Ilargi: Overshoot Loop and Evolution

[GliderGuider]

Here's a short but pointed article by Ilargi, the chief editor of The Automatic Earth. Like Ilargi, I'm an enormous fan of Jay Hanson (of dieoff.org fame). I had my earliest eye-opening education courtesy of his uncompromising research, and his insistence on looking at even unpalatable ideas without any sugar-coating or other forms of magical, emotionally-driven thinking.

Ilargi's reference in the article to the Maximum Power Principle is the key to the conundrum of how such an intelligent species could consistently do things that are so manifestly stupid. MPP underlies all activity in the world of living and even non-living systems, from hurricanes to natural selection, collective human behaviour and the teleonomics of our cultural institutions.

Ilargi: Overshoot Loop and Evolution

We are “political” animals from birth until death. Everything we do or say can be seen as part of lifelong political agendas. Despite decades of scientific warnings, we continue to destroy our life-support system because that behavior is part of our inherited (DNA/RNA) hard wiring. We use scientific warnings, like all inter-animal communications, for cementing group identity and for elevating one’s own status (politics).

Only physical hardship can force us to rewire our mental agendas. I am certainly not the first to make the observation, but now, after 20 years of study and debate, I am totally certain. The net energy principle guarantees that our global supply lines will collapse. The rush to social collapse cannot be stopped no matter what is written or said. Humans have never been able to intentionally-avoid collapse because fundamental system-wide change is only possible after the collapse begins.

What about survivors? Within a couple of generations, all lessons learned from the collapse will be lost, and people will revert to genetic baselines. I wish it weren’t so, but all my experience screams “it’s hopeless.” Nevertheless, all we can do is the best we can and carry on…

[GliderGuider]

1. A couple of further thoughts

Humanity can not voluntarily regulate its numbers or consumption to avoid a crash - we can not down-regulate our activity levels until that reduction is made necessary by the crash itself. We are hard-wired by our evolutionary history, the unconscious operation of our political neuropsychology and the physical laws of thermodynamics to do exactly the opposite. Whether these aspects of our nature rule against individual free will or not, they certainly rule against collective free will - at least when we try to apply our cortical powers to situations requiring degrowth and collective self-restraint. Ilargi's article at TAE addresses some of these aspects of human behaviour..

It's impossible to predict what our situation will be in two or three decades, but all the signs point to us continuing to degrade the larger environment and the global biosphere. What does seem virtually certain to me, however, that we will lose any opportunity we might have had to stop the descent that is now underway. The chance will be lost due to a combination of the biohysical tipping points we're now going through, and especially the ecological intransigence of sovereign states. When faced with the choice of increasing their international power though economic development or reducing their political and economic power through contractive ecological stewardship, nation-states choose the former wherever possible, and will continue to do so until they can't.

If, as I believe, we are already sliding into some kind of general global de-industrialization, I see nothing in our nature or social institutions that can arrest that slide, whether at the level of low-technology industry, low-energy agriculture, horticulture, hunting and foraging, or outright extinction. The systems we have already put in place are capable of consuming all the raw materials that are available, and poisoning the land, air and water with the resulting waste products. We will in all probability continue to do so until those resources - energy, metals, food and food precursors like potash, other keystone species and even other people - are no longer readily available for exploitation, and the climate has turned undeniably hostile to human life.

So it goes.

[Jim Lane]

2. Perhaps too pessimistic on population

You write, "Humanity can not voluntarily regulate its numbers or consumption to avoid a crash...." Experience of advanced Western societies is that the natural rate of increase levels off to zero with affluence -- people don't need lots of kids as old-age insurance, and women are more likely to enter the paid work force so not want lots of kids.

Whether this can extended on a global scale is of course another question.

On the other part of your sentence, I alas see no basis for doubting your pessimism re consumption.

[GliderGuider]

3. The fact that Western population growth rates are declining

doesn't mean that we are voluntarily reducing our birth rates in order to reduce our population growth. They are declining because we have so much automation in every aspect of life that fewer people are needed to keep production and consumption rates up. People can now have better lives with fewer children.

Increasing affluence even further can't fix the larger problem of ecological destruction - affluence is part and parcel of that problem. I=PAT, right?

Low fertility rates are being seen as a problem in Europe and Japan, rather than as the blessing they actually are. Imagine the hand-wringing when such countries begin to experience outright population declines as opposed to just slowing growth rates, as happened in the ex-USSR.

[Jim Lane]

4. I agree that conscious population stabilization explains only a tiny fraction of what's occurred

That's why I didn't even mention it in listing factors. There's a little of it -- some people who've chosen to have no kids or fewer kids because they're concerned about population -- but not much.

What it does show, however, is that endless population growth, bounded only by deaths from war, famine, or pestilence, is not inevitable. If there are factors that cause population stabilization, then there's at least some possibility of deliberately increasing those factors.

I'm pessimistic about population issues. In most discussions of the subject, I'm the pessimist -- but it's still possible to be too pessimistic, and the doomsaying from Ilargi, in the passage you quoted, is an example. He's saying that pursuing a disastrous course to the point of collapse is inevitable. I don't think that disaster is certain. It's merely probable.

As to consumption, though, my previous post noted that I can't find a basis for saying you're too pessimistic. As with population, there are small reductions as the result of acts of will of people motivated by global concerns. As with population, the cumulative effect of all these reductions is minute compared to the overall scale of the problem. The difference is that, with population, I can at least identify some factors that have some prospect of producing some more significant improvement. With consumption, I can't.