RIOTOUS GROWTH, PRECIPTIOUS DECLINE. ENDING WITH SHORT, NASTY BRUTES?

In a belated post from July entitled the “Last Day of June, 2008,” the Author postulated upon the post-petrochemical future.

Would this future be a nice road traversed by energy-efficient machines or a dirt path trudged by half-starved peasants? Would it be an efficient post-industrial society or a neo-dark age where blade servers must be beaten into plowshares?

Would men pull dog sleds while dogs aspire to the culture and comfort of wolfery?

ENGINES WITHOUT ENERGY. FLYWHEELS AND COBWEBS.

The “Last Day of June, 2008” quoted heavily from Kurt Cobb of Resource Insights. Cobb recalled the writings of Harrison Brown, an American geochemist that wrote in 1954 about the end of the carbon energy.

A post entitled “Which Future Should We Prepare for, Industrial or Agrarian” on the weblog Resource Insights contains a good discussion of Brown’s insight’s into the future of humankind.

In 1954 Brown published “The Challenge of Man’s Future”. In that book Brown outlined two futures of humans. One was the industrial future, the machine future, the future that we inhabit. The other future is an agrarian future, a far less comfortable future where life will be more troubled and tenuous.

Brown describes the problem this way:

Once a machine civilization has been in operation for some time, the lives of the people within the society become dependent upon the machines. The vast interlocking industrial network provides them with food, vaccines, antibiotics, and hospitals. If such a population should suddenly be deprived of a substantial fraction of its machines and forced to revert to an agrarian society, the resultant havoc would be enormous. Indeed, it is quite possible that a society within which there has been little natural selection based upon disease resistance for several generations, a society in which the people have come to depend increasingly upon surgery for repairs during early life and where there is little natural selection operating among women, relative to the ability to bear children--such a society could easily become extinct in a relatively short time following the disruption of the machine network.

YOUR FUTURE PHASED OUT...?

Browns’ future offered two trails. Post-industrial (post energy) or subsistence agricultural (masses of muscles). But can things go either way? Can carbon energy be replaced before humanity slides back into subsistence enslavement? What if cheap energy runs out and post-industrial becomes post-civilization?

Cobb writes in a recent post entitled “It’s Just a Phase”:

[L]ike other organisms humans can experience periods of riotous growth in their numbers followed by periods of decline and retrenchment. This "pulsing" is completely consistent with observed natural patterns. And, while we certainly should not abandon moral thinking, we need to be careful when we apply it to something as vast as the evolution of the human species.

In saying this, I do not mean to minimize the human suffering that may be in store for us in a future that is energy-constrained--one in which fossil fuel supplies decline, but nothing of comparable scale takes their place. I am only trying to point out what Howard Odum suggests in his book, The Prosperous Way Down, namely, that human societies are not immune to the expansions and contractions which apply to other creatures. To be more precise, industrial civilization is not a path of continuous expansion, but simply a phase of expansion that will inevitably lead one day to a phase of contraction.

THE CONCIET OF CONTINUING IMPROVEMENT? THE DENIAL OF DECLINE?

A lot has been written about the future. Nearly all of it wrong. Lots of reasons are proffered. Predictions are merely bigger and better projections of the present. Projections represent wishes yet to be realized. Otherwise rational linear projections unpredictably accelerate geometrically or are disrupted and disfigured.

Or asked more pointedly, could the future get worse and not get better? Or better for at least a few generations. The answer, evasively enough, is maybe.

A QUESTION DIFFERENTLY ASKED—A RESULT DIFFERENTLY CONSIDERED.

As Cobb reasons, maybe we should drop our present into a wider panorama.

If we could come to accept that our current industrial age is just a phase, ephemeral like all ages, neither a triumph which must be defended in its entirety at all costs, nor a mistake which must be allowed to collapse, nor a system that can be redeemed with just a few adjustments, we could learn to let go of it as it recedes without rejecting aspects of it that might prove to be instructive or useful. We could then move on to our next task, creating a new phase of human existence on planet Earth within limits we can no longer ignore.

BUILDING FOR, NOT BETTING ON, THE FUTURE IN THE DESERT OF THE REAL!