Perhaps the most fascinating factor shaping today’s debates about the future of industrial society, and certainly among the most frustrating, is the rapidity with which any such debate plunges into territory outside the reach of rational argument. Watch a conversation about the subject, and nearly always one of two things will happen: either the participants will find they share basic assumptions in common, and will proceed to build a conversation on that firm ground, or their assumptions will differ and they’ll spend the rest of the conversation talking past one another.
Any number of examples could be cited, but the one that comes to mind just now is the way that communications break down over the subject of environmental limits. It’s no exaggeration to say that either you believe in limits or you don’t. If you do, it seems glaringly obvious that modern industrial civilization, which depends on ever-increasing exploitation of finite and nonrenewable resources, is in deep trouble, and the only viable options are those that jettison the fantasy of perpetual economic growth and aim at a controlled descent to a level of energy and resource use per capita that can be sustained over the long run.
~ A Struggle of Paradigms | The Ecological Limits/No-Limits Paradigms | End of the Information Age ~Climate change, energy depletion, food shortages, resource wars, species extinction - these are not the problem, they are only the symptoms. The singular root problem that causes all these horrifying threats to mankind is overpopulation.
So - logically - the solution that will eliminate these threats is simply to reduce the population of humans on this planet to a sustainable number.
Yet, no one proposes this obvious solution. No one is even willing to discuss it. It is the Elephant in every room.
~ The Population Elephant: The Problems with “The Problem” || Ten Best Population Quotes, from The Population Elephant ~“Food has something in common with energy — they're both commodities that you use up. And they're both worth fighting over. Naturally, if food is a problem that could blow up in our faces, the smart thing to do would be to think strategically.”
~ AgriWarfare & Strategic Food: The Agriculture Ticking Time-Bomb: F-O-O-D, is a Fighting Word, like OIL ~
A Struggle of Paradigms
John Michael Greer | The Archdruid Report
John Michael Greer | The Archdruid Report
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Perhaps the most fascinating factor shaping today’s debates about the future of industrial society, and certainly among the most frustrating, is the rapidity with which any such debate plunges into territory outside the reach of rational argument. Watch a conversation about the subject, and nearly always one of two things will happen: either the participants will find they share basic assumptions in common, and will proceed to build a conversation on that firm ground, or their assumptions will differ and they’ll spend the rest of the conversation talking past one another.
Any number of examples could be cited, but the one that comes to mind just now is the way that communications break down over the subject of environmental limits. It’s no exaggeration to say that either you believe in limits or you don’t. If you do, it seems glaringly obvious that modern industrial civilization, which depends on ever-increasing exploitation of finite and nonrenewable resources, is in deep trouble, and the only viable options are those that jettison the fantasy of perpetual economic growth and aim at a controlled descent to a level of energy and resource use per capita that can be sustained over the long run.
If you don’t believe in limits, by contrast, such notions are the height of folly. Since, according to this way of thinking, progress can by definition overcome any limit nature might impose on human beings, it seems glaringly obvious that modern industrial civilization needs to push progress into overdrive so that it can find and deploy the innovations that will get us past today’s problems and launch our species onward toward its glorious future, whatever that happens to be.
Readers of this blog will have little trouble guessing the side of this division on which I can be found. As a student of ecology, I’ve learned that environmental limits play a dominant role in shaping the destiny of every species, ours included; as a student of history, I’ve reviewed the fate of any number of civilizations that believed themselves to be destiny’s darlings, and proceeded to pave the road to collapse with their own ecological mistakes. From my perspective, the insistence that limits don’t apply to us is as good a case study as one might wish of that useful Greek word hubris, otherwise defined as the overweening pride of the doomed. Still, the fact that these things seem so self-evident to me makes it all the more intriguing that they are anything but self-evident to most people in the industrial world today.
This same territory was mapped out the year I was born, from a different perspective, by Thomas Kuhn, whose famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is as influential as it is rarely read. Kuhn was among the first historians of science to put the popular image of scientific progress to the test of history, and find it wanting. In place of the notion that science advances toward objective truth by the steady accumulation of proven facts – a notion that continues to shape histories of science written for popular consumption – he showed that scientific beliefs are profoundly shaped by social and cultural forces, and that the relation between scientific theory and the facts on the ground is a great deal more complex than conventional ideas allow.
Kuhn’s take on things has been misstated often enough that it probably needs a summary here. During a period of what he calls “normal science,” scientists model their work on a paradigm. This isn’t some sort of vague worldview, in the sense too often given to the word recently; rather, it’s a specific example of science at work, an investigation by an exemplary scientist and the successful and popular theory resulting from that research. In bacteriology, for example, Louis Pasteur’s research program in the 1870s and 1880s, which led to the first successful artificial vaccines, became the paradigm that later researchers followed; good bacteriological research – in Kuhn’s terms, normal science – was research that followed Pasteur’s lead, worked at fine-tuning his theories, and asked the same kinds of questions about the same kinds of phenomena that he asked and answered.
Sooner or later, though, a mismatch opens up between the paradigm and the facts on the ground; the research methods drawn from the paradigm stop yielding good answers, and the paradigmatic theory no longer allows for successful prediction of phenomena. Scientists respond by making the theory more elaborate, the way that Ptolemy’s earth-centered cosmology had to be padded out with epicycle after epicycle to make it fit the vagaries of planetary motion. Crisis comes when the theory becomes so cumbersome that even its stoutest believers come to realize that something is irreducibly wrong, or when data emerges that no reworking of the paradigmatic theory can explain. Sooner or later the crisis resolves when a researcher propounds a new theory that makes sense of the confusion. That theory, and the research program that created it, then becomes the new paradigm in the field.
So far, so good. Kuhn pointed out, though, that while the new paradigm solves questions the old one could not, the reverse is often true as well: the old paradigm does things the new paradigm cannot. (Sailors who navigate by the stars still use Ptolemaic astronomy, for example, because one of the questions it answers elegantly – what does the movement of the heavens look like from Earth? – is awkward to work out using the Copernican system.) It’s standard practice for the new paradigm to include the value judgment that the questions the new paradigm answers are the ones that matter, and the ones the old paradigm does better don’t count. Nor is this judgment pure propaganda; since the questions the new paradigm answers are generally the ones that researchers have been wrestling with for decades or centuries, they look more important than details that have been comfortably settled since time out of mind. They may also be more important, in every meaningful sense, if they allow practical problems to be solved that the old paradigm left insoluble.
Yet the result of that value judgment, Kuhn argued, is the false impression that science progresses, replacing relatively false beliefs with relatively more true ones, and thus gradually advances on the truth. He argued that different paradigms are not attempts to answer the same questions, differing in their level of accuracy, but attempts to answer entirely different questions – or, to put it another way, they are models that highlight different features of a complex reality, and cannot be reduced to one another. Thus, for example, Ptolemaic astronomy isn’t wrong, just useful for different purposes than Copernican astronomy. (From the standpoint of relativity theory, please note, this is quite correct: since there are no fixed points in the cosmos, only frames of reference, it’s as meaningful to take an earth-centered frame of reference and calculate the movements of the planets from there as it is to take a sun-centered frame of reference and do the same thing.)
All these same considerations sprawl outside the limits of the sciences to define the rise and fall of paradigms in the entire range of human social phenomena. This brings us back around to the irreconcilable differences that introduced this post, for the difference between the believers and the disbelievers in limits is, at root, a difference in paradigms. Those who believe that modern industrial society is destined for, or even capable of, unlimited economic expansion have drawn their paradigm from the industrial revolution and its three-century aftermath, with James Watt and his steam engine playing roughly the same role that Louis Pasteur played in the old paradigm of bacteriology, say, or Isaac Newton still plays in some aspects of physics. Like any other paradigm, the industrial revolution defines certain questions and issues as important, and dismisses others from serious consideration.
This is where the problems arise, because a solid case can be made – and this blog has tried in various ways to make it – that some of the questions dismissed from consideration by the “normal culture” of industrial expansion are among those our species most needs to face just now, as the depletion of fossil fuel reserves and the soaring costs of environmental damage become central facts of our contemporary experience. The industrial paradigm can only interpret running out of one resource as a call to begin exploiting some even richer one. If there is no richer one, and even the poorer ones are rapidly being depleted as well, what then? From within the industrial paradigm, that question cannot even be formulated; the assumption that there is always some new and better resource to be had is hardwired into the ways of thinking that the industrial paradigm makes inevitable.
Thus a change of paradigms is necessary. The belief in limits discussed earlier in this post derives from a different model of this kind – the model of ecology, which is still sorting out its historical vision and has not yet quite found its paradigmatic theory, researcher, and discovery. (Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Charles Darwin are among the current contenders.) From within this paradigm, the models that provide the most insight into our contemporary situation are those found in nonhuman nature – specifically, the cycles of increase, overshoot, and dieoff which afflict so many other species that rely on outside forces to control their numbers. Unless we take that model and its implications into account, the ecological paradigm suggests, some of the most important factors shaping our future are completely out of sight.
The change from one paradigm to another, however, is not an overnight thing. Kuhn points out that in the sciences, it usually has to wait until most of the older generation of scientists, who have been trained in the old paradigm, have been removed from the debate by old age and death. The same thing is too often true in other fields. Thus it’s uncomfortably likely that even as the industrial paradigm fails to explain an increasingly challenging world, a great many people will cling to the faith that progress will bail us out. Meanwhile, those of us who have made the Copernican leap to a universe in which human beings are no longer central will have to accomplish what we can on the smaller scales available to us.
Source: Archdruid Report
The End of the Information Age
John Michael Dreer | Archdruid Report
John Michael Dreer | Archdruid Report
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
One of the repeated lessons I’ve learned over the three years since The Archdruid Report began appearing is the extent to which many people nowadays have trouble grasping some of the most fundamental facts about the crisis of our times. I had yet another reminder of that a few days back, when the comments on last week’s post started coming in.
A point made in passing in that post was that railroads, while they are much more efficient than automobile or air transport, still require relatively large amounts of concentrated energy, and so may become uneconomical for many uses at a certain point well down the curve of fossil fuel depletion. One of my readers took rather heated exception to this comment. Only America’s backwards railroads, he pointed out indignantly, relied on fossil fuel; since European and Japanese railways used electricity, they would be unaffected by fossil fuel depletion and could keep rolling along into the far future.
This kind of logic is common enough these days that it’s probably necessary to point out the flaws in it. Electricity isn’t an energy source; it has to be generated, using some other energy source to do so. The electricity that powers the European and Japanese rail systems is mostly generated by plants that burn coal, with significant help from nuclear reactors and a rather smaller assist from hydroelectric plants. Of these, only the hydroelectric plants are a renewable energy source; the others are poised just as firmly on the downslope of depletion as the diesel oil that runs American locomotives.
Coal is turning out to be much less abundant than the cozy estimates of a few decades ago made it sound, and of course there’s the far from minor impact of coal burning on an already unstable global climate. Fissionable uranium is well down its own depletion curve, and it’s worth noting that the enthusiastic claims sometimes made for breeder reactors, the use of thorium as a nuclear fuel, and other alternatives to conventional fission plants are very rarely to be heard from people who have professional training in the fields concerned. Thus my reader was quite simply wrong; the European and Japanese rail systems that so excited his admiration are just as dependent on nonrenewable fuels as the American system, and are also just as vulnerable to the economic implications of supply and demand as energy supplies dwindle.
Now of course there are other reasons why railroads may be kept in service, at least for certain uses, long after they become economic liabilities. Many of the world’s larger nations – the United States and Russia among them – grew to their present size only after rail transport made it possible to exert political and economic power on a continental scale, and future governments may well keep long-distance rail links going as a matter of national survival. That likelihood, though, does nothing to counter the point central to last week’s post: that in a world with much less energy, older and more energy-efficient transport methods such as canal boats may turn out to be much more economically viable than their more recent and more extravagant replacements, and those cities and regions well positioned to take advantage of waterborne transport may therefore thrive in the 21st century as they did in the 19th.
The same logic can be applied usefully to many other aspects of the future taking shape ahead of us right now. Probably the best example is the looming impact of a future of energy constraints on the ways that modern industrial cultures store, process, and distribute information.
It’s hard to think of a subject that has been loaded with anything like as much hype. Our time, the media never tires of repeating, is the Information Age, an epoch in which economic sectors dealing with mere material goods and services have been relegated to Third World sweatshops, while the economic cutting edge deals entirely in the manufacture, sales, and service of information in various forms. As usual – can you think of a short-term trend that hasn’t been identified as a wave of the future destined to rise up an asymptotic curve to infinity, or at least absurdity? I can’t – the standard assumption is that the future will be just like the present, but even more so, with more elaborate technologies providing more baroque information products and services as far as the eye (or, rather, the webcam) can see.
This is hardly a new vision of the future. In his 1909 novella “The Machine Stops,” which should be required reading for anyone who buys into the Information Age hullabaloo, E.M. Forster provided a remarkably exact dissection of contemporary cyberculture’s idea of its destiny most of a century in advance. It’s a great story on its own terms, but it also puts a finger on the central weakness of an information-centered society: information does not exist without a physical substrate, and if the physical substrate goes, so does the information.
In Forster’s story, that substrate was the Machine – an interconnected technostructure that spanned the globe and provided the necessities and luxuries of life to uncounted millions of people who spent their lives in hivelike cells, staring into screens and tapping on keyboards like so many of today’s computer geeks. Adept at manipulating abstract ideas, the inhabitants of the Machine lost touch with the fact that their universe of information only existed because the physical structure of the Machine kept it there, and their attitude toward the Machine gradually evolved into a religious reverence devoid of any reference to the practical realities of the Machine’s workings. The skills needed to apply physical tools to pipes and wires dropped out of use, and the consequences – minor malfunctions snowballing into major ones, and finally into total systems failure – followed from there.
Now of course fiction is fiction, and the events that cause the Machine to stop are unlikely to be repeated in the real world. The central concept, though, demands attention, because our Machine – the internet – depends just as much on a physical substrate as the one in Forster’s novella. In our case, that substrate is the global network of communications links and server farms, and the even vaster economic and technical infrastructure that keeps them funded, powered, and supplied with the trained personnel and spare parts that keep them running.
Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to maintain the information economy actually is. The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it’s easy to forget, for example, that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today’s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you’re reading them.
It’s not an accident that the internet came into existence during the last hurrah of the age of cheap energy, the quarter century between 1980 and 2005 when the price of energy dropped to the lowest levels in human history. Only in a period where energy was quite literally too cheap to bother conserving could so energy-intensive an information network be constructed. The problem here, of course, is that the conditions that made the cheap abundant energy of that quarter century have already come to an end, and the economics of the internet take on a very different shape as energy becomes scarce and expensive again.
Like the railroads of the future mentioned earlier in this post, the internet is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Once the cost of maintaining it in its current form outstrips the income that can be generated by it, it becomes a losing proposition, and cheaper modes of information storage and delivery will begin to replace it in its more marginal uses. Governments will have very good reasons to maintain some form of internet as long as they can, even when it becomes an economic sink – it’s worth remembering that the internet we now have evolved out of a US government network meant to provide communication capacity in the event of nuclear war – but this does not mean that everyone in the industrial world will have the same access they do today.
Instead, as energy costs move unsteadily upward and resource needs increasingly get met, or not, on the basis of urgency, expect access costs to rise, government regulation to increase, internet commerce to be subject to increasing taxation, and rural areas and poor neighborhoods to lose internet service altogether. There may well still be an internet a quarter century from now, but it will likely cost much more, reach far fewer people, and have only a limited resemblance to the free-for-all that exists today. Newspapers, radio, and television all moved from a growth phase of wild diversity and limited regulation to a mature phase of vast monopolies with tightly controlled content; even in the absence of energy limits, the internet would be likely to follow the same trajectory, and the rising costs imposed by the end of cheap energy bid fair to shift that process into overdrive.
The waning of the internet will pose an additional challenge to the future, because – like other new technologies – it is in the process of displacing older technologies that provided the same services on a more sustainable basis. The collapse of the newspaper industry is one widely discussed example of this process at work, but another – the death spiral of American public libraries – is likely to have a much wider impact in the decades and centuries to come. Among the most troubling consequences of the current economic crisis are wholesale cuts in state and local government funding for libraries. The Florida legislature was with some difficulty convinced a few weeks ago not to cut every penny of state support for library systems – roughly a quarter of all the money that keeps libraries open in Florida – and county and city libraries from coast to coast are cutting hours, laying off staff, and closing branches.
Some of the proponents of these budget cuts have been caught in public insisting that with the rise of the internet, nobody actually needs public libraries any more. (The fact that many of these people call themselves conservatives proves, if any additional proof is needed, just how empty of content today’s political labels have become; what exactly do they think they’re conserving?) Now of course public libraries provide many services the internet doesn’t, and it also provides them to all those people who can’t afford internet access. The point I’d like to make here, though, is that the public library will still be a viable information technology in a postpetroleum society. When Ben Franklin founded America’s first public library, it may be worth noting, he did it without benefit of fossil fuels.
If public libraries can be kept open during the waves of economic crisis that punctuate the decline of civilizations, then, everyone will likely be the better for it. I am sorry to say that this is probably not the most likely way things will fall out. The current wave of library downsizing is probably a harbinger of things to come; pressed between too many demands and too little funding to go around, library systems – like public health departments, for example, and a great many other institutions that make community life viable – are far too likely to draw the short straw. Exactly this sort of short-term thinking has driven the loss of vast amounts of information and cultural heritage in the collapse of past civilizations.
As we move into the penumbra of the deindustrial age, then, it’s crucial to start thinking about the options open to us – individually and collectively – with an eye toward their long-term viability and to the hard reality of a world of ecological limits. When today’s data centers are crumbling ruins long since stripped of valuable salvage, and all the data once stored there has evaporated into whatever realm magnetic patterns go to when they die, the thinking that led politicians to gut viable library systems on the assumption that the internet will take up the slack will look remarkably stupid. Still, the habits of thought instilled by the age of cheap abundant energy are hard to shake off, and from within them, such mistakes are hard to avoid.
Source: The ArchDruid Report
