Our Finite World

Gail Tverberg is an excellent analyst who wrote extensively for the now defunct "The Oil Drum" website.   As an actuary, she's a master of statistics and does a great job of cutting through the bs.   Her latest article, "Why a Finite World is a Problem" does a great job of detailing exactly why our industrial economy as we've known it cannot continue.   She focuses primarily on raw materials and energy, though her arguments clearly apply to the biosphere's capacity for pollution as well.  Definitely worth a read for anyone who is counting on retirement investments or the continuation of a 20th century type of world.

Going Rural

Among mainstream or green media, you can find a lot to support the opinion that urban life is the green choice.  There are undoubtedly some significant energy savings when you live in a multiple-family housing environment, and particularly if you can ditch the car.

If we're going to compare the typical rural family with the typical urban family of today, I think these stories are spot-on.  The picture changes significantly when we look at what's *possible* in both environments, however.  If we incorporate a forecast of future energy scenarios, the urban option takes on significant new shortcomings.

First of all, let's look back into history a bit. If we venture back before the time of the fossil-fueled industrial revolution, we'll find cities that would hardly qualify as such by today's standards. Why?  Because any concentration of people requires that all resources (food, fuel, construction materials, etc) be brought in from outside the city.  There are numerous instances throughout history of cities collapsing when the distance to their nearest fuel sources (firewood, typically) became too great.

When your transportation options are limited to your own two feet, animal power, or water transport, the area from which you can draw these resources shrinks dramatically -- probably no more than 10 miles for anything moved in significant quantity (though water transport would allow a greater range for high-value items that justify the additional expense).  If you're limited to drawing all of your goods from within a 10 mile radius, you'll find that supporting a large city, say of 100,000 or more, is nearly impossible.

Why is this important to consider today?   Our fossil fuel sources have now entered a decline which will be exponential in nature.  Like it or not, our history, in terms of energy supply, is going into reverse.  The ever-optimistic oil industry, in their attempt to retain investors, trumpets the fact that we still have a 54 year supply of oil, though their calculations do not incorporate what is likely to happen to us economically as the price of this energy rises ever higher, nor the fact that our planet would no longer be habitable if we burned it all. The fact that our Federal Reserve now has to inject $85 billion each month into our economy just to keep it on life support should tell us something of where our economy now sits, 6 years after hitting peak oil.  That 54 year supply is fully dependent upon our ability to pay for it.   Like the cities of old, we're watching our energy supply retreat over the horizon.

Our ability to pay for energy depends upon our economic condition, which in turn depends upon both our environment (climate change, anyone?) as well as the price of energy.  Also worthy of note is that the energy return on our oil supply here in the US has dropped from 100:1 to less than 10:1 in 80 years, with most of our newer sources even below 5:1. Chart that trend out for a few more years and tell me where it leads us. Suffice to say that there will always be loads of fossil fuels in the ground that are not worth digging up.

While urban living does offer significant efficiency advantages over rural living, it has an achilles heel which will become painfully apparent over the next decade, and which cannot be overcome. The problem is that urban energy requirements on the modern scale can only be met with fossil fuel sources, no matter how efficient their use is.  There is no way for Los Angeles or New York residents to return to burning firewood. The supply simply isn't available within economically transportable distance, and resulting air quality would make China's current problems look like a walk in the park.  Any attempted return to animal-based transportation in our oversized urban regions would fail for similar reasons.

So what about the renewable energy revolution and the high-tech green future?  Well...  It may have some limited application in our future, but suffice to say that much of it is hogwash when you look at net energy return.  The solar industry, when all inputs are considered, uses far more energy than actual solar output. Wind may be somewhat better, but I'd be willing to bet that most of it will disappear along with our fossil fuel sources as well.  At best, most of what's been presented to us as alternative energy is little more than the leveraged use of fossil fuels.

It is quite possible for a rural family to beat their urban counterparts in energy use.  The major difference in current energy use in urban vs. rural areas is that for transportation. There are tens of thousands of rural Amish and Mennonite families who do not use fossil fuels for their family transportation, but rather the "antiquated" horse and buggy, with many of them also making great use of bikes.  It always makes me smile when I see an Amish grandpa riding his bike to town, at an age when a lot of "English" Americans (as the Amish refer to the rest of us) can barely fit behind the wheel of the SUV they purchased to accommodate their super-sized physiques.

Keep in mind also that roads themselves require significant energy to maintain (which will soon be lacking).   The Amish of the 1800's rarely owned buggies, for the simple reason that most rural areas did not have suitable roads for them.  This is one area where downsized urban regions may maintain an edge, as paved roads were historically found only in towns.

The second energy advantage for urban residents is that of heating, though it's realized primarily through the use of multiple family dwellings.  The prudent rural resident wins here as well -- by heating with locally sourced wood.  Because wood is not a fossil fuel, the carbon emissions to not result in a net gain in biospheric carbon.  Keep your population density within traditional standards, and the smoke really isn't a problem either, particularly with newer recirculating stove designs.

Last but not least, it's important to remember that most energy use is industrial, not personal.  It's not the gasoline burned in the car you shouldn't drive, but the coal that was used to smelt the steel. It's not the natural gas used to heat your apartment, but the coal burned to create the concrete it's constructed with, and the diesel used to transport the building materials.  The rural resident has a distinct advantage here as well, as they have the option to provide for their own food, clothing, construction materials or household goods sourced from local materials, all of which can be (and was historically) accomplished sans fossil fuels.

So while the typical rural resident of today is in fact less green than their urban counterpart, a rural location offers far greater flexibility -- which can, should, and will be used as a matter of necessity. Probably the greatest shortcoming of rural life at this point in time is that of employment (which I should note, is also a product of the industrial revolution).

We're Sick

As a society, we stopped producing food decades ago.  Most of our families left their farms to go join the urban masses sometime in the last century.  That's when our disease took hold.  While we still learn as kids that that the food we eat comes from farms, that's about as far as our understanding goes.  We've lost the knowledge and understanding of what makes a farm -- or anything in the natural world -- really work.  We don't care about something we don't understand.

When we see on the evening news that the US is wracked with (climate change induced) drought, we might think "that's too bad for those poor farmers".  We might even suffer a moment's consternation as we realize that food prices will be going up.  We have no fear of starvation though.  Food will still come from somewhere (from the store of course!).  We "know" but we no longer understand how important the natural world is, because we think we've left it behind.   We've got more important issues to occupy our thoughts, like Miley Cyrus' butt.

The fact is that we are a part of the natural world, in the same way that your big toe is part of you.  We cannot separate ourselves from it any more than your toe can cut himself free from a life in your stinky shoes to embark on a new life of leisure at some sandy tropical beach.  We think of nature as a separate entity;  something we may enjoy on weekends when we venture out from our man-made environs.  We don't need it anymore, so we're cutting ourselves loose, heading out into our brave new world.

If we truly understood ourselves to be a part of nature, we wouldn't just shrug our shoulders at the news that our oil addiction just killed the Gulf of Mexico, shortly before we go to visit the gas station yet again.  We wouldn't brush off news that endocrine-disrupting chemicals are now making their way out of fracked groundwater and into our drinking water, right before we fire up the furnace to keep our home warm and toasty with "clean burning" natural gas.

If we truly understood that nature's health is our health, anyone suggesting something as absurd as this or this would be treated like a knife wielding intruder smashing his way into our children's bedroom.  Why?   Because both of them will ultimately accomplish the same thing.

The Last Nomads and the Culture of Fear

Please read this powerful and thought provoking article by permaculturist Toby Hemenway on our society vs. the nomadic societies we've destroyed.  His thoughts closely echo my own.

We also stopped at Little Bighorn on our move from Washington in 2008, and it struck me how recently this battle and the associated genocide had occurred.   The house we now live in was built before the battle, on land also taken from natives who treated it far more respectfully and appropriately than we have.

In a short 150 years, our "domesticated" masses have destroyed the freest people on the planet.  We're well on our way to destroying the possibility of anyone ever living in freedom again (I'll laugh at anyone who proclaims the US to be "The Land of the Free"), or living at all for that matter.

Those of us who accept the status quo, and who follow the default course that our society has laid out for us are guilty of the most heinous crimes imaginable, though most refuse to recognize it.   The worst evil imaginable is little more than the product of our own ignorance and complacency.

Turning Down the Volume

I've lately been listening to Mary Roach's book "Stiff" on my daily commute, a fascinating (and often stomach churning) book about all things cadaver-related.    One chapter covers the history of attempts to resuscitate cadavers and heads (freshly guillotined!).   The next moves to attempts by surgeons to transplant living heads (on animals thus far, though I'm not yet finished with the book).

One comment in particular caught my ear.   She mentions that people in sensory deprivation chambers invariably hallucinate and ultimately go mad (relating to the fact that a detached brain, if kept alive, would most likely suffer a degree of sensory deprivation with similar consequences).

Another book on my recent list (Pandora's Seed, by Spencer Wells) discusses the rise in mental health issues in modern society, to the point that mental health issues are expected to be the second leading cause of death in the US by 2020.

Could widespread sensory deprivation be the cause of our mental health issues?   Absolutely.

We already know that our immune systems "go mad" when they're deprived of frequent exposure to irritants and pathogens, resulting in a massive increase in allergies and autoimmune disorders, to the point that many children now risk sudden death from the exposure of a single drop of peanut oil or milk on their skin.  Researchers have discovered that Amish children, who frequently live on farms with livestock and often go barefoot in the summer (both likely sources of exposure to pathogenic bacteria), have very low allergy rates.  Coincidence?

So how are our lives like sensory deprivation chambers?   Consider the life of any human before the industrial revolution (or better yet, before the advent of agriculture), and contrast that with our daily lives now.   The pre-industrial human spent the majority of their time outdoors, directly experiencing everything from extreme temperatures to wind, rain, and all the weather that we nowadays just view from the comfort of our climate controlled car/home/workplace.

Their daily activities were highly varied.  They used their hands, not machines.  They hunted and gathered wide varieties of food (leading to better nutrition -- human stature dropped significantly once we became farmers), travelling through all sorts of terrain.  They built their own homes.  Schooled their own children.  They did everything that you and I now pay others to do for us, either directly or otherwise.  Nowadays, most of us repeatedly perform a single specialized task for which we receive money, typically performed within a climate controlled building while sitting still.  It's boring.

So to relieve the boredom, we go home, sit, and turn on the TV, computer, or game console.  We don't make our own entertainment, as pre-industrial man would've done.  We've outsourced damn near everything.

The net effect of trying to avoid physical work and make ourselves comfortable is that we've turned down the volume on life -- moving ever closer to the point of complete sensory deprivation.  The compartmentalization of our lives and careers has deprived us of varied and essential experiences. It's no wonder that both our bodies and minds are going nuts.

Get rid of the fossil fuels, and I suspect these ills of modern society will go with them.

Art and Beauty

As a decidedly left-brained type, I’d have to say I’d often had trouble relating to artists and their work.  So much art seems foolish and impractical, or a weak attempt to relive the glory-days of a high school art class.  The deeper meaning or message that others proclaim to see often appears like a case of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to me. Despite this clear handicap, I’m drawn towards beauty, as most people are . Traditional societies have all integrated art into their lives in ways that seem both meaningful and appropriate. The tribes of the Pacific Northwest apparently had lots of time left over after finding things to eat. They took art to an amazing level, adorning everything from their houses and canoes to their clothing and household utensils. I think that much of my aversion to "art" is a result of the separation of art and functionality that has come about as a result of industrialized manufacture. Anything which can be made, can be sold at a lower cost if there’s no artistic input. In the rare cases where a good is manufactured with some artistic beauty, the beauty is cheapened when it was clearly created by a machine, and is exactly like to 500,000,000 other items which were made in the same factory.

Functional beauty can come in many forms. It doesn’t need to be the elaborate ornamentation of a victorian house or an Eastlake-era piece of furniture, though I’m fond of both. I’ve heard beauty described as “the elimination of the unnecessary”, which I like.

An old Herreshoff designed sailboat comes to mind as an embodiment of beauty without adornment.  Beauty is, as they say, "In the eye of the beholder".  

Some of my perception of beauty no doubt draws from an aversion to objects which use fossil fuels.

The modern Bayliner "Fly-Bridge" type power boat is about the aesthetic opposite of the Herreshoff in my opinion.  I delight in referring to these as "self dumpers", in reference to what is likely to happen as their typically overweight crew all migrate to the fly-bridge at the top of the boat, making it a little too top-heavy. But I digress...

In the pre-industrialized world, where most all goods were made by craftspeople, beauty was an important element of any trade. It differentiated your work from that of the competition. As industrialization wanes, I’m looking forward to seeing the return of art and beauty re-integrated into the items we make and use each day.

The Market Economy

I think I've found a new model for those who rail on about our draconian EPA (and thus garner loads of corporate campaign contributions along with the admiration of the Koch brothers).   It's a land where market forces rule, and externalized costs are not a concern for business.   The pursuit of wealth and industry is the pinnacle of societal achievement there.   Though we can't live there, we rush to support them in their efforts, and we are clearly the beneficiaries of their amazing work ethic.  Look for the "Made in..." label on the next item you buy at the store.   Just don't look behind the curtain.