem. The fundamental issue is that exponential growth cannot continue within a finite environment. There will come a point when the lilies will cover the pond. If peak oil does not cause the system to break down then deforestation and the collapse of the topsoil will, or the exhaustion of water supplies, or the impact of highly evolved diseases will. That is the essential point which needs to be absorbed.
There is something of a 'litany' about environmental concerns like these, and the Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg offers a balancing perspective. Lomborg's book is called The Sceptical Environmentalist. It is thorough and well researched, with lots of important and useful information in it, and it makes some crucial points about the way in which our society has misordered its priorities. Unfortunately, it is also a perfect demonstration of how to miss the big point, and this can be seen by his treatment of oil. At the moment our system has more energy available in cheaper and more usable form than ever before, and what The Sceptical Environmentalist does is look at the last 50 to 100 years and argue that, on the whole, things have been getting better. This is true. It is only true, however, because we are still (just) on the upswing of available energy. Lomborg's forecast projection was that the price of oil would remain in a range of 10 to 20 dollars a barrel until 2020. History has shown that prediction to be not just wrong but spectacularly wrong. Specific predictions are always dubious – which is why it is the underlying concept that is important to grasp. There are limits to our physical growth, and those limits are starting to impact upon human society.
The real insight of The Limits to Growth is not about any one particular limit, it is that for any one problem that is solved, another will rear up instead, because the underlying issue of exponential growth is not a problem it is a predicament. What is unsustainable cannot be sustained and will come to an end. Trying to avoid this truth by addressing each individual problem – whether that be peak oil, global warming, overfishing, overpopulation, deforestation or any of the rest – is to build new ponds and ignore the water-lilies. The predicament we face is that our way of life has been built up around the maintenance of exponential growth – and as that growth crashes into ecological limits, so too will that way of life. As has happened so often in the past, it is the poor who will suffer first; indeed, this has already begun.
Some consequences are foreseeable. When Third World environments degrade and populations cannot feed themselves then there is extensive human migration and it will develop on a vastly greater scale than has yet been seen. All the impoverished people in Central Africa, in Asia, in Central America will head north and west. We are going to see hordes of starving millions outside and hordes of frightened westerners inside. The rich will want to put walls up, because they can see what’s coming but, ultimately, the wall will not last.
Our unconscious already knows this, and we can see this most clearly through cinema and film. Think of the film “Titanic”. This wonderfully plush luxury liner, filled with people who think it is unsinkable, “we’ll carry on as we are because everything is fine”, collides with an iceberg (a limit to growth!) and catastrophe follows. A more pertinent example may be George Romero’s 'Land of the Dead' which has a group of frightened westerners walled into a society of relative affluence, whilst outside the wall there are hordes and hordes of people who want what they have. Eventually the wall fails, as it must, and horror ensues.
The signs of crisis are all around us, for those with the eyes to see them. It is possible to insulate our minds from this reality – and for those who are affluent, in secure and well-paid jobs, with a comfortable house and adequate food and clothing, with access to the varied means of distraction that the modern West can provide, the insulation is effective. Yet that shielding of minds from reality is itself the symptom of the root problem.
One way to understand the situation of overshoot ecologically is to see it as an inability to receive feedback from the wider environment. The population of reindeer on St Matthew's Island, for example, were insulated from reality by the abundance of food. It was only when that abundance had been exhausted that the underlying reality (of how many reindeer could be supported in the longer term on that island) could be seen clearly.
Another way of talking about being 'insulated from reality' is to say that we have lost our wisdom. It is the way in which we have lost our wisdom that constitutes the most fundamental element of our predicament.