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We are running out of fertile land

The Guardian reports that the earth is running out of fertile land for agriculture.

Food Crisis Feared as Fertile Land Runs Out
· Maps show 40% of Earth's land is used for agriculture
· Growing human 'footprint' a risk to the environment

New maps show that the Earth is rapidly running out of fertile land and that food production will soon be unable to keep up with the world's burgeoning population. The maps reveal that more than one third of the world's land is being used to grow crops or graze cattle.

"Except for Latin America and Africa, all the places in the world where we could grow crops are already being cultivated. The remaining places are either too cold or too dry to grow crops," said Dr Ramankutty.

Peak Oil, Overpopulation & Collapse

A long, long time ago (back in the early 1970s), the local newspaper's editorial pages carried a half page article on an experiment in over-population conducted with mice at some university. In a nutshell, the researchers built a maze "city" and seeded it with a small number of rodents. At first everything was fine. But over time the population swelled and the nightmare began. To their horror, the researchers began witnessing constant violence amongst the once peaceful residents. Males engaged in neverending turf wars and raids; females were raped; and litters of young fell victim to cannibals.

I was still in high school at the time and totally scarred by that article. I have not been able to forgot it despite the passage of three decades. For me it revealed the grim future of mankind.

Back then the population of the earth was around 3.75 billion according to this graph and already there was a rising sense of claustrophobia. Today the population is 6.5 billion and growing.

Only a handful of geologists knew about Hubbert's Peak back then.

We have now long-passed the planet's carrying capacity for our species which many experts agree is about two billion at best. Think about it on a personal level. In many American cities, it's next to impossible to step out of earshot of other people's conversations for even a few minutes of quality "me time". In most developing countries it's far worse.

Today I went out for my daily mid-afternoon coffee break and took along a hard copy of Anthropik's latest thesis on collapse.  This is the 20th in The Thirty Theses of Collapse which argue why our civilization is doomed to collapse sometime over the next twenty years. Although the Jason warns readers off the top that many will find it "depressing and pessimistic", I found hope in it for a better future for our grandchildren if not for ourselves and our children.

Here are a few key points from Thesis #20:

Humans are adapted to a band-level society (see thesis #7), and have a very difficult time operating in any unit of society with much more than 150 persons. To accomodate such a maladapted scenario, drastic measures must be taken. These measures make an ill fit to the human animal, and it is precisely this adaptation that leads to all those social ills which we find endemic to civilization, but startlingly absent, or at the very least in a much diminished form, among band-level, foraging societies, such as war, poverty, corruption, chronic stress and even hunger and disease. These are the penalties a large-scale society pays for force-fitting humans into a society larger than they are adapted to. These penalties may be outweighed for a time by the high marginal returns of complexity, but when those marginal returns diminish, civilizations collapse.

...

Collapse has already begun, and progressed quite far without our notice. Rumblings of awareness have become increasingly ambient in the popular imaginaton in recent years, though full acceptance of the situation remains rare. The current level of complexity cannot be maintained, and individual regions cannot collapse on their own--they must collapse as a system. Whether the final blow is dealt by environmental problems, health issues, or the inability of diminishing resources to fuel our continued growth, the fragile interconnectedness of our globalized, industrial civilization will eventually propogate a catastrophic, catabolic collapse that will cascade through the entire system, feeding on itself until we have reached the next lowest level of sustainable complexity: the Stone Age.

...

Collapse ends those things that define complex society--hierarchical oppression, war, disease, toil and others. It restores society to the lower level of complexity to which humans are best adapted, a level which still enjoys art, medicine, science, mathematics, and technology. It is no idyllic utopia, but it is a life to which humans are naturally adapted.

...

The article Jason warned us would be very depressing actually ends on a very high note. He quotes Michael Green, creator of Afterculture,:

The truth is that for the first time we are bereft of a positive vision of where we are going. This is particularly evident among kids. Their future is either Road Warrior post-apocalypse, or Blade Runner mid-apocalypse. All the futuristic computer games are elaborations of these scenarios, heavy metal worlds where civilization has crumbling into something weird and violent (but more exciting than now).

The Afterculture is an attempt to transmute this folklore of the future into something deep and rich and convincingly real. If we are to pull a compelling future out of environmental theory and recycling paradigms, we are going to have to clothe the sacred in the romantic. The Afterculture is part of an ongoing work to shape a new mythology by sources as diverse as Thoreau and Conan and Dances with Wolves and Iron John. The Afterculture is not "against" the problems of our times, and its not about "band-aid solutions" to the grim jam we find ourselves in. It's about opening up a whole new category of solutions, about finding another way of being: evolved, simpler, deeper, even more elegant. Even more cool. Even very cool. [The italics are mine.]

Thank you, Jason and Michael.

Life After Peak Oil

I stumbled across this site about a month ago and find it soothing to visit. It contains artistic impressions of what life could be like 100 years from now when the last drop of fossil fuel is gone.

The site is called NORTH AMERICAN AFTERCULTURE. Be forewarned that it has a difficult to decipher navigation system. This means that you will probably miss at least half of the site on your first visit. On the plus side, it means that return visits will be amply rewarded with the discovery of more pages.

Peak Oil and the Coming Employment Holocaust

I just stumbled across this two hour radio interview with Julian Darley about Peak Oil and its repercussions. Julian does a superb job of tying together Peak Oil and the need for a new currency system to replace the current one which requires never-ending growth. Peak Oil will trigger what he calls an "employment holocaust". The only means to mitigate this are relocalization and community currencies.

Listen.

This is one of the most edifying and disturbing interviews you will ever hear.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Peak Oil

Someone recently accused me of being gloomy about the future because of my monitoring of Peak Oil.

Actually, I'm not a doomer. However, I do see a lot of short-term pain for long-term gain.

Let me quickly summarize the different scenarios as envisioned by the various factions of Peak Oil watchers. These are solely my classifications.

Being a movie buff I will use movies as a form of shorthand to identify these scenarios:

-Quest for Fire
This is the scenario envisioned by the gang over at Anthropik (although they are not alone in this thinking). They see a quick Peak Oil induced collapse of civilization followed by a huge die-off over the next 30 years with the survivors reverting back to the way humanity lived for 99.7% of its 3 million year existence: as hunter/gatherers.

Think Stone Age 2.0.

If you are tempted to do a knee-jerk dismissal of their ideas, I suggest you do yourself a favor and a spend a few evenings reading their Thirty Theses of Collapse. They know how and why civilizations collapse--and they all collapse eventually--when their primary source of cheap energy runs out.

-Little House on the Prairie
This is what I call the James Kunstler scenario. He is the author of The Long Emergency, a best seller on Peak Oil. Under this scenario we also have a die-off with the survivors settling down to a basically no-tech agrarian lifestyle like that of the Olson family in the old TV series.

A variant of this is what I call The Postman scenario. If government breaks down sufficiently there could roving gangs of bandits who decide that there’s a better ROI from robbing people than from work. In the movie the honest folk had to live behind stockades which often didn’t protect them from the bad guys.

-Firefly
This refers to the short-lived TV sci-fi series which blends the old west with a distant future set in space. I think this anachronistic vision is closest to what we will see by, say, 2030--minus the space travel.  Firefly’s world is about living along the edges of empire free from its suffocating controls. When the crew travels towards the center of the empire it finds cities and a society much like ours today: a high-tech, corporate-controlled, police state with surveillance cameras and armed guards at every doorway. In contrast, when the crew flies out to the perimeters of empire, it finds the type of freedom people had back in the 19^th century. Most Firefly outposts wouldn’t be out of place in the Wild West of the 1850s.

My hope is that we'll end up in an anachronistic low-power world but with Internet access and email so that people may continue to collaborate on solutions for the most pressing problems. We’ll still have some energy after Peak Oil but it will be allocated for priority uses instead of being squandered on three-block trips to Blockbuster in an SUV. The human population will be reduced significantly with the survivors finally understanding the importance of living sustainably. Wal-mart, globalism and all the corporate propaganda that tries to tell us that life is about working like a slave in order to buy mostly useless junk will be a thing of the distant past. Social and economic life will become localized. We'll trade with our neighbors instead of potential enemies half-a-world away.

If you stop and think about it, this is the life most normal human beings really want. We want freedom from meddlesome bureaucrats and politicians (and these days, busy-body fundamentalists) who want to tell us how to live. We crave some elbow room from our neighbors as well as the opportunity to spend at least part of our time in nature. We also want to experience genuine self-reliance at the community and individual levels. Life is truly about our relationships with other people and not about merely accumulating various gizmos.

Firefly portrays this type of life and contrasts it clearly with what we have today. This explains the resonant chord it strikes with viewers.  I only watched it recently and fell in love with it despite not being a fan of the science fiction genre.

Let me end this post with a quote from The Long Emergency:

"These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts." (source)

My hope is that the smart people stop working on yet another way to download song snippets as ring-tones and apply themselves to working on renewable energy systems and other solutions to soften the landing for humanity over the coming decades.

Let's get back to being humans instead of just consumers.

Three Post Peak Oil Apocalypse Scenarios

I just came across this 3-panel vision from 1988 showing three possible scenarios for the future. The first two show the "Doomer" and "Cornucopian" secenarios. The third one shows the scenario that I personally would like to see unfold.

Click to embiggen

Here's the third panel.

Peak Oil Cancelled!

World Oil Production capacity to increase up to 25% by 2015; No peak seen for decades, US Congressional Committee told
By Finfacts Team
Dec 7, 2005, 23:04

A field-by-field analysis of global oil production and development shows the world is not running out of oil in the near- or medium-term, and a large increase in the availability of unconventional oils will expand global liquid hydrocarbons capacity by as much as one-fourth in the next ten years, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), an IHS company, testified to a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee this morning.

“We see no evidence to suggest a peak before 2020, nor do we see a transparent and technically sound analysis from another source that justifies belief in an imminent peak,” CERA Senior Consultant and Director of Global Oil and Gas Resources Robert Esser testified before a House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee hearing on Understanding the Peak Oil Theory. “It will be a number of decades into this century before we get to an inflexion point that will herald the arrival of an ‘undulating plateau’ of global hydrocarbon production capacity,” Esser said.

Read the entire article.

So there you have it.

You can all just go home now and chill out.

Struggling with Peak Oil Induced Depression

The endless waiting for the collapse of civilization, coupled with the recent drop in gas prices at the pump by over a dollar, has made me downright suicidal.

Anyone else getting really depressed waiting for Peak Oil to finally kick in?

Jerome Corsi Pulls Out of Peak Oil Debate

I was really looking forward to Wednesday's radio debate between Micheal Ruppert and Jerome "Swiftboat" Corsi.  The debate was titled "Peak Oil vs Abiotic Oil".  I imagine that it finally dawned on Corsi that there's a dearth of supporting evidence for abiotic oil.

Too bad, this was looking like another "Thrilla in Manilla."

PeaK Oil: It's Whatever Your Heart Desires

This is one of the better quotes on the Peak Oil controversy that I've found in quite a while. It reminds me of the tale of the ten blind men trying to describe the elephant in front of them.

He [Kunstler] isn't alone in seeing what he wants to see of course - the Viridian camp sees a shiny green future awaiting us in the post oil world, old school oil guys like T Boone Pickens see a exploration and drilling bonanza, energy industry investors like Matt Simmons and Henry Groppe see soaring energy prices, gold bugs see rampart inflation and soaring gold prices, ferals and hippies see a return to living closer to nature, socialists see the revivial of marxism, conspiracy theorists see government/elite conspiracies and the rise of the new world order, primitivists see the collapse of industrial civilisation and human dieoff, libertarians see an opportunity for the market to bring new energy sources and technoloies to us, fascists see an opportunity for a return to authoritarianism and some of the uglier approaches to population control used by their ilk in the past, economists see supply and demand issues being resolved by energy prices, military-industrial complex members see the need to militarily dominate the energy rich regions of the planet, end-times Christian fundamentalists see another symptom of the impending rapture and survivalists see an opportunity to say "I told you so" and finally get to use the skills and tools they've spent their lives practicing for.

Source: http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/