The End of Our Complicity

The oligarchy and their elite minions (who make up about 0.01 percent and 1 percent of world population, respectively) own a full forty percent of the world’s wealth.[i] Clearly, they cannot maintain such inequality by themselves. There are simply too few of them. With their wealth and power and the promise of a better life, they buy off the middle class (the world’s financially top twenty percent) to do their bidding.[ii] In Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, regional oligarchs have given away their country’s natural resources to nourish First World affluence, leaving their own citizens scrounging for essentials.[iii] In the United States, Europe, and the wealthy Asian-Pacific countries, a huge middle class has wed their interests to those of the wealthiest. As long as they have jobs, plenty of meat and entertainment, a car and at least the illusion of upward mobility, these hundreds of millions have quietly accepted the outrages of the ruling classes.

Fifth week of 2019 protests in Russia for fair elections.

The complicity of this middle class in planetary-wide suffering is not wholly unlike the role of poor non-slaveholding farmers (who were a majority) in the Southern slavery states. Too poor to own slaves, they were nevertheless willing to be complicit with the practice and, indeed, to fight in a brutal war and even sacrifice their lives for the rich plantation owners’ right to own slaves.[iv] Through a reading of thousands of letters of American Civil War soldiers, the historian Chandra Manning suggests that a partial explanation for such seemingly irrational convictions and behaviors goes beyond simple economics: it can be found in the socio-psychological depths of slavery and racism, wherein one’s sense of self-esteem and status was—no matter how poor the white person—supported by being regarded, at the very least, theoretically equal to all other whites, and superior to the black slave.[v] There was the hope instilled by the aristocracy and the Confederate government that non-slaveholders could one day become fortunate enough to become a slaveholder, made more likely through one’s merit as a soldier. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the dominant paradigm engendered a fear in all whites that ending slavery would result in the destruction of Southern society—a highly advanced civilization of great sophistication, in their minds—followed by terrible chaos.[vi] The historian Jeffrey Winters found nearly identical psycho-social explanations—sans the racism—for the bond between the lower classes and the oligarchs against the slaves in democratic BCE Athens.[vii]

Brazil, 2020: Protesting Police Violence in Favelas.

Similarly, we have accepted our leaders perpetrating coup d’états and illegitimate wars in weaker countries; the use of torture; the theft of others’ oil, minerals, and forests; the degradation of the biosphere; the pilfering of trillions of dollars from our own citizens through all sorts of clever financial shenanigans; billions of tons of carbon emissions; racism,  sexism and ageism, implicit and explicit, personal and institutional; the takeover of the ballot box and of the government legislature, oversight, and judiciary.[viii] We have accepted all this because we live well enough to leave well enough alone. We may have protested in letters to the editor and even collectively on the streets, but, afterward, at the end of the day, we met with our comrades for dinner and drinks and went home sated. For the most part, it was only when the issues affected us directly that we took over the streets day after day, as millions did in the Arab Spring of 2011 and in the “Autumn of Nations” in 1989 Eastern Europe.

Hong Kong protests - 2019-2020.

Likely, we will continue to accept our leaders’ excesses until our conditions deteriorate beyond some unacceptable and as yet undetermined limit. When that threshold is crossed—and it surely will in many countries this century—and the social contract between citizen and government is considered null and void, it is then that all the other stressors that brought the states to that point will strain them beyond their breaking point, and they will fall apart. Numerous dynamic conditions are bringing us to this threshold—the sheer number of impoverished and hungry, the rapidly increasing population, especially of the poor and the young, the deteriorating environmental conditions, the quickly rising expectations of the middle half of the world’s population, the oligarchy’s insistence on taking ever more for themselves, and, most powerfully, the synergistic effect of these and innumerable other stressors.

Photo from CNN: Ferguson, 2014.

Causing further strain, social media makes us instantaneously aware of oppression throughout the world, of elite misbehavior and intransigence, and of their ruthlessness in quelling opposition and dissent. The media, in general, gifts us—through a lifetime inundation of images and sometimes contrary to their own intentions—with a growing awareness of our commonality, encouraging a sense of solidarity that bridges race, class, gender, and culture.

Logan Riely/The Seattle Times): Black Lives Matter, 2020.

We “get,” deeply and profoundly, the universal values that bind us. And mediated by the internet and social media, there is a gathering cognizance of a global village. We identify with virtual communities made of people from all over the world who share specific interests and ideologies and who otherwise may share little else. And we feel the internal tug of Martin Luther King Jr.’s prophetic words in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham City Jail: “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea.” 

Photo from NBCWashington, 2020.

The archaeologist Fakri Hassan who asserted, “If history is construed as the continued monopoly and social control by an elite to their own advantage with disregard to the suffering of others who are entrusted to their care, perhaps history is coming to an end.”[ix] Perhaps. The unending succession of demonstrations, protests, and riots that have been popping up all over the world in the opening two decades of this century may be signaling that we are entering a new phase of Civilization. The almost four weeks—as of this post—of worldwide protests against systemic racism, police brutality, and white silence (read complicity) suggests strongly that some substantial part of the population is no longer willing to adhere to the narrow, provincial roles their parents were taught to play. They are breaking free of the chains of ignorance and indifference. They understand in their bones that whatever affects one affects all. It may not truly matter whether this latest uproar from the bowels of our collective subconscious causes deep and lasting changes or whether, as Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven found in their 1977 book Poor People’s Movements, the system reverts to its old ways once the streets are quiet again. It may likely be that the contradictions of Civilization—its inharmonious exploitation of nature, its absurd insistence on inequity, its existential need for divisiveness among our human family and indifference to our extended family of all living creatures—spell its end. Perhaps this is why The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats has become if not the anthem of our times (“Surely, some revelation is at hand”) then the prescient keen for a world six thousand years in the making that is about to crumble (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”).

Khuzestan, Iran: 2017.

The end of history and the end of Civilization do not mean the end of culture, of our species, or of a flourishing civilization. It refers to the end of the type of civilization that has been constructed in most every society since the birth of large-scale agriculture, societies based on the institutionalized preservation of unequal status, wealth, and power. It does imply a rocky transition. Revolution is the term commonly used, as often to frighten away potential sympathizers as to motivate believers. The unpredictable nature of transitions is the main reason that it will be the youth who leads them. Not yet fully incorporated into the system, they have the least to lose. They hold little property and have little money in the bank; they have not yet acquired the jobs and titles that confer status, wealth and power; they do not yet have children for their biology to prioritize above all else—they have the least invested in the status quo, in the way things are. The motivating power of self-evident truths have not yet been quashed by these “realities.”

Tahrir Square, Arab Spring: 2011.

Many of us can remember a time when we felt that our generation might lead the world to meaningful change. Clearly, we did not succeed. Along the way we became complicit. We went from railing against the system to becoming the system. It is a sad truth that, by our complicity, we have placed today’s youth—our children and grand-children—on the front lines to face the many existential challenges of nature and civilization. Tear gas cannisters are burning their lungs and batons are cracking their skulls while the specter of a heating planet looms over them, along with the military drones and the doomsday clock and the latest version of the speculators’ bubble. I feel great admiration and respect for these generations, for their courageous attempts to simultaneously solve multiple social injustices—of race, class, sex, gender, age, disability—as well as the rushing tsunami of climate change, for their sanguinity and utter lack of self-pity about their predicament, for their insight into the systemic nature and therefore complexity of what they face, and for the clarity in which they express themselves. Many of them are in the streets and organizing for action not for reasons of narrow self-interest but because they have evolved a far grander understanding of enlightened one-interest, of all-inclusiveness, of ubuntu, “I am because we are.” They inspire hope in even the most skeptical of us. Hopefully, we will all be inspired to work with them, shoulder to shoulder, to conceive and create a new paradigm and become allied in this radical project rooted in compassion and love.

Demonstrations for Free Tibet, 2011.

ENDNOTES

[i] Davies, Sandström, Shorrocks, and Wolff (2006, 2007, 2008).

Davies, J., Sandström, S., Shorrocks, A., and Wolff, E. (2006) The World Distribution of Household Wealth. World Institute for Development Economics Research. Unu-Wider, United Nations University.

Davies, J., Sandström, S., Shorrocks, A., and Wolff, E. (2007) Estimating the Level and Distribution of Global Household Wealth. Research Paper No. 2007/77. World Institute for Development Economics Research. Unu-Wider, United Nations University.

Davies, J., Sandström, S., Shorrocks, A., and Wolff, E. (2008) The World Distribution of Household Wealth, Discussion Paper 2008/03. World Institute for Development Economics Research. Unu-Wider, United Nations University.

[ii] For historical examples, see Winters, J.A. (2011) Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press, New York.

[iii] See for example, Galeano (1973/1997), Chomsky (1989), Perkins (2004, 2007), Palast (2007:152-153), Maathai (2009), Skidmore, Smith, and Green (2010), Acemoglu and Robinson (2012).

Galeano, E. (1973/1997) Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press, New York.

Chomsky, N. (1989) Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Second End Press, Boston, MA.

Perkins, J. (2004) Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA.

Perkins, J. (2007) The Secret History of the American Empire. Dutton, New York.

Palast, G. (2007) Armed Madhouse. Plume Books, New York.

Maathai (2009).  Maathai, W. (2009) The Challenge for Africa. Anchor Books, New York.

Skidmore, T.E., Smith, P.H., and Green, J.N. (2010) Modern Latin America, Seventh Edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Acemoglu, D., and Robinson, J.A. (2012a) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown Business, New York.

[iv] Gutman, H.G., director (1989) Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture and Society. American Social History Project, Pantheon Books, New York.

[v] Manning, C. (2007) What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War. Vintage Books, NY.

[vi] Manning (2007).

[vii] Winters, J.A. (2011) Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press, New York.

[viii] That there has been increasing  opposition through the decades, organized and otherwise, to all these ruling class behaviors (as Noam Chomsky has often noted) only underscores the apathy and compliance of the media and much of the American public.

[ix] Hassan, F.A. (2007) The Lie of History: Nation-States and the Contradictions of Complex Societies, pp. 169-196, in Constanza, R., Graumlich, L.J., and Steffen, W. (Editors), Sustainability or Collapse: An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

From Perpetual Famine to Dieback

 As likely as any other major event this century will be a dieback of our human family and even the collapse of numerous already unstable societies. Dieback (sometimes also called a die-off) refers to a catastrophic crash, or pruning back, of the population of a species, in this case our own, Homo sapiens. The term is borrowed from botanists who use the term to describe the death, damage, or destruction to a plant, tree, or forest. It does not refer to our extinction or anything remotely similar. In these pages, it will be argued that—within the lifetimes of most of us alive today—there will likely be a catastrophic crash of the human population. Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people will experience untimely deaths, dying long before their natural expectations, from starvation, contaminated water, and related diseases. These horrible events may be precipitated by a decade of unusually severe weather, a rash of large scale wars, or a shift in the climate of some of the world’s major food-growing areas.  These have always plagued civilizations, triggering the eventual collapse of many, including some of history’s icons—the Mayan, Aztec, Indus, and Ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom.

From the Abu Simbel temples in southern Egypt, dating back to the 13th century B.C.

However, they will not be required for our dieback. We have assured it ourselves by adding to nature’s already substantial challenges numerous self-inflicted stressors. We have multiplied and fed upon all the Earth until it can no longer sustain us, and naturally we have done so during a climatic period that has been most hospitable to our kind. We have overshot the planet’s limits for our species, and our numbers must plummet back to sustainable levels, whatever they may be.[i]

Roman Ruin Architecture With Predigendem St. Paul : Giovanni Paolo Panini

Predictions for large-scale famines are hardly new. In his Essay of the Principles of Population, first published in 1798, the economist Thomas Robert Malthus argued that food production could not keep up with the “superior power” of human fertility.[ii] According to him, some countries such as China, India, and those of today’s Middle East had already exceeded their land’s carrying capacity. “The average produce of these countries,” he wrote in the 1826 and last edition of Principles, “… seems to be but barely sufficient to support the lives of the inhabitants, and of course any deficiency from the badness of seasons must be fatal. Nations in this state must necessarily be subject to famines.”[iii] Yet, a century and half later, by 1968 let’s say, the world’s farmlands were supporting not only the one billion people of Malthus’s time, but three-and-half times that number. I choose the otherwise random year 1968 because that was the year that Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich came out with The Population Bomb, in which he announced, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”[iv] About India, he noted, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971, if ever.” And yet, again contrary to sound evidence and reason, the fifty years since Ehrlich’s predictions have witnessed a more than doubling of world population and yet an actual increase in per capita food production and an Indian subcontinent that has been as self-sufficient as most any other region for much of that time.

The toxification of the planet with synthetic chemicals may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change, says Ehrlich. Photograph: Linh Pham/Getty Images

Malthus and Ehrlich may be forgiven their gloomy perspectives. After all, both lived at times when populations had started to grow at historically unseen rates. With English women having, on average, more than five children each, England’s population nearly doubled in Malthus’s lifetime, and it has risen ten-fold (from six and half million to 66 million) in the two hundred years since.[v] Ehrlich witnessed history’s greatest population boom, one that is still exploding at the rate of 9,800 additional people an hour, 235,000 people a day, 86 million a year. Both also witnessed firsthand the dire misery due to daily hunger suffered by untold millions, Malthus in 19th century England, Ehrlich in 20th century India.[vi] Surely, a sensitive soul could be touched to pessimism within sight of so much suffering.

Artist’s reconstruction of the gateway and drain at the city of Harappa. Image credit: Chris Sloan.

However, both were also guilty of mistakes in judgement and imagination. As an economist, Malthus could have been more aware of the powerful demographic and economic developments taking shape in his time.[vii] The fertility rate among Europeans was just beginning its centuries-long descent, and, through mass migrations, Europeans were moving their access millions to the settler states of the Americas and Australia.[viii] Both these demographic shifts had the effect of relieving Europe’s population pressures. At the same time, huge expanses of forests and grasslands in the new settler states as well as in Eastern Europe and Russia were being converted into farmland, from which Europe imported much of the harvests.[ix] It is harder to fault Malthus for his lack of imagination and clairvoyance. In the early 20th century, a century after Principles, two developments completely changed the human landscape. One was the Haber-Bosch chemical process that produced synthetic fertilizer at industrial scales, solving farming’s age-old problem of soil fatigue.[x] The other was the rise of petroleum production and then the development of motors and engines that led to mechanized agriculture, cold storage, and the rapid and inexpensive transportation of produce from farm to table.[xi]

Infrastructure Collapse : Jon Baldwin

Similarly, Paul Ehrlich missed the nascent miracles of the hybrid seeds that had already boosted yields in Mexico and the United States, was beginning to do so in India and Pakistan, and, indeed, had been coined the Green Revolution by William Gaud, an administrator at the U.S. Agency of International Development, in the very same year that Ehrlich’s book was first published.[xii] Ehrlich had fathomed the ramifications of the global population explosion but somehow failed to appreciate the technological marvels responsible for exploding yields of rice, wheat, and corn.

Artist: Eflam Mercier.

The failed predictions of widespread famine famously made by Malthus for the 19th century and Ehrlich for the 20th century have cast a long shadow over, if not completely discredited, similar perspectives. This is both understandable and unfortunate. Understandable because repeated failure usually suggests a mistake in theorem and because depictions of apocalypse have become so commonplace—indeed, regular entertainment for a world-weary chic—that a little optimism seems refreshingly sincere. It is unfortunate because we are dismissing a horrible truth: overpopulation and famine are not distant mirages; they are present day realities.

For the past half-century, humanity has experienced a quiet, nearly invisible, yet perpetual famine… if we mean by famine large-scale hunger and starvation.[1] At any one time, 800 million to a billion people have been severely undernourished calorically. Some six million children under the age of ten die of hunger each year, as do perhaps twice as many adults, mostly women. As a result of deficiencies in essential nutrients, an unimaginable two billion people suffer disabling and preventable maladies, including blindness, anemia, and physical and mental stunting.[xiii] Unlike the acute famines of the past, Civilization’s perpetual famine has not been concentrated in any one country, but rather has proceeded as a chronic event spread unevenly across the globe, thereby losing the concreteness that our minds need in order to name and recognize it. To rescue it from vague abstraction, I name it a perpetual famine.  

Likely, for much of history, perpetual famine has often been the chronic condition into which the horrors of acute famines intermittently visited. Hunger’s pervasive existential presence can be inferred from all the human measures that changed dramatically for the better when food later became abundant. For most of human existence, going right into the 20th century, human stature, weight, and lifespans remained significantly below the human potential.[2] As the human population increased through the millennia, so did the sheer numbers suffering from hunger and its disabilities. Until sometime between the years 1750 and 1800 there had never even been 800 million people living at any one time.[xiv] Since the 1960s there have been at least that many people suffering from hunger, alone.[xv]

What recasts this cumulative suffering to a humanity-level tragedy is that, according to all experts, the billions of undernourished and malnourished people and the hundreds of millions who have starved in the past two centuries have done so at a time of food abundance.[xvi] There have been actually no true food shortages during this time. If mere availability were the only factor that determined everyone’s access to food, then no one would have starved. Sometimes, as in the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1849 and the Bengal famine of 1943, millions starved in plain sight of the grocery stores and granaries.[xvii] Globally, Civilization has produced enough food to provide everyone a sufficient diet… and still billions have suffered terribly for lack of nourishment.

What is being proposed here is that this century will likely be the first in which Civilization will experience true food shortages across the globe. For, what separates this century from all our past is the immensity and intensity of the human impact. It has become global, ubiquitous, devastating at the local level, toxic beyond anything else found in nature, and it has been relentless. Both the Earth’s ability to provide resources and its ability to absorb our wastes have reached their limits. While humans have been for thousands of years slowly unraveling the biosphere’s tight complex weave, we have in just the last century accelerated our impact to such a degree that we are straining the biosphere—that is, a biosphere accommodating to our species—to its breaking point. The rising demands of the additional billions and the improvement of diets for other billions expected in many developing countries—“eating up the food chain”—will further degrade our food-producing capacities and will continue to accelerate the biosphere’s destruction. The coming blogs will address these problems.

A Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) ranger stands guard around illegal stockpiles of burning elephant tusks, ivory figurines and rhinoceros horns at the Nairobi National Park in April 2016. Carl de Souza—AFP/Getty Images

The human population, the consumption of natural resources, and the release of pollution has increased with each century, each decade, and most every year. Correspondingly, every marker of ecological health finds that the Civilization’s destruction of the biosphere has been escalating and that we are now entering dangerous and historically unprecedented threshold changes to that system. The relevant factors are many, interrelated, and their interactions complex. A short list of those with the greatest likely impact on the biosphere, food security, and the viability of Civilization includes:

•      The human population has more than doubled in just the past fifty years and has grown an unprecedented seven-fold in the past two hundred years. There is nothing in our long past that comes remotely close to either our present numbers or the speed at which we have arrived at them.  

•    During that same time, the consumption of natural resources has increased even faster. Energy use, alone, rose more than ninety-fold.[xviii] That’s more than a ten-fold increase per capita. This helped fuel a nearly twenty-fold rise in global wealth during the 20th century.[xix]

•    This extraordinary enterprise has been fueled by releasing the tremendous energies stored underground in fossil and nuclear fuels. By all accounts, reserves will probably be effectively depleted this century and we will exacerbate our environmental troubles in using them.[xx] Whether alternative fuels can continue powering our high energy lifestyles remains uncertain.[xxi]

•     Although Civilization will be demanding even more from the Earth, we will have less to work with. We have already passed “peak everything,” as Richard Heinberg put it, where “everything” denotes all those material conditions necessary to sustain industrial civilization, including oil, coal, and gas, arable land area and soil fertility, groundwater reserves, wild fish stocks, forests, climate stability, uranium, copper, phosphorus, and other important metals and minerals, as well as most every other important resource, renewable and otherwise.[xxii]

• Climate change due to the warming of the atmosphere and oceans has likely already crossed dangerous thresholds. Consequences are sure to include devastating crop losses, inundation of the world’s great coastal cities, volatile weather events, vast disruptions in terrestrial and ocean ecosystems, and the poleward expansion of deadly mosquito- and tic-borne diseases.

• Both biodiversity and the absolute amount of wild biomass have declined significantly. This simplifying and shrinking of ecosystems leaves them far more vulnerable to stressors such as droughts, floods, and infestations.

• Technological innovations, upon which so many people are pinning their hopes, often exacerbate the problems in unforeseen ways. Bioengineering, geoengineering, nuclear engineering, nanotechnology and materials science in general, the internet, robotics, cybernetics, virtual reality, and AI, to name just a few, present us with the Faustian bargain of limitless power and potential self-annihilation.

• Corporate and financial capitalism, a wealth-production system without equal, holds unparalleled influence over every aspect of our lives, profits by the clever manipulation of short-term thinking, and stands as the main obstacle to the fundamental changes needed for humanity’s long-term viability.

• The life of each and every person is now shaped not by just local circumstances, but also by powerful, often invisible forces from numerous actors around the world, collectively referred to as economic globalism. Transnational and supranational in structure, decision-making and operation, organizations as varied as ExxonMobil and the WTO circumvent the democratic process, thwarting personal and national sovereignty.

• Innovations in technology and economy evolve far faster than can cultural and biological adaptations. Religious mores, psychosocial development, and cultural values, beliefs, and traditions are not changing fast enough to keep up with the human-created challenges.

Most of us in the First World can appreciate the unprecedented conditions of our present lifestyles. The mistake we make is believing that these times are a continuum of inevitable progress, of evolution in some presumed direction of material betterment for all people. More likely, however, our inflated numbers and expanded lifestyles are the exception not only to history but to the future, as well.

Even if we change the operating rules of the Civilization system to more equitably share resources among the 9.7 billion people projected to be living in 2050, the challenges to that global system will be formidable, albeit more evenly spread. Working against that ideal, Civilization has evolved a deeply entrenched inequity that perpetuates itself. Those with wealth and power do not voluntarily relinquish their privileges. This is no less true of union workers making $50,000 a year than CEOs with three homes and a yacht. Naturally, therefore, as the conditions of climate and food security worsen, the poorest billions will suffer most. Should Civilization continue to prove incapable of distributing food to everyone, famines will be far worse than sheer production numbers would suggest. Refugees will surely flee these distressed regions in mass migrations, overwhelming cities and border countries, kindling violent conflict, and challenging the viability of unstable governments.[xxiii]  First World countries, too, will be rocked by these events, as their wealth and border walls cannot protect them from heat waves and other severe weather events, water scarcity, and the flood of climate refugees expected this century.[xxiv]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Hunger includes both undernutrition—due to an insufficient supply of calories—and malnutrition, which results from inappropriate nutrient intake. There are numerous working definitions for famine (see those, for example, compiled by Ravallion,1997; Howe and Devereux, 2004) as well as the United Nations recent IPC scale (http://www.ipcinfo.org/). Here, I am using the general description used by Cormac Ó Gráda (2007) where “famine entails a widespread lack of food leading directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced illnesses”.

Ravallion, M. (1997.) “Famines and Economics.” Journal of Economic Literature, 35(3): 1205–42.

Howe, P., and Devereux, S. (2004) “Famine Intensity and Magnitude Scales: A Proposal for an Instrumental Definition of Famine.” Disasters, 28(4): 353–72.

Ó Gráda, C. (2007) Making Famine History, Journal of Economic Literature, v. 45, pp. 3-36.

[2] We are approaching the human biological potential in most well-fed countries (Fogel, R.W. (2004) The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. Cambridge University Press, NY.)

ENDNOTES

[i] Catton, W.R. (1982) Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Univ. Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.

[ii] Malthus, T. (1798/1970: Chapter 1) An Essay of the Principle of Population. Pelican Classics, Harmondsworth, England. 

[iii] Malthus, T.R. (1826, Book 2, Chapter 13)) An Essay on the Principle of Population, 6th ed.

[iv] Ehrlich, P. (1968) The Population Bomb. Buccaneer Books, Cutchogue, New York.

[v] Livi-Bacci, M. (2001:18) A Concise History of World Population. Blackwell, Massachusetts.

[vi] Fogel, R.W. (2004) The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. Cambridge University Press, NY.

[vii] Ponting (1991) A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. Penguin Books, New York.

Livi-Bacci (2001), Fogel (2004).

 [viii] Fertility-Sax (1955), Livi-Bacci (2001), Fogel (2004).  Migrations—Sax (1955), Ponting (1991).

Sax, K. (1955) Standing Room Only: The World’s Exploding Population. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.

[ix] U.S. Census Bureau (1960), Ponting (1991:244).

U.S. Census Bureau (1960) Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957.

[x] Erisman, J.W., Sutton, M.A., Galloway, J., Klimont, Z., and Winiwarter, W. (2008) How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nature Geoscience, v. 1, pp. 636-639. 

[xi] Ponting (1991).

[xii] U.S. Census Bureau (1960), Borlaug (1970), Nielsen (2017).

Borlaug, N.E. (1970) Nobel Lecture: The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity, pp. 59-78, in Norman Borlaug on World Hunger, A. Dil (Editor), 1997, Bookservice International, San Diego, CA.

Nielsen, R.L. (2017) Historical Corn Grain Yields for the U.S.

[xiii] Marx (1997), FAO (1997, 2017), Ames (1999, 2001), Black, M. (2003), Black, R. (2003), Pimentel (2003), Underwood (2003), Sanchez and Swaminathan (2005), Barrett (2010), Ziegler (2013), Gernand et al. (2016).

Marx, J. (1997) Iron deficiency in developed countries: prevalence, influence of lifestyle factors and hazards of prevention, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, v. 51, pp. 491-494.

FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) (1997) Preventing Micronutrient: A Guide to Food-Based Approaches: Why Policy Makers Should Give Priority to Food-Based Strategies.

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO (2017) The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017: Building resilience for peace and food security. Rome, FAO.

Ames, B.N. (1999) Micronutrient Deficiencies: A Major Cause of DNA Damage, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, v. 889, p. 87-106.

Ames, B.M. (2001) DNA Damage from Micronutrient Deficiencies is Likely to be a Major Cause of Cancer. Mutation Research/Fundamental and Molecular Mechanisms of Mutagenesis, v. 475, p. 7-20.

Black, M. (2003) Micronutrient Deficiencies and Cognitive Functioning, Journal of Nutrition, v. 133, 3927S-3931S.

Black, R. (2003) Micronutrient Deficiency-An Underlying Cause of Morbidity and Mortality. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, v. 81, no. 2.

Pimentel, D. (2003) Malnutrition, Disease, and the Developing World. Science, v. 300, p. 251.

Underwood (2003) Scientific Research: Essential, but is it Enough to Combat World Food Insecurities? Journal of Nutrition, v. 133, pp. 1434s-1437s.

Sanchez, P.A. and Swaminathan, M.S. (2005) Cutting World Hunger in Half. Science, v. 307, p. 357-359.

Barrett, C.B. (2010) Measuring Food Insecurity. Science, v. 327, pp. 825-828.

Ziegler, J. (2013) Betting on Famine: Why the World Still Goes Hungry. The New Press, New York.

Gernand, A., D., Schulze, K.J., Stewart, C.P., West Jr., K.P., and Christian, P. (2016) Micronutrient Deficiencies in Pregnancy Worldwide: Health Effects and Prevention. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, v. 12, pp. 274-289.

[xiv] Historical population estimates come from studies compiled by the United States Census Bureau, but no longer available at the USCB website.

[xv] FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO (2017) The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017: Building resilience for peace and food security. Rome, FAO.

[xvi] Sen (1982, 2002), Lappé, Collins, and Rosset (1998), Smil (2000b), Ó Gráda (2007).  

 Sen, A. (1982) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Sen, A. (2002, June 16) Why Half the Planet is Hungry, Observer of London.

Lappé, F.M., Collins, J., and Rosset, P. (1998) World Hunger: Twelve Myths. Grove Press, New York.

Smil, V. (2000b) Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, The MIT Press, Cambridge Mass.

Ó Gráda, C. (2007) Making Famine History, Journal of Economic Literature, v. 45, pp. 3-36.

[xvii] Dreze and Sen (1989), Ó Gráda (2007).

Dreze, J. and Sen, A. (1989) Hunger and Public Action. Oxford University Press, New York.

 [xviii] Cohen, J. E. (1995b) Population Growth and Earth’s Human Carrying Capacity, Science, v. 269, pp. 341-346. Cohen referred specifically to energy increase from 1860-1991.

[xix] IMF (International Monetary Fund) (2000) World Economic Outlook: Asset Prices and the Business Cycle.

[xx] Campbell and Laherrere (1998), Aleklett and Campbell (2003), Heinberg (2003, 2007), Smil (2005), Shafiee and Topal (2009), McGlade and Ektins (2015).

Campbell, C.J., and Laherrere, J.H. (1998) The End of Cheap Oil, Scientific American, March, pp. 78-83.

Aleklett, K., and Campbell, C. (2003) The Peak and Decline of World Oil And Gas Production, Minerals and Energy, v. 18, P. 5-20. 

Heinberg, R. (2003) The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada.

Heinberg, R. (2007) Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada.

Smil, V. (2005) Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shafiee, S., and Topal, E. (2009) When will fossil fuel reserves be diminished? Energy Policy, v. 37(1), pp. 181-189.

[xxi] Smil, V. (2006) 21st Century Energy: Some Sobering Thoughts, OECD Observer, No. 258/259, pp. 22-23.

[xxii] Heinberg (2007).

[xxiii] McKibben (2010:83), Black et al. (2011), Adler, (2014), Porter and Russell (2018).

 McKibben, B. (2010) eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York.

Black, R., Bennett, S.R.G., Thomas, S.M., and Beddington, J.R. (2011) Migration as Adaptation. Nature, v. 478, pp. 447-448.

Adler, J. (2014, May) The Reality of a Hotter World is Already Here. Smithsonian Magazine.

Porter, E., and Russell, K. (2018, June 20) Migrants Are on the Rise Around the World, and Myths are Shaping Attitudes. New York Times.

[xxiv] See for example, Porter and Russell (2018).

One Day We Woke From Our Sleepwalk

Imagine watching the collapse of 2037 unfolding from a cosmic perspective. Imagine the skeletal figures of women and children mostly, and many men too, languishing in the heat and in bleak, parched landscapes, drinking from streams that are fetid, viscous, and black. Your eyes sweep across hundreds of millions of our human family dying in a swath of land that stretches from China’s eastern coast through Southeast Asia and into Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and from there through the Middle East and into the entire continent of Africa. It is a global famine from which there is neither respite nor hope—no monsoons or food aid rock concerts that will save them.  For Civilization has no food surpluses and nations have emptied their storage granaries. 

Poverty: Käthe Kollwitz, 1893-1894

Three bad years, that is all it has been.  A drop in any bucket of time's reckoning.  But there are so many of us, and there has always been so little room for error.  Even in America, legendary for its vast supermarkets—the enclosed air-conditioned acres with shelves to the ceilings, brimming with cans and boxes and bags of foods processed, sugared, fattened, salted, preserved, and dyed—even there in that paradise, the shelves are now empty, and a fear of death hangs about the people when only yesterday, it seems, obesity and organic food were considered relevant concerns.    

(Image: CEN / Twitter)

We pause over Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, as immense fires rage over oil fields abandoned by retreating American soldiers. In the eastern distance, a dust cloud billows to the sky, the collective upheaval of a million Chinese soldiers marching westward to secure the last of the remaining oil. The Europeans watch on anxiously, for theirs’ is the only territory left on that landmass with fields of grain and with mills still grinding the flour for their bread.  They are fixed to their screens, as the ubiquitous play of survey cameras and news cameras and personal cameras witness the refugees—belongings balanced on their heads and stuffed in suitcases—pouring in from the deserts and mountains and crossing the Mediterranean in waterlogged boats, causing the European cities to resound like myriad versions of Babel.

Europe is not their only destination. Refugees by the millions stream across borders like the Ganges flooding its banks, for what is a border and the name of a nation when there is no food for one’s children and no water for even their thirsts? No one can count the conflicts they prompted or the petty wars that spontaneously combusted around the planet. And now there is talk and fear—by all those with enough food in their bellies to worry of such things—about all the nuclear weapons known and unknown, secured and loose, hydrogen, atomic, suitcase, and dirty, and about those who might be desperate and hateful enough to use them. Unpredictably mixed in is that most explosive chemical, testosterone—civilization's bargain with the devil—which now fuels the passion of many young men filled with resentment, greed, fear, and rage.  For but a few dollars they will hungrily trade a pound of plutonium.  And young boys banded in their newly formed clans skitter about the brush and through the streets firing foreign-made guns, behaving not like the communities’ children but like drunken victors, taking orders from psychotic men in fatigues conspicuously starched, reveling in their rockets, jeeps, and tanks.

(Natalie Behring / Getty Images)

The Americans, barely holding on to some semblance of a nation, are in an inchoate process of directing the full force of their military onto their own people, for, even in this country of the constitution, the looting and violence cannot be contained and the rule of law sustained by mere policemen.  Isolationism is no longer a luxury, but rather an ominous imperative, for the global economy imploded within weeks of the Chinese-Russian War.

CREDIT: AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

And as in any Ponzi game, everyone who was caught holding the bag has gone under.  Hundreds of vast container ships stuffed with the usual bounty of the Third World countries—all the toys and electronics and clothes and every other imaginable bauble the indigents made in their factories for pennies—now sit in the harbors of Hamburg and Los Angeles and Newark and hundreds of other cities, with nowhere to go.  The stores are still filled with these very things. No one is buying them and perhaps no one ever will.  The whole human economic machine—with the deafening roar of all its valves, pistons, and gears—has been abruptly switched to OFF, leaving us in an eerie silence.  Eerie, because of how fragile the whole thing really was. And the men in the ships wait in port, smoking cigarettes, not knowing what to do with themselves, fretting about their loved ones at home, thinking that surely the system will pick up again from where it left off and empty their vessels of these worthless goods onto the dockside platforms, and all will be as it was before.  And with this same faith in civilization, the marines safeguard these ships and the stores and the power stations and everything else that a rich man may still own.        

Taking a Break: Ken Koskela, photographer (https://www.kenkoskela.com/photo/taking-a-break/)

It is true that the skies are still blue and the oceans are wide and deep, but their beauty no longer obscures their truth. We know that saline waters have leaked into the interstices of sediments once flush with oil and fresh water. We know that there once existed tremendous aquifers under the American Midwest, under China, India, and the Middle East, virtual underground seas, emptied for decades onto irrigated fields that were also fed on steroids, on oil, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, hormones, antibiotics, and everything else we could muster against nature.  The great rivers—once revered as gods—are now but open sewers.  Some never reach the ocean, drained by the billions of thirsty mouths they must pass on their ancient journeys to the coast.  The oceans themselves have become deserts, where no fishing boat will waste its time hunting.  And the glaciers, once strongholds in the mountains, are melting into the seas, their waters creeping up the coasts and down the city streets into basements and subway tunnels. 

Credit: DAVID NUNUK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

We could worry for the future, but who really has time for such abstractions?  Who, but the wealthiest few cloistered behind armed walls, do not spend their days working to make it to the next? Who even remembers how it all started, why the grocery shelves suddenly went bare? Or it seemed sudden to us. Three years ago, in 2034, when the droughts, floods, and plagues came upon us. Just a natural coincidence of variables, really, any archeologist will tell you this. These things happen and have happened and will happen many times more—the lands cropped for centuries finally died and the forests all about the tropical earth were then razed for farmland. From the fires that consumed all this life, smoke roiled up black and thick, as if from a ceremony of massive sacrifices. And still the famines mounted. And the economies came to a screaming halt. There was no wage for a day's work, and no taxes to be taken, the roads and bridges went without repair, the coal trains stopped on their way to the power stations, and cities darkened overnight. People poured out of their buildings into the streets and shouted slogans and pumped their fists at invisible leaders, and eventually they went home, scratching their heads, murmuring to each other about who was to blame.

Billy H.C. Kwok/Getty Images

 And on and on we could without hyperbole divine the future suffering of our kith and kin and the ruin of our lovely, nurturing, and simultaneously exacting planetary home.  We have already visited examples of less destructive societies, places such as Ladakh and Kerala where some few have managed sustainable lives, the kind of places that we have the resources, technology, and the know-how to create, but will have neither the will nor the wisdom to realize.  Instead, the likely outcome of humanity's experiment with Civilization will be some approximation of the above.  It may not happen in 2037—that date was picked for dramatic effect—or by 2050, or 2075, even. However, the younger one’s age, the more assured she is of witnessing these horrors. I have a daughter, and I am scared for her at times, especially in my early morning awakenings, when the sun is still far from rising, and I despair about the world our generation has left for her. I sit up and meditate until the sun has risen enough to light the air and the birds sing their morning songs of hope and celebration. When I step out in the day to join my community, I will remember that it is by honestly facing the futility of the easy solutions thus far offered by pundits and the leaders and followers alike of political tribes can we to engage us in the difficult work ahead.

The Collapse of Complex Societies: What’s past is prologue

Complex human societies have come and gone, and the drivers of their evolution and the causes of their demise are many, and for most of them, mysterious; that is, our archaeological tools are still insufficient to clarify their stories through the hazy film of time.  What does seem clear is that overpopulation, over-consumption, and degradation of arable land are common to many of their stories, including those of history’s paragons, the Mesopotamian, Indus Valley, Roman, and Mayan civilizations.[i]  Societies often outstrip their local resource base, forcing them to put more energy into exploiting the resources farther away, lands usually covetously held by neighboring societies.  Every empire—a dozen within today’s Middle East alone—has gone down this well-worn path.[ii] Many societies—the Mesopotamians, the Mayans, the Anasazi, and the Indians of Cahokia among them—cut down the surrounding forests for agriculture.[iii]  When they ran out of flat land they continued upslope, and the rainwaters—that would have normally nourished them—flooded them instead and sent their fertile farm soil downstream towards the oceans.[iv]  In southern Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, parts of the Roman Empire, and in the Ancient Pueblo societies of the American Southwest, fragile arid lands were irrigated literally to death.[v]  Either the salts left by the evaporated waters killed the soil, or the water pooled in places where the underlying geology did not allow drainage, and the crops drowned.

Before collapsing, all these societies thrived for centuries, sometimes millennia. Human ingenuity solved many of their ongoing problems. Societies are problem-solving entities. Until they are not. As their natural resource base degrades, the societies become less resilient to the continual onslaught of stressors to which they are all subject—floods, droughts, invaders, incompetent leaders, epidemics.  Weakened, a powerful stressor eventually overwhelms them.  The stressor is either prolonged, as in the Great Drought of the 13th century C.E. that brought down the Pueblo Indian societies, the prolonged (900 year) drying of the Indo-Gangetic Plain that ended the urban Harappan civilization about three thousand years ago, or the megadroughts that brought down both the Classic Mayas and the Andean Tiwanaku Empire in approximately 900 C.E. and the Khmer Empire in the 15th century C.E.; or the society was beset by a series of environmental and societal challenges that whittled down its resilience, as in the case of the Late Bronze Age Greece, and the Romans, the Mayans, the Axumites in Ethiopia in the first half of the first millennium C.E., the society on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Akkadians in Northern Mesopotamia, and, after them, the Sumerian’s Ur III empire of Southern Mesopotamia.[vi]

We are treading down the same path as past societies, overpopulating, overconsuming, and destroying the underlying biosphere, but do not have to come to the same dismal conclusion. Our numbers and our consumption will necessarily come down to whatever is sustainable within Earth’s biogeochemical systems. We can do it voluntarily or nature will do it for us through a dieback. The collapse of Civilization is certainly not a given. We can prevent collapse. It will probably take great determination, innovation, courage, honesty, and wisdom. It will require an honest assessment of our beliefs, values, and behaviors. It is principally this effort towards honest assessment that guides this website.  

Large crowds gather in the afternoon on Cacuaco bay, north of Luanda, Angola. Credit: Getty Images / iStock / mtcurado

ENDNOTES

[i] For example, Hughes (1975, 2001), Tainter (1988), Culbert (1988/2003), Ponting (1991), Redman (1999), Haug et al. (2003), Harper (2004), Redman et al. (2004, 2007), Wright (2004), Diamond (2005a,b;2007;2009), Aimers (2007), Redman et al. (2007).

Hughes, J.D., (1975) Ecology in Ancient Civilizations. Univ. of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Culbert, T.P. (1988/2003) The Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization, pp. 69-101, in Yoffee, N. and Cowgill, G.L. (Editors) The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.

Tainter, J.A. (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, U.K.

Ponting (1991) A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. Penguin Books, New York.

Redman, C.L. (1999) Human Impact on Ancient Environments. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.

Hughes, J.D., (2001) An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life. Routledge, London.

Haug, G. H., Gunther, D., Peterson, L.C., Sigman, D.M., Hughen, K.A, Aeschlimann, B. (2003) Climate and Collapse of Maya Civilization. Science, v. 299, pp. 1731-1735.

Harper, C.L. (2004) Environment and Society: Human Perspectives on Environmental Issues. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.

Redman, C.L., James, S.R., Fish, P.R., and Rogers, J.D., Editors (2004) The Archaeology of Global Change: The Impact of Humans on Their Environment. Smithsonian Books, Washington D.C.

Wright, R. (2004) A Short History of Progress. Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, PA.

Diamond, J. (2005a) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking, New York.

Diamond, J. (2005b, April) Collapse: Ecological Lessons in Survival. Natural History, pp. 38-43.

Diamond, J. (2007) Easter Island Revisited, Science, v. 317, pp. 1692-1694.

Aimers, J.J. (2007) What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands, Journal Archaeological Research, v. 15, pp. 329-377.

Redman, C.L., Crumley, C.L., Hassan, F.A., Hole, F., Morais, J., Riedel, F., Scarborough, V.L., Tainter, J.A., Turchin, P., and Yasuda, Y. (2007) Group Report: Millennial Perspectives on the Dynamic Interaction of Climate, People, and Resources, pp. 115-148 in Costanza, R., Graumlich, L.J., and Steffen, W. (Editors), Sustainability or Collapse: An Integrated History and Future of People On Earth. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Diamond, J. (2009) Archaeology: Maya, Khmer and Inca. Nature, v. 461, pp. 479-480.

Population rises often required intensification of farmland, which, if successful, allowed for further increases of population. For those who have followed the academic debates over a Boserupian versus Malthusian relationship between population and agriculture, it seems that both processes occur in a mutually positive feedback loop. Decreasing crop varieties also negatively impacted the resilience of the agricultural societies (Rhoades, R. (1992, April) The World’s Food Supply at Risk. National Geographic. P. 75-105.)

 [ii] Tainter (1988).

[iii] Good and Reuveny (2009), Middleton (2012)).

Good, D.H, and Reuveny, R. (2009) On the Collapse of Historical Civilizations. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, v. 91(4), pp. 863-879.

[iv] Hughes (1975, 2001), Olson (1981), Ponting (1991), Diamond (2005), Homer-Dixon (2006), Diamond (2005), Scarborough (2007).

Olson, G. W. (1981) Archeology: Lessons on Future Soil Use. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, v. 36(5), pp. 261-264.

[v] Tainter (1988), Diamond (2005), Childs (2007), Butzer (2012).

Childs, C. (2007) On the Trail of the Ancestors. Natural History, v. 116(2), pp. 58-63.

[vi] Tainter (1988), Weiss et al. (1993), Redman (1999), Weiss and Bradley (2001), Diamond (2005, April), Lawler (2007), Redman et al. (2007), Butzer (2012), Giosan et al. (2012), Medina-Elizalde and Rohling (2012), Middleton (2012). Some dispute a megadrought hypothesis for the Classic Maya collapse, given the many endogenous and exogenous factors affecting Mayan civilization; that drought conditions hit different Mayan states at different times; and that each state experienced unique demographic and sociopolitical changes (Middleton, 2012).

Weiss, H., Courty, M.A., Wetterstrom, W., Guichard, F., Senior, L., Meadow, R., and Curnow, A. (1993) The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization, Science, v. 261, pp. 995-1004.

 Redman, C.L. (1999) Human Impact on Ancient Environments. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.

 Weiss, H., and Bradley, R.S. (2001) What Drives Societal Collapse? Science, v. 291, pp. 609-610.

 Diamond, J. (2005, April) Collapse: Ecological Lessons in Survival. Natural History, pp. 38-43.

Lawler, A. (2007) Climate Spurred Later Indus Decline. Science, v. 316, pp. 978-979.

Giosan, L., Clift, P.D., Macklin, M.G., Fuller, D.Q., Constantinescu, S., Durcan, J.A., Stevens, T., Duller, G.A.T., Tabrez, A.R., Gangal, K., Adhikari, R., Alizai, A., Filip, F., Sam VanLaningham, S., and Syvitski, J.P.M. (2012, May 29) Fluvial Landscapes of the Harappan Civilization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

 Medina-Elizalde, M. and Rohling, E. J. (2012) Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization Related to Modest Reduction in Precipitation, Science, v. 335, pp. 956-959.

Winner, C. (2012) Climate Change Spurred Fall of Ancient Culture. Oceanus Magazine. Available at https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/LiviuIndia. Accessed November 4, 2013.

The Dieback of the Human Species

Any system—whether it is a rock, a living cell, or the Milky Way—exists because it is well-attuned to its particular environmental circumstances. Circumstances change, however. The Milky Way, the solar system, the Earth—each system is complex and dynamic (evolves through time) and so creates continual challenges for its inhabitants. That is why living systems—from cells to societies—are problem-solving organizations. We are alive because, for billions of years, our predecessors were among the best at addressing their environmental challenges. We, the millions of living species, have evolved together. We are intimately part of this planet. We belong here. And change is hardwired into us. In this website, we speak of human extinction, only of change. True, all species eventually become extinct, so that we too will one day vanish. However, we will likely be here for a long time yet.

The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three: Ji'nan to Mount Tai: Wang Hui, circa 1698

The average lifespan of a species is about four million years. The more complex the species, the sooner it comes to extinction.[i] The fossil record suggests that some bacteria have been around for three billion years. At the other end of the spectrum, mammal species average only a million years.[ii] By the reckoning of anthropologists, atomically similar Homo sapiens have walked the earth for at least two-hundred thousand years, and culturally modern Homo sapiens sapiens have been around some seventy-thousand years. So, at the very most, our species has been around about a fifth of the average mammal lifespan. We should have another 800,000 years coming to us. In our favor, there is another important factor that influences longevity. Called the Law of Evolutionary Potential, “the more specialized and adapted a form is in any given evolutionary stage, the smaller the potential for passing to the next stage.”[iii]  Specialists are uniquely adapted to a specific niche and thus have little tolerance for environmental changes.[iv]  Because generalists, like rats, cockroaches, and crows, are adapted to varied circumstances, they deal better with change. We are the epitome of generalists. We can crawl, walk, and run. We can swim, surf, climb a tree, ride a horse, and zip through space at supersonic speeds. We can eat just about anything, and have adapted to every earthly niche. Given our great virtues—from bipedalism to opposable thumbs; a cooling system composed of two million sweat glands; an omnivore’s digestive tract; highly sensitive, binocular, trichromatic vision; a complex brain composed of many trillions of connections and all its mental powers of memory, reasoning, language, social aptitude, culture, and so forth—we could be around for who knows how long, until the sun burns away the last life here. And by then we may be flying away in spaceships to other star systems.

Roots: Frida Kahlo, 1943

So, no, we are not considering extinction, only a pruning back of our numbers, of a human dieback. From eight, nine, ten, eleven or whatever billion, to some far smaller number. We, the living generations, are witnessing the peak population of humans on this planet. Never again will there be so many of us living at any one time on Earth. The bigger our numbers and the longer we postpone the dieback, the greater will be the suffering of our kind as well as the rest of the creatures our growing numbers replace in the interim. We will either voluntarily make the necessary adjustments, or nature will do it for us. As Alfred Crosby put it, “Mother nature always comes to the rescue of a society stricken with the problems of overpopulation, and her ministrations are never gentle.”[v]

What I Saw in the Water: Frida Kahlo, 1938

Droughts will force us to abandon the deserts to the cacti and solar panels, and dry aquifers will force us to stop irrigating arid fields. Hurricanes will force us to move our cities off of the deltas and leave barrier islands to the vagaries of the seas. A heating atmosphere will scorch and wither our more delicate crops. We will compete with each other for the fertile lands and the remaining resources. There will be winners and losers, and the latter will die off. Energy prices will force the winners to grow their food regionally and to consume intelligently.[vi] Cities will grow their own vegetables, and buffalos and cattle will be herded across the grasslands, turning the plains from breadbaskets into bio diverse cornucopias. Because we are such clever animals and because we have the potential of living up to our name Homo sapiens, the wise human, Civilization likely will one day live in harmony with Nature. Nature informs us of where we are most welcome. We will listen more carefully. We will participate in a dance with Nature, rather than raping Nature and then calling it our birthright. We will likely live a long time on this Earth, and we will face many more challenges, both from Nature’s vicissitudes (like super-volcanic eruptions and climatic fluctuations) and from self-inflicted causes (war and resource drawdown, for example).

Evening at Argenteuil: Claude Monet, 1876

In the meantime, we have to pass through the difficult transition or perhaps several transitions, from where we are now to that sustainable civilization. From nine destructive billion to the few sustainable billions. From a petroleum-based civilization to a solar-based one. We are just beginning. We have just become aware of our plight. Many still deny the problems of population, overconsumption, climate, and food security. Most are too busy trying to eke out a living by the rules of civilization to give it much thought and too poor to change their behaviors even if they knew how. Few people regard our predicament to be so dire as to actually warrant significant adjustment on our parts. A little tweaking of the ways of government and business will surely suffice, according to the predominant view. In these pages, however, we are suggesting something quite different. Our numbers have already overshot the Earth’s limits, and our methods of production and consumption are reckless and suicidal. Given our level of ignorance about the matter, our circumstances will deteriorate further before we commit ourselves to change. It will likely take a lot of pain and suffering before we can change something so big as civilization and its prevailing paradigm. It will likely require our dieback.

Canyon with Crows: Georgia O’Keeffe, 1917

Dieback is not uncommon in nature.  By pruning back unsustainable numbers, dieback acts as a last check on population.  It is a rapid re-establishment of harmony within a system. The species either overbred, overwhelming its environment, or the environment changed in a way that it could no longer support the previously viable population.[vii]  Population explosions, oscillations, overshoots, collapses: these are part of nature’s dance. Specific dances for specific ecosystems.[viii] Many creatures undergo regular cycles of “irruption” and dieoff—algae, insects, and rodents, for instance. Their populations explode and then they crash. Their predators face these same cycles. More hare will feed more lynx. A dieback of hares leads to a dieback of the lynx.

The Wounded Deer: Frida Kahlo, 1946

Herbivores, such as the moose, elk, and deer, often experience dieback. Unaware of carrying capacity or of the changing seasons, they mindlessly munch on all the edible vegetation within reach. In 1944, twenty-nine reindeer were released on St. Mathew’s Island, the site of a remote Coast Guard outpost in the Bering Sea.[ix] There were no predators, and the reindeer feasted on the grasses and thick lichen mats. Their population exploded. By 1957 there were an estimated 1,350 reindeer. By 1963, there were four times more, perhaps six thousand, albeit smaller and less robust. This was several times greater than the estimated carrying capacity, and their diminished stature suggested that they were experiencing intense competition among themselves due to their overpopulation.[x] By 1966, they had stripped the island nearly bare of lichen. The dieoff was sudden and horrible. By the end of 1966 there were only forty-two reindeer remaining. With no viable males, the reindeer died out by the late 1980s.  

The Dream: Henri Rousseau, 1910

Of the many other cases, both “natural” and human caused, here are a few rather arbitrary examples…

·      In 1965 tens of thousands of cattle suddenly died in Uganda after decades of overgrazing the country’s dry grasslands.[xi]  

·      In 1983, the population of long-spined sea urchins collapsed off the Jamaican coast. Algae were then free to grow unchecked on the coral, and the coral reefs collapsed soon after.[xii]  

·      The Lesser Flamingo in Kenya’s rift valley has undergone numerous dieoffs in the past decades, with several tens of thousands of individuals at a time “dying mysteriously.”[xiii]  The scene of pink carcasses on the shores of Lake Nakuru in 2006 was described as looking like a “flamingo death camp.”[xiv]

·      Cod stocks off North America’s Atlantic coast have been fished to near extinction. The fisheries were closed in the early 1990s and have not been reopened.[xv]

·      Indeed, in the last sixty years, some thirty percent of all fish species have been fished to collapse.[xvi]

·      The lobsters in Long Island Sound nearly disappeared in 1999 when multiple environmental stresses weakened their immune response to the parasitic amoebae, Neoparamoeba pemaquidensis.[xvii]

·      The salt marshes that rim the American Southeast and Gulf Coast states are among the biologically richest ecosystems in the world. In the first years of the 21st century, a prolonged drought altered the soil moisture, acidity, salinity, and the metal toxicity levels of these wetlands, severely stressing the plant life. Then, snails and a pathogenic fungus that they carried “acted synergistically” to cause a “a massive die-off” along a thousand miles of these important wetlands.[xviii] The “snails actively converted marshes to [nothing but] exposed mudflats”.[xix]

·      Several sea star species experienced weird “melting” deaths, their bodies disarticulating and disintegrating in massive dieoffs along much of the U.S. and Canadian east coast in 2013 and 2014.[xx] Sea stars regularly undergo population explosions and collapses.

·       Springtime melts carry nutrients from the partially decayed leaves of the previous autumn to mountain ponds, resulting in annual algal blooms. Then, after their food source runs out, the algae populations crash in mass dieoffs.[xxi]  The world’s coastal dead zones are the result of a similar process—the nutrients, in this instance, coming from upstream farmland fertilizers.

·      And then there are the wine-making yeast cells who die by the trillions each year in fermentation vats.[xxii] Gorging themselves on the sugars of the crushed grapes, they then suffocate in their own toxic wastes of carbon dioxide and alcohol.

On a larger scale, volcanic super-eruptions, asteroid impacts, novel and invasive life forms, and—more often—climate change have caused diebacks and extinctions and, sometimes, even mass extinctions. In the last two million years alone, astronomical and geological forces have colluded to substantially alter the surface of the earth. Continental ice sheets have waxed and waned numerous times across the northern continents, and deserts and jungles have replaced each other on the southern ones. Within these grand rhythms, and many others as well, species come and go.

Civilization and Destruction: Sewon Rai, ca. 2016

It does not take a vivid imagination to see the parallels to human civilization. The European invasion of the New World, with all its natural bounty, has been likened to yeasts introduced to the new crushed grapes.[xxiii] And the pollution of the environment has been likened to “the plight of the yeast cells in the wine vat…” after they have binged a while.[xxiv] The dieback of the Mayan civilization has been compared to the irruption and dieback cycles of the reindeer on Mathew Island.[xxv] The Indus and the Anasazi died back like the drying of the ancient Sahara forests, surely, gradually, mysteriously.[xxvi] And the causes of the Native American and Australian Aboriginal diebacks—a mixture of invasion, war, and invisible pathogens—were not unlike those that had extinguished the mega-fauna on those same continents thousands of years earlier and that have also laid low the American buffalo, the great whales, world fisheries, and coral reefs.[xxvii]  Likely, the 21st century human dieback will be caused by a combination of all of these.

Gaia: Alex Grey, 1989

 ENDNOTES

[i] Ward, P.D., and Brownlee, D. (2000) Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. Copernicus, New York.

[ii] Ward and Brownlee (2000)

[iii] Sahlins, M.D., and Service, E.R. (1960:97) Evolution and Culture. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

[iv] Ward and Brownlee (2000:166).

[v] Crosby, A.W. (2004:92) Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge.

[vi] That is, the rising cost of ever-scarcer fossil fuels and the low prices of ever present solar and renewable energy sources.

[vii] Catton, W.R. (1982) Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Univ. Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.

[viii] Catton (1982). Boettiger, C., and Hastings, A. (2013) From Patterns to Predictions. Nature, v. 493, pp. 157-158.

[ix] Klein, D.R. 1968. The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island. Journal of Wildlife Management, v. 32, pp. 350-367.

Rozell, N. (2003, November 13) When Reindeer Paradise Turned to Purgatory, Article #1672. Alaska Science Forum. Available at http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF16/1672.html. Accessed October 21, 2013. 

[x] Catton (1982), Harper (2004).

[xi] Harper, C.L. (2004:44) Environment and Society: Human Perspectives on Environmental Issues. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.

[xii] Zolli, A., and Healy, A.M. (2012:33-35) Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. Simon and Schuster, New York.

[xiii] Koenig, R. (2006) The Pink Death: Die-Offs of the Lesser Flamingo Raise Concern. Science, v. 313, pp. 1724-1725.

[xiv] Koenig (2006).

[xv] Homer-Dixon, T. (2006) The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Island Press, Washington D.C.

Randers, J. (2008) Global Collapse—Fact or Fiction? Futures, v. 40, pp. 853-864.

[xvi] Zolli and Healy (2012:36).

[xvii] Pearce, J., and Balcom, N. (2005) The 1999 Long Island Sound Lobster Mortality Event: Findings of the Comprehensive Research Initiative. Journal of Shellfish Research, v. 24(3), pp. 691-697.

Wacker, T. (2008, July 20) In the Sound, Reports of Lobster Disease Rise, New York Times.

[xviii] Silliman, B.R., van de Koppel, J., Bertness, M.D., Stanton, L.E., Mendelssohn, I.A. (2005) Drought, Snails, and Large-Scale Die-Off of Southern U.S. Salt Marshes, Science, v. 310, pp. 1803-1806.

[xix] Silliman et al. (2005).

[xx] Arnold, C. (2013, September 9) Massive Starfish Die-Off Baffles Scientists. National Geographic News.

Science Daily (2013, July 23) Why are Sea Stars Dying from New Jersey to Maine? Divers asked to Report Large Groupings of Starfish.

[xxi] Catton (1982).

[xxii] Catton (1982).

[xxiii] Catton (1982:169).

[xxiv] Catton (1982:176).

[xxv] Harper (2004).

[xxvi] Owen, J. (2008, May 8) Once Lush Sahara Dried up Over Millennia, Study Says. National Geographic News.

[xxvii] The sad irony of this example is that it was the ancestors of the American and Australian Aboriginals who were responsible for the megafaunal dieoffs.