Waking from the American Dream, 3

The United States has been the presiding power during the unprecedented economic boom of the past sixty years. American wealth as measured by GDP increased more than 43-fold in that time, from $300 billion in 1950 (1998 dollars) to more than $13,000 billion in 2006.  The world has never seen the likes of it.  We now take it for granted that most Americans live in ways far more comfortable than all of history’s royalty.  Because of technological innovation and cheap oil, the lives of today’s generations promise to be long and comfortable.

In moments of reflection, most Americans will shy away from an egoistic appraisal of our wealth, away from superiority of system, away from divine providence, away from hard-working determination.  We become mindful of our fortune, of our place in history, of the suffering past and present.  In these moments, armed with gratitude and heightened awareness, we may ask, “What have we done with our wealth.  Have we been spent it wisely?”  And, of course, there are many ways to take this measure.  I offer one measure, one that perhaps follows the injunction of those whom we have considered wise: Jesus Christ, Siddhartha Gautama, Mahatma Ghandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt—the list is long and we each know of many of them, and, necessarily, we also know where this analysis goes…

With our wealth, have we made sure that everybody had at least enough to eat and a comfortable place to rest their head before we had more?  Have we kept the environment clean, have we left room for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field?  Have we promoted a secure home for our children and theirs?  Have we promoted lifestyles that provide happiness, peace and serenity for ourselves and for those around us?  In these moments of reflection, when we are in touch with our more ideal self and we are away momentarily from the daily forces that propel us to work for status and bloated, disconnected salaries, or, conversely, to work in low-paying, demeaning jobs—in these moments, we can face with honesty the society of which we have been part.  And, again, we know the answers to these questions…

Fifty years of unprecedented wealth, and yet we have entered a new gilded age (using the terminology of Paul Krugman in his numerous New York Times columns).  The disparity of wealth is greater than it was in the boom-time pre-depression 1920s.  In our country, alone, there are at least 744,000 homeless people, fifteen million children who go hungry every day, 36 million who live below the poverty line.  The U.S. health system is ranked 37th in the world, its education 18th, and life expectancy is 45th.  We could not provide $35 billion dollars to help insure the health care of our own children, but we’re going $200 billion more in debt to fund a war in a little country with lots of oil, wreaking yet more untold suffering on that people.  The cost of that war has already totaled more than $450 billion.  The U.N. suggests that about $100 billion could solve the water problems for all 6.7 billion of our human family.  And once we lead our thinking in this direction, we know there are many measures by which we fall short of our ideal and many chances to yet correct the way we spend our trillions, if we just possessed the individual and political will.

Waking from the American Dream, 2

Numerous authorities on all sides of the political and philosophical spectrum have warned us business has evolved in ways that generates great wealth and, at the same time, holds no allegiance to any country.  The result has been described by Chalmers Johnson (1,2) as a hollowing out of American industry.  In American theocracy, Kevin Phillips shows that the American debt-industries are now significantly larger than American industry.  According to this Republican analyst in American Theocracy, “44% percent of all corporate profits in the U.S. come from the financial sector compared with only 10% from the manufacturing sector.”

Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Morris Berman, John Perkins, Naomi Klein, and David Harvey have all persuasively shown how transnational corporations have gravely compromised democracy in our country and elsewhere.  Through the power of political contributions and the daily army of corporate lobbyists, the branches of government have become the boughs of corporate fruit.  Politics, religion, business, the military and the media once each shared its place in our society.   However, business now dominates.

The business model has become the model for everything.  Even education, health, the environment, internal security and national defense are being privatized. And through advertising and the media, Americans have become willing participants in America’s transformation to the business worldview. As Benjamin Barber points out in Jihad vs. McWorld, we now think of ourselves as consumers, not citizens.  We are more likely to make our voice heard by the brand we buy, not the position we take at town hall or the person we elect in the voting booth.

Waking from the American Dream, 1

Two recent New York Times front page articles that may say so much: Rising Global Demand for Oil Provoking New Energy Crisis, and Fed Chief Warns of Worse Times in the Economy.  One about oil, the other about the economy.  Wisely, one can question the perspicacity of extending trends such as these—however large-scale—to divine the future.   We intuit that such trends are linear with a relatively short history and that reality is so complex that any number of unanticipated events can swallow up what we once considered important.

However, among the complexity of our global reality, three mutually-reinforcing mega-trends clearly stand out. One is the unprecedented boom in the world economy, the second is the unprecedented devastation of the Earth-providing life-support systems, and the third is the continuing economic bifurcation of our human family.  The first trend implies a huge improvement in many people’s material existence—300 million Chinese in the past twenty years, alone—and a huge increase in material consumption.  The second trend speaks of great suffering for about three billion people and unimaginable suffering to the nonhuman life that shares this planet with us.  And the third trend becomes—along with the previous one—a moral siren ringing deep under the layers of our unconscious, trying to wake us up to our senses. These trends are like trains running on the same track, headed for some as yet undetermined collision, and—being that, by the very nature of our universe, all events are somehow connected—they are reflected in the oil and economic news.

First, the economic news.  Intricately tied to the precipitous fall of the dollar’s value is U.S. debt and therefore the rate of American consumption.  The U.S. federal debt is five, nine, or sixty trillion dollars, depending on how you measure it.  All three are true.  If one takes the nine trillion figure-- the sum total that the U.S. government presently owes—it comes out to 65% of the nation’s annual GDP. On top of that, Americans are individually in debt to the tune of another 2.3 trillion dollars, $760 billion of it being in the form of credit card debt.  Our foreign debt is three trillion dollars. Clearly, Americans consume far more than they produce.  This single fact reverberates across the global fabric, creating ripple effects everywhere. 

Following one important wave across the world: Asian banks hold over 2.3 trillion dollars of U.S. assets.  China, alone—according to a testimony prepared by Kenneth Rogoff for the U.S. House of Representatives June 26, 2007—holds $1.2 trillion in treasury reserves.  As the value of the dollar compared to other currencies continues to slide, so does the value of the vast Asian holdings. Both buying more U.S. dollars and selling could destabilize the U.S. economy, and since the U.S. is the principle importer of Asian goods, this could seriously influence their economies.  Already, China has decided to diversify its investments by buying euros.  With less treasury bonds being bought by China (and likely Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia), the easy overseas credit that the U.S. has been using to run the government will begin to dry up.  Without the easy foreign money, wars, education and health care will be equally more costly to fund.  Within a generation, Americans could find that entitlements—such as Social Security, universal education, extensive highways infrastructure, a massive military—that we have held as our birthright may no longer exist. 

The Human Predicament

Since civilization began some 9,000 years ago, humanity's impact on the environment has been accelerating by an autocatalytic process of the mutually-reinforcing variables of surplus, innovation and population.  An inflection point in the J-curves of these variables occurred around 1950, so that from that point on, every factor worth measuring has exhibited a troubling skyward trajectory.

    As in all natural systems, the environment's responses (in this instance global warming, dwindling land, water, fossil fuels and wild animals, etc.,) signals a resistance to present behaviors.  Awareness of these signals and their possible meanings has diffused so thoroughly through Civilization that even the power elite's staunchest apologists (such as George W. Bush) must publicly acknowledge them.  We are likely approaching a crisis for the Civilization project.  In all its uses (general, medical, psychological), crisis is the term used to indicate a turning point for the system in question, when it becomes clear whether the system will flourish or decline.

   Our Environmental Impact is caused by the multiplier effect of Population, Consumption and the Resources/Wastes per amount of Consumption.  Globally, voluntary reductions in either population or consumption are unlikely.  Therefore, Civilization's response to its predicament revolves around the Resources/Waste factor, and this comes down to a reliance on human ingenuity to power us through: finding new resources, substituting new materials, innovating efficiency.

   We'll present our individual and sometimes divergent views on the nature of resources, survival, the future (including the very far future), taking into account the likely, the unlikely, the unthinkable, and even the impossible.  And we'll be counting on all present to weave from our threads a conversation that will hopefully become a microcosm of the larger human dialogue."

Switchgrass and Human Consumption

The October, 2007 issue of Wired magazine dismisses hydrogen, solar, wind, and corn-produced ethanol as viable energy sources, mainly as dramatic introduction to their cover story about the future of switchgrass. 

Switchgrass has its promises, no doubt. However, given the tough molecular design of cellulose we have not as yet found a way yet to competitively produce ethanol from it. The technical optimist, with great justification, will assure us we just have to wait until oil prices rise enough. Same argument made by the oil shale enthusiasts, BTW, who argued for decades that oil would have to reach $50 a barrel. Oil is almost double that, but little shale oil on the market.

Still, yes, switchgrass is the darling of the technological optimists.  Wired’s primary objection to corn-processed ethanol is that it is rather inefficient at producing energy.  “…it generates at best 30 percent more energy that is required to grow and process the corn—hardly worth the trouble.”   Nothing, of course about the morality of using what could be food to instead fuel one’s drive to the video store.  And there certainly isn’t any consideration at a more evolved, world-centric level of consciousness about growing vast tracts of one crop to fuel our profligacy at the expense of what would otherwise be a bio-web composed of thousands of species.

Okay, so let’s keep the debate to what is best for Americans.  That is, afterall, the focus of the Wired article… Switchgrass produces more energy than corn--80% more energy that is required to grow it. Which means for every acre of switchgrass that goes into a car, you have to grow another 1.2 acres of switchgrass as production energy. How many more acres of mono crop do we need to supply our 35 billion gallon a year habit? Not just 35 billion gallons, nor the 77 billion gallons to account for the production of the ethanol.  Since alcohol produces about 70% of the heat value of oil, we’d need enough switchgrass to produce 110 billion gallons.  Switchgrass would probably be able to produce at best 120 gallons of useable energy per acre, which comes out to nearly a billion acres of switchgrass.

This a little less than the total land allotted to all farming, pasture and rangeland in the U.S.  So, to produce switchgrass ethanol for even a small percent of American oil use will require turning the entire non-forest, non-urban portion of the United States into a vast alcohol farm.  And once we plant the U.S. with switchgrass for U.S. car consumption, what of the rest of the world. How much of the planet do we plant in switchgrass to fulfill our desires?     

Part 2.

When we speak of oil, we tend to speak in the language of a paradigm that will soon die. Whether oil production can maintain 85 or 100 million barrels a day, or whether peak oil is now or ten years from now, or whether oil companies are swindling us—these are all small-scale thinking. On the scales of even generations, much less the lifetimes of nations and civilizations, oil is a precious fuel with a very limited lifespan.

Demographers tell us we will have another 2.5 billion people and economists predict a 10-fold increase in production/consumption by 2100. Meanwhile climatologists, oceanographers, and biologists warn us that, by every measure, already the earth can no longer absorb our wastes and sustainably provide our resources. Yet, we assume the economic and social forces will continue as they have, unabated, just with a different fuel, a better car, a kinder government, a more responsible corporate environment...

We concern ourselves with which light bulb is most efficient, whether a car gets 25 miles to the gallon or 27.5, whether a politician supports the Kyoto Protocol, and all the other little details.  And, sure, each piece is important to the overall picture… Meanwhile Rome burns. We (the human family) know, for the most part, what we need to do. We know what actions, technology and policies should be implemented. And yet every indicator of environmental destruction has gotten worse every year.

We don't really know, because knowledge is not wisdom. We are clever enough to figure out what needs to be done, but we (the human family) are not wise enough to do those things we must. By 2050, demographers tell us we will have 2.5 billion more people, and economists tell us we will be consuming 4 times more. The planet can probably not absorb as much damage as was wrought between 1950 and 2000, and yet we are on the road to do even more in the next half-century. All ideas that we can continue as we have, tinkering here and putting this light there, and live on as we have merrily, merrily are highly problematic given the enormity of the problem.

However, on any time scale except those in which we individually experience, it doesn't matter what the price of gasoline is at the pump, or how efficacious capitalism is at producing wealth, or who the bad guys are.

Now, the earth is big and we are small and therefore it is difficult to know what information is significant--however, all signals from the earth clearly show that our big picture is not working. It's not that we need to make little adjustments to a faulty but basically working model. The whole model needs rethinking. It begins with the individual, internally. It begins not with knowledge--there's plenty of that and much of it contradicts--but with wisdom. And if we don't have wisdom, we need to listen carefully to those whom we have all through history agreed are wise.

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We concern ourselves with which light bulb is most efficient, whether a car gets 25 miles to the gallon or 27.5, whether a politician supports the Kyoto Protocol, and all the other little details.  And, sure, each piece is important to the overall picture… Meanwhile Rome burns. We (the human family) know, for the most part, what we need to do. We know what actions, technology and policies should be implemented. And yet every indicator of environmental destruction has gotten worse every year.

We don't really know, because knowledge is not wisdom. We are clever enough to figure out what needs to be done, but we (the human family) are not wise enough to do those things we must. By 2050, demographers tell us we will have 2.5 billion more people, and economists tell us we will be consuming 4 times more. The planet can probably not absorb as much damage as was wrought between 1950 and 2000, and yet we are on the road to do even more in the next half-century. All ideas that we can continue as we have, tinkering here and putting this light there, and live on as we have merrily, merrily are highly problematic given the enormity of the problem.

Electricity is produced in power plants that use fossil fuels as a principle fuel. Until wind power (or some integration of sustainable energy sources) becomes the major source of electricity, powering cars by hooking them to the grid is no solution. It’s the same problem we have with hydrogen fuel.

We are still locked into the present economic/political paradigm, looking for technological and policy fixes so that we can continue living our principally suburban, auto-rich, high consumption lifestyles. However, all indications suggest that the destruction to earth’s life support systems are far greater in extent and occurring far more rapidly than we are yet ready to accept. A more likely solution, going deeper than merely substituting one energy source for another, involves a major paradigm shift, one which includes a significant reduction in per capita consumption. In a world of simpler lifestyles and minimal consumption, technology will certainly present us with many surprises.

Once we plant the west with switchgrass for U.S. car consumption, what of the rest of the world. How much of the planet do we plant in switchgrass to fulfill our desires? Already, we are consuming a significant portion of the earth's biological productivity for our ends.

How much of the earth’s resources are humans consuming? The earth is big and we’re small, and from an individual’s perspective any reasonable attempt to answer this would be daunting. So, some have narrowed the measure of our impact to only the plant matter that we consume. This is called the net primary production (NPP). According to numerous articles in some of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals (Vitousek et al, 1986, BioScience; Rostaczer et al, 2001, Science; Imhoff et al in a 2004; Nature, Haberl et al, 2007, PNAS) we consume about a third of the earth’s plant matter. We make up 0.5% (that is, one-half of 1% of the mass of all animals) and yet we consume about 33% of the earth’s land plant biomass.

Not included in these measurements were land lost to desertification and urban settlements, roads, etc. The true human impact may be closer to 50% (which was within the margin of error in the 2001 study). Also absent from these calculations were our use of freshwater, our consumption of fossil fuels, or the appropriation of the NPP from freshwater and marine ecosystems.

According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, about 50% of the earth’s land surface has been converted to cultivated crops and grazed land, and more than half of the earth’s forests have been lost in the process.

We have taken over much of life’s energy and yet even this is not enough. The human population is supposed to increase by another third by 2050 and consumption is projected to quintuple. We certainly cannot take 5-fold more from the earth. We are in the absurd position of the yeast in a wine vat, its population exploding in the abundance of sugar, not aware that the sugar is finite and that it will soon suffocate in its own waste. We are waking up. Knowledge is the first step, but only the first in a yet long journey.

Sustainable, by definition, means that one's behavior can be sustained indefinitely. If there were only four million people on the earth, they could probably cut down as many trees, clear as much land as they wished, use as many resources and produce as much waste as they desired. This is, of course, ignoring the moral argument.  The immediate vicinity would be eventually destroyed, and humans would move on to another spot, behaving similarly. Meanwhile, thedestroyed area would recuperate and become vibrant again.  This would be sustainable behavior, and it is basically what Paleolithic and early Neolithic (early farmers) did.  From our individual perspective, the earth is big and could likely sustain this sort of lifestyle indefinitely.

However, with 1000 times that number, soon to be 2000 times, such Neolithic conduct is not sustainable. Every indicator--deforestation, overfishing, oceanic acidity, biodiversity loss, desertification, water drawdown, fossil fuel resources, global warming, etc--suggests that the earth's recuperative powers have already been overtaxed. And no matter how fast we move, it will get worse for quite a while before it gets better.

Many solutions are proposed, and many of them are thoughtful, informed, and likely to be part of future sustainable societies.  They are unlikely to be part of any large movement in the near future, however.  Reading trend lines (albeit in a linear way), the destruction to earth's life support systems is accelerating far faster than our behaviors are changing.  Water, land and energy (in a easily usable form, namely oil) are diminishing so rapidly--so unsustainably--that a crash is imminent.  Global warming has deservingly gotten a lot of attention, as has peak oil, mainly because the world's wealthy billion people do not want to give up their high consumption lifestyles. However, as big a threat to humanity--at least in the timespans of decades--is the desertification/water scarcity issue.  Numerous articles in the peer-reviewed journals, such as Science and BioScience have been documentinga disaster-in-the-making, leading to a Malthusian dieback of humanity. It is this event, perhaps more than any other, that will propel humanity into true sustainable action.

Given the bifurcation of the human family into two entrenched groups--rich and poor--the poor of the world will feel the brunt of a likely dieback.