Agriculture: Unsustainable Resource Depletion Began 10,000 Years Ago
Posted by Gail the Actuary on October 20, 2008 - 9:55am
This is a guest post by Peter Salonius, a Canadian soil microbiologist.
According to Peter, humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth's carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE). The problem is that soil needs tightly woven natural ecosystems to properly recycle nutrients and prevent soil erosion. Earth's inhabitants have devised a whole series of approaches to increase the amount of food that can produced, starting first with hand-cultivation and culminating in the last century with the widespread use of fossil fuels. These approaches strip the soil of its nutrients and cause soil erosion. Even Permaculture cannot be expected to overcome these problems. According to the paper, eventually, to reach sustainability, the world will need to reduce its population to that of the hunter-gathers, and go back to living on the resources the natural ecosystems can produce.
Peter's paper begins below the fold.
Part 1: Life Before Agriculture
The major departure for humans as just another member of the global animal species assemblage came when fire was first used about 400,000 years ago by Homo erectus (Price 1995). The dynamic cyclical stability of complex systems has been shown for most animal populations, except top predators, to depend on predation to dampen overshoot and runaway consumption dynamics of prey species (Rooney et al. 2006). The ability to control and use fire removed the influence of wild animal predators as moderators of human numbers. The use of fire made possible the colonization of cold lands at high latitudes where fuel for heating shelters was available in some form such as animal oil, dried dung and wood. Even though their shelters became more complex and elaborate, they were, for the most part, temporary encampments whose main structural components could be transported across the landscape so as to benefit from variable food availability as the seasons changed.
The bulk of human history has been that of a culture of hunter gathers or foragers. They did not plant crops or modify ecosystem dynamics in any significant manner as they were passively dependent on what the local environment had to offer. They did however domesticate dogs as early as 100,000 BCE (Vila et al. 1997); these animals were useful as hunting aids, guardians, and occasionally as food during times of scarcity. Hunter gatherers maintained social organization and interdependence, and prevented the loss of food to spoilage by sharing the harvest among community members. These people lived in harmony with their supporting ecosystems and their ability to unsustainably stress and damage their environment was limited by the fact that if their numbers exceeded the carrying capacity of the complex, self-managing, species diverse, resilient terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems from which they gained their sustenance, then hunger and lower fertility exercised negative feedback controls on further expansion.
They used culturally mediated behavior like extended suckling, abortifacients and infanticide to keep their numbers far below carrying capacity, and to avoid Malthusian constraints like starvation (Read and LeBlanc 2003). Warfare between groups competing for the same resources, before the evolution of states, also appears have been a significant constraint on the growth of human numbers (Keeley 1996).
Part 2: The Evolution of Agriculture
The development of agriculture is of great interest to us because it produces most of our food and it was a prerequisite for the tremendous growth of human numbers, and also for the various complex societies that have evolved since this new culture began (Diamond 2002).
After the advent of agriculture, mortality rates, caused by conflict, decreased somewhat as local raiding by chiefdoms evolved into long-distance territorial conquest by states (Spencer 2003). These cultural and conflict behaviors that limited human population growth served to maintain balance between humans and other species during most of the historical record. Read and Leblanc (2003) suggest that humans, in areas of low resource density, tend to maintain generally stable populations, while high resource density, such as that produced by agriculture, decreases the spacing of births more rapidly than the increase in resource density, which results in repeating cycles of carrying capacity overshoot and population collapse.
Nomads and Pastoralists
The earliest movement from strict hunter gathering toward agriculture came when people noticed the changes in ecosystems that they burned to move game animals to places where they could be more easily killed; sometimes the post-fire vegetation consisted of an increase in the numbers of plants used as food, such as berries and bulbs and also vegetation assemblages, like the sparse oak parkland of the U.S. Pacific Northwest that produced acorns for both human food and for the deer that they hunted (Angier 1974; Oregon State University 2003), while in other areas grasslands were periodically burned to encourage the growth of tender vegetation that was attractive to game animals.
Even though some hunter gatherer/ foragers did modify the vegetation or successional state of vegetation assemblages in specific areas with fire, these areas seldom were productive enough to support year round occupancy. Thus began the first steps of humans as a ‘patch-disturbance‘ species (Rees 2002), whose expansion would ultimately extend to and modify almost all of the ecosystems on the planet.
Movement toward actual cultivation agriculture began with the domestication of cereal grains at a time when postglacial climate warming was interrupted by climate reversal, even before the beginning of the consistently warm conditions of the Holocene (Hillman et al. 2001). Diamond (2002) shows that plant and animal domestication first occurred in areas where the most valuable and easiest species to cultivate were native. These species were later moved to new and more productive areas by the migratory expansion of their cultivators who overran resident hunter gatherers. As people worked with and cultured wild species, the process of genetic selection began to produce more easily managed individuals with modified behavior. Diamond (1997; 2002) outlines characteristics of wild animals dealing with diet, growth rate, captive breeding, disposition, and social structure that make individual species either candidates for domestication or that make domestication very difficult.
Nomads, inhabiting grassland / prairie ecosystems, who had relied on hunting herds of herbivores, learned enough about the habits of these species to begin the process of controlling some of them. The resulting pastoral herding culture of such animals as camels, goats, sheep, cattle, yaks, alpacas and reindeer made locating meat much less chancy, and allowed the further developing use of secondary products from living animals such as blood and milk. This very early form of species domestication without cultivation provides considerable independence in the face of environmental fluctuations because herds are moved to different areas as the seasons change and during periods of drought. These people developed a culture that moved to adapt to the environment as opposed to forcing changes on the environment to accommodate a particular food production culture, even though they did burn land to rejuvenate pasture and prevent forest growth from encroaching onto grasslands.
Pastoralists, like hunter-gatherers maintained close social organization and interdependence, and they prevented the loss of food to spoilage by sharing the harvest among community members. Hunter gathering, foraging and pastoral lifestyles are often thought of as precarious and requiring very hard work, while both archaeological evidence and the health of the few groups that have not yet been displaced by farming suggests that they lived quite long and much easier lives with better health and diets than the first people who practiced cultivation agriculture in the same localities (Diamond 1987).
Pastoralists were subject to the same constraints as hunter gatherers; their ability to unsustainably stress and damage their environment was limited by the fact that if their numbers exceeded the carrying capacity of the complex, self-managing, species diverse, resilient terrestrial ecosystems from which they gained their sustenance, then hunger and lower fertility exercised negative feedback controls on further expansion. There have only been a few groups that have been able to maintain the hunter gatherer life style even as they have been displaced and forced onto marginal land by agriculturalists. Pastoralists may continue to thrive into the modern era because the semi-arid lands they utilize are usually inappropriate for cultivation agriculture.
Of interest is the move back to nomadic pastoralism in some of the Central Asian republics that has followed the demise of the money economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1990s. Modern grass-fed cattle and sheep ranching, although not a subsistence culture, has a lot of similarities to pastoralism except that it is carried on in a grander scale to produce commodities for markets.
Beginnings of Cultivation Agriculture
The evolution of agriculture appears to have been an accidental, ‘hit-and-miss’ development that almost certainly sprang, not from necessity (Diamond 2002), but from the propensity of humans to experiment. Selective harvest and replanting of specific races of food plants took place at an accelerating pace as the hostile and unpredictable climate at the end of the Pleistocene gave way to warmer and more predictable conditions (Richerson et al. 2001). Although some authors suggest that the growth of human populations during the last 10,000 years has resulted in pressure to produce more food to feed them (Boserup 2005), most see the increased food production by cultivation agriculture as the driver of population growth (Abernethy 2002; Hopfenberg and Pimentel 2001; Hopfenberg 2008).
Cultivation agriculture usually began with shifting or ‘slash and burn’ techniques that utilized the accumulated nutrients, built up under native forest or grassland, and also those nutrients in the ash resulting from burning native vegetation. Reasonable productivity for cultivated plants lasts for only a few years on upland soils under shifting cultivation. Permanent agricultural cultivation appears to have been possible in river valleys that were fertilized annually by new soil carried by floodwaters. When soil nutrients are depleted on upland soils, it is necessary to move to a new patch of native vegetation cover and repeat the 'slash and burn' process. After the abandonment of temporary fields, a considerable period of native vegetation regrowth is necessary before soil nutrient levels are again built up to the point where another short cycle of cropping and nutrient depletion is profitable. On better soils in tropical climates the period of early successional woody vegetation growth may only need to be a few years before the next cultivation cycle, because temperature-driven soil weathering rates are very high in these areas.
Shifting cultivation is usually labor-intensive and the small plots involved do not produce enough to support humans and horses, oxen or other draft animals that could assist with tillage. Year round multi-cropping in tropical climates on erosion prone slopes such as areas of the Philippines sometimes involved as many as 40 different crop species on the same field so that there was always enough plant cover to break the force of the rain and minimize erosion. Shifting cultivation is only viable if the population remains low enough that the next cycle of temporary cultivation is not required until native forest or grassland regeneration on abandoned fields has rebuilt the supply of nitrogen (by biological fixation) and levels of plant available phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium and micronutrients (by soil weathering).
At the time of European contact in eastern North America, from mid continent and southward, much of the low altitude land had already been submitted to enough Amerindian shifting agriculture that the settlers discovered a landscape mosaic of cleared gardens, abandoned clearings returning to forest vegetation and maturing forest that was ready for yet another cycle of clearing, burning and temporary cultivation (Williams, 2006). European settlers, whose rapidly moving diseases had already decimated the Amerindians, were able to start farming on cleared land that had been prepared by the former residents.
Amerindians did utilize the nitrogen fixation capabilities of leguminous beans in mixtures with squash, corn and various other crops, and they did augment depleting soil nutrients with the placement of fish in planting spots. However at the time of European contact, Amerindian population dynamics were probably already on the same ‘increase and collapse’ trajectory as those of other populations, whose numbers increase to exceed carrying capacity as food production is increased by the adoption of cultivation agriculture (Costanza et al. 2005). Rees (2002-03) states, as did Malthus (1826), that unless there are constraints on animal (including human) expansion, all populations grow to the point that they destroy some critical resource and then they collapse.
Intensive cultivation agriculture provides adequate food to allow the growth of large scale, populous societies living in settlements with permanent dwellings that are near enough to the food growing areas to facilitate their management and that allow for the storage of food from season to season. The transition from the passive dependence on existing complex self-managing ecosystems by mobile hunter gatherers gave way to the greater control of food sources provided by cultivation agriculture on land in specific localities with radically altered ecology. Its practitioners were tied to the land, and they were vulnerable to environmental vagaries that could produce local crop failures.
Diamond (1997) suggests that the development of plant cultivation agriculture was a ‘trap’ that precipitated massive changes in the way we feed ourselves and in the social organization that is a natural product of land ownership and control of stored foodstuffs. The thinking with regard to this ‘trap’ is that, as populations rise to utilize the increased food supplied by cultivation agriculture, it is very difficult to revert to less productive food producing systems without incurring hardship and starvation.
The egalitarian food-sharing social organization systems of hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and shifting agriculturists, based on kinship, gave way to the class stratification of societies that rely on intensive cultivation agriculture. The stratum of society that controls the means of food production, and the land required for it, develops a hierarchy of property owners and leaders who are rich enough to thrive during periods of severe food shortages, while the less powerful, who are employed by them, suffer famine much more directly.
Eventually this social stratification and evolution of complex labor division proceeds to the point where merchants, craftsmen, military, clergy, bureaucrats, politicians and royalty occupy urban areas where food from the countryside is used, but not produced. A rich and politically powerful stratum develops absolute property rights that are accumulated as wealth and transferred to its descendants; this stratum, often doing very little labor, becomes more numerous and difficult to support as the ratio of elites to producers increases (Costanza et al 2005).
As economic class distinctions developed, the social changes usually included a decline in the status of women who were more equal partners in subsistence societies. While close to 100% of the people in foraging and hunter gatherer societies were involved directly in producing food, less than 60% of the population in non industrial agricultural societies may participate directly. In contrast, industrial, modern, mechanized agriculture that depends on non renewable fossil-fuelled machinery usually employs less than 5% of the population directly in food production.
The migration of foragers and hunter gathers to colder northern climates, the shift to more intensive food production systems that included increased densities of people living in the confines of enclosed permanent structures, the further migration of people into Asia, and the modern evolution of urban living conditions have all been accompanied by genetic changes in humans. The most well known of these changes are the adaptive development of resistance to "crowd diseases" spread from domesticated animals (Diamond 2002), food tolerances, the various blood groups we see in human populations, as well as the selection for lighter skin colors that has allowed people living in northern climates to use limited sunlight to accomplish the metabolic transformations of chemical precursors into Vitamin D (D’Adamo and Whitney 1996).
The transition to large-scale intensive cultivation agriculture in permanent fields often involved complex water management (irrigated rice) and the use of large animals such as horses, water buffalo and oxen to pull plows which turn up buried soil nutrients into the planting layer and aid in controlling weeds. Even though intensive cultivation agriculture did produce more food than subsistence food production on a specific area, severe local food shortages were not eliminated by the development of these techniques. Famine was caused by cyclic drought, climate cooling episodes and the natural propensity of humans to increase population numbers to meet then surpass any elevation of carrying capacity during benign conditions (Hopfenberg 2003).
Societies grew and prospered until soils were exhausted or as long as there was new land to cultivate, but they declined when they ran out of fertile soil options (Montgomery 2007). Temporary overshoot of carrying capacity has caused human numbers to fall back precipitously with some regularity throughout history (Stanton 2003), while less regular complete collapses of societies have been the norm since the advent of agriculture (Costanza et al. 2005).
Cultivation agriculture has resulted in a tremendous depletion of both soil mass by erosion ( Montgomery 2007; Sundquist 2007) and plant nutrients in soil (Williams 2006; Salonius 2007). Plant nutrients are lost because of bare soil cultivation and the lack of the very efficient recycling that is a characteristic of diverse, deep rooted, nutrient-conservative forest and grassland / prairie ecosystems. Nutrient replacement with fertilizers is the process that allowed intensive cultivation agriculture to continue after all of the arable soils on the planet had been occupied.
The Agricultural Revolution and Beyond
The Agricultural Revolution was the first of several food production improvements that took place after 1700. Soils, whose plant nutrients would normally be depleted after a period of cultivation, were augmented in the earliest stages of intensive agricultural development by forest leaves, animal manures, wood ash, fish, seaweed, mud from tidal zones, and pulverized bones. As a complex transportation industry began to develop based on coal and then petroleum for railways and ocean going ships, long distance transport of guano, Chilean nitrate, limestone, potash salts and rock phosphate allowed depleted soils to produce enough crops for domestic use and export. The absolute necessity for including legume crops in crop rotations was circumvented after the Haber- Bosch process began producing ammonia using methane and atmospheric nitrogen 1913 (Vance 2001).
Science-based management of soil nutrients and fertilizer materials became necessary as crop fertilization had to become increasingly efficient. The guiding principle for crop fertilization was Liebig’s Law of the Minimum that states that only by increasing the supply of the scarcest or most limiting soil nutrient would crop growth be improved. Later the emphasis shifted from crop fertilization to nutrient management planning which attempted to assess soil nutrients that would be released into solution during growth, the acidity of the soil as it effects plant nutrient availability, the nutrients contributed by manure applications and nitrogen fixing plants, and the possibility of environmental (especially to water) damage by nutrients that are not used by the existing crop or that are not held in the soil until the next crop begins to grow.
The next major increase in food production occurred as the Industrial Revolution began. Energy for manufacturing farm implements was first obtained from falling water. With the invention of the steam engine, energy from burning wood supplied power for the manufacture of farm machinery such as plows, mowers, diggers and threshers. The motive power to operate this machinery was provided by draft animals. Later these machines were pulled and operated by power obtained from internal combustion engines that slowly reduced reliance on draft animals such as oxen and horses, whose feed formerly came from the same arable land that grows food crops for people. Thus the Fossil Fuel Revolution began.
Since 1750 human society has increasingly augmented the solar energy that it relied on exclusively for most of its history with a progression of temporary supplies of non-renewable geological energy sources (coal, petroleum, natural gas and fissionable uranium). The profligate consumption of these energy subsidies has allowed tremendous increases in agricultural production and the global trading that removes the necessity for food to be produced in the region where it is to be consumed.
Thomas Malthus (1826) predicted that agricultural production increases would not be able to meet the requirements of a steadily growing human population. However he was not aware that the depletion of soils by the agriculture, that was feeding less than one billion humans in the 1700s, was already unsustainable in the long term. Malthus could not have conceived of the temporary increase of carrying capacity and food production that would be made possible by the use of non-renewable fossil and nuclear fuels during period after his death. The abandonment of the effective controls on human birth rates, exercised by pre-agricultural societies, and the decrease in mortality by warfare that followed the evolution of states have allowed the exponential expansion of human numbers to be fuelled by increased availability of food.
Human populations had grown very slowly until the advent of agriculture. Population grew rapidly in the context of both increased food security and the wealth that agricultural productivity created until the middle 1800s. During the latter part of this period, as soil productivity became seriously diminished by cultivation agriculture, and a scarcity of forest land that could be cleared for farming developed, migration to new lands such as North America and Australia was used to decrease the pressure on existing land. These new areas presented migrants with fertile land so that soil-depleting agriculture could continue (Manning 2004; Williams 2006).
This migration and exploitation of new lands continued the accelerating population expansion that increased agricultural food production makes possible. The historically unprecedented rapid exponential population explosion after 1800 was driven by the increased productivity that was made possible by the labor saving machinery of the Industrial Revolution in concert with the increasing access to cheap and abundant geological energy that characterized the Fossil Fuel Revolution.
Part 3: Our Current Agricultural Situation
The Green Revolution produced the last major improvement in food production during the latter decades of the twentieth century as new crop varieties were created by plant breeders. These new varieties depended on large inputs of fossil-fuel dependent fertilizers, irrigation, insecticides and herbicides. William Paddock (1970) warned, at the time of the beginning of the Green Revolution, that the increased agricultural productivity would simply produce more malnourished poor people if curbs were not applied to the increase in human numbers that would result from increased food availability. Global population growth since the beginning of the Green Revolution has borne out the futility of increasing food availability in the absence of measures to control human fertility (Diamond 2002).
Some forms of modern industrial agriculture, combined with the transportation necessary to ship food produced, use more than 10 calories of fossil fuel to deliver one calorie of food to the market (Younquist 1997). Montgomery (2007) states that before 1950, most increases in food production were the result of increased land under cultivation and better husbandry, but recently most of the increases have been the result of mechanization and escalating fertilizer use. Albert Bartlett (1978) has said, “Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food."
Salonius (2005) summarized evidence for the necessity that modern civilization must face the prospect of decreasing access to the cheap and abundant exhaustible geological energy that has served agriculture so effectively during the recent past. The cost of this energy is poised to increase and that eventually fossil fuel and fissionable nuclear energy will become economically unavailable.
The looming scarcity of fossil fuel resources will create great difficulty in continuing to supply fertilizer nitrogen for agriculture by the Haber-Bosch process. Inexpensive rock phosphate supplies are forecast to become depleted in as little as 60 years (Vance 2001). Dery and Anderson(2007) demonstrate peaking phosphorus production from several sources including the United States that follow the same trajectory as the Hubbert Peak for petroleum; these authors suggest that world rock phosphate production is already in decline and that future agricultural production will depend upon diligent phosphorus recycling.
North America has the largest reserves of potassium in the world that can be manufactured into fertilizer materials. Concerns about the stability of limited supplies as well as the increasing costs of transport, that are driven by petroleum scarcity, produced rapid escalation in the price of potassium fertilizer during the early years of the twenty-first century.
As fertilizer supplies and long distance transport are expected to dwindle in concert with fossil-fuel depletion during the twenty-first century, organic agricultural techniques are expected to replace the industrial agriculture that has been powered by fossil fuels and nourished by chemical fertilizers. The International Fertilizer Industry suggests that organic agriculture is only capable of producing one quarter of the protein produced when large amounts of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers are employed (www.fertilizer.org/ifa/sustainability.asp); however, Pimentel et al. (2005) have shown that weathering rates appear to be able to meet plant demand for nutrients when organic agriculture relies on nitrogen fixing by legumes on some soils.
Sustainability issues are becoming increasingly apparent to systems analysts who have begun to understand the dilemma faced by human populations that have overshot the carrying capacity of the ecosystems they rely on for the production of food and fiber. This understanding usually encompasses the looming current depletion of non-renewable fossil and nuclear energy subsidies, however more basic depletions are becoming recognized as having been sidestepped for the last 10,000 years.
The global human family has become dependent upon the enhanced food production made possible by temporary supplies of non-renewable geologically stored fossil and nuclear energy. The energy market, upon which present affluence levels are based, is a global one, and the availability of geological energy supplies cannot be maintained. As access to the energy upon which complex industrial societies are dependent becomes more expensive and less available during the twenty-first century, human population numbers will have to be brought into balance with the sustainable productivity levels of the local ecosystems upon which they rely for their sustenance.
The ecological deficits, that humans have sidestepped by migration to new lands, mining soil mass (erosion) and soil nutrients (leaching), and access to one-time supplies of exhaustible energy, will have to be squarely faced as the level of affluence diminishes. Food production per capita must fall as horses and oxen must again be fed from crop land and as access to fossil fuel dependent fertilizers diminishes.
Part 4: Intensive Crop Cultures Are Unsustainable
A growing number of commentators, such as Alan Weisman (2007), have begun to suggest that a world with fewer people would be far better placed to deal with climate change and the exhaustion of the dirty fuels of the industrial past. Many appear to think that high technologies such as nuclear energy and yet another agricultural revolution, this one supplying Genetically Modified crops, in combination with curbs on population growth, would begin to dampen the environmental disruption caused by human society that is becoming increasingly obvious. However the problem is even more serious than that visualized by these thoughtful individuals who are convinced that the neoclassical economic model of open-ended expansion and so-called ‘sustainable growth’ is a recipe for disaster.
William Rees (1992) originated the idea of the Ecological Footprint to measure the amount of land that people with different lifestyles both occupied and drew on for their sustenance. Wackernagel and Rees (1997) further developed this concept, calculating how many Earths would be required if all of the people on the planet lived at particular levels of consumption; they appear to believe that the human family overshot global carrying capacity sometime in the twentieth century. Regardless of the timing, we know we are in serious overshoot and that the total human footprint (whatever enormity it is) must get smaller.
As we run up against all of the renewable and nonrenewable resource depletions (oil, soil, phosphorus, minerals etc.) that will characterize the foreseeable future, we require an entire rethink as to how we do business, because the human enterprise has been living on borrowed time and resources for millennia. It is quite conceivable that most intensive crop culture is unsustainable and that it has been unsustainable since cultivation agriculture began.
It is reasonable to suggest that we begin unsustainable resource depletion (overshoot) as soon as we use (and become dependent upon) the first unit of any non-renewable resource or renewable resource used unsustainably whose further use becomes essential to the functioning of society. Each of the following has facilitated an increase in food availability and thus an increase in the human numbers that must continue to be fed whether the resources become depleted or not: the first tonne of coal, the first litre of oil, the first kilogram of fissionable uranium, the first barrel of fossil water for irrigation that exceeds the recharge rate of the aquifer being tapped, and the first hectare of formerly nutrient conservative native forest or grassland/prairie plowed.
The last item in the list, plowing of virgin ecosystems for cultivation agriculture, sets in motion unsustainable renewable resource depletion (excessive erosion and leaching/export of plant nutrients from arable soils, and more recently the excessive leaching and nutrient depletion that is associated with harvesting of nutrient-rich forest biomass) that has been looming over us, unseen, for 10,000 years (Salonius 2007). Some estimates suggest that nearly one-third of the arable soils on Earth have already been lost to erosion since cultivation began and recent moves to rely on agricultural crops as a source of biofuels (ethanol) are seen by some as trading a system based on mining oil for one based on mining soil (Montgomery 2007). We can expect that the unsustainable exploitation of soil will become increasingly apparent as the depletion of petroleum begins to affect the production of foodstuffs by unsustainable farming, and the production of fiber produced by unsustainable forestry upon which most of us are dependent.
Humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth's carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE) and it has been running up its ecological debt since that time.
Part 5: The Future of Food Production
In the context of depleting reserves of the fossil fuels that have supplied modern agriculture with motive power, machinery, fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides, it is expected that the way food is produced will have to change as the twenty-first century unfolds. 'Permaculture’ (Mollison and Holmgren 1979), and other modifications of agricultural practice that seek self sufficiency, such as those put forward by proponents like the Post Carbon Institute’s Relocalization program (www.postcarbon.org) include local food and biofuel systems, revitalization of local industry, and community cooperation.
These are good first steps that recognize global trade will wane as fossil fuel depletion gains momentum. They are also an attempt to wean people off the industrial food production that treats soil as a medium for fertilizer-dependent hydroponic agriculture, and simply a substrate to stand plants up in. These people are interested in popularizing organic agriculture, minimum tillage or no-till methods, solar powered tractors etc. that will make local economies less reliant on imported materials. However these alterations follow the cultivation agriculture model as a food production system, as they must in the short term.
All cultivation agriculture depends on the replacement of complex, species diverse, self-managing, nutrient conservative, deep rooted, natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems with monocultures or 'near monocultures' of food crop plants that rely on intensive management. The simple shallow rooting habit of food crops and the requirement for bare soil cultivation produces soil erosion and plant nutrient loss far above the levels that can be replaced by microbial nitrogen fixation, and the weathering of minerals (rocks and course fragments) into active soils and plant-available nutrients such as potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and magnesium on most of the soils on the planet.
Under natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems, erosion rates of soil mass are minimal, and the diverse and deep structure of the below-ground rooting community, with its microbial associates, makes the escape of plant nutrients entrained in downward-moving drainage (leaching) water to the ocean very difficult. Our ultimate goal, as we attempt to achieve a sustainable human culture on Earth, must be to move toward the sustainable exploitation of natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems at rates that do not cause the loss of physical soil mass or plant nutrient capital any faster than they can be replaced by biological and weathering processes.
Obviously, as we move back toward a solar-energy dependent economy based on self-managing natural ecosystems, we will no longer be able to run the massive ecological deficits that temporary fossil and nuclear fuel availability have allowed. Just as obviously the solar-energy dependent economy will not support the human numbers that have been able to exponentially increase slowly as a result of agricultural mining of soil mass and nutrient stores since ~8,000 BCE, and rapidly because of the availability of non renewable fossil and nuclear energy subsidies since 1750.
In order to lower the human population to levels supportable by sustainable exploitation of natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems we must begin to allow these ecosystems to reestablish on lands that have historically been devoted to intensive cultivation during our 10,000 year agricultural past. The best suggestion so far to produce Rapid Population Decline (RPD) is for the collective global human family to adopt a One Child Per Family (OCPF) 'modus operandi/philosophy'. Even with general acceptance of RPD and OCPF, the human population decrease that is necessary to achieve a sustainable solar energy-dependent culture, will take several centuries. Governments, as they become convinced that RPD is necessary, may choose monetary incentives, tax breaks and/or penalties to achieve general acceptance of OCPF or some other RPD program.
Part 6: Moving Beyond (Back From) Cultivation Agriculture
There are areas of the planet with such low rainfall as to preclude the growth of forest vegetation where a return to pastoral herding, with low stocking levels, will allow the reinvasion of native prairie vegetation. As we move toward the abandonment of unsustainable agricultural practices, it would be advisable to shift away from the cultivation of grains and forages that require bare ground cultivation on these lands.
As human numbers are contracting/shrinking under a OCPF/RPD or some other numbers reduction methodology, the extant population will insist on being properly nourished. The only way enough food can be produced for them is by cultivation agriculture that will further deplete most of the arable soils on the planet. During the centuries of transition, as we move toward a solar-dependent culture that again sustainably exploits natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems, we should be exercising as responsible agriculture as is possible on the shrinking arable land base where it is still practiced. During this transition, the growing amount of land that is abandoned will revert toward natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems very rapidly after we cease cultivating it (Weisman 2007).
Balancing of human numbers with the productivity of their supporting local ecosystems may be accomplished by planed attrition, much lower birth rates and the economic dislocations and hardships that a retreat from classical economic growth will incur, or the balancing of human numbers may be accomplished by a catastrophic collapse imposed by natural resource scarcity. The species with the large brain must make the choice between economic hardship and catastrophic collapse.
Cultivation agriculture must be relied upon for the bulk of the food required to support global humanity until we have reduced our numbers to a level that can be sustained by regulated exploitation/harvesting activities that fall within the
(now better understood) capacity of ecosystems to maintain diversity, to form soil and to replace soluble plant nutrients lost by harvesting or leaching.
The attractive aspect of moving toward sustainable co-existence with self-managing ecosystems is that the hit-and-miss process of evolution has already established how to make them work. Our responsibility (after our numbers have fallen to sustainable levels) will be to learn to live within the regeneration capacity of these restored ecosystems. The penalty for exceeding their regeneration capacity will be hunger and privation, as it was for our hunter gatherer, forager and pastoral ancestors.
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Why don't you lead the way and test out this hunter-gathering lifestyle so the rest of us can watch and see if we want to join you.
This is getting rated as bad, and it is a bit snarky, but I think it cuts to a relevant point about this article: if I'm understanding it correctly, there is no solution to the problem and practically everyone is going to die. If life at even a pre-Mesopotamian level is still going to doom us, then why try? Why not just continue as we are, enjoy it while it lasts, and make sure to buy some guns for when it all goes to hell? The lack of prescription, and in fact explicit ruling out of any possible prescription reads more like a reductio ad absurdum exaggeration for the whole sustainable agriculture movement than an argument for anything.
Basically, what I want to hear from Peter is: why write this article? What do you expect to accomplish by telling people to abandon all hope?
"why write this article?"
"If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst," or some such idea quoted here often. Thomas Hardy, I believe.
The way I read it is that modern agricultural practices are not sustainable. Eventually (for the sake of future generations) a more conservative approach will need to be taken (probably over several generations).
Organic farming is probably the most sustainable form of agricultural practice that is available... but probably can't produce the amounts of food needed to sustain the current population.
I don't see this as a doom-&-gloom article, it's just a suggestion for a new approach that will take a multi-generational time frame to impliment.
Like everything else, it depends ...
Modern agriculture farms dollars. It produces billions of livestock and wastes a large percentage of production in processing. We have to support our livestock, our processing, our unbelieveably lovely and incredibly desirable motor vehicles ... as well as the current populations.
That's a lot to sustain. Cuts will be necessary. People will eat less meat. This means a reduction in the numbers of livestock requiring sustainence. The auto population will shrink. The war between people and cars for 'food' will end with the annihilation of the car (hopefully). Processing will be simplified. More food equivalent in dollars (or other currencies) will be freed from 'sugarization' and packaging to feed.
And, of course, there will be better land and water management ... organic farming in place of subdivisions.
The greatest question I have with this presentation is that it considers the ecosystem as fixed, when it is not. Whatever state the biosphere is in at any given time ... it is in equilibrium.
I am not an expert, so I will keep my remarks brief. I have been in areas in the Andean highlands in Ecuador and Peru that have been cultivated with row crops by indigenous citizens of these lands for thousands of years. The terrain is steep and unforgiving with large rainfall amounts during the wet season. The inhabitants practice traditional agriculture as machinery is impossible to use. There is no reason that these areas cannot be productive for as long as people are willing to work the soils.
Why does there have to be a "point" to someone writing a research paper? And why do we always have to be offered a "solution" to our predicament. It seems obvious that almost 7 billion humans highly dependent on industrial agriculture are going to have to die back as fuels become scarce. The only question is to what number? If he argued for say 1 billion permaculturalists instead of 200 million hunter/gatherers would that have been more hopeful?
Obviously, although exactly what the carrying capacity of the Earth is at various consumption levels (Ghandi-like or NY 5th Avenue) is a job for generations practicing adaptive management ---- however we do know the direction human population numbers must go /// down.
As a research paper, I don't think much of this effort. It's a rather tendentious piece with little to support its dire conclusions, and uses a number of popular works as "references".
One of its glaring flaws is that it assumes that the trends of the future can only be driven by the same processes and knowledge as we had in the past, even the prehistoric past. I shouldn't have to point out to anyone here that the mere fact that we're having this discussion proves how completely wrong this is... yet the author has been given a pass on this point by every commenter I've read thus far.
There are a number of single advances which would throw the conclusions of this paper in the toilet. Perennial grain crops are one; if it was no longer necessary to disturb soil to get the next crop, the loss of topsoil through erosion is no longer a significant issue. Terra preta is another; it prevents much of the loss of nutrient ions through leaching. Some of these "inevitable" problems are actually the consequences of law, and can be reversed. Simple changes in agricultural policy to move back from CAFOs and other parts of industrial farming (see Michael Pollen's work) would recycle nutrients on the land instead of flushing them to the ocean after one cycle.
If you look at the system with the eyes of a physicist, you'll see that there's enormously more renewable energy available to us than even today's fossil-dependent society uses. Nature's been doing this job for aeons; what's a tree, but a mechanism to capture solar energy, fix it chemically and build useful structures with it? We've already got devices which capture energy 100 times as well as trees do; the problem is getting them built into fully-renewable systems and out into the world.
Engineer-Poet,
Your looking at 'it' thru the eyes of an engineer, I must assume.
The author as a soil biologist.
Me as a farmer. From early childhood when I was raised on farms, to farms I have held even though working in the IT industry, to now where I brought my present one in 1985 and farmed it and it was under intensive modern ag row cropping for much of my ownership in the 80s. Upon which time in the early 90s I stopped row cropping and resorted to grasslands and grassland management for the haying crops(made more money then).
Ok. It IMO takes a farmer who is close to the soil to see what has happened and I must agree with the author as to what I see.Though most farmers might see this they refuse to give it credence,IMO again.
My area has very good soils. It also contains much bottom land which requires no fertlizer inputs for the most part.
What I see and judge , viewing the past against the present is the vast amount of devastation. How the modern practices destroy the land.
A personal example then:
I noticed that the operators who put in my row crops had little real regard for the soil and land. They were destroying my farm as a result and they were the biggest in the county and the richest.
Yet when I dug 5 ft hole for the erection of a pole barn I was building I noticed that there was not a single earthworm to be found as I augered these holes. Right in the middle of a corn field. Looking over my farm which was BTW being No-Tilled..I discovered that I could find zero evidence of earthworms. Except in the nearby woodlands.
I also noticed plenty of gullies starting to form. I tried disking them and overseeding them with Ky 31 Fescue..did not good for they promptly sprayed weed burndown over them and planted right over them.
They had destroyed two of the ponds on the place by breaking the damns. Ponds that drained a lot of watershed. They pushed the fences into the ponds. Took me a great deal of work to resurrect the ponds after I discontinued the row cropping.
There is far more but the good fertile soil that was classified as Collins Silt Loam was being turned sterile over time.
I sowed it all down and it began to come back.
This has happened all over my county and other counties. The farmer thinks nothing of altering the land via dozers and trackhoes, which most now own. They destroy the topsoil and figure that as long as they can spread fertilizer on it then it doesn't matter at all.
Most farmers are IMO lousy stewards of the land!!!
I know a lot. They want the money,period. They will use what ever methods to ensure they have a cash flow in the positive.
Note that I have experience in more than one state as far as owning small and large farms. The lands of central Ky are entirely different and what works for one doesn't work for all.
So my view is that , yes we are fast destroying our precious soil and nature in the process.
One has to simply drive by a large paper/pulp mill or chip mill or charcoal making site to realize the enormity of what is transpiring , all in the name of a suburban family being able to cook meat outdoors. Or having cheap food, even though that food be fairly tasteless and void of much nutrition.
I think ag is our last frontier to destroy.
The oil is going.
Financials are in dire straits.
Ag is next to meltdown and believe me,it is ripe.
They, the farmers, have mostly forgotten how it used to be. How precious the land was when you sat on very good land and most of the us does not have good water, good growing seasons and good soil..all combined as we do in many areas nearby.
Illinois in the flat lands has been turned into a massive field of industrial ag. Thats about all it is. Mining of coal may come back but intensive ag is about it.
Iowa,Indiana,upper Missouri and so on.
We are killing it and at a rather rapid pace.
Good thing that ethanol is now just a dream.
Bad that we grow grains that are used to foist junk food on the masses and enable them to continue the dreams of endless dreams of paradise on earth thru gorging themselves and endless driving.
Airdale
Re Airdale comments.
Going through the same cycle. Being in farming for 46 years and farming and engineering in parallel I support the comments in the paper and Airdale’s comments.
For future farming the major problem is the soil degradation that is compounded by the removal of biomass residues for biofuel, animal feed and energy production. The organic components in soil are steadily removed and have to be replaced with NPK fertilizer etc.
In future some fertilizer can be made from renewable energies, and this will ensure that crop yield do not drop to medieval levels. More biomass wil have to be returned to the soil which will put a strain on all the renewable – biomass based future resources.
There still is IMO a good case for not so intensive “industrial farming” especially if we manage Phosphorous well. This is no new issue. Already 1300 BC this problem has been identified in the UK. http://www.bahs.org.uk/45n2a1.pdf
A few numbers that illustrate the issues:
Medieval harvest in Denmark 1600-1700 BC typically 5-7 “fold” (grown in 2/3 year crop rotation).
“Fold” means how many grains you harvest compared to what you sow.
For UK the literature gives a similar yield around 1800 BC of 20 bushel per acre ~7 fold ~ 1.25 ton per Hectare
http://books.google.dk/books?id=9XzxRXrIIo8C&pg=PA134&lpg=PA134&dq=crop+...
Present wheat harvest 40-55 fold and Barley 28-35 fold.
For grain yield nerds this English database is a must: “Three centuries of English crops yields “
1211-1491. http://www.cropyields.ac.uk/project.php Yields of 3 “folds” or less are not uncommon in those times.
/And1
I think that abandoning all hope is an interjection into the discussion of one's way of dealing with life. I see a bleak future, but am positive about my chances, and even welcome the challenge. It never crossed my mind to give up, build my coffin, and wait for circumstances to sweep me away, yet I fully agree that we have a human bubble which will be deflated by dieoff. What defines living in balance with nature certainly is not what we do today, but might not be a total animal existence either. Survivors will tell the story.
Far from abandoning all hope, we have the choice to orchestrate a reduction in our numbers during the next ciuple of centuries by planned reduction of the birth rate or having nature reduce our numbers by starvation.
I see a longterm globally decreasing population trajectory as being extremly difficult to achieve politically. Think of all the local perverse incentives. For example My local/regional group has the only true religion, and it is god's will for it to expand at the expense of the infidels. It would take some pretty draconian global government to suppress such instincts.
Assuming a reasonably non catastrophic population trajectory can be extablished, I think it is an open question what sort of population and living standard can be sustainably maintained. Presumably we will retain (and probably advance) science and technology, and that should allow equilibrium levels much greater than in pre-agricultural time. I don't believe fossil fuels (including fission) are the last word in energy, i.e. in some form renewable enrgy technology should allow the continuation of some level of industrial energy usage. But I guess we have at least a couple of centuries to answer that question.
Next couple of centuries? I think the wolf is at the door now, and well before mid century (2050) the population reduction will be in full swing. I don't see it happening as some sort of rational response, but rather an enforced consequence of being extremely out of balance with the ability of the earth give us the opportunity to provide for ourselves.
Looking at is as a couple of centuries seems to me to be a convenient way to think that the problem is far in the future.
Maybe that's all he was trying to say, enjoy it while it lasts. I doubt it, it has deeper implications than that, though, the principal one being don't have kids, and don't let your kids have kids (as though you can stop them). I am glad I am old and won't be around that longer, as the world prepares to go over the Olduvai Cliff. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/45518
When I eat lunch at my favorite fast food joint I look at the throngs of kids there and think how screwed they are, and they don't even know it.
QA_2 This is a classic example of refusing to recognise that we are just one organism inhabiting this planet. By being that we are subject to the same laws of population dynamics as other organisms. There is only one way for a species to go that is in population/resource overshoot-bust. We have had the boom now it is time for the bust. It is that simple.
I think if you look at it as a positive correction of the human species that will take resource pressure off all other organisms, then you will be able to put down your gun, have grace and smile. It is not the end of the World, it is the end of an era of Earth dominance by humanity.
Exiled Scot,
I'm confused by your comment.
Where is "this hunter-gathering lifestyle" for testing mentioned in this article?
The way I read it, the main proposal is a more conservative agricultural approach.
Just another variation on the "why don't you kill yourself" suggestion every time one discusses population reduction, or the Fox News "Al Gore lives in a big carbon-spewing mansion," which is why we can put our fingers in our ears every time that annoying GW comes up...
As I read various blogs each day, I am very aware of the "pie in the sky" attitudes and solutions. Over population is the key to our problems and the one least addressed. Having grown up in a very basic, "living off the land" fashion, I know there is a massive die off coming at some time. Flippant comments will not be so flippant as hard core scrambling for survival enters the picture. But today in the early stages of the impending catastrophy, thinking like this is blown aside with sarcastic comments and gets a label of "doomer". From my point of view, it's only "doomer" thinking if it turns out not to be true and only time will answer that. To ignore the potential is pure foolishness. Actually, it's an inability to face the potential as we can't cope with the fears, insecurities and doubts it presents. So we deny and plunge blindly on with, what may well be misplaced, hopes and dreams.
In many parts of the world, we have become accustomed to a level of luxury/comfort unknown to the masses of history. It is most difficult over a cup of coffee with a full stomach to even conceive it being any different. Keep in mind, five years ago todays financial disaster was unthinkable and still is to many. Facing the potential for disaster is extremely useful as it promotes caution and thoughtfullness.
If nuclear fusion works based on the tokamak design mankind will do just fine. Even without that a combination of efficiency savings, nuclear fission and renewables should do the trick. There have always been doomsday cultists and there probably always will be. The human race faces considerable challenges in the coming century but they are not insurmountable.
Where will the water come from to scale nuclear? We are pressing water limitations already with existing capacity...(I suppose many nukes could be placed near oceans, but then that raises other issues)
Nate -
Please keep in mind that while a typical nuclear power plant 'uses' a huge amount of water, it actually consumes but a small fraction of that amount.
In a nuclear power plant almost all of the water is used for cooling. If the plant has a once-through cooling system, almost all of that large flow of water going in comes right back out, albeit at a higher tempeature. (I say almost, because there are some relatively minor losses in the system.)
However, most nuclear power plants have large natural draft cooling towers that recycle the cooled water back to the plant. The water that is discharged is a relatively small cooling system blowdown stream, which is necessary to keep mineral build-up under control. Some water is evaporated in the cooling tower. This evaporative loss constitutes most of the water that is actually 'consumed' by the power plant.
Now, I'm not saying that the water consumption of a nuclear power plant is trivial, particularly in water-constrained regions, but the main point here is to note the distinction between water used and water consumed, the latter being but a small fraction of the former.
"Waste" heat? District Heating & Cooling...
Minor amounts of district heating I can see, though limited by the sheer nature of the distance of most nuclear plants from large population centers. What existing methods would you use for cooling? If absorptive, please provide the input and output temperatures for high A/C areas such as the US Southeast and Soutwest, the amount of cooling BTUs provided, and the amount of cooling water required. I see the same limitations of distance for any potential cooling as there is for heating.
Stirling engine, generator, electrical transmission lines.
What input temperature and rejection temperature are you assuming, and what percentage of the 60% rejected heat do you calculate you could recover in the form of electrical energy transmitted to the grid? Please provide us your calculations.
Joule
I just had a paper accepted on this exact topic (today!) and understand the difference between water withdrawals and consumption. But there are nuclear plants in water constrained areas that have to be shut down in summer due to lack of river flow (last summer in Europe for one example). I don't want to sidetrack this thread with a discussion of nuclear pros/cons - I just wanted to point out that in addition to Prof Salonius main point about soil, we also have water limitations. Note: also look at Marcellus Shale nat gas permitting in PA being withheld due to concerns about water.
Please provide consumption amounts for some of the newer nuclear plants (e.g. AP-1000) operating at 90% capacity (with references, please).
Also, note that our climate is changing, and areas that once had plentiful rainfall are increasingly at risk to shutting down their nuclear power plants due to water scarcity.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/01/23/america/Drought-Nuclear-Power....
Will Stuart -
In a nuclear power plant (as well as a conventional one for that matter) the amount of water water lost due to evaporation in the cooling tower is dependent not only on the amount of power being generated but also on the conditions under which the cooling system is operated. Thus, two identical power plants can experience different evaporative losses if those conditions are different. The main factors that determine evaporative losses are inlet water temperature, ambient air temperature, and (most important of all) humidity.
However, it is not difficult to arrive at a ballpark estimate of evaporative losses through a simple energy balance. On the following basis:
- 1,000 MW nuclear power plant operated at 90% capacity,
- 40% thermal efficiency (rejection of 60% of the total heat generated by the reactor)
- 85% of rejected heat removed via evaporative cooling, remainder through convection,
I calculate that such a plant would 'consume'roughly 200 cubic meters per minute of water through evaporative losses in the cooling tower. (Go through the exercise yourself to see if I made a mistake.)
While this is hardly a trivial flow rate, neither is it a raging river. This would create a problem if you sited a large nuclear power plant on a creek, but the question to be answered is: why would you?
Now, it is technically possible to go to air cooling, but that would increase the cost of the cooling system by a tremendous amount.
This air cooled thermal coal plant in South Africa shows how it might work. A nuke with a radiator is a novel idea. Despite the reduced efficiency since nuclear fuel is currently a minor cost item perhaps one day there will be air cooled boiling water reactors located way out of town so as not to upset people. Transmission losses and cooling inefficiency will just have to be written off.
Let's run a simple set of the numbers for just latent heat without taking humidity into consideration for a plant operating for 1 hour;
1000,000 kWhr x 0.9 = 900,000 kWhrs (at 90% capacity)
900,000 x 0.6 = 540,000 kWhrs heat rejected
540,000 x 0.85 = 459,000 kWhrs heat rejected via evaporation
459,000 kWhr x 3412 BTU/kWhr= 1,566,108,000 BTUs
960 BTUs of energy to turn one pound of water into steam
1,631,362 pounds of water turned into steam per hour
1,631,362 pounds / 62 lbs/ft3 = 26,312 ft3/hr steam
26,312 ft3/hr / 27 ft3/yard3 = 974 cubic yards per hour steam
974/1.3 y3/m3 = 750 m3 steam per hour
Less than what you had calculated, though humidity and sensible heat are not included.
The Point: What do you do when droughts occur, or the region the nuclear plant is in becomes progressively drier? And other demands on water supply compete? Take for instance the Colorado river; it no longer reaches the ocean as it is used up further inland, so it will not support a nuclear plant. How many high volume rivers are there in the SW US? Have you heard how old treaties and agreements are being dug up and investigated to attempt to grab more water for Georgia, US? Aside from the US, water resources are becoming increasingly scarce; simply stating that more nuclear plants can be built does not take water cooling consumption requirements in specific regions into account.
Will Stewart -
Well, I think we can both agree that the US Southwest, as well as other severely arid regions, are not terribly good locations for nuclear power plants (or for that matter, any other sort of power plants based on heat engines). The fact that the power plant is nuclear is of secondary importance in this regard, as a conventional power plant will entail an amount of water consumption in the same ballpark.
To me this is not the end of the world. The Northeast and most of the Midwest do not have chronic water shortages, and so nuclear power plants (and conventional ones too) should not strain the water supply situation in those regions.
I say let us promote the US Southwest for what it is most suited: solar energy. Not much water consumption involved there!
No one technology is going to provide all the answers.
In the highly water stressed, hot areas solar PV is likely to be very important, which uses very little water, as they are the best locations for this.
The author of the article although he raises important and interesting points, seems to me to too readily dismiss alternative solutions, for instance a shortage of fossil fuels is not identical to a shortage of power, and the use of a relatively trivial amount of land to generate solar power, for instance, would provide ample power for a technological civilisation, and should be perfectly possible within 50 years, although other technologies will also be important and have much to contribute.
If soil exhaustion is also as great a problem as he suggests, then his own mention of hydroponics potential should surely come to the fore, as after raising it he then seems to ignore it, presumably on the grounds that energy would be insufficient to run it, due to his false equation of energy with fossil fuel supply.
If we manage to stagger through the current fossil fuel and economic crunch, then as advanced nations typically have reproduction rates far below replacement there would seem no good reason to assume that numbers might not decline to a much more sustainable level, but one in keeping with a technological civilisation, not to the levels of hunter gatherers as is here suggested, and engineering food for such a civilisation would appear to be far easier than managing a decline to hunter-gatherer levels, when by definition most of the tools to manage would be gradually degraded.
The rather obvious answer to this 'waste' heat/water problem is: don't waste it...
Xenesys for example has a low temperature design that can extract eenrgy from smallr temperature differences -bit like an OTEC. There's also thermo-electrics on the horizon that can directly convert heat to electricity.
The fact that we 'waste' this resource is the clearest indication that energy is currently FAR too cheap...
Nick.
Aside from using it for space heat, there is no other use for it.
If the cooling system is well-designed, the ΔT between the outlet of the heat engine and the environment is small as economically feasible; cutting the ΔT in half requires handling twice as much air, and perhaps more than twice as much equipment cost and other losses. This runs into diminishing returns very quickly.
If a thermoelectric or any other bottoming-cycle engine is to be used, it has to reject heat at an even lower temperature than the outlet of the topping cycle. This either multiplies the size of the radiator or requires the topping cycle to run at a higher outlet temperature and lower efficiency. I've not seen one scheme yet where the gains would exceed the losses.
This is true for space heat and water heating (where cogeneration would make an enormous difference), but not for large-scale thermal powerplants. Once you've made the decision to put the plant where it's uneconomic to use the waste heat for e.g. space heating of buildings or greenhouses (too far away), the waste heat is just that. Putting waste in scare quotes shows ignorance of thermodynamics.
A few nits:
That figure is only valid for the specific temperature of 228 F. If you are evaporating water into air at, say, 140°F, the ΔHfg would be 1014 BTU/lbm.
The density of steam is a lot less than 62 lbm/ft³; you mean water.
Valid nits, admittedly. Rushed to finish this before putting the kids to bed. Glad to have a peer review.
If push comes to shove, many of these plants will discharge the water at higher temperatures rather than shutting off the grid.
So use higher temperature reactors like Molten Salt or Pebble bed that can get away with air cooling.
In power plant design the high temperature end and the low temperature exit are largely independent design problems. Even if one can design a high end that works at a new higher temperature than any one else has ever used, it is still very worthwhile to have a low end output that gets the exit temperature close to the local wet-bulb temperature, and that means wet cooling and water usage. Wet cooling is especially valuable in arid climates, i.e. where water is scarce, because in arid climates wet bulb is many degrees below dry bulb temp.
But more important than my simple reasoning is to do the real engineering design calculations before making a decision.
True to a point. However, at certain temperatures your working fluid can become a problem; water doesn't pump so well below 0°C.
If you've got a high enough high-end temperature, an open-cycle gas turbine using air becomes feasible. The exhaust could run a steam generator or be dumped straight to the atmosphere; voila, dry cooling.
BOTE for a simple-cycle turbine with 10:1 pressure ratio, no regenerator and 90% compressor and turbine efficiency:
Tenv = 300 K
Thot = 1120 K
Pressure ratio 10:1
Mechanical efficiency = 0.9
Heat capacity of air = 1005 J/kg-K
γ = 1.40
Theoretical compressor outlet temp = Tenv * 10(γ-1)/γ = 579 K
Tcomp = (579 - Tenv) / 0.9 + Tenv = 610 K
Wcomp = 310 K * 1005 J/kg-K = 312 kJ/kg
Thot = 1120 K
ΔHhot = (1120-610)*1005 = 513 kJ/kg
Theoretical turbine outlet temp = Thot * 10-(γ-1)/γ = 580 K
Tout = (1120-580)*.1 + 580 = 634 K
Wturbine = (1120-634) * 1005 = 488 kJ/kg
Net output = 488-312 = 176 kJ/kg
Efficiency = 176/513 = 34.3%
You could probably improve this figure using regeneration to recycle some waste heat back to the compressed gas, but even if you could only achieve 30%... that's pretty darn good for such a simple system. The waste heat would be quite suitable for many purposes, including industrial process heat/steam.
If you can hit 850°C (1120K), the heat can drive a sulfur-iodine cycle for hydrogen production. That yields a two-fer; hydrogen can be used to fix carbon, allowing CO2 as a feedstock for e.g. chemical production, such as ammonia and monomers for plastics. This removes the cliff in front of agriculture and petrochemicals.
I would be far more concerned about the myriad of other resources that we are depleting. Even assuming unlimited energy from a nuclear source, I believe the Limits to Growth studies still project a crash because of all the other restraints besides energy.
While one may be able to conceive of our unlimited energy being used to ameliorate the other resource shortages by 'deep' extraction, complex recycling and synthesis, I fear this would quickly lead to a super-exponential growth in the need for energy and the technological infrastructure for a society so dependent on extremely high energy needs.
Basically, I think 'nuclear cornucopianism' reflected in comments like exiled scot represent a sci-fi fringe and are totally unrealistic.
I think short term doomerism represent a cult fringe thats totally unrealistic. Whats your point?
We can use nuclear (and wind and solar) to do resource substitution on a wide variety of issues. To assume that we wont is silly.
No, to assume we will is silly. Collapse happens. You need to wrap your head around that and accept it as fact. By assuming it won't, you better prepare for the worst. Being completely unprepared? That's silly.
Either assumption as mutually exclusive of each other... is also silly. So you both lose.
Cheers
We could discharge the water at 70 C, kill all the fish, and then raise farmed fish in concrete ponds to replace these fish. Not that I'm actually proposing that we do that, but these 'other issues' that we run into all have solutions with side effects. Ultimately dealing with these side effects are much much easier than simply abandoning civilization and the billions of residing to starvation.
Most likely we'll simply use river water where we can, oceans where we must, and often alter the environment pursuing our benifit. Sometimes we'll have to deal with unexpected consequences. Too bad.
Name calling is neither reasoning nor is it analysis. If there were more people commenting on this post, your negative number would be increasing accordingly.
Anyone suggesting, a few months back, that oil would soon drop back to $70 a barrel would have got a stupendously bad negative rating as well.
Have you ever considered that an endless source of energy will only allow us to convert much more earth biomass (plants, animals, soil) into human biomass without solving any of our current problems ?
How is that not solving problems?
In the same way that expanding the high-way system doesn't really reduce traffic jams.
There appears to be feedback system that if you build bigger infrastructure it just gets filled to capacity again, as fast as you build it.
In the same way, "solving" the energy problem, which is really an overpopulation problem by bringing online substitutes that aim to perpetuate "business as usual" will leave us in essentially the same situation...
The fundamental problem is not getting addressed and sooner or later we won't have any more substitutes.
Bringing online alternatives will be necessary however, but it won't do us much good if we don't at the same time use this "borrowed time" to fix the fundamental problem: overpopulation and an economic system based on the assumption of perpetual growth.
If don't address the fundamental problem, we are only postponing the inevitable at the expense of making the final collapse that much more catastrophic (basically we are only digging a deeper hole out of which it is even harder to climb out of).
Bad analogy. Expanding highway systems do increase capacity. It does solve a problem.
You see population and growth driven systems as an actual problem to be solved, like traffic jams. They aren't.
Oh, I'm sure someday. Someday the sun will burn out as well.
Oh I know thats a popular opinion around here; Not one I subscribe to mind you.
Have you anything other than your opinion to offer?
Cheers
Omigod, something ominously new under the sun (or maybe that should be rain): The Nuclear Scot with tokamak rather than halberd in hand.
May be best to go back to name calling, look where reasoning etc. has got us; the Scot with a form of reasoning invented the halberd and deadly as is a Scottish oath I would prefer that in my face to his halberd in my head.
Seriously though I think that name calling is experienced at a point where we can go to either violence or understanding, a mechanism for venting anger more or less harmlessly. Of course I could be wrong and maybe that is why I wake up so often with these lumps on my skull.
If nuclear fusion works based on the tokamak design mankind will do just fine.
This ignores many other resource problems. Look at the graphs in this article that I got from the Energy Bulletin:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg20026786.000-special-repor...
There have always been doomsday cultists and there probably always will be.
Where is the doomsday cultist here? We face a problem according to this article. Which facts are wrong? Humanity is not doomed, but it must adjust to some severe constraints. This is one more article on those constraints. Where do you disagree on the constraints?
The human race faces considerable challenges in the coming century but they are not insurmountable.
Absolutely true -- and that seems to be the point of the article. But we must recognize what those challenges are, must we not?
I myself do not yet have a well formed opinion on how far we will need to retrench, but anyone who looks at the population and resource consumption charts for the last thousand and in particular the last hundred years and does not conclude that we face a truly major problem, well, I have to say that person is in denial.
My personal hope is that we can somehow manage to sustain a population level and a degree of global intercourse that allows us to rescue as much possible of world culture and science as possible. But that we have to radically retrench is to me indisputable. My specific hope is that science will turn more in the direction of studying just the issues raised in this article so that we can learn how to achieve a sustainable relationship with the planet - garden earth I like to call it, even though that's in slight conflict with some points in the article.
Nuclear fusion based on ANY design is so far out from having an actual affect on human energy consumption, that it should not be considered as even remotely likely to "save us" in a timely fashion.
You should talk to some fusion physicists - I have, including one involved (at a very high level) with ITER - and the future of fusion doesn't look so rosy.
Show me the massive (needed) buildup of fission renewables and energy savings anywhere in the world right now and I may believe your vision for a moment - but what I see is oil, natural gas and a whole lot of coal - with insignificant amounts of renewables and the only savings occuring among those who can't afford to stay in the game
and you should hope that we can't increase by a great deal the amount of energy available to human civilization - because all it will do is encourage a greater increase in human population, putting us further into overshoot and constraining the world we live on even more - AGW, pollution, deforestation, species extinction, ocean populations in terminal decline, looming shortages in (cheaply available) useful elements, horrific shortages in potable water, arrable land etc. etc. - all will be much WORSE if we can contiue to party-on like we have been
you are absolutely right our challenges are not insurmountable, and when I see any sign at all we are even admiting to a problem, I may believe we have a chance to even begin to address them.
Is it too horrible to ask the "meaning of life" question here? (Should I get a bucket?). Seriously, what do TODers think the real purpose of life is anyway? If there is a purpose, that is...
Regards, Matt B
I wouldn't be dead for quids, BTW, and I'm certainly not reaching for the razor-blade! Just curious.
I gave up contemplating this years ago. It's vanity.
"It doesn't matter."
Before you despair, it therefore follows that "it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter."
Or, as Ecclesiates puts it, "Eat, drink and be merry," or something thereabouts.
I'll try an answer, though I doubt there is 'one'.
The meaning of life is to live a life of meaning, broadly defined, different for everyone. We go through our brief decades on this blue planet pursuing the neurotransmitter cocktails that allowed our ancestors to meet with evolutionary success. The chemicals (serotonin, dopamine, norepinepherine, etc.) are the same for everyone, but the recipe for the cocktail differs by genetics, and the how we 'drink it' differs by our upbringing, our experience, our education, our culture, and how 'hijacked' we become to various 'fast' stimuli.
What is the meaning of life for a dog, or an elephant? Ours is different, but also the same..
"The meaning of life is to live a life of meaning"
I like that!
Regards, Matt B
This is what Viktor Frankl said, and I would guess that he knows better than almost any of us.
His book "Man's Search for Meaning" is very difficult to read, but worth it.
I was under the illusion that it was the no 42
Close, that's merely the answer. The unknown part; What was the question? Re: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The question is "What's six times nine in base thirteen?"
(Yes, it really is. Go back to where Arthur Dent is among the marooned phone sanitizers with Ford Prefect, and read closely.)
Seriously, what do TODers think the real purpose of life is anyway?
Seriously? Breakfast.
I don't know what TODers think about the purpose, er, Meaning of life but I think Monty Python did a pretty good job of summing it up.
"Seriously, what do TODers think the real purpose of life is anyway?"
Propagation of the species.
there is no "purpose" of life - humans create meaning, it doesn't exist outside of our minds. The universe exists, life is part of that universe, but it has no purpose, it just "is".
Species of course are driven to reproduce and pass on their genetic material to future generations, but that isn't a purpose, that is a mindless drive.
since there is no external meaning or purpose, we have to (as sentient beings) create meaning and purpose for ourselves - some do this better than others I think...
Since the universe appears to be utterly ateleological, human created meaning is arbitrary and hence essentially... meaningless. Arbitrary, idiosyncratic, human contrived 'meaning' may seem personally meaningful to the person who invents such for themselves and if so, more power to them. But everyone who creates such meaning for themselves ought to recognize that it doesn't exist outside their own head, ceases to exist once they die, and may mean less than nothing to others.
It would seem to be difficult to step outside of being a human to attain this perspective that the Universe is 'essentially' meaningless - not to a human it's not.
In the same way that humans see patterns and constellations in the stars, and give them significance, so as humans we see the universe as meaningful - now it is true and a sign of the liberal thinker that we should realise that the meaning will differ from person to person, and so is not to be confused with an objective fact, but it is surely equally erroneous to say that he Universe is 'essentially' meaningless - not to us it's not.
We have no Archimedian point available to make that judgement from.
Well Dave, you just have to speak for yourself on this. " - not to us it's not." Please leave me out of your "us." I want no part of any 'meaning' you or anyone else concocts.
We seem to be talking at cross purposes. It is not a case of accepting someone else's ideas - I was attempting to reference that the attribution of meaning just appears to be the way our brains work - in fact it may be the case that that is the only way that brains can work, human or non-human.
So a statement that the universe 'really' has no meaning would seem to beg the question of where that point from which that can be judged comes from.
Science is concerned with the how, not the why, and so is silent on 'meaning'. although to be sure for a lot of purposes it makes sense to hypothesise some sort of totally objective universe, and that would indeed be meaning free.
If you are talking about the Universe as it is in practice experienced by real people though, it is full of meaning, which however is relative not absolute.
How can the universe be "free of meaning" if the mind which makes meaning is a part of that universe?
Also, can the universe exist without an observer? (Who is also at the same time an integral part of the universe).
If a tree falls in the forest but there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Sure you can theorize about a purely objective universe, and your theories may even lead to certain useful insights and have some predictive power, but they are still inherently incomplete explanations of reality.
Though I do not claim to understand quantum physics. It seems that some of the truly weird things coming out of that nook of science actually indicate that in some sense the act of observing is fundamentally part of creating the perceived reality. So reality can not be understood without understanding the role of the observer.
As the Diamond Sutra says "Everything is created by mind alone". This turns our "normal" way of thinking completely upside down. It is the observer / conscious mind that gives rise to reality. Not the other way around. So if you make meaning, than you have it: *your* universe has meaning.
There is no truly objective reality, only a shared subjective one.
I would not disagree. Whenever we hear that something is not 'really' what is happening, we should carefully check what definition of reality is being used.
Often the divergence is simply one of different descriptions being in conflict, so one person might declare an agricultural crisis to be 'really' a matter of the levels of particular fertiliser in the soil, whilst an economist might declare it to be a matter of a slump reducing the ability to buy the fertiliser, whilst a lawyer might maintain that it was 'really' due to poor legislation.
It is easy to see in those examples why each of those descriptions are not full, and do not invalidate the other descriptions, but here in the West the power of the scientific paradigm, which chooses to objectify the Universe, and if you like until you reach the realms of chaos theory etc, pretends that the Universe is a separate entity from the observer, is very useful, but should be taken as no more than one particular partial description of reality, and certainly vaguely 19th century Darwinist claims that reality is 'really' meaning free should be questioned.
Joseph Campbell put it rather neatly: 'the problem is not the meaninglessness of the world, but it's unconditional meaningfulness'
"What is the meaning of life"
Could it be something like a coup of coffe, a glass of cognac and a good cigar?
When I was in high school (a long time ago) physicists said that producing commercial quantities of energy from nuclear fusion was 40 years away. They are still saying that. Don't put too much hope in this "endless" source of energy.
The last I heard, fusion researchers thought commercial fusion, based on the main lines of research, was about 90 years away. I think there are some promising new approaches, but nothing that would convince a skeptic.
I agree that our energy problems are solvable, but for the moment fusion is a distraction.
If you think about it, we can eat only a certain amount of food each day. It is doubtful that the food we have been eating has been getting more nutritious. All of the junk food we are eating isn't making us any happier.
There is a wide range of what we can use for clothing, and how often we need to change it. Having all kinds of goofy fashions that change every year doesn't add anything to our happiness. Having enough for warmth might be helpful, but people seem to have dealt with this through the ages.
Shelter can vary widely as well. Having a huge house with high ceilings doesn't make a person happier than a much humbler dwelling. Once the minimums have been met, and they are pretty low, we can pretty happy.
Good relationships with kin and neighbors is important. These have been suffering in our current society.
I don't think most of us are ready to go back to hunter-gatherer days, but it is something to consider for future generations. Perhaps climate change, peak oil, and peak lots of other things will things in this direction.
I believe that Diamond pointed out evidence that hunter gatherers had better health, were larger, and lived longer than the pastoral farmers who followed them.
This is well-known in the scientific community now. Scientists have been trying to understand why people took to agriculture if the outcome was worse. The theory I subscribe to is basically that a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. As wild game grows scarcer, crops, no matter how poor, are more dependable.
My personal theory is that they were in crisis, due to population overshoot. So the solution was either farm or die. Given a choice other than dying, they took it, for better or worse, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Also resource depletion was a likely factor, there simply were no large game animals to hunt.
Does anyone else see a parallel with modern day oil drilling? Perhaps oil drillers are modern day hunter/gatherers and ethanol producers are the equivalent of early pastoralist farmers. Ethanol has a poorer energy yield but it is predictable while searching for scarce oil fields is a gamble.
The bulk of the evidence suggests that increased food production came first and this 'mana' facilitated higher birth rates so that, in repeating cycles, more food made more people whose sustenance was not supportable when the ecosystems and soils they had depleted would no longer continue to produce at the new/higher level.
This would suggest that the correlation between hunters being healthier than farmers is not rooted in diet and lifestyle, but resource availability. It is possible that the farmers were less healthy not because they ate veggies and toiled in the earth, but because they had less food overall.
The idea of the 'noble savage' was wrong.
But I do enjoy this quote. Makes you wonder what they would think of American voluptuousness...
Same reason you would prefer a 12% expected annual portfolio return over a 20% expected return. If the former was 1% per month each and every month and the latter was up 40% one year and 0% the next year, the risk adjusted return (mean/standard deviation) would be higher. Or to extend the financial analogy to Sharpe ratio, subtract out absolute basic needs (t-bills in finance) and get
(mean return - minus basic needs)/standard deviation = return from strategy
I think agriculture did have a higher biological 'Sharpe ratio' 10,000 years ago.
Another aspect of certainty - agricultural product was also storable. Once it got started perhaps the practice would have been reinforced by trade, concentration and distribution of through hierarchy (as in grainaries) and, of course, the power of the king and taxation. A self-reinforcing system.
There's another explanation. Primitive warfare is all about demographics. The tribe that outgrows and outpopulates its neighbors wins.
"had better health, were larger, and lived longer"
Is that a cigarette in the archer's mouth? (see picture above)
ha, I spotted that too
I think that most pastoralists they are referring to are pre Phillip Morris exporting that particular habit to the world...
But who gave Phillip Morris the idea to begin with??
The London Company - an English joint-stock company that founded the Jamestown settlement - and of course THEY got the whole smoking tobacco thing from the American Indians - so maybe there is a bit of cosmic justice for all those gifts of virgin-field epidemics and one-sided land buys...
They had better Darwinian filtering. The ones who couldn't do the hunter-gather thing didn't leave any descendants.
re: going back to hunter-gatherer days
Near the back of Euell Gibbons' book Stalking the Wild Asparagus is a chapter called "Proof of the Pudding," which is about a one-week adventure in which Gibbons, his wife, and another couple eat primarily on foods they find that week at a cabin out in the country. They find and eat plenty of good food, but I seem to recall that many of the meals they ate also relied on eggs, butter, sugar, and flour, which they either found at the cabin or purchased at a nearby store (I don't have the book handy to check the exact details).
I am sure that what Gibbons was trying to convey was that the wild world is busting with good food for us to eat and enjoy, but what really inpressed me was that these four people gathered food from a very large area with no competition. No one else was out there digging up daylily tubors and calamus roots, gigging for bullfrogs and spinning for bluegills (though other people were out trolling for bass!), or climbing trees to gather juneberries and crabapples.
I will admit to being among the crazies picking up pecans at the local park in the Fall and picking wild blackberries in June (also at the park), and I have been known to add bits of the lawn--purslane and chickweed--to the evening salad, but if the whole population of my town decided to eat from the wild (if you can call lawns and parks wild!), we would deplete the local resources pretty quickly. In order to return to a less "managed" form of food acquisition, such as hunting and gathering, there will definitely need to be fewer of us. Since I have children already, I am hoping that the possible "future generations" you refer to at the end of your post are far enough out that as little trauma as possible is inflicted between then and now.
Gail,
We will certainly not be going back to the life style of our hunter gatherer ancestors, however we may have to lower our numbers to the levels that these ancestors were able to sustain in a solar energy-driven culture that harvested some of the 'interest/surplus' from the production of ecosystems as opposed to exploiting and damaging the 'capital/infrastructure' of ecosystems to the extent that their long-term productive capacity is diminished.
Heck why not just say humans were unsustainable the day we fell out of a tree? /snark
Antidoomer we were merely insufferable the day we fell out of that tree, it took much reasoning logic and analysis to become unsustainable as well. I am going to give you another negative not because you really deserve it but because I am just human and fallible (and of course perverse).
Masanobu Fukuoka, before he died recently, claimed to have been getting high yields of rice (summer crop) and rye/barley (winter crop) for decades without breaking the surface of the soil for any reason, no plowing, no cultivation, no holes or furrows for seeds. His external imputs are nitrogen via luguminous under crops (clover) and chicken manure. I do not know for certain whether or not his claims are exaggerated or whether his methods are universally applicable, but there certainly seems to be food for thought his published writings (The One Straw Revolution).
I made an earnest effort to read that book in my earlier, woolly days of "sustainable" agriculture. I had to read it again because I didn't get one bit of practical advice from it. So, Fukuyoka gets a "down" rating from me. I prefer "The Four Season Garden."
Formation of topsoil is primarily a biological process, not a geological one. It does not have to take millenia to occur, as has been demonstrated by Yeomans keyline system of agriculture. The key is allowing the decomposition of roots in place without excess soil cultivation in order to maximise the formation of humus from biomass.
I have found similar results in my vegetable garden by using regular green manure crops, leading to a deeper topsoil at a rate of about half to one inch per year. The green manures grow for half the year and are slashed repeatedly, encouraging roots to die in situ. The soil is never turned, but is instead deeply cultivated with a broadfork to allow the roots to grow deeper every year. No animal manure is necessary to boost soil carbon. Human urine is applied to the green manure to recycle basic food nutrients.
My field crops are grown with a permanent living mulch of low growing soft weeds along the style of Fukuoka. The density of these is managed by regular hand hoeing. No irrigation is applied, instead the soil is again occasionally deeply cultivated without turning to allow topsoil to deepen every year and increase rainwater retention. Small tree crops break up the fields into narrow rows. Erosion and nutrient loss are minimal, if anything moving food, biomass and soil uphill as a matter of habit works against the slow tendency for downhill movement. I have been reproducing Fukuoka's yields with a wide range of crops, giving a subsistence level of 2-10 people per acre (allowing for our variable rainfall here in Australia).
The key to the growth rate and yield of plants is the availability of nutrients. Plants can only access a certain depth of soil, but deeper microbial connections link the topsoil to the subsoil and geological strata. Every location has a base rate of sustainable nutrient extraction from the underlying strata. Plants will access the easy surface nutrients first before drawing up the deeper ones. The garden farm model is to use the strong growing field crops and trees to extract deep nutrients from the subsoil. These are then eaten as food, and the human wastes recycled and concentrated in the vegetable garden to produce high value foods. Inedible biomass is returned to the soil in a way that maximises the formation of stable soil carbon (humus) in order to shift the equilibrium of nutrients from the subsoil to the topsoil while minimising horizontal nutrient loss. In the modern world addition of bought food nutrients to the cycle further boosts the fertility of the land.
On a more general level I have to bring up the serious question of whether or not sustainability and stable societies are desirable, even if they are achievable. What is the ultimate purpose of a stable society, apart from the supposed amusement of its people? Nature itself does not tend toward sustainability- it is only our short attention spans and life-spans that prevent us from seeing that nature also favors boom and bust and constant succession. Every living thing ensures its own demise through its success. The benefit of this pattern, in nature and in human societies, is that there is a constant interplay of harsh selection of strength during the hard times, and a creative explosion of new experiments during the easy times. This is the way nature moves forward. Life is the opposite of sustainability. Sustainability is stationary and is equivalent to death. Life is by its very nature a dynamic disequilibrium. The key to success is to keep moving forward, through the good times and the bad. Most assuredly bad times are coming, but through that process new strengths will be found. Did you know that with a little genetic engineering scientists have managed to improve the rate limiting reaction in photosynthesis five fold? The stresses of the next few decades will most certainly lead to some creative and non-linear solutions to our problems. But in the mean time I will keep tending my little primitive garden-farm, protect my family, engage my community and watch the world unfold.
Roger K
speaks of inputs of "nitrogen via leguninous under crops (clover) and chicken manure" -
- I trust that the chicken manure came from hens fed the rice and rye from the same plot of land where Fukuoka assessed yields, because if the manure came from hens fed from some other land, it was the same as applying bagged fertilizer/imported plant nutrients from somewhere else.
If the manure of domestic animals and humans (and decomposed body parts) is placed back on the land, then the nutrient cycle is closed. Fukuoka used chicken manure because we currently do not have the infrastructure for recycling human wastes. I am quite aware of the fact that chicken manure is an external input.
My comments were more directed towards your statement about the necessity for 'cultivation', i.e. disturbing the soil in ways that cause soil erosion.
On a broader scale and at an elemental level the nutrient cycle of everything is necessarily closed because everything stays earthbound. The specific issue is the movement of nutrients from the terrestrial environment to the ocean. And the most fundamental question is "are the nutrients in a place and a form that is useful to plants/humans/agriculture?". Making nutrients biologically available necessarily makes them more prone to moving away from the site by leaching, erosion or movement of biomass. A barren landscape of rocks is brought to life by rock dissolving lichens, but in the same process nutrients are mobilised and their loss from the site is accelerated. Was it more desirable to leave the nutrients sustainably locked up in the rocks? Or is it a better compromise to engage in a kind of nutritional fractional reserve banking by recycling those mobilised nutrients through endless layers of other living things?
All terrestrial living systems, both natural and human driven, accelerate the loss of nutrients as a side effect of making those nutrients biologically available. All that differs is the rate at which they do so and the consequences for the organisms that drive the process. The only other difference is the existence of structures and patterns that promote the recycling of mobilised nutrients, either through topsoil humus or through biomass. Nature usually does this efficiently for growth rate limiting nutrients. Agriculture risks excessive rates of nutrient loss when it neglects these recycling investments. On the other hand sufficiently organised agriculture can reverse the loss of nutrients to the sea and subsoil by actively moving nutrients and biomass against tendencies of gravity and retaining them in topsoil humus and biomass.
Generate a flow of nutrients from ocean to land via e.g. anadromous fish eaten by land animals and birds.
Roger K says:
"If the manure of domestic animals and humans (and decomposed body parts) is placed back on the land, then the nutrient cycle is closed."
No it is not,-------- Roger K has forgotten that nutrients move out of the soil profile >> into groundwater >> into the streams and the ocean -and- the rate of this leaching is much greater when shallow rooted food crops replace native deep rooted forest and prairie/grassland plant assemblages whose below soil structures capture and move back to the surface most of these leached nutrients.
I am happy to learn new information and admit my mistakes, but this "Roger K has forgotten" contstruction is incredibly irritating and patronizing. Please treat me like I am intelligent human being rather than a recalcitrant schoolboy.
This phenomenon can be eliminated by very simple technology. The rate of leaching appears to shrink to near-zero values when charcoal is added as a soil amendment; see "terra preta".
Peter Salonius writes:
Apparently Peter Salonius has forgotten that rain forests have very shallow root systems and yet have existed as vigorous natural ecosystems for millions of years. Apparently the claim that shallow root systems imply unsustainable nutrient losses is an over simplification. I am not claiming that agriculture is saved, but it seems like there is more to the nutrient recycling story than root depth.
Roger K. writes:
"Apparently Peter Salonius has forgotten that rain forests have very shallow root systems and yet have existed as vigorous natural ecosystems for millions of years. Apparently the claim that shallow root systems imply unsustainable nutrient losses is an over simplification."
Roger K. insists on oversimplification of my thesis which does not hinge solely on the sustainabilty and nutrient conservation orchestrated by deep rooted plants but also on the diversity of nutrient cycling strategies in complex natural plant communities which never experience bare ground conditions. The commensal and symbiotic organisms such the mycorrhizal fungus root associates of rain forest plants form such a web of nutrient acquisition-capable tissue that very few nutrients escape into deep leachate.
This is where I would throw in (again, someone did up-thread) that it sounds like Terra Preta could alleviate this problem by keeping nutrients in place for much(?) longer periods of time. ...As well as hold water for at least a bit longer, if the enhanced soil is deep enough.
Not that it's a "solution" but I think of my work these days as helping the 1-2 billion people who might be left on the planet in 50-100 years. - My own little patch of thousand year soil that will likely help *some* creatures get thru a few days here and there.
Thanks to Peter Salonius for this intriguing discussion of population and soil erosion.
O. K., I'll bite: I see the argument for dramatic reduction in world human population, perhaps to 5% of current levels (about 300 million), but I do not see an argument (implied in Gail's introduction and that nice picture of hunter-gatherers) that we revert to hunter-gatherer mode of agriculture, which would seem to imply that we go back to a population of about 3 million, which as I vaguely recall was the population about 8,000 BCE. That would be a reduction to 0.05% of current population levels. To me the extinction of animals in pre-history, among other things, makes it quite difficult to believe that it is possible to support a population greater than 3 million on hunting and gathering. Or maybe the picture of those hunter-gatherers was just to get our attention. O. K., you've got my attention.
My understanding of soil erosion is that soil is being eroded about 10 times faster than it is being formed in the United States. (Actually, probably more than this, and it's worse still in parts of Asia and Africa.) That would imply to me that we cultivate only 10% of the potentially arable land, leaving the other 90% fallow. We should also take further measures to reduce soil erosion even further -- terra preta, no-till cultivation, small-time organic vs. large-time conventional, whatever as research indicates. I am conflating a lot of issues here into this "10%" figure, such as whether an organic agriculture can provide yields of current conventional agriculture, whether we can "police" soil erosion effectively (since soil is subject to the "tragedy of the commons" in agriculture), whether soil mass and soil nutrients are both included in "soil formation," whether soil formation on uncultivated land is as rapid as on cultivated land, and probably others, I'm just going for the ballpark view here.
Could we get by on 10% of current agricultural land, assuming that the world is pretty much cultivated to the max today? In the U. S., it would seem to be within the realm of possibility. You'd just put everyone on a strict vegetarian or vegan diet. About 80-90% of U. S. agricultural land (2/3 of the cropland, and obviously all of the grazing and pasture land) goes to livestock agriculture. But the U. S. is fairly well off in terms of agricultural resources and population, and this would still use 1/3 of current cropland, not 10%. So you'd probably need a vegan diet and population reduction, too. Alternatively, you could include animal products and reduce population even further, but the population reduction for even a small amount of animal products is rather steep.
Anyway, this back-of-the-envelope type analysis seems to be to indicate an ultimate reduction to on the order of 100 to 500 million people or so, and I would not be convinced of the need to toss out agriculture quite yet. You are absolutely right, this requires a revolution in the human way of existence. Perhaps the current oil and financial crisis or collapse will provoke people to raise these additional questions as well, if we make it that far.
There's one source I've found helpful which I didn't see listed in your bibliography: "Soil Loss Tolerance: Fact or Myth?" in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, by Leonard C. Johnson, May-June 1987. I haven't found an online source for this. The article analyzes the U. S. government idea of 5 tons/acre of annual soil loss as the acceptable "soil loss tolerance." Johnson's conclusion: it's a myth, the true "soil loss tolerance" should be an order of magnitude lower, maybe 0.5 tons/acre/year.
Keith
Clearly, if we chose to, even after peak energy we have a great deal of former sunlight stored in trees, soil, and lower quality fossil fuels to live 'unsustainably' for quite some time. Are humans today fungible with humans tomorrow? Are 2 'good lifetimes' today worth 1 in the future? Do we rank sustainability from 1-10 and decide to attempt to live at a '4'? (There is academic writing on strong-form, semi-strong form, and weak-form sustainability).
Also, no matter how bad things get, we also have technology that is 'better' than the bushmen. I think that Gail just grabbed that image to represent what modern day hunter-gatherers looked like for a headline graphic, not implying what our future society would look like. We have vast abilities and human capital able to harness sunlight, wind, water and combine resources that our ancestors didn't have the generational time to attempt the millions of trial and error iterations to make these discoveries. So, as long as we do pay attention to soil, and live within the bounds of ecosystem services, I would argue that the sustainable human population of the planet is much higher than the 300 million figure. But as usual, there is some black swan that we (I) am neglecting.
As we get closer to really discussing these thorny issues, they will approach existential questions. What IS the goal anyways? The most humans living with the most happiness? If so, then happiness must include empathy for well-being of other species we share the planet with? Should we weight life by the % of neocortex/advanced brain as % of body size? Should we define happiness as 'obtaining those neurotransmitter cocktails that met with evolutionary success, thereby making one 'feel' good? Does one happy human equal 3 happy elephants? 10? 100? One human equal 5,000 kangaroo rats?
I (obviously) don't have the answer to these questions. But if 'sustainable' population is to be achieved, someone is going to need to come up with some protocol addressing these nearly impossible questions.
And who will oversee that person(s)?
;-)
Nate,
Yes, I suspect the graphic of bushmen hunters was just to get our attention. Bushmen do not appear extensively discussed anywhere in the article, nor do I see references to types of bows, local hunting grounds, etc. And if the title had been "some implications of current agricultural practices" with a graphic showing some dirt, I don't think it would, uh, attract as much readership.
I'm not familiar with the terminology of sustainability as strong, semi-strong, or weak-form. I was just looking at one renewable resource (soil) and seeing what sort of human activity and population would be required not to deplete it for (say) the next 100,000 years or so. We also have technology, so hopefully we would be able to come up with ways to cultivate the soil without eroding it, or perhaps one day techniques to manufacture food from scratch, or get it from the 8th dimension. But if we can see the way ahead for 100,000 years on current technology, I'd say we can ratchet our panic levels down a notch.
Finally, I don't see the question of whether 1 human = 5000 kangaroo rats as being an issue just yet. Thomas Berry's "The Great Work" makes the point that since humans rely on the ecosystem, we need to develop ways of looking at the ecosystem as other than just a resource to be exploited. Human, meet kangaroo rat. Kangaroo rat, meet human. Now, let's not fight unnecessarily. (Wait! Stay out of my food!) As human numbers increase, though, these sorts of conflicts become inevitable, because we've lost the existential sense of connectedness with nature, so that it becomes just us or the kangaroo rat, and whose side are you on, anyway?
The next big "existential" question in the near future has to do with our economic system and human happiness. Our economic system is based on the idea that money is correlated one-to-one with human happiness. But is Bill Gates really 1000 times happier than I am? I could see an argument for 50% happier, or maybe even twice as happy (though I doubt it). While at the low levels of economic subsistence, money does correlate with happiness (ability to eat, shelter from the cold, etc.), studies repeatedly show that above subsistence level the correlation weakens or even goes negative (as in studies of lottery winners). We need an economic system that reflects this, and I think this means a roughly 10:1 ratio between the highest income in society and the lowest. This disconnect between money and happiness is what's killing us short term.
Then after that we can worry about the kangaroo rats, and whether happiness for all might actually be increased with an increase in kangaroo rats vis a vis the human population.
Keith
Sometime in the next couple of thousand years we all get pushed down to the "tropics/subtropics" by the next glaciation. It all changes, then. A whole "new" set of "Opportunities" arise.
A glacial period in the next 2000 years is quite simply impossible. If CO2 levels continue to increase, which they almost certainly will, we will be back to levels not seen since the onset of the whole Ice Age, not just previous interglacials. This would mean no more glaciations for several hundred thousand years, at least.
We might get pushed up into the Arctic though, which might create a similar set of "opportunities" you allude to.
While I agree with the implied probability that warming is inevitable and will be long-lasting, your response is a bit simplified. Fact is, we can't be sure our actions can only lead in one direction. We just don't understand climate clearly enough. What we can say with certainty is that whether we go hot or cold, it's two sides of the same coin. And volatility is the order of the day.
Just being a little nit-picky.
;)
Cheers
AFAIK there are no reputable climate scientists predicting anything other than increased warming. The general mechanisms are actually fairly well known, while the precise rate of change is difficult to calculate, an error in sign would be a very big surprise.
I don't know; it looks to me like temperatures have been falling since 1998.
In fact, this year is "cooler" than 1988, the year Hansen started getting "all revved up" with his warming predictions.
M'thinks the jury is still out on this proposition.
I think it was along about the end of the carbonaceous period that we went into a glaciation with CO2 levels approx. 7 times what they are today.
Nate -
Did you notice in that picture of the bushmen that the dude on the right has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. Doesn't it make you kind of wonder where he 'hunted and gathered' that item?
Those bows also look pretty crappy and are probably ineffective against anything bigger than a rat at close range. I probably made more powerful homemade bows as a kid while playing Robin Hood with my friends. Certainly not your proper 70-lb longbow of good old English yew.
What this picture teaches me is that even hunters and gathers need to be mindful of employing the right technology for the right application, which may involve nothing more than making a better bow or using a bigger stone axe. (In my early Robin Hood days I also employed 'technological enhancement', which entailed removing the suction cups off the end of toy store-bought arrows and then putting the end in a pencil sharpener.)
I just last week watched "The Gods Must Be Crazy" -about 25 years old now - about the Bushmen who finds a Coke bottle from the sky and tries to return it to the Gods by walking to the end of the earth. Great movie!! But now on the DVD version they have 'extra' scenes - and they showed !xiao - the lead actor 10 years after -wearing baseball cap and in very poor village and he seemed to be 'ruined' by celebrity and exposure to western ideas - they even showed a picture of him in Paris with a parka on drinking a martini. That ruined the movie for me - seeing the 'truth' at the end.
Marjorie Shostak and Megan Biselle (Women Like Meat) have excellent research/books on time with the Bushmen. I spent a month with them in Botswana about 15 years ago - amazing people - when we killed an animal they would gut it and eat all the fat like it was candy - pounds of it - and somehow this fat went right to their butts. I remember them tracking animals (an injured Kudu once, and a leopard another time) at a full on run through the bush, periodically looking at the ground - we followed as best we could in a land rover!). Genetically I am not very different than them - but wow --what a skill set difference...
More different than you realize, Nate. Bushmen men have penises that are always semi-erect, as depicted by them in their rock paintings. Then there is steatopygia. That's the big bums they have, specifically for storing fat for survival, somewhat like camels. So their rock paintings show them as stick figures with erections and big butts.
Not as different as you may think Mamba...;-)
They probably use the superior technology of poison arrow tips making a hulking, hard to pull bow (invented by those primitive British barbarians) obsolete:-)
The British Isles lacked a suitable supply of powerful toxins.
I've had some mighty powerful Scotch...
The Bushmen hunt with poisoned arrow tips. They don't need big bows to do the job.
Great article peter!
Thanks for the bibliography too. Many interesting titles to explore.
You might have an easier time of it explaining how all great religions evolved out of worship of the sun than you will have challenging the New World Religion of Technology.
IMO there are just too many in this new religion who blindly believe in the new gods ability to address all things to ever have a rational, reasonable discussion such as yours but I for one congratulate you and thank you for your good work.
I have felt for at least thirty years that our agricultural system is unsustainable given population trends, even if we go organic and use every soil saving technique we can think of. There are some nutrients that need to come from somewhere else even if they are considered organic. On an individual level, we can sustain ourselves, but not on a world level as we cannot get things from off planet except for sunlight -- unless we start mining other planets, which would probably not be economical.
Anyway, there is some hope, as you imply, if we get the population small enough. That way, we can let natural systems take over as we move from plot to plot. Population reduction, in the magnitude necessary, will occur because of overshoot and mass starvation and disease.
It would have been good to put some numbers into this article. As it stands, the author seems to argue that the carrying capacity of the planet is somewhere around 50 - 100 million people (hunter-gatherer level) and therefore an order of magnitude lower than the most pessimistic estimates I have read. The population of pre-industrial China alone was over 100 million, and this was sustainable due to their techniques of returning nutrients to the fields.
Editors, would some kind of peer review be beneficial before papers like this are posted?
Hi,
According to this web site:
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/history/world-population-growth.htm
. . . the world population 10,000 BCE was 1 million.
According to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
. . . the world population 10,000 BCE was 1 million.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere, I think it was in the book "The Food Crisis in Pre-History" by Mark Cohen, but I don't have the text at hand, that it was no more than 3 million. But in any of these estimates, we are talking about much, much lower population than 50-100 million. I don't think the author is specifically advocating a return to this level of population or to this specific method of gathering food. I think that this is a rhetorical device to get our attention.
Keith
We are working on a 2nd tier level of posting papers but with everything else it takes time, and time is something Gail, PG and I don't have much of. If we had to peer review everything we post and check every figure, we would post once a month. Hopefully readers can help us with that -as I wrote upthread - I think the sustainable # of humans on the planet has a wide variation depending on the assumptions. even 100 million Donald Trumps would kill the planet, but we could probably hold 2 billion Jason Bradfords, or 3 billion Megan Quinns or some such...Depends on technology and throughput.
IMHO the peer review process completes adequately within 100 posts. :)
Yes, it seems that comments here represent an informal peer review process, though based on the offhand nature of some responses (and the Joe sixpack tone), I move that such input hereby be formally recognized as the "Beer Review Process". Perhaps we can judge the number of pints consumed as directly proportional to the number of downward arrows (do I hear a "second"?).
Ah! What a great idea! Replace the whole arrow thing with a beer stein and a little light bulb, Beer Review and Peer Review, and let people judge each post based on the nature of the response! Far better than the arrows! If participants used the system in an adult fashion (yeah, right) you'd know instantly if a post was on topic and germane or not.
Cheers
'biologist' seems to think that an estimation of how many fewer humans, than those present today, could be supported by the carrying capacity of the [now] considerably damaged ecosystems on the planet --- while the important issue is to understand the direction that human numbers must go //down.
Very informative survey of the human conflict with nature. Thanks for the post. So far humans seem to have demonstrated they have the upper hand, but beneath the surface I think mother nature has a few tricks up her sleeve to give us our comeuppance. One of these tricks is the imposition by nature of additional costs (declining EROEI) as we progress in our exploitation of resources (low hanging fruit principle).
If you look at the growth curves alone for human population, food production, energy usage, water usage, and any of the other critical components that determine the future of the human species, you might start to feel a little uneasy. It looks to me to be a somewhat heroic leap of faith to think that we will continue on these curves, upward and onward into infinity. How long can humans frenzy feed on the resources of the earth until something gives way?
At some point these growth curves fall of their own weight; the next sought after human solution, like the dream of nuclear fusion, does not come to the rescue, and the energy growth curve turn negative, so instead of facing a doubling period, we are facing a halving period. I think that experience has shown that when growth turns negative, that the outcome is not always smooth and there are catastrophic spurts downward. Just look at the financial news of today if you have doubts about the disorderly nature of unwindings.
I am more and more inclined to side with Richard Duncan in his view that civilization is in the long run temporary. Once the peak is reached, the decline phase should be characterized by sharp collapses, followed by periods of stability or even slight recovery, followed yet again by sharp collapses, etc., etc., etc.
Each transition from one level of technology to the next has required use of resources to build the infrastructure for the new way of doing things. During the long expansion phase, additional resources were available to facilitate these transitions. Once we enter the decline phase, we will be facing the need to build new infrastructure to do things a different, perhaps more primitive way, but without readily available resources to do so.
Maybe humanity can manage to fight back the forces of nature for a little longer and those of you who wish for, want and predict a dieoff free future will realize your vision of the future; and then again, maybe not. The risk certainly seems to be increasing.
A conceptual shift occured in the transition from hunter/gather to agriculuralist. Whereas hunter/gathers probably considered themselves to belong to the world (ref: First American lore), agriculturalists eventually came to believe that the world belonged to them (ref: Ishmael, the Bible), giving rise to the dominator culture in which we now live.
Wow. I have to re-read this again to digest, but my initial impression is that this is harsh, terrifying, profound. It may see odd to "thank you" for it, but I do, nonetheless.
This is a good antidote to messianic treatises on "organics" that appear here periodically. I'm one such organic farmer who recognizes the fraudulence of such terms as "sustainability," "permaculture," and even "organic" itself. For me, soil-building, recycling local "waste," seed-saving, etc., are not panaceas nor keys to implementing a New Order but simply "fragments" to "shore against the ruins" that threaten us. Such farming is difficult, yet gratifying -- and yet impotent against continuous population growth.
My prediction: Scarce fuels will soon be requisitioned to keep the industrial ag paradigm going, organics be damned. Perhaps we small farmers will salvage survival out of the Great Unknown that encroaches at peak oil. But perhaps not.
I'm sorry to sound like a selfish git, but I farm for me, not for thee.
Mike B,
I agree with your prediction and have been saying as much myself. Our industrial ag will not give way to smaller, organic farms. Sitting in the halls of one of the largest agricultural academies I can tell you they will imagine, invent, and enable the largest scale agriculture while they have breathe and means to move a tractor over 5,000 acre plots.
But I am still committeed to getting beginning farmers established on medium sized farms (80-500 acres). If for no other reason than the solid democracy building of having independent farmers.
Thanks to TOD's PTB for the recent posting of articles focusing on agriculture / population issues. As a biologist, I often feel that the focus of the many PO / financial blogspots (TOD, AE, et al.) misses the point. While pertinent, economic & fossil fuel depletion issues are a bit inconsequential compared to the real threats faced by Homo, which are ecological in nature. It is our relationship as a species of organism to our environment that matters, not the institutions of culture we have contrived. Human population exceeds the carrying capacity (K) of the biosphere by at least an order & a half of magnitude, fueled by unsustainable fossil fuel exploitation. Populations that exceed K crash, and there is no reason to expect that human population is any exception to this reality of nature. Populations that exceed K to the extent that human population currently does sometimes crash all the way down to the absorbing value of zero, i.e., to extinction. To my mind, the possibility of human extinction occurring within the next couple centuries - and even within the lifetimes of those already born - is very real.
Where does the usage of the letter 'K' for carrying capacity come from? Pardon my ignorance. I am not a biologist.
Use of the letter K to symbolize carrying capacity comes from the Verhulst-Pearl equation [dN/dt = rN(1-N/K)] for logistic population growth. I'm not sure why K was chosen in this context but suspect that it comes from the German word kapazität.
wow. cool - I didn't know that.
I just wanted to highlight this, as it may be the most important equation there is at the moment. There is a great deal to be learned from the ecological perspective, and most of it is deeply frightening. (I came to this from a biology background as well, though not as thorough of one.)
Some species of reptiles survived the age of dinosaurs. I regards human beings as the most adaptable of all large land animals that have ever existed. Unless you are envisioning an ecological disaster so large that all large land animals are going to completely disappear, I would guess that the chance of homo sapiens survival of global population overshoot to be fairly high.
During a mass extinction episode, large body size is one of the few consistent predictors of susceptibility to extinction. The current on-going anthropogenic mass extinction pulse began in Afrika during the Pleistocene and picked up pace as Homo invaded & colonized the rest of the world. The Australian marsupial megafauna was absolutely devastated by the arrival of Homo on the continent, as was the placental megafauna in the Americas - witness the extinction of mammoths & mastodonts, giant ground sloths & glyptodonts, horses & camelids, and large predators such as the north american lion & cheetah, Smilodon & the giant short-faced bear. The Afrikan megafauna has fared somewhat better because it coevolved with hominids. But, Yes, I do expect that extant large mammals are doomed. Cetaceans, the great apes, large ungulates, et al., will go down along with Homo, in this the sixth great mass extinction episode to befall the biosphere. I don't expect the anthropogenic extinction pulse to rival that of the end-Permian, but fully expect the impact of our species to match that of Chicx, at the end-Cretaceous.
And not to quibble, but what exactly IS a "reptile." Are turtles - the direct anapsid descendants of the stem-amniotes - "reptiles"? Are crocodylians and dinosaurs including bird - diapsid archosaurs all - "reptiles"? What about lizards, snakes & the tuatara - diapsid lepidosaurs - are they "reptiles" too? Or are you referring to an illegitimate 19th century paraphyletic taxon that arbitrarily includes anapsid turtles with diapsid archosaurs & lepidosaurs, while irrationally excluding synapsid mammals & a particular clade of extant therapod saurischian dinosaurs (birds)? My point is that you apparently don't know very much biology, so why should your views regarding the probabilities of impending human extinction carry much weight?
"The Australian marsupial megafauna was absolutely devastated by the arrival of Homo on the continent, as was the placental megafauna in the Americas - witness the extinction of mammoths & mastodonts, giant ground sloths & glyptodonts, horses & camelids, and large predators such as the north american lion & cheetah, Smilodon & the giant short-faced bear."
The author of the article states that hunter-gathers lived in harmony with their ecosystems. If what you say is true, then this suggests something quite different.
It also suggests that agriculture was not just a chance discovery, but a necessary development due to the overexploitation of fauna. This is also contrary to the lead article.
However, these contradictions actually argue for an even earlier point of sustainability than the development of agriculture. Probably somewhere around the development of the spear and language skills sufficient for humans to conduct coordinated hunting. Also the key significance of the use of fire is little to do with warding off wild animals. Eating cooked foods significantly increases the calorific content, reducing the amount required to eat. This also could be the starting point for subsequent unsustainable growth.
I don't care much for the macho descriptor "hunter-gatherer," in that it delegates the role of women as "gatherers" to second shrift importance despite the fact that in the few extant examples of more aptly designated "forager-scavenger" cultures, women provide >50% of calories to both sexes. Elaine Morgan has ably parodied all such "Tarzanist" theories of human evolution as the term "hunter-gatherer" encompasses, so I won't bother to do so here. The point is that anthropogenic environmental degradation and the extinction of species commenced almost from the time of our species' speciation about 200K yrs bp. Human set fires (arson) drastically altered landscape ecology both within & outside Afrika. Several species of presumably competing hyenid along with all our confamilials went down contemporaneous with our ascendancy. (Toba may have leant a hand with the deminse of our congenerics outside the Crib.) You're correct in asserting that humans have been altering landscapes and driving species extinct long before the advent of agriculture, and that much of this carnage has involved human employment of fire. The gods were right to have punished Prometheus.
That said, overexploitation of fauna doesn't make the invention of agriculture a "necessary development." Human population could have just as well collapsed along with that of the myriad species we have driven extinct. The invention of agriculture allowed our species to ramp up an already unsustainably large population by orders of magnitude, and the exploitation of fossil fuels has allowed us to do so again. With each such subversion of K the unsustainable house of cards becomes that much more top heavy, ensuring that when the inevitable crash comes, it comes hard. No "soft landing," no controlled power down, no recovery. Sorry for all you who have some seemingly sentimental attachment to the idea that Homo should persist long after your own personal demise, as if you could somehow know or care. Anyhow, good post Bob. ;)
BobCousins writes:
"The author of the article states that hunter-gathers lived in harmony with their ecosystems. If what you say is true, then this suggests something quite different."
-- while I did not state that hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with their ecosystems". What I did say was that hunter-gatherers who overexploited or exceeeded the carrying capacity of their ecosystems had their numbers knocked back by starvation etc
BobCousins also writes:
"It also suggests that agriculture was not just a chance discovery, but a necessary development due to the overexploitation of fauna. This is also contrary to the lead article."
-- while I continue to maintain (with a lot of support from the literature) that agriculture was chanced upon,'stumbled' into
-AND- that the increased food production -- that was produced by mining soil mass (erosion) and soil nutrients (leaching and plant export) -- was instumental in producing rapid and unsustainable growth in human numbers, see slide deck entitled 'World Food and Population Growth at:
http://www.panearth.org
"-- while I did not state that hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with their ecosystems".
Yes, you did. I even changed my wording to match yours. Please read the article before commenting ;)
Also, if H-G had a tradition of keeping their numbers in check to match available food, why would this be abandoned when they adopted farming?
It is more likely the case that while some tribes aimed to live in harmony, other tribes rejected that and preferred to value human life above the ecosystem, as exemplified by the Old Testament. Whether these tribes were H-G or farmers is not relevant, the same conditions apply. Inevitably, the tribes that procreated faster may have been more prone to collapse but otherwise would outcompete the H-G.
Re: BobCousins' comment:
"if H-G had a tradition of keeping their numbers in check to match available food, why would this be abandoned when they adopted farming?"
They may or may not have had a "tradition" however Read and LeBlanc, Current Anthropology 44:59-85, 2003 suggest that tried to avoid malthusian constraints like starvation by limiting their fertility -- experience would have taught them that to do otherwise had serious consequences. These authors made a differentiation between fertility behaviour in the context of low resource density (H-G for instance)where stable populations were usually maintained // and high resource density (from agriculture for instance) where decreased birth spacing and larger families were not penalized because of increasing access to and consistency of food stores.
Why not produce large families of potential farm labourers when there seemed to be unlimited food?
Did 100% of large body size amimals disappear in previous mass extinctions? Or did some few species find niches in which they could survive? Maybe my ignorance of biology is showing here, but my impression is that human beings have adapted to a much wider variety of ecological niches than any other animal of comparable body size. If there are available niches I think that the chances are good that we will find them. If no niches whatsoever exist which can support us, then it is trivially obvious that we will perish. I was quite precise in my statement. I said that: Unless you are envisioning an ecological disaster so large that all large land animals are going to completely disappear, I would guess that the chance of homo sapiens survival of global population overshoot to be fairly high.
During all five of the previous first order (or second order in that the end-Permian was in a class by itself) mass extinction events, all large bodied animals - both terrestrial & marine - did indeed go extinct. The last such event occured 65 my bp when all large dinosaurs died out along with mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, & large marine crocodylians. Large pterosaurs also went extinct while small avian dinosaurs managed to squeak thru. (There were no large mammals.) Some relatively large animals did manage to survive the second (or third) order extinction pulses that bound Cenozoic epochs. The sixth great (anthropogenic) extinction pulse already qualifies as first (or second) order. I'm confident that the current on-going extinction event will be no different than the previous five. No animals much larger than a squirrel or small dog will survive.
First you wrote:
And now you write:
How did you get from from "a real possiblity than human beings might go extinct" to absolute confidence that no animal larger than a dog or a squirrel will survive? Scientific confidence requires a testable model. As a trained scientist I am sure you know that mere correlations cannot give certainty, and in fact you present no statistical correlations.
Something to consider: we are also the most physically delicate/feeble. Witness the die-off during the European heat wave not so long ago.
Cheers
Actually, the deaths from the heat wave in Europe did not impede the species at all. Almost all of the deaths were of people above reproductive age. Nature does not care if you live or die after age 50.
But what IS K??? Gail and Peter Salonius seem to claim (see discussion upthread) that K is 1 million! Current other pessimistic estimates are 1 BILLION, 1000 fold more. This post is like claiming that current oil reserves are 1 billion barrels and not 1000 billion (e.g. Deffeyes) and that oil will run out in two weeks - really good for TODs reputation as a fact-based forum...
To be clear, Gail said no such thing - she formatted Peter Salonius' paper and wrote an introduction. Think about the scale of the endeavor for editors here to delve in to that level of accuracy (not that anyone alive even could give an accurate estimate of K). We post what we recieve from credible sources, that are referenced, and relevant to the general energy discussion. That doesn't mean they are perfect.
As a biologist - what do YOU think K could be/should be/might be for humans - say given the resources available to our species say - in 2050? (meaning the vast majority of cheap fossil fuels will have been burned)
Well, one could extrapolate from known examples where countries were forced to forego modern agriculture and/or fossil fuels: China during the Great Leap, Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea. In China, approximately 700 million people survived the Great Leap even though it is reported that there was widespread famine and that the leaders made all agricultural mistakes that one could imagine (this was ordered by Mao, for example planting too densely or too late or too early). At that time, there was no widespread use of fossil fuels in China's agricuture, most things were done by hand. Extrapolate this to India: another 450 million (pre-green revolution population, compare to present population of those two countries (2.4 billion combined) and then extrapolate to world: about 3 billion. Increases due to nuclear, photovoltaics, wind energy, fusion etc. would have to be added to that.
K, is not necessarily a constant over longer periods of time, over enough time even K would even be a variable. One might argue that due to the destruction of our environment and other various non-reversible processes we have set up that, K may indeed be lower than it was before. K depends upon a large variety of factors such as resource availability, air quality, water quality, soil quality and other abstract factors. I would argue Nate, that whatever K will be in 2050, while it will obviously be lower than what it was today, due to the depletion of non-renewable resources, there is much stored energy left over from our industrial frenzy in the form of processed metals and materials that may be useful for many decades after the end of the fossil fuel age much may be salvaged and recycled, which would make K higher than you'd think. Anyway, This article indirectly proposes something that I am still not sure of, and that is that it is impossible to have a renewable energy system besides that of of biological origin, with enough of an energy return on investment to finance its infrastructure cost and be left with a surplus. There is nothing to lead me to believe for sure that such a process could not be created if it doesn't exist already. After all, life is just a process that turns energy into work and is self replicating due to this surplus, for what reason would a process of non-biological origin not be able to do that same? What do you think?
A 1M versus 1B population maximum will not be important for at least 6/7ths of the worlds population.
The wide range of estimates illustrates the fact that these are simply educated guesses, and no one really has a clue, despite the sciencey presentation of the guess.
As Nate points out, K depends entirely on what level of lifestyle is deemed acceptable, and what the hell is meant by sustainable anyway. Since even flint is a non-reneweable resources, does that mean stone tools are out?
Without some quantifiable measures and explicit statement of requirements, the debate is rendered almost completely meaningless.
Yes.
On the other hand, anything made from air or seawater will be available as long as those two resources exist (IOW, until the Sun brightens to the point that Earth goes into a wet-greenhouse phase).
This means that organic polymers, graphite fiber and magnesium won't have resource constraints for several hundred million years.
"K" is, obviously, the "Proponent" of the theory, and, however many minions that are required to keep him well-fed, well-clothed, and happy.
Once human population begins to fall it will have some negative rate of growth, and that negative rate of growth will produce a halving period. If the rate is -3.5%, not something unrealistic to surmise, then 20 years hence the human population will be 1/2 of its peak. The first halving period will be the biggest absolute drop, simply because it started at the largest value ever achieved. Were it to begin today, then 3.25 billion would be the first 20 year death toll.
But extinction! I suppose it depends upon what nature unleashes upon us in her attempt to reel in our excess numbers. And so the pendulum will swing.
The correct link to the Abernethy reference is:
www.int-res.com/articles/esep/2002/article1.pdf
For those interested, Abernethy's website is here
http://www.virginiaabernethy.com/
There are several worthwhile papers linked from the publications page.
I fixed the link. Thanks for the link correction and other information.
The author says:
From this statement, it is quite clear that the Salonius knows very little about the theory, and nothing at all about the practical application, of permaculture techniques. The central premise of permaculture is to grow food in a fashion that avoids exactly those pitfalls he is describing. A related set of techniques allows one to actively build soil while producing meat using high-intensity rapid-rotation grazing (e.g. Joe Salatin).
Permaculture can produce substantially more food per acre than conventional techniques. The major limitation is that it requires much more involvement by the farmer, more physical labor per acre, and the farmer must have an uncommon level of skill and intimacy with the land. So current circumstances do not support these farming techniques in terms of economics or cultural expectations. But the limitation is not technical.
Given the author's profound misunderstanding of one of the major techniques for creating sustainable civilization, I think we can safely discount his defeatist, Oludavi-eque conclusions.
Just to be clear, I am not saying that our carrying capacity is infinite. It's not. I'm also not saying that we can sustain our current level of population even with the best possible implementation of the best possible practices. (I think it might be possible, but it's very much an open question in my mind. Practically speaking, it's probably not if only because the actual implementation is going to be far from ideal.)
I am saying that the author's premises that all agricultural is unsustainable on any scale, and that a hunting-gathering ecology is the only sustainable one, are absurd.
GreenEngineer mistakenly puts these words into my mouth:
"a hunting-gathering ecology is the only sustainable one"
--- while close reading of my article will show that I suggested human numbers must fall toward those supported by renewable resources/ecosystems at the time of the hunter-gatherers, before the advent of the resource mining carried out by cultivation agriculture. Life style (hunter-gathering or NY 5th Avenue consumerism)will determine how many of us can be sustained by self managing natural ecosystems.
GreenEngineer, it would be great if you could help fill the rest of us in on what Salonius is missing concerning the application of Permaculture techniques. I've only read a couple of articles about Permaculture, and it is possible that other TODers have the same hole in their ag-education that I have, and only vaguely recall something about zones and the importance of tree crops.
More specifically, how does Permaculture avoid cultivation and the loss of nutrients that Salonius says we need to move away from, and how is it more labor intensive if the gardener/farmer isn't out digging, amending, mulching, planting, etc.?
Permaculture never plants monocrops. The entire point of permaculture is to mimic the "complex, species diverse, self-managing, nutrient conservative, deep rooted, natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems" substituting in some human food plants. A proper permaculture crop will be a mixture of plants that provide for human needs, plants that provide for the needs (food and habitat) of local helpful fauna, and plants that help protect and regenerate the soil.
Soil management is key. Stormwater is treated like the valuable resource it is, and is infiltrated on site. This minimizes erosion. Depending on soil type and rainfall level, this can lead to the formation of an underground "water lens" -- basically a small local aquifer -- to support plants through the dry season.
A thick mulch suppresses weeds and conserves water, and adds organic matter back to the soil as it breaks down.
A permaculture food production system will rely much more heavily on perennials, including trees, than we currently do. Perennials don't need to regenerate their structure every year, just their fruit, so they tend to be less depleting over time. Also, they have extensive root systems, which makes them less dependent on soil amendments.
When growing annual crops, you will plant more than one thing in any given place. Plants that have different growing cycles, nutrient requirements, and/or canopy and root zone space requirements are often good companions. Garlic and strawberries are a classic example: the strawberries cover the soil, while the garlic goes vertical. The three (or four) sisters (corns, beans, squash, and perhaps an insectiary plant) is another classic.
As a technique for backyard gardening, permaculture is actually much lower labor than most standard gardening techniques: good design, lots of mulch, and attention to the environmental needs of plants all help reduce the requirements on the gardener. But relative to standard farming techniques (where one human may "farm" hundreds of acres), the labor input is much higher (for annuals -- not so much with perennials). Partly this is because a polycultural crop does not mechanize well. Weeding tends to be by hand -- mulching keeps the weeds down, but you still wind up doing a lot of weeding on a big plot, if you're not going to use herbicides. Mulching is an ongoing process. And some of the techniques simply require frequent attention. The animals protocols, for example, typically have you moving your heard every day or two.
A capsule summary of permaculture is hard to do, because there are so many techniques that fall under the rubric. So this is not meant to be exhaustive.
A question then.
Just exactly where does one obtain or access all this huge amount of "mulch"?
Take it from another location perhaps?
Its not so easy to cover a plot with enough mulch. I know for I am attempting the same this very season. I have access to large round hay bales and am using that. Otherwise I would have zero. I chopped up my corn stalks, I pulverized my bean vines. I even used the grasses and weeds that had taken over portions of the garden and yet I had a very small stingy amount after all that.
Stealing mulch from another location just robs Peter to pay Paul.
One will basically HAVE to produce that mulch on the exact same plot that he is using for his permaculture.
Part of my plan was to use deadfall limbs from the nearby woods. But alas that suffers the soil being created in the woods and using limbs is very tiring.
Your solution then?
Airdale
Farm-scale mulching is a challenge, no question about it. I once sheet-mulched a half acre. It was a bitch. Would have worked, though, except that the damn wild turkey flock decided that our sheetmulch was a good place to dig for worms and such.
Anyway: You will want to grow as much mulch as you can on-site, of course, but bringing it in from the outside is not necessarily "robbing Peter to pay Paul". It depends on why you want the mulch: is it for nutrients, or for organic matter and soil structure? If the latter, then you can safely import that all day long -- most of the organic matter is former atmospheric carbon that has been converted to cellulose.
Anyway, if you want specific suggestions, you'll have to give me more to work with. What size plot, what climate, what's the condition of the soil, what local resources are available nearby, what level of technology is available to you, what level of money is available, what is the timescale, what are the desired results, is this a professional farming situation or a hobby garden, etc?
Don't forget about killed mulches and living mulches.
Haven't you ever read about "two legged tractors". Those turkeys were doing you a low energy favour. They were mixing dirt with the mulch speading up composting. lol
While living in a city for a while I had a rather large garden (about 0.15 acres). Once a year in the fall I would take a rather large trailer throughout neighbouring streets and pick up the mountains of plastic bags of leaves that people had thrown away as "useless trash". I then sheet-composted the whole garden with a 15 cm layer of leaves. Never needed any other amendments. Those same people who threw out their leaves as useless trash probably went out to the nearest garden shop and bought soluble fertilizers for their gardens. Btw the leaves made a perfect insulation for carrots in winter. I just brushed aside the snow and leaves and dug the carrots in mid-winter - they never froze even with -15 temperatures.
My wife and I have been raising food on our 1/3 acre suburban lot using permaculture techniques. After 2 years of working the lot we're pretty confident that we can - with intensive effort - raise nearly all our fruits and vegetables on this plot. With the cash basis of our market economy I don't see many people having the time to do the same. And when cash fails, it will be too late to learn the skills.
The big issue for us is that we don't have room to raise enough grain, and grain is a significant portion of our diet. There are permaculture techniques for growing grains, see Fukuoka and The One-Straw Revolution.
In our area, Eugene Oregon, there is a vast amount of acreage devoted to grass seed growing. The local permaculture community is working with farmers to convert to grain production. We probably won't be able to get the farmers to use labor intensive permaculture techniques, but establish a local gain market would be a big step forward.
You also have to have meat, milk, eggs etc that is animal products because they are they only source of vitamin b-12, you can't live purely on a vegetarian diet. Getting animal products is the most expensive process in terms of land usage. You need atleast 16 kg hay/grain to get 1 kg beef, 10 kg hay/grain to get 1 kg mutton, 4 kg grains to get 1 kg chicken/fish, 3 kg hay/grain to get 1 kg cow milk. If you go for non-cow milk, non-chicken eggs the ratio is much larger. These figures are for the experienced farmers, for amateurs ratios tend to be much high, atleast double.
Spirulina & Chlorella are excellent non-animal sources of B-12, and they grow abundantly in many lentic habitats.
Please do not use this incorrect information. Vitamin B-12 is found in a lot of things other than animal products, including vitamin supplements, your feces, and dirt. (Strictly speaking your feces are an animal product, but it's not from a livestock animal or something else hunted or fished.) Vitamin B-12 is not manufactured by animals; it is manufactured by bacteria. Much of the B-12 in meat is probably due to fecal contamination during the slaughter process. My discussion in "A Vegetarian Sourcebook," chapter 3, (fourth printing 1993) is somewhat dated but still pertinent.
One study of "third-world" vegans in Iran found that they had quite high levels of B-12, although vegans in England scored considerably lower. Victor Herbert, a researcher unsympathetic to veganism, has stated: "Strict vegetarians [vegans] who do not practice thorough hand washing or vegetable cleaning may be untroubled by vitamin B-12 deficiency." (Am.J.Clin.Nutr.48(3):852, 1988). It is likely that B-12 deficiency due to dietary deficiency was unknown prior to the 18th century or so, for this reason. (Pernicious anemia due to inability to absorb B-12 is, I believe, still the leading cause of B-12 deficiency.)
Supplementation (B-12 grown in a medium, not from meat or dairy or other animal products) is extremely inexpensive and will likely survive in most post-peak oil scenarios. It is a lot less costly and energy-intensive than, say, growing a cow and killing it and eating it. B-12 deficiencies are rare even among Western vegans. Supplementation of soymilk and other products with B-12 is increasingly common. Human feces contain B-12, but it is manufactured in the lower colon below the point at which vitamins can be absorbed. There is debate about whether some of this B-12 may actually be manufactured in the small intestine, where it could be absorbed, which has not been resolved the last I checked, which was some time ago.
While this would be highly disgusting and unlikely to be adopted even by fanatical vegans, strictly speaking you could get B-12 from eating your own feces, hopefully after cooking it to destroy pathogens. You wouldn't need much because your B-12 requirement is extremely small (it's measured in micrograms). The third-world vegans in Iran cited above grew their vegetables using human manure, the likely source of their B-12.
It is a phenomenal waste of resources to eat animal products to get B-12. This is like saying that we'll have to continue to use cars because it's too difficult to get to the grocery store on foot and otherwise we'll starve. Livestock agriculture is responsible for an incredible amount of environmental destruction, including creating much of the Sahara desert, being the leading cause of soil erosion historically, and being one of the leading contributors to global warming (18% of total human-caused warming). There may be reasons to eat meat, but getting enough B-12 is not one of them.
Keith Akers
That is the worst post I ever read, somebody actually suggest eating human excretions, when will you start doing it?
You are unable to give any vegetarian product that grow naturally that can provide vitamin b-12. Please don't expect people to depend on supplements to get this. Those supplements is another invention of west that will God knows better how harm humans in the long run. Westerners have destroyed everything they touched.
Please don't expect people to eat excretions or dirt to meet a regular, routine need of their bodies.
Please also don't use tod to advertise your books, trust me, nobody will buy it from here. If you want to give a proof please give one that is either on web or is freely and readily available in all major libraries of world, thanks.
That iranian study you quoted raise a question? Were they pure vegetarians or partial vegetarians? Pure vegetarians don't touch any animal product at all including eggs and milk, partial vegetarians do so. Almost all of world vegetarians are partial vegetarians. Pure vegetarians end up in hospital after 2 to 3 years (usual time for which body store vitamin b-12) and put themselves on a regular diet of supplements.
Reason you hate keeping animals is that you have only looked at industrial beef farms in europe and america, you have never came acrossed a pure and true farm in india or china where animals are kept as a regular help at farms. Their dung is a welcome and anticipated source of ... no ... not vitamin b-12 ... its poisonous to eat dung, seriously, it can kill you, never ever do it please ... but of soil nutrients. These animals unlike poor cows of industrial beef farms are fed on straw/hay that grow with grains and on grass and leaves of orchards.
Vitamin b-12's deficiency was unknown before 1800 because 98% of world population lived at villages and kept camels, lamas, cows, goats etc and drink its milk. Even the strictest vegetarian, a typical hindu love to drink milk. You not have to eat meat to get vitamin b-12, drinking 250 gm milk per day is enough.
Fish is also a great source of vitamin b-12.
You can destroy your environment without keeping any animals if you not know how to husband your resources and you can very well get along with your environment if you know the right way of doing things. Bulls were worshipped in almost all major ancient civilizations including babylon, indus-valley etc and yet the soil's fertility was maintained.
The key to sustainable farming is application of dung to farm.
Wisdom from Pakistan, thanks for your interesting reply. The issue is whether you need animal products (meat, dairy, etc.) to get vitamin B-12, as you asserted. The answer is "no." This is a factual question, not a matter of opinion, and nothing in your response contradicts this.
You find Western vitamin supplements disgusting: I find the slaughter of animals and the mutilation of the environment disgusting: and we both find eating dirt or our own feces disgusting. Let us agree to disagree on these matters of opinion, and discuss matters of fact as they relate to the subject being discussed.
I am not trying to promote by book on TOD, I am simply citing my sources in case you want more information. There are many authors here on TOD and from time to time they may cite their own work when it is directly relevant to a question that is raised. The book is somewhat out of date (first published by Putnam's in 1983) but was widely cited in vegetarian circles and the footnotes are still valid. Dr. David Pimentel of Cornell gave an endorsement of it, among many others. My book is widely available in libraries around the world and is available on Amazon.com for US $0.01 (seriously, I just checked it -- you have to pay shipping, though).
Here are some old references on studies of vitamin B-12 deficiency, one of them (I forget which) has the data on vegans in Iran. As I recall, the authors cite the use of human manure on their vegetables as the probable source of their B-12.
(a) Am J. Clin Nutr. 3(5):375, Sept.-Oct. 1955 "Human Dietary Deficiency of Vitamin B-12."
(b) British Medical Journal 1:1655, 16 June 1962, "Veganism, a Clinical Survey with observations of Bitamin B-12 Metabolism."
(c) Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 23(3): 249, March 1970. "Veganism, Clinical Findings and Investigations."
All the best,
Keith
Joel Salatin claims to have a formula for sustainable livestock and poultry production. Here in Eugene my wife and I formed a small co-op to buy a cow raised by a local farmer under natural conditions, no drugs, pasture raised, etc. We are very satisfied with the results and will do it again next year.
I was at Joel Salatin's farm this last Saturday. They compose manure in more than one way, though the one way I studied is to spread it in greenhouse-like winter poultry houses mixed with waste wood chips, with rabbit hutches suspended about 4 feet high on the walls. The rabbits' droppings are consumed by overwintering chickens who also scratch at the bioactive woodchip mix. The entire 'ecosystem' stays warm all winter, and by spring the mix is a rich, thick, black compose, high in many nutrients and low in intestinal parasites (eaten by the chickens).
Could one plant potatoes instead of grain? This may be a reasonable substitute.
Vaclav Smil (in which book I forget, but I have it), says that the EROI of root vegetables is 20-30:1. I can attest by my 6+ bushel baskets of potatoes this year (more than we can possibly eat) that one can grow one heck of alot of food on a small plot. However, if I subtract out the time I spent picking potato bugs by hand off the plants, the EROTI was quite a bit lower...Also there is decreasing 'utility' from potatoes -5th night in a row...;-)
Yeah^3 on potatoes. If I had to grow bulk calories, that would be one of my major strategies.
In our backyard (in Northern California), we have had potatoes growing since we moved in. We haven't planted any of them -- they're just growing feral, despite our heavy clay soil utterly lacking in organic matter. And they're yummy Yukon Golds, or something very similar. I can't imagine what would happen if we actually cultivated some.
Sweet potato for me gave a time in (3 days of prep, planting, weeding and harvest) for 30 days worth of food calories from 30 square meters, unirrigated. It is easier to measure human time than energy since it is the ultimate limiting factor. This proxy EROEI of 10 is enough to sustain a society of moderate complexity.
Root crops in general need more water that grains, and store for shorter periods, so can only form a part of a functional diet in any places that dont get reliable heavy rainfall (ie Ireland, Papua New Guinea). Even Andean potatos need predictable rainfall, even if it isnt heavy. The calories per area are about the same as grains when fertiliser and water applications arent available. Solution- if you only have so much fertiliser and water on hand, use it to grow a bumper root crop. Make up the rest of your needs with a low demand grain crop. Rotate the grain crop into the root crops space next year to vacuum up the left over nutrients.
void_genesis, THANKS for the sweet potato yield data!
Great, now we have some real data to calculate the carrying capacity of planet Earth (K in the discussion upthread): you produced calories for 30 days on 30 square meters. This would be calories for 365 days on 365 m2, round that up to 400 for storage losses. Add another 800 m2 for crop rotation gives 1200 m2 arable land needed per person. That means about 3 people per acre or 8 per hectare, 800 per square km. China has about 1 million km2 arable land, leading to 800 million carrying capacity presuming the the non-arable 8 million km2 don't add anything to K - well, one needs to produce wood somewhere. The USA has slightly more arable land than China - let's say K = 800 million too, slightly more comfortable life. The world has 19 million km2 of arable land (Wikipedia), this gives us, surprisingly,
K = 15 billion people
remember, if you live at K, there are frequent famines because harvests fluctuate and there is no surplus for storage. But, life as a hunter-gatherer also produces frequent famines when the prey migrates away etc.
I think your data disproves the assumptions in the Salonius post. Biosolar would work, we don't need to become hunter-gatherers again. The claim of soil erosion to be an unavoidable by-product of you growing sweet potatos also doesn't hold: on such a small plot it is possible to build terraces with your bare hands and to return all nutrients to the soil (even though disgusting to many, but what do you do to survive).
No question though that life way below K would be more fun, let's say 6 billion people. The Japanese, Russians, Germans, Italians etc. are already at work returning population to that level.
I think I picked this up here at TOD some time ago. One of the real pluses for root crops, potatoes, carrots, onions etc, is that they are more tolerant of weather and climate variations. Makes serious sense to me. I increased my potatoe plot this year, big time. We had a really off year on the salad garden but the onions, potatoes, and turnips are just fine. Something to think about in the coming years.
Don in Maine
One can, look at pre-famine Ireland. Turnips and beets work too.
Your phrasing would imply that hay and grain trade off kilo for kilo. Not so at all. Also, even if you claim that grazing and hay swap evenly, which they don't, just let your chickens loose in the garden. They'd rather eat free bugs than purchased grain. And I grow lots of mutton on land that can't be hayed, let alone grow grain. Pakistan has land like that too. It's why the tribal areas are still tribal.
My grandmother-in-law gets 100kg. of rice out of about 140 sq.ft. (Modern farming, unfortunately.) We don't eat rice every day, despite my being married to a Korean and living in Korea, but double that would do if we did. Doubling that with a barley fall/winter crop would essentially double your grains.
Are you not finding these numbers to hold up, or do you not have even that much space?
Cheers
Although many parts of the article are rather dubious, let's accept the premises of the article that we are in gross overshoot.
So what are the chances that a RPD protocol could be adopted? The author suggests governments will realise the problem and promote RPD, which appears to show a severe misunderstanding of how democratic governments work.
Given the unlikelihood of RPD happening, that suggests civilisation will hang on to industrial agriculture for as long as possible. Either this strategy will "work", for some value of sustainable, or massive collapse occurs. I think it's going to be all or nothing.
BobCousins states that I suggest:
"governments will realise the problem and promote RPD, which appears to show a severe misunderstanding of how democratic governments work." Damn, I hate being criticized for statements I have not made.
BobCousins should read and digest the following excerpt from my article:
*** Balancing of human numbers with the productivity of their supporting local ecosystems may be accomplished by planed attrition, much lower birth rates and the economic dislocations and hardships that a retreat from classical economic growth will incur, or the balancing of human numbers may be accomplished by a catastrophic collapse imposed by natural resource scarcity. The species with the large brain must make the choice between economic hardship and catastrophic collapse.***
The essence of democracy is that the people get to lead their governments toward common sense solutions or disaster -- then they have to live with the results of what they have instructed their governments to do.
You are one of those people who write things and then deny it when challenged. You wrote:
My paraphrase was accurate.
"The essence of democracy is that the people get to lead their governments toward common sense solutions"
That's not true either, but anyway contradicts what you wrote before. Is it the government trying to "achieve general acceptance" or the people leading the government towards acceptance? Please make up your mind.
Either you write very badly or you are unwilling to debate what you actually wrote. Either way, I'm done with your evasion and patronising tone.
Just before BobCousins decided to withdraw from this discussion he quoted me as writing:
"Governments, as they become convinced that RPD is necessary, may choose monetary incentives, tax breaks and/or penalties to achieve general acceptance of OCPF or some other RPD program."
Then he wrote:
"Is it the government trying to "achieve general acceptance" or the people leading the government towards acceptance? Please make up your mind."
RESPONSE: In a democracy, people lead government ----- so when/and if governments ascertain that Rapid Population Decline is the 'flavour of the month', then government will mount a campaign to "achieve general acceptance" so that they can bring in " monetary incentives, tax breaks and/or penalties" without being pilloried in the next election.
Apparently disagreement for BobCousins constitute "evasion and patronizing tone".
Such a government does not seem to exist on any large scale anywhere in the world. The EU is an unaccountable bureaucracy, the US seems to be a plutocracy, Russia and China are de facto dictatorships.
With respect to Engineer-Poet's assertion about people leading governments -- as he writes "Such a government does not seem to exist on any large scale anywhere in the world."-----
--- I RESPOND: In Canada and many other democracies, inordinant amounts of time, money and energy are spent on polls and surveys to find out what is acceptable to the voters. In totalitarian regimes, riding roughshod over the will of the people often results in the death of the perpetrators.
Fascinating article and discussion.
FWIW, I don't think we can come to any meaningful conclusion about carrying capacity, reversion to hunter-gatherer lifestyle or whether agriculture can ever be sustainable.
These topics are fun to talk about though.
More relevant are technologies and practices that are MORE sustainable than what we have at present.
Peter's field, soil microbiology, deals with some of the most intriguing possibilities for sustainability. I wrote Soil food web - opening the lid of the black box to try to understand the new field of soil ecology.
Imagine if we would put a fraction of the money into sustainable agriculture that we currently invest in the development and marketing of junk foods. Perhaps we'd have some good answers by now.
Bart
Energy BUlletin
"These are good first steps that recognize global trade will wane as fossil fuel depletion gains momentum. "
hmmm. As far as I can tell, that doesn't make sense.
Long distance land shipping can go by electrified rail, local can go by plug-in hybrid truck, and water shipping can find substitutes for oil.
Substitutes for oil for water shipping? Pshaw, you say.
No, really. Substitutes include greater efficiency, wind, solar, battery power and renewably generated hydrogen.
Efficiency: Fuel consumption per mile is roughly the square of speed, so slowing down saves fuel: lately, with high fuel costs, most container shipping has slowed down 20%, and reduced fuel consumption by roughly a third. For example, Kennebec Captain's ship ( http://kennebeccaptain.blogspot.com/2008/08/shipping-cars-cargo-per-ton-... )carries 5,000 cars from Japan to Europe (12,000 miles) and burns 8.5 miles/ton of fuel at 18.5knots, for a total of about 1,400 tons of fuel. At a 10% lower speed of 16.6 kts, the ship burns 21% less fuel (about 300 tons).
Size brings efficiency: the Emma Maersk uses about 320 tons of fuel per day to carry 220,000 tons of cargo, while Kennebec Captain's ship uses about 60 tons to carry about 23,000 tons (see http://www.ships-info.info/label-car-carriers.htm ), so the Emma Maersk uses roughly 60% as much fuel per ton.
Other substantial sources of savings include better hull (possibly including axe cleaver designs) and engine design (very large (3 story!)marine diesels can get up to 50% thermodynamic efficiency), and low friction hull coatings (the Emma Mærsk saves about 1.3% that way).
Wind: kites mounted on the ship's bow have been shown to provide 10-30% of ship's power - this is cost effective now. See http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/01/beluga_shipping.html and
http://www.skysails.info/index.php?L=1 It's astonishing what can be done with modern materials, computer-aided design, and electronic control systems, to turn the old new again.
Solar: The first question is: is it cost effective? Sure - it's just straightforward calculations: PV can generate power for the equivalent of diesel at $3/gallon (40KWH per gallon @40% efficiency = 16 KWH/gallon; $3/16KWH = bout $.20/KWH.
Let's take the Emma Mærsk ( http://www.maersk.com/NR/rdonlyres/53C3A206-24BD-4290-9FE9-417971C4A710/0/EmmaMærskL203FactSheetUK.pdf ). With length: 397 metres, and beam: 56 metres, it has a surface area of 22,400 sq m. At 20% efficiency we get about 4.5MW on the ship's deck at peak power. Now, as best I can tell it probably uses about 10MW at 12 knots (very roughly a minimum speed), 20MW at 15 knots, and 65MW (80% of engine rated power) at 25.5 knots (roughly a maximum). So, at minimum speed it could get about 45% of it's power for something close to 20% of the time, for a net of 9%. Now, if we want to increase that we'll need either higher efficiency PV, or more surface area from outriggers or something towed, perhaps using flexible PV.
Batteries: Large batteries could provide most of the remaining power needed, to be recharged at frequent port stops, as used to be done with coal. Let's analyze li-ion batteries: assume 20MW engine power at a cruising speed a speed of 15 knots (17.25 mph) or 20MW auxiliary assistance to a higher speed, and a needed port-to-port range of 2,000 miles (a range that was considered extremely good in the era of coal ships - the average length of a full trip is about 4,500 miles
http://vi.unctad.org/trasnpfaccd/docs/occ_55.pdf, chart 8 ). That's 116 hours of travel, and 2,310 MW hours needed. At 200whrs per kg, that's 11,594 metric tons. The Emma Maersk has a capacity of 172,990 metric tons, so we'd need about 7% of it's capacity (by weight) to add batteries.
So, li-ion would do. Now it would be more expensive than many alternatives that would be practical in a "captive" fleet like this - many high energy density, much less expensive batteries exist whose charging is very inconvenient, but could be swapped out in an application like this. It should be noted that research continues on batteries with much higher density still, http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/07/researchers-d-2.html , but existing batteries would suffice.
Hydrogen fuel cells: they can't compete with batteries in cars, but they'd work just fine in ships, where creation of a fleet fueling network would be far simpler, and where miniaturization of the fuel cell isn't essential. If batteries, the preferred solution for light surface vehicles, can't provide a complete solution, a hydrogen "range extender" would work quite well.
Hydrogen has more energy per unit mass than other fuels (61,100 BTUs per pound versus 20,900 BTUs per pound of gasoline), and fuel cells are perhaps 50% more efficient, so hydrogen would weigh less than 1/3 as much as diesel fuel.
Electricity storage using hydrogen will likely cost at least 2x as much as using batteries (due to inherent conversion inefficiency), but will still be much cheaper then current fuel prices. Fuel cells aren't especially heavy relative to this use: fuel cell mass 325 W/kg (FreedomCar goal) gives 32.5 MW = 100 metric tons, probably less than a 80MW diesel engine.
Hydrogen would have lower upfront costs versus batteries, and a lower weight penalty, but would have substantially higher operating costs. The optimal mix of batteries and hydrogen would depend on the relative future costs, but we can be confident that they would be affordable relative to, say, $150 oil.
How much to put electric rail accross the Bering Straight and eliminate water shipping altogether?
But water shipping is 3x as efficient energywise as rail, so even with the problem of onboard energy storage it's very likely to be more cost-effective than rail.
Plus that would be a pretty expensive bridge, a mighty big bottleneck for trade, and a long detour for most things.
You are completely ignoring time constraints in terms of onset of crises and time to transition. The quote you responded to made sense. Your response lacked full consideration of the issues.
Cheers
"You are completely ignoring time constraints in terms of onset of crises and time to transition."
True, I didn't include time constraints. OTOH, the Original Post didn't include them either. Instead, it asserts that we are dealing with theoretical, absolute resource limitations. I am asserting that some of the resource limits assumed in the OP are not realistic.
I agree that time constraints are an important issue - in fact I would suggest that they are the primary issue for energy (as represented by flow rates vs reserves, capex lag for wind/solar/EV's, etc). But, that's another discussion, which would be much more complex.
Let's look at a main quote:
"The global human family has become dependent upon the enhanced food production made possible by temporary supplies of non-renewable geologically stored fossil and nuclear energy. ... As access to the energy upon which complex industrial societies are dependent becomes more expensive and less available during the twenty-first century, human population numbers will (emphasis added)have to be brought into balance with the sustainable productivity levels of the local ecosystems upon which they rely for their sustenance. "
Here's another: "Food production per capita must (emphasis added) fall as horses and oxen must again be fed from crop land and as access to fossil fuel dependent fertilizers diminishes. "
Here's another: "We can expect that the unsustainable exploitation of soil will (emphasis added)become increasingly apparent as the depletion of petroleum begins to affect the production of foodstuffs by unsustainable farming".
Here's another: "global trade will (emphasis added)wane as fossil fuel depletion gains momentum".
Here's another: "Obviously (emphasis added), as we move back toward a solar-energy dependent economy based on self-managing natural ecosystems, we will no longer be able to (emphasis added) run the massive ecological deficits that temporary fossil and nuclear fuel availability have allowed. Just as obviously (emphasis added), the solar-energy dependent economy will not support the human numbers..."
There's nothing here about time delays, or even about social problems possibly impeding a transition to renewables and electric transportation/farm equipment. Nothing probabilistic about the risks of a successful transition. Just an absolute statement that fossil fuel limits will necessarily cause drastic problems. Now, I see some hints that the author isn't relying on FF depletion, when he talks about the need to deal with a wide range of resource limits (including water and soil) simultaneously, but do you see something that contradicts these absolute statements, somewhere in the Post? Could you point it out?
It looks to me that if the thesis of limits to energy is refuted then this Post (as written) is seriously weakened.
I'm glad to see that it's not just me.
No, it's definitely not just you.
The one thing I haven't addressed, that I know can be addressed fairly straightforwardly, is the ammonia fertilizer/hydrogen problem.
You've written about that before, both elsewhere and in another comment here. Do you feel like addressing that at greater length (I think people probably missed it)?
BTW, here's a hybrid tractor.
From the descriptions of the effect of tailored crop rotations elsewhere in this thread, it looks like production of ammonia is simply not needed on the scale we're doing it. The demand for nitrogen supplements is a consequence of mono-cropping, which in turn is fallout from agricultural policy. Fix the policy, renew the rotations, and a lot of ammonia demand will just vanish. Converting e.g. corn stover to charcoal to add in as terra preta will hold more nutrient ions and further cut demand.
Its hilarious to see people giving as much varying numbers for carrying capacity of earth as 1 million to 1 billion. Getting food by hunting animals is no doubt the least efficient way. First you rely on only as much plants being grown as they do naturally, then you let lots of insects, animals etc that humans don't eat consume those plants, only a small part of the plant material is consumed by animals that humans eat and finally you share your food with lions, tigers etc. If you grow your own crop than the plant material that is grown is 10 to 100 times more than what is grown naturally. If you rely on rain water as the only source of water for your crops, that is you not make any canals, dams etc and don't take river water you still can grow on average 10 times more plant material that can be grown naturally. If you do use dams, canals etc and do apply human and animal dung back to soil you can easily grow 40 to 50 times what can be grown naturally. You limit the number of unwanted insects and animals around your crops and you eat and milk animals that have a higher meat/milk ratio to hay/grains.
Europeans and their derivatives americans forget that about half of the world population live in only two countries india and china and both of these are able to sustainably support a large population since past six thousand years. The trick to the game is to return everything you get out of farm back to the farm. If you have cities and 20,000 cart loads of hay and grains go in city every day then 20,000 cart loads of dung must come out of the city every day and be applied to farm sooner or later.
Europeans hate applying dung to farm all through history till today. One of the tasks of the mythical hercules was to clean farm of a farmer from the dung, washing it away in the river water, something any indian, chinese, egyptian, babylonian etc farmer of the age would know is disasterous. For decades farmers in america and europe paid large amounts of money getting fertilizers from an island which had birds' dung gathered many feet deeps through centuries. Why not simply return to farm what you take out of farm?
Ok, now you might ask what about erosion. The process of actually losing the top soil. One way is to not use canal water, this reduce the soil run off with water to 1%. Another way is to keep forest around your village, that is when you initially cut forest to make a village you keep some of the forest around your village. The existence of trees around your village would reduce the soil run off to almost zero.
Another golden rule is to have only one crop each year. That is the natural way because there is only one spring season in a year. Keep the six months of winter to let some nitrogen fixing plants being grown if you live in hot climate or snow to accumulate and increase nitrogen of soil if you live in cold climate. Europeans in middle ages basically used land once every two or three years. We know that during 1000 years between 500 ce (after decline of western roman empire) and 1500 ce (before start of modern era) european farm lands gained 2 inches of top soil due to that three-field or two-field policy of middle ages. Even though in the stated era europeans weren't returning human and animal dung back to farm still they were able to support on average one person on every 4 arable acres. That is obvious from the size of a typical manor 1500 acres and its population 300 with 80% arable land, rest 20% is rocks, paths, houses etc.
Ancient egyptians also don't return dung to the farms, yet they were able to build and sustain a large empire for thousands of years. River nile bring enough potassium and phosphorus each year that if half of it is used (half of the sediments of river nile used to get deposited on farms after annual storm water go back, the other half sediments get deposited in mediterranean) a maximum 6 million people can be supported in egypt. There is a reason why ancient egyptian population never grow more than 6 million.
My own calculations told me that if have a balanced diet each person need about 4 kg nitrogen, 2.7 kg phosphorus and 0.6 kg potassium. If you are having 20 inches or more of rain or as much snow as is equal to 10 inches or more of rain then you are on average getting 4 kg nitrogen in your soil naturally just from rain or snow. To get phosphorus and potassium you have to at some stage either return the dung to farm or use canal water. If your river is giving you one acre-ft or more of water per acre then for most of the world's river you are getting on average 2.7 kg phosphorus and 0.6 kg potassium just from the canal water.
So, what is world's carrying capacity. Once you agree at a diet of 100 kg fruits, 100 kg grains, 100 kg milk, 25 kg meat, 25 kg vegetables, 12.5 kg spices, 12.5 kg dry fruits, 12.5 kg sugar/honey and 12.5 kg oil per year per person then you need only one acre of arable land per person if you are using only rain water as water source and getting only 10 inches rain per year.
Lets see some historical data:
In europe starting from the first village till green revolution, on average 4 acres of arable land was able to support one person. That is obvious from the minor size and its population.
In india, at the peak of mughal empire in 1700 ce, 150 million people were living in 450 million arable acres without any loss of wild life. Assuming that one-third arable land was left untouched in form of ancient forests (mostly in afghanistan, punjab and upper india) 2 arable acres were needed to support one person.
Data of ancient china, egypt, iraq, palestine etc would also support the above facts.
We can conclude that if you do apply the dung to farm you need only 2 arable acres per person, if you don't you need 4 arable acres.
There is a problem in this analysis, which is that we are assuming that the diet of a european was equal to the diet of an indian which we know was not the case. Europeans were getting much much poorer diet, one of the reasons of so many plagues and diseases and low population. Europe had 6 million people in 1500 ce, india had about 150 million.
European diet for most part was limited to oats in grains and apples, berries, cherries in fruits. Meat was very limitidly used. Indian diet used a variety of grains including wheat, fruits eaten were also of a very diverse and wide variety and meat usage was also much higher than european usage of the age. Note that even though hindus which made a large proportion of indian population of 1700 ce do not consume beef but most of them did consume mutton, chicken, eggs etc.
So, what if european diet of middle ages was same as indian diet of that time. Given the fact that in europe oats had twice as much yield as wheat and applies, berries, cherries etc had twice as much yield as average of all fruits, european diet being limited in variety had half as much impact on land or have half as much foot print as it would have if they had a balanced diet. Therefore, we can conclude that if european diet of middle ages was as diverse as indian diet of that time a european would need 8 acres of arable land rather than 4 acres told above.
This shows that application of dung to soil increase soil fertility and carrying capacity 4 times.
We can say that europe of middle ages being scarce in population and thickly covered with forests had the luxury of not fully incorporating agriculture or in other words not doing the real agriculture. Their form of living was between hunter-gathering and farming. The real, sustainable and dependable agriculture is what was practised in india and china.
If you keep population where it is then india having 450 million acres can sustainably support only 150 million people at maximum as it used to in middle ages. India has btw 1500 million people now, that is ten times. Egypt never had more than 6 million people in ancient time, today it has over 60 million people, therefore it is also ten times over populated. If you look closely you can find that more or less entire world is populated ten times as it used to be at peak of local empires. At times when local empires were not at its peak populations used to be about half. For example in egypt during reigns of pharoahs population used to vary between 3 million and 6 million.
Therefore, we can conclude that the real, sustainable carrying capacity of world while keeping population where it is (that is without mass immigrations of say indians and chinese to americas) and while keeping good amounts of wild life and forests is between 300 million and 600 million.
Forager-scavenger societies were entomophagus and in many habitats and seasons insects provided more protein than scavenged vertebrate carcasses did. Your statement: "insects... that humans don't eat" is entirely misleading. So is your assertion that India and China have sustainably supported large populations for six thousand years. Only recently have the populations of those nations been "large" and there is certainly nothing sustainable about agricultural practices in either of those countries. The floodplains of the Indus, the Yangtze, the Yellow River... are utterly degraded. Egypt cut its own throat building the Aswan High Dam, precluding the natural renewal of the Nile's floodplain by its annual spate. The Soviets wouldn't bankroll the building of Nasser's pyramid, so he had 'em build him a dam instead.
Your approach to the analysis of the biosphere's carrying capacity for humans is on the right track, Wiz, but you make some unsupportable assumptions related primarily to population distribution & efficiency of resource distribution, that inflate K by about 100%. Human population isn't Poisson distributed and while you take into account the direct application of fossil fuels to modern agriculture, you seemingly fail to account for indirect applications re: transportation & distribution of fertilizer & foodstuffs. K for humans globally is more in the range of 200 to 500 million, rather than the 300 to 600 you assert. Your analysis, presented both here & in last week's post concerning organic ag, is within the ballpark but is still rather inflated.
That supports my point even further. You are basically saying that even though "forager-scavenger societies" (in other words hunter-gatherers) eat insects as a primary source of protein (i disagree with that) still world can support very few hunter-gatherers and even though farmers do not eat insects world can support much much more farmers (more on that below). So you get two good things, higher human population and better diet (that is an insect-free diet).
I used the word "large" about 6000 years of indian & chinese population in relative sense. Since past 6,000 years india & china has roughly half of the population of world. All estimates of population show this. There must be something indians and chinese know about soil management that americans and europeans don't.
You said that past 6000 years of indian & chinese agricultural practises were not sustainable. If that is so then given the large interval of 6000 years india and china would have ruined all their farm land long ago. We know that it didn't happen. The deltas of yangtze, indus, ganges and brahmaputra are still fertile, they were still supporting half a billion people in 1950 before green revolution began at these lands and before large scale dams and series of canals were put in place. Uptil 1950 indian and chinese farmers were relying only on rain as water source and were not using any artificial fertilizers.
You are right that these deltas are degraded now (mostly because of soil erosion) but that is only after canal water effects started appearing and artificial fertilizers application started. Yet, due to still application of dung in farms, keeping animal husbandry and low application of artificial fertilizers soil erosion is not that high as I expect it to be in europe and america.
Basically, wherever the white man got his hand he ruined things, most obvious of that is environment but there are other things too including people's sense of what is right and wrong, selflessness, non-materialism and traditions.
I am totally against building any dams on rivers. Rivers naturally bring sediments that provide a natural, vast and free source of minerals like potassium and phosphorus, usually these sediments should be allowed to go to sea to support plants there so we keep having fish near sea shores but during floods we should let rivers spread sediments on a large area of land. Rivers like indus, gangus and yangtze have floods every fourth or fifth year but Nile has an annual flood since past 10,000 years. This annual flood was the basis of all the fertility of the six deltas of nile that supported one of the largest empires of ancient world. You are true in saying that egyptians had cut their own throat by building the Aswan Dam. It not only deprive them of the rich sediments but also stopped the other half of Nile's sediments reaching the mediterranean which resulted in killing plants there which in turn resulted in reducing number of fish there. Aswan dam though enabled egyptians grow larger amounts of crops to support ten times population through control on water but this is unsustainable. As far as I know dams have to be abandoned in about 50 years because sediments gathered slowly fill the dam reducing its water carrying capacity. What to do once dam is fulled therefore reducing your country's carrying capacity yet you have ten times high population?
This is an interesting point. Also, about Egypt: Starting about 10,000 BCE, there was agriculture based on flood-borne soil from up-stream. Why was this happening? Surely at this early time the upstream land was not degraded by agriculture, so why was it eroding?
I also wonder about the validity of the historical facts presented in this study.
Nile is bringing sediments and with it nutrients from ethopia since millions of years. We humans have started using this treasure of sediments since only past few thousand years.
You can check the historical facts from any encyclopedia in your local library or this online one http://www.wikipedia.org.
I gave you an up-arrow for a very nice, informative, and well-reasoned piece; but, I do have one little question (for the group at-large, actually.)
How do we decide who gets to stay, and who has to go?
Nature will decide who have to go. Usually nature use some disease for large-scale population reductions (plague in europe etc). Obviously people living at a country with higher arable-land to population ratio has a much higher chance of survival than countries with lower arable-land to population ratios. Any province which has equal or greater than two arable acres per person is at a safe zone. Countries that have low ratio can survive if they have something to trade for food or enough military to conquer arable lands.
Central asian countries like kazakistan etc but not china, some african countries, all south american countries, united states, canada etc are in safe zone because of their high arable land to population ratio. United States and Russia have both military power and high ratios. China though have a low ratio but have enough military power to get land from for example far east.
Kuwait, Japan, Germany, France, United Kingdom are worse than average.
Excellent, thoughtful, informative posts, WisdomFromPakistan. We very much need your perspective here.
lilith
I suggested, a long time ago, the focused Earthmarine vs Merc conflict scenario, Asimov's Foundations for Optimal Overshoot Decline assertion, the initialization of biosolar habitats with continous enlargement until it includes the entire watershed boundary, wholesale enclosure of all possible recycling loops starting with O-NPK by SpiderWebRiding, counting down with finger amputation as a cultural tradition to help protect species decimation, Strategic Reserves of [wheelbarrows + bicycles + I-NPK], plus much more available in the TOD archives.
It will take a real bleeding-edge, outside-the-box cultural paradigm shift to give future humanity a decent chance. I admit that I am not the sharpest pencil in the box: I think many TODers can come up with plans even more advanced and more readily acceptable to the global pop. than what I have proposed to help blunt the worst effects of a fast-crash Thermo/Gene Collision and/or the long grind of Catabolic Collapse.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I find your claim that wildlife had not been drastically affected by the time of the Mughal empire most questionable. You are also completely neglecting the effect of climate. If it requires 2 acres in Bengal to support a person, then 4 acres in England and 6 in Scotland is damn fine farming.
Ofcourse when empires flourish populations expand and therefore previously unused lands at forests got cut and new villages are made. So its not like impact on wild life was zero, it was that impact on wild life was not to the extend of extinction of species or to total destruction of forests, not even close, not even at a local/provincial level. Even in 1920 indian forests had enough lions that jim corbet could have made his record of 300+ lions hunting for example. Almost all of the wild life of the subcontinent was there in their natural home forests till 1950 before the green revolution made the subcontinent its victim. Mughal era paintings and history shows princes hunting gazalles, lions, tigers etc in vast and diverse forests of india. None of the historians reported any shortage of game.
So I take it you attribute no contribution from the sea whatsoever?
If your username, WisdomfromPakistan, is correct, I could understand that, being in a landlocked country, this is an omission one would expect.
I am from Kentucky in the U.S., and many here attribute nothing to the sea, even though it covers three quarters of the planet.
It is interesting that more than 70 percent of the world's population is concentrated on the coasts. This causes them to see the world in a different way, as concentrated, over populated and dirty, choking on it's own waste. Try coming out into the outback of the world now and then and you will see miles and miles and miles of almost nothing but big empty. (a trip across the U.S. by airplane often fascinates many, as so much of the country seems virtually empty!)
The issue will soon be moot anyway, as in all modern nations population is barely replacement level, and still dropping (of my parents 4 children, only 3 grandchildren have been produced, I have no children...and this pattern is not at all uncommon, even in Kentucky, which is prone to producing more than the average number of children compared to most Americans). The invention of modern birth control may go into the history books as one of the great turning points in history. Humans may not be smarter than yeast, but I have never seen yeast use a birth control pill!
RC
I not think I denied taking any contribution from sea water, if you think so plz specify where you think I said that.
Please try to first do some research before writing anything on tod, pakistan is not a land locked country, it has a 800 km sea coast, my city karachi is a sea port, sea-fish export is one of the major exports of pakistan.
Sure in usa you have high arable land to population ratio so I guess your claim about unused fertile lands in usa is correct. There is no doubt lots more unused arable land in canada near you.
Humans were able to somehow control their numbers in past 12,000 years before 1800. The method was low tech.
Interesting article.
We could probably argue about whether this is overly pessimistic w.r.t how much overshoot there is. Or we could argue until we are blue in the face about how fast the collapse/decline will happen.
But one thing is for sure, no matter how you turn it, there are too many people on this planet, and some way or another, sometime this is going to get corrected.
In this sense I'm not very hopeful that mankind is smart enough to steer its way out of this situation without a drastic catastrophe or collapse.
As the author writes:
It is blatantly obvious that the "species with the large brain" is incapable of making this decision rationally. Given a choice our "collective mind" always picks the catastrophe by trying to avoid economic hardship.
I've been recently reminded of this by our (Canada) federal election. The collective voice of the people has spoken. It is obvious that once our immediate economic situation seems in danger, all other concerns get thrown out the window, or at least must take a back seat.
This means that we should not hold much hope that market crashes and financial meltdowns, will be an incentive to change our ways. It seems that collectively, we are simply incapable of making these kinds of choices.
It seems that the worse things get, the more we, collectively, want to grasp on the last sliver of hope that we can still restore/repair our crumbling economic system as it disintegrates around us.
So ... in the end, the only thing that can really force a change is a major catastrophe. It has to be catastrophe of unimaginable scale, obviously, the financial meltdown we experience now, is not nearly big enough to make a real difference to the way the collective mind thinks about adressing the fundamental problem (i.e. overpopulation / overconsumption).
picoday
"So ... in the end, the only thing that can really force a change is a major catastrophe".
Both China and Western Europe have birth rates below replacement, that will eventually lead to much lower populations. I wouldn't call these events "major catastrophes".
Why do you think that there are only two choices, economic hardship or collapse? More likely growing prosperity will continue to lead to lower birth rates in most countries except the failed states.
Well, in Canada, of the 59% who bothered to vote, the majority (62%) voted for a party with some kind of plan for AGW (however half-assed). It was hardly a sweeping affirmation of the Conservative BAU BS.
I've realised my feeble attempts at tera preta are really oil assisted slash-and-burn. I take the petrol powered chainsaw and the petro/bio diesel fuelled pickup into the forest to collect firewood. Later the ash and charcoal is spread on to the paddock, not plowed in. If I had to collect wood using only an axe and a wheelbarrow I would probably wimp out, particularly once I had exhausted nearby timber resources.
If we have to go back to slash-and-burn because there is no tractor diesel or storebought NPK and herbicide it probably won't support more than a billion people worldwide. Farm fields might have to be fallowed for five years at a time before burning and replanting. The few people still living in cities can grow some hydroponic tomatoes. When the vintage locomotive calls into the central station city folks can barter services for stone ground wheat or whatever. On the return trip the train carries a load of city folks night soil. Barring technical breakthroughs I don't see much alternative.
Why do all so-called sustainably related writings think its necessary to talk about tomatoes? What is the significance of tomatoes?
Tomato is just another vegetable. It contains only 200 Calories/kg. Who is willing to eat 10 kg tomatoes per day to get 2000 Calories diet?
Hmm, may be few are but do tomato provide us a balanced diet. We need 300 grams carbohydrates, 60 grams proteins and 60 grams fats along with many types of vitamins and 23 minerals but lets only focus on carbohydrates, proteins and fats here.
Each kg of tomatoes contains 40 grams carbohydrates, 10 grams proteins and 2 grams fats. So you have to eat 7.5 kg, 6 kg and 30 kg tomatoes respectively to meet these needs.
I think that a tomato plant is the only thing that most Americans have ever successfully grown. But almost none have grown them from seed. Also many Americans have found success in growing zuccini. But here they have a problem attending to them and harvesting them before they become plain zucca.
Advocates for weird lifestyles like to try to use examples that Americans might already know about.
"I think that a tomato plant is the only thing that most Americans have ever successfully grown."
Ouch, nice jab!
What amazes me is that there is a huge, and I mean HUGE gardening industry in the U.S., but most of the industry is centered around growing ornamental flowers and gardens. Why not more around food production?
The answer is simple: At current energy prices, growing food at home is simply not economical. The justification for growing your own food is simply not there on an economic basis.
But...on the issue of health, I think the home/local food growing effort can be greatly expanded.
I have done gardening, and raised more than just tomatos. I gave it up because the consumption of time and money was simply not worth it.
But I have been looking at going back to gardening, mainly in an effort to get clean food that I can trust. With the U.S. now importing food from all over the world, and much of it proving to be unsafe such as food product from China, I simply want to know where the food has been. I think that clean, local food may well find a larger following, not for economic reasons, but for health and safety reasons.
RC
Boof,
You seem to be lacking any imagination today.
How about "taking an electric powered chain saw, connected to my electric powered pick-up, and plowed in with an electric roto-tiller. Re-charge at home from PV or renewable grid electricity". Even now, in 2008, we have in Australia about 1kWh per day per person of renewable energy.
I would avoid that stone ground wheat it gives excessive tooth enamel erosion. One of the flour mills in Sydney is using steel rollers build in the 1920's. Should be good for another 100 years. We are not going to run out of steel to build wind turbines, power tools, with all those old SUV's parked around back of the yard.
Whats wrong with pumping sewerage by pipeline as we do now, only onto agricultural land not into the ocean? Probably use less energy than railway transport. In Sydney at least water supply is gravity fed so no reason this system will not keep running as long as the Roman aqueducts, or longer.
electric pickup..that limits me to 20km out and 20 km back. That's OK I live in the woods.
electric chainsaws .. are for pruning shrubs not cutting hardwood logs.
stone ground flour .. just trying get into the right imagery, think Mad Max or Waterworld.
Pumped sewage is a bit like pumped hydro, the geographics have to be right, or until someone gets Salmonella. I notice if you take a pee at the cricket at Bellerive Oval you could be helping to grow vegies.
I cut almost half my hardwood with a electric saws. I cut to 3ft lengths in the woods with the gas chainsaw. Once home, I cut that in half with my plug-in 120V electric saw before splitting by hand. I also have a 12V "pruning" saw that I can easily cut up to 6 inches with. It is not nearly as fast as the gas chainsaw, but then I don't need chaps and a helmet either. There is no reason an electric saw can't cut hardwood.
I do a lot of branch trimming by hand too, with a good pruning handsaw. I try to save the batteries for the bigger stuff.
I tried running the 120V saw off of an inverter and battery pack, but the pack couldn't provide enough juice for the starting surge for all that long. I looked into hydraulic, to be run off of the biodiesel tractor, but that was too expensive and I have lots of good dead wood too steep for the tractor to get that close to. Fortunately it is all above the tractor and nature designed trees to roll nicely when cut.
I started urinating into a jug this week and soon urine soaked char will be heading back to the wood lot / camp. My yard is small and will not take long to terra-pretaize.
I bought myself an electric ($64 cheapie) to deal with the fallen wood on the property I bought.
So far, the only limitation I've found is the length of the bar. I'm trying to saw through some 40+ inch willow trunks, and I just can't get all the way through them even with an extra-long bar. Nothing else I've applied the saw to has given me the slightest bit of trouble (well, except for my hands getting tired on the long cuts).
If I could get 220 V to the saw, it would be easy to have 4-5 horsepower on tap with an electric. Stihl makes an electric saw that looks like it packs a whallop; don't sell them short.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
Worm poop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv_WVUDjmIc
Hello TODers,
Fascinating keypost and follow on comments--Too bad we can't force everyone everywhere to read and comprehend its postPeak implications. Thus, we still appear to be headed to the result of Jay Hanson's Quote:
"Trapped in obsolete belief systems, Americans won't even know why their society disintegrated."
Please mentally contrast this following photo with the keypost hunting photo:
http://www.prosefights.org/pnmelectric/rateincreases/shoppingcarts.jpg
You may not believe it, but there are already very many businesses whose explicit task is to hunt down these very elusive grocery carts, then return the harvest back to the grocery stores.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
"Malthus (1826), that unless there are constraints on animal (including human) expansion, all populations grow to the point that they destroy some critical resource and then they collapse.
As a practical matter I think we're going to have a hard time juggling all of our resource crunches, but I think we should be clear on what the theoretical problems are, and are not.
In particular, Malthus was wrong.
The most important refutation of Malthus is on the population side: world population as a whole has clearly stopped growing exponentially (or geometrically, if you like), due to the demographic transition (it's roughly arithmetic at the moment). This is a key point: in many ways, growth is generally self-limited, and follows a logistic (or sigmoid curve), generally referred to as an S-curve. For instance, US car sales peaked about 35 years ago, and the US has a clear over-supply of vehicles, due to increasing vehicle longevity.
In fact, in most of the world population growth is on a long-term negative path, due to fertility rates well below replacement, including Western Europe, Russia, China, and the US (excluding immigration). Japan and Italy are the poster children for this - both are starting to show absolute declines in population.
Now, are there still parts of the world growing pretty quickly? Sure, but they're in the minority. Just as importantly, the parts of the world that aren't growing clearly refute Malthus's idea that population always grows until it hits a resource limit - he couldn't conceive of voluntary birth control.
Do we still have huge, basic sustainability problems? Sure, but it's important to know that the broad, simple framework that Malthus proposed is just plain wrong.
I don't buy your refutation.
"world population as a whole has clearly stopped growing exponentially"
The current growth rate is around 1.14% and predicted to be around 0.5% by 2050, both of these growth rate are exponential. A 0.5% annual growth rate still means a doubling every 150 years.
The clue is in the fact that the growth rate is predicted to drop from 1.14% to 0.5%. The growth rate was as high as 2.19% back in 1963. The total population peak is currently expected to be at about 9 billion around 2075 and population is expected to drop after that.
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300fin...
There are two keys here: the difference between arithmetic and exponential growth, and the difference between high fertility and "bottom line" growth.
Consider the following series of numbers: 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. There is growth of 7.7% at the end, but this is arithmetic growth: the change from number to number is constant, not growing with the base. Malthus assumed exponential growth for population, and arithmetic growth for agriculture. What we see now is that exponential growth for population has ended.
If every couple has less than 2 children, the population is very young, and the death rate is low, there can be a lot of children and "bottom line" growth in the population, but in the long run the population will stabilize and decline, as every generation is smaller than the one before. That's the idea behind the original poster's proposed "one child" program.
Does that help?
Nick says that:
"world population as a whole has clearly stopped growing exponentially".
I thought being able to dismiss reality with completely unsubstantiated statements (wearing a straight face) was the purview of politicians.
FACT -- we are on track to increase human numbers from 6 billion to 7 billion in 13 years.
Yes, at the moment overall world population is increasing, at about 72M per year, IIRC. However, that number is stable at the moment, and very likely to decrease soon.
Consider the following series of numbers: 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. There is growth of 7.7% at the end, but this is arithmetic growth: the change from number to number is constant, not growing with the base. Malthus assumed exponential growth for population, and arithmetic growth for agriculture. What we see now is that exponential growth for population has ended.
More importantly, as I noted, growth varies enormously by country - in Japan, for instance, absolute growth will be negative next year. Italy and Russia will follow soon after. These alone are sufficient to refute Malthus's general rule.
For many more countries, the fertility rate is below replacement. If every couple has less than about 2.1 children (the definition of the replacement fertility rate), the population is very young, and the death rate is low, there can be a lot of children and "bottom line" growth in the population, but in the long run the population will stabilize and decline, as every generation is smaller than the one before. So, if we clearly have fertility rates below replacement, we clearly have in the long run stable or declining population growth.
I realize this seems a bit theoretical, in the face of current population growth, but isn't your whole post theoretical? And, doesn't it make sense?
Well, can we replace replace oil for farming, and all of the support functions for farming?
The answer is yes, primarily through electrification of surface transportation and building heating. Aviation, and long-haul trucking can be fully replaced with electric rail and water shipping, if necessary, though that may not be necessary, as there will be some oil for quite some time, and it will always be possible, though expensive, to synthesize fuel.
This will proceed through several phases. The first is hybrid liquid fuel-electric operation, where the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is dominant - a good example is the Prius. The second is hybrid liquid fuel-electric operation, where electric operation is dominant. Good examples here are diesel locomotives, and the Chevy Volt. The Volt will reduce fuel consumption by about 80% over the average ICE light vehicle. This phase will last a very long time, with batteries and all-electric range getting larger, and fuel consumption falling. The last phase is, of course, all electric.
Here's an example of hybrid buses.
Trucking can be electrified - Kenworth Truck Company has introduced a new Kenworth T370 Class 7 diesel-electric hybrid tractor for local haul applications, including beverage, general freight, and grocery distribution. Kenworth, a division of PACCAR, already offers a T270 Class 6 hybrid-electric truck. Volvo is moving toward hybrid heavy vehicles, including garbage trucks and buses.
Mining is a common concern. Much mining, especially underground, has been electric for some time. Caterpillar is the only manufacturer of 200-ton and above mining trucks with both drives. Cat will produce mining trucks for every application—uphill, downhill, flat or extreme conditions — with electric as well as mechanical drive.
Water shipping can also be electrified: see my separate post on this topic.
Finally, pure electric cars are slowly expanding. Electric bicycles have been around for a long time, but they're getting better.
Farm tractors are just another large vehicle that can be electrified.
Real farm tractors will, almost certainly, Never be electrified.
But, why would you want to? Just pour some soybean oil in the tank (if it's diesel,) or Home-made moonshine if it's gasoline-driven.
"Real farm tractors will, almost certainly, Never be electrified."
Is that like "real men don't drink Zima?"?
Seriously, why do you say that?
They have to pull too much "load," for too long a period of time, Nick.
Doyle Brunson described "No Limit" Poker as being "hours of boredom, interspaced with moments of stark terror." Farming is kinda like that. When you've gotta get the work done, ya gotta "get'er done."
The work is time/weather dependent; and, sometimes, you just don't have time to go to the barn, and "recharge."
It's just very unlikely that we'll see batteries in "our" lifetime that can come close to doing this particular job.
There's a simple solution to that.
Don't.
Batteries can be trucked to the field in swappable packs. Zinc-air fuel cells can just be refuelled. Both Zebra batteries and ZAFC's are within the weight parameters to power modern farm tractors.
Engineer-Poet is right.
I would note that he didn't exhaust the list of power sources within the weight parameters to power modern farm tractors. Others include lithium-ion, and the latest lead-acid from Firefly Energy, but the list is much longer. Even hydrogen fuel cells could be used, though they're not likely to be cost-competitive soon with the alternatives. PV roofs certainly could be used to extend battery life, though the cost effectiveness of that will depend on how much of the year the tractor is in the field.
Farm tractors are a fleet application, so they're not subject to the same limitations as cars and other light road vehicles. Providing swap-in batteries is much easier and more practical.
Electric drive trains are likely to be much more cost-effective than liquid fuels, but it should be noted that Kdolliso is correct that locally produced bio-fuels would certainly work. Also, fuels synthesized from renewable electricity, seawater and atmospheric CO2 would certainly work, though it would be rather more expensive than any of the above.
Any and all of these is several orders of magnitude cheaper and more powerful than animal-pulled equipment. The idea that we'll go back to horses or mules is entirely unrealistic.
Electric farm tractors (some solar). Don't assume a farm has to bottom plow.
I would like to address a comment/question to the author of this post, if he is reading it.
Since hunter/gatherers were able to survive why can't the remnants .or those who have the abilty and desire, once more pursue this theme?
Right now a massive amount of animal life is slaughtered on our roads and highways. I propose that as the automobile ceases to exist that there should be an increase,perhaps large, in the number of animal species that can be used as food, albeit for a diminished number of inhabitants.
Animal life has an ability likewise to increase rapidly based on longer longevity and a increase in food/forage.
Such as deer. They are so numerous in many areas where I live that they are a nuisance. Squirrels gnaw on the siding of my barn. My dogs kill quite a few chipmunks and young squirrels.
With out so many humans to decimate they by accidents perhaps the increase would act as our avenue back to a more sustained lifestyle via hunting. Gathering I am unsure of since the ecology has perhaps destroyed many species that once flourished and noxious weeds have taken over instead. Canadian Nodding Thistle and Johnson Grass to name a few.
Currently we are rapidly once more decimating our woodlands. I know of pulp mills that have many thousands of dead trees piled over many acres just to make paper. Surely this is one of the most ignorant acts possiblem,,,being right up there with modern(stupid) ag?
So I revere , in my own way, nature and its wildlife. I once hunted by since I didn't need the food I stopped. Fishing has been ruined by the Asian Carp species which has totally ruined our lakes and ponds here. A now perhaps very large lakes as well.
Thanks for the article. It is as I am sure many suspected. We are bent on self-destruction due to abhorrent greed and ego. The rich feed off the blood of the rest of us and hasten the ultimate demise. The corporations who seem to have zero controls are intent it seems on reducing life to mere consumership.
Airdale-the dreams are all over,now comes the hard part and hopefully those who championed this mess will pay some type of penalty,somewhere,somehow,sometime....but I seriously doubt it.
Has anyone ever proposed an 'inverse child tax credit' whereby your income tax credit decreases with the number of children you have? That might be a humane way to convince people in affluent countries to limit their reproduction rates to below replacement levels.
But then again, is this not already the case in Japan, Italy, Russia and (I think) Germany?
Before you propose anything like that you first have to stop immigration. We are no where near that in the USA - immigration is cherished and romanticized and the rich love the downward pressure it puts on wages - and Europe seems to be fond of cheap (often illegal) immigrant labor as well.
We all know that someday the earth will collapse into a black hole and the sun will explode, etc etc, but what we really need to think about are the next hundred years. Evidently, sustainability is not an absolute but really just varying degrees of something. Additionally, nothing is actually 100% sustainable (not even squirrels) because ALL species eventually go extinct for one reason or another. I completely agree with Nate that pursuing the "solution" to our energy problems is not a good idea at all, because bringing more energy into play brings all of those other problems (limits to water, soil, food, land, health, etc). If we really want to "solve" the energy problems, we need to develop fusion and then immediately impose a law of population stability. Even then though, the other problems would probably come into play anyway. And besides, based on the current PO situation, depleting energy resources will hamper our ability to do just about everything, so fusion and "solutions" are out. As Nate clearly addressed in his video about human nature, people are irrational and constantly lie to themselves and each other. When it comes down to it, most people are going to do whatever their means allow them to do at any given time, and right now are means are pretty substantial (oil) so we use them. When oil is gone, we won't use it, and we'll do something else, or die, or whatever. Now the next section is going to sound really lame but read it anyway.
None of us here will ever be in a position to decide where humanity goes, because we really only have control over our own bodies. We really shouldn't try to control each other, because that only results in extreme frustration. (lame part approaching) Life is not a about reaching some utopia (we never will, we're inherently imperfect) but merely doing the best we can as we move through life. As far as problems go, lets solve the ones we can, accept the ones we can't and deal with them. People are going to do what they are going to do, based on their means.
Another comment: It is absurd to think that we have a hope of moving to a much more sustainable society without major turbulence. It will be rough no doubt, and we as the informed have a duty to prepare those around us and do what can.
I have one final word(s): net energy. If you don't get it, get out.
AshtonW says "I have one final word(s): net energy. If you don't get it, get out."
Great, a new recruiting slogan for the peak oil cause!
It tests the limits of irony that this whole discussion occurs only one day after the "HairBrained PepperHaired Eco-nitwitz" discussion and reply to said e-mail by Nate.
As for me, in my effort to help reduce our dependence on unsustainable food production, I am trying to find a way to do what must be done: Stop eating. It is comforting to know however that even at the time of the Battle Of Hastings, we were aleady so far into our unsustainability collapse, that there was no turning back. And yet Malthus did not die of starvation centuries later.
What to do? Well, due to the economic turmoil, I have seen some bitchin' Ferrari's for sale on ebay, and the prices have actually been pretty good lately...how about one last one for the road? :-)
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) (indicating loads and loads of irony :-)
(if you are of average abilities you must realize however that the whole discussion is now becoming as farcical as something you would see on theonion.com)
RC
Here's another good slogan in keeping with this post
Be a good ancestor-- now
We know that traditional East Asian agricultural practices (which are essentially organic methods) have sustained relatively dense populations for millenia. See Kings's Farmers of Forty Centuries.
I don't know if such methods are sustainable over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. However, it seems to me to be perfectly reasonable to set our sights upon a transition to an organic agriculture along these lines as our immediate goal. Once we are there, then future generations can consider whether or not such an agriculture is sustainable for a longer term, and can consider what to do about it if the author of this key post is correct and any form of agriculture is unsustainable over the long term.
I totally agree with that comment. I just think its incredibly silly to believe the following:
1. getting there will be no problem
2. that any form of our current economic system will exist at that point
3. that once we get on a "sustainable" track humans will live in harmony and balance forever. We used to have more sustainable methods of farming, and look what happened to them. People love to fight.
4. That we can somehow avoid all of it with something like fusion or the Searle Effect Generator
A side note. For all you glasses and contact lense wearers. Now might be a good time to get laser eye surgery. It will be hard to fight off mad max if your contact shipments stop coming and you can't see.
Also, does anyone know anything specific about the sustainable development program at St Andrews in Scotland? I am applying there and would like to get my masters in it, despite my dislike of the blatant irony in the name.
Peace,
Ashton
This is a reasonable comment. We know for sure that we have to retrench. Exactly how far we can't yet know for sure. Better for us to be a little too pessimistic than too optimistic. This will make it easier on our heirs. But it is they who will have to discover exactly what is sustainable.
excellent , well written post; identifies the problem & outlines some possible solutions. time frames seem of the correct order.
one of the primary arguments i make re moving to more local everything is that our hard wiring leads us collectively to make poor choices- towards self destruction in our global, city-state way of living. This is Not a way of organizing/living that we are wired for & as Mr. Salonius points out was not most of our history.
the tragedy of the commons is that to collectively care in an actionable, meaningful way we have to be quite close to others[include nature] & the consequences of our living.
we are headed towards smaller groupings in our ways of functioning by the forces of energy depletion. i am concerned we will not make that choice; it will be forced on us. we will then function better & more meaningfully [if we are still here].
I disagree with the conclusion of the article. What if crops were grown inside multi-floored huge buildings with efficient electric overhead tracks that have interchangeable tilling and harvesting equipment that can move from floor to floor. What if the electricity was powered by fusion, so fossil fuels would not be part of the equation.
Presuming that existing forms of agriculture will lead to our eventual demise, dismisses advances that may occur to avert such a culling of the masses.
Climate change is probably a much bigger problem, from the standpoint of altering precipitation amounts in different regions. The highest temperature above normal was recorded recently in the artic; 9 degrees celsius. Also, methane is now venting from the Artic sea during its Summer months. At some threshold we won't be talking about how much oil is left, or how long we can continue to grow crops in depleted soil, but rather how do we adapt to a world with ever greater climatic swings. Where are all the people going to migrate to when the sea level rises 1 meter?
I read an article like this and think, great research and over simplified conclusions, yet too long term. The short term is climate change or lack of fossil fuels, but depleted soil is down the list.
Cslater8 asks:
"What if the electricity was powered by fusion".
Why stop at fusion whose success has been 15 years in the future since it was conceived of ------ What is there were lemonaide springs and candy floss mountains and ---- What if, Julian Simon-like, we could simply get scarce resources from other planets.
A diet of imagination, while attractive, offers very few calories!
A growing number of commentators, such as Alan Weisman (2007), have begun to suggest that a world with fewer people would be far better placed to deal with climate change and the exhaustion of the dirty fuels of the industrial past.
I chuckled when I read that sentence but it's not funny. It's a classic "no-brainer" and yet the subject of limiting how many births a mother can have is so unpleasant that very intelligent people turn instead to faith. Faith that somehow all the mothers of the world will become rich enough that they only want a couple of children each "before population growth becomes a problem". And I guess, as they say, "All Things Are Possible with Faith".
"The best suggestion so far to produce Rapid Population Decline (RPD) is for the collective global human family to adopt a One Child Per Family (OCPF) 'modus operandi/philosophy'. Even with general acceptance of RPD and OCPF, the human population decrease that is necessary to achieve a sustainable solar energy-dependent culture, will take several centuries. Governments, as they become convinced that RPD is necessary, may choose monetary incentives, tax breaks and/or penalties to achieve general acceptance of OCPF or some other RPD program."
Although it seems a good idea on paper OCPF in reality causes many problems.
Using our current economic model how does a smaller younger generation suporting a larger older population?
What about the imbalances that are bound to happen in societies that prefer boys over girls as offspring?
These are just two of the more obvious problems associated with OCPF and I'm sure there are many more. I cant realy see this as being a solution to the worlds overpopulation problem.
The lack of labor is always pointed to as a reason why you can't have a population decline. And yet at the same time over the years technology has progressively allowed the same amount of work to be done with less labor.
The diesel engine in your average farm tractor is designed around the same principles, with some minor tweeks, as when it was first invented over 100 years ago.
Is it technology or cheap energy that has allowed us to reduce the amount of labour?
The diesel engine in your average farm tractor is designed around the same principles, with some minor tweeks, as when it was first invented over 100 years ago.
Is it technology or cheap energy that has allowed us to reduce the amount of labour?
Not all equipment runs on diesel. ATM machines, bar-code scanners, computers, robots used in manufacturing are some examples that don't. If they are dependent on cheap energy it is possible to provide that energy without fossil fuels. I think it is also possible (if it hasn't already been done) to replace diesel-powered farm equipment and construction equipment with electric-powered. If it's not, then we can still make enough ethanol for that purpose while electrifying transportation.
And in many cases you don't even need technology to get by with less labor. You just eliminate the service which is not required for a functioning society. Waiter, manicurist, grocery bagger, gas station gas pumper (mostly gone already except in a few states like Oregon), dog walker/pooper scooper, lawn maintenance (or get rid of grass). Entire industries could be eliminated if their really was a severe labor shortage from a population decline. Fast food is not necessary (and that includes coffee shops, ice cream shops). Restaurants are not even necessary. And increases in the cost of transportation are already going to decimate certain tourism related industries. Less people is the least of our worries.
Hey Grautr
It is dead simple to opine that something will not work as you say:
"These are just two of the more obvious problems associated with OCPF and I'm sure there are many more. I cant realy see this as being a solution to the worlds overpopulation problem."
OK -- if you are not attracted to trying to convince the global human family that One Child Per Family practice MIGHT work -- what is your alternative to curling up in the fetal position and categorizing all proposals as unworkable?
"Using our current economic model how does a smaller younger generation suporting a larger older population? "
Simple - make retirement age much, much later, and change the ratio of retirees back to what it used to be. The disability rate of people over 65 is steadily dropping - there's no justification for early retirement.
"What about the imbalances that are bound to happen in societies that prefer boys over girls as offspring? "
Take better care of the truly old, so they don't rely on boys to support them (that's much easier if we're spending much less on the "young-old"). Invest in education for women, so they can support parents. etc, etc.
I found the article a bit disturbing, because technology is not included.
In a way the writer is right that the earth has only limited resources, who can only provide so many people, either hunters or farmers.
A lot of science fiction writers have offered a solution( asimov, clarke)to extend our resources gathering beyond this planet.
Colonization of space is a way to escape the "trap" for the next few centuries.
spreading our footprint on other planets will also have the benefit of not longer having all our eggs in one basket, so if a meteor hits this world humanity can survive.
And just where are you going to find a planet to colonize? It is 900 degrees F on Venus, no air on Mars and all the other planets are a lot worse. But what about other solar systems? Well, we have no idea if there is an earth like planet anywhere in the galaxy and the closest stars are so far it would take many centuries just to get to them.
True Asimov talked about colonization of space in many of his science fiction works but he was highly critical of any such scheme in all his non-fiction works on the subject. Asimov agreed with Einstein and did not believe faster than light travel was possible. Clark did but could only come up with: "Just possible, that's all." At any rate, travel to other solar systems many light years distance is just a pipe dream. Limited energy will soon put the brakes on even local space travel.
No, we are stuck here on earth so get used to it. And that was a great article Gail, spot on. For a solution that gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling then dream on. You are living in as much of a dreamland as this guy with a handle called "final frontier".
Ron Patterson
He didn't say "planet", he said "space". There are plenty of raw materials in asteroids, including volatiles in extinct comets, to build massive structures with ecosystems inside.
Roughly 1 millibar, but there may be as much as 300 mb of gases either frozen or absorbed in the soil. These could be freed by warming. Adding a few billion tons of CF4, SF6 and the like to the atmosphere might accomplish quite a bit of that without any further action.
If there are ices in polar craters on the Moon, we could un-stick ourselves just a quarter-million miles away. A social or technological collapse would be fatal, but leaving the Moon if you're dissatisfied is much easier than leaving Earth.
Hello TODers,
Most regular readers here are familiar with the tragic problems in Zimbabwe:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-10/21/content_10225796.htm
----------------------
SADC, AU consider agricultural package to assist Zimbabwe
..Zimbabwe is experiencing shortages of critical inputs to kick off the season, diminishing prospects for the country to avert hunger next year.
In the meantime, the inputs were being sold at selected shops in foreign currency with a 10 kg packet of seed going for 40 U.S. dollars while a 50 kg bag of fertilizer was going for 80 dollars.
------------------
From a metric conversion website: 50 kg = 110.23 lbs.
One ton or 2,000/110.23 = 18.14 bags
18.14 bags @ $80 USD/bag = $1,451.51 per ton.
Yikes!--> I hope this is the ZIM retail price, not the ZIM wholesale price, because that means the retail price would be probably double the $1,451.51...!!!
Now the article doesn't specify the precise NPK ratio of this product, so I will compare it with a typical I-NPK available at my retail Home Depot in Phx:
VIGORO{Tm} All-Purpose Fertilizer 16-16-16 [I-NPK] in a 20 lb bag for $8.92. Thus 100 X $8.92 = $892 per ton. Obviously, if I found a much bigger bag for sale: the price/ton would be less.
I hope this real life example will make more people consider my earlier Drumbeat posting reproduced below for you convenience:
++++++++++++++++++++
Hello TODers,
Recall that Matt Simmons and our AlanFBE both say to move as much as possible by boat first, then electrified mass-transit [E-RR] for max. efficiency. I would postPeak offer SpiderWebRiding and wheelbarrows for the last, local miles to the final square footage dispersion and/or initial accumulation [for the other flowrate direction].
If we are postPeak forced to use our nuclear aircraft carriers to transocean move non-substitutable NPK: let's hope that money can be found to build a huge fleet of non-luxury sailing ships like Perkin's 'Maltese Falcon' megayacht:
Google Images Link:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Perkins%20%2B%20maltese%20falcon...
Recall the earlier weblink that stated that moving I-NPK far inland and/or up in altitude can result in the cost multiplying by four to six times. Of course, this is purely fixed by the laws of physics, but if the US transport infrastructure is non-FF optimized as much as postPeak possible: tremendous competitive advantage should accrue as the FF ERoEI declines.
Let's say a postPeak 50 lb. bag of Moroccan DAP is twenty bucks at their seaport. If moved by a US sailing ship: the transocean cost is mostly the food and grog cost for the captain & crew. In contrast, a FF-burning ship headed to a seaport for overland transhipment to Zimbabwe is already at an embedded energy cost disadvantage.
US [Nola seaport] @ $21, Mozambique [Xai-Xai seaport] @ $25. Next, the US bag is moved upstream by a combo wind & [pantograph equipped?] E-barge, while the barge leaving Xai-Xai burns more postPeak expensive, but low ERoEI FFs while steaming up the Limpopo River towards Zimbabwe. US: $23, Zim: $35.
Next, the bag is moved to US E-RR in St. Louis for the next transport leg vs the competing Zim bag is moved to truck at Parfuri. The US bag moves quickly, easily, and efficiently far inland and far up in altitude to Denver [now $27]. The Zim bag had to travel slowly over bad roads and a badly tuned truck [now $50/bag in Harare].
From Denver, the 50 lb. bag is easily 3-hour moved by a pedaling SpiderWeb rider going 10 mph for 30 miles on Denver's relocalized permaculture network for mostly the food cost of $5 for a nutritious meal. The bag is now $32 in Boulder. The Zim worker, having neither a wheelbarrow or bicycle, much less an even more energy-efficient SpiderBike, could only carry this bag on his head for 5 miles for the same caloric intake [bag now $55 in the Harare suburbs].
The last distance in Boulder to the final farming/gardening acre is quickly covered by a worker moving and dispersing this 50 lb bag in a wheelbarrow that also has an additional 100 lbs of locally recycled, and well-composted O-NPK manures and mulches mixed in, plus 50 lbs of diluted urine than can be efficiently drip-targeted to the crops. Let's say another 3 hours of work and $5 more food: US cost per acre of both I/O-NPK at ideal Liebscher's Optima--> $37 per acre input will yield 1,000 lbs of food with ideal weather.
Meanwhile back in Zimbabwe: to move the 50 lb I-NPK bag the last 25 miles by the iconic, but tragic head-transport method--> it takes five more workers at a slow and arduous 5 miles apiece, or another $25 dollars in food calories [$55 + $25 = $80]. The I-NPK bag has now reached the final acre, so let's add $2 in food calories for human topsoil dispersion; $82/acre, but no O-NPK was recycled [the sewage is piled up in the houses and streets back in urban Harare--see earlier weblinks].
Thus, the Zim acre is barely above a Liebig Minimum, has poor soil mulching and low worm and micro-organism growth--nowhere near a Liebscher's Optimum. Final result with ideal weather: $82/acre input, but only 350 lbs of generated food.
US: $37 input-->1,000 lbs output [easily moved far back into town or city on Spiderweb and AlanFBE's RR to feed many]. If you add the additional harvest yield from the local O-NPK addition--> My SWAG is that this total I/O-NPK input will generate over 2,000 lbs of foodstuff output.
Zim: $82 input-->350 lbs output [most likely consumed entirely by the local, nearby village at starvation rates].
The Zim topsoil being non-optimized caused the plants to be weaker, grow slower, be more susceptible to disease and insect pests, and produce less harvestable yield/acre/bag.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Peak Oil I can sympathize with. But Peak Soil? Why would we ever run out of soil?
If I understand the article correctly, then after so much time of Darwinian progress, now we have to go backwards? By the way, why would those who predict the future with the same certainty as they interpret history of a few million years, be upset about the outcome of said progress? Because according to their theory the fittest will survive and thus whatever the outcome is for the human species is the best. Why then would Darwinians want to get on the doom and gloom bandwagon?
If we have to become hunters again, we (the fittest of us) could drive around in Humvees (powered by biodiesel from deer tallow) with the blessing of the NRA, using the most modern shooting gear and GPS and Satellite tracking of deer, complete with the optional loincloth. Since our hunting practices will be so refined and effective, we would only have to work a few hours per week. The rest of the time we can watch TV and keep beating the (oil) drum over the internet. Oh what state of happiness that will be….
Farming practices on the prairies of North America are not sustainable and will eventually have to change but what was clearly overlooked in the article is the way that flood planes of great river systems like the Nile and Ganges have already been farmed successfully for millennia. The idea cultivation will grind to a halt one day is way off base.
Exiled Scot says:
'what was clearly overlooked in the article is the way that flood planes of great river systems like the Nile and Ganges have already been farmed successfully for millennia. The idea cultivation will grind to a halt one day is way off base."
Perhaps Exiled Scot missed some of the statements about SOME soils on the planet (certainly not widespread enough to support 6-9 billion humans) being able, with careful management and permaculture techniques, to maintain long-term agricultural productivity -- such as:
***Pimentel et al. (2005) have shown that weathering rates appear to be able to meet plant demand for nutrients when organic agriculture relies on nitrogen fixing by legumes on some soils.***
Caribou Silt Loam in Northern Maine, once 22" deep, now stripped bare. UMaine researcher looked for ten years on one farm in that area to find an earthworm and never found one. [I don't know the search pattern or frequency - sorry.]
And the Nile no longer floods, right?
cfm in Gray, ME
This guest post is very very disturbing and given even a few holes in the thesis it is , to me at least, very apparent as to the eventual outcome.
We will mostly cease to exist.
This very post puts all the others to rest!..
I think at some deep level we all knew that we were totaling out this planet. Even the cornucopians must have realized it.
This means that the Doomers were right and the cornucopians were wrong.
We lose. Its just a matter of time.
This post caps all the rest.
Airdale
This probably has been said innumerous times, but I just have to say it again:
This is one of the most ridiculous posts by TOD! Congratulations, you've outdone yourselves!!
Why not making a "paper" that proves beyond any doubt that since life was created on Earth, that it has been in overshoot ever since?!?
People, this paper is basically saying that life's not forever. That death is certain.
WOW I BE DAMNED!
Newsflash, people, we are all going to die!
Enjoy while you still can. I know I will. (Oh, look, a soccer ball! Hey guys wait for mee!)
Hehe,
I have enjoyed the post, and much more the comments.
This post is, if something, actually quite optimistic. It shows the life of hunter-gather people with a rosy color. Even very "primitive" societies have depleted the resources and extinguished animal populations, etc.
Nevertheless, the problem is that people tend to believe in the "dogma" of our current culture. It is something like this: "Human being evolved to be a civilization builder, with burgers, cars and the Internet". Consequently, when confronted with a lucid post like this one, people tend to react saying: "Another doomer saying that we all are going to die". Well, that is quite inacurate. Human beings are NOT Western civilization. A bushmen is as human as a CEO. All this post says is that, after 1 million years of human existence, the experiment of the last 10000 years, which is just 1% of our history, is a failure, and that the way we live will go back, we like it or not, to the way we live the other 99% of our time: hunting, gathering and dancing around a fire in the night.
We are NOT going to die. This civilization, and "our" culture is going to die. That is for sure. But our culture is just one of the many cultures that have existed and will exist. The fact that is now shared by 99% of the people, and the fact that we are 6.5 billion people sharing it, does not mean that it is the "right" one. Human being is just another ape, and apes do not live in cities.
So, the bad news is that our historic anomaly is going to finish. Good news is that we are back to normal soon. If you find the post disturbing is just because you are too identify with your culture, with your "tag".
Regards.
It does look like humanity's 10,000 year experiment with agriculture is proving to be a dead end. Agriculture can't continue on a global scale, as ag is essentially the process of converting ecosystems into people. Farms are not functional ecosystems, and at some point, a planet covered with farms will undergo ecosystem collapse.
Resources and environments are patchily distributed, so there are probably places that can support agriculture almost indefinitely, such as regularly flooded river valleys where soil is renewed. But much of the planet--most of the places that are now irrigated--are probably more suited for a foraging culture. However, what's largely missing from Peter's post is mention of that large fuzzy area between agriculture and foraging: horticulture. There have been many cultures that create food production systems within intact, functioning ecosystems. Usually this means leaving at least 3/4 of an inhabited area as natural ecosystem that is lightly harvested for mulch and compost, and doing some hunting there, or rotating polyculture cultivation around a large area, letting much of it go fallow. I think this is what permaculture is really getting at: a gardening culture rather than a farming one.
I wrote an article a couple of years ago covering much of the same ground as Peter's, but with some emphasis on the negative health and cultural consequences of agriculture, and a suggestion that horticulture might help us. It's at http://www.energybulletin.net/node/19334