If not a stupid paradigm, then, as previously described, what might a smart paradigm include?
Many people who live in societies that embrace the western industrial dominant social paradigm don’t subscribe to that paradigm in whole or in part. Many realize, or sense, that our current paradigm threatens our ability to survive long-term. Our current paradigm tells us that the economy must continuously grow; that the role of government is to enforce contracts and keep it’s regulatory hands off of business; that technology will save us, particularly from our environmental sins; that humans are the most important forms of life; and that competition is the best way to manage systems and people.
Because this paradigm shapes the way most people think about how the world works and even shapes our living space (for example, with an emphasis on roads and driving) it won’t be easy to change. But since not changing it will clearly impact whether we survive into the future and what future life for our children and grandchildren will look like, changing the paradigm, or trying, is a moral imperative. First we need to consider what a new paradigm should look like.
There are many different paradigms to choose to live by. Humans lived on this Earth without significant impact for eons. We can use paradigms that have supported human and ecosystem health over thousands of years as examples from which to build a new and more resilient paradigm.
The paradigms that have supported long-term human adaptation and survival have some common characteristics – they use or used myth, ritual and mores to enforce limits of the biophysical system (ecosystem) on human actions, enhance the understanding that humans are embedded in (not separate from) their ecosystem, encourage humility and caution of human activities and foster respect for (not dominance of) the animals and plants that make up the ecosystem in which we are embedded. These paradigms support the recognition that there is no separation between humans and their environment and that every human action generates a response from the ecosystem and has consequences. They require reverence for what the Earth provides to us; what we are now calling “ecosystem services.”
The water temples range from mountains to seacoast and were the Balians’ solution to the problems of sharing common resources (in this case, land and water) described by Garrett Hardin in Tragedy of the Commons. On Bali, farmers were motivated to plant rice continuously and use as much water as they needed for their crop to maximize their return. Other farmers had the same goals. However, the limiting factor was water – there was not enough to supply all the farmers all the time. Also, continuously planting rice results in an explosion of the populations of pests that feast on rice. The most effective means of controlling the pest population is for all farmers to suspend planting rice at the same time so pests starve.
The temple system included symbolic ritual activities such as food offerings to the Goddess of Crater Lake and other deities. Due to the rigorous social coordination orchestrated through the water temples, led by temple priests, pest levels were minimized and water sharing optimized in the rice paddies. As a result, for over a thousand years, the system maintained a delicate balance, allowing farmers to plant land that remained fertile because it lay fallow for periods of time, and to control pest populations.
During the Green Revolution, the Indonesian government convinced farmers to use fertilizers and pesticides and to abandon the water temples. The government pressured farmers to plant rice as often as possible and ignore the irrigation schedules of neighboring paddies. The first production increase was short-lived as water shortages and pest infestations reduced rice production much below levels obtained with the water temples. Despite, and because of, massive application of pesticides, insects evolved, became resistant and prospered.
Although the farmers wanted to return to the water temple system, the government resisted until Dr. Lansing collaborated with ecologist/computer modeling expert Dr. James Kremer to study various crop management scenarios. Incorporating historic rainfall data into their computer models, they demonstrated that the water temples were far more effective at maximizing yields and reducing pest infestations than the government’s policy. The government then encouraged farmers to return to using the water temples.
This is only one example of a different paradigm that has worked for at least a millennium; there are many others. In India, research on groves considered to be sacred by communities suggests that these areas are particularly rich in biodiversity and other ecosystem services that are essential for survival of the community (see, e.g., Bhagwat, et al., 2005; Gadgil, Hemam, & Reddy, 1998; Waghchaure, et al., 2006). The links between people, their social institutions, and the physical environment are complex, diverse and redundant in these communities. Additionally, people living in these communities appear to use social institutions to enhance and increase these links and to manage their behaviors in relation to the ecosystem (Berkes, et al., 2000).
Berkes (1998) describes a story of caribou hunting in a resource-dependent community in Canada. Caribou had been absent from the community for over a decade. When the caribou returned, they migrated close to a road and were easily accessible. The local people harvested more caribou than they needed. The following year, the caribou did not return to this area in great numbers. The elders of the community explained to the people who, because they had disrespected the caribou by taking more than was needed, were punished by the caribou who did not offer themselves to be eaten. People living in the western world might scoff at this as a misunderstanding of caribou population and migration patterns.
In this example, a social institution was used to remind people of the link between humans and caribou and the results of overuse of the caribou. This illustrates an understanding of the role of humans in this complex socio-economic system. It also illustrates use of social institutions to mitigate the impact of humans on the environment. The interactions can be understood as a complex system, with the need to manage human actions as they impact the environment, rather than managing the environment to meet human needs.
Paradigms that work are adapted to local social and economic conditions, not to scales as large as (most) countries and especially not to scales on a global level. These paradigms require humans to have an intimate knowledge of the workings of the ecosystem in which they are embedded. Obviously, this requires abandonment of our myth that we are separate from nature. It also requires that we carefully observe, which means that we live woven into our ecosystem.
What that also means is that answers to how we develop a new paradigm can have only broad outlines, not specific answers because each paradigm will have to be uniquely adapted to its ecosystem. Specific adaptations to a southern United States ecosystem will not work in the north. It means that people will have to reacquaint themselves with their local ecological conditions and adopt strategies that balance what their ecosystem can offer with their social goals.
On a broad scale, a social paradigm that makes us more resilient will require us to recognize that we are part of a complex system and that we may never understand the intricate interconnections and responses of all the parts of that system. In turn, this dictates that we should be humble; that we are cautious of our abilities and the unintended and potential long-term consequences of our actions. It will mean adoption of the precautionary principle and looking long-term into the future rather than just next year or the next five years. Very importantly, it will require that we acknowledge that there are limits to what we may do, and that we strive to understand and remain within those limits. To foster our resilience, a new paradigm will require an understanding that socio-economic and ecosystems are intricately connected and creation of closer links among us and our ecosystems. We must acknowledge that we are not separate from nature, but an integral part. Perhaps when we are better connected, we will be glad knowing that we are woven into the web of this beautiful world.
Ed. note: Additional reading on ecological engineering:
The picture above is a metaphor for our contracting society in an era of declining nonrenewable energy. What is the emergy basis of an electric bike powered by a solar power battery that the bike and rider tows? How do we use technology while our horizons of available yet marginal net energy recede? The award-winning bike/solar bob is touted as every environmentalist’s dream, where I can have my cake and eat it too. If I tow a solar panel behind my electric bike, I can boost my power and range to go longer distances at higher speeds. I can even charge electronics and power LED lights. What Is the true value to society of the electric panel towed behind on a bob, and is it worth it? Is the time we save worth the expenditures of energy? Can high-tech boosters augment or be layered on top of human-powered technology in a lower energy world? How much tech is too much? In our struggle to extract usable energy from the surrounding environment to maintain our society based on high-quality fossil fuels, our highly transformed society uses energies of varying qualities in substitution for each other, without an understanding of the Transformity involved in different types of energy.
Transformity
Odum, 2000
Transformity is the idea that energy creates a hierarchy where at each level, transformations convert different kinds of available energy to produce a smaller amount of energy in another form. “Transformity is a measure of the hierarchy of energy and is apparently applicable to all quantities of matter, energy, or information. Transformities have as many orders of magnitude as there are energy levels in the universe. For example, the solar transformity within the geobiosphere ranges from 1 for sunlight to 1 X 1032 sej/J for some categories of genetic information” (Odum, 1996, p. 19). Most energy transformations in society involve four or more kinds of energy. The higher the transformity value, the more available energy of another kind that is required to make it. Transformity and thus emergy basis increases with each transformation, so it measures the increasing quality of energy or as it passes up the food chain or hierarchy. These can be depicted through graphs of power (energy flow) and empower (emergy flow) in order to view the position and relative importance of different types of energy (Tilley & Brown, 2001). Transformity is typically represented on a logarithmic scaled graph, because losses from entropy are so great at each stage that a plot on a normal graph would be hollow and cover a very small range (Odum, 2007, p. 75).
The solar transformity of electricity is one or more magnitudes of order greater than the original fuel, be it from peanut butter with the electric bike transformation, or from gasoline with the electric car transformation. The use of electricity to transform materials into solar panels is an even greater obligation of available energy, beyond electricity, which uses high-emergy human labor, high-tech, and highly refined materials. Those added steps of transformation, from peanut butter, to electricity, to solar panel are highly wasteful of energy for a society that can’t afford it. Making all of those leaps across the energy hierarchy drain energy from society, from the person riding the bike to people’s household budgets, and to countries’ trade imbalances that drain resources from our biosphere.
I will admit to owning an electric bike as an experiment. It is useful for plowing through unplowed trails during mid-winter, and for heavy loads, or those big hills I have to pedal on the way home that might otherwise force me into a car. An electric bike is also useful for those with disabilities. But the electric bike’s range may be limited due to the need to recharge, or we may travel to a place where electricity is not available for charging. Initial costs and maintenance/replacement costs for the battery add more energetic costs–we are on our second costly battery with this bike. And ultimately, the limiting factor from multiple emergetic inputs is the power in our legs. Uneven matching from a solar panel and human power results in more production but less efficiency. “As nonrenewable resources have enriched the economy, more feedbacks have passed to environmental interfaces, thus increasing the production, increasing the Emergy investment ratio, and producing with less efficiency” (Odum, 1996, p. 166). China has 120 million electric bikes already. Is an electric bike or an electric velomobile a good transition from a car to human-powered transportation? Is it really worth it, when an electric bike battery adds complexity and has energetic and material costs that may not be affordable or sustainable in a lower energy world? Emergy investment ratios of free environmental resources versus purchased inputs can help to gauge whether some economic-environmental use will be economical relative to the ratio of the prevailing region. In other words, this bike bob from the Netherlands, with its high emergy investment ratio (users must buy much of the emergy from trade instead of getting it free from the environment) may not be competitive in global markets.
Energy matching
Best Transport Alternatives Odum, McGrane, Brown, & Bastianoni 1995 (Florida Policies)
When we add a heavy solar panel and its associated bike-bob towed behind the bike, we are stacking tertiary economy technology on low-tech, human-powered transport. The bike bob illustrates the concept of energy matching–high quality energy such as electricity is best used when paired with larger, low quality fuels. Electricity should not be used for cars, or bikes or electric heat when there is a lower quality fuel that will suffice. The electric mechanism has to engage more to accommodate for the extra weight of the bob and the panel, and we’ve extended the footprint of the humble bicycle to China’s dirty, cheap-labor solar panel factories. We are matching the high-transformity solar panel to the low-transformity of a human-powered bike, which might be successful if the solar panel was net positive, with an emergy yield that does not drain yield from society. But a solar bike bob takes the place of more efficient electricity, and it only works in first-world countries for consumers with surplus wealth–how long will that last in our contracting economies? As discretionary income wanes, people will choose simpler, less expensive efficiencies. We are just rearranging the deck chairs while the band plays on.
We trial marginally yielding technology using surplus wealth, not seeing the added layers of energy transformity that become circular reasoning. It is like raising yourself by your own bootstraps against gravity, or like the Ouroboros eating its own tail. We spend more, but get less. At some point, the cost of this labor-saving device gets too expensive for my personal budget, if it isn’t already! Or I crash the bike and break the solar panel, or it needs repair, or someone steals the panel–how do I lock that up! Or a string of cloudy weather limits recharging. Or, as a form of energy cannibalism, I just get tired of dragging half of China around behind me just so that I can make it easier to pedal up that last big hill to the house, or get somewhere a little faster. Or I find that the electric bike makes me lazy, and I’ve started to get fat. I opt for the simpler solution, which is to go back to my simple cruiser. The added complexity ends up being just not worth it. A bike is the most efficient form of transportation.
Code Green Stephanie McMillan
The same process occurs with electric cars. We add technology and thus added emergy to cars with no real increase in function, to use different energy sources that gasoline. In a form of energy cannibalism, we use more energy in factories in China and military efforts in Afghanistan to produce electric cars and batteries that are less efficient than a small, low-horsepower car with an internal combustion engine, or a bike. And we put more demands on an overburdened electrical grid. Because we cannot see the transformed energy, or we have not valued it properly with our false monetary systems and inefficient markets, we may reach for technology as the solution when faced with limits. Even our inefficient, false money markets have rejected electric cars and even hybrids. We have empirical evidence now of the high emergy basis of electric cars.
Paul Kingsnorth calls this “the myth of progress manifested in tool form. Plastic is better than wood. Moving parts are better than fixed parts. Noisy things are better than quiet things. Complicated things are better than simple things. New things are better than old things. We all believe this, whether we like it or not. It’s how we were brought up.” In a growing society with surplus energy, these beliefs were true, because surplus energy allowed us to heap transformed energy into technological bells and whistles that promoted a consumer society and profits, which maximized power. We are compelled to create something out of available surplus energy by the system, and to design lower energy amplifying circuits in the form of cultural feedback loops that tell us that consumption is a good thing. In a world of planned obsolescence, we must continue to buy new versions of products to pay the debt and keep companies growing. If we accept that the economy will have to contract back to a level of technology compatible with mostly renewable supports, then we will start to make wiser choices that use the emergy basis for society more wisely.
Solar share
If solar panels have a marginal net emergy yield, then dragging one behind my bike means that I’m dragging a very large footprint with me, with origins in China, Afghanistan, and the Netherlands, just so that I can go a little faster. On average, a US citizen consumes 19 times his personal solar share of the world’s annual global renewable energy income that he is entitled to. If I eat a Big Mac I consume 3.3 times the average daily per capita global renewable solar income (Brown & Ulgiati, 2012). I can only imagine how much of my personal solar share that a solar panel bike bob consumes. In a future with less fossil fuels, this wealth inequity will be resolved either willingly or unwillingly, peacefully or violently. A functional low energy economy means that everyone will have smaller, more equitable personal solar shares. What is the relationship between social justice and solar equity? That question will have to wait until later.
Brown & Ulgiati, Tesla Conference, July 2012
Referring to the table above, electric power has a transformity of about four times that of fossil fuels. The emergy basis of an electric car (or bike) includes the initial outlay of complex technology, resources such as rare earth metals and human labor, and the recurring costs of high quality electricity required to run the car. Why would we use energy in the form of electricity that costs society four times as much to produce than the original gasoline form of energy? The different forms of energy–gasoline for an internal combustion engine versus electricity for an electric or hybrid car–are not valued properly by society, so we waste energy in our search for alternatives. The contributions are from multiple levels of hierarchy with varying qualities of energy contribution. Because there is a surplus of energy in society, and we cannot see the energetic contributions, and since we do not understand the difference in energy quality, the system allows us to waste energy by encouraging superfluous technology for profit that does not really add value. Profit incentives of capitalism dictate that added technology begets more sales, so technology is added whether it is needed or not. Our imperfect market and currency mechanisms fail to value environmental and human contributions appropriately, so we layer environmental degradation on top of the wasted energy in our pursuit to maximize power. Can our society support that extra load? Electricity is not free, electric grids are maxed out, coal creates mercury and other kinds of air and water pollution. How do we calculate those costs to society? Complexity of electric cars requires extra maintenance, less sustainability, and more rare earth metals mining such as lithium from places like Afghanistan—calculate those costs of sustaining our empire through war in hopes of expanding our battery production in the US from 2% to 40%, as Obama proposes. Why are we even considering electric cars, much less putting them into production? Because we haven’t done the math, we’re only looking at pieces of the problem, and we’re asking the wrong questions. Short-term systemic goals of profit instead of sustainability drive the system, at least for now. “The auto age will come to an end when alternate needs for the fuels running the personal autos become more important than the time saved by having individual cars” (Odum & Odum, 2001). A simpler society in the future will have to begin to revalue the calculus that values human labor/time and energy expenditures.
When we try to use technology to eke out extra efficiencies or improve on Nature through technology, marginal energy sources (and our economy) begin to look more and more like a Rube Goldberg diagram as we try to add technology to improve borderline processes and make them functional. Designing artificial leaves to do Nature’s work of photosynthesis and respiration demonstrates our ignorance of the thermodynamic laws, the energy hierarchy, and the variation in differing energy quality. Or we make claims that some countries are powered entirely by renewable energy, not seeing the large footprints of modern societies powered by global trade and advanced technology that would be impossible without fossil fuels. The same holds true for any situation where we try to salvage unsustainable problems with high tech solutions such as geoengineering, carbon sequestration, biofuels, high-tech healthcare and other high-tech, add-on solutions that oppose nature rather than working with her. Nature knows best, and there’s no free lunch.
If we use environmental accounting such as Emergy synthesis, then we can weigh the relative merit of electric cars, solar bike bobs, and other high-tech gadgets with incremental impacts against low-tech options such as human-powered bicycles. Are solar-powered bike bobs more valuable to society than sharing information? Those choices may need to be made in our future. And money is not the answer in valuing these choices. Money is a poor measure of the true value of a complex electric car or bike. Money does not value the associated resources required for its production and operation. A resource is generally worth more than it costs according to the calculus of emergy. We’re wasting time and energy going down energetic dead ends. What are better uses for this energy?
Recent news about Hanford leaks, a flurry of news surrounding the two-year anniversary of Fukushima, and today’s news about breast cancer rates in the US center my thoughts on blind spots in health research. I will use ionizing radiation again as an illustration of environmental linkages to disease, beginning with the trigger for this post, which was a new World Health Organization (WHO) report. Previous posts about nuclear hazards are linked here and here.
This week, the WHO published a preemptive report on Fukushima, only two years after the disaster. The WHO concluded that “for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated.” This conclusion is from the same organization that has been muzzled on the topic of ionizing radiation contamination of our environment since 1959, when they agreed to misinform the public in subordination to the global nuclear governing body, the IAEA, to protect civil and military nuclear interests. If you believe that Fukushima has not increased background risk and there will be no increases in cancer rates, I have a bridge to sell you. Mark Twain’s maxim about lies, damn lies, and statistics can be applied here. The point of this post is to examine western medicine’s epistemology of disease, specifically examining how we select the risk factors that are involved in cancer and other diseases.
Epistemology is the study of the nature and scope of knowledge. Our society lacks a broad understanding of how ionizing radiation behaves once it is accidentally released into the environment. There are two main reasons for this. Bednarz (2010) describes Mitroff and Silvers’ discussion of Type 3 errors, where we unintentionally solve the wrong problems through our narrow worldview and reductionist focus in science, and Type 4 errors, where we intentionally solve the wrong problems, because we are pursuing goals such as profit that subverts the science. In our western system of medical research, we commit both Type 3 and Type 4 errors as a result of our narrow worldview and our economic mandate for profit and growth. These type 3 and 4 errors result in blind spots, especially regarding environmental linkages to disease.
In another medical report this week, a new epidemiological study of breast cancer reports increasing rates of breast cancer in young women (Johnson, Chien, & Bleyer, 2013). The pattern of increased incidence in younger patients would be compatible with the epidemiology of radiation-caused cancers, which are more common in the young who have faster cell division/turnover. The increased incidence could also be compatible with many other accumulating environmental toxins.
“The number of American women ages 25 to 39 diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer — which has already spread to other organs by the time it’s found — rose about 3.5% a year from 2000 to 2009, according to a study in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association. The trend began in the 1970s, although the most rapid increases occurred in about the last decade, the study says. The study doesn’t provide any clues about what might be driving the increase, says study author Rebecca Johnson, a pediatric and adolescent oncologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. . . .
The number of women in this age range diagnosed with advanced disease rose from about 250 a year in 1976 to about 850 a year in 2009, Johnson says. The largest increases were in the youngest women, from ages 25 to 34, the study says. There were also slight increases in metastatic diagnoses among women ages 40 to 54, but no increase in older women” (USA Today, 2/27/13).
Western medicine’s emphasis on treatment and pharmaceuticals, with abandonment of science that is focused on prevention and risk factors in fields such as epidemiology, public health, and environmental medicine points to reductionist science and the influence of money in directing the focus of research. Recently, Dr. Susan Love said that “. . . her experience [of a recent diagnosis of acute myelogenous leukemia] has emboldened her in her quest to focus on the causes of disease rather than new drugs to treat it.” This aha! moment from a well-known breast cancer researcher illustrates our blind focus on research oriented towards treatment with increasingly costly drugs that may not cure. These days, our science is often directed by funding, and funding increasingly is directed by large corporations whose incentives are to increase profit. This research emphasis leads to a focus on tertiary treatment in high-tech healthcare centers, while blind spots develop about the causes of illness, especially environmental ones, including PCBs, heavy metals, radiation, and pesticides. In Love’s case, her leukemia is even more likely to be attributable to radiation exposure than other diseases. Strontium-90 is a bone-seeker, playing havoc with bone marrow. Should we be focusing on and funding genetic testing and treatment as the future of medicine, or should we be widening our view to encompass better science about preventive care and attention to burgeoning environmental risk factors? Especially since the cost of healthcare in America is now at 18% of GDP, and rising without brakes.
There is a sea change coming in our satisfaction with medicine and the focus for our research. The environmental risk factors of many of our diseases may be a driver for that shift. Evidence-based medicine values randomized, controlled clinical trials that use reductionist methods of statistics, so there can be blind spots in what we view as causation. Potentially, heart attacks and strokes, Type 1 Diabetes, thyroid disease in women, stress ulcers, many cancers, and some other immunodeficient-related disorders are at least in part caused by or made worse by the increasing problem of radioisotopes in the food chain, for example. The hazards take years to accumulate, and do not create immediate health effects. Our food safety organizations are increasingly helpless or avoidant about the risks. The corporate nuclear lobbies make sure that science is subverted. It is important to understand the risks and to protect yourself where possible. This post is a plea to healthcare scientists to begin considering radiation as a risk.
While most healthcare professionals think in reductionist terms of single causes to illness, I can’t help but take a more integrated approach. Could radiation be a contributing cause to many of our modern diseases? I was recently discussing the impacts of radiation on the body with a good friend who is a pathology professor (MD-PhD). The professor was unaware of most of them, including the nature of “cesium heart” which is well documented in Chernobyl victims. He wasn’t buying it.
As a side note, disturbingly, Bandazehvsky’s research on the topic of cardiac effects of cesium landed him in a Russian jail shortly after he published reports critical of official research. There is a long tradition of locking up scientists who threaten the status quo. For example, Dr. Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that childbed fever could be prevented by good handwashing. For his discovery, he was ridiculed, dismissed from his post, and committed to an asylum where he died shortly thereafter. And Galileo was threatened with torture and committed to house arrest for the last decade of his life for his heresy of heliocentrism. Bandazehvsky is in good company, and his imprisonment is suspicious–was his research was too threatening?
If you look at the long arc of many modern chronic diseases over time, Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), heart attacks, and other diseases became more common in the general population after the start of above ground nuclear testing around 1950. While correlation is not causation, when one examines epidemiology studies, radiation is nowhere in sight as a risk factor. These diseases have been commonly blamed on the stress or diet of our modern lifestyles or on genetics. Study after study where I search for radiation as a potential risk factor and find . . . nothing. We have rewritten the official party line about contributors to disease and what is important in medicine. Impacts from the environment are not a threat in this new storyline.
Biomagnification and the hierarchy of energy
Where is our vaunted western healthcare system on this issue of environmental pollution? Health professionals’ training regarding environmental pollutants is minimal. For example, during our education, physicians and nurses receive a brief lecture on radiation safety during radiotherapy cures, and the impact of some of our high-tech radiation treatments and diagnostics on tissues. That’s it. We are taught to believe that the formula Dose = time X distance X shielding = protection from radiation. Medical students only get detailed knowledge of radiation sources and tissue impacts if they go on to pursue residencies in things like radiology, radiation oncology, or nuclear medicine. Most Emergency Departments have a Geiger counter in their disaster inventory closet, but most healthcare professionals would have no idea what do with it or what the numbers mean. And instead of being taught ecological medicine, research dollars promote the wonders of small-scale genetic
TR Frieden April 2010, 100(4)Am Jo Public Health Genetics science is at the top of the pyramid, while ecological medicine is at the bottom.
technology and our ability to manipulate genetic cures. In my doctoral program in the mid 1990s, genetics was hailed as the future of healthcare. As usual, we look inwards at smaller and smaller pieces of the puzzle, never looking up from the microscope to see the bigger picture looming on the horizon. The dangers from radiation are very real, and they arise from accumulation of isotopes in the food chain. Western medicine pursues high-tech cures at the top of the emergy pyramid that only perpetuate the problem of environmental pollution, as technology requires expanding power use. Instead we should be teaching our healthcare professionals an entire course on environmental medicine. Ironies abound. We are spending considerable efforts to extract the last bit of cure from our advanced health care system, while ignoring the basic socioeconomic factors such as clean food, air, and water that gave us our longevity to begin with. We are hollowing out the base of the pyramid that supports our health while continuing to pile on technological complexity at the top. We need to do the best we can to learn how to protect ourselves.
From NativePerspectives.net
Unfortunately, protecting yourself from radiation food hazards is an ever-expanding threat requiring the use of expensive technology. A decent Geiger counter costs about $500. Your regular Geiger counter will detect a part of the range of isotopes, which will give you a relative feel for contamination. But internal contamination is ten to hundreds of times as dangerous as external exposure, depending on the isotope involved and the age of the victim. The dangers of radiation are primarily from ingestion of internal emitters which have been concentrated in the food chain over time. Nuclear promoters discount this danger by suggesting that internal exposure from hot particles is the same as external exposure. Yet logic and physics dictate that if you internalize a cesium, strontium or plutonium hot particle, you may carry that particle around permanently if it is not excreted, subjecting you to continuous bombardment. External exposure means walking by an isotope with brief exposure–that isotope may or may not emit. But when we breathe, drink, or eat an isotope, it gets absorbed and taken up into different organs depending on the type of isotope and other factors, and is then carried around for months, years, or decades, while it continues to bombard tissues. So detection of contamination in food and water needs to be much more sensitive, and limits need to be much lower. Proper measurement is performed in a lab, by drying and ashing the food and using a high purity germanium detector (HPGED). The process is time-consuming and costly, and is better suited to research than to personal protection.
So if we will be exposed anyway, despite our best efforts, why try? While Japanese food exports are relatively negligible, some people will be exposed, either from Fukushima, or from future events. In November of 2012, the US reopened food imports from Japan. And while recent reports suggested that Fukushima fallout was gone with the wind, spent fuel has some very long half-lives in its make-up, so the isotopes are not gone with the wind. The isotopes have been dispersed by wind and water, with heavy isotopes settling close-by and the lighter stuff dispersed widely. Food chain dangers will most likely accumulate over time through biomagnification in the food chain, as more and more isotopes are released from more and more disasters. We need to try to limit our exposure, because short-term health effects will kill some of us, via leukemias, cancers, and weakened immune systems. Limiting our exposure limits longer term impacts to our children and their children.
Odum & Barett, 2006, p. 205, after Ophel, 1963 How come we have to go back to 1963 for a diagram of radiation in the food web?
Each isotope has different rates of biomagnification and then uptake and also different impacts in the body. Strontium follows calcium pathways in the body, so it settles in bone marrow, replacing structure and weakening bones and teeth, and causing leukemia. Cesium follows potassium pathways, lodging in muscle such as the heart. Many other isotopes act in other damaging ways in the body.
The dangers are probably still small for most foods, but hazards are tenfold to a hundredfold for children, infants, and fetuses, who have the fastest rates of mitosis and development. Rapidly dividing cells in the young are most sensitive in any organism. Similarly, organs with rapidly dividing cells are affected (bone marrow, digestive tract, skin). So risk avoidance is most important for the young.
Some of the list of long-term impacts for human health include the following:
Circulatory damage (high blood pressure, rhythm disturbances, MI, stroke, cardiomyopathies, rhythm disturbances artery spasm, especially during cardiac stress such as temperature extremes, physical/emotional stress) (Bandazhevsky, 2001)
Hematologic problems (leukemias especially)
Endocrine problems (especially Hypothyroidism, thyroid nodules/Cancer, and Diabetes)
Immune system
Uro-genital system
Musculoskeletal system
Dental problems as cesium replaces calcium in teeth and bones
Central nervous system and psyche
The eye (cataracts and retinopathies)
Increase in congenital malformations
Increase in cancers
Accelerated aging
Increased frequency of mutations
Fertility problems and Change in secondary sex ratio (Yablokov, 2012)
http://www.epa.gov/radnet/radiation-monitoring/index.html (UNSCEAR, 2000, 1945-1996 rates of SR90 in milk)
Because exposure to radiation is invisible and difficult to detect, it is far under-represented as risk factor for disease. Causes of mortality for radiation exposure are difficult to track beyond the obviously linked leukemias and cancer. Manmade radiation from above-ground testing beginning in the 1950s has been added to by military depleted uranium from expanding use in the Middle East and expanding failures in the 435 nuclear power plants (NPPs) around the world, along with the reprocessing plants. Radiation is often ignored as a reason for immunosuppression, various cancers, and perhaps even endocrine dysfunction, especially thyroid. Because radiation impacts have not been measured in the general population, radiation’s contribution to cancers and other diseases go unnoticed. Women are more vulnerable than men, and children are at least times as vulnerable as adults, because of the rapid mitosis of their cells as they grow. Fetuses are even more vulnerable.
(Gale, 2002) Incidence of diabetes in children under age 10 years in Norway, 1925–1995
I would be very interested in seeing an epidemiological study that examines the relationship between Type 1 Diabetes, which typically appears in children, and radiation. Anecdotal reports from physicians at Fukushima of a big increase in T1D in their pediatric patients (Fernex, Independent WHO, 2012) set me to looking for evidence. A recent epidemiology describes T1D as “environmentally triggered autoimmune destruction of pancreatic beta cells occurs against the background of genetic risk, although alternate hypotheses exist” (Maahs et al., 2010). Yet if you look at the long-term epidemiology of T1D, a sharp upturn in the incidence occurred around 1950, at about the same time that above-ground nuclear testing began (Gale, 2002). Maahs et al. make no mention of radiation as a risk factor. It is simply off peoples’ radar. Instead, we’ll blame Diabetes on climate change, since we’re blaming everything else on climate change.
Similarly, there has been a rash of sudden deaths recently in young athletes during athletic events. It will be interesting to watch trends in cardiovascular mortality post-Fukushima. Cesium has an affinity for cardiac muscle, and stroke, aneurysms, and early heart attacks are sequelae of bioaccumulation. Instead we focus on cholesterol as a cause, at least as long as cholesterol drugs are the highest-profit patented drugs in the world. Now that most statins are off patent, the guidelines are suddenly deemphasizing cholesterol control–a clear example of a Type 4 error. One only needs to look at the history of cholesterol discovery and treatment, and the correlation between patented drugs and treatment guidelines to understand the direct relationship between corporate pressures and medical evidence.
Stomach cancer has been common in Japan specifically during the last 50 years, commonly associated with diet and place of birth. Stress ulcers have increased after Fukushima independent of common risk factors such as H. pylori and drugs such as aspirin. Might internal isotope ingestion be an unseen risk factor in both? Similarly, an increase in celiac disease is being blamed on gluten. From a recent New York Times article, “All of which may explain a curious historical phenomenon — an “epidemic” of celiac disease that struck Sweden some 30 years ago. Anneli Ivarsson, a pediatrician at Umea University, recalled a sudden wave of “terribly sick” infants.” Wasn’t that the same time that a wave of radiation from Chernobyl impacted Scandinavia? If we can’t see it, and don’t measure it, can we pretend that it isn’t there? From the same article, the author notes that Finland ranks first in the world for precedence of T1D–another connection to Chernobyl fallout? Who’s to say–I would really like to see an epidemiologist tackle some of these relationships.
The best science we have on the medical effects have come from Chernobyl, but very little of the information crosses over into western medicine–a combination of reductionist thinking, taboos, and growth memes where technology equals progress. We find explanations that fit our world view. We are now discovering that inflammation is a probable cause of coronary disease, in contrast to earlier theories. What if the idea that obesity as a risk factor for heart attacks is in part related to accumulation of background radiation and fallout? These things are not on practitioners radar.
Bioaccumulation will get worse over time
Bioaccumulation will be variable and patchy depending on rainout, and the impact beyond more cancers will be on general immunity of the population at large, probably eventually causing some large epidemic that overwhelms the healthcare system. Food and water security are going to become increasingly important, and food from a distance will be increasingly viewed as suspect, and we will need to know if the soil we grow on is safe; just one more reason for relocalization. Organic will need to be redefined. There is a rumor that uranium tailings are sometimes added to organic fertilizers–I do not know if that is true. Babies will need to be protected strenuously as a precautionary principle. In systems with limited resources, there will eventually be stigmas, taboos, or other cultural mechanisms that feedback to control family and population size, and radiation and other environmental pollutatnts may impact these behaviors. Toxic impacts on fetuses could also create hesitancy in childbirth, along with reduced fertility. Sexual taboos such as spaced births and limits on casual sex may also reemerge, limiting procreation (Osei, 2006).
The rate of change in our world is accelerating. For the US, we’ve got to mothball our clunker NPPs and cask the spent fuel in our spent fuel pools now, while we still have the fossil fuel supports. Otherwise we’ll end up just like Japan–what are the odds? And unless you’re wealthy and privileged, there is no place to run. Eventually, there will be no ‘there’ there anymore to run to, as countries clamp down on migration and the pollution effects from a number of sources multiply.
There is too much unquestioning acceptance of current reductionist, piecemeal science funded by the military-industrial complex in this country and globally. Focused science that examines pieces of problems but misses the big picture needs balance with better, less biased funding for environmental or ecological medicine so that we can learn how to protect ourselves. Traditional ecological knowledge will be helpful in accumulating wisdom about new values for working and living within nature’s limits.
Public health and a safe, adequate food supply are arguably an uphill battle against the limits of natural selection and population control–one that we’ve been winning for the past two centuries with the help of fossil fuels. Radioisotopes in our food may be one form of natural selection as we progress. Someone has to say it–those who stay in contaminated areas or have habits of eating food from a distance or processed food may become part of that natural selection process as our economies and populations contract. Instead of keeping everyone alive as long as possible, we need to be preparing a whole new way of caring for people that allows people to die gracefully when their time comes. Our current system of medical ethics attempts to keep everyone alive at all costs, no matter what the pain, as it is embedded in a system where more care creates more profit. In a future with much less healthcare, we will need a different form of bioethics, embedded in a new system of ecological medicine with different goals.
Header art: Salvador Dali, The Three Sphinxes of Bikini, 1947
But to every mind there openeth,
A way, and way, and away,
A high soul climbs the highway,
And the low soul gropes the low,
And in between on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth,
A high way and a low,
And every mind decideth,
The way his soul shall go.
One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
‘Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.
Like the winds of the sea
Are the waves of time,
As we journey along through life,
‘Tis the set of the soul,
That determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife.
HT Odum, Branford, CT
The AtLast, Boynton Beach FL, 1982
Sailing Canoe-Camping SW FL
The Aquila, a Rhodes 19, Branford, CT
The Maverick, a 1935, 76-foot gaff-rigged Brixham Trawler
Horn Island, MS Gautier Yacht Club
Snow-kiting, Eklutna Lake AK
Risk for Injury, Eklutna Lake
Late summer Eklutna Lake
By Mary Logan
We’re sailors. Sailboats have been part of our lives for decades, beginning with my husband Todd’s 17-foot sloop, the AtLast, so titled because his mother finally got her garage back when he finished building the boat in high school. Eventually we sold the small sloop when we developed competing interests such as family, and I refused to help my husband paint the wooden boat, yet again. Ever since then, we’ve had various small boats, from small catamarans, windsurfers and even a sailing canoe, to a snow-kite and an ice boat here in Anchorage. Todd built the ice boat in our garage here in Anchorage in an attempt to accommodate his need to sail in the subarctic winter–I christened it Risk for Injury, because those were the first words on page one of the design plans. The ice boat can hit speeds of up to 60 mph if unencumbered by various limits. Todd is not allowed to take the craft out alone (that’s another story). Sailing on ice in winter does not really feed our fix for sailing, and sailing in the summer up here has to compete with many other interests during a very short summer. We generally wait until we head to warmer climes to sail.
This month, we have burned through many people’s allotments of fossil fuels to come to the cruising grounds of the British Virgin Islands (BVIs) to warm up and to sail. We have done this trip many times before, typically during the off-season in the summer when we lived in Florida, in order to unplug from high-pressure jobs. But I am sensing that traditional vacations where we fly somewhere far away to go sailing may be on the way out. We have some discretionary income this year, and who knows how long it will hold its value/meaning? So this is one last fling in the BVIs, with a flotilla of two boats and thirteen sun-starved Alaskans–the winter has been grim this year in Alaska, with lots of dark but little snow.
Sailing can be a cheap vacation if we rent a boat that we share with friends while provisioning, cooking, and sailing ourselves. Americans often feel that we must buy our own things, but renting a boat for the occasional use is far cheaper than owning. We have watched many friends and family members struggle with boat ownership, and the old maxim, a boat is a hole into the water into which one pours money, is really true. Over the years, the charter boat industry has become a monopolized industry, paralleling the development in many other industries. There are fewer but larger companies to charter from. This year, during high season, the charter docks for those companies were full of boats, and it was easier to find anchorages alone. The charter industry appears to be hurting from the global economic recession.
Sunrise, Anegada
I’m writing this post organically this time, using pen and paper, sitting with my coffee in the quiet mornings, before the trades freshen for the day in response to the heating sea and land, watching brown boobies and pelicans feed on schools of fish in quiet anchorages. My thoughts circle the idea of sailboats as a slice of life that demonstrates on the small-scale the limits of energies, materials, and wastes, the importance of teamwork, and how technology changes over time as surplus energy continues to flow.
Energy, materials, and limits on a boat
Sailboats are a microcosm, a small system that shares the same characteristics as larger, more complex systems. The most noticeable feature of a sailboat is the limit of both renewable and non-renewable energies. We cannot control the wind, but we can direct the sails to capture the renewable energies. When the wind is up, sailboats jump along wave tops, within limits. They can’t head directly into the wind–to go to windward, we have to tack, and that takes more time and effort. Sometimes we sail fast, and sometimes we sail more slowly. We wring added speed from the boat using larger sails such as genoas and spinnakers, and through the development of knowledge and skill in tuning the sails. The wind is variable but unlimited over time, with daily and seasonal pulses, and occasional larger pulses from storms. Otherwise we must fall back on the non-renewable energies of a diesel engine, which provides steady, invariable power if our technology through engines and the entire edifice of global supply continues to run. Over the long-term, our diesel fuel is limited in accessibility and control of the source, through a complex system that is dependent on marina supply, cost, political and military might of a country, global trade, and other vagaries.
Boats can be designed for efficiency and comfort or for speed, but attempts to maximize both usually fail. If our charter company rigs our boat for maximum speed with large sails and a stripped hull and ballast, then we will need more skillful crew who must scramble frequently to change and manage sails to prevent the boat from broaching or capsizing during changes in available energy due to changing weather. “During self-organization, these systems reinforce (choose) pathways with the optimum load for maximum output”(Odum, 2007, p. 38). Our charter boat in the Virgin Islands was rigged for optimum load for maximum output with inexperienced sailors, which means it was under-canvassed. With inexperienced sailors, too much rigged sail on a catamaran may result in the use of costly boat insurance and a ruined vacation.
Modern boats also have limits of materials such as water and food, and places for waste to go. If we don’t provision adequately in port, we run out of various things while under way that Americans may view as essential. Our large catamaran had two, large 125-gallon water tanks whose levels were visible. But the Water Information Program suggests that the average American uses 176 gallons of water per day, compared to 5 gallons per day for the average African family (that may be an underrepresentation of the problem of embodied water use). As Americans, we are not used to water or other restrictions. My daughter reacted to the idea of limits (especially on vacation) with an air of insult, calling me a water nazi when I suggested that perhaps we could do better on water conservation when eight of us burned through the first 125 gallons of water in 3 days. From habit, I tried to limit my own water use, and I use very little since I’m a sailor habituated to sailing on small boats with tiny supplies of water. But what I didn’t use got used instead by others without awareness of our limits and customs of heavy water use. Experience helps–any swabbie who has previously run out of water behaves differently on a boat. Having clear, visible limits also results in better awareness of inputs and outputs to a system. Our boat this time allowed us to see how fast we were using water. On earlier boats there was no water gauge, and so the gurgling, sucking noise attached to a dry water pump was a rude surprise, especially to the uninitiated.
When drinking water runs out, it is a sharp reminder that even though we are surrounded by water, fresh water is a precious commodity that we waste amazingly on land. Fortunately for us on vacation, we avoided conflict over water by paying for easily accessible refills at marinas during our gunkholing. If we were cruising sailors attempting to cross an ocean, our boat culture would have needed to evolve quickly into a much more efficient, restraint-based, cooperative culture or risk strife with threat of failure to complete our journey, or worse. That transition would have required development of rules and respect for the commons of water, food, and labor. Americans may assume that it is our manifest destiny to pump our wells dry, and then go find some more from elsewhere and use that too, since that is all that we’ve known how to do for the past 40 years in this country.
Outputs are clearly visible on a boat. Removal of a bag of trash in the dinghy to someplace on shore is a visible cost, $3 per bag. On larger boats, when there is no place to send trash away, it remains aboard somewhere, in a lazarette or locker, as a stinky reminder. If our boat is small, it may be towed aft in the dinghy if there is no room aboard, as a visible, odorous decoration following us about. In the old days, the trash went overboard, and it still does in some places and situations. But Americans on vacation in a pristine sailing ground are new to the idea that their trash and waste actually have to go somewhere. Holding tanks from the heads fill up while anchored. People are rather appalled at the holding tanks that open into the ocean after we get underway–the waste stream is a visible reminder in the azure Caribbean Sea. Trash and waste removal on a large cruise ship is a different matter–cruise ships have gotten away with dumping it overboard for many years because people do not see it and the costs are borne over the longer term by the ocean, not the vacationer–out of sight, out of mind.
As we sail about the ocean, we are by ourselves, free to sail about in many directions, with wind direction and shoals as the main limits. But when we come into a crowded harbor, suddenly there are many boats, moorings, shoals, traffic, and other complexities. A harbor is an analogy to a city. We used to sail on and off of our mooring ball or anchor, but the anchorages have become more crowded over the years. So now we must use the motor to navigate crowded harbors, especially with a large boat. Costs go up in anchorages; there are no overt costs on the open ocean. We run from storages of food, water, and batteries, and from renewable energies of sun, wind, and waves. But in city centers, we pay for a mooring ball, we go out to eat onshore, we reprovision, we pay for someone to remove trash from the boat, we might buy something to fix something on the boat, and so on. The wallet comes out, and expenses go up in city centers.
What benefit technology?
With our large, modern sailboat, we have to run the engines for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening to charge the battery bank. Over the years, the technology on sailboats has evolved to the point that the electronics and twin diesel engines on a catamaran need three batteries–one for each engine and one for the house of electronics, lights, and other technology. Electronics have expanded from a simple depth finder to sophisticated GPS, autopilot, charts, and so on. Similar to the expanded technology in cars, while the basic mode of transportation hasn’t changed in terms of sails and sheets, the accessories have expanded profusely. How much of this is necessary or desirable? I still like the organic feel to a chart spread on my knees as I (wo)man the tiller. Private cruising boats may be equipped with wind vanes or solar panels to augment battery charging, so they are less reliant on the engine. But the bulk of recharging on most vessels, even those with renewable systems, is still dependent on diesel engines. Sailors accustomed to cruising use less of everything, as they are much more attuned to their limits, in terms of inputs and outputs of food, water, and energy.
When we started sailing down here, the stove was a simple single-burner alcohol stove, the water tank was very small, and the ice box was a block of ice in an insulated box with a drain. Now we have a two-burner, gimballed propane stove, a refrigerator, and a freezer. The single toilet with no holding tank has evolved into two to four heads, all with holding tanks, hot water showers, and sinks. Extra accoutrements make sailing easy–lazy jacks on the mainsails that automatically fold and cover sails at the end of the day, electric windlasses to raise anchors, two-speed self-tailing winches, and dinghies with motors rather than oars. Because of technology, we need less skills and less strength. I can no longer slam my fingers or toes in a hatch cover, as the hatches have high-tech preventers on them. Large biminis and dodgers protect our fair skin. If we dive, we no longer have to worry about buddy breathing, as our regulators have octopus rigs and other safety features. Similar to the technology that has expanded on land, our use of technology at sea makes sailing easier and safer, but also makes us soft, less skilled and perhaps a little stupid, too. We need less physical and intellectual muscle, and fewer calluses develop.
Some things haven’t changed over the years. On a boat, paperbacks beat Kindles when inverters are scarce, and pen and ink beat the laptop for writing when exposed to spray and limited battery life. The rum is still plentiful and cheap, as long as we have provisioned enough (heaven forbid). As the trip progresses, we fall into timeless rhythms of day and night, storm and sun, gaiety and calm.
Working as a team
The human culture on a sailboat is a microcosm of life too. Traveling in a group of eight is a lesson in how teams form. Various business models exist that explain teamwork, and I am not current with the latest theories. But many of the theories describe the importance of top-down control and emphasize the importance of leadership in what gets done. In a world of gross excesses in managerial salaries, business theories that emphasize the importance of the leader rather than the entire system may also give too much credit to the role of managers in what eventually gets done. This focus on leadership may be part of a business culture whose goal is expanding bureaucracy, perpetuation and expansion of the status quo, and unfair pay scales for those at the bottom and top of the hierarchy. Spencer and Marx both suggested that the times produce the person and not the other way around. Our times have produced leaders who resemble pirates rather than effective captains of industry.
I like Hersey and Blanchard’s situational leadership model that describes a more self-organizational model where teams develop over time within different systems at varying paces, through stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing. In this model, leaders change their styles as teams develop over time, based on the needs of people and development of the team, from telling and selling activities, to participating and delegating for high-performing teams.
Boats are notorious for requiring both teamwork and good leadership, especially when rapid decisions need to be made. During the first few days on the boat, as people find their sea-legs, everyone focuses on their own needs as they orient to the boat and begin to develop as a team. Communication is crucial here if leaders are to describe safety rules and shape functional roles for quick team development.
A group forms when there is a need–for sharing, gathering food and eating, for sailing a boat, for security, and so on. The more the need for group work, the more the need for cohesive teamwork. Groups go through an initial formative stage of introductions and getting to know each other. Teamwork develops either slowly or quickly on a boat, depending on dynamics and the need for cohesion. Rules are required on a boat that relate to conservation, since there are limits.
During the storming stage, strengths and weaknesses are revealed, conflicts are hammered out, and the group self-organizes or comes together through leadership to work on chores surrounding sailing, eating, and play. Leadership and communication can make a difference in how quickly and smoothly the process of bonding happens. If leadership is too strong, cohesion can devolve into a hierarchy dependent on tight control from the top, for better or worse. And if there are few tasks for the group to perform, groups may fall apart or never form properly for lack of need. With less tasks, such as a vacation where paid employees do the work on a cruise ship, either group cohesion never forms, or it develops through artificial means such as games from a social director who works to create an artificial sense of bonding. The best teams develop by overcoming significant challenges–smooth seas never make skillful sailors. I would add that diesel engines and twin props don’t help much in skill-building, either. The social culture of team work is part of our social DNA–without significant or challenging work to do within the system, it is hard to form bonds and to develop a sense of community.
Once groups form and storm, they norm. Culture develops on a boat as conflicts start to wane and groups develop a sense of camaraderie and social cohesion around tasks. A specific group culture may develop, with rules that fit the skills of the people involved, the tasks that need to be performed, and the level of commitment of those involved. Eventually, over time, teams become high-performing, with less direction and communication needed. Recognition of limits may become part of that culture, but only if the team is small enough and experienced enough to recognize and support values of respect for the commons.
Americans have developed a highly specialized hierarchy of labor. We are a nation of specialists accustomed to paying others instead of learning to do a lot of general tasks ourselves. Does the habit of specialization interfere with the ability to form teams? American business hierarchy has developed during a time of security and energy surplus, which allowed fossilized, complex hierarchies to form where too much emphasis was placed on leadership, and not enough on resilient teamwork from the bottom up. On a boat, when bad things happen, while strong leadership from a knowledgeable captain is helpful, a functional team that knows what to do and how to respond without direction from above is even more valuable. A team of generalists who can fluidly perform each others’ jobs if necessary adds to that resilience. What happens in a complex, rigid, specialized business hierarchy in a real crisis, I wonder? We can probably throw most of the current business theories out of the window when that happens.
Closer to nature
Since we are closer to living in nature on a boat, respect builds for the wind, the weather, and mother Ocean. Where do these islands stow their trash? How much of their water is through catchment versus aquifer? The accessible coral reefs are suffering from too much tourist love, a heating, acidifying ocean, and overfishing. The beach bar proprietors insist that the lobster are fresh and locally caught, but the lobsters, conchs, and grouper are increasingly absent from the close-in reefs and grass beds. Tarpon are prolific, perhaps in part because they are not very edible, and we see less other small reef fish. There are less birds, and very few fish pots are now found in the islands, either through regulation or scarcity of fish, as a sign of depletion.
Cultural change over time
I lived in Puerto Rico during the mid-1960s, when my father, HT Odum, was chief scientist for an Atomic Energy Commission-funded project to explore the impact of radiation on Luquillo rain forest (Lugo, 2004). I first came to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands around 1966 by ferry. The shops were quaint and local, with subsistence crafts for sale made of coconut and other plants and flowers, local seafood in the restaurants, and local village cultures concentrated round harbors and boat transport. Jets were rare, and prop planes were for the rich. Charlotte Amalie was still a relaxed, quaint tourist town with a lot of rum and t-shirt shops, friendly steel drum bands, and a lively night life. Now, St. Thomas revolves around big daily pulses of multiple, massive cruise ships, and the shops have changed from island crafts to international jewelry, perfume, and boutique culture for the very wealthy during the day, with the poor scrounging through the dumpsters at night. There’s more crime, and our proprietor warned us not to walk down certain streets unless we were in a large group. Eating out is very expensive. Each year there are more navigation lights in the harbor, more cruise ships, and more houses on the hillside. There is less music, less joy, and less room for a garden, a locally based job, or other resilient forms of living. The islanders don’t look as happy as they used to.
How big is too big when the oil becomes more valuable?
Private boat sizes in the BVIs have become bigger on average over time. We see few 20 and 30-footers these days in the cruising grounds–aspirations and the wealth-effect have increased boat charter sizes to the 40 and 50-foot size. And at Christmas, the rich descend in their 100 to 200-foot boats. People with smaller boats eye the larger boats and are envious. Older people with more access to surplus resources, symbolized in our society by money, aspire to more status, comfort, or power. Those without an electric windlass or the convenience of an extra shower on the aft deck want one, whether the additions are truly useful or not. As long as there is surplus energy fueling the bareboat charter industry, the trend is towards ever larger and more complex vessels, even though there are many advantages to smaller boats in terms of flexibility, less reliance on nonrenewable energies, and less waste of resources such as water.
How big is too big? How much of our technology becomes counter-productive if diesel fuel is not available to recharge the batteries and run the props? On our 40-foot cat, we could still sail the boat without diesel, but we would need more workers to sail on and off anchors, and to raise the anchor, for example. Old sailing vessels had many smaller sails and a very large crew to make them manageable. How big is too big, in either boats or cities?
Once the surplus energy stops, small boats may come back into fashion. What will happen to the huge cruise ships (and the ports that they frequent) as economies stutter and vacations fashioned on buying luxury stuff in air-conditioned shops falls out of favor? Can we retool those big boats into old-fashioned ocean liners used for transport, or are they too reliant on fossil fuels? The drama that resulted this week when a Carnival Cruise ship was stranded with limited water and generator power after a fire in the engine room suggests that our large cruise ships, or at least their passengers, are too reliant on electric technology and luxury. And how secure will smaller, private boats be in an ocean with more pirates and less available resources? How much complexity is too much in boats, and in society? Our freedoms are based on energy slaves, and before that, on the backs of real slaves, as Newman suggests in his song below, Sail Away. What happens when we can’t use energy slaves anymore?
How did this post get so long? I must be on island time. This may be the last time we can make this trip–in the future, flights and charters may become more expensive, or inaccessible, or dangerous. We may end our sailing days where we began, gunkholing on small boats up and down the coastline of southwest Florida, the Keys, and the Tortugas.
Two prominent energetic systems principles that drive our complex economy are hierarchy and autocatalysis. Earlier posts highlighted the concepts of energy transformity and hierarchy. The concept of autocatalysis can be seen in many circular loops in our current society, such as current proposals for geoengineering technology to fix the problems that industrial and post-industrial technology have wrought. Autocatalysis is also known as the positive feedback loop, and it is the engine for our growth economy.
The energy flywheel
Odum, 2007, p. 47, Fig. 3.6-Autocatalytic growth where available resources are in excess
Production within economic systems consists of the interaction between inputs of energy flowing in one direction from a concentrated condition to dispersed, along with feedback from a storage of assets interacting to drive cycles of materials through work, round and round. Autocatalysis is the combination of the storage and a feedback loop that uses “the products of growth to accelerate the capture of more energy so that growth goes faster and faster . . . with the products of production (in storage tank symbol) being fed back (to the left) to amplify capture of more energy” producing maximum power production and exponential growth when resources are unlimited.
“Each energy transformation process within the energy hierarchy has an associated storage from which the autocatalytic feedbacks originate. . . . To have a longer period of accumulation for levels with less energy flow requires a larger storage. . . Growth and succession on any scale require and are accompanied by development of the storage necessary to maximize the energy intake with feedback pumping. When resources from transformations are stored, both energy and emergy accumulate” (Odum, 2007, p. 81). [This is how the energy hierarchy concentrates materials through successive concentration into centers of organized complexity.] ”Autocatalytic feedback [and hierarchy] are general design characteristics of self-organization” (Odum, 2007, p. 119). And ”when available energy levels are large enough, the system develops a self-interaction to accelerate even faster, a super acceleration” (Odum, 2007, p. 46).
Systems are ultimately controlled by the amounts and types of energy sources outside of it. The system “gradually fits itself, its storages, its material cycles, its feedbacks, and its design to that pattern which maximizes energy in the combination available to it. . . Surviving systems are those that feed back their stored energy to stimulate the flow of energy” (Odum & Odum, 1976, p. 46). Odum suggests that the US economy was in super acceleration until 1973, when surplus energies became less constantly available. Autocatalysis maximizes power by processing more energy, with less emphasis on efficiency and more on growth. Examples of autocatalytic loops in our economy include control of the media, science, and politics through amplification of information, to promote consumption and to lower restraints of regulation that control growth. The goals of the system shift to wealth acquisition and promotion of consumption.
Ortega, Gusman, Borelli & Salek, from 7th Biennial Emergy Conference Jan. 2012 Autocatalysis and hierarchy at work in successive iterations of expansion of civilization over time
Flywheel from MT Brown 2004 Picture Worth a Thousand Words (from Odum, 1976) Another Rube Goldberg machine?
During the global spread of civilization, growth economies set priorities for development of fuel, transportation, and water resources. Large stocks of different energy sources interacted, creating a flywheel effect or reinforcing feedback loop for economic growth and a chain reaction. Because storages or stocks are not flow limited, the rate of use can increase over time. Production pathways for fossil fuels generated storages, and consumption prevailed by reinforcing production. Environmental resources were coupled to fuel-using economic production. Negative feedback cues that should have controlled the rate of growth were suppressed, and amplifiers were maximized. But as stocks/storages are drawn down, surplus energy and emergy yield wanes, and growth slows and stops by lack of inputs rather than inhibition through negative feedback. The system becomes flow limited, dependent on renewable resources, as the competing feedback loops develop from flow-limited ways of living. But since feedback loops have delays, the tendency in autocatalysis is to overshoot and collapse.
Energy cannibalism
So what happens when limiting factors slow or stop growth?
“Each time an environmental product is further transformed into a more highly developed product in the economy, additional Emergy is added and the transformity is increased. If the higher transformity is developed by collecting and concentrating dilute energy, using more emergy from the free environment, the emergy yield ratio (EYR) of the product is increased. If, however, the emergy for the transformations is being supplied by the economy, the net emergy yield decreases” (Odum, 1996, p. 146).
As EYRs approach net, “more and more of the economy and human service becomes involved in getting the fuels, and fewer other activities are possible” (Odum, 1996, p. 140).
davidprince.org energy cannibalism?
Energy cannibalism(Pearce, 2008) is the circular reasoning that occurs when we trial net negative energy sources, leading to thermodynamic limits. With each step of fuel transformation in borderline energy sources such as biofuels, net emergy decreases. It is like raising yourself by your own bootstraps against gravity, or like the ouroboros eating its own tail. It just won’t work. My brain hurts thinking about these impossible solutions. We can frame some current examples of energy cannibalism using a classic Aldo Leopold quote, “Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to stay warm.”
As Smolker and Peterman illustrate, on the way up sources became sinks as we burned fossil fuels, but on the way down, sinks become sources as we burn biofuels and further degrade the biosphere’s abilities.
On the way up, fuels become food as “potatoes are made of oil”, but on the way down, food becomes fuel as biofuels are tried as replacements.
On the way up, our interest/debt based money system encourages wealth acquisition and expansion, but on the way down, this growth-based information system promotes dysfunctional behaviors seeking more growth, delaying feedback from the competing feedback loops representing the renewable economy. Because Mother Nature has no cash, she has no voice.
On the way up, we add more and more complexity to bureaucratic systems, but on the way down squeezing more growth out of a system with declining resources makes it crash.
Shifting dominance in competing feedback loops eventually allows the secondary renewable based loop to take over (Meadows, 2008). In this case, emergy yield ratios and decreasing benefits of complexity are the driving factors that switches the system to a renewable emphasis and a simpler system. The relocalization movement as pushback to industrial agriculture and consumption is an example of a competing feedback loop that groups are trying in different regions, as negative feedback stabilization is too weak to be effective.
The biosphere as more than the sum of its parts
Because of our reductionist world views, we try to deal with the problems of growth through technology. We use more energy in projects such as geoengineering, creating even more resource cannibalism and environmental degradation, as we slap band aids on
The United States Postal Service’s 1995 commemorative Rube Goldberg stamp
a failing biosphere. We have created a Rube Goldberg economy, where engineers’ technology and a reductionist focus creates unneeded complexity. (Thanks to Albert Bates for his Goldberg cartoons that gave me the idea for the title of this post.) Instead of removing the trees to make factories to make massive widgets to vacuum carbon from the biosphere, maybe we should just leave the trees and let nature do the work, as Bates said? Instead of creating costly photovoltaic solar panels that cannibalize energy, just plant some veggies, as nature has had more practice and is more efficient at changing sunlight into energy? We are so divorced from nature that we now propose replacing plant leaves with silicone technology artificial leaves (ironically touted in a journal called Nature). Why would we do this? Here are some possible reasons.
Reductionist views–if we think that our system can grow forever through use of technology, we will behave very differently in what we pursue. Thus, we look for high-tech solutions that maximize power for a system that rewards wealth and corporate growth.
We equate technology with energy since technology is typically garnered to produce more energy. In this example of the artificial leaf, nature has had millions of years to perfect the most efficient method to translate sunlight into energy, yet we think we can replace or compete with nature.
Since there are no limits, there is no need to understand or rank the relative embodied emergy of our technologies in terms of which yield the most emergy. In a contracting economy, we must use the fuels with the highest emergy yield ratio–the ones that work with nature instead of opposing nature.
We have learned that technology grants us more power, so if we can do something, we will (maximum power).
Our systemic goals are wealth and growth; there might be a profit in the investment, with science for sale.
Scientists can garner some journal articles, “bringing money and attention to the field of solar fuel.”
No one asked if this was an important priority for science or why we are doing this–is there a need for priorities in a culture with infinite growth? If we asked why, would there be an answer?
Our autocatalytic loops are firmly in place, and there is no understanding of energy basis or the big picture. Don’t these scientists realize that in a world with fewer resources, we will need to work with nature to become more efficient instead of duplicating nature’s processes at great energetic cost, waste, and pollution? This is what comes of not living within one’s means. Bryan Norton said, “the value of biodiversity is more than the sum of its parts.” Our reductionist view of both the problems and the ensuing solutions lead us to treat the biosphere as an unlimited toolbox of parts.
Decoupling from reality with circular reasoning
The prime directive of wealth subsumes all else and creates feedback loops–we chase growth to create more wealth in a chain reaction, over and over. Examples are everywhere I look. In my favorite example, healthcare, we medicalize normal conditions of living and then create complex tests, and then we medicate, operate, or otherwise treat. Even dying is now a profit center.
Rube Goldberg healthcare
Medical science first leans towards big pharma solutions, and then it lunges, as “careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is.” In America, the business of health becomes a paradox, where we “spend more but get less.”Our industries eventually reach the silly endpoint of being a Rube Goldberg machine, where we add more inefficiency, bureaucracy, and features to allow more steps and more players to make more profit from the disease factory, while never removing any steps in the process.
Diminishing returns and competing feedback loops
(source unknown) Transformity of your gym workout
http://maxistentialist. tumblr.com Transformity of plastic spoon?
As energy returns per investment diminish and growth peaks, some of the autocatalytic loops begin to look a little silly. We create uses for fossil fuels such as imported spoons and gym clubs for stationary biking. We attach status to the advertised object or experience, creating want and unhappiness about consumption. We hijack natural systems to create profits for elite capitalists. We have treadmills for dogs, we own massive cars and houses, and we heat sidewalks, while people go hungry. “Emergy is wasted if high transformity energy is used when energy of lower transformity will suffice” (Odum, 1996, p. 163). We cannot keep this up for long, but we will keep it up until people realize that the old growth economy is not coming back.
Welcome to America
http://www.kudelka. com.au Parable of the Broken Window
At some point, the law of diminishing returns on the old system dictates that we switch to the competing feedback loops of a flow-limited renewable energy based system, as the cost of importing spoons or the cost of gym membership overcomes our personal budget and we begin to behave more frugally. Eventually, after some feedback delays, the ridiculous nature of some of the autocatalytic loops in the accelerated economy starts to dawn on people, especially when compared to increasing austerity in personal budgets, and they stop the wasteful behaviors.
Holding back the tide
For those who insist on remaining in the dominant paradigm, the centralized control and manipulation of the system to try to keep and grow what we’ve got in resistance to the thermodynamic certainty of economic contraction eventually fails, as CH Smith points out. When we mask risk, and try to support the current system by holding back the tide, eventually the suppression fails and the system switches more violently than it would have if we had not suppressed it to begin with. For example, if our money managers realized how certain economic contraction is, they might be trying to accommodate it and not paper over economic contraction by printing money. If our economy is contracting, the monetary information system that guides it must contract also. How simple that fact is, yet all of our incentives are skewed towards expanding the money system instead. When the shift or tipping point comes, it will be all the more severe for the suppression and manipulation of our economic system. Time and tides wait for no man – when dams burst, the chaos that ensues is all the more powerful for the pent-up size of the pulse, more likely to cause a big mess.
So what does this mean for us? The higher and faster we grow, the farther and faster we’ll fall, because we lack balancing feedback loops to slow our growth adequately. Our powerful Rube Goldberg economy keeps adding loops to the chain reaction, creating more unnecessary overshoot. The economy is chasing its own tail, like an ouroboros, and it is now starting to catch it and eat it, not sensing the negative feedback which should ensue. We are consuming ourselves. We must restructure our system from the ground up as resources wane, since the feedback loops that drive the current system are too powerful to overcome intentionally. Those reading this post are probably part of the newly developing feedback loops for a relocalized economy. That is why I’m rooting for empire to fail sooner rather than later, before we’ve grown and polluted too much to allow for grass-roots recovery.
How do cities concentrate energy and materials spatially? What is the relative emergy basis for modern cities, agrarian towns, and rural spaces? Do city dwellers use more or fewer resources than suburban or rural dwellers? Are big cities more sustainable in descent, as some propose, and how do we maximize empower in the future for our cities?
Spatial Concentration of Emergy
Odum, 2007, p. 203, from Odum, Brown, Whitfield, Lopez, Loithe, & Doherty, 1995
“Although there is energy in everything including information, we recognize that energies of different kinds are not equal, but can be compared by expressing everything in units
of one kind of energy required [Emergy]. In this way, human services are found to require thousands of times
Transformity Depiction (Tom Abel)
more energy of ordinary kinds than do agricultural processes. The Emergy production and use per unit of time is called Empower. . . . The Emergy of one kind of energy required to generate a product or service of another kind of energy is the Transformity. The more energy transformation steps there are, the higher the Transformity. In an agrarian landscape, the resources of agriculture and nature are converged to support small cities. . . . [In fossil fuel based cities] the city processes reach out to surrounding zones in their interactions (Odum, Brown et al., 1995, pp. 5-6).
The central zones of cities return services to reinforce the rural system. Resources and people converge and diverge on the city in pulses, and people, information and money are concentrated in the centers. The emergy basis and zonation are a function of the fossil fuel basis, with increasing complexity resulting out of multiple levels of transformation. The largest cities embody the most levels of hierarchy, and the level of complexity that has been built up in large urban centers requires a global supply chain and high quality fossil fuels. One empirical test of this idea is history; urban pre-industrial man lived in cities of less than 1 million at the largest, with much less complexity. Now our largest megacities contain as many as 37 million people (Tokyo), with heavy reliance on electricity, computers, and transportation. The complexity and interdependency of infrastructure, employment and information exchange are a direct function of fossil fuels, and our megacities have grown become massive because of the competitive advantage of information and resource concentration found in cities, creating an influx of resources from greater and greater distances. Our megacities have many more people and roles embedded in layers of transformation at the high emergy end of the equation due to fossil fuels. The roles in a megacity are skewed towards information processing in areas of government, law, education, healthcare, and the financial-insurance-real estate industries. We can argue that the cultural behavior and values in megacities are different from more agrarian settings, with more competition, more inequity in salaries, looser values, more deviance, and a different perception of time.
Steamfitting industry WSJ ad–garbage barges from NYC sending their garbage out “there”
Cities also create concentrated solid, liquid, and gas wastes (CO2 and incineration, for example), which they then disperse, often in concentrated form and at great distance. Cities are heat islands that produce large amounts of concentrated pollution. Odum once proposed that an ecological approach to waste disposal would be to disperse it across the landscape instead of concentrating it in waste dumps. That is the method that is used by nature, where everything is recycled naturally and eventually used. Dispersal of waste would create a feedback loop limiting wastes, as people would have to look at and be accountable to their mounds of trash. More recycling would occur. That dispersal happens somewhat in rural living settings already. Cars and tractors are kept for their spare parts, for example, which is more efficient and ecological than concentrating them in a dump. Some recycling from dumps is already occurring as descent begins. Sewage is successfully dispersed by dispersing dilute wastes through wetlands, increasing productivity and allowing nature to do the work of reprocessing.
Odum, Brown, Whitfield, Lopez, Woithe & Doherty 1995 Zonal Organization of Cities and Environment
Odum, Brown, Whitfield, Lopez, Woithe & Doherty 1995 Zonal Organization of Cities and Environment
What is the zonal empower of agrarian and urban cities? Who uses more resources? While fuel use decreases in city centers, the sum of empower and information increases due to transformity. And while the emergy/person decreases in city centers, that energy basis is only made possible with support from the lower hierarchical zones of agrarian support. If we view cities through an energy lens, the cities become terraced sets of hierarchical transformations. While fossil fuel use and environmental contributions may drop off at the center of cities, creating a seeming efficiency and low footprint, the emergy contained within the infrastructure of skyscrapers and the information and culture at city centers is immense. Money becomes less effective and prices are higher in city centers because money is circulated faster than emergy flows, especially these days!
Self organization generates spatial centers as part of energy hierarchy. One reason is that spatial concentration is a way of making transformed high quality flows of less energy have a commensurate feedback effect outward to reinforce the system. Examples are the information centers of cities, the water convergence at the mouths of rivers, and the concentration of organic matter in tree trunks. Concentrations are readily measured as areal empower density with values ranging from less than 1 E11 solaremjoules (SEJ)/m2/yr in wilderness to 50,000 E11 SEJ/m2/yr in city centers (Odum, 1998).
Emergy basis, hierarchy, and technocratic optimism
What is the emergy basis for a major metro city now, and how big of a city can we afford in the future? That question may depend in part on available local natural resources and cities’ current self-sufficient use of resources. In descent, some smaller, well-located cities may thrive, while larger cities facing unfortunate disasters at the larger scale will wink out. In one recent ecological evaluation of Beijing’s relative sustainability, Jiang et al. found that:
Emergy Consumption Structure of Beijing (Jiang, Zhou, Chen, Yang, Ji, Zhang, Chen, 2009 Ecologcial Evaluation of Beijing using Emergy)
“. . . the Beijing city operated its activity on 0.31% renewable sources in 2004, and its emergy self-sufficiency ratio was 0.042. . . Based on the emergy analysis above, Beijing’s ecological economic status is characterized by: (1) heavy reliance on imported intensive fuels, goods and services; (2) high empower density and high environmental loading. (3) Most indicators of Beijing’s are located at middle level among the selected Chinese cities” (Jiang et al., 2009).
General status of Beijing Economy 2004 (Jiang et al. 2009)
Beijing is one of our largest cities, and it is heavily dependent on high emergy resources and infrastructure. Our largest cities have little connection to their region of support due to fossil fuels, making them unsustainable without fossil fuels. Many technocrats disagree, however. Trust a technocrat living in a megacity to make this statement below.
“This straightforward observation has some surprising implications. It suggests, for instance, that modern cities are the real centers of sustainability. According to the data, people who live in densely populated places require less heat in the winter and need fewer miles of asphalt per capita. (A recent analysis by economists at Harvard and UCLA demonstrated that the average Manhattanite emits 14,127 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide annually than someone living in the New York suburbs.) Small communities might look green, but they consume a disproportionate amount of everything. As a result, West argues, creating a more sustainable society will require our big cities to get even bigger. We need more megalopolises. . . . “When we started living in cities, we did something that had never happened before in the history of life,” West says. “We broke away from the equations of biology, all of which are sublinear.” (Lehrer reviewing West in NYT, 2010).
While Lehrer (and West) recognize the dangerous exponential growth of cities, they fail to recognize the root cause, which is a century of overgrowth due to fossil fuels. These optimists attribute cities’ success to economies of scale and technological innovation, while failing to recognize the hierarchical base of energy support from the outer zones of cities and from nature that make life possible in city centers. The emergy basis of information centers is immense, accumulated through many transformations and levels of hierarchy. They also fail to recognize that the supposedly efficient city living is only garnered as a result of the unseen volumes of global imports that come into a smoothly running megacity, as suggested in Jiang’s Beijing emergy diagram above. Technocrats in academia and economists such as Glaeser (Goffman review) have great hopes of technocratic miracles to rescue us, with cities as the sustainable solution of last resort. Technocrats fail to see that technology is not equal to energy. Technology is a way to maximize power and harness resources. Technology is impossible without resources, and resources in cities come from afar. They bargain that while “urbanization is the problem, urbanization is the solution”(West, 2011). The technocrats fail to see the wider problem of growth, which is the real problem and not “urbanization.” If we replace the word urbanization in West’s statement with “growth” then the statement becomes illogical; “growth is the problem, growth is the solution.” The technocrats fail to find the larger scale problem, thus focusing on the wrong solutions. Technocrats are bargaining for sustainable growth through more people living in larger denser cities. Yet as descent begins, we already have examples of cities in decline in the US. New Orleans and Detroit are two early, obvious examples of how cities could collapse in descent. As economies and poverty worsens, small-scale restoration may become the norm as new building wanes. We do not have the resources to keep what we’ve got, much less rebuild as disasters at the larger scale impact our overcrowded cities.
Maximizing empower
(Odum, 1995, p. 24)
Electricity and information are essential for our modern megacities. Electricity has a high transformity, approximately four times that of fossil fuels but much, much less transformity than information. Electricity is necessary for industrial and information societies, yet its use reduces resilience. Diversity of emergy sources decreases for complex infrastructure and organization due to heavy reliance on storages of fossil fuels, and as footprint broadens, resilience decreases. Thus, the more power we use, the less resilient we become. Electric power is an input to the industrial and information zones of large cities in the diagram above; without electricity cities would probably not support these zones. Is decentralization of our cities into secondary towns and suburbia the first step in descent, and how functional will suburbia become as it reintegrates into its region? Will the presence of regional grids create uniform descent, or will gaps and emergy centers create patchy resilience, similar to lights on a christmas tree?
The Postman–hydropower dam and lower energy information center of the future?
In an empirical test of this idea, what would happen if we suddenly stopped the electricity in a city, in comparison with a rural setting? We would suddenly discover how dependent the city dwellers are on elevators, mass transit, safe lighting, pumped water, air conditioning and heating, and global supply chains. Similarly, waste removal for sewage, trash are essential in high density areas without capacity for using natural resources for recycling. What level of complexity is supportable without consistent electricity? City centers were historically situated at convergence zones for rivers where waters and their contents converge, or at sea coasts or mountain bases, concentrating natural resource. Successful information centers of the future may remain in areas where hydropower is used for electricity (with the caution that wherever we borrow from nature, we must knowingly trade off energy security for loss of productive ecosystems).
As cities with poor maintenance deteriorate, what level of density and emergy basis can we maintain? Megacities are history. Our largest city, Tokyo is starting to disperse and collapse demographically as a result of our over-reliance on nuclear energy and 20 years of economic contraction. Waning resources in descent will mean less concentrated, more agrarian cities. Hierarchies within cities will simplify. Job niches and some specialization will disappear. Losses in diversity may result in loss of resilience. Relationships within networks will change. Efficiencies may change, and much information will be lost. Total activities will decrease, and city patterns will reorganize, with smaller units, lower building heights, fewer cars, and less new construction. Transportation and housing will reorganize for better spatial distribution. As density decreases, greenbelts will reestablish (Odum, 1987; Ulgiati and Brown, 2009). Those changes are already occurring in the US. The size and complexity of our fossil fuel based cities is a direct function of the amount of entrained energy. In descent, less energy will mean smaller agrarian cities, with electricity as the defining line between successful higher emergy centers and dispersal. Cities are already downsizing in an arbitrary, haphazard fashion based on cost-benefit of values that are more appropriate to the growth phase, without attention to the contributions of nature. City planning based on emergy accounting could help to delineate alternatives to the growth model to design ecological cities of the future.
As cities decline, contract, and reorganize, the value systems of people in the cities will also change to a more cooperative mode, colliding with the old competitive values of the growth system. How will that play out?
Walking the New York Bedrock Alive in the Sea of Information
. . . Gingko trees of Gondwanaland. Pictographs, Petroglyphs, cover the subways– Empty eye sockets of buildings just built Soulless, they still wait the ceremony that will make them too, new, Big city Gods, Provided with conduit, cable and plumbing, They will light up, breathe cool air, Breathe the minds of the worker who work there– The cloud of their knowing As they soar in the sky, in the air, Of the sea Of Information . . . .
“Bruegel’s paintings of the Seasons and his Fall of Icarus celebrate peasant life for an industrious harmony with nature. This view of peasants is particularly clear in the Icarus where the sweeping panorama is anchored around the heroic figure of the plowman. . . . The husbandman was a familiar paragon of industry, moderation, and moral integrity, both in classical and early Christian writings. . . . Virgil’s account offers intriguing parallels to Bruegel with its extensive description of the peaceful, moderate plowman ignorant of the bellicose, avaricious ambitions of city dwellers seeking “kingdoms doomed to fall.” Horace, Columella, and Pliny also contrasted a past, moral country life to the present immorality of cities. In the golden age, even urban life was guided by the virtues of rural existence. Thus Pliny wrote of Republican Rome. “The agricultural class produces the bravest men, the most gallant soldiers, and the citizens least given to evil designs.” . . . The introduction of a setting sun may also suggest the timeless cycles of a golden age and a natural order indifferent to folly. See thus, the whole picture emerges as a cosmological panorama which goes on with its elemental rhythms, its husbandry and commerce, its life and death, its labor and folly, until the final day when those who have “plowed diligently” enter the harbor of God’s kingdom. With its elemental contrasts, the picture would have also suggested to its educated viewers one of the central questions of Renaissance humanism: what was human nature and how did it relate to nature’s wider orders.” (Baldwin, 1986, p. 101).
Thanks to Gail at Wit’s End for the Baldwin/Bruegel links above. The painting represents the tensions between agrarian and urban society that has occurred over and over in civilizations throughout history, as we pulse up into civilizations that later fail. Bruegel’s good plowman, sensible sailors, shepherd, and fishermen in the painting above are symbolic of a culture that harnesses earth, wind, and sun to live within the restraints of nature, in contrast to foolish, ambitious Icarus. Early scholars associated Icarus with urban technologies of “kingdoms doomed to fall.” What symbolic culture will represent us as empire wanes?
First, we need to define empire and symbolic culture. An empire organizes diverse materials and people into spatial centers that concentrate resources through domination and innovation. The Roman empire is often used as an isolated example of centralized power built solely on solar energy, through innovations in organization, and military and government service. American imperialism is a unique modern example, as America dominated the high empower industrial revolution, creating an early advantage. The US remained as the only superpower after the Cold War, allowing for further global colonization through military-industrial and corporate reach. American imperialism has evolved over time through stages of industrial revolution and population explosion to the current stage of global information storm and peak empower as seen in the progression in the figure above (Odum & Odum, 2001, p. 120).
And what is culture? What are symbols? Cultural knowledge, beliefs, art, law, moral and customs help humans adapt to and maintain their ecosystems in different physical environments. The environment determines many cultural traits. Economic and political institutions can be adaptive or maladaptive, and if the ecosystem changes, cultures may change, diffuse, or clash with other cultures, resulting in acculturation or assimilation. Geertz viewed culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life”(Geertz 1973, p. 89).
Religion was historically a means of conveying culture. While culture and religion have separated in the last 200 years, political, economic and religious symbols are beginning to merge again. Religious symbols are even being commodified. As the social system changes, religious and political symbols will need to change to represent “stability over growth, organization over competition, diversity over uniformity, system over self, and survival process over individual peace”(Odum, 1971).
Perhaps the most prevalent modern symbol of empire is the corporate suit and tie. This uniform represents the profit-making values of the growth economy. Clothing is a powerful cultural identifier, and as attitudes about power and the pursuit of wealth shift, we will need new symbols of relocalization with ethnic dress. In Alaska, those symbols might be Carhartts and ball caps, or kuspuks, for instance, depending on cultural preference, emergy basis, and availability of materials as fossil-fuel based cloth becomes rarer. The Occupy counterculture favors t-shirts and hoodies, while women’s skirts are longer again, reflecting economic slowdown.
Clay in Carhartts
Food is another common cultural symbol. The foods of empire are exotic, imported foods prepared without regard to the season. Organized sports competitions such as football and basketball are also symbols of competition and power for empire. Faceless terrorists are distant symbols of threats to our empire that unite us. The threat of loss of control of nature in the form of climate change also looms on the comfortably distant horizon of the future. In descent, symbols of threats will probably be more prosaic, imminent, and closer to home.
Powerful Symbols-Adbusters Occupy Wall Street poster
There was a reason the Occupy movement began with the symbol of Wall Street and the Wall Street bull. The Corporation and the stock market have become the best symbol of America’s ever-growing financial health, inextricably intertwined with a financial empire around the globe. Fiat currencies are other powerful symbols of empire with great emotional value, that are largely fictional. Thomas Jefferson said that “money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.”Our representations of money are not even physical anymore. Money consists of digits on a screen, plastic cards, or derivative paper being traded for more paper in distant urban centers. As we print money and the supply grows, its connection to real assets is disappearing as the counter-current
Spinning military- industrial deathstar?
of exchange with real assets strips its gears and starts to spin, creating a separate surreal super-circulation where the monetary information is no longer connected to the underlying reality of real production and consumption. This slippage is now occurring, even to the point of causing monetary unions to fracture off and devolve away from traditional political and economic states. When confidence fails, the money stop being used. All fiat currencies eventually fail. When the economy collapses, the shock may cause us to replace the pursuit of money in our value system. The sense of being cheated at a very fundamental level may become the cultural tipping point for descent. What trustworthy symbols will replace destroyed currencies? New, transient, digital forms of money may also fail as confidence in representative moneys fails. And what connotation does unforgivable debt have? We are at the point where “student loans have basically ruined my life”and student loans may
prevent or delay students from marrying or having families. Suddenly the corporation is intruding into our most basic social decisions of who to marry and when to procreate. Obligations to corporations and to a culture that insists that growth will continue clash with our most basic needs. What will the new local financial values and symbols be? Old religious ideas that disfavored debt and moneylenders will probably resurface, and simple barter may aid the transition as we attempt to reboot. We must “judge value by the energies spent, the energies stored, and the energy flow which is possible, turning not to the incomplete measure of money” (Odum, 1971, p. 244).
Academia is yielding to the enticements of technology and corporate culture, too. Perhaps the biggest symbol of the corporatization of learning is the ubiquitous use of Microsoft’s business tool, Powerpoint (PPT), in lectures. Students in my courses are surprised to see chairs arranged in a talking circle on the first day of class, as opposed to the usual arrangement oriented towards the projector screen for the PPT sage. PPT creates distance and dehumanizes teaching, and “disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content”(Tufte, 2003). Additional complexity and tasks come between message and students. Click on the 6-slide PPT presentation above for a demonstration of how technology is changing our methods of teaching. Symbols of science and the consumer culture are also merging.
Status symbols reflect hierarchy of social elevation in different cultures. Symbols of cultural status and power in empire include large, fast, expensive cars, big houses, skyscrapers, new technology, and other symbols of affluence such as jewelry, clothing, and other costly items. I ask my freshmen students what they want out of life, and they say that they want to be rich. Fame and money are typically the source of power in this culture. Recent interviews of sinking middle class Americans revealed shifting views of status and priorities. Debtors weren’t paying their home mortgages but they were continuing to pay their car notes. Perhaps the more mobile car represents the last hope of upward mobility for the middle class? We will always have hierarchy and status symbols, but traditional cultures were more stratified through roles, with less mobility. Will successful farmers be the new source of power in a hungry world? If so, is land ownership the rising status symbol? I just know that I will be happy when the SUV departs as status symbol.
Polarized politics is the final resting place of hope that some charismatic leader will save the world, so that we don’t have to change. Political symbols include leader’s images, maps, flags, and symbols such as the donkey, the elephant, the hammer and sickle. But transformational leadership is difficult in a gridlocked, teetering economic system that has ground to a halt. Disengaging from politics allows us to free our activist space for something different to rise up out of the ashes. As we relocalize, symbols of polarization will still exist, but the clashes may fall back into patterns similar to those found in the American Revolution where the resource competition occurs between failing urban empower centers and rising rural agricultural zones. The Hunger Games (again!) reflects that theme in the homespun sacrifice of children symbolized in the reaping ceremony in District 12. Revolution begins with inequities and maladaptive cultural institutions that no longer work.
“Organizations at great distance from their source of control develop tensions if the reinforcement loop between the people and distant governance fails. For example, in the early American colonies, self-organization on the frontier reinforced local needs, whereas the English crown tried to sustain the inequitable exchange of empower favoring British needs in its trade with the colonies. Thus two feedback loops were competing for control, one for local benefit and one by and for the governing parent. Protests such as the Boston tea party started the American Revolution. In the subsequent empower testing of war, there was enough empower in the 13 colonies, supplemented with empower aid from the French, to overcome the empower that Britain could transfer easily across the ocean” (Odum, 2007, p. 304).
How will the empower balance between rural agrarian society and urban empire shift during transition? As we descend the energy hierarchy over time, will Odum’s zonal distribution shift back towards an agrarian economy slowly in stages or will it crash? Are there other lessons we can take from Icarus’ fall of the mighty? And if we merge our social, political, economic, and religious symbols into the multinational Corporation, and the corporation fails, what will we be left with? And are our cultural values for sale? Recognizing symbols of empire helps us to clarify and shift our world views. Are you ready to give up skyscrapers and business suits for Bo Falk’s peasant imagery of the good plowman? What are your symbols of Empire, and are your ready to find some new symbols for descent?
“A century of studies in ecology, and in many other fields from molecules to stars, shows that systems don’t level off for long. They pulse. Apparently the pattern that maximizes power on each scale in the long run is a pulsed consumption of mature structures that resets succession to repeat again. There are many mechanisms, such as epidemic insects eating a forest, regular fires in grasslands, locusts in the desert, volcanic eruptions in geologic succession, oscillating chemical reactions, and exploding stars in the cosmos. Systems that develop pulsing mechanisms prevail. The figure above includes the downturn for reset that follows ecological climax. In the long run there is no steady state” (Odum, 2007, p. 54).
http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/panarchy Holling, Gunderson, & Ludwig, Panarchy and Resilience
“The aspect of resilience and panarchy that is most novel and significant concerns the “back-loop” phase when resisting structures and institutions start to break down or transform, releasing the chance for a renewed system to emerge. The many ecosystem examples are matched by many business examples where technology shapes products from sneakers, to automobiles, to electrical appliances. At that moment, novelty that had been simmering in the background can emerge and be stimulated. And new associations begin to develop among previously separate innovations. The big influence comes from discoveries that, at that time, emerge from people’s local experiments at small scales, discoveries that can emerge at times of big change, to trigger bigger changes at large scales. That process highlights the keys for the future” (Holling, 2009).
As a follow up to Dave Tilley’s article on renewable rhythms, and in celebration of summer solstice, I would like to discuss the idea that fossil fuels have allowed us to suppress or even ignore pulses of Nature and our own biorhythms. We have adopted artificial pulses of industrial production and consumption with attempts to create continuous growth. Fossil fuels allow us to create a seamlessly, climate-controlled, homogenous monoculture that blurs night into day, and summer into winter. It even homogenizes trends, with everything always improving and going up without a break in the action. This separates us from Nature and creates the impression of invincibility. How does this invincibility present in our dominant culture, and what does it mean as our culture transitions into descent?
Up here in Alaska, the annual pulses are so great that it is hard to escape the reminders. Summer solstice is a special time in Alaska. In Anchorage, the number of daylight hours at solstice peaks at 18 ½ hours. Solstice is a reminder that the days are now getting shorter, and that we need to get a move on with things we plan to accomplish during the summer. We begin to get 70 degree + days. The vegetables start to produce in the garden. Local markets are full of produce. It is a time of plenty, and comfort, and celebration. Picnics and
Scott Robb’s giant cabbages at the AK State Fair, from ADN archives, photo by Mark Lester
potlucks abound. After solstice, the urge to go-go-go accelerates for some. Alaskans catch and put away salmon, and by late August the smell of high bush cranberry gives me a sense of restless urgency reflected in outings of berry picking and restless hikes in the high country. The Alaska State Fair in late August demonstrates the power of our summer sun and the prowess of our farmers. Brief fall colors, fall rut, and waning daylight bring the promise of winter. Seasonal pulses in Alaska are big, and there is no steady state. Excess light switches to not enough light very quickly, at a rate of over 5 minutes a day, and moods shift and behaviors change with the seasons.
Historically, seasonal pulses have been symbols of growth, fertility of death in multiple cultures. Older medieval cultures connected seasonal melancholy with a complex set of moral, religious, and emotional symbols and associations that created cultural order out of the seasons, and was even treated as a mark of distinction in 16th century Europe (Harrison, 2004). The seasons were connected to human behavior, moods, and rich symbolism regarding life and death in a number of cultures. Winter was a season for rest, regeneration, and reflection. In the arctic and subarctic, Scandinavians and Alaska Native peoples have a much longer culture of adaptation to long winters than the dominant American culture, and they are much better adapted to the changes in light and the long winters. Diet adaptations to physical changes due to inadequate light include cod liver oil for Scandinavians and a diet of fish and muktuk for Alaska Natives. Calendars were oriented towards harvest, and seasonal harvest celebrations such as Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrated and honored seasonal changes with feasts, candlelight and storytelling. Stuhlmiller (1998) tried to explore Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in Norway, and found that Norwegians did not medicalize their seasons, and considered the behavioral changes that come with the seasons as normal.
“Norwegians’ seasonal experiences are embedded in a tradition of specific activities and attitudes, which precluded viewing seasonal change as a potential disorder as some Americans do. Scandinavians accept a certain amount of moodiness and insomnia as a normal seasonal adaptation, for example, and treat it with the cultural adaptation of exercising outdoors in the winter. The joke that Norwegians are born with skis on their feet is accompanied by a “palpable peer pressure to go out in the woods fairly frequently otherwise one is not really Norwegian . . . . If you go on a skiing trip through Norwegian nature, you are a good person. The moral undertone is there and cannot be ignored’” (Reed & Rothenberg, 1993, p. 21, in Stuhlmiller (1998)).
Some of that expectation can be seen in Alaska, as some cultural exchange with Scandinavia has occurred. Some of my friends nod in approval when I describe skiing activities outdoors in the winter. Our American fossil-fuel based culture not only smooths out the pulses using fossil fuel means, it medicalizes natural conditions such as seasonal adaptation, demanding that we SAD light our behavioral changes, or medicate them with antidepressants. Is it prosperity to burn the midnight oil to finish work late into the night, in opposition to our nature? Do we then burn SAD lights or take pills in order to medicate our lack of adaptation to the seasons? Is sadness adaptive in some way, or must we always be happy? I have friends who can’t sleep in our sunlit summers without special darkening shades, eye-shades, and sleep medications. The sleep medications become addicting and can cause rebound phenomena, creating worse insomnia than originally experienced. And shift work is known to cause a number of physical disorders due to the alteration in biorhythms. Our industrial society creates unnatural patterns requiring unnatural treatment with strong medications. On our recent bike trip, headlamps were unnecessary. We naturally fell into rhythms of day and night without watches, alarms, or other digital reminders or sleep/wake aids (oh, except for the coffee).
Fossil fuels allow us to ignore in part the natural lunar, solar, and water driven pulses. Schedules shift from solar/lunar to corporate/quarterly or business weekly/commercial or even political/every four years. In the winter, we light up the night, and create many large heated spaces to carry on activities such as indoor tennis that are perhaps better suited to summer. We ship summer fruits and vegetables from the other hemisphere, or we grow them with the assistance of fossil fuels. We go to great lengths to clear roads of snow, and cart off the excess to large snow dumps so that we don’t have to modify our winter behaviors in any way. School is morphing into a year-round schedule, without attention to the seasonal calendar. Hot climates are made cool, and cold climates are heated to a homogenous, standard 70 degrees. We control floods and we irrigate droughts. Advanced weather forecasting allows us to safely flee hurricanes and hunker down in tornados or blizzards. We create ski slopes and water parks in the desert, and transmit a mall-oriented homogenous consumer culture to just about everywhere, at least in America. Music, language, food, and culture become uniform to the point of blandness.
The general pace of life is different, too. Just in time supply chains supply our every need whenever we want, quickly and efficiently. Behaviors are transmitted globally via the Internet, causing loss of languages and globalization of corporate culture. The internet also smooths diurnal pulses, creating a never-ending stream of information, extended work days due to connectivity, and no down time/rest/leisure from information streams and digital excess. Speech patterns are rapid and courtesies may be dispensed with in crowded urban settings in comparison to slower, rural cultures.
We escape winter by vacationing thousands of miles away from home, avoiding hardships that might build relationships that could foster community cohesion. We rejoice in uniformity in cruise and jet travel. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live in large populations in places like Phoenix, Dubai and Anchorage using adaptations that allow us to exert high tech control over Nature. Historically, small populations of Alaska Native peoples migrated seasonally in order to adapt to low energy ecosystems with extreme pulses of weather. Now we just apply a dose of fossil fuels to our pulses and smooth them out. One can even wonder at our obsessive focus on climate as a symbolic failure in being able to control the weather.
So what does the importance of pulsing mean in adaptation to descent? Relocalization will mean reinvigoration of regional differences. Alaska will lose its box stores and malls, and will re-acquire local markets, diversified zoning, and better adaptations to winter that are not based on fossil fuels. Places will start to look different economically, socially, culturally, and perhaps also biologically. For example, skin color is an adaptation to the latitudes that allows a variable dosing of Vitamin D according to the latitude and skin color. People who cannot adapt will migrate away or suffer or perhaps die. Areas that were historically sparsely populated due to low resources may lose their populations. For example, the aged and the young in some of our extreme urban environments such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Anchorage who are dependent on electricity for cooling and heating will need to adapt in one way or another. As fossil fuels wane, we can adapt by recognizing and following natural pulses and responding to periods of growth, harvest, and regeneration appropriately.
Example of Steady State Condition Looney Tunes–Time Warner
Pulsing does not mean “end to growth” or “steady state” which is what is most often proposed as the alternative to growth. If our pulses stop, we are dead. What goes up must come down. Looking at a pulse and seeing only steady state is either optimistic cognitive dissonance or a bargaining stance of viewing the pulse through a narrow time window where Wile E. Coyote never has to fall. Natural ecosystems are organized around pulses of sun, rain, tides, wind, and storms. Pulses help to mediate predator-prey and host-parasite relationships, and may prevent overgrowth in systems by resetting feedback loops. These paired pulsing populations help to keep populations healthy. Pulsing maximizes power and is adaptive.
With the smoothing of nature’s pulses in industrial society comes complex bureaucratic structure that resists change. Forest fire tinder is allowed to accumulate for fear of fires, and we suppress wildfires because of overpopulated landscapes and the loss of natural ecosystems that would have absorbed these larger pulses from nature. We combat natural cycles such as spruce bark beetles. We channelize rivers to control for flood, and support unsustainable building of houses in floodplains and on barrier islands. We create just-in-time round the clock systems of operation that lack resilience. We are intolerant of hardship and increasingly resistant to change, which creates more pressure on the existing system. Steady states are not adaptive—all systems pulse. Attempting to circumvent pulsing from systems prevents regeneration, lowers productivity, and creates rigidity and a lack of system responsiveness. We have incrementally added so much complexity while suppressing nature’s rhythms that we are vulnerable at all scales to the impact of large disorganizing societal pulses. Every move that we make towards more centralized, corporate control eliminates competitors and diversity. A system that promotes more and more growth creates overshoot that will be hard to dismantle without collapse.
Perhaps the most important meaning of the change that is required is the emotional acceptance of our renewed loss of control over Nature as complexity wanes in a lower-energy world. The control we have over our culture and the complexity that comes with it has created an obsessive fear of loss of control along with increasing intolerance for change. Our industrial society denies ecological and cultural roots of our behaviors, assigning biochemical causes alone to our behaviors, thus medicalizing what may be normal adaptive behaviors. Since we are separate from Nature, ecological connections and causation are denied. Many previous cultures used the image of the ouroboros snake to represent the cycle of life and the renewal that is necessary to sustain it. The All is One. The end is the beginning–here is our chance for cultural evolution in our rebirth as we shed our old skins and rise anew. We’ve slid a long
Riding the tides of change can be fun? Bob Hallinen Surfing the bore tide @ ADN
way from old cultural values that helped us to live sustainably within nature. We need a new compass to steer by for the dislocation that is to come. Chaucer was right, time and tides wait for no man. We need to regain and honor the rhythm of time and tides in new relocalized agrarian systems. Living in Nature’s pulsing paradigm will be messier, more diverse, less uniform, and more exciting. Bring it on.
Header: Martha Odum watercolor, Fall Marsh Scene, Sea Island, GA, 1968
My first significant memory of big storms came as a 5 year old, as Hurricane Carla advanced on Port Aransas, Texas, where my father, HT Odum was administrator of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute. That day, as we were due to evacuate, HT took me on his final rounds of the Institute before leaving. We walked out on the Port Aransas pier, and I remember that my father had to lift me over the gaps where missing planks had already disappeared from storm waves (my mother was later horrified at my proud retelling of the story). We stood there halfway out on the pier, and I received my first lesson in hurricane science and energy transport in waves. We counted wave troughs, heights, and wavelengths, and he explained the dynamics of wind energy, relating the sizes of the pulses to size and scale of storms. Local weather creates little wavelets, and large distant weather creates bigger, more powerful pulses that have higher impact on beaches. We talked about excess heat in the atmosphere, and how hurricanes act as Nature’s way of dispersing extra heat. It was my first lesson in storm/energy analogies, and I have never looked at storms the same way since.
Odum often drew an analogy between the way meteorological storms such as hurricanes disperse heat and the way that other systems do, including information systems. After Tom Abel’s excellent post last week on trends in education in a world in transition, it is a good time to share Odum’s analogy linking storms of information and weather storms. But to make that analogy, we first need a meteorology lesson, starting with the second law of thermodynamics.
2nd law thermodynamics (MTB) most of the energy is dispersed
The geobiosphere of the earth transforms sunlight through a number of heat engines that transform the earth’s potential energy of heat along with solar heating through temperature gradients into kinetic energy of circulating air and water. These maximize the use of energy and help to self-organize the natural capital of the earth through whirl cells of activity at different levels of scale. There are a number of different planetary heat engines driving these whirl cells: surface-sky, north-south atmospheric, oceanic, and up-down geothermal earth engines (Odum, 2007, p. 107).
Odum, 2007, p. 111 whirlcell diagram; different levels of scale, energy transformity and flow
The second law dictates that potential energy that does not go into storage is dispersed during processes. Meteorological storms or whirl cells at different levels of scale serve the purpose of dispersing and distributing excess atmospheric heat and water, transforming the landscape through rain and wind, and even creating social eddies in the form of fire from lightning to release minerals and restart succession. The distributed water creates geopotential energy by forming water at high altitudes. The main classes of whirl cells form a hierarchy of energy and transformity, beginning with latent heat flow and ocean cumulus, then land convection, temperate cyclones, hurricanes, mesosystems, and finally polar jet streams at the top of the “atmospheric food chain” (Odum, 2007, p. 112).
At the local scale, thunderstorms take disorganized heat energy and turn it into winds and rain that are organized both vertically and spatially over local landscapes. With more extreme temperature gradients, winds spin into tornadoes. At the larger scale, hurricanes prowl the lower latitudes and disperse ocean heat. With extreme storms such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and supercells, there is a direct relationship between the amount of heat and the severity of the storm. Supercells occur, for example, when a thunderstorm’s updraft builds vertically until it reaches an equilibrium of drier air that no longer cools, typically at the tropopause (between 30,000 and 60,000 feet, depending on latitude), at which point it spreads out horizontally. In transient, unstable conditions, a dome of overshoot can even form on top of the anvil, created by short-lived strong updrafts indicating potential for severe weather.
Odum, Crafoord Lecture (1987, p. 60) Information Storm
We can make an analogy between energy degradation/heat dispersal in storms and entropy in economic systems. As our energy production and consumption peaks, what happens to the volumes of information that we are producing? How much of the information is useful, and how much is dispersed as ephemeral heat entropy or dispersed as information rainfall to flow across the landscape? Sustaining information requires continual processing of information to select and refine information, and make and replace copies that are lost, broken, or otherwise depreciated. Information is tested, refined, and shared and adapted to local variation. Shared information has the highest emergy embodied in it. Our current society is experiencing an information storm that has expanded both vertically and horizontally, as the costly, noisy information explosion of the past century disperses, mixes, filters, copies, selects, and stores information. And the internet allows an extreme, global form of information sharing that is not possible in traditional ways. The internet serves as a novel, networked form of information testing, allowing many rapid interactions among many to process information quickly, perhaps providing feedback and steering currents for the information storm. If society is experiencing a series of information storms and the rain is the information, and the wind is perhaps the more destructive parts of the storm, such as gossip and media frenzies, perhaps the internet can be compared to the river carrying the information-water across the landscape, as Babauta suggests.
Odum, 2007 Information storm
If a surge on input energy of one kind is added to a system, it creates a bulge in the energy spectrum, causing energy to be propagated upscale and downscale. For example, the average distribution of energy in water waves is like the figure at right, with many waves of small energy and few of larger energy. When a storm passes, it generates waves with energy in the middle of the spectrum, causing a bulge in the spectral graph. Some waves interact to form larger waves, but most lose energy to friction, moving downscale to waves of lesser energy and heat (Odum, 2007, p. 7).
The same self-organization that occurs in the non-living structures of weather and climate also occurs in the social learning systems of human economies. Maintaining structure of thunderstorms and information storms requires continued flow of energy over time. Our superheated global economy creates a global internet information storm that can be compared to a tornadic supercell, creating a strong updraft of information spreading into an anvil top and a dome of overshoot that will not last. Those who view the current information storm as a stepping stone on the way to the Singularity or an information society may not understand the degree of continuous, incremental energetic transformation that is required to maintain and expand a highly technological society.
In the map of science at right, the explosion of journal articles since World War II appears to have peaked. What does that mean for our science? Similarly, our monetary system is a form of information that has exploded, resulting in a super-circulation of paper wealth mostly represented by paper debt in derivatives, securitized assets, and bonds, outside the real economy, creating a surreal digital super-economy consisting of the financial, insurance, and real estate sectors that can be viewed as a supercell. Most of the money is circulating outside the real economy at this point,
BIS Pyramid of Global Liquidity circa 2007?
with paper being swapped for more paper as symbolic representations, with little real work produced. The current digital money storm is like a supercell with a rotating top made up of anvils of derivatives forming cloud tops that will dissipate after the storm passes. The storm is creating waves of money that transfer energy but no material, similar to ocean waves. But our information storm is not yet done. If we fail to hold money supplies constant on resources, we may have to deal with severe inflation as resources diminish, which will accelerate the spin of the economic storm and the chaos that could occur from currency instability.
Television and the internet are the primary sources of information for our modern society. Competitions and sports championships become outlets for competitive behavior that might otherwise be turned to violence and war. Social causes, fashion magazines and polarized religion and politics provide outlets for excess, creating avenues for release of energy in an overheated economy. How many of these channels for energy release will become less useful or available in a lower energy society? Can we realign our goals and reorder society into less wasteful pursuits without destroying it in the process?
Is our information system in a dome of overshoot similar to a supercell? Has information accumulation peaked, as the figure above showing the history of science journal publishing suggests? Will information decline take the form of less and less usable information, similar to a low-precipitation supercell that produces little rain? What happens if the internet cannot be supported, as Tom Abel pointed out last week? What are the limits to information? Access to information decreases as it becomes more complex, however, so there is a limit to what can be supported (Odum, 2007, p. 245). Does information devolve into another instance where a digital divide dictates who has access to college education and internet access–and what does that do to society? What parts of our information storm are of value, and how do we retain those parts in long-term information storage if the digital information systems fail us? Is digital information detracting from long-term information storage in a durable format? Where is the consolidation of knowledge and simplification of principles for all of this information that we have created? What do we preserve, and how do we preserve it? How do we teach more efficiently? Can we maintain cooperation and global information sharing in a prosperous way down?
Information Principles and Policies for Descent
The value of information is increased by sharing it among many, so share free information for unified cooperation
Developing shared information such as common objectives requires large resources
With declining resources, less information and less education can be supported
Art and literature are powerful amplifiers for generating unified action
Information is necessary for efficiency, diversity, and organization; information use increases as growth stops in order to adapt by developing efficiencies and responding to resource shortages
Urban centers concentrate information (in addition to energy and materials)
More information is stored than is used at any one time. Information depreciates and requires energy to maintain and/or grow, so select and consolidate information for libraries
Direct electric power to useful information processing and sharing
Balance emergy trade equity to replace free exploitation
Hold money supplies constant relative to resources, which means decreasing money supply over time to match economic contraction, in order to avoid severe inflation
Reduce expectations of unearned income from stocks, bonds, and other sources (Odum, PWD draft, 1987)
The principles of energy transformity, hierarchy, and energy can be applied to everything including information.
A wide variety of blogposts roll across my Google Reader on a daily basis. There have been some great articles on Environmentalism lately, most notably one by Paul Kingsnorth in Orion magazine. The goal here is to add to that discussion by exposing the assumptions that underlie our beliefs about growth and to locate various groups on a continuum of growth beliefs.
Understanding the nature of our energy basis is critical to understanding where we are headed as a civilization. Unless people have received unusual education to break their conditioning to expect and desire growth, most people are so schooled and immersed in the growth story that they do not realize that there may be other possible futures, especially in the US where growth has been so consistent and rapid. In this period of global resource transition, peoples’ beliefs are separating into a growth continuum of three general belief systems or world views that inform our lives and trace a trajectory for our future. I have attempted to categorize some prominent growth-related groups below as examples of each category—with the qualifications that these categorizations are my opinion, and that a person in one group may host a range of beliefs, often contradictory! Some of the categorizations are self evident, with the group’s name as a description of where the group stands on the issue of growth. Other groups such as the Resilience Alliance are more obscure in their stance; perhaps so that they can provide a larger umbrella as a scientific group.
We will continue to grow, and we can maintain Business as Usual (BAU) into the foreseeable future because resources are infinite, or because our society has grown successfully for so long, or by leveraging technology. The growth premise of this group is either that market demand creates energy, or that technology is the same as power, or that money drives the economy rather than energy. This group consists of capitalists, economists, and resource extractors as exemplars who seek wealth and economic progress as a primary goal. This group also consists of most consumers, especially in the US where resource consumption is very high. Most consumers rarely think about growth issues; they have been conditioned to consider growth as a positive, natural and enduring part of reality. Perhaps some modern
Nuclear Energy Institute Infographic--Nuclear Optimism regarding clean green energy?
environmentalists who believe in sustainable development also reside here, as Kloor suggests, especially those who are pro-growth, pro-tech, pro-city, and pro-nuclear. Kathy McMahon further subdivides this category in a humorous post describing Panglossian Disorder.
We must stop growing, but we can keep what we’ve got now
http://www.upcolorado.com/book/A_Prosperous _Way_Down_Paper (Odum & Odum, 2001, p. 78)
by making some Green changes in how we live by leveraging renewable energy using technology. The fundamental energetic premise here is that alternative fuel sources such as nuclear, wind and solar can replace fossil fuels. Another perspective of those in this category is a view of the pulsing cycle from a smaller scale of time that suggests that systems can be frozen at the climax phase of pulsing. Many in this group believe that there is room for both social justice and environmental justice. Steady Staters, Zero growth advocates, environmentalists, sustainability enthusiasts, and single-issue advocates such as climate change proponents reside here. The Resilience Alliance, with its emphasis on “retaining the same controls and function” in reaction to systemic change, is probably primarily in this category?
Pulsing Succession (Odum, 2007, p. 56) http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0- 231-12886-5/environment-power-and- society- for-the-twentyfirst-century
Our economies will contract to match declines in resources, and we must adapt proactively if that decline is to be orderly. This group generally believes that the current economic/political system will need to be reorganized more locally in reaction to resource decline. The main premise for descent is an energetic systems perspective, including the concept of net energy/emergy. This category holds the belief that we will not be able to provide technological solutions for continued exponential growth or even for a steady state when resources are declining. Descent, Research & Degrowth, Permaculture, Transition, and the Prosperous Way Down groups have this world view. Perspectives on economic collapse vary within groups.
There may even be a fourth, smaller, more extreme category, of those who believe that we should bring the current industrial economic extremes to a slower pace or a halt by actively slowing the flow of fossil fuels. Very few people fall into this category—I am one of them. Some in this small group worry about the environmental base for our diverse planet, and others take the position that a system in extreme overshoot is more likely to crash precipitously. Systems modeling shows us that the further our exponential growth carries us into overshoot, the more likely a complete or fast collapse becomes.
Where do you fit on the continuum above, and why do you hold these beliefs? The world views that we hold frame our beliefs and theories about how the world works. Our assumptions dictate who we can talk to, who we go silent with, and who we end up talking past. For example, when I hear an announcement for a talk with the word climate change in the title, I make an assumption that the content of the talk will be narrowly focused on market or geoengineering solutions within the framework of BAU, without an energetic systems framework. HT Odum was called an environmentalist occasionally, but he was wont to bristle up when that happened, suggesting that environmentalists were people who thought they could keep their entitled lifestyle while walling off a token, symbolic piece of nature as wilderness in recompense. People are slowly diffusing down the continuum, with more environmentalists such as Kingsnorth shifting away from green environmentalism towards descent/degrowth perspectives, and perhaps more consumers are becoming environmentalists, as they become disenchanted with the current economic/political state. I see that transition as a hopeful, positive shift in public opinion. Rogers (1962) suggests that diffusion of innovation requires that the new ideas be better than the old in terms of relative advantage, compatibility with an individual’s life, simplicity, trialability, and observability. As the economy worsens, politics becomes more extreme, and the corporation becomes more powerful, simple, frugal, cooperative living may become more advantageous, especially when the simple living behaviors are role modeled by peers. The Occupy Innovators are probably the first significantly large group of visible role models for this change for a complete shift in world views and behaviors.
It is important to question the assumptions that we make in order to identify with a certain world view. The answers to some of the questions below define what you believe, what you know, and where you stand on these issues of growth, energy, the environment, and the economy.
What is your belief about growth based on—which group do you fall into? Can we grow forever? If not, what is our limit? How long can we sustain our exponential rate of growth? Can our population be sustained or continue to grow, or must it contract?
If you belong ideologically to a group, does your group have distinct, stated beliefs about growth and energy, or are the beliefs implied?
Do you believe that resources are limited, and what is the role of technology in possible limits? Is technology the same as power? Is technology positive, or negative, or does technology have mixed benefits and problems? Are resources always used to the fullest extent possible? Can existing systems operate without continuous flow of energy?
If there is a universal tendency to entropy in the universe (the 2nd thermodynamic law), then why did our complex civilization occur? Is there a scientific principle that explains this emergence or self-organization?
Are there any systems that do not pulse? How do pulses at different scales of time, territory, and transformity affect growth patterns? Does our economic system pulse, and if so, how? This question is probably the most important question, and it deserves more discussion later. While we view civilization as consistently growing over time, if we expand the view through our macroscope to the larger scale, there have actually been many, many civilizations over time, rising and falling as they grow and descend over time. Is there a difference between the organization and behavior of individuals and communities in different phases of growth and contraction?
In order to fit within the natural hierarchy, natural systems are required to recycle everything and eventually stop growing—why is man different? What is the nature of feedback over time—what limits the growth of expanding systems?
What has allowed us to build densely urban metro areas in the last century? Is the footprint of a resident of Tokyo larger or smaller than a footprint of someone on a rural farm in Ohio, and why? Do cities need Nature in order to exist? If so, how much Nature do they need?
Can we understand and fix global problems with specialized science by breaking things down through analysis and then piecing them back together with policies?
Is there always somewhere where we can dispense with pollution—is the solution to pollution dilution? Will there always be a “there” to throw things away to? What about materials—when they are used what happens to them as they are used in a system, over time?
What is the relationship between efficiency and power? Is the effort to obtain different resources such as energy the same? How does that effort change over time?
How does energy differ at lower scales (photosynthesis?) versus higher, more complex scales (computers?) in terms of quality and quantity? How do different forms of energy interact? What is embodied in your laptop, and how do you value it? Is there any energy in a Tweet? How much energy is in an electric car, and how do you measure it?
What is complexity and how do we define it? What are the drivers of complexity, and how do we maintain it?
Money values our work and our wealth; if you woke up tomorrow and your paper money was worthless, would you value your work, your resources, and your life any differently? Mother Nature doesn’t deal in currencies; does she get a say in how we run things, and if so, how?
No matter what your beliefs on these issues are, it is important to ask yourself these questions regarding energy in our growth-focused economy. How we view energy and growth is either a non-issue, or it is a political campaign issue, or it is the fundamental question for our time, depending on our perspectives, our understanding of systems, and the assumptions we make. These three or four potential futures are radically different from each other; the outcome will probably be dictated by thermodynamic laws. Understanding the pulsing, hierarchical nature of systems can help us to parse our future. And if you don’t like the category you’re in, perhaps it’s time to move your thumbtack further down the spectrum on the bulletin board of growth beliefs?
A previous post explored the cognitive dissonance that occurs when we fail to recognize the true energy basis for global problems such as climate change. This week’s post follows up with another example of cognitive dissonance in the sciences; the disconnect in relating the energy basis of ecosystems to that of economies.Soddy (1926) describes the essential nature of understanding the energy basis for society:
We thus arrive at the conclusion that any sort of perpetual motion is impossible. A continuous stream of fresh energy is necessary for the continuous working of any working system, whether animate or inanimate. Life is cyclic as regards the material substances consumed, and the same materials are used over and over again in metabolism. But as regards energy, it is unidirectional, and no continuous cyclic use of energy is even conceivable. If we have available energy, we may maintain life and produce every material requisite necessary. That is why the flow of energy should be the primary concern of economics (p. 56).
Yet economic perspectives fail to recognize the unidirectional, limited nature of much of the energy that drives our economy. Economists consider environmental resources to be “externalities” whose only limitation is market cost. If we do not recognize varying qualities of energy and how they contribute to the hierarchy of energy, then we do not understand the limits of what is achievable. Sewall called this “reperceving depth.” And if we do not value energetic contributions of the environment to society and recognize the limits of different types of energy sources, then we will fail to organize society in a sustainable way. A description and quantification of how energy flows through systems is essential for explaining growth, complexity, carrying capacity, and sustainability in systems.
The cognitive dissonance regarding energetics can be illustrated by examining perspectives about energy from Economists and Ecologists. How do we view the movement of energy through systems in both the environment and the economy? E.P. Odum (1997) describes the interface between the study of ecosystems and economies:
In theory, ecology and economics should be companion disciplines. In practice, however, economists deal with human works and with market goods and services while ecologists have until recently focused on the natural environment . . . . (p. 32).
Economists focus on human production and consumption using monetary measures, while Ecologists focus on natural ecosystem production and consumption using measures such as population size or biomass. The recent trans-disciplinary field of Ecological Economics proposes to combine the two sciences using economic methodology while merging conceptual theory. Ecological economists propose that we “internalize the externalities” of Nature into human economic systems. Yet this does not go far enough, if one is to value resources properly as the basis for our survival. In one of their last papers, Odum and Odum (1999) proposed that, in order to understand sustainability issues, we should reverse the idea and “externalize the internalities” by placing the contributions of the economy on the same measurement basis as the work of the environment. This reversal requires a different type of measure than money, since Nature’s processes (from which we are all derived) do not use currencies. So neither Economics nor Ecology nor Ecological Economics sciences as they currently exist can capture the relationships and levels of hierarchy in the unified system of Man and Nature. The new science of Emergy Synthesis proposes to quantitatively measure the complexity in those relationships. The premise for this post is that the unsustainable hierarchy and complexity of our economies can be represented visually by inverted pyramids for those who are not mathematically inclined.
Abel (from Odum)
Ecologists originally described the energy basis of ecosystems in terms of a food chain. In a food chain, larger numbers of basic producers at the base of the food chain provided many calories flowing through numerous organisms to converge in a network, transforming into fewer higher level consumer units with fewer total calories but with larger size and territory over a number of trophic levels. Stable food chains were initially viewed as pyramids, with large bases of energetic support narrowing to a top. Available energy decreased through each transformation, but the energy quality increased. The largest predators were at the top, with increased ability to reinforce energy interactions both upscale and downscale through feedback loops. Theoretically humans were the top predators in the system. Odum (1987) viewed this process as a proposed fifth law of energy hierarchy; All the energy transformations known can be connected in a series network according to the quantity of one kind of energy required for the next. The representation of energy as a hierarchy allowed the pyramid to be quantified and standardized based on comparable embodied solar energy equivalence units in order to measure the real wealth generated by nature and humans on any scale of time. This then allowed comparisons of capabilities of available energy of different kinds to do work, and to properly value Nature’s contributions (Odum, 2007, p. 97).
Ecological pyramid/food chain
Yet, if one performs a google image search for the words “food chain,” none of the pyramidal images that result depict humans! So where are the humans in this big picture that the ecologists describe? Aren’t we the top carnivores and the dominant species on the planet? Ecologists turned away from food chains in favor of food webs, deeming that webs better fit the complex network of feeding relationships in systems. Interestingly enough, when food webs appeared, humans were finally added to the top of the some of the diagrams of webs, although energy hierarchy was dispensed with. Yet the concept of a chain of transformations is integral to the description of energy flows and for the quantification of energy hierarchies. So energy hierarchies are less easily explained or quantified in webs.
An Economist views Ecology http://www.econguru.com/ fundamentals_of_ecology/ecosystems .html
As an interesting historical aside, those few scientists who study isotope behavior in systems appear to consistently understand the importance of energetic hierarchy. Frederick Soddy won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921 for his early studies of isotope decay, and he was insistent about the importance of energy for understanding economic systems. Both Odum brothers developed their energetic theories about society using radioecology. Ecologists are showing recent renewed interest in radioisotope tracers to quantify food webs (Hebert et al., 2006) along with other, more reductionist, top-down methods. Will humans be included in those isotope surveys as a result of the rising background levels of isotopes in some countries, and will we derive a tardy understanding of the relationships between Man and Nature?
Critiques from Goldsmith (1985, 2002) suggest that ecologists may have turned away from energetically-based theories of hierarchy and succession in favor of theories focusing on genetics and evolution in order to achieve consistency with the reigning growth-oriented social paradigm of the past 30 years. Is this why ecologists gave up the food chain in favor of food “webs?” It is difficult to retain oppositional world views, and scientific theories are arguably derived from world views rather than vice versa. Most ecosystems reach a stable, pulsing successional climax, eventually being replaced over the larger scale of time. This theory does not fit our world views regarding the future of industrial society. And in an energy hierarchy that is quantified, humans must either exist within the limiting energy budget of renewable resources, or else the assumption about the temporary nature of exponential growth due to nonrenewable resources must be made explicit. Quantifying these implied assumptions would mean that we would have to either change our world view to match our inevitable energetic limits, or else change our scientific theories? In unintentional support for this idea, Rudel (2009) suggests that the ideas of succession and food chains are flawed meta-narratives that . . . “have no place for important features of human societies like globalization and the world system” (p. 90). Rudel discounts succession as a potential master narrative for environment and society, and suggests that succession may instead yield clues to sustainable development that yields both economic growth and environmental protection. Rudel appears to be discounting theories that do not support his world view. Additionally scientists focus on problems and ask questions that address their world view; Ecological studies are only recently attempting to include humans in studies of urban ecology. Kingsland notes that these recent studies used microscopic methods such as “patch dynamics”, however, that omit the energetic basis. Our ecological blindspot regarding energetic limits appears complete.
. . . one in keeping with American ideas about progress and the other subversive. The clash between these two view-points made it necessary to think more deeply about the extent to which ecology can or should be human-centered. This question in turn relates to the problem of how we view ourselves in relation to the environment, whether we are outsiders and disturbers or intrinsic parts of a system, whose health depends on our cooperation (p. 209).
Transformity Depiction (Tom Abel)
Although some subversive scientists such as Tim F.H. Allen and others are still exploring the concept of hierarchy as a unifying concept for ecology, most ecologists appear to have abandoned the idea of hierarchical energy as an explanatory theory for both man and nature. As Allen points out, the limits of what is possible in a system typically come from the lower levels of an energy hierarchy. So theoretically, humans are limited by the Transformity of the lower levels of the hierarchy. Tom Abel’s Transformity pyramid above depicts the representation of human society as it ideally rests upon its natural resource basis, with genetic DNA and human society information at the pinnacle of transformity within the naturally-shaped pyramidal hierarchy. Due to nonrenewable energy inputs to society over the last two centuries, however, the reality is far different from the ideal society depicted above. What would our current global industrial society look like in a qualitative representation using pyramids?
Is there a single energy hierarchy for Nature and the Economy together, or are Nature and the Economy separate entities described by disconnected sciences with separate toolkits? Can we visually marry these two seemingly oppositional energetic and economic world views as to how the world works? Kurt Cobb skirts the boundaries of this topic in his post on Upside Down Economics. When we examine the sub sectors of an economy, here is what Economists see when they look at the US Economy, for example.
Kurt Cobb Resource Insights http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2007/07/upside-down-economics.html
Yet here is what an Ecological Economist might see instead, at least in the extreme economy of the United States, if we transposed the pie chart above into a pyramid, as Mr. Cobb did.
Kurt Cobb Resource Insights http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2007/07/upside-down-economics.html
Abel&Cobb-Industrial Society as an Hourglass
The sectors of a human economy based on nature do not appear to follow the normal pyramid shape of a stable food chain. In our current economy, sectors of natural resources and basic services are a small part of our global economy, while sectors that are arguably dislocated from the real economy are dominant, such as the financial, insurance and real estate sectors. If we try to visually marry Abel’s ideal representation of Man living within limits of Nature with Cobb’s upside-down economic pyramid on top, what results is an hourglass at right, with a fuel injector made of fossil fuels between the natural and human worlds. Although the analogy is qualitative and imperfect, the images suggest that fossil fuels have allowed us to build a separate skewed society perched on the apex of the natural, sustainable energy hierarchy of Nature. The amount and degree of high quality transformities are inflated by the injections of fossil fuels, creating an exponential super-circulation of information in the human end of society, and an increasingly impoverished Natural end. This may seem obvious to many, but then why do our theoretical models do not reflect this basic understanding?
BIS Pyramid of Global Liquidity circa 2007?
We can even make analogies about the shape of our current global monetary system, which takes on the same shape of a skewed, upside down pyramid, as shown at right in the BIS Inverted Pyramid of Global Liquidity. Many other examples of upset hierarchies can be found by googling images of upside down pyramids. Inverted pyramids are inherently unstable. Is there anything natural about our current global economic system, and how far must we bend or even
Gothard http://online.wsj.com/articl e/SB123958260423012269. html
break theories about Nature to make them fit our worldview of our economic system? Dr. Abel’s naturally shaped Transformity pyramid represents how our society should be, in balance with Nature. But our society can no longer be represented by a normal pyramid with a broad base and narrow apex. The inverted shape of our society is only workable as long as we can extract an increasingly broad footprint of natural resources in order to avoid toppling our rapacious economy. In fact, if one combines the visual images of an imbalanced upside-down economy and its associated upside-down money supply spinning like an accelerating flywheel, then a spinning top results. And we all know what happens to spinning tops that stop spinning? Isn’t that what they call a “pyramid scheme?”
Sharon Kingsland (2005) summarizes ecological perspectives that view Nature as a problem isolated from society, and energy as a market commodity:
. . . Unless a human-centered perspective can be built into environmental discussions, it will be difficult to convey to ordinary people, and also to politicians, the links between environmental reforms and other issues that affect human health and societal health. This failure also creates a barrier to the teamwork that is needed to solve environmental problems (p. 262).
We have shifted our theories to fit the context and perceived reality of industrial society and capitalism. Our perceived world view lacks unifying concepts that might consider a future with less resources. We are very unprepared for the limits to growth.
And the next time that you see images of inverted pyramids, consider the nature of hierarchies, their relative inherent sustainability or stability, and their place within Nature.
H.T. Odum spent formative years interrupting his undergraduate study during World War II as a tropical meteorologist in the Panama Canal zone, which helped him to develop understanding of the energetic basis of global systems. He was generally less disturbed about the threat of climate change than he was about our coming bottleneck due to peak oil, proposing that the greatest and most impacting effect of climate change would would be greater extremes and wider swings in weather. On the subject of climate, he was
A little ice-age in Anchorage
unsure about whether heating due to greenhouse gases would cause significant rises in sea level or not; one early hypothesis of his in the 1980s was that if heating caused more water vapor to go into the air, then more snow and ice could form in polar regions at high altitudes. Glaciers might melt at their toes at sea level, but might actually accumulate in ice fields, perhaps counteracting the relative rise in sea levels. While there is accumulating evidence that sea levels are rising, and the jury is still out on glaciers at high altitudes/latitudes, there are certainly greater extremes in weather. I ponder these questions as I write about the intersection of climate and peak oil this morning, looking out my window in Anchorage, a weather sample of n=1. We are victims of the polar jet and La Niña here in Alaska this winter, and I’m wondering when it’s all going to melt?!?
Ouroboros as symbol of cyclical birth and death of Nature, energy, unity of all, cycling, and self-sufficiency
We can frame the discussion using the hot-button example of climate change, since the polarized arguments on climate reveal some of our faulty logic and assumptions regarding global problems and solutions. The problems of peak oil and climate change are basically two ends of the same snake, which consists of the inputs and outputs of our global energy problem (see the ouroboros at right as a metaphor). We currently produce too much CO2 as a
Flywheel from MT Brown 2004 Picture Worth a Thousand Words (from Odum, 1976)
result of the excessive use of our surplus stash of nonrenewable fossil fuels, especially here in the United States. The starting point is the unsustainable use of fossil fuels, which creates excess CO2 in the atmosphere. The process of production and consumption accelerates over time, as the flywheel global economy continues to accelerate due to oil-related growth. So instead of being sustainable as suggested by the ouroboros, it becomes unsustainable, only limited by the amount of fossil fuels that can be removed from the eath. It is the amount of energy in the tank and how we control it that is perhaps the source of our incorrect assumptions. Isn’t the polarized war on the science of climate really a proxy for the struggle about growth and capitalism?
How we examine problems depends in part on our worldview. Our world view can be faulty, resulting in cognitive dissonance, blindspots, incorrect assumptions, or failure to examine all aspects of an issue. The failure to view problems at a larger scale sometimes prevents us from asking the right questions in framing problems. Which are the biggest problems, and how are they related to each other? Does our worldview about how the global economic system runs impact our scientific viewpoint and the theories we subscribe to? Which choices in using waning resources are best for the system as a whole? What are the fundamental assumptions of our scientific worldview, and is the natural world or energetic limits and principles considered as a part of those assumptions? Systems science can describe the nature of complex systems, in order to help us understand of nature and society.
Here is an example of questionable assumptions regarding climate change from an interesting list of five future strategic scenarios from Deutsche Post DHL. In it, a relocalization scenario was described by a group of economic experts:
SCENARIO 5, GLOBAL RESILIENCE – LOCAL ADAPTATION
This scenario describes a world initially characterized by a high level of consumption thanks to cheap, automated production. However, due to accelerated climate change, frequent catastrophes disrupt supply chains and lean production structures, resulting in repeated supply failures.
This statement suggests that climate change will be the cause of future global supply chain interruptions. If taken at face value, apparently these economic experts have less concerns about the supply for oil production than climate change. Economic experts, corporations, and the media return repeatedly to climate change as our greatest environmental problem, the cause of our woes, and the focus of our attention and funding for solutions. Soddy (1926) said, “If we have available energy, we may maintain life and produce every material requisite necessary. That is why the flow of energy should be the primary concern of economics” (p. 56). Yet the flow of energy is not the primary concern of our political and economic leaders in general, or here in this specific example. The primary concern of economics is arguably money and the perpetuation of growth. Corporations look for market problems and solutions that do not impede economic growth, as growth of stockholder value and managerial salaries is their primary goal. If one has a hammer, then everything becomes a nail? And since corporations increasingly drive media and politics, corporate agendas may also begin to drive national science and policy discussions, and frame our reality through the media.
How can we view the problem of climate as a critical imminent threat, and not view peak oil in the same way? (Thanks to Dave Cohen and others for beating this drum.) What are the incorrect assumptions that lead to our faulty logic?
Misunderstanding regarding what drives our economy, thinking that the basis is money and technology rather than energy
Failure to understand net emergy, leading to gross overestimates of energy reserves for oil, coal, and gas
Mental and scientific models that fail to include peak oil as a limiting factor to production
Insistence on extrapolating existing conditions of growth indefinitely in climate models
Dependence on television media for explanations of complex global systems problems, reducing the issues to single problem sound bites
Incentives to pursue growth as a prerequisite for the goal of wealth
Cognitive dissonance between media exhortations that economic growth is of primary importance and beliefs/concerns about the environment
Has “climate change” become a euphemism for the peak oil problem that we appear to be unable to face? Is there some psychological benefit to focusing on climate instead of energy problems or is it simply a blindspot due to lack of education regarding the energy basis for society? Can we maintain BAU (Business as Usual) if we focus on some distant environmental problem as a proxy for those threats too close at hand for psychological safety? When the cognitive dissonance is that great, does it qualify as a form of mass delusion or psychosis? Does the energy resource blindspot regarding our source of empire extend also to issues of war, where those who fail to view energy as a problem also view causative factors for war with Iran, Iraq, or other Middle East countries as based on terrorism rather than based on oil? If we are made to understand the prominence of the oil problem, must we then accept the energy basis of our empire? Is it a coincidence that these two related controversies of climate change and also war in the Middle East are so polarized, especially in the United States? Isn’t climate change really just a proxy or euphemism for our oil addiction problem, especially here in the U.S?
from Cohen 2009 http://energybulletin.net/node/48193
While climate scientists focus on the waste CO2 buildup caused by consuming fossil fuels as primary, resource experts focus on the disappearing fossil fuels. Is either problem, climate change or peak oil, really a separate issue that can be isolated, with separate and independent economic solutions for each problem? If the problems are separated, then are the solutions separate and different also? Can single issues that are subsets of “a safe operatingspace for humanity” be prioritized as “the most important issue” and what is our
Rockstrom et al. 2009, Nature A Safe Operating Space for Humanity
metric for that? If we “chunk up” and view both problems from one scale up at the global level, what is the real root cause of both of these problems? Who is molding our cultural debates about priorities in science, and why? Who decides our policies and is the policy based on unbiased science? If we were to reverse the problem, how would the solution change? In other words, if we wanted to increase CO2 in the atmosphere, what would we do—withhold carbon credit policies, stop geo-engineering, or speed up
Climate Change Geoengineering Proposal from Bipartisan Policy Center Oct. 2011 http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/library/report/task-force-climate-remediation-research
growth? Doesn’t our flywheel economy, the root cause, dictate that the only solution for climate is to slow the rate of spin, either voluntarily or involuntarily? How do we change the fundamental goal of our economic system–growth?
A new national policy agenda focuses on geo-engineering as a solution to the problem climate change as an example. In Oct. 2011, the Bipartisan Policy Center proposed expansion of climate mitigation through technology focused on specific large scale projects. Instead of addressing the
Bipartisan Policy Center Oct. 2011 http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/library/report/task-force-climate-remediation-research
fundamental problem of growth in energy consumption, we want to create an elaborate energy-intensive set of solutions that further degrade the environment (click on the picture at right for more details). Does a narrowed focus lead to finding solutions framed within the narrow boundaries of economics and market solutions, subject to corporate gamesmanship through carbon credits? Or are the problems better addressed by examining the problems with a
Stephanie McMillan Code Green http://www.stephaniemcmillan.org/codegreen/
broader focus on the economy as it exists within Nature and our energetic basis? Isn’t the solution of geo-engineering a classic example of the story of the blind men and the elephant, where each blind man describes a different part of the elephant, thus arriving at a different reality for the whole? Aren’t market solutions a bit too convenient for corporate absolution and continuation of BAU? Might mitigating climate change make other more imminent and threatening problems worse? If we fix one problem, are there unintended consequences that impact other parts of the system? HT Odum said, ”Geo-engineering the planet with interventions such as dumping iron filings in our oceans could be catastrophic.”
Here is another example of reductionist solutions to climate, from the Princeton Climate Mitigation Institute (CMI):
Double fuel efficiency of 2 billion cars from 30 to 60 mpg
Decrease the number of car miles traveled by half
Use best efficiency practices in all residential and commercial buildings
Produce current coal-based electricity with twice todays efficiency
Increase wind electricity capacity by 10 times relative to today, total = 2 million large windmills
Replace 1400 coal electric plants with natural gas-powered facilities
Install 100 times the current capacity of solar electricity
Use 40,000 square kilometers of solar panels (or 4 million windmills) to produce hydrogen cells
Capture AND store emissions from 800 coal electric plants
Produce hydrogen from coal at six times today’s rate AND store the captured CO2
Capture carbon from 180 coal-to-synfuels plants AND store the CO2
Increase ethanol production 12 times by creating biomass plantations = 1/6th world cropland
Add double the current global nuclear capacity to replace coal-based electricity
Eliminate tropical deforestation
Adopt conservation tillage in all agricultural soils worldwide
Taken singly, each one of these proposals from the Princeton CMI may sound reasonable, if one does not do the associated math on scaling and emergy basis. Taken together, however, one begins to realize the desperate, bargaining, “grasping at straws” nature of our efforts to bend over backwards to avoid the real issue, which is our desire to grow forever.
Finally, when we think like a system, we begin to see other problems that were not even on our radar. For example, why did none of the mainstream economists see the economic problems on our horizon, calling the problem a “black swan” when it arrived, as though it came out of nowhere without building causation, when actually the problem was very predictable when viewed from a perspective of expanding money supply combined with diminishing resources? In the same vein, are there other environmental hazards that we need to consider from a more comprehensive view, such as nuclear hazards resulting from aging nuclear plants in a setting of economic deterioration? As a former radioecologist, Odum also said, “Every home should have a geiger counter.” What part of the words smoldering ruins (above) do we not understand? Is a hazard such as this even on scientists’ radar and how do we prioritize it in a world with waning electricity security?
How fast can we/should we put on the brakes to avoid falling apart? We need integrative, ecological thinking to both prioritize the problems and to frame solutions. As scientists are herded into zero sum games and even negative sum games for solutions to our ecological problems, the solutions will become more disintegrated and less logical. Which policies ensure that we brake our flywheel economies slowly in order to match reductions in resource production or imports, while also protecting the environment so that it is there for us when nonrenewable supports have departed? Odum (1995) said, “Maximizing jobs and the economy requires maximizing the symbiosis of the economy with the environment and its resources” (p. 367). Encouraging a growth economy while creating policies that transfer blame for the growth amongst the culprits will not stop the problem. Trying to close the barn door after the horse is gone with carbon credits or other market-driven solutions will not stop the problem. Our media focus on climate change suggests a concern for the rapid consumption of energy but sidesteps the real root cause of greenhouse gases, which is growth. Solutions based on climate change are too narrow, focusing on market solutions that will probably not work–market solutions that do not acknowledge the need for descent are bandaids (or bananas, below). The focus on climate distracts us and takes energy away from more important national agenda priorities, such as the need to anticipate diminishing resources by changing our infrastructure to accommodate less energy inputs. Arguably self-organization will eventually select for optimum intermediate efficiencies, but wouldn’t it be better if we were proactive, as changes in fossil-fuel infrastructure requires fossil fuels? How fast can we/should we put on the brakes to avoid falling apart? Perhaps Emergy Synthesis can help us to answer some of these questions and provide solutions that best maintain economies and environments together as we descend.
Using carbon credits to fix climate change is like stuffing a banana up the tailpipe of your 1983 Mercury Marquis? Thanks, Eddie Murphy & Beverly Hills Cop!
[This article is reposted with permission from Kurt Cobb's April 5th, 2009 post on his Resource Insights website. Kurt Cobb is the author of the peak-oil-themed thriller, Prelude, and a columnist for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen. His work has also been featured on Energy Bulletin, The Oil Drum, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, EV World, and many other sites.]
This decade was the one that was supposed to usher in the era when bits and bytes would replace tons and barrels as the measure of what an economy does. The information economy would eclipse the economy of blast furnaces and railcars.
The allure of such an economy is that it was said to be less resource intense, less driven by the high-amplitude economic cycles of the industrial economy, and more driven by the need for and efficient use of information, something that is always in demand. It turned out not to be so. The tech bust of the early part of this decade highlighted the vulnerability of the so-called information economy to cyclical forces and also the reliance of that economy on the more substantial physical economy.
Abel (from Odum)
We mistake the lightness of electrons and the vaporous nature of the information that rides on them for the lightness of the entire economy behind them. Every person who works in the so-called information sector of the economy must be housed, clothed, schooled, provided transportation, provisioned with household goods, given opportunities for entertainment and recreation, supplied with a wide array of public services, and…well, you get the idea. And, much of the manufacturing economy which previously provided employment in the United States and other industrialized nations has simply shifted to China and other low-cost locales. As it turns out, one of the main tasks of the information economy is to direct and manage the resulting global logistical system, a system that continues to bear down with its ever increasing weight on the landscape and the environment.
Howard Odum, the great pioneer in understanding energy flows in nature and society, understood that information, far from being a feathery presence in society, is actually its most resource- and energy-intensive output except for the natural process of species formation.
To read the chart below one must know that Odum turned all measurements into equivalent calories of solar energy which he dubbed solar emcalories. Concentration of emcalories leads to their greater and greater usefulness to human society. Diffuse sunlight on a field only warms a person for as long as the sun shines. But the energy concentrated in field crops can be stored until needed for food or fuel. Such is the role of what Odum calls transformities, that is, the transformation of previously concentrated energy into more concentrated, more energy-intense forms. Transforming fossil fuels into electricity is another example.
Odum is not trying to discount the usefulness of information. In fact, energy embodied in the various products of nature and of human societies generally becomes more useful, the more concentrated it gets. Energy that is more concentrated is more easily transported and used. And, energy which becomes the above-mentioned weightless information may be the most potent of all. It was Archimedes who said, “Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.” He was, of course, talking about the power of the lever to move things. The key element, however, is a piece of information, namely, where to stand.
Facebook Connectivity
Far from being costless or weightless or light on resource use, information comes to us at very great expense. Today, we talk about the vast volume of information that is being produced. But is this the case? Aren’t we really talking about the vast quantity of copies of information flowing through the information system? Aren’t we also talking about the vast quantity of gossip that moves through that system? As anyone who sifts through the information on the Internet on a regular basis knows, a good piece of solid, actionable information is not always easy to find. In proportion to the chatter and clutter on the Internet, there simply isn’t that much good information. Perhaps one reason is that genuinely useful new information is so very hard to produce.
Flowing Data http://flowingdata.com/2012/01/02/high-resolution-maps-of-science/
The idea that ours is a new age when people first began to grasp the importance of information is patent nonsense. When someone tells you that we are moving into an information society, you can retort that we have always been an information society: information about how the forest works and where one might find food, about how to grow crops and which ones grow best, about how to cut and stack stone upon stone to make buildings that will last for the ages, about how to float vessels on water, about nearly everything human societies value past and present. We are now copying and disseminating what information we have on a grander scale and at a faster pace than ever before. And, we certainly have a lot of information about how to make the earth, the sky, and the sea give us whatever we want. In truth, much of the modern “information revolution” is nothing more than this.
Adbusters Spoof Ads-Name These Plants kickitover.org
What we are lacking is the widespread understanding of how to live within the limits prescribed by the planet. Putting to rest the idea that so-called information-based industries somehow have a negligible impact on the biosphere might be a good first step in focusing us on the kind of information that we will need to become partners with nature rather than its adversaries.
There are many different paradigms to choose to live by. Humans lived on this Earth without significant impact for eons. We can use paradigms that have supported human and ecosystem health over thousands of years as examples from which to build a new and more resilient paradigm.
What that also means is that answers to how we develop a new paradigm can have only broad outlines, not specific answers because each paradigm will have to be uniquely adapted to its ecosystem. Specific adaptations to a southern United States ecosystem will not work in the north. It means that people will have to reacquaint themselves with their local ecological conditions and adopt strategies that balance what their ecosystem can offer with their social goals.
