overshoot

Update 1 June 2015: See new related articles: "Concern that Australian PM Abbott position on MH17 has no solid basis and is unfair to Russia" and "Anti-Russia Sanctions rely on False Statement by Julie Bishop, Australian Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister." This is an occasion for people to make factually based comments and inquiries to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Prime Minister's Office on the way Australia is participating in what appear to be ill-based hostilities. See ABC Australia apologises for bias against Russia in reporting MH17 crash and general tag: http://candobetter.net/taxonomy/term/585. This human aspect, coupled with the involvement of oil industry concerns, highlights the problems associated with globalised, commercialised universities, globalisation and US/NATO alliances and energy resources. This is yet another warning signal of a population and economy in overshoot, locally and internationally. Expansionism is driving blocs of countries into a collision course. Our association with America has made us officially unfriendly with a large number of countries and complicit in the destruction of several. Human rights obligations are under scrutiny. We must pull back from escalations like these. [Ed. Broken link now fixed.]

We believe that some Australian universities may be sending away Russian PhD students, as under new sanctions they are not allowed to teach some of them.

Students must certify that they are not studying in any of the areas related to the new sanctions policy, otherwise their projects cannot be continued. See below statement by the University of Queensland, last updated: May 4, 2015 at http://www.uq.edu.au/grad-school/sanctions.

"The Regulation amends the Autonomous Sanctions Regulations 2011 (the Principal Regulations) by expanding the scope of existing measures in relation to Russia. These measures include an arms embargo, restrictions on the access of Russian state-owned banks to Australian capital markets, preventing the export of goods and services for use in Russia’s oil exploration or production, and restrictions on Australian trade and investment in Crimea." (Excerpt from the attached "Explanatory Statement to F2015L00356")

This document also goes into the possibility that the sanctions might contravene human rights obligations, but argues with itself that it does not:

"The human rights obligation that may possibly be affected by the amendment to the Regulation is the presumption of innocence. Article 14(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides that everyone charged with a criminal offence shall have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law. As strict liability offences allow for the imposition of criminal liability without the need to prove fault, all strict liability offences engage the presumption of innocence in article 14(2) of the ICCPR. A strict liability offence will not necessarily violate the presumption of innocence provided that it is: (i) aimed at achieving a purpose which is legitimate; (ii) based on reasonable and objective criteria, and (iii) proportionate to the aim to be achieved.

Regulations 12, 12A, 13 and 13A of the Principal Regulation provide that strict liability applies to the circumstance that the sanctioned supply, sanctioned import, sanctioned service or sanctioned commercial activity is not authorised by a permit under regulation 18 of the Principal Regulation. The Amendment Regulation extends these provisions to certain supplies, imports, services or commercial activity in relation to Russia, Crimea and Sevastopol. The effect of this is that strict liability applies to the existence or otherwise of a sanctions permit. For an individual, strict liability will not to apply to any other element of the offence. The purpose of this provision is to prevent a spurious defence that a statement of the Minister could be taken as de facto authorisation to engage in conduct that is prohibited under the Act.
Either the permit exists or it does not exist." (Excerpt from the attached "Explanatory Statement to F2015L00356")

This news-article post is made quickly and without yet having absorbed the detail of allegations against Russia - if it is available in these documents or elsewhere.

See also Autonomous Sanctions (Russia, Crimea and Sevastopol) Specification 2015- F2015L00390 which is dated 1 March 2015 with the date to be ceased in 2025. It seems utterly amazing that we are cutting ourselves off from Russian and affiliated bloc knowledge and expertise gained independently and complemetarily to the familiar Western sources on the basis of extremely flimsy allegations.

One fervently hopes that Julia Bishop will show the initiative she has shown in Iran and seek detailed dialogue with Russia's foreign affairs and trade ministers and President Putin in these matters and that they will quickly be resolved. One also fervently hopes that the whole US/NATO incursion on Russia's borders and in the Middle East will be quickly scaled down, despite the growing influence of "Hawks" behind the United States' current expansive and warlike policies. As things seem to stand, our dependence on the United States looks like a liability and puts us at odds in many cases with Indonesia and other countries we have strong associations with, due to the US's anti-Russia attitude and its incursions in the Middle East.

Below is a quote from a statement by the University of Queensland, last updated: May 4, 2015 at http://www.uq.edu.au/grad-school/sanctions.

"Sanctions and UQ

Of particular relevance to UQ is the provision of technical training or assistance related to military activities and/or the provision, manufacture, maintenance or use of arms and related material of all types including; weapons, ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary equipment, spare parts and accessories for the former. This includes goods present on the Defence and Strategic Goods List (DSGL), including ‘dual use goods’ which may not be of a military nature.

Iran, Syria, Russia and Ukraine also have specific sanctions in terms of ‘export sanctioned goods’. The provision of technical training or assistance in the use, development, manufacture or maintenance of these goods is also of relevance to the University.

Studying at UQ

For all applicants who are a citizen of a country listed above, including those who are a permanent resident or hold dual citizenship of Australia, the Graduate School is required to complete an assessment of the proposed research project against current sanction regimes. In some cases a review by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is also required.

The assessment will include the nature of the research project as well as the goods and equipment that will be used throughout the program.

This will mean that an application for admission and scholarship will take longer to process. In order to assist UQ with the sanctions assessment applicants will need to submit a 2-4 page research proposal with their application.

Unfortunately some applicants may not be able to study their intended or preferred research topic, and a revision of the research project for Research Higher Degree study may be required."

See also https://www.unimelb.edu.au/compliance/compliance-materials/sanctions-regime-related-measures.html

We attach the government's "Explanatory Statement to F2015L00356" in regard to this matter.

Permission to publish this eloquent and magnificently drawn cartoon gratefully acknowledged to the artist, Keith Nesbitt of Sustainable Population Australia, South Australia. The original drawing was done in black and white. Jill Quirk (President of SPA Victoria and Tasmanian Branch) coloured it electronically.

The new science of ecology will now describe animals as they really are---moral agents, not biological automatons. And as such, they are to be charged with a moral responsibility to constrain their cravings and live simply so that other animals like them can simply live. Or as they now say on St. Monbiot Island, “Be the reindeer you want the world to be.”

Island in the Behring Sea Renamed To Reflect New Paradigm

Guilty as charged:
Fat, Greedy and White---guilty ungulate “Rudy” reacts to news that responsibility for the infamous St. Matthew Island Reindeer die-off is now attributed to his appetite, rather than to excessive reindeer numbers. Had he eaten lichen modestly, a scientific report says, other reindeer could have lived and the island’s bio-capacity would not have been exceeded. According to data released by the GHN (Global Hoofprint Network) in San Francisco, if all reindeer consumed as much as Rudy did, four planets would have been needed to supply the species sustainably.

Reuterz News Item:

A 137 square mile island in the Behring Sea made famous by the spectacular increase of an introduced reindeer population of 24 in 194 which became 6,000 in number in just two decades ---only to suddenly collapse in a matter of months by 99% until only 42 were left in 1966---was renamed recently in a ceremony to mark the occasion. http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/st-matthew-island

What was once known as “St. Matthew Island”, the remote and desolate island is now to be called “St. Monbiot Island National Park”, in honour of renowned environmentalist writer George Monbiot and his trademark “Monbiot Mantra”--which goes something like this: “Overpopulation has little to do with it--it is our appetite, not our numbers. Especially the gluttony of old middle class white guys looking for a scapegoat to deflect attention from their culpability.”

The decision to rename the island came in the wake of a report commissioned by the Sierra Club—and paid for by billionaire David Gelbaum and several of their big corporate donors like natural gas fracker Cheasepeake Energy---that while greedy reindeer of the Northern Hemisphere make up only 5% of the global ungulate population, they account for fully 25% of the total amount of lichen consumed in a given year. Constant repetition of that statistic is now mandatory for every college student who hopes to graduate with a degree in Environmental Studies, Political Science or Communications. Education ministries across the continent have now determined that rote memorization of clichés like these is more cost-efficient than actually teaching young people four years worth of real science.

In other words, the name change was thought necessary to fit the new paradigm, and signalled a watershed moment in the evolution of environmental thinking. Gone is the hopelessly unfashionable and politically incorrect foundational formula of the environmental movement, which assigned critical importance to the population level of a given species when gauging its ecological impact.

Animals redescribed as moral agents

Henceforth, no researcher or environmental commentator will dare to say that any species will grow its numbers to meet the available food supply (the Hopfenberg Hypothesis). Instead, cultural conditioning ---typically in the form of mass advertising and the promotion of a competitive “keep up with the Joneses” mentality---will be regarded as the key driver of environmental degradation and the demise of all species. The new science of ecology will now describe animals as they really are---moral agents, not biological automatons. And as such, they are to be charged with a moral responsibility to constrain their cravings and live simply so that other animals like them can simply live. Or as they now say on St. Monbiot Island,

“Be the reindeer you want the world to be.”

When asked to comment on the historic name-change and park dedication, Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May---an aspiring United Church of Canada Minister---remarked that

“With this announcement, it is to be hoped that the scourge of sociobiology will never again raise its ugly head. Now that it has been laid to rest, biology itself must now finally be exposed for what it is---a fascist concept.”

“It is not how many reindeer there are,” she continued, “but how they choose to live. The reindeer on St. Matthew Island could have lived like Ghandi, but instead they chose to live like Gates.”

Ms. May recommended that the environmental movement continue to follow its true mission---the inculcation of guilt for bad behaviour, and the pursuit of “good feelings” among its adherents by making trivial lifestyle changes rather than measuring their success by the achievement of meaningful concrete results.

“Self-righteous self-abnegation and the worship of green pie-in-the-sky technologies is the New Christianity,”

she exclaimed with buoyant pride. Making an obvious pitch to the social media generation, May continued,

“ You can continue to be a dope-smoking, lying adulterer and fornicating flake and be blessed, so long as you go vegan and give up your car.”

Citing the United Church of Canada as her model,

“The Church of Green is inclusive and diverse,”

Ms. May concluded. Moreover, it has been speculated that in keeping pace with evolving standards in the United Church, in the new ‘progressive’ Green Party even unqualified reindeer will not only be welcomed but ordained. (It is not as if the Green Party has set its leadership bar too high, is it?)

The impact of the name-change has already been felt across all North American campuses and Biology Departments, which are now faced with an imminent overhaul. In an arguably futile attempt to save the discipline, Biology Department heads all over North America are now calling their field the “The Sociology of Flora and Fauna” , and in some cases, “The Moral Philosophy of Natural Selection”. Eventually, however, it is expected that biology courses will soon fall under the rubric of “How- Zionism-Caused-the-Sixth Extinction-Event”. Such is the chill that has descended upon academic discourse in the wake of this announcement that when one professor was heard to remark that the fate of St. Matthew’s reindeer might have been related to their unchecked fecundity, his college was quickly censured by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) following a complaint from a professor at the Women’s Studies department at Hampshire College. In her words,

“No one should be able to tell female reindeer what to do with their bodies.”

So it is all now official. There is enough lichen in the world to go around, if only it is shared equally and consumed responsibly. Breed on.

Tim Murray

November 22, 2012

Elizabeth May:

Now I don’t claim to be an A student baby or an authentic Green Party Leader either, and I ….

Don't know much about history,
don't know much biology.
Don't know much about a science book,
don't know much about the french I took.

But I do know that I love you,
and I know that if you love me, too,
what a wonderful sustainable world this would be.

PS Readers will understand that the quotes cited in the foregoing parody are fictional and made only to highlight the absurdity of predominate green ideology. They are the responsiblity of the author alone. Tim Murray

I live in a community of right-brained people with innumerate minds full of New Age mush, devoid of logic and antagonistic to science. The shibboleths of 'compassion' and 'caring and sharing' prevail over dispassionate analysis. The medieval mentality of Tibetan Bhuddism combines with the prescriptions of soft-green environmentalism to produce a brew of 'thinking' that is toxic to comprehension. It is a community where people will pay $50 for a psychic reading or a quack medical therapy but balk at paying the same amount of money to fix a leaking kitchen sink or a subscription to Science Daily. I wrote this almost 5 years ago, and despite the development of our much acclaimed "Community Garden" and a local "transition" initiative, I can think of no good reason to make more than one amendment----even we do grow a backbone and a "hard edge"---a local 'fortress' would not indefinitely endure. We are hopelessly dependent on the outside world in ways that we have not yet contemplated. Our deficiencies will only become apparent, I think, when our "Long" emergency becomes a permanent one.

“We like to think that moral progress has made us nice people. We've heard that our distant ancestors were mean and cruel and ruthless, and we can't imagine that we would be such people - but we're nice mainly because we're rich and comfortable. And when we're no longer rich and comfortable, we won't be as nice." Robin Hanson, economist

“Katrina helped us realize that the veneer of society is very thin and it doesn’t take much to peel that veneer back and what you see underneath it is quite ugly, quite nasty”- Kevin Reece, Defense Consultant

What will the Dalai Lama say when the oil runs out? Will his words feed my children? Will they appease the starving marauders who threaten to take what little is left to go around? Is universal love a prescription for dealing with universal scarcity? When survival dictates that we must first defend our homesteads, then our community, then our nation from desperate outsiders too numerous to accommodate? When the oil runs out will Jesus appear to distribute loaves and fish to the hungry billions and save us from stark choices?

When affordably accessible oil runs out, food cannot be sufficiently produced or transported. There are no “green” alternatives that can be scaled up to our needs. Five billion people will die in less than twenty years, and as Dale Pfeiffer concluded, one third of America’s 300 million people and more than one third of Canada’s. The idea that we could feed ourselves is a quixotic notion that doesn’t bear up to scrutiny. We’ve already covered 20% of Fraser Valley farm soil with buildings and lost a similar proportion of arable land nationally to urban growth, which will only continue unchecked with current immigration rates. When you remove fertilizers, chemicals and fuel-run machinery with a power-down, the required land per person for food production skyrockets.

A study done of London, Ontario, a growing city of 460,000 surrounded by farm country, revealed that it simply could not be fed without fossil fuels. It would need to use 200,000 animals and conscript half the labour of the city, posing logistical problems for their commute or the commute of their school children. Storage for the food could not be found and if it was, it could not be kept from freezing in the winter time. And this is for a city that might have enough arable land in proximity. Other Canadian cities would not have that advantage.

“Relocalization” in Canada is a pipe-dream. Without oil, we’re cooked. Those Californian vegetables and fruits will not get here-- the Americans will not have a surplus to export and if they did it certainly wouldn’t be delivered to us by electric cars. The last hurdle in our island community would be the Quadra ferry. Without fuel it is not operational and virtually everything we need could not be acquired in meaningful quantities. In three days or less the shelves of both of our stores would be empty, and those with hunting rifles would make the local fish-packing plant release everything they had at gunpoint. Needless to say, the vegetables grown on Quadra would not suffice to feed 2700 people. The Community Lunch would be faced with thirty times its normal patrons but with no food to give them---it would be cancelled. The Churches would open their arms but not their empty refrigerators. It is then that we would find out about our much vaunted community spirit.

History tells us how people behave when they go hungry. The better angels of our nature often do not prevail over the desperate instinct to survive. Even in normal times, social psychologists report that more than 80% of us fantasize about murdering people we don’t like. Growing your own food is one thing. Stopping other people from taking it is another. One day we will regret our restrictive gun laws.

During the Second World War, Vancouverites living on rations made the long 40 mile car trip up a narrow road to beg for butter and eggs from farmers like my parents whose neighbours typically carried rifles to fend them off. One day my folks came back from a shopping trip to Mission and found ladders up against all the trees in their orchard with the fruit stripped off them. And these thieves were only motivated by deprivation, not starvation. By contrast, in Leningrad during the 900 day siege people were dying of starvation in the tens of thousands every month. Leningraders not only dug up the freshly buried corpses of starving people to eat them, some even resorted to cannibalism. When you are only getting 10% of your caloric needs, it’s amazing what moral precepts go by the wayside. Morality, you see, is not much use when you are dead.

So what then, of love and compassion? In my moral universe these hypocritical Christian pieties offer no help in an environment of too many people and too few resources. “Love” must co-habit with cold calculation. Empathy begins at home, and extends outward with prudence and caution. As the airplane sign instructs, if you experience a loss in cabin pressure, first secure your own oxygen mask before attempting to help others.

The kind of compassion needed in the coming collapse, be it resource depletion or ecological in nature, is the kind shown by a ship’s captain who orders that a few crewmen be jettisoned from an over-loaded lifeboat to save the rest from drowning. It’s the kind of compassion that will deny medical care to me in those times because folks my age cannot be allowed to siphon off scarce resources from the young who must survive if any portion of humanity is to survive. And it is the compassion required to save our nation and its environment from the tens of millions who will look to board our lifeboat and sink it.

Sometimes compassion would require that I shoot a beloved horse with a broken leg. Or, when medical help is unavailable, that I amputate the leg of a beautiful young woman with a gangrenous leg. Or that I assist in the suicide of a brother who suffered the indescribable nausea and pain of terminal cancer---- in defiance of Christian morality.

True compassion is not the compassion of Christianity or Buddhism or of any the major religions. It is not the compassion which would dispense development aid to African nations so that their populations explode and misery and starvation returns at an even greater level. True compassion often means saying no.

True compassion comes with a hard edge.

Tim Murray
April 12, 2007

Article, A century of famine, was kindly reposted here as a comment by its author, Petter Goodchild. It has been re-posted here as an article. - Ed

Social Scientist and petroleum depletion writer, Ted Trainer, gives his views on a way forward that does not involve growth. Most of you out there are working three times too hard, and going down with depression and obesity, as your social cohesion crumbles. How about trying a different, simpler way?

So much of the discussion of the human predicament takes for granted a uni-dimensional view of development, wealth, progress. For example many people (especially of the red-left variety) argue that there must be much more economic growth and therefore energy use to increase production so that the poorest billions can rise to satisfactory living standards. They therefore criticise the many green people who are saying that there is already far too much producing and consumption, production, energy and resource use going on. Many red left people argue for redistribution but many green people say that wouldn’t change the amount of consuming so it wouldn’t reduce resource and environmental pressure. So it looks like an insoluble dilemma.

Another way

The way out is to take The Simpler Way. I first put it in Abandon Affluence, Zed, 1985, and have detailed a more elaborate case in The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World, Envirobook, 2010. The first point is that the big global problems cannot be solved unless there is dramatic reduction in the resource consumption, GDP and “living standards” we have in rich countries, probably to one-tenth of their present levels. Several lines of argument within the general “limits to growth” analysis should now leave no doubt about this. For instance the Australian per capita “footprint” is 8 ha of productive land but by 2050 the amount available in the world will be at best .8 ha; so we are 10 times over a level that it would ever be possible for all to have. ...and these numbers totally ignore the absurd commitment to economic growth. Anyone who thinks 9 billion can rise to the “living standards” Australians expect by 2050 given 3% economic growth is assuming the planet can sustain 30 times the present global volume of producing and consuming.

Logistics

It follows that we must move to ways of living, institutions and systems that allow us to live well on a small fraction of the our present rich world affluence affluence, and indeed of the present world resource production levels. The Simpler Way argument is that this could be done, easily and quickly, thereby defusing all the big problems...if enough people saw the sense of it. TSW involves mostly small and highly self-sufficient local economies processing local resources to meet local needs, via intensely participatory and cooperative ways, with no economic growth, in economies that are not determined by market forces...and value systems in which there is no interest in competing or gaining.

Ecovillage and Transition Towns movements

Many of us in the ecovillage and Transition Towns movements live in very resource-cheap but quality of life rich ways. I live way under the “poverty line”, never travel, never watch TV, almost never buy new clothes, and could build you abeautiful small earth house for under $5000. My quality of life is high, but nothing like that in some of the communities I know. Meanwhile most of you out there are working three times too hard, going down with depression and obesity, as your social cohesion crumbles. Why don’t you come across to TSW and devote most of your week to your arts and crafts, conversation or just sitting in the sun (…working three hours a week in the remnant offices and factories we’d need)?

Prospects for Transition

Now you might think the prospects for such a transition are remote. My view is that the transition will not be achieved. But that’s not central here. What matters is that you are going to move towards TSW whether you like it or not. We are entering the era of intense and irremediable scarcity. The resources are already inaccessible for most people, and becoming scarcer, especially if you attend to declining EROI (energy return on investment) rather than price. (EROI has halved for oil in a couple of decades.) Only 1.5 billion are using the resources now...just wait until another 8.5 billion go after them. And we few in rich countries are losing our capacity to hog all the available resource wealth as we have for 500 years The Chinese are racing past us and Uncle Sam doesn’t seem to be able to win the necessary resource wars any more. You are in for a rocky road down to getting by on something like your fair share of the world’s resources for a change.

Exercise choice now because there may be no option later

So you might be wise to join us in trying to work out how to run very frugal and self-sufficient communities well, because the most likely alternative will be a nasty feudalism as the rich and the middle classes call for repressive state power to secure their property and privileges against the accelerating scarcity, discontent and breakdown.

Marxism and Capitalism both rooted in growth

My main point is that TSW represents a rejection of the uni-dimensional way of thinking, i.e., that the only way development can be thought about is in terms of moving up the slope of progress towards more jobs, production, income, GDP, wealth and development. No group has been more trapped in this mind-set than one of the teams I belong to, the Marxists. They adopt the same capitalist conception of development as the neo-liberals; development involves investment of capital to increase production for sale...how else could it be conceived? (Marxists just don’t want the capital to be privately owned.) So 3-4 billion Third World people are trapped in hopeless squalor waiting for trickle down from capital invested in the most profitable ventures ... when most of them have all around them the soil, rainfall, forests, traditions, networks, knowledge and labour that could quickly develop the simple but sufficient housing, cooperatives, chicken pens, permaculture gardens, swales, schools, woodlots, sheds, clinics etc. they need to meet most of their basic needs. Appropriate development needs little monetary capital.

Globalisation works against self-sufficiency

Of course the rich countries work hard to prevent the available resources being devoted to such purposes; they must be kept free for use by transnational corporations, and devices such as deb t and the Structural Adjustment Packages ensure that they are. (And any country foolish enough to still deviate is likely to find itself invaded on some pretext.) But the main factor preventing appropriate development is the mentality that can’t deviate from the development=growth dimension. It’s as blindingly dominant within NGOs as within the IMF.

Scarcity will undermine the centralisation dreams of Marxists and Capitalists both

The main reason why I don’t think we will make it is because the commitment to affluence is now so deeply entrenched. No one wants to think about moving to any alternative to it. It has a firm grip on academics in general and Marxists in particular. Their classic statement is that the revolution will take the factories off the capitalist class and then everyone can have a Mercedes. The left has no idea about, and evidently no interest in living simply in highly self-sufficient communities. It is still focused on getting control of the state to organise utopia from the centre. Scarcity rules that out; from here on there can be very little centralisation, heavy industrialisation, globalisation, transport , travel or tourism. Now a satisfactory society all could share can only be organised and run by small towns, suburbs and regions via political systems directly involving all in the decision making and implementation. Sorry but the Anarchist have the right vision now. (There will still be a remnant role for centralised “state” bureaucracies...which are given no power...see Chapter 10.)

The Transition book argues that both red and green people urgently need to take these simpler way themes on board.

The Julian Simon/Matt Ridley School of economic optimism essentially denies the limits to growth and the possibility of human extinction because they believe that human technological capacity makes humans exceptional. But technology is applied science and it is well recognised that science in itself has limits, perhaps intrinsic limits.

by Fiona Heinrichs

Sitting above an article by Paul Howes for The Australian about alleged ‘thought crimes’ (20 June, 2011, p.14) is an article by the author of The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley, ‘Left Activists Profits of Doom’. Ridley is of the Julian L. Simon School of optimism that sees the world as getting better and the future as so bright that we’ll all need to wear shades. The Australian, especially in columns such as ‘Cut & Paste’ has pushed the line that the ABC appears intolerant of controversial views, but The Australian has its own economic correctness, that of a faith in endless economic growth.

In his book The Ultimate Resource (1981) Simon claimed that the supply of natural resources was ‘infinite’ due to recycling and substitutes. Further, even though more people ‘mean higher total output, and this implies more pollution in the short run, all else being equal’ (248), in the longer term additional people will create new ways of reducing pollution. People are the ultimate resource being creative problem-solvers.

Matt Ridley carries on where Julian Simon left off. He maintains that ecological pessimism, largely advanced by the left, ‘relentlessly preaches millennial doom and technological risk’. But Ridley claims even with rapid growth in the world economy, there will be falling populations, ample food and mild climate change. All this based ‘on the trajectory of the past five decades’. But assuming that is true, in itself that is no scientific basis for supposing that such a trend will continue. Philosophers are still debating how inductive inferences are justified but many believe that the basis for predictions is some law-like relationship. Nothing like that is shown by Ridley.

He raises against the pessimists the failed predictions of the Y2K computer bug. See, it didn’t happen, and right he is. It did not happen because nations mobilised to correct the problem. If nothing was done to correct the date problem then no doubt chaos would have occurred. Rather than showing that ecological pessimism is false, his example supports the basic philosophy behind it, namely that action is needed to avert catastrophe.

Ridley does not attempt to justify his claim that there will be only ‘mild climate change’ in the future. There is considerable scientific debate about this, some of which has been mentioned in The Australian. For example, Professor Chris Field of Stanford University believes that the rate of climate change will be faster than previously predicted by the IPCC because greenhouse gas emissions have increased at a rate faster than expected and because positive feedback processes are now starting to kick in.

Higher temperatures are starting to melt the Artic permafrost which could release hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane. Methane is twenty-five times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In my online book Sleepwalking to Catastrophe (www.sleepwalking-to-catastrophe.com), I cite scientific papers documenting the release of methane from the permafrost, underwater. The release of only a small fraction of the methane held in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf could trigger catastrophic climate change. Already 80 percent of the deep water and over half of surface waters have methane levels eight times higher than normal sea water.

The Simon/Ridley School of economic optimism essentially denies the limits to growth and the possibility of human extinction because they believe that human technological capacity makes humans exceptional. But technology is applied science and it is well recognised that science in itself has limits, perhaps intrinsic limits. There are unsolvable problems in computing science and limitation results even in mathematical logic such as Gödel’s theorem. In physics, quantum mechanics and relativity are logically inconsistent, although the physics community hopes that String theory will ultimately solve the problem some day. In evolutionary biology it is accepted that mass extinctions, often caused by climate change have devastated life on Earth a number of times. Looked at from the perspective of the hard sciences, Ridley’s optimism simply lacks a scientific basis.

Unfortunately saying all this, that there are limits to growth in a finite world has become something of a ‘thought crime’, contrary to Ridley. This position is rarely seen in opinion pieces in Australian newspapers. Yet regardless of how inconvenient this position is, without action future generations will battle against the conditions past generations left behind. An ecological, rather than a business profit mindset requires thinking beyond commerce and money-making, and focusing upon the biological parameters that keep civilisations in existence. Our business elites seemingly have no concern beyond day-to-day profit-making. This would not matter if they did not hold such influence over both our major political parties.

What to do? Well, leadership has been demonstrated by one notable exception – Dick Smith, who champions the limits to growth argument in his new book Population Crisis. Under such guidance, this force needs to be countered by ordinary people taking action but that is easier said than done. Nevertheless we all must try. As a 23 year old generation Y female, I am determined to show my own leadership in challenging the ideology of growth. After all, it’s our future at stake.

Australia uses huge volumes of water to produce products for export, but cannot find enough water to keep its river systems alive.

The driest inhabited continent on earth - also the world’s biggest water exporter!

While the Murray-Darling Basin Authority apparently struggles to find even a paltry 3,000 gigalitres of water in its increasingly compromised attempt to restore the nation’s most vital and productive river system, a new report[1] reveals Australia to be the world’s largest net exporter of virtual water. This water is exported in crop, livestock and industrial products. It is the water consumed to create produce for export.

Independent data cited in the Canadian paper. It does not pertain to the time of the Australian drought.

The report also indicates that our agricultural sector is responsible for the vast majority of the total volume of water exported from Australia in this way, shipping an average of 72,000 gigalitres of virtual water overseas every year.

“While few would question the important contribution made by most Australian farmers, it defies belief that a country continually struggling with unreliable rainfall and severe drought allows more virtual water to be lost than any other nation on the planet”, national coordinator of Fair Water Use, Ian Douglas, commented today.

He added, “This sad fact is made even more poignant when one considers that the Murray-Darling Basin Authority seems incapable of finding a mere 7,600 gigalitres of environmental water to ensure the health of our most important river system”.

“These statistics also confirm the arrant irresponsibility of applying Murray-Darling water to semi-desert country, irrigating water-intensive crops such as cotton - a product which largely heads offshore, together with the vast amount of virtual water it contains”, he concluded.

Footnotes

1. The report (PDF, 1.8MB) may be downloaded from the Fair Water Use web site.

Full media release and report may be viewed at: http://www.fairwateruse.com.au/content/view/317/48/, Fair Water Use Australia, 'striving for a revived Murray-Darling basin by supporting environmentally sustainable water-use'.

See also: Council of Canadians' new report: 'Leaky Exports: A portrait of the virtual water trade in Canada', WORLD WATER WARRIORS: ‘Canada a major exporter of virtual water, says new Council of Canadians report’, Leaky Exports: A Portrait of the Virtual Water Trade in Canada, Council of Canadians’ new report: Leaky Exports - A portrait of the virtual water trade in Canada. (Sites found with a Google search using terms "Leaky exports: A portrait of the virtual water trade in Canada" (quotes omitted), although we believe it inadvisable to indefinitely depend upon Google or other search engines finding such resources as seems to be the practice amongst some Internet users these days. That is why we prefer to add links rather than repeat the hackneyed phrase "Just google it". - Ed)

Footnotes

1. The report Leaky Exports: A portrait of the virtual water trade in Canada (PDF, 1.8MB) may be downloaded from the Fair Water Use web site.

Overpopulation conjures up many images. Most typically, one thinks of traffic gridlock or bulldozers ripping up forests or farmland to make way for more housing developments. But these images fail to impress the green wing of the Growth-Management Industry, the so-called "environmentalists" of the "progressive" coalition of feminists, eco-socialists, soft-greens and human rights advocates. For them there are always "solutions" that obviate the need to face the elephant in the room. Public transport, smart growth, green technology and good green living habits will do the trick. The trouble is, they won't. It is all a delusion. Numbers matter--the social justice agenda cannot defeat the laws of physics. And the best metaphor to make that point remains Garrett Hardin's sinking lifeboat.

Bulldozers or Traffic Jams---What Better Symbolizes Runaway Population Growth?

After the website for Immigration Watch Canada was recently re-designed, I was asked if I could think of a more appropriate image to adorn its mast ---a more plaintiff illustration of the negative ecological consequences of mass immigration to Canada. Initially, I was persuaded that a picture of ten lanes of gridlocked traffic leading out of Toronto would make our point quite eloquently. But then I faltered. On second thought, I said, a picture of a new housing development being constructed on farmland would prove more poignant. I added that given the impact of hyper-immigration, the bulldozer should replace the beaver and the maple leaf as our national symbols. But then, once again, I had second thoughts. Why?

The Soft Green Party Line

For as predictable as frost in winter, Fem-Green-Left environmentalists can be counted upon to reflexively retort with their standard objection. It goes something like this:"Gridlock is not a function of overpopulation but wrong-headed transportation policy. With disincentives for driving cars and extensive public transit in place, we could move people efficiently and economically without environmental impacts. And urban sprawl is not a function of overpopulation either. With strict land-use policy, we could house people within compact urban growth boundaries and preserve greenfield acreage. In both cases, our per capita energy consumption could be dramatically reduced. There is unexploited brownfield acreage in our cities that could be the site of energy-efficient low-rise infill housing that would reduce commuting by placing people close to their workplaces."

Betsy Hartmann A Leading Exponent of Population-Denialism

None better regurgitate this party-line more quintessentially than the Queen of Smear, Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, author of the infamous "Greening of Hate", which attempted to discredit the ecological case against mass immigration by accusing those who make it of fronting for a sinister racist, nativist and xenophobic agenda. She showcased this fallacious reasoning in her attack on Chris Hedges for arguing that we are "breeding ourselves to extinction." ("Rebuttal to Chris Hedges-- Stop the Tired Overpopulation Hysteria", Alternet March 14/2009)

"The population controllers also have blinders on their eyes when they attribute the cutting down of forests, the polluting of water supplies, and the extinction of species to too many poor people, rather than the unchecked power of large corporations to monopolize resources and ravage the land. Missing from the picture is the question of technological choice: for example, reducing the population of automobiles and investing in public transport worldwide would do much more to curtail climate change than imposing limits on family size."

Again resorting to standard green-left script, Hartmann cited the United States as the worst offender of industrialized countries who, with only 20% of the world's population, have contributed 80% of the carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the atmosphere. Instead of recognizing that as a good argument for curbing immigration and reproduction in America, she proposed that Malthusian environmentalists drop their apocalyptic act and "get down to the gritty green work of making effective and equitable environment and climate policy." By “histrionic fear-mongering” that “pointed the finger at population growth”, Malthusians would have us "alienate the Global South" and "shirk" our responsibility to find practical solutions like carbon capping, energy-saving retrofitting of existing buildings, investing in alternative energy, public transport and lifestyle changes.

Climate-Change Obsession Serves The Globalist Vision

It must be understood that for this generation and genre of “environmentalism”, atmospheric pollution is the only metric of environmental degradation that deserves much attention. The virtue of climate-change obsession is that in its call for “global” solutions that must demand “global cooperation”, the open-borders mentality finds its most convenient friend. The impertinent demand of “nativists” to protect their nation’s environment from unfettered trans-national migration can then be framed as the wrong-headed belief that the environment can be “nationalized”. Gone is the foundational injunction of environmentalism to “act locally”. Passion for what is closest to hearth and home is alien to the rootless cosmopolitan greens, who see such attachment as a parochial bond that succours a “fortress” mentality. We have no right to a “national” culture or a national environment. Thus the corporate agenda finds cover in the Trojan Horse of Green Globalism--- the world without borders they both seek.

Reducing Per Capita Consumption And Waste To What End?

This "tired" soft-green cant provokes the obvious questions. Questions like "What good would come from 'alternative energy and public transport' and 'energy-saving retrofitting of existing buildings' if there are more people consuming resources and more buildings being built than ever before due to population growth? What if you succeeded in getting everyone out their cars and into public transit while population growth continues, would not the amount of resource consumption and pollution still increase? Even if you could cut per capita consumption in half---which would be a death sentence for a great majority of people in the world and bring severe destitution to most citizens even in the developed world---what net benefit would accrue if the population doubled? Should we forfeit a sustainable future for the sake of not alienating the corrupt leaders of the "Global South"? If our very survival as a species is contingent on aggressive family planning measures in developing countries and the cessation of mass migration of the global poor to the industrialized north, should we defer to etiquette and the diplomacy of silence? If was a firefighter who saw smoke coming out of your attic, should I avoid pounding on your door or bursting in to loudly demand your evacuation for fear of alienating you? And how do you think I would feel about an environmentalist who smelled the smoke but preferred to "get down to the gritty green work" of polishing the wood furniture, admonishing me for "histrionic fear-mongering" and “shirking” my responsibility to look for effective solutions?

Elementary Physics Obviously Not A Course Requirement At Social Justice University

Showing pictures of gridlock and urban sprawl to the snake-oil salesmen of green delusions will not register because they are congenitally incapable of understanding the physics of bailing water out of a leaky boat. It is quite simple. If you don't bail out a volume of water equivalent to the volume of water that is pouring into your vessel, you are going to go for a swim, and then you are going to regret that you welcomed so many passengers on board, and that you accused those who had warned against your reckless hospitality of racism, nativism and xenophobia.

Overloading a lifeboat to satisfy the dictates of an ideologically fashioned concept of social or "environmental justice" is not only perverse and suicidal, it supremely arrogant. For there is no greater testament to human hubris and conceit than the assertion that a moral law of our making trumps a law of biophysics and the species-imperative to survive. Hartmann and the “progressive” coalition of feminists, “eco-Marxists” and soft-green growth-managers consistently fail to understand that there can be no equality, justice, reproductive or human 'rights' in world without humans.

Perhaps then, the best image to illustrate this stark truth is not a traffic jam or a shiny new subdivision atop farm acreage, but an overturned lifeboat surrounded by passengers floating face-down. The lifeboat can be Canada or the United States or any one of a hundred nations. Or it can be Planet Earth, capsized when too many passengers shifted to the more affluent starboard side to find the “justice” which Betsy Hartmann and the ideologues of delusional egalitarianism claimed was their due. It is called “slosh dynamics” and it involves a concept referred to as “the centre of gravity”, but that is another one of those laws of physics that they obviously don’t teach in Political Correctness 101, Womens’ Studies or at Hampshire College.

Tim Murray
November 19, 2010

Of all annual rituals, Halloween strikes me as the most absurd. The eternal question is, why do we need to scare children in an era when real-life horror envelopes us?

Publishing trivia and avoiding inconvenient truths

More than a year ago I was invited to become one of the people the Vancouver Province newspaper would turn to when they wanted a short opinion on current issues. "Here is your chance to get your say in The Province!" they explained. Silly me, I expected to be asked to comment on issues of over-riding importance. But I forgot that newspaper owners don't see that their mandate is necessarily to inform and educate the public. Instead it is to both tillilate and sedate them with inconsequential rubbish. The world is burning so let's all fiddle. As long as the advertisers and subscribers are happy, who the (expletive) cares? Even environmental journalists tip-toe around brutal inconvenient truths to satisfy our psychotic need for a happy ending. As T. Michael Maher revealed in his seminal study, "How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection", only one in ten environmental stories identified populaton growth as a root cause of the problem, even those reporters who are most aware of its critical importance shied away from it. Newspaper editors and reporters won't go near the ticking time-bomb of human overpopulation---- they are so frightened of tackling this taboo that they choose instead to frighten us with symptoms and sideshows.

Why conjure up imaginary horrors?

The following is a sample of the kind of trivia that excites the editors of the mainstream press. "What do you like to do to celebrate Halloween?" the Vancouver Province asks. What would your response be? Mine would be something like, "As a dress rehearsal for the impending collapse of industrial society I want to spend my Halloween hunkered down in my bunker provisioned with enough food supplies and ammo to deal with the legions of starving marauders who will attempt to get at them. For entertainment I will watch "The Road" which conjures up more terrifying images than the ghosts and gobblins of Halloween night. Instead of indulging in the cliched fantasies of the supernatural, why doesn't the Province attempt to educate its readership about the very real horrors that Peak Oil will visit upon us?"

There can be no 'duck and cover' from $300/barrel oil

The submission date is providentially ironic, October 27th. It was about this time of year when, following my 12th birthday, the Cuban missile crisis was upon us. At school I was taught to "duck and cover", and on my way home, the air raid siren two blocks away went daily off just for practice in case I wasn't traumatized enough. Like other kids, on more than one occassion, I ran home in panic . For almost two weeks, I would come home to find my mother standing over the ironing board in front of our black and white TV set, with her eyes glued to Walter Kronkite while, almost robotically, her hand guided the iron over the newly dried clothes, or sat mending them from a chair positioned to see the unfolding drama. On some afternoons she would just sit there transfixed and paralytic. I can still see her now. Like my classroom, my home was a morgue, and I could read the same fear on the faces of my parents that my teacher, Mrs. Nergaard had. They didn't dare to tell us how serious the situation was, but they didn't have to. School children of all ages knew. They read body language too. After all, we got Reader's Digest and I remember it was full of nuclear war scenarios. I remember reading one story about how a family survived the onslaught of Russian bombers by being prepared. How I begged my Dad to build a bomb shelter. But my parents were wise. They made it clear that there was there was no secure shelter from an atomic blast in our city nor from the fall-out thereafter. Even if we did survive for a time, they pointed out, our supplies would run out, and if they didn't, we could not possibly prevent less prepared survivors from taking them. The same arguments could be made now. We will see a collapse of some kind of horrendous and unprecedented proportions, either abrupt or protracted, and there will be no sanctuary from privation when our economy crashes. And certainly not from the nuclear, chemical or biological war that could ensue from the desperate competition between nations for scarce resources. There can be no duck and cover from $300/barrel oil.

As if real-life horror was not enough to contend with

What struck me then, even at that age, was the absurdity of having been 'scared shitless' for two weeks in October, and then, still shaken, being subjected to an obscene but sanctioned ritual at the end of the month whereby kids were once more 'scared shitless' ---- only with corpses, skeletons, axe-murderers, poltergeists and demons instead of mushroom clouds. All in good fun, you see, and with enough of a sugar overdose from Halloween candies to keep our pancreas pumping for days. As if real life-horror was not enough to contend with.

Forget Stephen King. I will stick with the two Richards, Duncan and Heinberg. That's horror enough for me now.
Have a Happy Halloween.

Tim Murray
October 25/2010

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself

Have you seen the latest TV commercials promoting the new Jeep Grand Cherokee for 2011? The theme is summarized with the slogan, "The Things We Make, Make Us". The 'manifesto' video ad, 1:01 minutes long, makes an unanabashed appeal to American pride and patriotism. Poignant scenes are punctuated by proud declarations.

"This once was a country that made things, beautiful things, and so it is again." "It was a country of colts (with the image of colts galloping across the screen) that made Colt revolvers, and Jeeps (pictures of a stream of Army Jeeps presumably poised for the Normandy invasion, then liberating the streets of European towns in the Second World War).... These things make us who we are."

The American industrial heartland will surely rise again, given the inspirational lead that Chrysler beckons us to follow. The fact that the non-renewable resources critical to this heroic enterprise will not be affordably available to sustain it is just one of life's tiny, inconvenient details that are best swept under the carpet. Pessimism, not the reality of limited resources, is our real enemy you know. What did Obama say? He repeated FDR. "The only fear we have is fear itself." God, is that all. And here I thought I had to worry about Peak Everything and the prospect of a thermo-nuclear exchange that might follow the desperate scramble for scarce resources. Or the strong possibility of biological and chemical war, but then, here I go being pessimistic again. Maybe I should look on the bright side of life, the life that these SUV ads promise me.

The reality of urban gridlock vs. the fantasy of wilderness escape

It is interesting that the product Chrysler is pitching an SUV whose production involved the expenditure of a least 400 barrels of oil per vehicle--or its equivalent--and tons of metals and minerals first mined, then transported, then smelted, then shipped to a factory to rendevous with rubber harvested thousands of miles away and fashioned into a vehicle by hundreds of employees who demand a range of products and services as recompense for their beautiful craftsmnship. Employees who fought two hours of traffic driving their Jeep to work, only to repeat the ordeal after their shift. But hey, they are Americans, like the can-do Americans we once knew, who get the job done! And once it is done, this same vehicle then is marketed as an off-road machine that is seen dashing through lush forests, across unpolluted rivers and over the vast and seemingly pristine Moab desert of Utah."Go where regrets can't follow" is the motto that subtitles the scene. Cameras don't show the getting there, however. You know, the Jeep Grand Cherokee stuck in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic on a Friday afternoon as its driver tries to make it to his weekend gettaway, cursing and honking in a vehicle built for speed but trapped in a nation of gridlock. But alas, the promised land of galloping colts, lush forests and pristine deserts, the America of our fantasies, the one advertisers play on, surely awaits us. It is quite the juxtaposition. The nasty, noisy and smoky process of primary and secondary industrial activity that heralds the resurgence of proud American manufacturing, co-existing with an apparently vast and uncluttered American hinterland.

There are more than 254 million registered passenger vehicles in America and more than 100 million are SUVs and trucks, with over 8 million of that category sold in 2008 alone. Few of them apparently know or care to know that it takes 98 tons of dead plants and animals buried for eons at seabed, lake and river bottoms to produce one gallon of gas for a nation that consumes one quarter of the world's crude oil. America isn't a country of colts but a country of dolts. How sad it is to see so many fat-ass Crocodile Dundee wanabees and redneck "chicks with dicks" lay down $40,000 US to feed a self-image manufactured by Madison Avenue when their SUV spends most of its life outside a shopping mall or in the drive-in queue of MacDonalds? How many ever see the wilderness? And of those who do, how, one wonders, do they all manage to find it---where are these huge pristine expanses in a nation bursting with 308 going on 508 million people? The answer can be found in the last line of the commercial that has dominated the airways recently:

"The Jeep Grand Cherokee---built for a world without limits"

That just about says it all. American car manufacturers and their ad agencies--- and those who fall for their pitch---really don't have a goddam clue. The phrase "Peak Oil" is notably absent from all of videos and from all the reviews. Instead, we read about "fuel economy". We are supposed to be impressed that the new Jeep Grand Cherokee can allegedly travel 500 miles on a full 24.6 gallon tank. "That's 16 miles in the city and 22 miles on the highway!". Wow. That means that when gas is $20/gallon as analysts like Christopher Steiner predict it will be, it will cost you about a dollar per mile---that is if hyperinflation doesn't overtake us. Auto journalists, like the consuming public who read their columns, are like deer transfixed by the headlights. They see all the bells and whistles and all of the specs but are blinded by the same infatuation with these toys that Americans of three generations ago had for the Model T Ford. The internal combustion engine is as inefficient as it ever was. But maybe that's a good thing, otherwise there would be more drivers driving more cars. You have to feel sorry for American capitalism, it just can't defeat those efficiency paradoxes. Especially when it encourages runaway populaton growth to grow the pool of cheap labour and delusional, manipulated consumers.

I must agree. The Jeep Grand Cherokee for 2011 really is built for a world without limits. Unfortunately, that world is not the one we live in.

Tim Murray
October 15/2010

illustration from http://www.elzpublishing.com/index.html

(Thanks to editor Jim Stiles and author John Feeney for permission to reprint this article, that was originally posted at Zephyr Canyon at http://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/html/aug10-20.htm)

Modern environmentalism

So how's all that modern environmentalism working out for us -- the green living, the carbon credits, reduced consumption, development in the Third World, better solar panels? If it all seems hopelessly inadequate, even laughable in the face of today's global ecological crisis, perhaps that’s because it’s rooted in denial of the origins of the ecological drama now playing out.

It's a drama of which climate change is only a part. It goes back ten thousand years and farther into the human past, confronts us with how we relate to nature, and brings reminders of abandoned civilizations.

We turn away from this drama because it raises troubling questions going straight to the foundations of our way of life. But grappling with converging environmental crises and the specter of widespread ecological collapse, for the sake of the human future it's time we face it. [1]

The big switch

Pull back and consider the whole of human history. For perhaps 2.5 million years, well over 99 percent of our time on Earth, we lived in small bands or tribes, foraging and hunting for food. With baskets and tools of stone, bone, and wood we walked the bush, blending gracefully into Earth's ecosystems.

Then around 8,000 BC we began the transition to agriculture, growing and storing our own food. That changed everything. Arguably, there have been only two fundamentally different phases of human existence: before and after agriculture.

Why the switch? Why quit something which had worked for us for thousands of millennia? We have only partially informed guesses. Perhaps changes in climate made hunting less productive or the domestication of grains in some areas more attractive. No one mentions, though, that only a few people had to make the initial change for it to take over the world. Nor do many observers acknowledge that the adoption of agriculture was not as nice for us as we've been led to believe.

At what cost?

Examine it closely, in fact, and agriculture emerges as a springboard for most of today's environmental and social problems.

Yes, it made possible civilization with its cities, jet liners, and corporations. But at what cost? Its most immediate impact was the elimination of all who stood in its way as farming cultures spread around the world. Part genocide and part culture killing, the process continues today as the handful of remaining hunter-gatherers on earth struggle for survival. [2]

With farming came a large increase in work and a steep decline in health, the latter discovered by archeologists examining the bones and teeth of people living in the same regions before and after agriculture. It brought social hierarchies, sexual inequality, famine, slavery, time clocks, money, and a massive upscaling of violence. [3] Jared Diamond called it "the worst mistake in the history of the human race." [4] More recently, anthropologist and geneticist Spencer Wells provided his own list of some of the costs of the shift away from hunting and gathering: "diabetes, obesity, mental illness, climate change." [5]

Less publicized have been agriculture’s ecological impacts. History texts glorify civilization, based on agriculture, as the pinnacle of human existence. They don't mention it required an end to living in harmony with nature as contributing members of local ecosystems. Author John Zerzan has said of agriculture, "The land itself becomes an instrument of production and the planet's species its objects." [6]

Trying to live apart from nature carries a price. Why don’t we take more seriously the many peoples, such as the Maya and the Anasazi, who adopted farming only to see their civilizations fall apart as drought, depleted resources, or too little arable land for a growing population sent a recurring message from nature? Why don't we hear about those who simply walked away and returned to hunting and gathering? [7]

Circumventing nature’s limits

The problem of agriculture is in part a problem of human numbers. Before farming human population size had been regulated by the same process that works for black bears, dingos, bonobos, rainbow trout, and long-tailed parakeets. It works for all species, generally keeping their numbers within carrying capacity. It’s simple: Population follows food supply. Normal oscillations in available food exert multiple small, cumulative, typically painless influences on fertility and mortality. With agriculture we circumvented this process. Growing and storing food we could go on growing our food supply. The result has been predictable: more humans.

In publications ranging from peer reviewed journal articles to novels, analysts such as Russell Hopfenberg, David Pimentel, and Daniel Quinn have described a continuous cycle of human population growth followed by expanding agriculture to feed our growing numbers, followed in turn by more population growth. [8] [9] In less than one percent of our history our numbers shot from perhaps five million to 6.7 billion, an increase of 134,000 percent.

This cycle of growth explains how agriculture spread around the world. It was not a matter of hunter-gatherers observing farmers and eagerly adopting their practices. It was the spread of farmers themselves. [10] Their ever increasing food supply meant ever more agriculturalists who needed more land and took it, often violently.

The resulting environmental impacts of human population growth are well known. From species loss and climate change to the global spread of chemical toxins and the death of coral reefs, human numbers figure as a fundamental driver of nearly all environmental degradation.

Some insist those problems are mainly the result of excessive per person resource consumption. Population does multiply with per person consumption to determine total consumption. But individual levels of consumption only became a global issue as the number of consumers grew large enough to make them so. Agriculture made it happen. It links with human population growth to destroy the biosphere.

The sixth mass extinction

Chief among the destructive impacts of agriculture are today's alarmingly elevated extinction rates. Just as agriculture has crowded out hunter-gatherers, it has pushed out other species. Most biologists agree we are today in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history, the fifth having eliminated the dinosaurs. This time one species -- our own -- is the cause.

Fossil evidence suggests an increase in extinctions even before agriculture. Anthropologist Paul S. Martin has championed the "overkill" hypothesis, arguing the cause was the spread of human hunting out of Africa to continents containing large mammals unaccustomed to human predators. Other investigators such as Donald K. Grayson dispute his conclusions and point to evidence implicating changes in climate. What we do know is that extinction rates have accelerated greatly since the advent of farming. [11]

A primary cause of extinctions is habitat disruption. And what better way to disrupt, to destroy habitat than to level a piece of land, eliminating all life on it, then to plant a single crop exclusively for human use. That's agriculture, and it has spread over more than a billion hectares of the earth. Indeed, any human-caused environmental damage prior to agriculture pales in comparison to what has come after.

The industrial age and our use of oil has meant yet another acceleration of the Sixth Extinction as far more land has been put under cultivation and the human population has skyrocketed, obliterating habitat to make way for cities, subdivisions, shopping malls, and highway systems.

We hear all about resource consumption, particularly energy consumption. Why don't we hear about our consumption, through agriculture and the human population growth it drives, of the very web of life on which we and all other species depend for our survival?

Paleontologist Niles Eldredge writes, "Agriculture represents the single most profound ecological change in the entire 3.5 billion-year history of life.... Indeed, to develop agriculture is essentially to declare war on ecosystems." [12]
Author Lierre Kieth says, "The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet... [It] requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems." [13]

Once the cycle of agriculture and population growth was underway, of course, there seemed little choice. We did what we could to keep feeding our growing numbers. We've trapped ourselves. As Keith puts it, "Except for the last 46 tribes of hunter-gatherers, the human race is now dependent on an activity that is killing the planet."

Soil mining

Further making crop cultivation unsustainable on anything like a scale to feed billions is its often inevitable erosion of the soil and depletion of soil nutrients. This happens at rates far faster than natural rates of renewal.

Soil microbiologist Peter Salonius writes, "The simple shallow rooting habit of food crops and the requirement for bare soil cultivation produces soil erosion and plant nutrient loss far above the levels that can be replaced by microbial nitrogen fixation, and the weathering of minerals." [14]

Already we have lost perhaps one third of all arable land worldwide. [15] We are using it up just as we are coal or oil. Keith coins the term "fossil soil." It may have taken ten thousand years for us to see it, but that is barely an eye blink in human history.

Some hunter-gatherer societies have long included small scale gardening in their repertoires. But once we upped the scale, clearing land and increasing production to produce food surpluses, we committed to agriculture proper and the trouble began. While a more ecologically sensible option such as permaculture moves farming in a more sustainable direction, it was never intended to feed increasing billions of people. [16] If it were it would still run into the problem of transforming wilderness, turning the land excessively to human consumption with all that implies for the web of life. Planting crops on any large scale means seriously damaging ecosystems. Agriculture cannot be sustained.

Overshoot and collapse

The historical view of humanity's ecological path leaves no doubt we long ago overshot human carrying capacity. Our numbers are today supported only by temporary measures such as our use of limited stores of fossil fuels and, more fundamentally, the use of agriculture and our consumption of our own life support system. In his classic text, Overshoot, William Catton calls such supports "phantom carrying capacity." [17] They are not carrying capacity at all; they cannot last.

Contrary then to the popular notion that our technologies have increased carrying capacity, we have created only a carrying capacity illusion. We're a species which evolved to live in the millions, yet here we sit, well into the billions. It's basic to ecology that when a population overshoots carrying capacity it must inevitably return to a lower number, often via a crash.

It is of course not only our numbers which will come to an end. Civilization is made possible by agriculture. Agriculture is unsustainable. If it weren’t obvious already, you can see where this is going. There's no predicting the timeline of civilization's collapse. Techno-fixes and any resiliency industrial society possesses may draw it out. No matter, a better future, indeed the only future for humanity and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants is one beyond civilization.

What we could do, what we might do

Few people want to hear that agriculture is unsustainable. Fewer still care to consider that the civilization it supports will therefore come to an end. Who wants to hear their whole world is going to go away? Yet as surprising as it may seem, there is room for optimism. The way out will be difficult, but will open to a new beginning.

Ideally we could begin systematically scaling back agriculture and gradually dismantling civilization. We could turn instead to small scale, localized horticulture and then to tribal, non-industrial and non-agricultural ways of living. The transition could include a concerted worldwide effort to support humane, voluntary measures enabling our numbers to decline gradually and dramatically. Perhaps most importantly, we could work to spread a different view of our place in nature, acknowledging that we are of the earth, just one of millions of species, as much subject to ecological laws as any other. At some point, the few surviving hunter-gatherer groups on Earth might serve as mentors rather than objects of academic study. This, however, would be an exquisitely delicate undertaking, as the last thing such groups need today is the increased intrusion of those of us in civilization.

But despite converging ecological catastrophes we show few signs of such a massive, voluntary shift. Those with vested interests in the status quo see to that. So writers such as Zerzan and Derrick Jensen advocate a purposeful resistance movement designed to hasten civilization's end. [18] In this they owe a clear though too seldom mentioned debt to Edward Abbey. The Monkey Wrench Gang opened multiple generations' eyes to the option of direct action against perpetrators of environmental destruction. Says Jensen today, "Systems of power are created by humans and can be stopped by humans. Those in power are never supernatural or immortal, and they can be brought down." [19] Though this raises the frightening specter of triggering loss of life before it would happen otherwise, the argument is that bringing down civilization sooner would leave more life intact than would a delayed and drawn out collapse. We face hard choices.

The first daunting challenge, though, faced by those against civilization lies in disabusing enough people of the ingrained message that our way of living is a great thing. Perhaps, in the end, our best hope lies in building resistance as we work to soften the landing through efforts, for instance, to address population growth and to protect biodiversity.

Meanwhile, participants in the growing "rewilding" movement work today to prepare for a post-civilization world. No gloom and doom in this group, rewilders like Peter Bauer (AKA "Urban Scout"), Jason Godesky, and Emily Porter acknowledge a collapse of civilization is inevitable and work with zest toward a shift to a tribal, wild way of living. [20] [21] [22] Learning aboriginal living skills and exploring ways of creating more genuine connection with the earth and those close to them, they strive to "undo domestication."

Critics argue they're romanticizing a lifestyle Thomas Hobbes rightly characterized as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Others insist "we can't go backwards." These are predictable responses, imbued with the same pervasive cultural message to which we are all subject. It tells us constantly that the development of civilization was an amazing improvement and that its course has been one unbroken line of progress. Everything's getting better all the time, isn't it? A look at our ecological plight alone suggests it's not, and Marshall Sahlins, among other anthropologists, easily debunked Hobbes's view beginning in the 1960s. [23]

It is difficult, as well, for most people to appreciate what a tiny moment of human history civilization has occupied. Without perspective it’s natural to assume this way of living will and should continue for eons to come. Debate continues, but the notion that the hunter-gatherer life is a terrible one is as absurd as suggesting the gorilla life or the lion life is terrible. It's wrong on its face. [24]

How much evidence do we need to see that civilization is not the ultimate expression of human existence after all? It has been a momentary detour, the fleeting, cameo appearance of a dysfunctional approach to life, the result of straying from living at one with the natural world. Whatever the path to civilization’s wind-down, if we can preserve enough biodiversity, those coming out the other end will have the chance to enjoy anew a different, yet satisfying way of living, the only way proven sustainable for humans. Racing toward a precipice, can it be wrong to embrace once again a life which worked for over two million years when it has become obvious the current approach is an abject failure? We don’t have to go backwards; we need only nurture who we really are. Whatever our course, we have only to consider the agricultural origins of our ecological crisis to understand civilization is an unsustainable trap.

References

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7078857.stm
[2] http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/1786
[3] http://www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm
[4] http://hthttp//www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j.htm
[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10257679.stm
[6] http://rewild.info/anthropik/library/zerzan/demon-engine-of-civilization/index.html
[7] http://tinyurl.com/34y6fyu
[8] http://www.springerlink.com/content/u4x1r416w5671127
[9] http://www.ishmael.org/Origins/Ishmael/
[10] http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%252F10.1371%252Fjournal.pone.0006747
[11]http://tinyurl.com/3xrskxe
[12] http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html
[13] http://tinyurl.com/296j57c
[14] http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6048
[15] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;267/5201/1117
[16] http://www.energybulletin.net/node/19334
[17] http://tinyurl.com/2altxhd
[18] http://www.endgamethebook.org/
[19] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5340/
[20] http://www.urbanscout.org/
[21] http://tobyspeople.com/anthropik/thirty/index.html
[22] http://trackerofplants.com/
[23] http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
[24] http://tobyspeople.com/anthropik/2008/01/noble-or-savage-both-part-1/

"Humankind cannot stand very much reality" T. S. Eliot

Analyst Chris Clugston offered a sobering assessment of our response to the crisis that is unfolding before us.

"Seems to me", he said, "that the 'perspectives' regarding our predicament fall into 5 clusters:

1. Delusionists--totally oblivious

2. Denialists--see reality but turn away

3. Happy Ending(ists)--acknowledge reality but believe that a "down-scaled" BAU will prevail

4. Soft Landing(ists)--acknowledge reality but believe that "lifeboats" are the answer

5. Realists-- (like you) who acknowledge the reality that imminent social collapse is inevitable

In America, there are about 300 million in the first cluster, 8 million in the second, a few thousand in the third, a few hundred in the fourth, and a handful in the fifth. I guess I'm glad; if it was the other way around, we'd be over-run by panicked idiots! Probably better that they watch Amercian Idol..."

I believe this to be a very succinct and accurate categorization. I am becoming increasingly impatient with people in clusters three and four. People who will not follow the logic of their own arguments to their logical conclusion. It all comes down to what I have argued is a flawed human brain that is a failed prototype of what should have rolled off the evolutionary assembly line to supercede us. Just as the Neanderthals were quite possibly driven off the field by a competitive disadvantage---a language deficit --- homo sapiens of our design should have been pushed off the plate by a hominid who could acknowledge and act upon long-term dangers. In other words, we play chess with an inability to see more than one move ahead. With a language of complex symbolism we had the facility to articulate thoughts in a future tense, to speak of potential scenarios and plan for them. But instead, in my view, language became our albatross, because we used it as vehicle of entertainment and obfuscation. If I were to write an epitaph of the human race, it would be "Death by Storytelling". For eons we sat around the campfire regaling listeners with tales---myths and legends that would entrance and beguile us. And we are still doing it. Our appetite for escapist novels, movies, heroic feats of athletic accomplishment and fairytales is insatiable. And if even a morsel of truth is to be swallowed, it must be coated in entertainment.

The entertainment industry is so pervasive now that it acts as a buffer against reality. Our minds occupy a virtual world, not the real one, which is too raw, shocking and depressing for a primate brain that cannot tolerate more than a minimal quota of bad news. This is not an exclusively human trait, of course. Paleo-climatologist Andrew Glikson commented after a lecture in Australia last year than even zebras practice denial in order to maintain a mental equilibrium. They can be grazing just a few short metres from a lion without panicking. There is an inborn calculation that allows them to "play the odds" that a predator will victimize some other member of the herd but not them. As Glikson put it, we must live day to day. We cannot take another step if we think the sky is falling. On a personal level, some measure of denial is a necessary coping strategy, especially for a species that can forsee death. The only difference, I think, is that humans have taken this pardonable personal posture and completely enveloped themselves in a make-believe world---thanks to language and symbolism. Rather than seek knowledge, we reach for a cushion---something which the priests of corporate capitalism and Madison Avenue are only to happy to throw at us. The sum total of delusional individuals is a collective that walks blindfolded toward the cliff of extinction. Organized religion is only the most developed form of delusional thinking. We are all religious it seems, most especially the so-called intelligentsia whose intellectual realizations are not truly internalized. We embrace faith without evidence and grasp at false hope. So even those in our movement who understand "reality", who see the cliff ahead, cannot help themselves from attaching a Hollywood ending to their story. After all, their audience demands it. We crave intellectual comfort food, not the clarity of mental castor oil.

A man in Ireland recently asked, "Is there anywhere to turn from the despair which all thinking and rational persons must feel?" Indeed there is. Hallucinate. Take refuge in a virtual reality. Perceive the real world differently and confuse that perception with objective reality. Embrace a faith like environmentalism, which seemingly offers us the hope of accommodating infinite growth by infinite reduction in our per capita consumption. Or believe that industrial civilization, or civilization itself, is sustainable, if only it was organized along equitable lines. Or immerse yourself in murder mysteries, children's fantasies or tales of the supernatural . Or invest your hope in a technological fix. Dream about new technological miracles that will save us from ourselves, much in the way that the Nazis dreamed of miracle weapons that would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The name of the game, after all, is to feel good about yourself, not about actually changing society around you. To paraphrase Marx, philosophers have merely tried to understand the world, the point however, is to be able to live in it by looking at it through rose-coloured glasses---or inventing another world in which to dwell. My father did that from a hospital bed. After he had lost his wife of 63 years, and his favourite son, in quick succession, he suffered three months of intolerable grief, then snapped. Thereafter he would ask me how they were doing, and proceeded to tell me how he had spent the day in some exotic locale like Mexico, India or down the mine shaft where he slaved for much of his life, coating his lungs with particles that would eventually choke off his oxygen supply. Dad even imagined that his male nurse was the host of a TV program which he appeared on. It was as if there was a Stephen Spielberg in his brain working full time spinning out fables of the fantastic. And my father believed in everyone of them, recounting the details with complete sincerity and a straight face. He was like a child who compensated for his loneliness by conjuring up an imaginary friend. That is exactly what most of us do. We cannot take in the full panorama of stark and brutal reality, so we live in our minds--- or watch American Idol. And once every four years, we vote for a saviour who promises to fix the unfixable.

At this late date, should we disturb these refugees from horror with information that is not likely to save them? And what thanks will we get? Are Cassandras ever popular---or useful? I, too, struggle with these questions. I chose to humour my father with fictions of my own, constructing stories of how his wife and son were doing well and asking about him. It got him through the night---- until he died two years later from congestive heart failure. Perhaps that is what I am doing now. Getting through the night by writing about it, and pretending that writing about our predicament is in itself, an adequate alternative to solving it. As Peter Goodchild wrote with disarming candour: "The keyboard acts as a safety valve for low-level political dissent, serving roughly the same function that sex and alcohol have served at other times and in other places, allowing ordinary people to believe they are rebels when in fact they are doing nothing to disrupt the structure of society." I suppose then, that I belong to a sixth category of denial---that cluster of 'realists' who confuse their realism with making a difference.

Tim Murray
August 16, 2010

PS If you would like to visit reality, go to Chris Clugston's website, "Wake Up Amerika" at http://www.wakeupamerika.com/

"No apology"!

Is this "Newspeak" for a decision the Australian PM feels uncomfortable about?

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he makes "no apology" for believing in a "big Australia". he also said " I make absolutely no apology whatsoever for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia."

But Mr Rudd should apologise !

Rudd is socially-engineering Australia's population growth

He presides over a massive rate of population growth which his government has engineered. He should apologise to the present population and also to the future population that will be so much worse off than we are now as the Australian environment inevitably declines . Australia's environment right now suffers from population overload. It's the number of us and the way we live, the way waterways are interfered with for human activities, the way natural habitat is taken over for human habitation, the impact on our environment of human wastes both domestic and industrial, mining extraction and agricultural..... the sheer scale of our activities !

Optimism without foundation may doom Australians

Rudd's optimism reported by the ABC at the growing population seems to be founded on no real data. It appears as rhetoric, no more than a declared belief. The serious concerns of continuing population growth expressed by Treasury Secretary Dr. Ken Henry - water availability , biodiversity welfare of wildlife are waved away by Rudd as mere "challenges" (in "Newspeak" challenge =problem)

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth with thin fragile soils and relatively little arable land.
Australia's environmental indicators- climate,waterways,land and biodiversity indicate stress right now from increasing human impacts.

.......but Rudd has set his reckless course and will not be diverted.

He makes no apology.