permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

On 5/18/06 10:54 AM, "Bart Anderson" <bart@cwo.com> wrote:

> Who is the "we" that will be making these life-and-death decisions?   When
> do "we" get to vote on these decisions?

Bart: it's nice to disagree with you, finally!

There is no "we" making decisions at that level. This is a system-level
problem. Nobody "decides" collectively to use oil to grow food, to
overpopulate the planet, or to create an unsustainable practice like
agriculture. Turning away from the course we are on, as a civilization, is
not something that is going to occur by a vote or changing our shopping
habits.

Take population. Twenty years ago the UN and others were predicting world
population would peak in 2050 or so at 12 billion. Now they predict a peak
of 9 billion. Nobody voted to lower fecundity; no politicians or evil cabal
conspired to reduce Europe's birth rate to below replacement and to drop
rates in most of the developing world. Not many Italians or Germans said,
gee, it would be moral to have fewer children.  Low birth rates are a
product of the huge cost of having children in a complex industrial society
(poor ERoEI), as opposed to an agrarian culture where more kids means more
farm labor and elder care. (Effective birth control has been around for
millennia, but there has been no advantage to using it on a societal level
until now.)  That's a structural change, with no decision necessary, or
desired (quite the contrary!), or voted on.

These cultural shifts occur on a system level as individuals respond to
changed conditions and act in their own perceived best interest. And people,
or at least those in our culture, are poor at seeing the big picture and
responding to it proactively. When the oil shocks of the 1970s hit, we
legislated and built high mileage cars while we felt the pinch. Any
half-perceptive person could see that oil would get more expensive in the
not-too-long run. But when the production system rebalanced at a new price
level in the 1980s, as complex systems will (they are homeostatic, seeking
stable states), the whole US and some of the rest of the world went back to
sleep and started buying bigger and bigger cars. That's because short-term
interest dictated that people wanted roomy, powerful, "safer" cars, even
while oil supplies visibly dwindled. Even in Europe, gas mileage stalled,
just at a higher level than in the US due to huge gas taxes.

So I cannot be optimistic that we will collectively decide that we should
use less oil to grow food or, on the other hand, volunteer to ride the bus
so we'll have more oil to grow food. We still feel have enough oil to grow
food with it, so why stop? (Witness the foolish ethanol programs.)
Similarly, we won't reduce birthrates further until having children gets yet
more expensive, because a lot of the world still gets more ERoEI with large
families, and those are the signals all life responds to.  Even though we
can be rational at times, the large decisions like these are not made
rationally, politically, or even morally. They are made as individuals, by
assessing the resources available (in Quinn and Sean's parlance, seeing how
many grocery bags are in the parking lot) and making the strategic choice
that will maximize your share of the resources. That's how life has done it
since the beginning. That's why I keep arguing, elsewhere, that oil demand
will plummet as prices get higher, instead of there being a huge gap between
demand and supply as doomers believe. Life is very good at assessing
resource levels and adjusting use accordingly. But it's not good at saying
"in 3 generations these resources will be exhausted, so I should leave some
for the future." That's because some other currently living creature will
use what that "moral" one won't. Conservation only works, long term, when
there are structural constraints on consumption. In general, resource use
will closely match resource availability. I don't like it; I wish we were
smarter, but 3 billion years of programming is hard to shake.

 
> Most  oil is currently used for transportation, not food.

12% is used for food. That's a lot, although, yes, more (50%-ish) is used
for transportation.
 
> The US and other
> industrialized countries use many times the amount of oil as Third World
> countries.  In the US, our political choice is -- do we continue being
> oil-hogs, or do we start to become more sustainable?

First we have to abolish or reform the corporations that are benefiting not
just from our way of consumption, but from selling that way of consumption
to the rest of the world. And utterly revamp the political system that
supports and is owned by them. Tall order; not much sign of it happening
(you think McCain or Hilary will do it?). I think we are just going to wait
until the price of oil forces them (us) out of the game. I too, would love
to believe we can choose to do otherwise, but the evidence for such altruism
is lacking.

And I don't see the end of the world in this turn of events. I think we'll
readjust at a vastly lower level of consumption due to systemic changes like
resource availability, and if it happens slowly enough, population will
slide to a sustainable, post-oil level. Even figuring a 9-billion population
peak, we could come down to 2.5 billion in 80 years from today with a
decline of 1.6% per year, less than Europe's decline rate today. No die-off
necessary.

Excuse the somewhat chaotic thought order; it's late and it's been a rough
day.

Toby
www.patternliteracy.com