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Category: collapse
Talk GMOs to Me
HuffPo’s minky in-house science blogger talks GMOs with a plant geneticist. (Hey, you don’t title your show/column”Talk nerdy to me” if you look like Ann Ramsey in Throw Momma from the Train.)
The scientist who was interviewed says the science blogger knows her stuff. I agree. I watched it about 12 times. Then I moved on to her other “Talk Nerdy to Me” videos. (I had to catch up!)
In other GMO-related news, did you know that “genetically engineered corn is so tough on equipment that farmers switch to kevlar for tractor tires” and that genetically engineered foods are making you fat? Finally, a real reason to label GMO foods!
One last thing: Via John Fleck, who talks nerdy to his New Mexico readers, I learn that survivalists will not be turning to GMO seeds to help them ride out the apocalypse. On that note, if you ever want to go full in on that doomsday stuff–or just keep up to date as the world is collapsing around you–hook up with these folks. There’s even a weekly column at their site that explores
the psychology of change and the heart and soul of Collapse
GMO-free seed vaults. Psychotherapists who teach you how to embrace the collapse of civilization. You can’t make this stuff up.
The Collapse of a Green Parable for Collapse
UPDATE: Some of the information and assertions in this post have been disputed by Jared Diamond here.
In 1995, Jared Diamond wrote an article for Discover magazine that began:
In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?
Diamond expanded on his thesis ten years later, with the best-selling Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Many people concerned about resource depletion and overpopulation now think of Easter Island as a symbolic case study. Something about those statues, too, that seems to haunt us.
I have noted that Easter Island as a green parable and cautionary lesson
appears to rest on scientifically shaky ground.
Mark Lynas discusses the latest evidence that calls the tale into question.
More recent archaeological work has now challenged almost every aspect of this conventional “˜ecocide’ narrative, most completely and damningly in a new book by the archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo entitled “˜The Statues That Walked‘. Hunt and Lipo did not set out to challenge the conventional story: their initial studies were intended merely to confirm it by providing some greater archaeological detail. However, as they dug and analysed, things turned out very differently.
Moreover, Lynas suggests that we might be drawing the wrong lessons from the history of East Islanders, since the modern-day inhabitants aren’t doing so bad:
Perhaps the more recent studies of their history will help challenge the Hobbesian and pessimistic view that human nature necessarily tends towards destruction and violence. Resilience and sustainability are just as likely outcomes, even over the longer term.
Rooting for Collapse?
Gail the Actuary, who often writes about peak oil and resource scarcity issues at The Oil Drum, makes the case here that we’re on borrowed time. But unlike Jeremy Grantham, she doesn’t think we can do anything about it:
There is no real solution to our predicament. Even if a cheap liquid fuel could be found in abundance tomorrow, at most what it would do would be move the problem down the road a little way. Population would continue to grow. Pollution would become a greater and greater issue. We would have more problems with fresh water. We would likely come to another limit, in not too many years.
This pessimistic outlook is oddly embraced by one of the writers at Ecological Sociology:
What I love most about Gail’s presentation is that she finally concludes that “there is no solution.” This is the conclusion I came to almost a year ago. When you put the whole ball of wax together, you have to face that fact that there really is no solution. That’s either a ‘bad thing’ or a ‘good thing’ depending on what is collapsing and whether you’re really invested in keeping it going. What is collapsing is globalized Capitalist civilization, and frankly, I’m not sorry to see it go.
This cavalier attitude really rubs me the wrong way. The dominant global economic order may well be poised to collapse, but wishing for it to happen strikes me as insensitive to the amount of suffering that would occur. And just out of curiosity, exactly what sort of (sustainable) economic system does this writer see rising from the ashes? [UPDATE: Shaun's response is here.]
Thankfully, a much less depressingly fatalistic view can be found over at the Oil Drum thread:
From what I see in urban Seattle, the generation of people in their 20′s and 30′s are developing a very different set of expectations than the generation before them. Younger people are driving smaller vehicles if not walking or biking, living in smaller spaces, delaying having children, renting instead of owning, spending their money on experiences and good food rather than consumer goods. It reminds me most of European urban living where a high quality of life requires a much lower level of consumption.
I’m not disagreeing with Gail’s premise at all. The current Business As Usual is not sustainable. What people often miss, however, is that there is a generational change underway and that the upcoming generation may not want or miss the current BAU.
In other, less well endowed countries there will undoubtedly be much misery in the years ahead (see Somalia today). But in the US at least, there are (and always have been) many ways to live within our still bountiful resources. It won’t necessarily look like what many people think of as ‘normal’ today. But for some of us it will be a very welcome change.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Indeed. It’s also better than waiting (expectantly) for the world to crumble all around you.
The Art of Graceful Collapses
On a recent post of mine at Climate Central, one reader left an impassioned comment that sounded as if he considered overpopulation to be the greatest threat to humanity. I’m going to break it up into three parts. Here’s the challenge, as he explained it:
An even more overlooked problem is overpopulation (defined as living unsustainably, whether due to a high number of people at a low level of consumption or a smaller number of people at a high level of consumption – basic human ecology). In most or all of the Arab countries undergoing civil unrest, unemployment is rampant due to a rapidly expanding number of people flooding the job market. Also, the fraction of the population that are children is enormous, meaning the problem will get worse very soon. Expect more countries to undergo this process, continued unrest, failed states, wars, and terrorism. Smaller families would have prevented this a generation ago.
I think he’s conveniently overlooking the venal corruption and oppression of the regimes in those countries as a major factor, and making a faulty assumption about smaller families. No matter. Here’s his solution–and because it will come too late, the consequence to humanity:
Now it will take 1 – 2 generations at one child per family just to stop growth, and a century or two to bring population down to a sustainable level. We don’t have that much time before we hit the wall of climate change, inadequate resources, and mass extinction. That’s true worldwide: we need smaller families everywhere, and drastically reduced consumption in developed countries. Since that won’t happen, expect collapse of modern civilization.
Now this final part, a riff on the nature of “graceful collapses,” is what fascinates me most:
In principle collapse could be “graceful,” with preservation of knowledge and diversity and an orderly retreat to agrarian, nomadic, and hunter-gatherer societies as humanitarian calamities rapidly lower population and consumption through natural disasters, disease, and famine that we will be powerless to prevent or adapt to.
Graceful collapses have happened before, but the odds are against it now for two reasons. First, languages and cultural knowledge are already being lost at a rapid rate as cultures go under. Second, the powerful will try to maintain their own well being by force, leading to more unrest, wars, terrorism, and possible nuclear holocaust.
Ungraceful (“graceless?”) collapse would probably mean the end of our species, and millions of years for the world’s ecology to rebuild after the mass extinction – if climate change doesn’t sterilize the planet.
Jeez, that makes Soylent Green seem like a Disney flick.
So here’s my question: Does anybody know of examples of “graceful collapses” in human history?
As for the “orderly retreat to agrarian, nomadic, and hunter-gatherer societies,” well, good luck with that Flintstones/National Geographic mashup. For a nice tonic to such romanticism, see this recent piece, the main point of which you can glean from its subhead:
Pre-modern lifestyles were fraught with violence, disease, and uncertainty. We should be happy that indigenous societies are increasingly leaving them behind.
Surviving the Future
I have a deeply cynical side but I’m also an optimist by nature. Ms. Collide-a-scape is the fretter in the family. Several months ago, we finally got around to watching the dystopian documentary that made quite a splash in 2009, which NPR accurately characterized:
So this is how the world ends: Not with an action-movie bang, but with a guy sitting in a darkened room, chain-smoking and warning that “things are falling apart.”
Ms. Scape found the movie plausible enough to be sufficiently haunted by it. I, on the other hand, found the chain-smoking guy to be too preposterous to take seriously. After all, remember the last chain-smoking guy who got us all paranoid:
So I’m happy to report that Ms. Scape’s despair has now been tempered after watching this documentary on CNBC last night that was originally released in the Fall.
The Collapse Meme
The paranoid flip side to Glen Beck is Civilizational Collapse hawker Michael Ruppert, the subject of this creepy 2009 movie. Like Beck, Ruppert has a loyal fanbase who share his dark worldview, which he now propagates on the web through…get ready for it: Collapse Network.
Ruppert periodically posts videos on Collapse Network, such as this beaut from last week, in which he explains why Americans should be “scared shitless” by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. His prediction:
It will not be long before we start seeing these same events happen in Europe and happening here as well. This is a very dangerous time.
Like Beck, Ruppert is also not shy about his prophetic prowess:
I’m the guy who can tell you which tree is gonna fall on you first–hopefully.
Now what’s really interesting to me about all this is that Ruppert has linked up with New Age survivalist/guru Tom Brown, who I’m familiar with. But that is a story or a post for another time.
Peak Oil Meets the New Age
The NYT uses the Gulf oil disaster as a hook to examine the peak oil “collapsitarians.” Some of them are a bit overwrought, it seems, and want to do more than rub their worry beads. Fortunately, there’s a new cottage industry catering to their anxieties. The theme of the NYT story can be gleaned from this opener:
As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.
For Mrs. Wilkerson, 33, a moderate Democrat from Oakton, Va., who designs computer interfaces, the spill reinforced what she had been obsessing over for more than a year “” that oil use was outstripping the world’s supply. She worried about what would come after: maybe food shortages, a collapse of the economy, a breakdown of civil order. Her call was part of a telephone course about how to live through it all.
In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.
Indeed there is. Click on the link for that telephone course. Check out its marketing pitch:
How do you feel about the current unraveling of industrial civilization and the coming transition? Do you long for a place to discuss your feelings, thoughts, and methods of preparation? Do you long to feel less alone as you live with all you know?
Now that’s some serious fear mongering, served up with a soothing New Age veneer. Sure enough, click on the instructor’s bio and homepage, and you’ll learn that she’s a former psychotherapist, whose latest book is called Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Path.
What’s that sound you hear? The wonks at The Oil Drum retching in unison. Because I’m sure that’s just what they want, their high-minded debates on overshoot being co-opted by pseudo-spiritualist claptrap.
Still, you gotta admire that singularly American can-do entrepreneurial spirit. If industrial civilization is going under, someone might as well cash in on the collapse.
The Media Ecosystem Collapse
Who else but Clay Shirky would draw on Joseph Tainter’s seminal 1988 book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” to discuss the downfall of a once dominant business model?
Noting the regeneration of media on the web, Shirky also makes this very interesting observation:
When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.
Hmm, I wonder what the The Oil Drum gang or the Resilience folks would make of this.
Of Science & Stories
Michael Wilcox, a Stanford University archaeologist, has a new book that takes a fresh look at the Pueblo Revolt. A university press release captures some interesting themes of Wilcox’s post-colonial work in the Southwest, such as this quote directly from his book:
Archaeologists and anthropologists have imposed disease, demographic collapse and acculturation as explanations of discontinuity and cultural extinction. Almost universally written from a European perspective, the mythologies of conquest have helped render Native Americans invisible.
Part of what’s bugging Wilcox is also the focus of a new volume of essays (by a number of scholars, including Wilcox), that challenges the research behind Jared Diamond’s popular and influential tome, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It so happens that just yesterday, Rex over at Savage Minds covered this renewed debate in a detailed post.
Not having read either of the newer books, it’s impossible for me to offer any informed comment on them. But the Stanford piece quotes some provocative Wilcox statements, such as this one at the end:
I may be critical of archaeology, but what I am saying is that it makes sense to do work that is responsive and includes the opinions of indigenous populations. The more that archeologists and Native communities work together, the better things get. I really want this field to do well, and I believe it can be much better. It has to because stories of the past matter.
On this, he’s likely to get little argument from southwestern archaeologists, as many have become increasingly receptive to Native American concerns and oral history. But there’s something about that last sentence–because stories of the past matter–that might set off alarm bells in some quarters. Because, in fact, there are points where science and tribal stories of the past collide.
It’ll be interesting to see how Wilcox and his colleagues reconcile the tension between science and oral tradition. As my recent piece on the contested Navajo history in the Southwest suggests, science can be trumped by the politics of this newfound, well-intentioned sensitivity.
Carter's Energy Speech
There’s an interesting exchange over at The Oil Drum about the legacy of President Carter’s infamous 1977 energy speech. For my money, this commenter (who also posts essays at The Oil Drum), is spot on:
It is almost impossible to quantify the damage that this one speech did to the very real need for a modern restructuring of the advanced world’s energy systems. Such is the terrible damage caused by false alarm. To this day, that time period (the late 1970′s), that speech (the Carter energy speech) and that period of press hysteria has ingrained into my mind the absolute need to be cautious about making or accepting hysterical pronouncements of “we are running out of oil”, “by the year XXXX we will consume more oil than we can produce {you actually heard this said in the 1970′s, but of course on a worldwide basis it is a statistical impossibility) and all such claims that the end is nigh.
There can be nothing more damaging, NOTHING, than false alarm. It destroys for decades the credibility of the perhaps well intentioned campaigners issuing the warning, it destroys support for the cause (whatever cause it may be) among the most able and dedicated potential recruits to the cause, it gives the enemies of the cause needed ammunition to rip apart the cause on the sword of it’s own words.
I have always believed, and still do, that Jimmy Carter was and is one of the most honorable politicians in American hitory, one of the few men of absolute conviction and decency to ever become President of The United States of America.
I also believe that the speech he gave on energy on the fateful day was one of the most damaging speeches ever given, to the future of the United States, to the future of rational planned transition to a modern energy system, and by extension, to the future health and prosperity of the world.
Jimmy Carter armed the enemies of modern energy, he destroyed the credibility of those who knew the need for change and modernization was real and imperative, and he drove a generation away from taking seriously one of the most serious issues of our era. No enemy could have done as much damage to the cause of a real humane transition away from our enslavement to fossil fuel as this friend of the cause Jimmy Carter did by way of a poorly researched, poorly thought out false alarm. His hysteria helped waste a third of a century.
Any cautionary lessons here for climate catastrophists? Will people be making similar observations about the climate crisis in thirty years?
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