The teacher was talking about the regulatory hoops anyone building a 12X12 has to jump through (such as swearing that you do not intend to live in it–which troubles the religious people) to live like Thoreau lived almost 200 years ago. I asked about the tiny houses on wheels. The teacher was not very forthcoming on that subject. Apparently, if you have one of these and are living in it and have evaded the notice of the Authorities, it is best to keep quiet about it.

In our area, there are areas of clay soils which cannot pass the percolation test for a septic tank. But the rules require either a conventional toilet hooked up to a city sewer system or else a septic tank. There is no provision for a composting toilet such as you might find on a boat. Since the Official Regulations sound absurd, the Officials came up with another option (drip lines) which cost roughly 35,000 dollars. Simple living, indeed! Yet I can show you dozens of composting toilets scattered around–you just have to keep yourself under the radar.

So…as you say, many people are simplifying their lives in ways they find gratifying despite the best efforts of the Authorities to force them back into conventional channels.

Don Stewart

I’d be interested in getting your analysis of the following argument made by economist Jeff Rubin. I agree with his theory of an oil shock causing the GFC and while his suggestion future shocks will drive us to rengineer our economy to one that is local and regional and therefore less oil dependent, I wonder if the economy is flexible enough to make the transition.

I haven’t come across Bejan’s work before so thanks for sharing. I was just watching some videos by an economist, Jeff Rubin, who believes that, in the near-term, increasing oil prices will drive behaviour toward more local economies as global trade is no longer cost effective, but that it won’t signal the end of the world just the end of globalisation as we’ve known it. This is probably one of the more optimistic visions of post-peak oil. I suspect improvements in energy efficiency and decoupling from fossil fuels would also be an implicit effect of this process. If goods don’t need to be transported around the world, the volume of oil required in such an economy would be much lower. It strikes me as a pattern of crude lower energy efficiency globalisation (now) which collapses back to refined higher energy efficiency local economies, and may be viewed as progress or evolution of the trade and economic system and the energy inputs into them. This pattern of expansion followed by contraction or consolidation before the next increase in complexity is not an unusal growth pattern. Just another idea to add to the list.

I do agree forecasting the future of such complex systems can be difficult if not impossible. As you say it’s a tight rope we’re walking at this critical juncture in our journey. I think you’re right about focusing on what you can control. Even if things aren’t so dire as they seem, people are longing for a return to some of the more fulfilling activities we’ve left behind, so such a focus on basic needs is a bit of welcome relief regardless of the outcome. Most of us know we’re living beyond our means, and a return to living within them might be a positive thing even if we had unlimited energy today.

Nuclear Waste as it is currently distributed out is an ELE waiting to happen. I favor collecting all the material, glassing it with silica so it doesn’t dissolve and dropping it into a subduction zone off of the coast of Antarctica. It wont go super critical and should only kill off very deepwater fish and anaerobic life forms that aren’t critical to the food chain.

Left where it is, when the society breaks down, you’ll have a Fuk-U-Shima on every streetcorner. In theory though, it can be avoided.

RE

Second, are nuclear power plants. Assuming Gail and many, many others are right and we have a rapid massive die-off, what happens to the 400+ nuclear power plants that are out there requiring significant amounts of energy and technology to keep them functioning? Even if we shut them down, what do we do about the millions of tons of radioactive waste that requires constant cooling for thousands of years? The plants are positioned in such a way that virtually every place on the planet will be doused with lethal amounts of radioactivity. So much for the aboriginals.

Nuclear power plants are just one example of the chemical and biological nasties that the modern industrial technology has created. Alan Wiesman covered this fairly extensively in his book “The World Without Us”. A sobering read but definitely recommended.

gailtheactuary says:
February 21, 2012 at 11:48 pm
I am sure that there will be some living organisms on earth that continue to do quite well, especially if humans are much less numerous or cease to exist. It is our existence that has caused the death of or reduced habitat for many species.

My guess is that the collapse in human population will be fairly rapid (20-50 years), after the financial system implodes, and it becomes much more difficult to transact business long-distance. We will need to relearn how to do things that we could do 50 or 100 or 1000 years ago, because the systems that were in place then are no longer in place. This will make it difficult to do things that were at one time taken for granted–operating huge fleets of sailing boats, for example.

I expect that infectious diseases will likely become a problem quite quickly, even if food and water can somehow be handled, because of our high population now.

The reason why I see a fairly rapid decline is because we don’t have systems in place (that I can see) to facilitate a transfer to a lower-energy world. In the past, we built systems gradually, expanding and upgrading as we went–everything from banking to trucks and trains to electrical systems to manufacturing facilities to healthcare. We don’t have a good way of going backwards, that I can see. If we scale back the transport system, the electrical system will suffer, if for no other reason than that it is not meant to operate at much lower capacity. It is still necessary to repair transmission lines, even if there are fewer users, and fewer roads servicing those transmission lines. And of course electric utilities must still pay back debt, regardless of how few customers they have. This is just an example–nothing really moves backwards well.
——-
20-50 years would be a mighty quick extinction.

First off, this means even knocking off the last of the Inuit in Nunavut, the last of the Kalahari Bushmen, the last of the Aboriginal Australians, the last of the Amazonian tribes.

From Wiki:

“On 18 January 2007, FUNAI reported that it had confirmed the presence of 67 different uncontacted tribes in Brazil, up from 40 in 2005. With this addition Brazil has now overpassed New Guinea as the country having the largest number of uncontacted peoples.

Besides that are numerous neo-Primitivists who already are practicing neolithic living. So, while perhaps you could achieve a 99.9999% Dieoff of Homo Sapiens inside 50 years, it is highly unlikely you could completely squash out the species simply through collapse of the Ag systems.

Besides all these folks, there are also numerous EXTREMELY wealthy people who have underground Bunkers built complete with renewable energy power sources, hydroponic growing systems, and freeze dried foods with shelf lives of 50 years by themselves.

Now, once 99.9999% of the Homo Sapiens population gets knocked down, the prey move back in much faster than the predators do. So by the time you emerge from your Bunker, there are caribou that have moved in to downtown Anchorage.

In the absence of some disease vectors or Nuclear poisoning or sufficient Ocean acidification to knock down the phytoplankton and destroy the food chain from the bottom up, I do not think you possibly could wipeout Homo Sapiens in 50 years. You don’t have a vector strong enough to accomplish the task, and their are too many people still left who know how to live by the old ways.

RE

As for modeling the future, it seems to me that we have many different issues:
1. Liebig’s law of the minimum. The failure of the first critical system or input is the death knell. In a complex machine such as a computer, there are many, many such components.
2. Exponential doubling. Before the last doubling, the glass was still only half full. Which makes it hard for human’s to see the danger. This applies not only to use of resources but also to debt.
3. The nature of human behavior. The way hormones control us in pretty predictable ways. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking: Fast and Slow is a pretty good layman’s introduction to all that.
4. The thermodynamic principles which imply flow of energy from areas of surplus to areas of shortage.

I will elaborate a little more on the fourth issue–thermodynamics. Adrian Bejan, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University, has just published Design In Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization. I haven’t yet finished the book, and am certainly no expert–so caveat emptor. The gist of his argument is that it is simply a law of physics that design emerges in the world to facilitate flows. Thus, a tree is a design which facilitates the flow of water from the relatively saturated ground to the relatively dry air. And if you examine the design of trees in detail, you will find that the tree tends to accomplish that mission pretty effectively in terms of the collection system (roots), the trunk, and the spacing of the branches and leaves which actually lose the water to the air. Bejan sees global trade, similarly, as facilitating the flow of goods and services through human societies. And he derives from his root theory the designs that we should expect and shows that they are what we see.

I should note that he does not require the presence of any ‘Designer’. A river’s flow can be predicted from the root theory. He even shows that mathematical patterns such as the Fibonacci series and the Golden Mean are derivable from his root theory.

One of the implications of the theory is that evolution generally does have a direction–toward more efficient flow and more complex organizations. This assertion is in violation of the current Evolutionary Dogma that evolution has no direction.

Bejan, perhaps since he sees direction in Evolution, is optimistic about the future. He sees continual improvements in human ability to use energy flows. If hydrocarbons are impossible because of Global Warming, then we will just use solar energy in all its manifestations.

I am not ready to make any grand pronouncements about whether Bejan and the cadre of scientists who subscribe to the theory are correct or incorrect. I see many, many different ways to interpret it all. For example:
1. Immense stores of hydrocarbons were locked up in the Earth (and Solar System, if you are a True Believer) and, in the course of time, Humans evolved with the brains to facilitate the flow of that buried energy into the atmosphere. Our history is similar to that of trees.
2. Number 1 is true, but it turned out to be a catastrophic mistake and resulted in the Sixth Extinction on an obscure planet in the Milky Way.
3. Bejan is correct that evolution tends to result in more efficient facilitation of flows, but he fails to see the immense ‘gift’ that hydrocarbons have been. Take away the hydrocarbons and the increased facilitation of flows would not be nearly so impressive in terms of the world made by machines.
4. The most complex substance we know about is probably healthy soil. The soil ecosystem required a couple of billion years of evolution, mostly by single celled creatures. Everything Bejan says about facilitating flows can be said about healthy soil. To then claim, as Bejan does, that Industrial Agriculture (which kills soil) is a great advance is evidence of insanity.
5. The future of the world COULD be modeled as the thermodynamically directed dispersion of energy equally among all people. Just as a tree takes water from the ground and moves it to the air, globalization might take resources and distribute them equally. This would likely be welcomed by those who have traditionally been shortchanged on resources, and provoke violent responses in those who have traditionally been gifted with excess resources.

There are many other interesting question that will occur to you if you take Bejan seriously. But that is enough for now. All this stuff indicates to me that forecasting the future is very nearly impossible. I think humanity is walking on a knife edge–and prudent people will focus on some basic issues and prepare as best they can.

Don Stewart

I was inspired to see this conversation occuring in a church. While I myself don’t align with a particular religion, I agree with most of their central beliefs which promote the sacredness and value of all life. While we’re aware of some of the church’s shortcoming and failings, largely due to it’s being usurped as an instrument of control by the dominator culture, in my opinion it’s important we don’t also lose it’s messages of life with the understandable rebellion against religion that is all too common today. As intimated here, there is a spiritual element to our predicament and so religion has a role to play.

I especially liked Korten’s suggestions of how to effect great change by referencing the women’s liberation movement. He presents the idea of two narratives; the public narrative and private narrative. The public narrative was that women had no rights and shouldn’t have any, while women privately understood this was wrong. The same could be said today. The public narrative says growth and greed are good, we should be in opposition to each other through competition and predation. The private narrative tells us this isn’t true, that cooperation is our inclination, what’s good for others is good for us, and our culture of growth is not sustainable. Women started by sharing this private narrative with each other in private gatherings. Slowly, as they realised they weren’t alone in their private narrative, it became their public narrative and the knowledge began to spread until they acted on the new narrative which then became the new norm. You may recognise this is not unlike Charles Eisensteins method that I’ve spoken of here before. The conversations we’re having on this very blog are part of this process and I urge you all to have similar conversations in your communities as well.

This is the approach I believe is necessary if we’re going to come together to attempt any change of trajectory. There is an epic battle of ideas happening in the world today. The converging crises are bringing this about. Let’s hope the most beneficial idea to our survival wins. It begins with talking about it, then doing it, and finally being it.

http://www.davidkorten.org/ (scroll to the bottom of the page for the video)

My guess is that the collapse in human population will be fairly rapid (20-50 years), after the financial system implodes, and it becomes much more difficult to transact business long-distance. We will need to relearn how to do things that we could do 50 or 100 or 1000 years ago, because the systems that were in place then are no longer in place. This will make it difficult to do things that were at one time taken for granted–operating huge fleets of sailing boats, for example.

I expect that infectious diseases will likely become a problem quite quickly, even if food and water can somehow be handled, because of our high population now.

The reason why I see a fairly rapid decline is because we don’t have systems in place (that I can see) to facilitate a transfer to a lower-energy world. In the past, we built systems gradually, expanding and upgrading as we went–everything from banking to trucks and trains to electrical systems to manufacturing facilities to healthcare. We don’t have a good way of going backwards, that I can see. If we scale back the transport system, the electrical system will suffer, if for no other reason than that it is not meant to operate at much lower capacity. It is still necessary to repair transmission lines, even if there are fewer users, and fewer roads servicing those transmission lines. And of course electric utilities must still pay back debt, regardless of how few customers they have. This is just an example–nothing really moves backwards well.

To me, religion or a value system of similar sorts, has historically held this back among individual communities. The wars between different communities are almost a part of the process of population control. Despite the growing hatred of religion in this country (and it IS hatred and intolerance), it will live on past some of the more modern and urban new religions (of secularism) which are merely the result of oil wealth and short-sighted thinking.

It will be interesting to see how much white communities in the country (most communities in the country in the U.S.) are concerned with racism in the future. Ha. I am sure glad I am white!