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Thoughts on a Sustainable Human Ecosystem
Posted by Rembrandt on September 19, 2011 - 10:19am
It is clear there are limits to the pollution a given ecosystem can absorb, the level of resources that can be depleted, and debt that can be incurred. Despite concerns of many about these limits we are far from tackling any of these problems on a meaningful scale. The question is why this is the case and if we (the Human Race) have the knowledge and capability to live within such limits on Planet Earth?
In this post, different modeling approaches to gain insights into sustainability will be discussed. We hope that readers will contribute their thinking of what a sustainable ecosystem would look like, and how to map the road towards it. One of the parts of this post is the initial outline of a project to model a human ecosystem from cradle to grave. This project will be carried out by the Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER), an institute in which Nate Hagens and myself are involved. Also IIER is looking for individuals to participate in this project, and encourages anyone with a passion for working on resources and energy consumption to take a look at our job advert and contact us via recruiting at iier dot ch.
Can a sustainable world be achieved?
The question of sustainability at a global scale can be difficult to fathom. In the case of ecosystems the size of damage done in past decades to centuries is immense, relative to the original state these ecosystems were in before the industrial revolution. For example, between 1950 to 2003, around 29% of fish species that are frequently caught today had collapsed, defined as their catch being 10% below the recorded maximum (Worm et al. 2006). The trend of this problem is many ways similar to non-renewable resources such as oil depletion, in that first the best available and cheapest resources are depleted. Historically, the big fish in the rivers on land were depleted first. In Europe this already occurred in the Middle Ages. Subsequently, the large fish near the shores, then further offshore, then the arctic, the shallow waters, and finally the deep sea. About twenty to thirty years ago we began to deep fish the ocean at depths of 1 km below the ocean surface in order to continue catching sufficient fish (Roberts 2007). This pattern does not imply that there are no longer fish in the rivers or offshore, but that the number of fish and their size is much smaller than before, and that a large portion of species have ceased to exist or are dying out. More importantly, at a global scale there are no new regions to explore in terms of fish catch today and the total number of fish caught began to plateau in the 1990s. It is likely that the total catch will decline in the not too distant future if the worlds fisheries continue to collapse at a rapid pace. The big question is if we are able to prevent this from happening, can we maintain the fish catch at today’s level, or at least not let it decline too much, by better management of fish stocks globally. So far global agreements to regulate fishing and to protect stocks have failed to make a substantial impact, notwithstanding the success that has been made in some cases locally. The reason is fairly common for all the 200+ global agreements made today, when they come in effect the actions posited in them are often not implemented, at least not at a sufficient scale. This because sanctions are not a part of such agreements which makes non-compliance the norm. Many reasons can be found for this type of behaviour, one example being the tragedy of the commons as first described in detail by Garret Hardin.
The lack of proper management of the world’s non-renewable and renewable stocks underlies what I think is part of general behaviour of the human species. We are not capable to deal with these problems by consuming less, or only with great difficulty. At an aggregate level because this would impact our path of economic expansion, at a disaggregate because it effects the wages and income of people (fishers in the example above). We as humans are best at solving a problem by developing new technologies and practices to fix one part of the problem. It is very unlikely that this will continue to work, as you cannot engineer your way out of depletion in the long run. For instance aquaculture as a technology in our fish example can help, but this is not a solution at the global scale of fishing today. For several fish species it is more profitable to catch them in the wild and deplete these stocks first before switching to aquaculture (Koldewey and Martin-Smith 2009), because of which the present lack of global regulation and sanctions imply a continuance of wild-fish depletion.
In light of the above, the solution to achieve a sustainable human ecosystem lies in developing solutions beyond more than technological change, but also into regulation of extraction to sustainable levels (which means consumption). The question is how to achieve such a sustainable human ecosystem, a system wherein all material and energy flows can endure, instead of being either exhausted or accumulated as waste. Can this be done at a global scale? Probably it cannot, at least not at the level of welfare that we enjoy today in OECD countries, but we can make meaningful attempts at a smaller scale of cities and regions to take important steps towards such a future. To do so we have to further develop the knowledge and capabilities to know which steps to take.
Approaches to understand what a sustainable world means
There is a common tendency in our industrial society to see solutions in terms of technological solutions. Many advocates of a sustainable world also adhere to this belief, one notable example being the plans outlined in Plan B (PDF). In this book Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute, outlines technological solutions and their cost to tackle a large number of problems such as deforestation, decreasing biodiversity, and lack of health care provision in developing countries. He ends the book by summing the cost of all individual solutions resulting in a figure of 187 billion US dollars needed to “restore the earth”. The problem with this approach lies in the lack of integration of problems and their effects. Not only of the effects that these problem have on each other, but also the solutions which influences other problems than those they intend to tackle. For instance, consider the problem of exhaustion of the seas fish stocks. By consuming less fish to reach sustainable reproduction rates, demand will be shifted to other food segments, for instance meat or beans as an alternative protein supply, where other problems may emerge. For each alternative such trade-offs need to be considered. The solution to waste can be an increase in the rate of recycling, by separating materials and collecting them from households, but this will substantially increase transport movements as each waste stream needs its own transport chain. Similarly, the production of cadmium-telluride thin-film solar cells can reduce the amount of fossil based electricity, but will also produce a lot of toxic components that need to be dealt with (Fthenakis 2004), and so on.
To deal with these, increasing use is made of integrated models that look at different scales, including resources, energy, population, environment, and economy. These models are often not built to investigate what a sustainable system looks like, but assess how the present growth based system we have is affected by steps that are seen as part of a more sustainable system. For instance, the PRIMES energy model used by the European Union gives a full picture of energy consumption and production within the EU, and allows for application of different technologies as well as environmental regulation through taxes, permits, and subsidies. The way in which these models are used in policy are therefore to explore different options under the conditions of today’s society, still assuming that the solution lies in obtaining technological solutions. There is little there in terms of halting certain activities, or choosing for radically different technology options which may be bad for short term economic growth, but beneficial for long term maintenance of welfare as their impact on the environment or resource exhaustion is low. Such roads plausibly have to be taken, as can be learnt from global models that map the problems at an aggregate level. The best known of such models is the Limits to Growth developed for the Club of Rome. Many others have been developed since. For example, the most advanced of such a model today in terms of ecosystems modeling is the GUMBO model developed by the University of Vermont, which maps changes at a global level in key indicators of ecosystem services, including soil formation, water availability, and climate regulation, and hooks these up with economic and energy activities.
To summarize, we have many models that only map partial aspects, some that map a more integrated world but still operate without sufficient reality checks, thereby losing the goal of a sustainable human ecosystem, and finally global level models which focus on aggregate development trends, but these generate little in terms of clear solution pathways. The challenge today is therefore to work on models that are able to provide clear answers to what needs to be done within the constraints of what is physically feasible, at local, national, and international scales. The question is how to go about to achieve this goal? In the remainder of this post we will look at one possible approach, informed by a project in its early stages of the Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER).
A framework to map a sustainable human ecosystem
The objective of a sustainable society is to establish an environment that is stable and resilient in the long run in several ways:
• From a perspective of resource availability, both renewable and non-renewable;
• In the sense that no agent or group of agents or location ends up accumulating resources in a way that is unsustainable for others;
• Equally, exchange with entities outside the boundaries needs to be balanced to avoid long-term instabilities in any one direction.
Under these conditions the key to understanding what a sustainable human ecosystem looks like comes down to mapping all resource flows through the economy and its connected ecosystems. The mapping of an entire “economic system” including all relevant exchanges and processes allows for looking at various complexities and interactions. Any intervention in the starting state of the system related to the required sustainable conditions can then be examined as to determine what both feasible and best solutions are. It may seem like a gigantic undertaking, but this is not the case when taking a limited geographical scope and through some simplifications. It should be feasible to limit the description to those processes and outputs in a society which produce approximately 90% of vital outputs, and assume others without detailed specification, as long as they do not form vital inputs that could stop other key delivery systems from functioning.
We strongly discourage modelling the “economy” of such a world based on money, but rather on physical interactions between participants and systems – which can later be complemented with a monetary component. That way, distortions from market imperfections – for example the insufficient assignment of a price for externalities – can be avoided. Thus, instead of using money as the baseline, we suggest modelling the entire “economy” on a non-monetary basis, but with the assumption of money being present as an enabler of simple and smooth exchange between agents.
The key components to achieve a view of the entire economy are inputs, outputs and transactions which get shifted between physical entities (sub-locations) and agents in the model. Transactions can be processes, services or other exchanges (trade). The outputs and inputs can end up as infrastructure, in usable or non-usable resource stocks, or as pollution in connected ecosystems. The flow that these components create should be built in a way to allow for “imperfection”, as humans make errors and natural events can result in resource losses. This both in the availability of inputs (for example sunlight, wind, water), but also in the process stages, where human error and excess waste are rather the norm than the exception.
More details on each of these components can be found in the 9-page overview project document.
The modelling of these components based on a given system such as a city, region, or country, allows for tracing all type of flows and stocks within the human ecosystem. We can then see what happens if one stock becomes depleted or when pollution accumulates.
To get a grasp for the level of wealth and required changes are to achieve a sustainable human ecosystem, we need to adapt the model to be able to work with different degrees of cycling as one key condition. In a 0% scenario, no cycling takes place and all waste and losses of the processes go into sinks. In a 100% cycling situation, the society is not allowed to lose more resources and energy than can be harnessed or cycled. This provides a tool to map the road towards a sustainable human ecosystem, which is more important than knowing what such a society plausibly looks like, as the goal is to derive insights in what steps need to be taken. In most cases, the final reality of such a newly created ecosystem is not one of full cycling. Some inputs – like fossil fuels – might still be present for extended periods and thus used, and in many cases full cycling cannot be reached because of thermodynamic limitations.
The challenges to modelling
The framework above should allow for understanding the present reality that underlies the chosen geographic “economic system”, what a sustainable version of that system would like, and what a plausible road towards that sustainable system would be. The key challenge is to properly catch the boundary conditions of the model, and within these conditions understand what the essential variables and their interrelations are, as to resemble the real world as best as possible without introducing too much complexity. We think that with today’s knowledge this can be done, but acknowledge that there are still many uncertainties that will remain despite best efforts. Therefore, our intent is to take an open source approach to the modelling, so that remaining uncertainties can be narrowed down over time through the contribution of many people.
We encourage readers to contribute their thoughts as to what they think about the framework above, and what their thoughts are on the main parts that need to be mapped to understand what a sustainable human ecosystem looks like, within the scales of resources, ecosystems, economy, and energy. We hope that by this modelling effort we can contribute to new insights on the road to a more sustainable human ecosystem, and for those interested in working on this project to take a look at our job advert and contact us via recruiting at iier dot ch
references
Fthenakis, V.M., (2004). Life cycle impact analysis of cadmium in CdTe PV production. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. 8. pp. 303-334.
Koldewey, H.J., Martin-Smith, K.M., (2009). A global review of seahorse aquaculture. Aquaculture. 301. pp. 131-152.
Roberts, C., (2007). The Unnatural History of the Sea. Washington: First Island Press
Worm et al. (2006). Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services. Science. 314 (5800). pp. 787-790.
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Rembrandt, enormously ambitious and complex. I'm not sure it can be done. It requires great foresight to anticipate and predict all connected outcomes of one action.
Scottish wild salmon stocks have been in long term decline - who knows there could be a natural cause for this linked to shifting patterns of ocean currents. However, one human response to this was to introduce salmon farming in the 1970s. This has grown to become a major industry. In Scotland most of these farms are located on the west coast in sea inlets called sea lochs. Normally there is a small river draining into the head of the loch and 30 years ago these were teaming with wild salmon, sea trout and black eels.
The intentions of salmon farming were I believe good - aiming to save the wild salmon from extinction due to over fishing. What has happened is this:
1) High concentrations of fish lead to high concentrations of parasites and disease to the detriment of the wild fish stocks
2) Escaped farmed fish mix with the wild fish corrupting their finely tuned strain specific DNA that enables fish to navigate home to their home river (maybe)
3) The fish are sometimes fed on fish meal - meaning that certain other species like eels are being hoovered out of the ocean to feed the salmon - with bad impact on certain sea bird stocks and so on.
Wild salmon and sea trout stocks have become extinct in many of our west coast rivers.
Rembrandt,
I think it can be done. Yes it is ambitious. Yes it is complex. But there is already an enormous body of data on the natural world and human manipulation of it. The data needs to be reorganized into a form that supports the construction and testing of the model. Definitely will require more than a few people and more than a few months. As I say elsewhere, it should have be initiated back in the mid 50s, but it wasn't. And, if it really cannot be made to work, we will have learned not to try the particular approach taken again and some idea why. But the project really can't be abandoned unfinished. That would be a true collapse of civilization.
About de-emphasizing prices and money costs: A model that is built on physical transformations, stocks, and flows as you are planning can always be rewritten as a set of linear equations for a sufficiently small range of the system variables. The dual of that linear model will tell you what the prices will be if the real system actually takes on those values of the physical variables. One learns how economics is caused by physical reality.
Cheers.
The thing that modelers need to understand is that damage to the world's ecosystems began long before the industrial revolution. They began back in the days when hurter-gatherers were still small in number (fewer than 100,000) and even at that, could wipe out whole species of large animals. In fact, some say that the sixth mass extinction began 100,000 years ago. It was made worse when the world transitioned to farming, about 10,000 years ago. And, of course, the industrial revolution made it worse in the last few hundred years. Read more about this in my post, European Debt Crisis and Sustainability.
I think that what the modelers will find is that there is virtually no solution to a sustainable human ecosystem. Somehow, it is necessary to change man's nature, in terms of taking all he can, at the expense of ecosystems. With man's ability to use tools (such as nets for fish, and bows and arrows, and guns, and all kinds of modern devices), man has such an unfair advantage over ecosystems, that the system is headed for failure. Unless the model addresses these issues, I don't think it really adds to the world's knowledge base.
This is a very interesting question - will there ever be something like a truly sustainable human future? But to be honest, the objective of this project is not to start out with the assumption that because we've been unsustainable for a long time it doesn't even make sense to get to a better understanding of HOW sustainable our societies are and may become.
The final objective of this undertaking - and we know it is ambitious - is to create a macroeconomic view that hasn't been accepted broadly: that our ecosystem is as finite and as driven by energy and resource conversion as any other ecosystem, and to find out how that translates to a better understanding of reality.
I agree that there is no solution to a sustainable human ecosystem, however I doubt that the modelers will ever admit to this even if they finally come to that conclusion.
The problem is in our nature, not just in our human nature but in our animal nature also. We are competing with every other species on earth for territory and resources, and we are winning... big time! That is the way it has always been ant the way it always will be. It is the height of ignorance to believe that human nature can ever be changed.
And while we are easily winning the battle with other species for resources and territory, we are also competing with each other for resources and territory. There will always be The Haves and the Have-Nots among people within a country as well as among countries. And the have-nots are always trying to have more and the havs are always trying to increase their lot also. We are always in competition with each other.
Books are published on what this struggle is doing to the environment. Models are made and Plan Bs are proposed, but nothing really substantial is ever really done. Books and models are useless unless you can get almost every person on earth to change their behavior. Lotsa luck with that one.
Ron P.
Edo Japan was fairly close to sustainable. And SOME Pacific islands were sustainable IMO.
Fish from the sea renewed land trace minerals, etc. Population control by several means. Limited trade with distant islands.
One island decided to slaughter all the pigs for sustainability reasons.
Absent Climate Change, or a super typhoon (if the island was in that range - not all are), they appeared to be sustainable.
Other islands were not.
Alan
Surely you jest. Japan is the furthest of nations from sustainability. The world’s biggest importer of the fuel will take delivery of 131.4 million metric tons (of coal) in 2011, up from 125.3 million tons in 2010. Japan imports almost 100% of its coal, oil and gas.
The Japan Syndrome Japan, a country that today imports 70 percent of its grain.
Japan imports all of its energy and 70 percent of its grain. Now Alan, you just don't get more unsustainable than that.
Gad! It gets even worse. Overfishing is killing the ocean and the Japanese, by far, are the worst offenders. Their whaling fleet is driving the beast into extinction. I could post a thousand links about what the Japanese are doing to the ocean, killing off all fish, whales, squid and around their home island, the dolphins. But you Alan, see only the positive side, they will renew trace minerals in the soil. Really now.
Alan, think about it man, Japan has a population of 128 million. Not the most densely populated nation but considering that their island is so mountainous they have 12 people per acre of arable land. There are some much smaller nations with more people per acre but of nations with a high population that is the highest by far. (Except for South Korea which has a slightly higher population per acre of arable land.) Japan has over four times as many people per acre of arable land as India and 1.6 times the people per acre of arable lan as Bangladesh. Arable land > hectares (per capita) (most recent) by country
Japan is perhaps the most unsustainable nation in the world.
Ron P.
He said "Edo Japan". That is, Japan between 1600 - 1850.
Furthermore, modern Japan has all that it needs to survive, which is an appreciation that the critical resource is knowledge, and that the means to exploit knowledge, that is, the acquirement of skills, is the first order of business.
Hydrocarbons have been the low-hanging fruit, a resource we learned how to exploit following the onset of the scientific revolution. We are in the first stages of moving beyond hydrocarbons and I have no doubt that the Japanese will be among the leaders in the transition. They will continue to trade for foodstuffs, minerals and whatnot, offering products useful to farmers among other goods and services.
It continues to amaze me that some who claim to understand evolution, i.e. adaptation, fail to appreciate that our brain is both the result of evolution and the means of our continuing adaptation to an everchanging environment.
You must be a Julian Simon fan. It was his theory that human knowledge was the "Ultimate Resource" Simon believed that we would never run out of anything, that we could recycle everything.
Dr. Albert Bartlett on Julian Simon
But back to your post:
Yes, we did not leave the stone age because we ran out of stones. The Japanese will just transition to "something else". And just what will that be? They have only a fraction of the land required to grow enough food to feed the nation so they have no land to grow energy. But they have knowledge! Can they turn knowledge into energy? From someone who claims to understand evolution I am saying that knowledge will never evolve into energy. We get energy, fossil energy, from the earth. There is no replacement. And for a small overpopulated island with no fossil energy and less than half the land to grow enough food to feed themselves, it is highly unlikely that they will ever come up with "another form of energy".
There is no cure for overshoot, not even human knowledge.
Ron P.
Speaking of evolution, here's an interesting report from an interview with Richard Dawkins:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/science/20dawkins.html?_r=1&pagewanted...
I especially like the not wanting to be too dogmatic part.
And just in case you miss this part about his book "The Selfish Gene":
As for overshoot, what overshoot? Evidence please.
As for Julian Simon, I haven't read him. From your representation of two of his views (presumably he has more), he's got one right and one wrong. Not bad, I guess. He's right that the most important resource (I assume he's talking about our species) is knowledge. As for recycling everything, I do believe he ignores the second law of thermodynamics.
As for Japan, it doesn't need to grow energy. It just needs to capture some, either within its borders or through trade, offering the product of its people's skills in return.
So tell me, Mr. Ron P. Darwinian, why didn't the Romans run their chariots on diesel or gasoline? Might it be because they were short a little information? Or maybe you believe that hydrocarbons were only recently delivered to earth by spaceship along with an instruction booklet?
Obviously you have absolutely no idea of what overshoot is. Video: What is Ecological Overshoot?
Or you can read the very best (short article) ever written on the subject. Energy and Human Evolution
Or you could read the very best book ever printed on the subject. Overshoot by William Catton
A short excerpt from the book can be found here: Industrialization: Prelude to Collapse by William Catton
You are a real smart ass aren't you. We have had a lot of such people on this list before but they usually don't last very long unless they tone it down a bit. I am not arguing that we have not used our knowledge to get where we are. Indeed that is the problem.
The population during Roman times was about 230 million or about 1/300th of today's population. And it did not rise very fast until the industrial revolution when it really took off. Fossil fuels powered the industrial revolution as well as the green revolution. That enabled our population to explode. And when fossil fuels disappear, the population will implode. Read the essay linked above, "Energy and Human Evolution" and you will understand why.
Ron P.
+10 LOL
The population estimate for 'Roman times' is interesting, but so what? My question was, why didn't the Romans run their chariots on fossil fuels? After all, the material ingredients were available.
The British agricultural revolution and the British take-off of population began before the industrial revolution; in fact they were both key contributing factors in the process of industrialization, though secondary to the critical role of thinking.
You haven't provided any evidence of overshoot, only some speculative writing. Was China in overshoot when its population was less than half of today's, but millions were starving, in stark contrast to today. (And by the way, did you know that China is the world's largest producer of potatoes, by a long shot, when only a few years ago, it produced next to none.)
You have seen the future (time machine? crystal ball?), and it looks miserable. How sad for you. I guess when you get to purgatory, you can head to Malthus' and Ricardo's pad and join in their chanting: "Any day now, we're all going to hell in a handbasket".
There is an even better example of overshoot.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4734760
A population of mice given unlimited access to food and water and protected from disease and predators goes into a period of exponential growth and then collapses to zero and goes extinct.
A local library was having problems with mice, but it wasn't because they weren't returning borrowed books or disturbing other users with loud debates about the implications of some new invention.
It's true that mice are involved in science, but I honestly don't expect that Mickey or Minnie are about to publish anything in the near future. They've had decades and have yet to produce one page of legible scribbling.
And please, before somebody adds something about some remote island where reindeer had a bad experience, try to remember that Rudolph was a uniquely bright beast. We're just not likely to see his type again among the antlered.
Looks like it's going to be difficult to have a reasoned conversation with you.
I heard the same line, word for word, lo these many decades from a priest when I questioned his dogma.
Nonetheless, I am ready to reason with people who recognize that the act of reasoning separates our species from mice and reindeer. It also helps if my interlocutor(s) appreciate(s) the difference between a tiny isolated population on a tiny isolated island in the Pacific ocean and the modern world characterized by remarkably low, worldwide communication costs and by an immense and ongoing increase in knowledge.
Granted the uptake of knowledge is uneven. Dogmatism explains a lot of this uneveness.
Would the words "limbic" and "reptilian" find a place in such a reasoned conversation?
Because any conversation about human behaviour that doesn't take the unconscious, more primal drivers of that behaviour into account is going to be hopelessly truncated.
So, what's your take on Dawkins?
And what do you mean when you write: "more primal"?
I'd be a little less dogmatic than Dawkins. I would agree that we can probably overcome our genetic impulses some of the time with our reasoning capacity.
Unfortunately, for most human decisions the reptilian and limbic systems (which are evolutionarily older and therefore more primal parts of the brain than the neocortex) play a very heavy role in our decision-making due to their connections to our emotions. This gives the decisions and actions they influence a much stronger sense of immediacy and urgency than those arrived at through pure neocortical reasoning. The influences of the limbic and reptilian systems tend to be below the threshold of rational awareness. As a result these influences are notoriously hard to detect and control, though one can learn to do it to some degree with training and practice.
What this means is that for most people decisions related to survival, reproduction, status and social acceptance, the exercise of or submission to power - and all the activities that impinge on such issues - are not terribly rational, and in fact tend to be be irrational and emotional. Most such decisions are merely dressed up with post-hoc rationalizations when they appear, already fully formed, in our cortical consciousness.
Man is not nearly so rational an animal as his conceits would have it. We can be better described as rationalizing animals.
Clear enough?
Ya think?!
We ain't gonna see the likes of Rudolf the red nosed reindeer with his shinny nose anytime soon...
Well I guess one might call that a reasonable assumption!
Sigh.
So what is the mechanism by which women in many places (Japan, UK, Canada, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, the EU) are deciding to have children below replacement rates (2 children per woman)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertil...
Conscious choice.
A small quibble: two children per woman is below the replacement rate, only slightly given declining mortality among the young, but still below.
How is their conscious choice different than the unconscious choice of the mice to not reproduce?
Wiedemann would probably say that for the Romans the less expensive exploitable energy source was human slaves (his Greek and Roman Slavery book is very good).
Consider that a quick snapshot of Caesar's Gallic campaign brought 1 million slaves when Rome had a population of 1 million, never mind the Germanic and African
slave from Gaius Marius or Cornelius Sulla prior. War for the Romans was a profit center.
You are correct, I missed that. I knew the "Edos" were an indigenous tribe in Nigeria but was unaware that it was also a period in Japanese history. Japanese history is not my strong suit. Sorry about that.
However they proved that they did not have what it took to be sustainable by becoming the most unsustainable nation on earth. If they had truly been sustainable that would not have happened. You must realize that sustainable means to live sustainable, that is too keep their population from overshoot. Edo Japan failed miserable in that respect. They were never sustainable because thy could not control their population growth.
Ron P.
I'm not great at Japanese history either (but I'm not bad at google '-)
Actually, it seems that Japanese population was remarkably stable throughout most of the Edo (or Tokugawa) era, staying at around 30 million from 1700 to about 1850, then edging up a few million toward the end of that century.
Yes, the Japanese population eventually exploded when they could no longer resist the 'gunboat diplomacy' of the west. But the question is, are there examples of systems or regimes that consciously limited their technology and their population in order to avoid overshoot, and it looks like this period of Japanese history might be one worth looking at more closely.
Don't expect a paradise--there were rigid caste systems and severe punishments...
We're not looking for paradise here, just a system that doesn't explode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan_before_Meiji_Restoration
However they proved that they did not have what it took to be sustainable by becoming the most unsustainable nation on earth. If they had truly been sustainable that would not have happened.
The use of 'they' needs definition. If the 'They' would be the leadership and population of Edo - not 'they' being Japanese - then you, Darwininan is wrong (again) on a matter of history.
Matthew Calbraith Perry went to Edo Japan with guns and the threat of force and ended the Edo period.
The leadership of Japan decided on a different path due to the threat of force.
But for Darwininan to be correct, a people are defined by ONLY their location. I'll leave it up to the readers to decide if people are defined by their location only.
Edo Japan was fairly close to sustainable.
Surely you jest.
You are either ignorant or wanting to make the next statement.
Japan is perhaps the most unsustainable nation in the world.
As is my tradition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period
You now have a starting point on removing your ignorance.
(I was going to use One Straw Revolution http:www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta//onestraw.pdf as a peg to hang a comment about taking material from the Sea to the land as part of closing of a loop / adding to the food supply such that comments about arable land when one can obtain material from the sea are not the best comparison, but alas One Straw was not the source my memory had it to be.)
Not sure about that. The human species is in massive overshoot and the results of the modelling may well be that fewer humans can live sustainably at lower standards in a damaged and resource depleted world. I do not know how many humans and to what degree technology will survive. Certainly some humans and some technology will survive, but what is almost certain is that this world will be much less complex.
One aspect of the modelling that appears to be missing is the impact of the capital markets and what form these will take over time. during the contraction I suspect they may well be highly dysfunctional and one aspect of the great contraction (already present) will be virtually non existent credit availability.
This leads inevitably to the consideration of whether modelling the world after the great contraction is worthwhile. Maybe our most immediate need is to understand the great contraction and how the effects of that can be mitigated.
Nevertheless this is a fascinating project and I wish I was smart and well educated enough to be able to apply. Even though I have a Master of Sustainability Science degree I feel woefully inadequate against the task at hand.
I think there are many sustainable solutions. The trouble is that a sustainable solution reveals something about our true nature as living things and most of the obvious sustainable solutions give a picture of us that we don't much like to see. We would like to find a sustainable solution that is more harmonious, less brutish and nasty. That doesn't require changing human nature, I think, but building social structures that limit the consequences of the worser aspects of human nature.
Yes exactly, the solutions that are harmonious and sustainable in the long term don't fair well against unsustainable, short term and brutish "solutions".
Gail, I think you confuse the issue of a system removed from its original state with one that is in equilibrium. A few thousand hunter gatherers became part of an evolving system. Theoretically at least it should be possible to stabalise the Earth Ecosystem in some new state but I very much doubt this will be possible with 7 billion humans on the planet.
Of course no ecosystem is ever in a state of equilibrium but rather a state of dynamic equilibrium so the architects of the model may be able to choose how much evolution is permitted per unit time.
It sounds like you are too busy worrying about the minutiae of modeling. What is the point of modeling silly things that can never be? My issue with Gail's writing is she dreams of a world where some authority will regulate these resources. Both goals are totally divorced from the reality of human behavior.
Peak oil is the only hope for sustainability. Only a hard limit that declines over time will scale back human activity. As long as resources can be found, the world population will double and redouble until we become the yeast culture in the test tube. Call me a cheer leader for peak oil ;)
"Peak oil is the only hope for sustainability. Only a hard limit that declines over time will scale back human activity."
What then. As in the past, a new drama will unfold. Perhaps we'll call it "Desperately Seeking Substitutes" :-/
Yes, the great project now is not how to expand our capabilities, but how to limit them, especially the capabilities to consume the world.
Let us assume the perfect model is constructed. What is the result?
1) The solution is presented - we must reduce the global population to less than 1 billion people.
2) The solution, while very simple, is deemed impossible to implement. Case closed, model and report are ignored. Authors are labeled as crazy tree-huggers or agents against humanity.
Humanity needs to go through The Great Lesson - a real-world crisis that proves to the masses we cannot have exponential growth in a finite system in perpetuity.
When all the dust settles and the rebuilding begins, will we have learned our lesson? Will we be able to construct and manage sustainable communities and protect them from outsiders that didn't learn the lesson?
The problem with technology is that complexity requires massive energy gaps and plentiful resources. Hopefully, we will have a few areas that can keep our collective knowledge and keep moving it forward.
Until then, It seems the best play is the short-sell and hedge bet. Enjoy it while it lasts, this just may be the finest hour of human civilization.
Yes, a crisis is doubtless necessary, but please note that there are no shortage of those in the world. What you need to have on hand when a crisis occurs is a plan for how to proceed once the crisis makes many question the dominant paradigm. This is how the Chicago school implemented their (ultimately disastrous) schemes all over the world (See Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine"). If this approach can work for ill, perhaps it can also work for less nefarious ends.
Agreed Tt. You may model as much as you like, if human population doesn't decline significantly, every modeled future will suck. It's like mopping with all taps running.
Concerning Gail's comment: "man has such an unfair
advantage" ...
Reminds me of a Scientific American article from perhaps
45 years ago. It compared abundance of mammal species
based on a typical specimen's weight. A summary graph
was on log-log paper with the X-axis being the log of
a typical specimen's weight and the Y-axis being the
log of the abundance of the species. Most species were
on a straight line from top left to bottom right. In
the lower right corner was Blue Whale (200 tons); if
memory serves the upper left corner was some species
of field mouse (< 1 oz.).
The exact extremes aren't important. What is important
is that one species wouldn't fit on the graph: Homo
sapiens which based on the typical specimen's weight
was at that time 30,000 times too abundant to fit on
the line.
Since 1965 human population has gone from 3.3 Billion
to today's 6.8 Billion and many other species have
declined. So we're probably 60,000 times too abundant
to fit on the ~45 year old line today.
Indeed "man has such an unfair advantage ..." and
we're using that advantage to terraform the planet
so that the only species left will be plants and
animals we eat and plants and animals we feed to
animals we eat which of course is an extreme that
can't be reached.
If the global human population were decreased by
99.998% to ~150K the planet would get a rest.
However civilization would suffer. As just one
example it would be difficult to maintain the current
let alone develop the next intercontinental jet.
How about 50 million people?
"Don't accept the chauvinistic tradition that labels our era the age of mammals. This is the age of arthropods. They outnumber us by any criterion--by species, by individuals, by prospects for evolutionary continuation. Some 80 percent of all named animal species are arthropods, the vast majority insects."
Stephen Jay Gould-- Wonderful Life p 102
"There's plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us." --Franz Kafka
MD3,
For a long time I speculated that Homo sapiens outweigh
any other single species including termites or any other
specific Arthropod. I was surprised to learn that for a
couple of months in the Antarctic Spring krill (an
Arthropod of the Subphylum Crustacean) outweigh Homo
sapiens by a wide margin. However there are ~85 known
species of krill so it might not be comparing apples with
apples.
You quote Gould (for whom I had a lot of respect): "They
outnumber us by any criterion--by species, by individuals,
by prospects for evolutionary continuation." That quote
doesn't include the criterion of "total weight of a
specific species."
By reading lots of articles and comments I conclude that
chauvinistic or not from the perspective of most TOD
posters and readers the ecological footprint of Homo
sapiens is of far more concern than that of all Arthropods
combined.
Ruddiman's Early Anthropocene Hypothesis
http://westinstenv.org/palbot/2010/12/08/the-anthropogenic-greenhouse-er...
This is why nuclear power is so important.
Desperate, starving people will destroy everything and eat anything (see Haiti, or any of a dozen overgrazed-to-dustbowl countries in Africa). Nuclear power does not compete with ecosystems for anything of great significance; uranium and thorium in particular are useless to everything on the planet that we know of, except us. Taking the energy demands off the ecosystems frees more for nature (even before the effects of effluents are considered).
It may even be possible to turn nuclear energy into food. Archaea can make methane from CO2 and electrons (a process which Electrochaea is trying to commercialize). Methane can form the basis of a food web which needs no sunlight (there are similar food webs around volcanic vents). No sunlight required means no surface fields required, and so forth.
I know that some "green" types think of humans as Morlocks, but we really do have the option of re-writing the story without Eloi.
That is rather interesting. If it came about I doubt it would be good for the planets life in the long run. We would simply continue to expand the population and impact, and the ultimate level of damage would be greater still. We would simply runaway with the noyion that since we are separate from nature, that we don't need it. So I doubt you'll attract any fans here.
The societies (First world) capable of doing these things have already reached ZPG (even the USA is only growing as a result of immigration). All that's required is to refuse to share with nations which don't limit their numbers and educate their populations.
I don't think you appreciate the difference it would make if people didn't have to dominate or destroy nature just to avoid starvation. Desperate people do not have the luxury to care what else is lost. Wealthy, secure people do.
There is no reason to believe that zero population growth will persist anywhere perpetually except in the case of extinction. Population collapse follows a bell curve. Near the peak there is approximately zero change in population which can be deceptive for those who reject overshoot. Yeast in a Petri dish enter population collapse from either resource depletion or pollution depending on the amount of food they are given.
Although Japan had an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster all at once, you do not understand the looming disaster posed by nuclear power. Even when the nuclear power industry externalizes its risks upon its victims, the clue sails right on by you.
It's been "looming" for decades, but for some reason it never seems to get here (save for Chernobyl). The death toll from the meltdowns at Fukushima stands at zero. There were what, 3 minor injuries from beta burns? The Japanese people are getting annoyed with the anti-nuclear paranoia driving all the news coverage; there are lots of people who could use help and attention, but they're never mentioned and get no mind-share because of the anti-nuclear agenda of the MSM.
The biggest irony is that the Fukushima Dai'ichi plants were among the oldest and least-refined designs running anywhere in the world. Newer plants of similar design rode out the quake and tsunami just fine, and a healthy program of nuclear development and expansion would have replaced those outdated plants already. Modern designs don't need electric power to prevent fuel damage. The lack of this healthy program is largely due to the efforts of anti-nuclear activists, hyping non-existent "looming disasters".
I love the smell of irony in the morning.
NB: For those who didn't get the memo, we did NOT almost lose Detroit. This 1976 document debunks the hype around Fermi I.
The death toll from the meltdowns at Fukushima stands at zero.
Citation please.
There were what, 3 minor injuries from beta burns?
Again, provide citations.
The Japanese people are getting annoyed with the anti-nuclear paranoia driving all the news coverage
Now you are speaking for 'the people'?
I'm REALLY looking forward to you showing your data/sources on this claim.
My comprehensive rebuttal, WITH REFERENCES, was deleted from this thread.
I protest this unconscionable censorship on the part of TOD's administration and demand the return of my work to me. Research is not free. It takes time and effort. For all intents and purposes, I have just been robbed of it.
I also protest that the baseless trollish charges made in the parent ARE ALLOWED TO STAND while the rebuttal was censored without a trace. This bias is why nothing about this issue gets settled; the science has been here for decades, but only the anti-nuclear side is allowed to speak.
Repost w. edits (thanks, Kate)
It's hypocritical of you to demand this given that you never give any, but for the rest of the world I'll summarize what everyone ought to know already.
The only nuclear-related injuries listed here (last updated 9/20/2011) are those detailed here, claiming 3 with beta burns due to lack of protective equipment (walking through contaminated water without waterproof boots!), only 2 requiring hospitalization. All other injuries and the handful of fatalities (3?) were unrelated to radiation.
Unlike you, I let the Japanese speak for themselves. I just pay attention to them instead of ignoring everything that doesn't fit a "nuclear problems are the ONLY disaster" narrative.
We are likely entering/have started to enter a period of climatic, economic, political and social chaos.
In this period, every nuclear plant is a potential Fukushima or worse.
Even if we somehow ride out the current set of storms comparatively unruffled, history tells us that eventually every area experiences chaos. When that time eventually comes to each nuclear plant, they will blow, with more or less devastating consequences for the region and the planet.
Nuclear proponents are often quite knowledgeable and excited about technology and nuclear physics. But they seem to be stunningly ignorant or naive about history and the consequences that the inevitable chaos that it brings will have on their tidy little plans.
Which will be much worse in areas where there is no reliable electric power.
I'd say you have it backwards: the fear of a Fukushima will accelerate and exacerbate the chaos.
If you have such a concern, it would be sufficient to provide enough dry-cask storage to store all irradiated fuel at each site and substantial amounts of fuel for the generators. If chaos makes it impossible to continue running a plant, the generators will allow it to be shut down and the fuel loaded into dry casks for indefinite storage. This avoids unnecessary blackouts leading to chaos on their own.
A PWR operating at 30% of full power could go roughly 5 years without refuelling. That's enough time for a lot of chaotic things to be resolved. Other technologies could be far more robust; an Integral Fast Reactor could be supplied with enough raw breeding material for its complete lifespan at the time of construction. Even if it needed other consumables or parts every 10 years or so, that's a long time to be able to wait compared to a gas-fired turbine. A nuclear economy would be almost immune to disruptions in fuel supplies, from politics, chaos or anything else.
If you have such a concern, it would be sufficient to provide enough dry-cask storage to store all irradiated fuel at each site and substantial amounts of fuel for the generators. If chaos makes it impossible to continue running a plant, the generators will allow it to be shut down and the fuel loaded into dry casks for indefinite storage. This avoids unnecessary blackouts leading to chaos on their own.
I have such a concern. The reported cost of a single dry-cask storage unit is over $1M currently, with the cost guaranteed to go up as we head further into a situation with high inflation and no surplus energy for such shenanigans. The dry casks are supposed to last 100 years, but have a history of defective welds that spring leaks quickly. The cost of dry cask storage is so great that Nukes have put off dry cask storage, opting instead to double stack, rack, and rerack the fuel in spent fuel pools (SFP) that, in Fukushima's case, have now spread spent fuel and Mox fuel loaded with plutonium, strontium, and other relatively permanent isotopes across the Japanese landscape. So the cost of offloading into casks from SFP is already prohibitive and not something that private nuke corps will do without government assumption of cost.
Dry-casking spent fuel is not a decision to be made in an emergency; the fuel of a scrammed nuke has to be cooled for at least a year before it can be moved to a SFP. Then the fuel must be cooled in the SFP for another 4 or 5 years before it is cool enough to be put in dry casks. During that 5 years, cooling must be maintained with no interruptions of more than 100 minutes, or the fuel will boil dry and burn up, permanently rendering the countryside within 50-100 miles unlivable, and making a much larger swath of the US dangerous due to lower levels of radiation. So all of that fuel in SFP in the US (many times the amount at Fukushima) is just a bunch of sitting dirty bombs of our own terrorist behavior, waiting for one 100 minute broad breach in electricity delivery as complexity starts to deconstruct.
And I will stand by my original statement that in the end, the Japanese will throw a sheet over the 6 or 8 China Syndromes that is Fukushima and walk away from the middle part of Japan as food chain and waste contamination continue to concentrate, making the central part of Japan unlivable. The corium is now 25 feet down into the groundwater. Incinerate wastes and sewage, and isotopes disperse quickly. Can the fish, give it away to poorer neighbors as a gesture of good will, and the isotopes disperse slower. Wait long enough, and the fish in the Pacific food chain are inedible. Any "fixes" just move the isotopes around and spread things further. The problem with isotopes is that they last too long (25,000 years) and cannot be mediated.
100 minutes is all it would take to get the party started in the US. We're getting lots of warnings, too, that running 40 year old nuke plants that are past their design limits is not a good idea. The nuke plants are debt men walking, and they know it. The good news is that leukemia takes 5 years and the other cancers take 10+, so the corporations responsible can say, I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone, just like the financiers on Wall Street. Use up all the oil, decimate the food chain, and leave Mad Max for our kids. Thanks, EP.
A quick search turned up a figure of $20-30 million for storage to serve a 2-reactor plant. That's a fraction of 1% of the price of a new plant, perhaps $1.5-$2 billion for the entire USA. It should have been done as part of the stimulus.
No citation, and an apparent self-contradiction: how does a dry cask spring leaks?
Of course. Government has failed to take the fuel as it is contracted to do and is collecting a 1 mil/kWh fee for doing. Would you go to your shareholders and say you want to spend $15 million per reactor for dry casks, or would you re-rack? Let's take the Yucca Mountain fund and spent it on dry casks.
It's already been done at every decommissioned plant in the USA, and a few which have overflowed their SFP capacity.
Fuel has to be moved to the SFP before new fuel can be inserted. This takes days, not a year; the fastest refuelling intervals in the USA are a mere 15 days.
Active cooling is required for a while if the coolant is water at atmospheric pressure, but placing the fuel in a pressurized container which can hold a non-corrosive coolant (CO2 under pressure might do) would allow it to self-cool at a slightly higher but safe temperature. I've worked in a shop which could build such vessels, no problem.
Cs-137: 30.17 years. Sr-90: 28.8 years. I-131: 8.02 days. Those are the worst of them, because they wind up in the metabolism.
I had to quote this because it's so over-the-top. Yet some people take it at face value... I'm just amazed. The level of ignorant fear never ceases to surprise me.
Cs-137: 30.17 years. Sr-90: 28.8 years. I-131: 8.02 days.
Stating one half-life for how long the isotope "lasts" is also over-the-top when we know it remains extremely dangerous for many half-lives. I know you're not this ignorant. If this was true, much of the contents of SFPs around the US would be totally harmless by now.
The claim "25,000 years" is approximately the half-life of Pu-239. I was comparing like to like.
Courtesy of All Things Nuclear.
Weak troll. Your propagandists can barely get one fact right (reactor temperature).
LOL. Rebranding efforts are going to have to double. Lots more at Stephanie's link.
http://www.stephaniemcmillan.org/codegreen/
More silly propaganda, sans rational analysis.
In reality, natural gas kills far more people than nuclear power, but its hazards are ignored by the MSM. Maybe you'd like to explain this very selective blind spot... or maybe not.
Not sure about that. Some weeks after the Tsunami infant mortality rates spiked on the US West coast! I suspect it will be almost impossible to attribute the spike to the disaster, nevertheless the mere fact that there is a chance it can be attributable should give one pause for thought.
The contamination of the sea has yet to run its course in terms of human damage. We shall have to wait and see what happens in the months and years ahead, while on land various isotopes of Caesium and other nasties are turning up in vehicle and airconditioning filters. This means almost certainly that these particles will also have lodged themselves in peoples lungs. Will cancers diagnosed in 10, 15 or 20 years be attributed to Fukushima? I doubt it. One only has to look at the cancer records around Chernobyl and the Tuamotus (Mururoa) to get a feel that Fukushima is a very long way from being played out. BTW the total radiation released to the environment from Fukushima exceeds Chernobyl by a wide margin. And the distaster continues, even though it is no longer front page news. At least 3 cores melted down right through all the containment vessels and I have not heard what is happening now. The Japanese are excellent at creating maximum opacity.
We are a very long way from having viable disposal strategies for nuclear waste. Only a very small proportion of all the nuclear waste ever created has been permanently stored. Until we do learn to deal "for ever" with the waste, nuclear energy is a non-starter in my opinion and I oppose it when ever possible. Remember, the oldest human constructions in existence are some 10,000 years old. And they are not in great shape. It seems somewhat arrogant that we think we can can build something that is expected to last for 250,000 years, especially something that has the durability and complexity needed to safely store nuclear waste for that long.
Finally, I applaud the decisions of Germany and Switzerland to phase out nuclear power. But I want to see things go a whole lot further. Firstly all Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactors should be closed down immediately. They have inherent design flaws that are not rectifiable. Thereafter all countries need to enter into a public debate about whether they should continue with nuclear power. What democracies do about totalitarian states like China, Iran and Russia I have no idea. Chenobyl taught us that radiation is no respecter of international borders. Meadows in Wales still cannot be grazed some 25 years after the disaster. The fact that all of this is happening during Peak Oil and when we should be cutting back on coal use is a disaster.
Personally I would prefer it that when the lights go out that it is actually dark, rather than being lit by an unearthly radiation glow!
Citation, please. Also please provide a mechanism for barely-detectable traces of radiation to have a much greater effect than the doses received in Japan. Are you suggesting that Fukushima emissions are like homeopathic medicines, more powerful the more they're diluted?
You do realize that homeopathy is bunk, don't you?
I doubt it too. Aside from thyroid tumors nearby, there was no great spike in cancers from Chernobyl either. Certainly not in Europe.
Whereas the real authorities say "The total radioactive release from Fukushima is currently estimated at about 5.5% of Chernobyl". Cs-137 emissions at Fukushma are about 1/5 of Chernobyl.
You have NO respect for the truth, sir. Shame on you.
That's a gross exaggeration of the most sensational headlines I could find in a search.
For shame, sir. For shame!
The Egyptian pyramids are upwards of 3000 years old. The Coliseum is ~2000 years old. The waste products from e.g. LFTR become less radioactive than uranium ore within about 500 years.
Paranoia stokes political power, but it doesn't solve real problems.
I don't. They're crazy, and inevitably going to violate their obligations under climate-change treaties. Nuclear energy is the only source available in sufficient supply soon enough to keep us from pushing the earth into an Anthropocene Thermal Maximum to rival or exceed the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
Infant Mortility: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201161664828302638...
Thyroid Cancers in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs303/en/index.html
Radiation Releases: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/run-rated-fukushina-radiation-release-p...
Incidentally I do not trust TEPCO of the Japanese government. They have been shown to be economical with the truth too many times. In addition I am not sure anyone can ever know how much radiation was picked up by seawater during the efforts to cool the reactors in the days and weeks following the incident. Perhaps releases into the sea are not as bad as releases into the air as with Chernobyl. I guess we will have to see.
Melt throughs: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8565020/Nuclear-fue...
Waste: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management
Not only is fission inherently dangerous, but it is not financially viable (ie it cannot either be insured or financed other than by governement). I would also like to understand what its EROI is. The last estimate I read was 5. If so that is too low for all the trouble.
Hopefully I have demonstrated that I do have some evidence to back up my opinion. Maybe not the sort of evidence that stacks up in peer reviewed science or a court room, but that is the overwhelming impression I have from reading a wide a array of sources on this issue. So Mr/Ms Engineer-Poet I would appreciate you desisting from all the ad-hominem attacks in this forum. They do not belong here.
Clearly you are a nuclear power supporter. Fair enough, but that doesn't mean Germany and Switzerland have got it wrong, or that my opinion isn't valid.
Oh, goddess! A "news" item from al-Jazeera, which leads with a quote from Arne Gundersen! You can't get much more propagandistic than that. Nor can you get any more self-interested. al-Jazeera is headquartered in Doha, Qatar. One of Qatar's major exports is LNG, which is one of the products Japan will need to replace power from the closed reactors. Do you think a Qatari news source is going to do anything but hype the dangers of nuclear power in Japan? Follow the money.
The "35%" increase was in a total death count of 125 (presumably from a long-term average of 80-odd). This is supposed to be "statistically significant", but a 95% confidence interval will be exceeded by random chance 5% of the time. For a 10-week average, we'd expect that to happen around once every 4 years.
You also ignored the dose-response issue after I put it front and center. The levels which reached the USA were "hundreds of thousands to millions of times below levels of concern". Looks like pure bunk to me.
That's never been questioned. Chernobyl released lots of I-131, and people did not receive treatment to prevent uptake. But that sort of disaster requires mismanagement of a graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactor like the RMBK, and nobody in their right mind will build another one.
Dated March 23, and debunked by later and more authoritative sources that I already gave you.
You seem to be ignoring Finland.
The "problem" isotopes of I-129, Tc-99 and Np-237 really aren't. They can be chemically separated and, because of their low activity and heat output, isolated very easily (especially compared to natural materials of similar toxicity, such as arsenic). Np-237 in particular is usable as nuclear fuel in fast-spectrum reactors, or bred to Pu-238 for use in heat sources such as for RTGs. Pu-238 has a half-life of 89 years and decays to U-234 (both of which fission in a fast neutron spectrum).
France and China seem to have good luck with the government model. Since the advent of the NRC, the USA has had government in the role of roadblock and cost center without any identifiable improvements in safety. TMI Unit 2's meltdown was partially due to a failed instrument mandated by the NRC, but the pre-NRC Unit 1 ran and continues to operate to this day; it received a license extension through 2034.
A nuclear plant uses a fraction of the steel and concrete of a wind farm of the same nameplate wattage, and has a much greater capacity factor. Wind farms have calculated EROEI of around 20-25, so nuclear has to be as good or better. The only way it can be worse is if "regulation" and interest costs are counted as energy costs, which is bad accounting.
To make your case you need evidence which backs your argument unequivocally. I don't think you've managed that.
As for Germany, Angela Merkel is a highly accomplished physicist, with several books to her name such as Merkel, Angela; Lutz Zülicke (1987). "Nonempirical parameter estimate for the statistical adiabatic theory of unimolecular fragmentation carbon-hydrogen bond breaking in methyl". Molecular Physics 60 (6): 1379–1393. Bibcode 1987MolPh..60.1379M. doi:10.1080/00268978700100901.
I doubt she entered into Germany's no nuke policy with her eyes closed.
Angela Merkel went into the last election proposing to reverse the Green's policy of nuclear shutdown. And, for a while, she and her party actually did so.
Which position do you think was based on facts, and which on political considerations?
Since the 1970's, on average there has been 1 core meltdown per decade.
There were two bodies found in the rubble on March 30, 2011, and decontaminated. They were not reported as missing until March 16, 2011. There were reports that they died from the tsunami (March 11) or during the explosion of reactor 3 (March 13). After the explosion, TEPCO stated:
TEPCO has released so many contradictory statements and consistently downplayed the seriousness of the disaster, that it is not possible to make positive assertions about the death toll to date. Because radiation exposure can kill people decades after the exposure, there will be no final tabulation until the nuclear disaster at Fukushima is a distant memory.
Death toll is a pathetic metric for a nuclear disaster. You ignore all the people who have been removed from their homes and jobs. You omit sickness and injuries caused by radiation exposure and explosions. The contamination of land for longer than a human lifetime and the loss of farms, fish and livestock are a crushing burden for victims who you ignore. Using Chernobyl as an indicator, people and products from Fukushima will be shunned. As long as such burdens fall upon others, nameless, faceless, unknown souls, I am certain you will be content with your advantage gained by externalizing the costs and consequences upon them. Even while a disaster is ongoing, you ignore it, trivialize it.
You have it backwards. Those liberal arts majors whose paychecks are paid in part by the nuclear industry spout the propaganda of their masters. Usually that means they do not report nuclear events, and when they do, they are massively slanted toward no problem, no risk and no danger so the viewer/reader should move along and direct his attention to something else.
There are lots of these defective General Electric Mark I reactors still in operation. Fukushime Daiichi was the closet nuclear power plant to the epicenter. Distance matters with earthquakes and tsunamis. A healthy program of nuclear development and expansion does not exist because it cuts into the profits demanded by the bean counters. Those anti-nuclear activists warned TEPCO that their sea wall was too low while TEPCO insisted it was plenty high to handle the worst case scenario. Those anti-nuclear activists did not have anything to do with constructing reactor buildings too close together or locating backup diesel generators in places that could be flooded. Nor did they have anything to do with workers neglecting to refill the fuel tank of a fire truck pumping cooling water into reactor 1. Despite its imperfections continuing unabated, I sense an idealistic belief that technology can be perfected.
And we've wiped out life on Earth? Everyone's gotten cancer? We've awakened Godzilla and he's stomping Tokyo flat?
None of those things, you say? It's so subtle that nobody noticed?
I suspect that we've released less radioactivity into the environment from nuclear energy, meltdowns included, than coal power due to the tramp U+Th in coal.
TEPCO was dealing with a crisis situation. The people briefing the press had a Catch-22: if they vetted their information thoroughly they would be accused of stonewalling, and if they did not have their facts absolutely verified before talking to the press they would later be accused of lying. The rules you insist on amount to "heads I win, tails TEPCO loses".
You state a claim contrary to your reference, which begins "The bodies of two workers killed by the tsunami"...
I copied your link so readers can see that it points to a report from March 14. You couldn't be bothered to check later reports to see if the 7 "missing" were actually harmed, missed in the headcount after the fact, or not actually at the site at the time of the event. I did check, and found this timeline which says 4 workers and 7 soldiers injured, ZERO dead.
Do you think "radiation" is an unknown quantity? Do you believe we don't have data on the effects of radiation exposure going on 7 decades old, and actuarial data on the long-term effects?
The radiation from the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no detectable genetic or other effects on survivors receiving low doses. No members of the public received high doses from either TMI or the Fukushima, so this "looming disaster" is a shadow cast by fears in the darkness of ignorance. Turn on the light and it disappears.
Pure, unadulterated falsehood. The science agencies and Japanese people had plenty to say about all sorts of things, but the MSM only wanted to talk about nuclear problems. (This video was linked in my censored rebuttal to "eric blair" above, which proves conclusively that the Japanese do not have the all-meltdown all the time paranoia that he does.)
If only. In the real world, the MSM takes a minor industrial accident and blows it up into an international news item because it occurred at a French nuclear waste handling plant.
Wrong again. The plant at Onagawa (on the mainland side of the Oshika peninsula at the top of this image [source]) was considerably closer to the quake than Dai'ichi. The Onagawa plant served as a refugee center after the quake and tsunami. (The 3 reactors at Onagawa are all from Toshiba. It appears that a lot changed between 1969 and 1984, doesn't it?)
Empty accusation. GE has had designs out there for decades, but has been blocked by NRC red tape and political hatchet jobs in the US Congress (see the tale of the Integral Fast Reactor, killed by Hazel O'Leary and John Kerry). The only winners are the coal and gas industries.
True. But the goal of the anti-nuclear activists is not to fix the vulnerabilities of nuclear power. It is to kill it, regardless of what they have to do or say or what replaces it.
The main error with the "just go nuclear" plan is that the problem is not just with energy. The problem includes many other resources (arable land, fresh water, clean air, toxic-free zones, radioactive-free zones, threats from man-made substances, ocean fisheries, depleting mineral deposits, etc.). How can this not be obvious to people that understand the Peak Oil premise?
by the way, uranium is a non-renewable resource that will peak soon as well. Can the failing global economy even afford these massive monuments of human ingenuity with their ever-increasing costs, both financially and environmentally? Of course, the answer is no. Even today, only governments can afford these systems because they can spread out all of the costs (security, fuel enrichment, unlimited liability, decommissioning, radioactive waste storage, Fukushima-like disaster responses, etc.) to all of their citizens, even if these citizens have no idea what is going on.
Nuclear is dead, may it rest in peace.
This assumes that we don't make use of technology that has been known about for fifty years and trialled over thirty years ago. That is possible; but it's a choice, not a certainty.
With enough energy we can desalinate water and remove toxins from it. With enough energy we can clean up toxic zones and recycle minerals cleanly. With enough energy in the right places we can reverse erosion and increase arable land.
We're going to have to live with radioactivity, just as we now live with radioactivity (yes), AND arsenic, sulfate aerosols, ozone, and toxic nitrogen oxides from burning fossil fuels. It's the lesser of two evils, the other of which is killing life in the oceans.
Nuclear power is finite, but it could keep 10 billion people in European levels of comfort for several centuries. That's enough time to reduce the population to sustainable levels in a non-catastrophic way, if we choose to.
All is choice.
Radioactive-free zone?! Where can you find one of those? I doubt there's been such a place anywhere in the universe since the first supernovae went boom and made elements heavier than lithium (and filled zones far beyond their remnant nebulae with high-energy cosmic rays). Earth is full of uranium+thorium and their daughter isotopes, potassium-40, carbon-14 and other all-natural stuff. A little more isn't likely to be harmful; the "linear no-threshold" model is known to fail to describe observations at low, chronic levels of exposure. Areas with high natural levels of radioactivity do not have the disease/mortality statistics LNT predicts.
Nuclear power helps a lot with the other parts. Cleaning up air, eliminating toxics from fossil fuels, desalinating water (and avoiding contamination of natural supplies from e.g. fraccing), stopping ocean acidification, all benefit from nuclear energy. With cheap energy, depleting resources are easier to recycle. The list goes on.
It's you who haven't thought about it enough.
Of course I am not talking about background radiation but man-made radioactive waste that can kill people for thousands of years and make places like Chernobyl and Fukushima less desirable for family picnics.
Regarding what the poster above said about using our other "sustainable" nuclear fuels, I feel a thorium debate coming.
How about we wait until there is a great, fully commercialized thorium or breeder power plant running by a private company profitably before we get into deep discussions on the topic.
Maybe man-made (have to put this in here because the above poster will start talking about the sun being a fusion reactor) nuclear power will save humanity and Earth's ecosystem... But I doubt it.
Too bad we don't have another earth-like planet close enough to us to try out a few different scenarios.
The one thing I am sure about is there will be people able to figure out how to live very well, indeed, during the long crisis. There just won't be as many of them that we have today.
The stuff at Fukushima is IIRC primarily cesium, which binds strongly to materials like concrete and other minerals. It's not going to make the area undesirable for picnics. Even at Chernobyl, the top soil layers are being depleted in the radioactives as they wash towards the subsoil. Increasingly, to be exposed to significant radiation would require literally digging it up.
The other issue at Fukushima is strontium, which is taken up like calcium. It may make it unrealistic to grow food crops in the contaminated zone for a couple of half-lives, or until it's flushed out by something like lime treatment or depleted by growing several crops of calcium-intensive plants and throwing them away (bio-remediation).
I'd be happy to. Get the NRC out of the way and let Flibe Energy do its thing. But we know that's not going to happen, so I refuse to accept your conditions for having a discussion.
The question is whether people like you will even allow people like me to try to prove you wrong.
"Increasingly, to be exposed to significant radiation would require literally digging it up"
Luckily, humans never have dug and never will dig into the ground.
/sarc
Oh, the irony. Here we are talking about sustainability and you're proposing the only energy source, which, by its very nature (that of destroying matter), can never be sustainable.
I can't believe this. Please look up the Integral Fast Reactor, or thermal breeder reactors using thorium (possible in several different ways) for a start.
Fissioning one heavy atom releases about 50 MILLION times more energy than oxidizing one atom of carbon. Use that completely with breeder fuel cycles, of which there are many possible options, and world uranium and thorium reserves could sustain ALL of humankind for millennia. A 50,000,000:1 energy density advantage means resource utilization and total life-cycle environmental impact (resources consumed in mining, transportation, land use, infrastructure, waste streams, etc.) per kWh delivered can be minimized by orders of magnitude over fossil fuels, and orders of magnitude again over solar or wind. Enough supply for 1000's of years while eliminating the environmental holocaust of fossil fuel mining and waste dumping into the atmosphere. I call that sustainable and a worthy vision for the future.
The science is well established and breeder technologies have been successfully demonstrated. We need a political consensus to make bold commercial innovations in nuclear technology possible. Since this would put fossil fuels corporations, a trillion-dollar lobby, and the power of petro-states on the road to extinction, I don't expect this epiphany to happen any time soon. But, happen it must - eventually.
Believe me, I've looked up the IFR, thorium reactors of all kinds, read the pros and cons, and right now I see a massive propaganda campaign of half-truths and major omissions by the pro-thorium shills.
And it is still not, by any definition, renewable or sustainable.
But if you want, please show us how to build me a thorium-powered infrustructure which is completely self-sustaining, without subsidies from fossil fuels, which meets sustainability requirements.
And prove that it can be delivered in the quantities "needed" within a reasonable timescale without taking any safety shortcuts.
China says it'll take them 20 years to get a production-scale prototype. How long should that protoype run before being considered reliable and safe enough to progress into full production? And how many iterations of improved designs before we're satisfied with the design. And how fast will we be able to build them?
Simple arithmetic is pretty good at destroying the technofixers' panaceas.
Do you have any specifics, or are you just throwing slurs? Seriously, if you have anything solid I'm very interested. I shifted my stance a few years ago when I learned about the technology which had been developed to the point of imminent large-scale commercialization, and then killed. All the numbers I've seen work out. If you have proof they're wrong, I want to see it.
Neither are most of today's systems for capturing wind and solar energy, so I don't see the reason to pick on thorium. Thorium pushes the horizon out for at least a couple of hundred years. That's more than long enough for the other problems to be solved, or for thorium to be replaced in its turn.
I calculated in a previous thread that thorium reactors should be scalable to well above average US electric consumption in under 20 years. This holds for a bunch of different assumptions, because the thorium system can be started on a one-time investment of enriched uranium.
The USA was in the process of designing a full-scale thorium reactor in the 1970's. The MSRE was constructed and started in about 3 years. There is no reason for a new effort to take longer, and the "safety" argument implies "full speed ahead" when you consider that the alternative is rampant climate change, ocean acidification and detrimental ecosystem shifts from differential effects of CO2 fertilization.
I might believe you, if you bothered to show your work.
The Sun works by "destroying matter", so by your definition all "renewable" energy is unsustainable.
If FBRs are used, the average ton of granite has more available energy in its U+Th than a ton of coal. Rivers carry about 30,000 tons of U to the oceans every year; total human energy use is equivalent to about 5,000 tons. Uranium is at least as renewable as wind.
This is why nuclear power is so important.
Desperate, starving people will destroy everything and eat anything (see Haiti, or any of a dozen overgrazed-to-dustbowl countries in Africa).
And exactly how does one get functioning man-made Nuclear Power to Haiti, North Korea, Lybia et la?
You make hydrogen, make ammonia and export urea as fertilizer.
You bet, Williams discusses somewhat the Classical period's impact on forests in this article http://geography.fullerton.edu/taylor/ENST595T/darkages.pdf. In one of my research projects on Ancient Near East agricultural practices in grad school, I was referred to papers on the Greek's adoption of olives and grape cultivation due to soil depletion post forests, post wheat, and this model moving into portions of the middle East. In fact I picked up an article on the dramatic difference in New England forests over a 200 year period by the Amerindians I believe between the 14th century and he 16th century as cultivation of the three sisters grew.
Don't forget what John and Paul said: "All you need is love."
That may seem a bit humorous, or naive, but it is true. How do men currently solve their disputes? By drawing lines in the soil, creating borders, massing soldiers and weapons, using them, and justifying whatever outcome there is. Until men learn to solve their problems peacefully, there will be no solution to a sustainable human ecosystem. Why is it so hard? Can men ever learn to choose cooperation over competition? I doubt it.
To be as flippant, wasn't it a bit too much loving and too little death that got us into this mess in the first place?
I also do not see how a sustainable human ecosystem is possible. If all open systems are subject to the maximum power principle, which includes all life forms, human beings and the societies we build, then how can any level of sustainability be created? You would need some sort of extream totatalitarian government to make sure people did not revert back to their true nature and because maximum sustainable yields for most renewables hovers around the 1% mark then your human population is going to be very small.
What such a project could do though is give a more accurate eco-footprint figure which is needed because IMO the Wackernagle calculations are far too optimistic.
Gail, I think it's important to understand that the evolution of life, and our place within it as human beings, is neither a zero-sum game, nor its alternative, but rather transcends this paradigm. Terms such as "damage to the envionment", like "saving the Earth" imply that there's an ideal state from which human activity has caused a deviation, and that by modifying our collective behavior we can somehow return to that state. In truth, evolution is driven by change, and you can't go home again. We, as humans, are subject to the same evolutionary forces as all other creatures. In the long run, the environment will out, with or without the human race, and in fact a study of the evolution of life on Earth strongly suggests that homo sapiens will probably go the way of almost all the myriad species of great apes which branched from a common ancestry perhaps twelve million years ago.
Given this, I would guess that you're probably correct in your suggestion that modelers will find virtually no solution to a sustainable human ecosystem.
This isn't to say that the situation is necessarily hopeless, but that hope, and constructive solutions which will give us some level of confidence that our great-great-grandchildren will be born, and born into a world in which they can reasonably expect some level of peace and happiness, depend on our acceptance of the evolutionary dynamics of our situation. There is no activity in which humans engage, nor has there ever been one, which does not alter the environment in which they live. The same can be said, ultimately, about any species that has ever lived on this planet. The term "balance of nature" is an oxymoron. There may be no solution to the task of developing a sustainable human ecosystem, but there may be principles which allow us to survive with some level of confidence that our survival is robust and that we are adaptable enough in our societies to sustain it.
This may be dismissed as irrelevant theoretical philosophy, but if the task here is to "model" a sustainable future, an understanding of (and agreement on) the meaning of "sustainable" is important. Ultimately, of course, "the environment" will sustain, until such time as solar and cosmic conditions make life of any sort on Earth impossible, but it seems to me that some agreement on where the moral high ground lies is a prerequisite to the task of any such modeling as is proposed here. Is a return to the biodiversity of a pre-industrial world, or an attempt to go there, a good thing? Is the ability to sustain the human population on Earth at current levels a good thing? Is the ultimate good the survival of homo sapiens at any population level the goal? The answers to some of these questions may well be mutually exclusive, or may not, but they deserve some thought and attention. To refer to human-caused changes to our environment as "damage" implies a moral judgement, which may or may not be appropriate, but let's put it on the table explicitly rather than implicitly.
The only unchanging certainty in the universe is the certainty of change.
I think the problem of human motivations is that humans evolved during a time when life was a zero-sum game. For virtually all of evolutionary time, the average number of descendants a person had was 2. We know this because if the number was 2.05, then in 1000 generations the population would have reached levels it did not reach.
Some things are zero-sum, territory, number of mates in this generation, position on the social hierarchy. Money in the short term is zero sum.
Humans evolved to want more of what ever zero-sum game there was and to compete for an ever larger share of the zero-sum pie. What is needed is to limit competition for the other zero-sum things.
At one time, that competition involved fighting to the death over mates. We don't do that now because society has limited the number of mates a person can have at one time.
At one time, war to acquire territory was common. It isn't now, simply because international conventions have eliminated war as a legitimate way to acquire territory.
Whatever the social niceties it is a truism that the rich and powerful have more mates, in all cultures, in all time periods, from ancient history to the current day.
There are of course celibate or faithful powerful individuals, but the statistics are overwhelming.
OK, the moral high ground. That's a good place to start for a practical solution.
Here is a slight modification to the Golden Rule:
Implement technology in such a way that you would feel good about letting your own children live near by.
That would eliminate several human activities like:
Nuclear power
Current petrochemical processing plants
Urban design for poor communities
Tar sands refining plants
Overseas mass production factories to utilize cheap labor
...
In a system where people can do anything they want for their own benefit at the expense of others is obviously not the way to go. Can we change it?
That level of cooperation may have to wait for an evolutionary change.
Where do you put sewage treatment, solid-waste disposal, slaughterhouses, etc?
I would live next door to a nuclear powerplant, even one of the current generation. (After it was built. Big construction sites are not good neighbors, no matter what's going up.) I would not live next door to the other things on my list, but they are still absolutely essential and must go somewhere.
Dealing with or utilising biological waste is essential.
Dealing with or utilising artificial waste is essential.
Slaughtering animals is essential for utilising animals in food production.
None of the things you listed are essential.
I agree. Our disfuctional mindset issues must be addressed. If this can be done the model might prove useful, if it cannot the model will be of little use.
Seems like a project with its heart in the right place...
...But I think the requirements for a sustainable society pretty boil down to two things: (1) internalization of the principles of ecology and (2) some form of Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic ("A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.")
Unless these are internalized broadly among the people, the best of intentions are doomed to fall flat.
...Plus, I think any form of complex model as discussed here pretty much goes out the window when socio-economic trouble comes (...as it will). Sustainability's got to arise out of the gut of the regular guy/gal on the street/path. Until then, we'll continue our historic role as blood-sucking parasite of the ecosphere.
So what should we do? As Wes Jackson says, fix agriculture & everything else will follow.
Recent experience, especially in the US is that that isn't sufficient. The current US population polls as very pro environmental (even if superficial in many ways, such as plastic bottles, versus say energy consumption), yet the politics seems to be trending towards tea-party style, damn-the environment (and environmentalists, and system scientists etc.) actions. So even with a partial change in the spiritual realm, sustainability seems vulnerabile to money/power/propaganda forces.
The current US population polls as very pro environmental (even if superficial in many ways, such as plastic bottles, versus say energy consumption), yet the politics seems to be trending towards tea-party style, damn-the environment (and environmentalists, and system scientists etc.) actions.
These two things are not in conflict if instead of politics serving the population, politics serves Corporations.
Citigroup-Oct-16-2005-Plutonomy-Report-Part-1.pdf
Precisely my point. We are living in a plutocracy with a democratic facade. Now, its really a soft form of control, mainly via propaganda, training the people's brains to support the corporate agenda, as opposed to hard controls (laws, police state etc.).
I'll post a couple of URLs of Flickr galleries I created. They suggest, visually, that "sustainability" will be unattainable without a considerable drop (which most of us will refuse) in what are thought of as standards of living (but which don't maybe result in such a bad life as we think). Circumstances, rather than modeling, will get us there, and those circumstances (as at Fukushima) are likely to be regarded as tragic. It's not like no one's ever been through that, though -- vide Grave of the Fireflies, or any good book about the fourteenth century.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12305112@N07/galleries/72157625046800196/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12305112@N07/galleries/72157624920809773/
The problem is that such practices can support only a small fraction of the current world population (the per-capita footprint is arguably larger than modern agriculture), and overshoot and consequent overconsumption means population will undershoot—BADLY—in any forced "correction".
If we're going to have an orderly correction, the human ecological footprint needs to drop steeply per-capita. I believe we can do this, the question is if we will. And I think we just might, and the key is... make it fashionable.
Living sustainably is only accomplished by negative forces that counteract our natural biological drives. It is far too much to ask a human to restrain their natural behaviors. If there were only one woman and two men remaining on the planet, a contest would ensue to use whatever was at hand to once again roll back those negative forces that counter reproductive success. The winner would be an aggressive user of resources that could ensure reproductive success and comfort.
Living sustainably looks like the past, when disease, starvation and warfare kept populations within ecological boundaries. Without these forces or a remake of the human brain, sustainability is not achievable, IMO.
"It is far too much to ask a human to restrain their natural behaviors."
Sorry, dop. I call BS on that claim. Every traditional society had a wide range of taboos that effectively 'restrain[ed] their natural behaviors.'
Humans live in societies and societies have rules of behavior. Of course, they are not always followed perfectly. But in few if any societies do men just rape whatever woman seems to be weak enough to be overcome whenever he has the urge.
So your basic claim just fails at the outset.
I do agree that living sustainably is not likely to mean living in some ecotopian fantasy.
Of course, life under industrial capitalism is not always a bowl of cherries either.
"Humans live in societies and societies have rules of behavior."
Who makes the rules? Nature? Govts.? The Church? Who imposes the rules?
Society has rules? How well is that working on Wall St. right now? Rape will occur as will the resultant warfare amongst men. There is rape going on all over the place as we speak of all sorts of resources and not a thing is being done. Taboos are established so that they can be broken by the wily and cunning. How many college students are looking for an old test to cheat today? In my experience at least half of college students were engaged in that activity. Taboo schmaboo.
Yes, our society has made it essentially a central tenet of its ideology to break taboos.
That does not mean that this is the norm. Many traditional societies have settled into the places where they dwell and learned what activities lead to a breakdown of the healthy functioning of that place. They then place taboos on those activities.
Are these sometimes violated. Yes. But harsh social and physical punishments are meted out to those who violate them. Most ecosystems can rebound from an occasional violation. It is when the whole society becomes devoted to violating ecosystems that we get into trouble, especially when that society have global reach and is fueled by very dense and powerful ff's.
It may be that the way global culture has evolved, it is now so pervasive and has such momentum that it cannot change. But this culture is not the only culture that has ever existed. We should not judge the capacity of all humans based on the behavior of some spoiled, privileged teenagers brought up in the most insane culture ever to grace the planet, fed on a constant diet of advertisements cleverly constructed to convince them that they are so special that they should never deny themselves anything that money can buy, or by extension, that they can get by hook or by crook.
Objection.. argumentative.
There are layers upon layers of rules, and the enforcement of them comes from all sides, like the everpresent air pressure that keeps your lungs from exploding. I notice you are still putting periods at the end of your sentences.. have you said 'Excuse me..' in conversation to anyone today? Are you planning on wearing clothes when you go out in public next?
Yes, rules get broken.. even great numbers of them.. but that fact still goes to remind us of the reason we have systems of rules to start with.. they are an ideal for assuring the function of society, and as we see now, when enough of them are consistently abused, things nearby and downstream will fall apart 'a bit.. or a lot'.. and soon, rules will get changed or abandoned to follow people's need to keep things from falling apart MORE..
It doesn't always work, and it could certainly ALL come crashing down.. but that is the pattern and the motive that puts it in place, and a great majority of people are involved in keeping it working, like Osteoclasts and Osteoblasts. Strong, flexible, appropriate bones. Not PERFECT, but always trying to move towards some kind of optimal function, and persistently reacting to changing conditions..
There are formal norms, and then there are informal norms. For instance a formal norm against daterape exists, but a large part of young male culture rejects it. Likewise with your test cheating example. Or with the useage of many banned psychoactive substances. For the most part if the people breaking these formal norms, don't feel they must hide the behavior from their immediate peer group, then the norm is only formal, but has not penetrated into the informal culture.
"We encourage readers to contribute their thoughts as to what they think about the framework above, and what their thoughts are on the main parts that need to be mapped to understand what a sustainable human ecosystem looks like, within the scales of resources, ecosystems, economy, and energy. We hope that by this modelling effort we can contribute to new insights on the road to a more sustainable human ecosystem..."
..resources, ecosystems, economy, and energy.....population???
Interesting exercize, but purely academic without first considering the mass driver of unsustainability: human population, barely mentioned. Am I to understand that this program is designed to strike a bargain of some sort between current population levels and the planet's carrying capacity? Maybe I'm missing something. The feedback loop between increasing population and increasingly unsustainable exploitation of planetary resources must be broken somehow; a prerequisite to humans' sustainable coexistance with their home planet. Just sayin'......
....and the term "human ecosystem" seems a bit oxymoronic, IMO. Necrosystem perhaps?
Population typically is a dependent and not an independent variable in ecosystem models. As such, it will have to play an important role in any model, but rather in the way of answering one key question: How many humans with what level of consumption will be sustainable at what rate of cycling?
Cynicism, however, won't be part of the model.
I look forward to hearing the answer. Level of consumption is of course a variable inversely linked to population. At too low numbers you may hit other problems of sustainability linked to knowledge, communication and delivery of services to a sparsely distributed population.
It's clear we agree that sustainability and population levels are inseparable, but as for, as you would brand it, cynicism; it's clear, at least to me, that a healthy level of"cynicism" is required to thoroughly test any model.
being very dramatic and "over the top"...............
My guess is that humans would need to leave 90% of the earth as a nature reserve.
Evacuate 7 billion people to the least important continent (Australia), let em duke it out until a sustainable tribe remains, then allow "tourism" to other continents but no colonization.
We don't need a starship to another habitable planet, we have one right here. It can be saved but not by building more in an attempt to save it. Recovery will take many thousands of years but we can't do it by attempting to take an increasing population, resource depletion and environmental degradation simply to a lower level.
The starship we are on is Earth. There are no lifeboats. We only have enough resources to sustain the supply on a failing ship, for a finite amount of occupants if we are to reach our destination of a new sustainable world successfully. With that information we know what needs to be done. Being what and who we are (human) of course, will not allow the ship to be saved.
Age of Reason
# Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
# Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
Ghung:
Actually, it seems the per capita footprint (except for carbon emissions) has been close to inversely related to population the last half century. There seems to be an environmental Kuznets curve, so that the environmental harm peaks at a certain level of economic output, and then decrease as it goes above that. Coupled with the obvious fact that the global population is set to peak at only 25% above the current level, the overall numbers are very encouraging. Absent climate tipping points, I think we are set for a great future for humanity.
You are neglecting that even if the per capita resource use is going down, non renewable resources are still declining rapidly. See any number of presentations at various ASPO conferences for more on that.
All you have said is, "A car traveling 100 km/h is approaching a brick wall, but it is slowing down and the rate at which it is slowing down will bring it to a stop roughly 100 meters beyond the wall." Of course, the car is still going to hit the wall despite what the fact that it might be decelerating.
But your logic is even worse than that because you are quoting per capita resource usage and what matters is total resource usage. You're saying, "The average kinetic energy used by the people in the car is declining." Does that tell us what is happening to the car in relation to the wall? No, it doesn't.
That's why we are interested in millions of barrels per day of oil production and only rarely are interested in the per capita oil use. Quoting how much oil is used by the average American, European, etc. doesn't tell us what we need to know when looking at the big picture.
Thus, your logic is faulty in two significant ways.
This is most likely the future of humanity:
The initial data indicate that we are following this scenario almost exactly:
A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality
I think he may be fudging more numbers than that. As countries become more affluent, the off shore more and more of the really nasty stuff they are doing to the environment. So it may look like they are being more "green" as they get more affluent, but this is almost always a kind of smoke and mirrors game.
So true! I wish there was a way to get a true idea of the total per-capita energy use trend of the US, for example. As I sit here and look around at all the stuff in the room, it's really hard to actually find things manufactured in the US. Even kitchen utensils mostly come from outside the US! And none of these things are counted in this per-capita energy consumption, only direct energy use. I think we'd find that we've exported a truly huge amount of indirect energy use (and pollution) to third-world countries and in actuality our per-capita energy use (and pollution) has continued to skyrocket.
I would love to apply for one of these jobs. All I lack is the requisite skills and experience.
As I see it the bottom line to this problem is the evolution of human culture beyond that of the simple tribal hunter-gatherer. It started as we leant to record culture first through complex language and story telling, passed down through the generations, which imparted knowledge that could skip a generation, and teach people skills without on-the-job training. We could then build up resilience to manage environmental set-backs (droughts, etc) which would have triggered population decline without the inherited culture.
Of course this process resulted in an explosion of knowledge and skills, once writing was invented, leading to stores of knowledge and libraries on a scale unimaginable when all knowledge was limited to capacity of a single human memory, passed down with error loss between the generations.
Needless to say, we then invented machines which could harvest wind and animal and other renewable energy sources which could magnify the environmental impact of our own actions enormously. Add in fossil fuels and we could reach for the moon. Add in the internet, and at least in theory, anyone can learn anything from anybody, for the price of a laptop.
Needless to say we are drunk on all this power. However, not all human cultures have been overwhelmed by this explosion of possibilities,
Some cultures that evolved in periods of constrained resources did instil traditions of moderation and constraint. Bhuddism, Polynesian islands, and some others, preached and continue to preach self -restraint and honour self-denial. Self-denial is the core attraction of many religious orders of monks and nuns, in many religions. It is noble for a successful Hindu man, with a prosperous business and grown family, to abandon family and all material wealth and become effectively a beggar in his later years.
The problem is that all cultures evolve. None is static, although in areas of limited resources, more restrained and resilient cultures can survive centuries or even a millennium. However, as new resources are discovered or become accessible, it is inevitable that these will be exploited by dissenting and ambitious elements in even the most stable of cultures, we only have to look at the influence of TV in Bhutan, to see the impact.
If the resources available to the dissenting elements are large enough, they will overwhelm the dominant culture, and in some cases eradicate it, or merge with it subverting the culture of restraint. This rarely end well.
To have even a remote chance of building a sustainable global culture, we need several elements.
We need the scientific knowledge and skills to identify what economic activities are sustainable, and to monitor and adapt activities as they exceed the environment's ability to sustain them.
We need a human culture which is based on self-restraint and adoration of self-denial. It would help, given our biological brains, if this was a quasi-religious culture, but one backed up with profound science and adaptable to changing environments. Managing this basic contradiction will be (has alwys been? ) a major philosophical headache.
We need a living space (presumably the entire planet) where there are no large reserves of energy (or fisheries or valuable mineral resources) are concentrated in small areas, allowing for disaffected elements to gain a foot-hold of power. (Given that most resources are so distributed is a problem).
We need a society that can tolerate and control disruptive elements, either by suppression (ends badly) or inclusion in the state (dangerous) or by giving them a means to express themselves in a cultural context (Olympic games) or by expelling them in the name of exploration (Polynesia) or ?
Given that we are now a more or less homogeneous culture of 7 billion people, of highly competitive nation states, each jostling and fighting to control a dwindling supply of finite resources and energy floes, it is going to be a very hard transition to anything more sustainable. The best hope I can see is to set up libraries and monasteries and retreats in a wide diversity of regions and habitats, and keep a low profile until all the fighting and dying has subsided, and the major concentrations of nature's resources have been disapated. Only then to lowly emerge to pick up whatever is left of humanity into a more humble and modest culture.
Best I can offer.
Ralph, I like your learned pessimism. I myself adored "A Canticle For Leibowitz" which you seem to refer to in your last paragraph, and I believe conservation of knowledge to be a most honorable business in the centuries ahead.
What concerns the modelling approach: I am a trained statistician, but I find myself uncertain whether to research sustainable human societies or better start builing one bottom-up (or sitting back, relaxing and reading Orlov). Maybe research is just one of the more advanced forms of denial.
Knut.
In his book, "Anathem", Neal Stephenson posited a society that has sequestered scientists in monastic type of organizations, in order to protect society from their inventions! I read the book through four times in a row because this model is so attractive to me! But in the book it turns out that there is an invasion of aliens, which require the scientists to be let out of their cage!
"We need a human culture which is based on self-restraint and adoration of self-denial. It would help, given our biological brains, if this was a quasi-religious culture, but one backed up with profound science and adaptable to changing environments. Managing this basic contradiction will be (has alwys been? ) a major philosophical headache."
I think this is basically what you had in a lot of traditional/premodern societies and religions. There were the more popular forms of religion which went in for all sorts of magical thinking and devotionalism. Then there were more or less esoteric orders of priests/scholars who had a more nuance (though obviously not fully scientific) view of things. Look at the difference between popular Buddhism and, say, Zen.
The former is devoted to all sorts of gods, magic, conjuring...
The latter is a combination of penetrating philosophy and rigorous personal psychological training.
""The latter is a combination of penetrating philosophy and rigorous personal psychological training.""
It is far from "penetrating philosophy" to learn to live in the Natural World. Quite easy if one has the Biology, but then again, not all Men are created equal.
Satsun.
Unfortunately, I think what we would need is a world view that omits the self-awareness that we have the possibility of materially changing our world.
Look at indigenous peoples around the world (try to look PRIOR to their discovery and interaction with "modern man", which inevitably ends in tears). There are lots of examples where the society described lived, more or less happily, in balance with the natural systems around them, often for many, many generations. For the most part, it seems these groups had little or no interest in changing the world around them. Perhaps the very concept was absent from their collective thoughts.
The question, then, is what distinguishes these people from the empire builders, those who are drawn to expansion and change. Is it a genetic difference? Religious? Social? Or is it a scale difference? Are we all capable of living happily in harmony with nature provided our numbers are relatively small, but incapable of resisting the urge to expand and consume and grow once our numbers exceed some threshold?
I think that whatever the cause, it is probably a genie that cannot be put back in the lamp. Our numbers seem to have surely passed some critical mass with respect to balancing with and tuning in to nature. The expansionist consumer view has ingrained itself in the whole of humanity and it seems vanishingly unlikely that we could somehow make the required transformation back to any kind of lifestyle that would exist in balance with the natural systems of the planet.
I, for one, would love to see this modeling effort succeed, or at least produce a first iteration upon which future work could build. I wish them luck on the effort.
All human cultures alter their environments to some extent, as far as I know. But the influences are generally local. So if they get it 'wrong' the consequences for the culture can be devastating.
But these alterations are so tiny compared to the planet-altering project now underway that, from that perspective it can look like complete non-alteration.
Quinn claims that the difference essentially boils down to a difference in the story cultures tell about their purpose, identity and place in the world.
On the one hand, changing a story would seem to be the easiest thing in the world to do.
On the other hand, you could look at the entire cold war period as a massive mobilization of enormous weapons of mass destruction in the service of defending one such story against another such. And compared to what we are talking about, the differences between those two stories was relatively minor.
So, while I approve modeling, the deeper work is telling and propagating a different story about who we are and what our purpose is in the world.
That lack of awareness is what got us into the current state, and the most dangerous propagandists today are promoting exactly that (e.g. AGW denialists).
Going back to ignorance isn't a solution. Stone-age technology did not save Easter Island from catastrophe.
Thats unfortunately true. The biggest thing driving denial from a philosophical perspective, if the idea, that stuff like weather/climate is god's domain, and he will make it do what he wants, regardless of what we mere mortals do. To such people proposing that man can effect such things is taken as an affront to god.
People once said similar things about infectious disease, too.
Some still believe it. But they have lost nearly all influence.
It seems to me like they are gaining influence (at least here in the US). All thats required is to delay action until the worst of the damage has been done. That is looking increasingly likely.
The evidence we have indicates that early H&G humans pretty much systematically wiped out the mega-fauna in each area of the globe that they inhabited. This is hardly living in balance with the natural systems. It isn't to much of an extrapolation to figure that depleted hunting grounds provided pressure to move to an agricultural method of producing food. Seems like any way you look at it, most paths would lead to overshoot.
The sustainability argument, was not that the longterm ecological state of H&G humans plus ecosystem would closely resemble that which came before, but that some sort of quasi-equilibrium would be reached. I suspect the transition was largely military in nature, H&G living alongside organized farmers cannot defend themselves against even rudimentary armies and are driven away absorbed or wiped out. So once agricultural communities get started, they tend to take over neighboring H&G territory.
+100
When we examine the question of the intransigence of human nature, it’s essential to distinguish between the underlying biology or neuropsychology involved and the cultural overlay that expresses aspects of our neuropsychology in our social organizations and practices.
Human brains are capable of expressing a vast array of contradictory traits, any of which may be exhibited in different situations – even by the same person.
In order to understand how a particular culture (in this case our modern, globalized, hierarchical, industrial-exploitive culture) comes about, I think we need to go beyond simply looking at the human brain. Over the millennia humans have, after all, created a wide variety of long-lived cultures that marched to very different drummers. Nomadic cultures and horticultural gift-economies, for example, sprang from the same kinds of brains that today give us the “corporation-as-person”, mountaintop removal mining and the Powell Memorandum.
The interesting question to me is what drives the creation of such wildly divergent cultures out of the same basic neuropsychological material. If we could answer that question, what clues might those answers hold for the future of this culture, the planetary biosphere and humanity itself?
Along this line, one of the more interesting things I’ve discovered in the last couple of years has been the work of anthropologist Marvin Harris. In “cultural materialism” he developed a descriptive framework that makes intuitive sense to me. He describes culture in terms of three levels: infrastructure, structure and superstructure.
“Infrastructure” consists of “material realities” such as technological, economic and reproductive (demographic) factors, as well as resource availability and the quality of the physical environment.
The “structure” sector of culture consists of organizational aspects such as domestic and kinship systems and political economy. Political economy involves issues of control by a force above that of the domestic household whether that is a government or a chief. At this level we also find trade and legal systems.
The “superstructure” sector consists of the ideological and symbolic aspects of society such as religion, shared mythology, rituals, taboos, and symbols. Ideology consists of the code of social order regarding how social and political organization is structured, and describes the obligations and rights of the members of society.
For our purposes this remains merely an interesting taxonomy until Harris adds the final touch – the priority of infrastructure.
In Harris’ words, "The modes of production and reproduction probabilistically determine the behaviour of the domestic and political economy, which in turn probabilistically determines the behavioral and mental superstructures.”
In other words, changes in the environment, in the “material realities” of the infrastructure, tend to drive changes in the culture more often than the reverse. In Harris’ view it would be especially difficult, for instance, to try to control rates of reproduction or resource usage (infrastructural factors) by first modifying superstructural factors such as beliefs or symbols.
So what does this mean for the possibility of sustainable human cultures? Basically it means that we are very unlikely to achieve such a thing by voluntary means such as education and policy changes (or even spiritual awakening), so long as the ecological and resource factors that support our current culture remain unchanged.
If those infrastructure factors do change, then the culture we erected over them will shift in response, to accommodate the new “material realities”. And since we all know that our infrastructure (especially resources and ecological factors) have entered a period of rapid change, we can reasonably expect rapid cultural changes to follow along behind.
Can we direct the coming shifts in culture? In most cases we will probably not be able to, since we have failed at a cultural level to adequately understand the nature of the changes that have been unleashed.
This dovetails neatly with the pithy words of Charles Eisenstein in his highly recommended book “The Ascent of Humanity”: “That which must be done to avoid the crisis will be done only in response to it.”
If we do some day achieve a sustainable society, it will not come from the top down, by re-educating people on the benefits of altruism, cooperation and self-restraint. Instead those characteristics may emerge as the ground falls away beneath our feet. Until then, as individuals, most of us will only be able to watch, wonder, and make whatever preparations we deem prudent.
I think Harris fails to account for the fragmented, sometimes relativistic nature of cultures and puts too much focus on infrastructure, rather than seeing the base and superstructure as a dialectic, mutually-influencing arrangement. I do agree with you though that re-education is not enough to reach global sustainability.
I would suggest that we need to look at the way that power, inequality, and resource use are institutionalized. I think this might be a nice addition to the original post's suggestion of an agent-based model, since it would allow the model to account in some way for incomplete agency and structural effects of the system across multiple scales. Overall, it seems like this might be a worthwhile modeling task even if the goal is impossible to achieve. The journey might just bear some useful fruit.
I hope you are right about them being in a dialectic. They certainly are for individuals, I just don't know if that generalizes to cultures. The problems with changing existing institutions is that it generally goes against the wishes of the corporate power elite. They tend to object. Strongly.
That's the reason I've decided to wait down here at the bottom and help the grass roots grow instead of tilting at windmills.
For me the best model is one that unfolds as we live it. I have little interest in penetrating the veil of the future - I like surprises.
"those characteristics may emerge as the ground falls away beneath our feet. Until then, as individuals, most of us will only be able to watch, wonder, and make whatever preparations we deem prudent."
Probably true. But, as I pointed out below, the collapse is not happening in one fell swoop. At each step down more people become aware that the existing systems are not working.
Those people start looking for new explanations of what has gone wrong that make some sense and they start looking for models that are based on those explanations for how to proceed.
Having such models developed and ready for when those greater and greater numbers of doubters of BAU emerge may, I think, be a valuable thing.
It won't stop the early stages of collapse at this point, but models might help make the final stages less than the absolute catastrophes they would otherwise be.
(Of course, some think that the best thing for the long term viability of the planet would be a sudden collapse. Not only is that a bit too misanthropic even for me, but it is likely that 7B clever apes suddenly left to scramble for themselves will manage to sweep the planet clean of life form that is remotely edible, and probably many that aren't.)
As events unfold, those who have knowledge and wisdom will use it to help others who have just awakened. Each change brings a new opportunity in that regard.
Either we will eat the songbirds out of the trees, or we won't. It will be interesting to see whether Schrodinger's sparrow is alive or dead when the probability wave collapses.
It's great that more people are taking an interest in this question. I suggest that there is a simpler way to approach it, however. And that is to model the biophysical boundary conditions. Without any regard for details of internal stocks and flows one can treat all of the human built world, including human, pet, and ornamental plant biomass as a single category stock - assets, measured in emergy units. Some assets will be consumed (giving waste materials rapidly), others will have various life spans based on how entropy treats them (clothing will break down faster than bridges). But the totality of assets result from work processes driven by net energy inputs. Model these inputs with the appropriate EROIs to obtain net, and normalize every kind as exergy, and you will be able to tell how much asset stock can be produced and maintained. This is the upper limit condition. You can do no better.
Then model the decline of fossil fuels (as exergy) and whatever net increases you think (these are the unknown what-if assumptions we have to consider) regarding truly sustainable alternative energies (i.e., the collection of alternatives able to regenerate their own repairs and replacements while still providing an adequate net to society) and you will find out what the likely long-term dynamics of the system will look like at the boundary.
Nothing can be better than the boundary. So adding internal details, like financial systems feedback (e.g. investment based on expected future profit, or debt financing in a non-growth economy) will only show that the impacts will be worse than the boundary. How much worse will depend on how much more detail and realism is put in.
The point is this. I've already done the boundary computations and have published here several times, both in articles and in comments. For some reason it doesn't seem to click. Be that as it may, the results show that even in the best possible scenarios (assuming, for example, a rapid build out of alternatives with EROIs > 10) the impact of the physical limits on fossil fuels results in a very rapid decline in total assets (remember Ugo's recent contribution on Seneca's cliff?), mostly due, initially, to loss of biomass. Later as the bridges decay, total assets further decline.
The answer to what is sustainable totally depends on net energy (exergy) flow. And I suspect that without some magical way to overcome the second law of thermodynamics, that flow will mostly involve real-time solar energy and photosynthesis when the dust finally settles. In other words, the carrying capacity of the world, for human beings, will look an awful lot like it did shortly after the advent of agriculture (presumably we will have some better low-tech tools available to improve yields over what early farmers had).
In addition to the above, consider the impacts of global climate change. It will take even more high power energy to adapt (e.g. move some of our major urban centers back from the current coasts). Given the potential rapidity of fall off of fossil fuel inputs while alternatives are struggling to pick up, I seriously doubt that we will have the energy to make much of a show of it. Look at New Orleans as a preview.
I've posted all of the bases for these comments at:
Question Everything
George
(this link will provide a graph figure for those who haven't seen it, or have short memories)
"that flow will mostly involve real-time solar energy and photosynthesis when the dust finally settles."
Maybe it will be ONLY daily/yearly Photosynthesis
Solar energy powers wind and rain. Solar hot water can be as simple as a clay pot or a pond lined with black rocks. A sail can be made from animal hides.
George - I'll take your "question everthing" to what seems like a logical point: why would one expect mankind to be sustainable in the first place? What population has ever been sustainable? Nearly all species that have roamed the earth are extinct. Crocs have had a pretty good run but for how much longer? Granted we are a tad more clever than the dodo bird. In one sense mankind sustaining for ever is rather unnatural. Mother Earth has allowed and even contributed to billions of species not attaining sustainability. Even more to the point: should we even strive for sustainability? Isn't a perpetual exisitance the basis for most religions? Looking at the world around us it appears that the vast majority would agree with that point. Little concern appears to be invested in the next few generations beyond us and our children. How may of the planet inhabitants truly care about a generation born 500 years from today?
Corny but as was once said: being immortal would be a terrible fate...how would you assign value to any one day? Given an infinite number of days where would ambition root? How important would be the expectations for tomorrow be if there were countless tomorrows to come? Perhaps focusing on just your todays and tomorrows is what's really important. Why not just accept man's nature.
I am constantly surprised by how much Social Darwinism remains a part of the supposedly scientific mind, as shown by the prevalence of quick intolerance here at TOD Comments for anything that leaves open any door to the human mind and the possibility of cultural evolution.
It is certainly true that humanity has never yet governed itself with attention to ecological limits. Does that mean it is impossible (as opposed to merely very unlikely)? Why?
Nobody with a brain is saying there are reasons for optimism, but why is there zero possibility? Humans have learned to do democracy, and even some global-level democracy. Why couldn't we ever learn to reform and downsize our societies?
More immediately, if one believes that's impossible, why bother with TOD and its issues?
As to this iier project here, personally, I have no faith in modeling entire socio-economic processes, and little more that anybody actually takes such models seriously. Far better to study specific problems, IMHO.
... if one believes that's impossible, why bother with TOD and its issues?
That's what made me back out of most discussion around here. I firmly believe that what most people see as "the problem" is not solvable in the terms in which it is usually described. I'm much happier simply kicking back, watching the predicament unfold and getting on with living as good a life as I can, in my circumstances, on my terms.
I'm quite sure that alongside the spreading immiseration there will also be positive changes ahead (there always are), but I'm similarly sure they will not be brought about by creating more windmills or new climate change policies.
I am constantly surprised by how much Social Darwinism remains a part of the supposedly scientific mind, as shown by the prevalence of quick intolerance here at TOD Comments for anything that leaves open any door to the human mind and the possibility of cultural evolution.
Perhaps the posters of TOD have met their fellow man and therefor understand the size of the average door to the human mind along with how evolved they are culturally?
The UN has Agenda 21 as a way to address some of the items this post is to address. And a number of TOD posters have mentioned how useful smart meters will be in the energy future.
Yet a percentage of "my fellow men" can go on for HOURS about how both are, err, "wrong" and in fact I believe I can get ya one older woman who will claim her face cancer is from a Smart meter.
So this situation, brought to us by "culture" and "human minds" are somehow going to be changed fast enough to avoid a YOYO (You are On Your Own) future disaster?
Thanks for the laugh, Eric! And you are underlining my point exactly.
Which brings me to some comments I made on Twitter last night:
"We shouldn't be asking when #peakoil is going to happen, we should be demanding that it happens now #climate"
"You know what pisses me off about most #peakoil discussions? It's how both sides of debate approach it with a submissive "victim" mentality"
"Both sides seem fixated on belief that it's our duty to consume oil as fast as possible, and argue about the speed we can"
"Whereas the real issue is whether we should be consuming the stuff" [at all]
*sigh*
Okay,now where did the rest of this subthread go? I didn't curse. Is TOD censoring its own discussions? If so, why, and on what basis?
Yes. Has been for years.
Editorial and authorial fiat, so far as I can tell.
Complaining about it has gotten me almost nowhere (I was completely stonewalled for the better part of 2 years), but if you want any kind of real satisfaction you'll probably be frustrated.
Edit: See upthread. My point-by-point rebuttal to the blatant falsehoods of "eric blair" was censored sometime since I researched and posted it last night. (And of course, I neglected to save a copy of the full page in case that happened. This should NEVER be necessary. NEVER.)
Rock,
Evolution itself is sustainable as long as the solar energy flows! I do not expect the current species of humans to last forever. Indeed, in my writing, including my review of William Catton's "Bottleneck" (published here) I explicitly state that the genus Homo will need to further evolve in terms of more sapient mentation capacity (the brain basis for attaining wisdom) in order to become wiser managers of our balance with the rest of the Ecos. I think this is the trend or trajectory of evolution, as described in my blog, and that humans will be able to do this, in a new species form. The process may already be underway. It is called sympatric speciation (based on a form of mating preference similar to sexual selection). Read the blog entries on evolution if you are interested.
I do accept man's nature, which is why I do not attempt to write books trying to get people to change their innate behaviors based on a weak form of sapience. I just like the science. And I accept evolution as the penultimate arbiter of what will be (with the Second Law of Thermodynamics being the ultimate - AFAWK).
George
Evolution works when a less-adapted species dies out and a better adapted one fills the niche that remains. I don't see that mechanism helping at all with the most fundamental elements of the human condition.
I'm always highly suspicious of theories that say evolution is operating now, or will operate, to bring us to this new enlightened state. I'm open to being wrong in your case George but mostly people don't understand how evolution works and misapply it. Based on what you've written above, I suspect that you are doing the same.
I see no reason whatsoever that evolution will change the items I mention in my post below, and that I'll list here again:
- the need for humans to be "right" in a discussion; this stops collaboration and turn discussion into an argument; see the U.S. Congress or almost any divorce
- the ability for humans to interpret facts in different ways (is 9/11 a great tragedy or is it the best thing to happen on the planet? Depends on who you ask)
- the constraints inherent in language (See Foucault's The Order of Things and similar, later works by other thinkers)
In my view, these are the most fundamental obstructions to humans agreeing with each other. Evolution simply has nothing to say about these things. There is every reason to believe that even after a great die off the factors above will continue to exist. That's so because many of them are embedded in language and language will very likely continue in its same form no matter what crisis befalls the human species.
To be a little more precise it has to do with fitness. And doesn't necessarily involve replacement (as in die off of the one). Ordinary allopatric speciation simply deals with two populations being separated and the conditions of one changes enough to warrant divergence.
Also, perhaps you want to do a little research into sympatric speciation before claiming that the process you describe is the only mechanism that can lead to new species. In fact, an offshoot species can develop by simply discovering a previously unoccupied niche. Study the evolution of cichlid evolution, for example in Lake Victoria in Africa.
And, you might want to read the work I've done.
Fair enough, George, I was simplifying too much.
Still, my main point stands unchallenged. The obstacles to gaining human agreement reside in the "software" not the "hardware" of our species (though even that is simplistic because the source of the software is, ultimately, the hardware).
But the current operating system for humans seems to me to be thoroughly established. Education seems to be the way to alter it, not evolution.
Again, I'm willing to have my eyes opened, but how could evolution possibly affect phenomenology, especially as affected by and experienced through language? More specifically, how does evolution "get rid of" the tendency for humans to use dichotomous logic? i.e. I'm right and you're wrong, which is just one example of our capacity to add meaning via language
The overwhelming probability is that dichotomous logic will carry into the new species, no?
Once again I will direct you to my writings. There is probably no way I can summarize the nature of sapience and the way in which it produces what we typically think of as wisdom. However, wise people are much better at damping down, so to speak, the kinds of effects you mention. Sapience involves higher level judgment as well as a capacity to handle ambiguity, uncertainty, and tolerance for other humans' emotional responses.
The further evolution of sapience (see my work on Brodmann area 10, for example) may help more members of the population achieve these qualities in mentation. Ergo, evolution of sapience, if it continues, leads to less of the heuristics & biases problems with errors in judgment to which you are currently witness.
See: my working papers on sapience. Your questions might be better answered than I can do here.
Butting in here, but I've often posited that applying evolution to humans has limited usefulness since humans have become extra-evolutionary in so many ways. How many other species nurture the sick and weak to the point where the sick and weak are able to reproduce on any scale? Agriculture, with a few exceptions (ants, perhaps) and trade over distance allow populations to remain fairly stable through periods of stress. Other examples: Warm clothing, antibiotics, transportation facilitating migration, etc., are all extra-evolutionary capabilities which set us apart from virtually all other species. We have divorced ourselves from natural processes that were life-limiting factors for billions of years. There is no turning back. Attempts at behavior modification (what this post is discussing) will be temporary at best as long as humans have the ability of choice. We have the capacity to willfully resist evolutionary drivers.
Just another commonly believed meme! There is NOTHING that is extra-evolutionary. It is true that humans are more subject to coevolutionary processes with culture, but we are still subject to all of the laws of nature including evolution. There is growing evidence that humans have been evolving (microevolution) up to the present (e.g. the evolution of lactose tolerance is now understood this way). And there is NO evidence to suggest that somehow evolution doesn't or wouldn't apply to humans. That is a hold-over myth from our self-perceptions as somehow being above the laws of nature. Dangerous thinking.
As far as what evolutionary drivers are: Do you know? Can you describe the fitness landscape of humans? Good luck making the claim that we can "willfully resist evolutionary drivers". We'll see how that plays out when the climate changes get really interesting. But more to the point, we simply can't actually know what traits or behaviors (or genetic controls) are being selected for or against at any time. Like PO it's another rear view mirror phenomenon.
But certainly small scale evolutionary capacity like lactose tolerance doesn't play a role at the higher levels we're concerned with. And it certainly doesn't play a role with language and phenomenology.
I'll try to take a look at your papers later tonight but I'm extremely skeptical that the sorts of things I'm pointing to will be effected by evolution. Education, yes, evolution, no.
You make these claims with a great deal of certainty. How is that? Should you be interested I would be happy to swap current citations from the literature. As it happens I am currently working on the chapter in my systems science book called "Auto-organization, Emergence, and Evolution". Not claiming to be the font of all knowledge here, but I am up on the current research and am not working from some vague memories of my college biology class. And I have to say that what you have expressed here sounds very naive. In fact microevolutionary changes CAN end up having a large impact on macroevolution when the environment changes such that the modified trait provides superior fitness. It has been called the "ratchet effect". If there is no stronger selection then it could de-evolve just as easily. But when selection takes over it can become a permanent version of the trait.
In the case of my investigations a possible microevolutionary event includes a minor mutation of a control segment of DNA that regulates the genetic timing in early brain development (EvoDevo). The timing of on-set and off-set of gene expressions responsible for the development and peculiarities of BA10 could be dramatically affected by a very minor mutation in one of the control network segments. There are several neurobiologists currently investigating this possibility as an explanation for the rapid evolution of the human brain from about 500,000 to 250,000 years ago and again about 125,000 years ago (leading to modern Homo sapiens).
Language and phenomenology (or more precisely the conception of phenomena) are not immune to evolutionary changes like this. How do you think our version of language and conceptualization evolved in the first place?
Educability (goes along with conceptualization ability) is also subject to evolutionary change. Again, let me emphasize. There is NOTHING that is not subject to the laws of evolution, which proceeds as long as energy flows.
Skepticism is good. But make sure it is grounded in facts you know for sure rather than opinion.
Well, I assert that at this point language and phenomenology are largely immune to the kinds of changes we're discussing here in the timeframe that makes any difference whatsoever. Do you have examples of human language changing due to changes in DNA? How would you even prove that?
Of course our version of language comes ultimately from the hardware but its a long shot that changes to DNA are somehow going to give someone the capacity to see that all meaning exists only in language, that right and wrong are merely concepts and so on. You'd better demonstrate a pretty good causal link because it strains credulity. I could see evolution changing how we perceive color or similar, but higher order concepts are overwhelmingly determined by acculturation and language learning. As I've pointed out, our language even locks in how we see the world and how we respond to it:
Being and Nothingness
It's like telling me that my day tomorrow can be predicted based on quantum mechanics. Of course I'm made up of quanta and the world is made up of quanta but it's too far of a stretch to say that studying my quanta will allow you to predict my word choice this evening and how I perceive incoming stimuli (consciousness). Same thing with the kinds of minor changes in DNA that what we're talking about. At some point, education just swamps these signals.
On the other hand, with greater or lesser success I can easily teach these concepts via language i.e. education.
Existence proof, if nothing else. Once hominids didn't have language. Now they do. Surely you would not argue that that has nothing to do with DNA. But there is a lot of really exciting stuff going on with the genetic basis for changes in Brocca's and Wernike's areas re: development of language. Suggest you come up to speed.
OK now you are just ranting. I have no idea what you are talking about. I certainly never made any claim of this sort. And bringing older philosophical arguments to bear is not really illuminating given modern sequence analysis applied to brain development.
It is clear to me that you are not up on the latest work in evolution theory so I see no reason to continue. We can have a discussion when you want to talk about science and not antiquated philosophy. Sorry to be so blunt.
The point is that we don't have to wait for a biological evolutionary change to acquire a radically different language from the one our parents spoke all their lives.
Yes, language itself developed over biological evolutionary time, but the acquisition of individual languages and of course specific unique sentences that one speaks, are not predetermined by ones genes. Our linguistic abilities, and the further cognitive abilities that they enable, certainly provide a dimension that is extra-, or if you prefer, co-evolutionary.
This ability to evolve linguistically and culturally, at rates far faster than biological evolution would have allowed, holds the key to how we ended up such a threat to life on the planet.
But it also, I believe and hope, holds the key to how we could potentially quickly change from a culture based on the destruction of life and exploitation of the planet to a more species less threatening to the rest of life.
And no matter what sh!t is now baked in to go down in the coming years, it is never too late to have a change of perspective.
Do you see written language development over non-biological evolutionary time as more significant? If meaning of the words circumscribes what can be done, and the meaning
comes from public use, do the methodologies of public use also have an effect. In fact the changing public use methods of almost-linearity (books et al) to hyper-link (approaching
random access) seem significant even today. I appreciate your introduction of human language into this discussion and its ability to create a change of perspective, evolution as
the meta-narrative for the entire universe's direction becomes a bit much at times if not a form of neo-Stoicism. Wittgenstein at least started with mathematics.
Good point on mathematics. But bear in mind that evolution (of the universe) does not only refer to biological or neo-Darwinian evolution. My ignorance showing, I don't get the neo-Stoicism point.
I used to believe that evolution of the universe was different until I read Carrier, and found a branch of cosmology that thinks the organizing principle is one in the same.
I am simply thankful that someone brought up another organizing principle for "new" on TOD - specifically language.
Please describe this radically different language. How different? Different conceptualization?
Do you imagine we throw out everything we know or think we know and start over again? Do you have any idea how language builds in a culture or how the capacity for acquisition builds in the developing brain?
Linguistic evolution ultimately depends on brain evolution. You are mixing up the difference between language acquisition and language development. Also, language is not the basis of "cognitive abilities". Rather it is the other way around. Language is predicated on cognitive abilities. One cannot say what one cannot conceive. Language evolved as a tool for communicating conceptions (first perceptions and later conceptions). It didn't go the other way. Admittedly once conceptions were effectively communicated that reinforced the ability (acted as a selective pressure to refine the ability). But it also had the effect of locking in some conceptualizations, such as imagining agency in inanimate objects or processes, e.g. the gods, now thought to be the basis for religious, faith-based believing.
What you are expressing is little more than wishful thinking. Hope that humans can change what and how they conceive by inventing new sentences completely underestimates the power of semantics and pragmatics. What you can say depends on what you can think. What you do say depends on what you experience within the framework of what you can think (again, conceptualization). You, too, are expressing a form of human exceptualism, believing that humans as we are represent the epitome of consciousness development. The belief that we have reached a level of evolution in which merely the generative power of combinatoric sentences should be able to express every truth. Maybe that is a form of locked-in conceptualization! Maybe your sentential claims are the only allowed expressions because that is the only conceptualization you are able to make.
Finally, this line of argument ignores a simple fact. The range of intellect as well as sapience in the population, these being the basis for cognitive processes, is such that all people don't actually share the same conceptualization even when using the very same words and sentences. I suspect there is a good amount of talking past one another going on right now. Evolution operates on variations in traits and capabilities in the population. There really is no ONE language that we all speak.
I would give anything if you guys would provide some current citations for these very general and vague claims re: evolution. I've pointed to my working papers with lots of references. If you are going to make claims I hope you are ready to back them up with demonstrable evidence.
"once conceptions were effectively communicated that reinforced the ability"
Yes, that is the point.
If you think my genes completely determine the sentence I am writing now, I guess we will just have to part ways. One doesn't have to cite support for what is (to me) obvious and indisputable.
(I do happen to have a PhD in Linguistics from Harvard, so we could go into this in much more detail, but it would take us pretty wildly off topic, I'm afraid, and I do have some other things to do.)
I think, also, that we my be talking past each other, since you seem to be (perhaps?) using evolution in a broader, not strictly biological sense whereas I think aangel and I are assuming you are talking strictly biology.
When you come back dohboi, could we refine that statement that you genes do not COMPLETELY determine what you are writing now. I'd also like to hear from you on how much you write is dependent upon the "wiring" of your brain. There have been some very interesting reversals on neural elasticity and the effect of browser use as mapped by MRI's in older Americans. I'm still on the hunt of looking for more than evolution driving us forward.
OMG! I must really be bad at expressing myself! No. Of course not. Where did I express this idea? If you are a linguist from Harvard, surely you couldn't have interpreted anything I said in this way!
I am, indeed, talking about evolution as a much more universal process than mere biological evolution as understood as neo-Darwinian. The latest research in biological evolution itself, however, is pointing to process universalities beyond what is commonly thought of as biological evolution as it has been understood in the past. All I have asked is that people who want to engage in this discussion should acquaint themselves with this more up-to-date research before asserting that THIS is what evolution means.
May I ask who your supervisor was? I only ask because I am familiar with the work of several Harvard linguistic evolution researchers. Maybe if I knew what your history entailed we could find a common ground for discourse. You can e-mail me at gmobus at uw dot edu to communicate directly. I am really a very collegial guy.
I mostly worked with Calvert Watkins and the late Jochim Schindler.
I only mentioned the claim about the sentence because some of the stuff E.O. Wilson (whom I greatly admire for much of his other works) sometimes come close to making such a claim in some of his work, so I wasn't sure if that was where you were coming from. (Of course, it is entirely possible that I am misinterpreting Wilson, as well.)
(And I generally hesitate to mention my educational background, particularly to avoid getting sentences that begin, "If you are a linguist from Harvard, surely you couldn't have..." or such like.)
I for one, find what you're saying here very interesting...
No, I'm not ranting. I started the conversation with exactly those tests. I suggest you go back and re-read the thread.
You still haven't offered any decent proof. All you've offered is "proof of existence," which I have acknowledged several times as what started it all. Then I asserted that language and the fundamental traps that lock people into disagreement are extremely unlikely to change with a new species because they are properties of phenomenology as expressed through language. You haven't said anything to change my mind. I'm still open to it but telling me to go read up somewhere else doesn't help.
I'll ask yet again: present an example of DNA changes modifying human language. It's quite a simple request. Until you do that, you have an interesting theory that is yet to be proved. You think it will be, and you may be right, but I would be very surprised if something as fundamental as dichotomous logic ever gets modified.
I'm not really that interested in joining this conversation (not my area of interest), but if you are interested in a gene change that modifies human language there is FOXP2.
Thanks, Binder. The content of that article isn't surprising to me and it still doesn't deal with the factors I started this thread with.
Language is conceptualizing and inherent in that act is a clear discontinuity between reality and our perception of it. In other words, the word "table" is not the table itself.
Because of the very nature of this break in continuity, we must interpret, or assign one or more of an infinite number of possible meanings to a particular circumstance. Two meanings/interpretations we've invented are the concepts "right" and "wrong." They are just concepts and don't exist outside of language. You can't point to "right." You can't point to "wrong" because neither are physical objects.
So we humans are trapped in a web of meanings and for the most part they are pretty handy tools. Two particularly handy ones are "right" and "wrong." Now that we have invented them, I believe they are going to be a mainstay for our species forever. They are just too fundamental to how we move through the world and are ever likely to move through the world.
My assertion is that evolution is not going to change this. It's not going to change the basic issue, which is that there is a gap between reality and our conceptionalization of it as expressed through language.
DNA may impair language (as in the family in your article) but I'm pointing to the act of creating language itself, which inherently has to address this gap. "Right" and "wrong" are like the wheel is to us now, but even more fundamental. Take away "right" and "wrong" and we would re-invent them in an instant.
As long as we have language, we'll have "right" and "wrong" — two very useful tools that, when used poorly (and they often are) lead to much mischief, including arguments, wars, divorce, etc. I assert that until we educate enough people how to use these tools well, we are going to continue to fail to agree on the steps necessary to address our predicament.
Gosh, George, evolution is a slow process. In a few decades modern man has interfered with many of these processes, though, in time, evolution will certainly correct this, time I doubt we'll have.
Take disease resistance as an example. Over time, natural selection selects those with the most resistance to evolving pathogens to pass on their resistance to their offspring. We now use artificially induced resistance to bypass this selection process, and also resist the natural process of population control. This to me is extra-evolutionary. The natural processes of our evolution have been corrupted by us. My point is that this ability, especially on the scale we are witnessing today, has only existed for a tiny fraction of evolutionary time. This results in an imbalance between humans and their biosphere. Many types of medical intervention fall into the same category, excluding licking each others' wounds perhaps ;-/
How many other species have the capacity to allow (cause, in fact) offspring with certain genetic birth defects to survive and reproduce? It is a fairly recent, uniquely human trait, natural selection intervention, something evolution hasn't seen before, therefore extra-evolutionary.
Ghung,
Evolution is a mixed temporal process. Darwin believed it was slow. Gould and Eldridge argued (and subsequent evidence confirms) that some very rapid changes can occur (see: Punctuated Equilibrium). There is no necessary preferred time scale when you look at the whole range of possibilities with mutation (including generated ones - see evolvability below), fitness profiles, selection, and suddenly changing climates.
Same basic question I posed to aangle. References please? Cite the research that supports your contention. I know it was a popular conception even as little as ten years ago. But more modern work has demonstrated that evolution continues.
I think you are confusing an adaptation that lessens one kind of selective force but does not change the fact that other selection forces are at work still. In fact, the fact that we, through our medical interventions, have subverted one pathway could actually mean we've simply created another avenue for selection to work. For example, overuse of antibiotics has promoted adaptations in microbes that will now come back to haunt us and lead to selection against those who have no natural immunity to their onslaught.
You are asking the wrong question wrt: other species' abilities. Our environment is largely a result of our own inventions, no argument there. But it is still an environment that continues to put selective pressures on us. And btw, the fertility rates in nations that can successfully support defective babies is far less than in those nations where such defects are culled by early death.
You are clinging to an outmoded version of human exceptionalism. This is the stuff of religious beliefs, not science. I do agree that there is something emergent about humans and their cultures that transcends previous biological evolutionary processes. But it isn't to become extra-evolutionary. Rather we've become hyper-evolutionary. We can create (knowingly or not) the very forces that select for and against our traits. And we are doing it at a highly accelerated rate.
BTW: check the term evolvability. This is new stuff, very exciting and lends weight to the argument that humans are actually evolving faster than ordinary biological evolution. Quite the opposite from what you suggest.
I think you are full of it..............
Where is the other human species? Where are the mutants passing on their genes to every other human on the planet. Show me a different human to that of sixty thousand years past.
We are not an ant colony with a single queen. We can all interbreed and we are spread over every niche of the planet.
Humans DO NOT need to evolve. There is no reason to evolve, we probably need to devolve. We don't grow fur longer in winter, we kill a beast and use its fur, we put a bull horn to our ear to hear better, we wear glasses to see better, use crutches, accept the infirm, care for the elderly, the list is practically endless and unchanged since time immemorial.
There has been no dieoff to propagate a unique adaption or mutation. If one occurred now it would be bred out. Humans have not been isolated like chickens, dogs, cats, horses, cattle or fruit flies.
Tall breeds with short, smart with stupid, insane with sane, six fingered with five. We artificially immune ourselves to disease, we eliminate hazards and pathogens. No one is saying we are unique or not subject to "the laws of nature". If there was a dieoff to a few dozen breeding pair, there still would not be "evolution" unless there was a need. Look around you for pities sake, there are a gazillion mammalian species older than humans which have not evolved further. You think we are unique and can "evolve" BECAUSE we are human.
If there is a massive dieoff due to ozone depletion or radiation and a few survive who have a special ability, they may pass on that ability. But what would it be? Able to survive with minimal vitamin B? Would it have been just luck or be small in stature, tall.
Many human traits are hereditary including mental illness but not everyone is mentally sick, there are too damn many of us and we can all interbreed.
The humans of 60,000 years past were not the same as modern humans. There were gene exchanges between African diaspora humans, Neandertals and Denisovans around 30,000 years ago. Non-Africans bear around 2.5% Neandertal and 5% Denisovan DNA.
The physical and personality traits suitable for success as an African hunter are radically different from those which work for an Inuit, or for an English farmer. These groups would seldom interbreed. Continued long enough, speciation would result... assuming that one group didn't just replace the others.
You don't understand what evolution is. It happens all the time. Evolutionary pressure from the bubonic plague appears to have given Europeans greater resistance to HIV than Africans. Mate-selection effects drive evolution as some traits grow in frequency as others shrink. Even your "devolution" is evolution.
Pure speculation, there is no evidence for Neandertal DNA.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100506-science-neanderth...
This article is full of "probable", "skeleton based claims", "apparently", "rough draft", "the genetic study team reached their conclusion after comparing the genomes of five living humans", "thought to have"........as I said, speculation no facts.
Humans have inhabited Australia for over sixty thousand years. The original inhabitants are not a different species.
Would seldom interbreed...........the fact is they can. Knowledge, culture and experience are not inherited. An African Pygmy child could be reared (vice versa) by an Inuit and survive well.
Looking for evidence to fit a theory, re "appears".
I understand "devolution" I just surmised it would be good for the planet if humans devolved to something less destructive. You think we are going to "evolve" into something good for the planet.
Small differences do not show an evolutionary trend for human beings. Why are people so desperate to find recent evolution for Homo Sapiens. There are seven billion of us, there is bound to be diversity and differences, to claim evolution is silly. Is any one group, or culture more adapted to this world now, than sixty thousand years ago. Would a child taken from sixty thousand years ago and reared today not survive and breed?
Evolution requires hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, environmental change, continental collision, isolation, luck.
I am in no way saying that humans are exempt form evolution. If a small colony of humans were dropped on another Earth with different flora, fauna and environmental conditions and given enough time evolution could occur. But being human with the same brain, we would probably do the same to the new planet as we have with this one and remain essentially human.
There's been speculative papers published for years now that Neandertals may be the source of some archaic genes that are old enough to have fixated or drifted out of existance. The sequencing of the Neandertal genome by Svante Pääbo pretty much clenched it, the issue really is settled.
TED Talk -- Svante Pääbo: DNA clues to our inner neanderthal
OK! Here is just one example.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/science/11evolve.html
Here is a link to the original study and paper:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/tcgapdf/Ingram_HG07_LCT-africa.pdf
Yep, and as I recall, modern Tibetans evolved genetically to tolerate much lower levels of oxygen--a hopeful thing, since we have already killed of about half of the world's phytoplankton, the critters that generate about half the oxygen.
Evolution works when a less-adapted species dies out and a better adapted one fills the niche that remains. I don't see that mechanism helping at all with the most fundamental elements of the human condition.
With higher rates of heavy metals, hormone-mimics and even extra radiation from the regular failure of fission power - you've got a fine engine to move along mutations in humans.
The Paleoanthropologist John Hawks has written about current human mutation rates - http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/genomics/variation/more-mutation-rat...
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/evolution/selection/acceleration/acce...
What we haven't got (yet) is the pinch-point where these mutations are weeded out.
I dont see any need for humans to evolve a greater cognitive ability than what we have now. We have exploited our niche, those of other species and now exploit the biosphere like no other lifeform has been able to do (near Earth orbit in the form of satelite communications to the deepest oil and gas fields).
And you don't see the logical inconsistency between the type and level of cognitive ability we have and what we are doing (mindlessly it seems) to the planet?
Who is doing anything mindlessly?
Ignoring things is a cognitive ability. ;)
"Look at New Orleans as a preview."
Or Vermont:
http://www.mansfieldheliflight.com/flood/
That does depend on what choices are made in e.g. materials. Steel and iron rust, but what's the lifespan of a graphite-fiber cable in a suspension bridge? What's the lifespan of an Accoya beam, or one made of basalt-fiber reinforced plastic?
Those "truly sustainable" alternatives include nuclear. The totality of current human energy consumption could be supplied by about 5000 tons of uranium per year in FBRs. Uranium is recoverable from seawater for around $200/lb with known methods (persimmon extracts). Rivers bring about 30,000 tons per year of uranium to the oceans.
Then there's solar with future methods. Quantum-dot PV may reach 50% efficiency. Archaea already use electricity to convert CO2 to CH4 at 80% efficiency. Plants using cholorphyll are nowhere near that good. What do the boundaries look like if technology includes light-to-fixed-carbon at even 10% efficiency? I can answer that: like nothing ever seen on earth, by humans or anything else.
This is what we can conceive of today. A century ago, no one could have conceived of where we are now. We'll get there soon enough, if the fearmongers step (or are shoved) out of the way.
Have at it. Prove the fear mongers wrong. I am on your side. Now it is up to you to deliver.
The book outline is done. I'm trying to write it now.
What comes after shoving?
Keeping them out of the way of the adults while the adults get work done.
@George.Mobus
The type of model that you propose (and have been working on) gives little information as to what type of interventions are necessary at the spectrum that is required in my view. The language of exergy is poorly developed for processes outside of energy flows, and totally unknown to people involved in making interventions in the system. I don't see that approach as having much practical value.
I understand the lack of understanding. I will just respond with this one fact: There are no "processes outside of energy flows".
@George.Mobus
I agree with that notion (no process occurs without energy flows), but this is not recognized as such (unfortunately). I meant with "outside of energy" people who work on things that are not directly related to energy (at least appear to be). My apologies for the poor sentence construction.
Ah. That does explain it and so now we are on track. You said above:
This is absolutely correct in the sense that it isn't intended to tell us how to intervene. It is intended to notify us as to what the best case scenario might be (in a depletion scenario). If we assume that no interventions will result in a much worse case scenario (an asset curve far below the maximum shown in this pure model) then, by all means, we need to seek interventions that will get us closer to this boundary case. I have nothing against that idea at all (unless it ends up being a search for a magic wand).
Given the shape of the curve from my model I would say that even the best case scenario seems grim. I have actually also modeled the same dynamics but added in something like a WWII-level marshaling of alternative energy sources (assumed to be themselves self-sustaining) in the same way that LTG folks said what-if we had more minerals than we thought - then what? Turns out, and I can send you the graphs, that it doesn't really change the timing or the dynamics much. It only changes the level of the bottom, i.e. the sustainable dynamic steady-state.
Of course I hope you and Hannes and Nate do some great work. You've definitely got the intellectual horsepower (no pun intended) to do it if it can be done. My only suggestion is recognize what the limits look like so you don't go chasing interventions intended to exceed those. It would be like believing you can find a polynomial time algorithm to solve the traveling salesman problem.
From many of the above comments I can see that human exceptionalism is alive and well. It makes having a scientific discourse difficult when people believe we are the epitome of evolution. But, then, maybe the holding of that belief, which, at least for the western and middle eastern world, started with the Abrahamic tradition, is natural to a lesser evolved cognitive ability than we imagine ourselves to have.
Humans are not above or outside of evolution. If anything, through our evolved consciousness and ability to even grasp the process of evolution, we have become partners with the process in a similar way that we are partners with gravity. All I can suggest is that much of the latest research is dissolving the old beliefs (even some of Darwin's and Dawkins'!) Those interested in learning might actually investigate.
George, we're trying to have a conversation here. Some of us may have the time and interest to go do all the reading you suggest but most of us do not. Speaking for myself, my guilty pleasure is participating here on this board. I can't really devote more time to side topics like this one.
So I request that you stop cutting off conversations with a haughty "when you've learned more come back and we'll continue."
It's pretty clear that you've got a hypothesis, maybe even a thoroughly worked out one, but you have no evidence that the hypothesis is true (i.e. no examples of DNA changes leading to changes in our language). I'm saying that dichotomous logic is firmly established in language and is unlikely to be unseated now that it's there.
Certainly keep theorizing, since it's fun to do.
How would you know it is theorizing if you haven't been following the literature?
Binder (above) gave you a link to a pretty reasonable description of the interconnection between genes, development, and language. The rest requires that you do understand (deeply) the dynamics of evolution.
Your resort to "dichotomous logic" and "phenomenology", with no explanation as to how these relate to the brain, or the production or interpretation of language is simply not a challenge to the science that is being done and that you don't have the time to investigate.
As you don't have time for doing so, I suggest that "conversations" be kept to subjects you do have time for. And I am not offering to explicate in this thread or this site. A conversation about a technical issue is possible when both parties have access to similar background. I've offered links and references, that is all I am going to do.
PS. There is no such thing as "proof" in science, only in math. The existence proof is not a logical proof. All science can do is do a better job of describing reality as time goes on. So please dispense with requests for proof.
I responded above before reading this. Please see that answer for what I am pointing to.
I'm happy to leave this thread where it is. I've got other work to do.
"From many of the above comments I can see that human exceptionalism is alive and well. It makes having a scientific discourse difficult when people believe we are the epitome of evolution."
It's clear that humans are exceptional in many ways compared to other lifeforms on the planet. This doesn't imply any moral or judgemental superiority, or that we are "the epitomy of evolution" as you say.
What other species can modify the fundamental genetics of other lifeforms at will to suit their needs/wants? What other species can record it's history and willfully make decisions based on past behavior its living members weren't actually witness to? What other species has landed robots on Mars, or walked on the Moon, just because they could? What other species can harvest a heart from a dead member and use it to extend the life of another who was genetically selected to not survive? What other species can accumulate tons of stuff which is in no way related to its survival? What other species accumulates waste that is likely to remain lethal longer than it (the species) does? What other species can contemplate the extinction of another?
Delegating "exceptionalism" to a religion belies the truth: that we are, indeed exceptional in numerous ways. Not very scientific, that.
First you should read what I have written about the human condition before attacking me for not recognizing that we are an exceptional species.
Second understand the use of the word exceptionalISM. It is a philosophical position that includes the idea that whatever is exceptional is exempt from the laws of the ordinary. My statement is that we are not exempt from evolution. Somewhere in this thread I even mentioned that we, because we are "exceptional" in the more limited sense, can consider ourselves partners with evolution.
Firstly, and with due respect, I never attack people, though I often challenge their ideas (at least I try, there are some pundits out there need to be bopped).
Secondly, I've seen little in this discussion to indicate that folks are suffering from 'ISMs. To posit that humans are evolutionarily atypical is, IMO, quite valid. Semantical discussions over whether humans are "extra-evolutionary", 'hyper-evolutionary", co-evolutionary", or even "pseudo-evolutionary" are only discussions about the seemingly anomalous nature of ourselves compared to other species, not a claim to some divine, anointed position among "God's little creatures". I, for one, fear we may soon be the victims of our own evolutionary success unless we "evolve" some special quality to temper it; yet one more evolutionary first?
Ghung, I just love your way of reasoning and I agree with you at least 90 to 95 percent of the time. Your post here is no exception. But I would express it in much stronger terms. We will not soon be victims of our own evolutionary success but we are way past that point. Our evolutionary success is what is destroying the natural world.
I have posted this John Gray quote before but this seems a perfect time to re-post it.
Ron P.
Thanks, Ron. It's been suggested on the home front that I tone it down a bit, and understatement has its place (especially for a properly raised Southern boy, but you knew that). I tend to get more forceful when I allow myself to consider the unknowable number of precious and universally unique lifeforms, ecosystems and the biodiversity freakin' snuffed out forever due to our evolutionary success. The only solace I have regarding this is that this too will pass, and the planet will eventually recover from yet another homegrown disaster. At least, this is my hope.
Well that is my hope also, but I am not so sure. Yes we will recover, but it will take, literally, millions of years. In my opinion that is not something we can take comfort in. That is the tragedy of the whole situation. All the beautiful species that exist today will be gone. Something else will evolve but not likely to resemble what exist today. We, as humans, will be responsible for their demise.
It is just too horrible to contemplate. I don't even like to think about it.
Take care, Ron P.
"It makes having a scientific discourse difficult when people believe we are the epitome of evolution."
One might try having a "scientific discourse" with another species then...
Could you transform the modeling problem into something amenable to a solution by gamers?
http://news.yahoo.com/online-gamers-crack-aids-enzyme-puzzle-175427367.html
It is clear there are limits to the pollution a given ecosystem can absorb, the level of resources that can be depleted, and debt that can be incurred.
How can we model our systems from the bottom-up? We can't understand systems from within, and we certainly can't understand them from the scale below. Things get forgotten. For example, while I see attention paid to sinks in the poster's first comment, when I go to the IIER website, none of the tabs to the left address sinks. The focus is on the sources. Incomplete models do strange things--witness the climate models based on extrapolation rather than fundamental energetics.
Of course, sinks are part of any meaningful ecosystem model (and will be of this one). Maybe the attached PDF document will shed some light on this.
I have long wanted this kind of modeling to be done. You are at the start of important work. Keep in mind the global climate people have been modeling for three decades and are still learning. To get this right will take decades. But there will be huge and valuable learning along the way.
The item you have not talked about is human population and its regulation. This must be included and in several possible forms (market driven, policy driven, locally, globally).
I started to make a World3 model with several regions and stopped when I realized the amount of work to get the numbers for the inter-region flows. You have a huge amount of work ahead of you. Best of luck.
Enclosure of the commons and there regulation and enforcement seem an obvious future outcome. The three commons yet to be enclosed are the atmosphere, the oceans beyond 12 (200?) miles, and geosynchronous orbit slots. The last may not be import for a long time. There are also a few cases of rivers between multiple countries that need regulation and enforcement to be defined. The best example being the Nile.
When you talk of agents how far down are you thinking of going? Each (10 billion) individual? One agent to represent 1000 people? OK having read your pdf I see the agent represents a groups of people involved in a specific activity (i.e. working at the fish cannery).
It is clear there are limits to...debt that can be incurred.
That is not quite true--there are limits to the amount of debt that can be serviced and repaid or from which can be obtained a meaningful benefit but there is not a discernable limit for how much debt can be incurred especially when borrowing from the future.
I think the project could probably come up with a reasonable model, once population and per capita resources consumption comes down (by whatever means), but as others have pointed out, getting to that point voluntarily is is always going to be the sticking point. We can't even get agreement on climate change and it has overwhelming science behind it now.
So the place to work, I think, is on how to get humans to agree with each other. This happens at the very personal level. Look for how traditionally rancorous circumstances have resolved well: the divorces, the labor/management disputes and so on. Then get to work on teaching that to, well, every human being.
I think quickly you will find that the ability for humans to interpret facts in different ways will present a problem. The need for humans to be "right" when faced with an opposing point of view will present a problem. Our tendency to label others and objectify them rather than see them as fluid entities will present a problem. You will bump into the constraints of language and how it locks thinking ("I am an engineer" rather than "I perform engineering work for some part of my day"). And so on.
In my view, these "soft" issues are the ones that will prevent us from enacting a global plan or even very many local plans.
I've worked at teaching these but in the past few years I've been forced to acknowledge that I and the others who teach this simply didn't get to enough people in time. Thus, the world's physical systems will determine our future because we will not alter our behavior in time to live well within their constraints, like lowering our population voluntarily before wars, famines and natural disasters brought on by our excessive pollution, most notably CO2, do that for us.
Like GliderGilder, I've largely pulled back from discussions here because the global trends now unfolding are, I believe, absolutely unstoppable. There is certainly a way to make it slightly better here and there but no amount of technocornocopianism will convince me that this isn't our future:
But look at what you are saying.
We know for sure that there will be decline, and as you have pointed out elsewhere, the decline will not be smooth, but will coming in jarring downsteps.
Each of those downsteps is an opportunity to reach people who were unreachable when all the evidence around them was that everything was likely to continue as it had up till then.
We have the advantage of knowing that major downsteps and jarring crises and shocks are baked into the cake.
If we can position ourselves in ways that make it so that:
1) Our basic message has some degree of currency so people are not completely unfamiliar with it
2) When the big shock comes, we have some access to decision makers and opinion shapers so that we might convince them--when they can finally see that everything they have known to do is no longer working--that there are other ways about thinking about the world and other strategies for approaching the crisis.
Yes, it is certainly too late to prevent a steady stream of horrific shocks. But each shock will also be golden opportunity to reach people whose worldviews would otherwise be essentially unshakable.
Thanks, by the way, for all your work on this over the years and for the times that you still do grace us with your presence and insights.
Thanks, dohboi for the kind words.
I believe that to be very true. It seems that there is a sizable category, probably the majority, of humans who will not connect the dots ahead of time. It's the same reason people smoke and only when they are given six months to live due to lung cancer do they say, "Damn, I wish I had listened when people told me."
Most people will see the problems only after the decline begins — maybe. You see, our capacity for interpretation of facts (by way of language) means that we won't even get agreement after the decline begins on what the cause of the decline was.
So, my personal goal is to lessen the suffering/increase the general happiness of my loved ones and my fellow citizens of the planet while we experience a very tough future ahead of us.
I'll raise the ante on your thought then.
I'd say it won't even BE a "decline". ;)
The equation Lower Energy = Lower Level of Civilization doesn't hold.
Oh my. From this post the impression is that you want to model the world. From the PDF document it is clear you want to model a single city and its surrounding farm land.
An important question is what level of energy is available? Solar and wind only or are thorium fueled reactors available? In one we have London in 1800 in the other we have Irvine, California 2011.
The interface to the atmosphere depends on what the rest of the world is doing to the atmosphere. You will have to make a big assumption here.
I would prefer the agent level be down to the individual making movement from one occupation to another more natural. Making the 300 person cannery employees agent give up one of its members to the 500 person teachers agent will be kludgie.
How much computing power are you planning on buying? A laptop, a desktop, a workstation, a compute server with 24 cpus, a compute server with 512 cpus, .....
Your assumption that money is always available to make the system run smoothly is an OK assumption but clearly not always true.
Will human population be constrained by the market or by policy in this city? Will immigration from the rest of the world be open, partially open, closed? Will immigration be by policy or by lack of ability to enforce policy? That is if you have a nice low population density city and rest of the world is worse off will masses of immigrates try to break in?
Are you planning to write your own differential equation solver? and graphical display software? The existing good ones are all proprietary. Open source Modelica defines a language for models but has no engine and no pretty graphics. Dymola (engine and graphics) that is often used with Modelica is proprietary. You will have to use open source or you will spend your whole budget just writing the engine and pretty display software. The other non open solution is to buy or get a donation from say Dymola.
How big a city do you want to do? 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000?
My impression from reading your PDF is that the model will start with the ideal population. Is this correct?
Any thoughts on Windows versus Linux as your platform?
Will this city be on the coast and have access to ocean resources like fish?
This is key. Energy is the driver, and the conclusions of the model are only as good as the assumptions which go into it.
Model assumptions which rule out nuclear energy a priori may have political aims (e.g. Michael Dittmar's faulty uranium-mining assumptions, aimed at shutting down nuclear energy [thankfully, failed] and forcing nuclear disarmament [sadly, failed]), and should never be allowed to pass unchallenged; ideologues will attempt to use them to make policy for their own ends, without acknowledging that other options exist.
@edpell,
The development of a stable society requires a number of assumptions and these always involve uncertainty. In several of these cases we can do sensitivity analysis of different variables to assess changes. As Hannes pointed out earlier population is a dependent and not an independent variable,and as such we will start with the population as is and this will change from the model run. The initial geographic scope has not yet been decided upon, and the answers to your other questions follow from this choice.
I see one of you is located in Albany, New York. I am in Rhinebeck, New York. I have a class every other Thursday in Albany in the evening. I would love to stop in and chat with you in Albany some Thursday.
Interesting project & good people, and I'm impressed there's money for salaries, though that can be a decidedly mixed blessing in a time-critical situation.
If we could press a button and possess the optimal model result in hand tomorrow, what would we do with it? The premise - if premise it is - that we can pilot a complex/chaotic system from initial state to a far-removed target state while keeping all intermediate states viable is problematic to say the least. Still, I'll be interested at what comes out of it.
There are any number of speculative futures for high human populations which could be sustainable within the limits and assumptions of idealized modeling, but would run into problems in the real world. (Indeed, the limits imposed by the complex real world are what makes a system metastable/sustainable, right?).
So it comes back to assumptions, examined and unexamined. I'm not aware of the assumptions of this proposed modeling, but a frequent one is that that it's intrinsically good to have a sh*tload of humans simultaneously extant. And of course, that's what's unsustainable. There's a place for billions of humans: spread out over time.
The first 90 billion or so humans to live on earth hardly messed up the planet at all in sustainability terms. The most recent 10 billion did the damage. That deserves more thought than it usually gets. Pretty much every planet-level ecosystem challenge that's going to hell in a handbasket on earth today did quite well with the first 90 billion humans. Pretty rigorous model, that.
The angst with which we approach such seemingly-intractable problems generally stems from an unspoken assumed imperative to have billions of human brains and bodies existing simultaneously, which is a subset of our recent experience and cultural disconnect from anything but the immediate future. Yet "Billion of humans at once" has been modeled in the real world and been found wanting. The desirability of having a billion humans alive on earth at once, versus say a couple million, is a values call which is deeply entangled with our steep cultural discount rate and our anthro-exceptionalist technocentric self-image.
Had the human population never risen above a million on earth, the aggregate total of human happiness, lives, biomass, and perhaps even intellectual achievements of humans during our species' lifetime would likely have been far higher than they now can be. As it is, we may well stand on the knife-edge of killing off most species (including ourselves) larger and more complex than jellyfish, and that has negligible effect on our real-time actions.
We have been almost fatally lucky. The dance of DNA with the physical world gave us dexterity, a modeling brain, durable exosomatic information storage and an oxygen atmosphere, and proximity of many things to burn like fossil carbon, unfortunately including frozen methane possibly on a hair trigger to end the very conditions we evolved under.
The class of models which is sustainable is the class we reject: not many humans on earth at a given time. No need to really model it; for we will always breed our way back to the hard limits, rejecting any vision of sustainability others may have modeled for us. The need for geolological thinking these days is great; not in extracting more "stuff" to burn and refine; rather to help those in a position to make hard decisions see the world through a paleontologist's eyes; to visualize the time dimension as salient in the question of human inhabitation of and impact on the planet.
Best wishes for the project.
Hi Greenish, can you remind us of how many homo sapiens have ever lived and how many are alive today?
I agree entirely here, and hope that Hannes, Nate and Rembrandt take note.
Hi Euan.
I take 100 billion as a reasonable estimate; YMMV depending on assumptions of course. I forget where I got it; but a quick google comes up with similar order-of-magnitude estimates.
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx
http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/People.html
http://1000memories.com/blog/75-number-of-people-who-have-ever-lived
Taking this a step in the other direction, how many people might we expect to live in, say the coming million years under various scenarios? Those people are the ones at existential risk now, as options, carrying capacity, intact ecosystems etc are foreclosed or diminished.
A population of humans of perhaps 50 million average, sustained over a million years, is a lot of people. Yet they are nonentities to us, while to a hypothetical sapient species they might arguably be the primary concern.
I'd like to popularize the notion of thinking about the first trillion of those; a trillion real human lives. Who speaks for the trillion?
The current 7-8 billion should be viewed against the real past and the possible futures.
best
(geolological? jeez, I need better glasses or more caffeine)
This is a widely known factoid. Tks for links that I hope many will read. A Planet fit for a trillion humans!? Whose DNA gets selected and how?
Yes, I remember doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation to reality-check that factoid and having it not hold up, so I went looking for other estimates.
The very concept of a trillion human lives is alien to us; yet if we had not gone into severe overshoot in our cleverness, it would have been very likely; perhaps multiple trillions. It sounds like science fiction just to say it, doesn't it? But the only reason it's so glaring is that it stands in stark contrast with our current cultural narratives, conscious and unconscious. The lack of our feeling connected to those people is what destroys them.
Presumably, DNA would get selected the same way as usual, by screwing and surviving. Nothing special is required for a trillion humans to exist. Just a sentient, sapient, self-aware desire and ability to not preclude it.
I came at this initially (decades ago) from the perspective of the mass extinction event; but we're also destroying our own childrens' children, who would otherwise have inherited the best little planet in this area of the galaxy. That's what's at stake, and "the trillion" are a good thing to keep in mind when contemplating the dieoff. It'll be the greatest time of privation and suffering ever to occur for our species, yet is trivial in comparison to the actual human lives potentially precluded by despoilment of the planet.
best...
If you're trying to quantify total historical human population, you have to realize that the first 200k years of human history had much smaller populations than you might expect. Estimated population in 10,000 BC was about 4 million.
If we assume an average lifespan of 30 years, the total number of humans who lived between 10,000 BC and 5,000 BC was on the order of 200 million. That's perhaps 2/3 of the present-day population of the USA. People just do not intuitively understand exponential functions; the curve of a function which grows exponentially will have half its total area beneath the last cumulative doubling. The idea that well over half of all humans who ever lived are alive today is quite credible to me.
Saying it should have been this way or it could have been this way doesn't help, at least for me.
The fact is that it isn't like this. Something at the core of our beings refuses to accede to these communal ideas about the future.
I don't know why exactly. We want it all now? We can live with failure but not with someone else's victory?
It is,certainly, fatal, but then so is life.
The only refuge at times like this, when thoughts like this come up, is the knowledge that there is universal suffering....so trillions of people would also have suffered the same slings and arrows that assail us. Having a jolly green planet wouldn't exempt them from pain, cancer, suffering, infectious diseases, etc. Call me suicidal if you like (I am not)....our destiny is not to be happy and smart. We are working out something for the cosmos, and it might be scary and cold, the way the rest of the cosmos is (or we might reform ourselves and heal the planet and allow for smaller generations of humans for millenia from then on). I really have no idea what the plan is, but who is to say that we should like it or include as many as possible in it? Maybe we should include as few as possible, sparing them. So precluding trillions of births may be seen to be nature's way of lessening suffering?? Is this possible?
It isn't always easy to be alive, after all. We like it, of course, under most circumstances, but not all. What if the deity overseeing the cosmos is rather a tricky, dark, satirically-minded creature? The situation with fossil fuels may mirror the mind of a being who likes mean tricks and practical jokes...
I'm not sure if you're commenting on what I said, but I mean my point to be that hard choices should be made so that future people (human and nonhuman) are more likely to have lives. Being a little less vague about it, I'm implying that a relatively rapid depopulation is probably more than justified by the potential of very many lives which might still exist past the bottleneck. (And that what may descend from a dolphin in the next hundred million years might be more interesting than what may descend from a jellyfish, though I admit that to be a prejudice of a self-aware being on behalf of Mind).
I'll also admit that an arbitrary assumption I make here is that life is, on balance, worth living. (An assumption all my ancestors have made in practice for billions of years, at least until they reproduced).
The universe is rather scary and cold, and the period in which there are stars shining on planets will be a negligible fraction of its lifespan. Yet we exist now, and can know joy as well as suffering.
We don't know yet that the trillion can't still live. We have made it less likely, maybe knocked the potential down from 3 trillion to one trillion, but there are things we don't know. I do know that we haven't earned the right to a self-fulfilling nihilism about the future of our species and others now in existence. (not that I'm characterizing your position that way, it's a more general statement of attitudes I see.) There may be hundreds of millions of years before the planet becomes uninhabitable by conscious beings, or we may make it happen much sooner.
best...
I think I am not nihilistic---but in the type of society you are positing, where people collectively act as though life were worth living and assume that as many people as possible should make it through from birth to death, rather than remain motes in remote stars or other dimensions---in a society like that, we can assume that nihilism would be banned. Then a lot of the dimensions we explore in the arts and philosophy and even science would no longer have their depth and breadth. Our full range of emotions---including utter despair (such as many feel over the future of the planet) would be lost....a richness, a bitterness, ourselves in effect, would be lost---the music would be different. It is OK if we evolve to be better naturally, but we so far haven't---though some say the process has started--- and there is something to be said for that side too.
And let's not forget that in Buddhism the highest level one can reach---nirvana---is not to be reborn anymore as a mortal being. Mortal coils carry with them adherence to the fatal Second Law-----there is the culprit that forces us to eat and search for new shoes and hairbrushes. We go at the world ---or come at the world---from our material beings. It's a kind of limitation for us (though some food is so delicious and some shoes are wonderful). That is why religions often look beyond that.
I guess I am just arguing for some sympathy for our frail imperfect beings. What else could we have done but what was done?
Good points. But that is one thing that cooled my early ardor for Buddhism (Zen in my case)--the goal of transcending the cylces of rebirth strikes me as being uncomfortably aligned with the (unintended?) goal the global industrial/consumerist society is effectively carrying out of ending (nearly) all life--if there are now more bodies to be born into, all would presumably achieve nirvana ("blowing out") and all suffering ends.
Doubtless this was a misinterpretation in some way, but I have not seen an argument that has completely assuaged these concerns.
(Of course, there's the other problem that it is yet another mega-religion focused around an upper-class (or caste), white(-ish) male, but that's another kettle of fish.)
I moved from Buddhism to a mix of Taoism and Advaita because of similar concerns. To me "Nirvana" cut uncomfortably close to the ideas of heaven, salvation and the transhuman singularity. I have no desire to absent myself from this world - it's too damned interesting, especially right now. However, I find that ideas like codependent arising ("interbeing" is the term used by Thich Nhat Hanh) and the embrace of fundamental paradoxes like my simultaneous being and non-being give me a deeper grounding in the moment where it's all happening.
What an exhilarating time to be alive. I hope we all get to see some big changes...
Thanks for sharing your insights, and yes, I still find those and some other Buddhist insights very valuable.
I can't quite share your enthusiasm for our present moment, but I'm glad you are finding it interesting.
@Greenish
Thanks for your comment Greenish. I was thinking what you would see (hypotehtically) as (practical) criteria for sustainability say for a region or country as a geographical scope?
I'll give it some thought; feel free to be in touch via email as well, a contact address is at my user profile. Actually, one of my nonprofit groups is being explicitly re-tasked to focus on some aspects of these questions, though I'm fiddling with it and it isn't live yet.
It depends on the context. Clearly one could construct a number of workably "sustainable" regional models if huge populations are not required to exist simultaneously. That is, of course, the elephant in the room.
I'm an advocate of far lower human populations, asap. It's a great shame that we have foreclosed most of the humane ways to get there and are now looking at old-fashioned dieoff.
best.
Will you be using finite element modeling to track the diffusion of pollution? Or will you assume it sits in the dump and there is one diffusion term that pollutes the whole of the not dump area equally? Likewise will soil erosion, air pollution, phosphorus depletion and metal depletion be finite element modeled or lumped?
Will the production of metals, and phosphorus be local only or imported?
My expectation is that "sustainability" will pretty much follow the trajectory of Strauss and Howe's Fourth Turning regardless of models or any other approach. By this I mean that society will remain on its current unsustainable trajectory until several generations have died out. Of course, society will have pretty much collapsed in the mean time and there will have likely been resource wars. However, at the very least the BAU generation(s) has to have died out along with their younger minions before substantive change can occur.
At that point, it is a crap shoot as to how things will play out: What will the population be at that point? What technology is possible and what technology has been forever lost? What philosophy will be dominant?
I have suggested this several times: We should base decisions upon short term time horizons, i.e., 100-200 years at most. Planing for a sustainable society in the near future is stupid IMO.
Todd
Not stupid but rather a purely academic exercise with little practical consequence. It's simply too late for that.
The planet has been tipped out of its steady-state and is now unstoppably racing towards a new steady-state with a climate different from that under which human civilization and agriculture have evolved. This will happen within a matter of decades, as is clear from the dreaded "hockey-stick" chart:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_CXhZq5GDGH4/TGoWgvTsEjI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/S_KyPNOJp5...
What is called for now is adaptation to a new reality.
Or concerted action to restore the old one. However, given the inherent instability of a system which accumulates methane clathrates (see the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum), avoiding climate excursions may require more in the way of active management than most people suspect.
That would be a neat trick, considering all the positive feedbacks that have already been triggered.
I didn't say it would be easy.
Rembrandt mentions Limits to Growth, and talks about agents, transactions, inputs, and outputs. He is expecting a dynamical model that can be run in a time-step fashion to carry a starting point forward in time and develop a simulation of a feasible history. I have on my desk a copy of "Linear Programming and Economic Analysis" by Dorfman, Samuelson, and Solow, which is an early attempt to model small portions of the economy (e.g. the business firm, the optimum route for a traveling salesman, optimum location of warehouses in relation to customer sites, etc.) This work was begun before computers were available to the vast majority of business as they are today. This early work could be reintroduced and applied to Limits-to-Growth type higher level view. They would fill in the internal details of every individual box in Rembrandt's sketch. The research program would not be simply to run the computer program, look at the output, and declare that this will be the future. Of course it won't be.
But the differences between the computer output and what actually happens will show where the model must be corrected and why it must be corrected. Part of the rules of this model building must be to make sure that all the constraints of physical laws are properly accounted for in the computer code and not merely fudged in with "rules of thumb". There will be an enormous number of internal variables is such a model, but not an impossibly large number because every one of the internal variables will be an operating parameter of some entity that already exists in the economy, or a guess as to the size of a relevant natural resource that has been made (the guess) by management or official planners. Put all this together, turn the crank, and study why the answers are wrong and make corrections to the model and try again. Only if a large, well funded research organization does this work will be know whether or not it can produce useful results.
Now, all we have is optimists and pessimists shouting past each other. This program could have been started in 1958 when the LP book was first published, but the nay-sayers were vocal and the believers were faint hearted. We have got to get past producing graphs on which the curves are sketched free form by hand, and the constraints on their shape have only to do with the anatomy of the human arm, hand, and fingers.
Is a linear model adequate? No. But the model is not linear, it is a collection of linear patches that model non-linearities to whatever accuracy is required. Part of the work is learning what degree of accuracy is actually required to track the actual human enterprise.
Also, it certainly wouldn't hurt to have a parallel program of wise men thinking deep thoughts about the human condition. But such deep thinking cannot be a substitute for a careful accounting of our current status. And a lot of time and energy can be wasted arguing about who the wise men really are. Somehow we have gotten ourselves into deep doo-doo. Which purported wise men participated in that?
A few points:
A model should be used for illumination - are you sure there are corners that can usefully be illuminated, or are you just building a torch in the hope there will be something to see?
@garyp
In the article I have outlined that in many cases the solution is seen only in technological adaptation, instead of regulation or changing some consumption patterns. That does not mean that in many cases a technological solution works well. The model should be built to be flexible in the type of interventions and mapping that is possible and what is not possible, in the most rigorous manner possible. Furthermore, depending on the geographical scale and context different type of solutions are feasible, as it is very feasible to introduce a local or regional tax, but a global uniform tax is difficult. In that sense thinking about problems from the perspective of a global solution is theoretical and does not make sense. This also holds true for the workability of the output. The given answers, as a multitude of interventions follow, will depend on the chosen scale (i.e. looking at the world or looking at a small city or society, which is the initial scope).
I know sometimes it is unpopular and even unpleasant to "comment against the general consensus". However, I think it is usually worthwhile and I hope that TOD members will consider the following in the positive spirit in which it is written.
I was wondering if it would be possible in these models (economic, ecological, etc.) to include the effect of "pollution" that was an input for "sustainability" in another part of the system?
For example, human and animal waste can sometime be considered as an inevitable pollutant ("negative") effect of too many beings on the Earth. However, human and animal "wastes" are often (and have often been in the past) considered as important ("positive") input for farming as long as they are properly used. One could argue (probably correctly) that improper use of wastes is more of a problem than the actual amount of the wastes. Could the models take into account the possible BENEFICIAL effect of these wastes on the sustainability of a given level of economic output (in this example, the amount of food being produced without FF or with reduced FF inputs)? Of course, there could be BOTH beneficial and negative effects from a given usage of waste.
Another (more than a little contentious) possible example is the effect of carbon dioxide emissions and temperate and sub-arctic temperature increases on the productivity of farm crops (and forest lands). It is clear that greenhouses are more productive with increased CO2 (and more tolerant of dryness) and tropical forests produce more biomass than sub-arctic tundra. Perhaps CO2 increases and temperature increases need to be considered across a wide range of assumptions to assess their possible positive/negative effects. After all, there is little doubt that CO2 will increase in the future (even with Peak Oil, Peak Coal and Peak Gas - although the amount of increase may very well be limited by those events). Why not include a range of reasonable possibilities in the models to see if there are scenarios (hopefully realistic and subject to improvement in a positive direction by decisions made by informed individuals), that are more likely to reduce the death toll in the short, medium and long term?
An example of a positive and possible policy adjustment would be the development of genetically engineered crops that take advantage of the increased CO2 to increase yields in a drier/enriched CO2 world. Another example could the use of garbage dumps as sources of raw materials, etc. Given the profit motive inherent in these policy innovations, I do not believe that they are unlikely in the face of future economic stress.
Hope that this is helpful,
IWylie
I see only one solution, and it is a technical solution, to generate via genetic engineering plants that can grow on sea water and produce the food and hydrocarbons needed to run our civilization, and then grow these plants on a hundred million km2 in floating plantations in the oceans. This is 10 billion hectares.
The yield of wheat is ~6,000 kg per hectare. Oil palm yields 7,250 liters per hectare. 5 kg wheat per day for 10 billion people is 8.3 million hectares. 90 million hectares of oil palms produce 16 billion barrels per year of palm oil. That is 43 million barrels per day.
If wind and land-based solar is used to generate electricity, with electric cars and trains, then that oil could be used for air transport.
I think the need is to appreciate that when space is taken over for agriculture, that land area is irreversibly destroyed as wildlife habitat. The same would be true of the water taken over for these floating plantations. Do we destroy the land, or the open ocean? I think that destroying open ocean to free up land for wildlife habitat is a good trade-off.
"when space is taken over for agriculture, that land area is irreversibly destroyed as wildlife habitat."
That statement is over-broad. You can't have elephants or bison herds wandering through the fields, but deer-sized and smaller animals survive quite well, and often do so well that extra open-seasons are needed to keep the crop damage down to tolerable levels.
And based on the rate at which abandoned farmland was reverting to forest last time I went to visit my parents, the natural reclamation process will have the forests back in a couple generations, although they won't reach climax stage for a couple centuries.
The initial biodiversity of the wild land is not restored. Maybe the abundant animals and plants are restored, but the rare species that were never catagorized remain unknown and are not missed.
I think the bio people would say this is a fraction of the diversity that was or could be there. For someone who has spent many hours on a tractor trying to remediate land that has spent generations in the corn/soybean cycle and close to 20 years in the roundup/pesticide annual assault, adjacent lands not subject to this direct action from soils to creatures, plants, water retainment etc look very different without using a single scientific instrument or test. NYS had a number of research reports on the amount of contiguous undisturbed lands that was required to maintain Lynx populations that they were trying to establish in the 80's. It was very large for this predator. I've seen estimates of 50 years for soils to return to normal plasticity and water flow due to plowing compression layers. So, for instance I am surprised how few moles I can find in these lands compared to adjacent undisturbed soils, are their young drowning because of the compression layer and restriction in porosity?
@iwylie,
The conceptual model outlined in the project document takes everything as a process with inputs and outputs. This in the sense that any change, regardless of it being beneficial or non-beneficial or human or non-human, is a process that has (physical) inputs and outputs. This allows for linking every output to re-enter as an input, within the constraints set in the model (physical cost, monetary cost, physical feasibility). This makes it possible to also link pollution as an input within a finite number of possibilities entered into the model.
As to carbon dioxide there are two sides to this, it is possible with a low amount of uncertainty to model the solution side in terms of lowering CO2 emissions since we have a good grip on the physical attributes of different energy sources and their possibilities and costs. To the problem side there is a wider range of uncertainty given lack of knowledge on for instance radiative forgings, which can be modelled with a more scenario type of approach including for instance a risk assessment (if relevant as this depends on the geographical scale).
I think that for future technologies it would be best to take the physical boundary, assess the current status how far we are from that physical boundary, and work with a probability scale of progress towards the ultimate physical boundary minus the practical losses that will always occur. This only holds for known physical processes though, as there is a (very) low probability that in some cases new radical technologies could develop.
Rembrandt,
I must admit that this paragraph is a little confusing to me:
<>
Could you explain with examples of what you mean?
I had thought/expected that "pollution" would be considered as an input into other processes. So does that mean that you will be assessing the impact of Peak Oil/Coal/NG on the growth rates of CO2 (given the CO2 sink in the ocean which seems to be taking 50%+ of the extra CO2 and dissolving it)?
Also, given that even existing crop plant growth rates are almost linear in their yield increase (as a percentage) with increasing CO2 (as a percentage), will you be increasing crop growth rates to compensate for that? How are you planning on factoring in increased temperatures at higher latitudes on crop yields? Do you expect to model some of the increased dryness due to temperature increases or do you consider that too speculative?
How do you expect to factor in increased human/animal/plant wastes as a function of increased population?
Lots to consider. I would expect (guess) that the range of outcomes would be wildly variant depending on input parameters (chaotic). I certainly believe that the effort itself to be worthwhile although the "results" should probably in determining trends rather than "quantitative" outcomes.
I wish you the best of luck and hope that you can keep us updated on your progress (or even the lack of it) and why.
Iwylie
What will be the renewable source of phosphorus and of metals? Once phosphorus is leeched from the ferm field by rain and washed to the sea where will the new phosphorus come from?
If all the phosphorus washed to the sea then I guess it would have to come from the sea.
Anadromous fish (salmon, etc.) are a substantial source of phosphorus to the ecosystems where they spawn and die (and are eaten by land-based predators).
If I understand correctly, there are some zones on earth where phosphate rock is precipitating out of seawater. If this can be expanded artificially and harvested, it closes the loop on phosphate.
Fertilizing with fish, exactly what the native Americans did. :) We used to do this with our backyard corn 40 years ago. We would fish and catch sunfish that are good for nothing but great for fertilizer.
And the energy to get that extracted and placed back on the land comes from?
Agreed, phosphorus and many micronutrients, plus some metals are the trickiest to cycle. Two comments (a much larger discussion might be warranted):
- The model is not supposed to be anything that it cannot be. If we don't find methods to bring a significant portion or all those nutrients back into the cycle, we won't have a sustainable world. That doesn't render the model useless, but instead provides valuable inputs for planning.
- There are a number of methods in test which at least increase the ability to cycle particularly phosphorus, one of which being the capture from (fresh- and sea)water through algae (to be used as nutrient input on arable land, not as feedstock for biofuels). One of the objectives of the model will be to be as accurate as possible in integrating the total system impact such technologies could have, and from that, help evaluate their feasability.
"phosphorus and many micronutrients"
Sorry to sound crude, but you've simply got to get the pee, crap and the corpses back into the soil.
The fact that this does sound 'crude' tells us something about just how far we've come in our general cultural outlook from the kind of full-cycle thinking that is needed.
Of course, this means we have to be even more careful about what we put into our bodies, particularly limiting salt intake, since salt can quickly make soil useless and it is very hard to extract once it is there.
We have to see our bodies as part of the process of turning (mostly) vegetable matter back into useful soil. Our bodies (and really, our lives) are not our own, but belong to the future, to our children, and especially to the land.
dohboi - this goes without saying - no cycling world can ignore human "waste" - but unfortunately, it's only a small portion that ends up in this bucket.
"Once phosphorus is leeched from the [farm] field by rain and washed to the sea where will the new phosphorus come from?"
One of the many reasons to fight farm runoff like the war for survival that it is.
Sounds like a big job, but if you get a framework in place, you can finetune and drill down. Starting it is the main thing.
Ignore the naysayers. This is worth doing, just for the technical knowledge we might gain.
AppleSeed Permaculture's site touches upon several of these concepts in their Financial Permaculture section.
Looking upon the economy as a closed system is the scaffold they build on. The slideshow presentations and video's are interesting.
Rembrandt
“We strongly discourage modelling the “economy” of such a world based on money, but rather on physical interactions between participants and systems – which can later be complemented with a monetary component. That way, distortions from market imperfections – for example the insufficient assignment of a price for externalities – can be avoided. Thus, instead of using money as the baseline, we suggest modelling the entire “economy” on a non-monetary basis, but with the assumption of money being present as an enabler of simple and smooth exchange between agents”.
As a modeller, I know that getting your scope and assumptions right is the most difficult step. Of course they can be changed later, but only at great cost (rework).
Others have commented on the scope of the model, I want to challenge your assumption that money is “an enabler of simple and smooth exchange between agents”. It is more than that and you ignore it at your peril.
First, I agree that you need a process based rather than a money based model. You must model the dynamics of the flows through processes and the finite nature of your sources and sinks.
However, your treatment of money risks being too simplistic. Excluding geology, one of the most significant lags in the system comes from capital accumulation and debt. You have only to listen to the news to see that ever rising debt has been used to mask the fact that many countries are not paying their way in the world (i.e. they are not sustainable by any measure).
The response by most western governments has been:
1) To reduce interest rates (ineffectual when close to zero).
2) To reduce the government deficit by increasing taxes and reducing public spending. This leads to social unrest.
3) Hoping that growth will make the debt shrink. This may not be possible in a resource limited world.
4) Defaulting, Devaluing, Quantitative Easing, Printing Money to make everyone poorer. Not a long term solution, look at Zimbabwe which has had to abandon its own currency and use US dollars.
These policies are all to do with money and none of them actually addresses the root cause that these countries have a trade deficit with the rest of the world. I.e. they are unsustainable.
Unless your proposed model can show that current and proposed policies are wrong and why, it will remain an academic exercise.
IMHO you need to define what you want from this model, then address the scope and assumptions that will deliver.
Thank you for this valuable comment. If you look at IIER's website, you will find out that we quite thoroughly look at money and debt, so we are (painfully) aware of the specifics of this concept.
But because we are, we exclude it from the base of the model, for a number of reasons, first and foremost because we are quite convinced that the current concept of credit will have a life that is significantly shorter than that of our model, which is why we want credit system mechanics layered above and not intermingled with physical realities.
So while money is an imperative in any mildly complex society - eliminating the need to find a bartering partner with the exact need for whatever excess one person has AND the desire to get rid of the exact thing the other wants - debt is not.
P.S. Credit in an old-fashioned sense - i.e. the lending out of excess resources to someone who has a better use - should definitely be part of the model.
Will usury be forbidden by policy or will it be included in your model and it will fade away over time because other more desirable alternatives are offered?
I am a big believer in social credit. In fact the US Constitution is based on the issuing of credit rather than the selling of debt. Unfortunately that was ignored in 1913. We are now debt slaves not free persons.
C4 plants maybe as good as we can get. Photovoltaic panels may not increase that much
"As a C4 plant (a plant that uses C4 carbon fixation), maize is a considerably more water-efficient crop than C3 plants (plants that use C3 carbon fixation) like the small grains, alfalfa and soybeans."
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_sGbvJ3_cTEJ:en.wik...
Thanks for raising the issue, Rembrandt.
There's one thing you forgot to stress.
A system is only sustainable if each and every of its components are sustainable.
For the purpose of this discussion we can consider our solar energy input as "sustainable". When the sun turns into a red giant, we're all screwed anyhow.
For a simple example, consider the construction of a wind turbine, a whole lifecycle:
1: Obtain the minerals and iron needed for its construction. Initially, that'll be from mining, later, mostly from recycling (though the entropy law puts limits on our ability to recycle, recycling can't be 100% efficient [Georgescu-Roegen, 1975]). Diggers running on diesel fuel. That would have to change to the use of renewable energy only.
2: Transport the materials. More diesel. That would have to change to the use of renewable energy only.
3: Turn the iron ore into steel. We currently do that using coking coal [note that it was the discoveries of Dud Dudley and Abraham Darby which kickstarted the industrial revolution by replacing charcoal, which was hitherto used to smelt iron ore, with coke]. That would have to change to the use of renewable energy only. Whilst electric arc, induction, and concentrated solar furnaces are possible, they're not on the scale required. Can they scale to the point where they replace coke-based smelting of iron? And if not, would we then face peak-iron? And what energy efficiencies are involved with the alternatives?
4: Manufacture the wind turbine's components. Probably using a mix of fossil fuels and fossil/nuclear/solar/wind-generated electricity. That would have to change to the use of renewable energy only.
5: Transport to final site and erection. Using fossil fuels, electric vehicles, sailing ships, whatever. That would have to change to the use of renewable energy only.
6: Repair and maintenance.
7: Decommissioning, recycling, returning to step 1.
We could infinitely recurse here and consider the manufacture of the mining equipment, transportation vehicles, etc. Just bear that in mind.
So there's the problem. For a technology to be sustainable, every constituent component must itself be sustainable, powered by replenishing energy sources.
The same problem applies to the manufacture of nuclear power plants in a post-carbon (ok, post-fossil-fuel) world.
It would also be interesting to apply the same sort of analysis to agriculture. Which would be more efficient? Feeding 1/4 (or whatever the figure is) of our arable crops to our shire horses, or turning some of our crops into biofuels to feed our tractors? Don't forget to factor in the manufacture of horseshoes and tractors into the calculations.
So far, we've got to the concept of replacing fossil-fuels with renewables, easy enough whilst their "market penetration" is small, but eventually we'll have to confront the hidden fossil-fuel subsidies which we are all conveniently ignoring.
Oh, and one more thing. Man's destructiveness is powered, in part, by available "high grade" energy. A a man with a biofuel-powered chainsaw can still destroy a forest far more easily than a man with an axe, and I doubt if the victim of a war cares one jot whether the tank that's destroyed their home is powered by diesel oil or biofuels.
Refs
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, 1975, Energy and Economic Myths
Good points. I especially liked the last one, which I have made in various forms over the years.
We already had a mass extinction event going before the effects of GW kicked in.
If we could switch tomorrow to all alternative, non-ff sources of power, but we were still doing everything else the same, we would still be driving life on earth over the cliff (yes, a few microbes and perhaps jelly fish would likely survive--woopdidoo!).
Suppose the wind-turbine tower and major structure is made from basalt-fiber reinforced plastic, the sections assembled with glue. They're brought to the site on rails laid for the purpose and removed after the farm is complete. Wiring is primarily aluminum (a substantial fraction of earth's crust and widespread in clays).
Organics can be made using all kinds of things, including bacteria. Basalt and aluminum come from rocks (we use bauxite because it's cheaper than processing other stuff, but we don't have to). Even aluminum may be replaced by carbon; graphene and doped carbon nanotubes conduct electricity rather well, and they're also quite strong.
I can see a future where the vast bulk of new energy systems are made from air, water, and energy. Like leaves. We'll get there if we don't crash the system first.
Rembrant -- The Job Posting says "The project is undertaken together with the Center of Process Systems Engineering at Imperial College in London, one of the most advanced centers of excellence for ecosystems modeling, and sponsored by The Ecological Sequestration Trust, a non-profit trust focused on creating long-term sustainable societies."
Will the model be based on an extension of CPSE's Synthetic City modeling toolkit?
While money need not be modeled, the formation of capital should be, since the acquisitoin and use of new capital equipment would modify the parameters of the process that makes use of the equipment. Possibly this can be done by characterizing the equipment as a unit that stores material and energy and whose level is an input to the process input/output function.
Even more complex is characterizing innovation, technological substitution, etc. It would be best to not fall into the habit of classical economists of ignoring these altogether.
While I am pessimistic, people can learn new rules, create new institutions, and change behavior on a large scale in relatively short time frames. One example is that of Denmark, where village schools were set up after the Reformation and the peasant class rapidly became literate. This resulted in fairly rapid social change.
See also Yasheng Huang: Does democracy stifle economic growth? for a discussion of rapid change and the role of the development of human capital, specifically literacy, in the development of democracy and the economy.
Merrill, you always have such high quality information +.
This explains a lot about their thinking. 2D no 3D makes things less compute intensive.
Looks to be PC based. For each material one just adds a layer to the model (i.e. phosphorus, aluminium, iron, coke, limestone, air, water, fish, cows, pigs, chickens, eggs, milk, grass, beans, potatoes, rye, nuclear reactors, solar PV, wind turbines, etc.).
Have you found The Synthetic City toolkit?
I have found reports about it. I have not found a download site but I have not looked hard for that. I do wonder if it is in the open source domain?
The model will be based on a new approach, but we will obviously use the experiences made with Imperial College's SynCity modeling kit.
And yes: The formation of capital will be looked at in a "physical" way, as the accumulation of resources in any possible form (raw, processed, as infrastructure, etc.)
The accumulation can have different effects. An accumulation of wheat, for example, would have the effect of putting a "back pressure" on the supply chain to decrease the amount of wheat produced by the farmer agent. In conventional economics this would be signaled by a decrease in the price of wheat.
An accumulation of millstones, on the other hand, would have the effect of increasing the conversion of wheat to flour, provided that millstones were the limiting factor of several factors of production for the miller agent, and provided that there is demand for additional flour. This may deplete the accumulation of wheat, which must be signaled to the farmer agent to raise production.
Rembrandt,
Could you mean, instead of a "sustainable human ecosystem," a sustainable ecosystem with humans resident and taking part in it? Not being a scientist or economist or computer scientist, were I to imagine a model I'd start intuitively by mapping an ecosystem with its plants, animals, water, climate, weather, etc. and then gradually add in humans utilizing various types of resources and technologies to see what works for said ecosystem. Intuitively again, the results are not going to be encouraging from an anthropocentric, technological viewpoint. So is your model a way of theoretically codifying what we pretty much know already?
It could be useful, as climate change models and interactive impact maps are useful, as a way of understanding different models for living in different ecosystems.
Modeling allows scientists to quantify and thus predict, which then builds science. And if you want to be a scientist, you still have to publish in the old paradigm, while forging a new meaning in the new perceived world view, with one foot in each camp. Describe explain predict control. Models are good for what ifs. And building models reveals assumptions you didn't know you had. But you've got to start top down, or you miss pieces of the puzzle. Scientists are taught to be analysts, but bottom-up approaches tend to result in too much complexity and too many parts. Look at the LTG world model and study how they aggregated as a model for how to model a city. Model at two or three different scales; the scales above/below that are pertinent to the phenomena of interest. First define the attention frame, then add limited symbols aggregating (Odum, 2000, p. 15).
Energy accompanies all flows, so the fundamental currency is energy. Money is information in a countercurrent. Information disappears real quickly sometimes. Heh.
Read Nature has a really good point--it's not a "human" ecosystem until it's built properly on its ecosystem services base. The term human ecosystem is an oxymoron, rather like the term sustainable development. If we understand the hierarchy and transformity required to get to the level of complexity we have now, we can understand what we can afford with less inputs?
The system is not sustainable until we can completely recycle wastes. Sustainable systems don't have garbage dumps; everything gets used. We're also not sustainable until the social culture shifts to a much more cooperative attitude, at least on a local basis. Not much evidence of that yet.
The good news is that we don't have to be completely sustainable immediately. Maximum Power Principle dictates that adaptation take place by staying one step ahead of everyone else in adaptation. Don't take yourself completely out of the energy loop, but make changes, build resilience, and role model for your neighbors without getting too far out in front, thus cutting yourself off. I heard a rumor that Nate got a draft horse. We brewed our first beer yesterday. The foundation for our attached solar greenhouse goes in this month before the ground freezes.
Thanks for the explanation and amplification. I'm learning how to put up food and we're weatherizing our house, among other things.
We added pullets to our flock, and I found out this summer that I love turnip greens.
Here's a visual of what you describe, Read Nature, represented pictorially courtesy of Tom Abel in Taiwan and in an energetic diagram by Sergio Ulgiati of Italy. The hierarchy is an ecological food chain, basically, but extended into the human realm. So the "human ecosystem" only exists if each layer of hierarchy and ecosystem services to the left exists. Each layer uses a magnitude of energy more than the process below, concentrating the embodied energy. The layers to the right, at the top of the transformation process support less and less organisms at each level, with a large loss to entropy at each step. So the same embodied energy minus entropy exists at each level, but with many fewer organisms. The only reason we can support 7 billion humans now is because we've bypassed nature's processes--temporarily.
If one doesn't include the ecosystem services layers in one's thinking, the model may function just like reality. Things may appear to work temporarily as long as there are fossil fuel inputs, but once you start to remove nonrenewable support, everything stops working. How many levels of transformity will we have to delete, and how quickly, in order to reduce complexity?
Science, 15 July 2011, Estes, JA et al.
Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth
ABSTRACT
Until recently, large apex consumers were ubiquitous across the globe and had been for millions of years. The loss of these animals may be humankind’s most pervasive influence on nature. Although such losses are widely viewed as an ethical and aesthetic problem, recent research reveals extensive cascading effects of their disappearance in marine, terrestrial, and freshwater ecosystems worldwide. This empirical work supports long-standing theory about the role of top-down forcing in ecosystems but also highlights the unanticipated impacts of trophic cascades on processes as diverse as the dynamics of disease, wildfire, carbon sequestration, invasive species, and biogeochemical cycles. These findings emphasize the urgent need for interdisciplinary research to forecast the effects of trophic downgrading on process, function, and resilience in global ecosystems.
Hello, I would like to read the graphics. Can you post a version that can be expanded. This version is too small to read. Thanks.
Edpell, the first link is Ulgiati's powerpoint, with lots of goodies about the energetics of international trade. Open the second link in a new tab to see the labels better.
http://www.lu.lv/Sharing/presentations/ulgiati.ppt
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSBZmmBCwNn9NnxqKGk6zUYz2ZLSk7hx...
Rather than make a utopian community I think the first output of this model will be a list of inputs and outputs that are not handled locally and the size and timescale of each one. In future work they can try to whittle the list down.
Hi Rembrandt,
Your (IIERs) ambition is massive - I would say on the edge of unimplementable (I am very much in favour of small and understandable models) - but since there's no fun in doing something that is easy, I will try to be as constructive as I can:
- what is the purpose of the model? who is the intended audience? are you trying to "prove" things that you already know to be true?
- are you predicting or are you exploring possible future developments?
- since more people have been looking at tragedies of commons, try to connect to their work. Elinor Ostrom's IAD framework comes to mind and in that context I also suggest you have a look at what my colleague Amineh Ghorbani is doing trying to map the IAD framework to an agent-based model framework (MAIA).
- I understand why you would avoid money in your model - but if you intend to capture some behavioural aspects, you should consider the great motivational and distortive power of money
- having said this, adding any non-trivial social components to the model will be very exciting and difficult
- open source sounds pretty nifty, but don't underestimate the time required to understand a model and to succesfully contribute to it (which is certainly no reason not to do it - other open efforts are e.g. www.openabm.org - but the amount of participation is likely low)
With regard to the pdf:
- it is good that you choose a manageable scope, geography-wise, but in my opinion you should also limit the scope topic-wise and not attempt to model the "economic system to the finest degree possible". what is the finest degree? me buying groceries at the grocer's?
- wrt long-term stability and balance I assume that you are studying mandated redistribution as an option, not as a goal
- 5.7 if you include im- and exports, you have to say something about carrying capacity at the higher scale
- 8.1 be careful not to design scenarios in such a way that they are self-evident or self-proving to begin with; there should be something exciting, something to learn in scenarios.
- 8.3 minimum requirements and maximum inequality are value-based choices; it will be hard to consider (change of) values adequately in a model
Hope this helps,
cheers,
Andreas
In my planning and speculation about the future, I assume that people will remain people and we will not evolve anytime soon. But we need to break down the idea of 'people' a bit because there are differences.
For the purposes of this discussion there are a few points of interest. First, it takes much convincing to get your average schmoe to really believe something he doesn't want to know. I know it took a lot for me. Second, the vast majority of folks really are concerned about their children and would take steps to help if they truly were convinced of the situation. Third, there's always some asshole. Always. Count on it.
Currently the situation is obscured with the same old tool as always, a blizzard of bullshit. Your average guy hears all kinds of stuff and really doesn't know what to believe. It's only natural to believe the version that's most comfortable.
Considering history and looking around the world today, it becomes apparent that controlling a resource base involves force or at least the credible threat of force. To date people have only been willing to fight about a resource in order to exploit it. But they have been only too willing to do that.
The question of sustainability comes down to regulation of resource extraction. Much like a park or game reserve, that takes enforcement. But in this case your friendly park ranger isn't going to cut it. The kind of regulation we're talking about will significantly lower our standard of living. This will only be possible with massive public support. To date I have only convinced one or two people of the situation. We need something a lot faster. Something graphic and undeniable.
Adding it all together, this is why I believe that we will not check our destruction of the earth until there has been a big enough disaster to where even your average schmoe can't help but see the truth. Something major enough to where no amount of horse exhaust can change the picture. At that point we might have enough popular support to create and enforce reasonable limits on resource extraction.
The rub here is that this will come down to war, and that burns through tremendous amounts of resources. Any group that does not fully exploit it's resources will be at a fatal disadvantage in an armed conflict. The dynamic that might work would be to take military steps to protect access to resources, while negotiating to reduce extraction. This can only work of there is a very high value placed on the remaining resources. Value that people are willing to pay real money for. That's going to take a groundswell of changed thinking. It's going to take a train wreck, or more likely a series of them.
All that is about the near term. For the long term we need to think about generations. I have observed that children of rich people tend to be seriously disconnected from the source of their support, and instead fritter away their time driving fast cars and betting on horses. I think some version of this a major source of our national problems today. I don't know of any reliable way to maintain focus and drive across many generations. We can build a social and legal structure, but it is always up to the next generation to make of it what they will. However I believe it's an effort worth making.
I guess the point I was dancing around with my first post is this: we know that individuals and nations make tradeoff judgements between cooperation and violence. From primate studies we know something about what those tradeoffs are. Unpleasant as the subject is, I believe that any model which assumes cooperation and ignores the violence option will not give effective real-world results.
Just heard a radio interview with someone who's experimenting with an intriguing substitute for fishmeal protein -- flies, or more specifically their larvae.
They feed them offal and blood that the abattoirs throw away, so the feedstock costs nothing, and it helps to clean the environment. The flies lay 100s of eggs each, they separate the eggs, and raise the larvae.
He says their big problem now is scaling up to commercial quantities. They need to produce at least a hundred tons a day to get the big chicken producers interested.
I must say, the guy sounded pretty together. He's not some hippie dreamer. And he's working with the University of Stellenbosch, so there's academic input.
http://www.agriprotein.com/ if anyone's interested. I have no connection with the business. Posted purely because it sounded interesting.
Well, that's done for the fishing industry but I don't recall the quantity. I saw one video that showed some large tanks holding the 'production'.
NAOM
In a "sustainable human ecosystem", what is the minimum number of species that have to exist?
To make the problem easier, consider only species of organisms where adults have a mass > 10 grams.