I was pointed to a very interesting book; mandatory reading, I should say, for any involuntary depressed cynical pessimist, especially concerning the survival of our civilisation. Not that I am such a person. There is no other compulsively positively-thinking person like I am.
Back to business. The book I am referring to is called “The Upside of Down” and it is written by a bloke called Thomas Homer-Dixon. Great name. And the book is not so bad either. At first glance, it comes across as a somewhat non-academic book, but that is just appearance. Mister Homer-Dixon is a professor and an academic all right, but he popularized his book a little to make it readable for the common audience. Well, that is what I think.
I won’t bother you with the details, because you can read those if you follow the link above, but in (very) short, the argument in the book is that society faces several stress factors, that can have far reaching effects – by themselves or concurrently – therewith causing very undesirable outcomes like the breakdown of the entire system. This is shown by the example of the Roman Empire, which, as the argument goes, broke down because of a mismatch between it’s energy requirements, caused by it’s complexity as well as some disturbances, and the ability to produce this energy.
I am making a small sidestep here: Homer-Dixon talks about The Thermodynamics of Society. The second law of thermodynamics states, that in a closed system, complexity and order tend to decrease and the system strives towards an equilibrium that requires less energy to uphold this complexity and order. This is called an increase in entropy. In society, this means that a higher level of complexity and order require a lot of effort and energy to run and maintain. At some point, this will outstretch the actual ability to put in the required effort, and the system breaks down. This is what happened to the Roman Empire. It became to complicated to exist. It collapsed under its own weight, so to speak.
A few days ago I was discussing the dangers of our current world with someone, and the mutual agreement was that we do live in a dangerous time and that most people handle this with an adequate sense of cognitive dissonance. We don’t want to know. Like the Americans don’t want to know that they have a huge recession coming, because the global market will be flooded with their crap dollars at some point. This will happen when the world wakes up, scratches it’s head and wonders “why the hell we have to finance this American ignorance of over-crediting and overspending.” In the same way, we are still eating meat and driving our cars, and flying our aeroplanes to have vacations for a few days on the other side of the planet….
Appalling, that is.
On the other hand, it occurred to me that some changes can be swift and radical as well as positive and desirable. In this country for instance, if we stopped eating just pork, and stopped exporting it as well, we could save the daily food for roughly 25 million pigs, and start feeding 25 million extra people instantaneously. Every day! Comparable figures might apply for other meat producing livestock, and before you know it, this country alone can feed anyone who is now food-less on this planet. Just for the sake of argument, of course, because we don’t want to do that. But we do want to make our ecological footprint smaller at some point in time. We can achieve this by becoming vegetarians.
My point is that we are able to pull off catastrophic changes, which are choice induced (like becoming a vegetarian species) and that we can have an enormously positive impact on our energy effort / pay-off ratio – or Energy Return On Investment (EROI). We just have to incorporate this into our thinking. It seems to be possible, even in the USA, where people are starting to drive smaller cars. It is forced by energy pricing, yes, but the effect is there, and the mindset that comes with it might be a permanent one.
And it should be too, because we’ll be sitting on this planet with many more people in the furure, and as far as I know, it is not hip to propose any kind of control on that. It would require someone to determine who can procreate and who not. Any takers?
