Surfing YouTube, I came across an interview of Ezra Klein by Stephen Colbert. He was promoting a new book called Abundance, basically arguing that scarcity is politically-manufactured by “both sides,” and that if we get our political act together, everybody can have more. Planetary limits need not apply. I’ve often been impressed by Klein’s sharp insights on politics, yet can’t reconcile how someone so smart misses the big-picture perspectives that grab my attention.
He’s not alone: tons of sharp minds don’t seem to be at all concerned about planetary limits or metastatic modernity, which for me has been a source of perennial puzzlement.
The logical answer is that I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. Indeed, many of these folks could run cognitive/logical circles around me. And maybe that’s the end of the story. Yet it’s not the end of this post, as I try to work out what accounts for the disconnect, and (yet again) examine my own assuredness.
Imagined Basis
What is the basis of pundit-level rejection of my premise? Oh yeah: my premise is that modernity is a fleeting, patently unsustainable mode of life on Earth that will self-terminate on a historically relevant (i.e., brief) timescale—likely to convincingly crest the peak this century. Modernity can’t last.
I will reconstruct how I think an ultra-smart person might react, were I to present in conversation the premise that modernity can’t last—based on past interactions with such folks. Two branches stand out.
One branch would be the unwittingly spot-on admission of “I don’t see why not.” I could not have identified the core problem any better, and would be tempted to say: “Wow—what a courageous first step in recognizing our limited faculties. That humble confession is very big of you.” My not having the wit to prove conclusively to such folks that modernity can’t work (and I would say that no human possesses such mental powers) says very little about the complex reality of our future—operating without giving a flip as to what happens in human brains. But it’s also quite far from demonstrating convincingly how something as unsustainable as modernity—dependent on one-time exploitation of non-renewable resources—might possibly address the host of interacting elements that will contribute to its crumbling.
That branch aside, the common reply I want to spend more time on goes something like: “Just look at the past. No one could have foreseen the amazingness of today, and we ought to recognize that we are likewise ill-equipped to speculate on the future. In other words, anyone expressing your premise in the last 10,000 years would have turned out to be wrong [well, so far]. Chances, are: so are you.”
Damn. Blistering. How can one get up from that knockout? And the thing is, it’s a completely valid bit of logic. I also appreciate the intellectual humility involved. Why, then, am I so stubborn on this point? Is it because I want to be popular or rich? Then I’m even stupider than I thought, because those things are basically guaranteed to be incompatible with such a message. Is it because I crave end-times, having been dealt a bad hand and never “good at the game?” Nope: I thrived as an all-in astrophysicist and had/have a rather privileged and comfortable life that I would personally, selfishly prefer not to have disrupted. Is it out of fear of collapse? Getting warmer: that was a big early motivation—the alarming prospect of losing what I held until recently to be a glorious civilization. But at this point all I can say is that based on multiple lines of evidence I really think it’s the truth, and can’t easily or honestly argue myself out of this difficult spot. Denial, anger, bargaining, and depression don’t help us come to terms with the hard reality..
Returning to the putative response: I’ll name it as lazy. It’s superficial. It’s a shortcut, sidling up to: “Collapse hasn’t happened yet—in fact quite the opposite—and thus most likely will not.” It declines to examine the constituent pieces and arguments, falling back on a powerful and persuasive bit of logic straight out of the left brain. It has all the hallmarks: certain, crisp, abstract, decontextualized, logical, clever.
It carries the additional dual advantage of simultaneously avoiding unpleasant confrontation of a scary prospect and inviting starry-eyed wonder at magic the future might bring. No wonder it’s so magnetically attractive as a go-to response!. We’re both driven to it and attracted by it! The very smartest among us, in fact, often have the most to lose, and may therefore be among the most psychologically attached to modernity. We mustn’t forget that every human has a psychology, and is capable of impressive levels of denial for any number of reasons.
Some Metaphors
Its time for a few metaphors that help to frame my approach. I offer two related ones, because none are perfect. Together, they might work well enough for our purposes.
Take One
Imagine that someone tees up a golf ball in an indoor space full of hard objects: concrete walls and steel shelves—maybe loaded with heavy glass goblets and vases, etc. Poised to deliver a smashing blow to the ball with an over-sized driver, they ask me: “What do you think will happen if I hit this ball?” Imagining a comical movie scene where the ball makes a series of wild-ass bounces shattering priceless collectables as it goes, it might seem impossible to guess what all might or might not happen. So, I “cheat” and say: “The ball will come to rest.”
And guess what: I’m right! No matter how crazy the flight, it is guaranteed that in fairly short order, the ball will no longer be moving. I could even put a timescale on it: stopped within 10 seconds, or maybe even 5—depending on the dimensions of the room. I can say this because each collision will remove a fair bit of energy from the ball, and the smaller the room, the shorter the time between energy-sapping events.
During the middle of the experiment, it is clear that mayhem is happening, and it’s essentially impossible to predict what’s next. That’s where we are in modernity. So, yes: some intellectual humility is called for. We could not have predicted any of the particulars, after all. But one can still stand by the prediction that the ball will come to rest, much as one can say modernity will wind itself down.
Take Two
The golf ball metaphor does 80% of the work, but I don’t fully embrace it because the ball is at maximum destructive capacity at the very beginning, its damage-potential decaying from the first moment. Modernity took some time to accelerate to present speed, now at a fever pitch. For this, I think of a rock tumbling down a slope.
I do a fair bit of hiking, sometimes off trail where—careful as I am—I might occasionally dislodge a rock on a steep slope. What happens next is entirely unpredictable (even if deterministic given initial conditions). Most of the time the rock just slides just a few centimeters; sometimes it will lazily tumble a few meters; or more rarely it will pick up speed and hurtle hundreds of meters down the slope in a kinetic spectacle. Kilometer scales are not entirely out of the question in some locations.
Still, for all these scenarios, I am sure of one thing: the rock will come to rest—possibly in multiple fragments. I can also put a reasonable timescale on it, mid-journey, based on its behavior to that point. I can tell if it’s picking up speed. I can evaluate if the slope is moderating or will soon come to an end. It’s not impossible to make a decent guess for how long it might go, even if unable to predict what hops, collisions, or deflections it might execute along the way.
Maybe the phrase “a rolling stone gathers no moss” can be re-interpreted as: kinetic mayhem is no basis for a healthy, relational ecology. If tumbling boulders were the normal/default state of things, mountains would not last long (or more to the point: never come into being!). Likewise, one species driving millions of others to extinction in mere centuries is not a normal, sustainable state of affairs. That $#!+ has to stop.
Modernity’s Turn
Modernity is far more complex than a tumbling rock. But one side effect of this is a multitude of facets to consider. When many of them line up to tell a similar story…well, that story becomes more compelling. I offer a few, here.
Population
Global human population has been a super-exponential, in that the annual growth rate as a percentage of the total has steadily climbed through the millennia and centuries (0.04% after agriculture began, up to 2% in the 1960s). It is no shock to anyone that we may be straining (or overtaxing) what the planet can support. Indeed, the growth rate has been decreasing for the last 60 years, and the drop appears to be accelerating lately. Almost any model predicts a global peak before this century is over, and possibly as soon as the next 15–20 years. This is, of course, highly relevant to modernity. Economies will shrink and possibly collapse (being predicated on growth) as population falls from a peak. Such a turn could precipitate a whole new phase that “no one could have seen coming.” I’m looking at you, pundits!
The argument of “just look to the past” and imagining some sort of extrapolation begins to seem dubious or even outright silly in the context of a plummeting population. Let’s face it: we don’t know how it plays out. Loss of modern technological capabilities is not at all a mental stretch, even if such “muscles” are rarely exercised.
Resources
Modernity hungry!. Fossil fuels have played a huge role in the dramatic acceleration of the past few centuries. We all know this is a limited-time prospect. Oil discoveries peaked over a half-century ago, so the writing is on the wall for production decline on a timescale of decades. Pretending that solar and wind will sweep in as substitutes involves a fair bit of magical thinking and ignorance of myriad practical details (back to the “I don’t see why not” response). We face an unprecedented transition as fossil fuels wane, so that the acceleration of the past is very likely to run out of steam. Even holding steady involves an unsubstantiated leap of faith—never fleshed out as to how it all could possibly work. “I don’t see why not” is about the best one can expect.
Mined materials are likewise non-renewable and being consumed at an all-time-high rate. Ore grade has fallen dramatically, so that we now must pursue increasingly marginal and deeper deposits and thus impact more land, while discharging an ever-increasing volume of mine tailings. This happened fast: most material extraction has occurred in the last century (or even 50 years). We would be foolish to imagine an extrapolation of the past or even maintaining similar levels of activity for any long duration. More realistically, these practices will be undercut by declining population and energy availability. I’ve spent plenty of time pointing out that recycling can at best stretch out the timeline, but not by orders of magnitude.
Water/Agriculture
Agricultural productivity has also steadily increased, but on the back of “mining” non-renewable resources like ground water and soils—not to mention an extraordinary dependence on finite fossil fuels. Okay: at least water and soils can renew on long timescales, but our rate of depletion far outstrips replenishment. Land turned to desert by overuse stops even trying to maintain soils, while also suppressing water replenishment by squelching rainfall. This is yet another domain where the fact that the past has involved a steady march in one direction is quite far from guaranteeing that direction as a constant of nature. Its very “success” is what hastens its failure. The simple logic of “hasn’t happened yet” blithely bypasses a lot of context sitting in plain sight.
Climate Change
I don’t usually stress climate change, because I view it as one symptom of a more general disease. Moreover, should we magically eliminate climate change in a blink, my assessment is hardly altered since so many other factors are contributing to the overall phenomenon of modernity’s unsustainability. I include climate change here because it seems to be the one element that has percolated to the attention of the pundit-class as a potential existential threat. It isn’t yet clear how modernity trucks on without fossil fuels. Yet, even if we were to curtail their use by 2050, the climate damage may be great enough to reverse modernity’s fortunes (actually, the most catastrophic legacy of CO2 emissions may be ocean acidification rather than climate change). Again, the “logic” of extrapolation becomes rather dubious. The faith-based assumption is that we will “technology” our way out of the crisis, which becomes perfectly straightforward if ignoring all the other factors at play. Increased materials demand to “technofix” our ills (and the associated mining, habitat destruction, pollution) puts a fly in the ointment. But most concerning to me is what we already do with energy. Answer: initiate a sixth mass extinction by running a resource-hungry, human supremacist, global market economy. Most climate change “solutions” assign top priority to maintaining the destructive juggernaut at full speed—without question.
Ecological Collapse
This brings me to the ultimate peril. As large, hungry, high-maintenance mammals on this planet, we are utterly dependent on a healthy, vibrant, biodiverse ecology—in ways we can’t begin to fathom. It’s beyond our meat-brain capacity to appreciate. Long-term survival at the hands of evolution has never once required cognitive comprehension of the myriad subtle relationships necessary for a stable community of life. An amoeba, mayfly, newt, or hedgehog gets on just fine without such knowledge. What is required is fitting into the niches and interrelationships patiently worked out through the process of evolution. Guess what: in a flash, we jumped the tracks into a patently non-ecological lifestyle not vetted by evolution to be viable. It appears to be not even close.
This is not just a theoretical concern. Biologists are pretty clear that a sixth mass extinction is underway as a direct result of modernity. The dots are not particularly hard to connect. We mine and spew/dispose materials alien to the community of life into the environment. Good luck, critters! We eliminate or shatter wild space in favor of “developed” land: exterminating, eradicating, displacing, and impoverishing the life that depends on that land and its resident web of life. The struggle can take decades to resolve as populations ebb—generation after generation—on the road to inevitable failure. Even this decades-long process is effectively instant compared to the millions of years over which the intricate web was crafted.
I have pointed out a number of times that we are now down to 2.5 kg of wild land mammal mass per human on the planet. It was 80 kg per person in 1800 and 50,000 kg per person before the start of the agricultural revolution—when humans held a roughly proportionate share of mammal biomass compared to the other mammal species. In my lifetime (born 1970), the average decline in vertebrate populations has been roughly 70%. Fish, insects, birds decline at 1–2% per year, which compounds quickly. Extinction rates are now hundreds of times higher than the background, almost all of which has transpired in the last century.
Just like the golf ball in the room or the rock tumbling down the mountainside, these figures allow us to place approximate, relevant timescales on the phenomenon of ecological collapse—and that timescale is at the sub-century level. We’re watching its opening act, and the rate is alarming. The consequences, however, are easily brushed aside in ignorance. Try it yourself: mention to someone that humans can’t survive ecological collapse and—Family Feud style—I’d put my money on “I don’t see why not” being among the most frequent responses.
So, Don’t Give Me That…
I think you can see why I’m not swayed by the tidy and fully-decontextualized lazy logic of extrapolation offered by some of the smartest people. This psychologically satisfying logic can have such a powerfully persuasive pull that it short-circuits serious considerations of the counterarguments. This is especially true when the relevant subjects are uncomfortable, inconvenient, unfamiliar, and also happen to be beyond our capacity to cognitively master. Just because we can’t understand something doesn’t render it non-existent. Seeking answers from within our brains gets what it deserves: garbage in—garbage out.
We used the metaphors of a golf ball or rolling stone necessarily coming to rest. Likewise, a thrown rock will return to the ground, or a flying contraption not based on the aerodynamic principles of sustainable flight will fail to stay aloft. Modernity has no ecological context (no rich set of evolved interrelationships and co-dependencies with the rest of the community of life) and is rapidly demonstrating its unsustainable nature on many parallel, interconnected fronts. This would seem to make the default position clear: modernity will come to rest on a century-ish timescale, the initial reversal possibly becoming evident in mere decades. [Correction: I think it will likely be mostly stopped on a century timescale, but it may take millennia to fully melt into whatever mode comes next.]
Retreating to the logic of extrapolation or basic unpredictability amounts to a faith-based approach that deflects any actual analysis: a cowardly dodge. Given the multi-layer, parallel concerns all pointing to a temporary modernity, it would seem to put the burden of proof that “the unsustainable can be sustained” squarely on the collapse-deniers. The default position is that unsustainable systems fail; that non-ecological modes lack longevity; that unprecedented and extreme departures do not become the rule; that no species is capable of going-it alone. Arguing the extraordinary obverse demands extraordinary evidence, which of course is not availing itself.
When logic suggests an attractive bypass, recognize that logic is only a narrow and disconnected component of a more complete, complex reality. Most importantly, the logic of extrapolation only serves to throw up a cautionary flag, without even bothering to address the relevant dynamics. That particular flag is later recognized as a misfire once the appropriate elements are given due consideration: this time is different, because modernity is outrageously different from the larger temporal and ecological context. Pretending otherwise requires turning a spider’s-worth of blind eyes to protect a short-term, ideological, emotionally “safe” agenda. Pretend all you want: it won’t change what’s real.
Views: 781
Yes. The main driving pistons of the machine will come to a rest within a century or so. But the myriad wheels-within-wheels will continue spinning, expending their momentum for quite some time; as you say, perhaps a millennia or more. But I don't look at the end of Modernity as a death knell; I see it rather as an extended introduction to the next act. I find it exciting to think about the new epics that will be written during this next millennia, the new works of art produced, new forms of music and dance and expression, new ways of regarding one another as human creatures and living together on a planet filled with other lifeforms. I know many folks think we are stuck, condemned to the will of 'human nature,' doomed to forever repeat our mistakes. And I know we are at the brink of our own extinction. It keeps me awake at night. But we shouldn't discount the possibility that we will change in ways we can't imagine; and who's to say the changes won't be for the better?
Well put, and I share this excitement. Let's get this modernity thing over so we can usher in a more lasting and healthy phase…
It's hard to get very excited about stuff that might happen long after I'm dead. I think your optimism has no foundation but we can, of course, wish for anything, and those wishes can become extreme for timescales that stretch out long past our demise.
Humans didn't actually do anything wrong. Without free will, humans are just following the neuron sequences that have evolved over millions of years. If you regard that natural behaviour as a mistake, then, yes, humans, if they remain a species, will probably repeat those mistakes, once the dust of this civilisation has settled.
Brilliant, Dr Murphy, as always. It is heartbreaking to experience the denial when speaking with friends and family who should have more wisdom. I, as well, think a future that has the remnants of human population may find a much more meaningful existence than what we find ourselves in now. Perhaps I am prejudiced as one who has a temperament for the visceral in life instead of the “bells and whistles” of modernity. Fully on board with Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry as the “smart” ones.
Hey, Tom…
I probably sound like a broken record, at this point, but I feel compelled to mention Ernest Becker once again. When I read his book, 'The Denial of Death,' more than a decade ago, it clarified so much that had confused me. Hard to put it in a nutshell, but the behavior you describe, "Look at how well we've done. Of course we will keep doing better." This is a commitment to a "way of life," a "world view," a means to ensure oneself that the work to which one has committed one's life will guarantee that one's way of life will continue…forever! Because, if it doesn't, then all my life's work will have been wasted, and I might just as well never have lived at all! But, just look at me, at all I and my fellows have accomplished, at the wonderfulness of my mind that can project itself into an endless future, into the vastness of space, into the quantum nature of everything…surely this proves that my way of being in the world will never disappear. Your petty challenges to my superior cognitive/logical intelligence are beneath me. And while it is true that, one day, my body will cease to function (although we are working on that one), and my mind will disappear from existence (until we can figure out how to transfer it into an immortal biological computer), despite all that, the Work! that I have Accomplished! will be Remembered! by all those who come after me, and I will be IMMORTALIZED in the collective memory of my race!!!!!
That kind of thing is hard to give up.
I actually started the Becker book but failed to stick with it. The prevalent "hero" theme was not resonating. I don't doubt I'm missing out on great insights, so at some point I'll probably give it another go.
There is now a movie, “All Illusions Must Be Broken” where you can hear Dr Becker’s voice, including on his death bed.
It is no waste of time to watch this one. 🙂
That "hero" thing… The essential thing that makes a hero is the willingness to give up one's own life to save another's. Perhaps the most essential thing we must face as civilization falls, is that we will all have to be heros.
@Gordon Shephard
Indeed.
Oblivion waites for all of us.
Long time reader, first post! No doubt the proponents of human
ingenuity often have a background in economics or are technological
ueber-optimists? Whenever I express doubt about our ability to
innovate ourselves out of our mess, I am told by said proponents to
reflect on our amazing progress and how it surely will extend forward,
and that I could be wrong about my misgivings (so can you, I think to
myself). Being a natural scientist myself, I find it hard to
understand the economists faith in innovation as a driver of perpetual
economic growth.
I recently read a blog post by Economy prize winner Paul Romer on The
deep structure of economic growth, in which he claims that
"non-economists have said that it helped them understand why unlimited
growth is possible in a world with finite resources". Innovations can
multiply indefinitely, much like cookbook recipes in a kitchen,
allowing endless combinations of ingredients. One would think though
that the recipes would be useless if the refrigerator is empty, but
apparently I am missing the bigger picture here.
I do have one question regarding your comments on recycling. Bob Ayers
has written a lot on recycling (e.g., The second law, the fourth law,
recycling and limits to growth) in which he shows that infinite
recycling is not thermodynamically impossible, provided you have a
sustained energy source and a large enough waste bin from which to
mine. I'm sure you are aware of it, but I don't know if you have
commented (if you indeed have, sorry if I missed it, I haven't read
everything you've written 🙂 ).
Thanks a lot for you thoughtful posts, I enjoy reading them a lot.
I assume you meant, " in which he shows that infinite
recycling is not thermodynamicall possible" rather than "impossible." But if such a possibility requires "a sustained energy source and a large enough waste bin from which to mine" then it really becomes impossible.
Finding a metaphor to fully describe our predicament is tricky.
How about an avalanche?
Starting small and picking up material as it goes until the whole cascading mass comes to an abrupt end at the bottom of the valley.
(An abrupt end being my prediction of the future of modernity. I can't see things unwinding over a long period of time, in the mirror image of modernity's "rise")
Most graphs show the measures of modernity "rising", so the avalanche metaphor, is perhaps wrong.
Or modernity has always been on a downward slope, but we have never looked at it like that.
Growth always seems to be imagined as going upwards. (In my head anyway) But why not downwards?
Yep, good article.
"….yet can’t reconcile how someone so smart misses the big-picture perspectives that grab my attention."
That's easy, the vast majority do not see the world through an ecological lens. Once you do, the implications are clear, enormous, and liberating. You don't have to be a trained ecologist, just learn a slightly different way of thinking.
The vast majority will not countenance anything that threatens their perceived privilege, whatever their status may be in the social pecking order, and will fight like hell to maintain that privilege:
John Kenneth Galbraith:
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material portion of their privilege.”
The golfball/rock will indeed come to rest. When the human population has declined to whatever the new sustainable carrying capacity is. It was c35 million before modernity:
http://paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html
(not sorry if I've posted this before, I do think it's important)
by any logical extrapolation of ecological overshoot, it will be less than that, if not zero.
"Biologists are pretty clear that a sixth mass extinction is underway as a direct result of modernity."
I would say, rather than underway, the 6th mass extinction is near the end point. The 70% decline you mention in our lifetimes is only measured on a 1970 baseline; if it was measured on a 1750 baseline, or 12000BC baseline, it would be nearer 99%.
Lyle Lewis has some thoughts on this, I've just got round to ordering his book:
https://race2extinct.com/
The 6th mass extinction is not just because of modernity, but because of humans full stop.
Scientific Briefing https://xkcd.com/2278/
Another xkcd, but this *is* related to the post imho.
Tom,
I recently finished Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by Brad Delong. It has a similar thesis that we are moving toward an era of abundance and the ability to provide a safety net for all. He acknowledges the impact on the environment but seems mainly focused on the opposition by the plutocracy to increased social democratic support structures.
We are likely entering a time of economic stagnation and a collapse of social support structures precipitating an all out assault on the ecosystem. Trump is now trying to restart shut down coal fired plants.
Much worst is ahead. With difficulty I watched a YouTube video of Musk railing against empathy. He indicated that empathy was a poison to the “West”. The hyper and super rich will strive to accumulate everything to themselves while crashing the world.
For some reason, I think that you are too cautious in estimating the time of the start of the acceleration of the collapse, the speed of the change of states and the depth of the consequences.
It is clear that all these are "scenarios", but I would give a different story:
A car (present day) inside which there is an ant, a parrot, a newt, a squirrel, a dog and a person (driving) on a section of 250 m (the time of the set of future "consequences"), begins to accelerate by pressing the pedal to "growth", in front of a concrete bumper perpendicular to the road (growth limits).
It is clear further… the trip will not end well for everyone, perhaps except for the ant and uninvited microbes and viruses (the base of life).
Forming chains of interconnectedness of many sectors of the meta-crisis, you see that the risks increase, like snow sticking to a wet stone rolling down a mountain. The mass of the ball is growing and it is not possible to control it, even trying is futile and dangerous for life. Only its collapse and disintegration will stop the danger and destruction.
Your observation that seemingly inteligent people ignore the reality of ecological overshoot is quite accurate, but unfortunately it's to be expected. If you haven't read Jeff Schmidt's "Disciplined Minds", I highly recommend it. He makes the case that the formal university and professional training institutions of modernity function as a filter; preventing people who might not fully support status quo modernity–and all it's assumptions and myths–from occupying positions of relative authority. And so according to him we should expect that educated and inteligent people are more likely to avoid facing reality than people who are less educated and less inteligent.
The idea is that the majority of white collar professionals view their positions and the institutions they are part of as being meritocratic. They got where they are today because they worked hard and applied themselves, and because the overall system is built on a just foundation (any potential issue can be addressed with piecemeal reform). Accepting the reality of ecological overshoot would mean accepting that role that professional institutions have played in normalizing overshoot. Really coming to terms with this and letting your mind stray from the ideology that allowed you to so easily acquire power/priviliedge in the first place would amount to carreer suicide.
To develop the capacity for critical thinking on a systems/governance level, it really helps when there is no immediate consequences for your own material well being as a result. Which is way i find it much easier to talk about collapse with people who didn't go to university or people who work blue collar jobs.
But you are absolutely correct that despite all this, smart and inteligent people have a moral responsiblity to seek the truth, no matter how awful/unpleasant such a process might be. It is better to be frightened by what we think is true, than to cower behind comfortable illusions that help us deny those uncomfortable truths.
Good article and comments.
I'm reminded of sitting in an office years ago with a bank employee as he referenced a long-term stock market value wall-chart showing overall growth over decades. His logic was that any long-term investment must increase in value. I pointed out the fine print of "past values are not predictive of future performance", and he essentially waved that away. It wasn't long afterwards that I decided investing wasn't for me, and garden tools and seed-saving were a better store of wealth.
Anyone predicting the future on past performance should be reminded that they haven't died on *every single one* of the thousands of previous days. By their logic, they are then immortal. I'm sure the dinosaurs would have argued with each other that since they had been the dominant life-form for millions of years, there's no way that could ever change. Things are the same, until they aren't…
Entropy—its irrevocable nature, and the fact that it can only increase in a closed system—has proven to be the key concept in my discussions with educated people.
Once people grasp the implication of the Second Law—that all energy consumption must irreversibly increase total pollution—a door seems to open. They realize that the faster we consume energy (regardless of the immediate source of the energy), the faster we pollute. And they perceive "time's arrow," the ratchet effect, the irreversibility, of the changes caused by energy consumption.
Sometimes I have to give examples to explain the Second Law (air flowing from a punctured tire, heat moving from a stove to a room (and never in the other direction), aging, etc.) Sometimes discussing collapse of the natural world (loss of half of all wildlife in the last 50 years, loss of 40% of phytoplankton, recent extinction of the vaquita and other species, etc.) is helpful. But once they "get" the Second Law, the end to which modernity is driving becomes clear.
Perhaps I have been lucky in my discussions. But I've yet to encounter an educated person who, having grasped the Second Law, did not perceive the problem of modernity.
[edit: shortened considerably]
I’m curious if you have any particular rationale for suggesting that ocean acidification may be worse than climate change? I’m not personally sure which is worse but see them as extremely interconnected problems as they are both products of same CO2 pollution.
My instinct is not to downplay climate change but to up-play it, using it as a familiar ‘hook’ that people have already been exposed to while introducing them to the broader polycrisis while pointing out that the mainstream actually downplays climate change’s severity.
The Tolkein-esque way I play it in my head has Frodo on Weathertop with his short-sword Sting, climate change is the Witch-King of Angmar (wouldn’t want to mess with him), but there’s 9 ringwraiths all converging simultaneously with their swords drawn (ocean acidification, deoxygenation, the sixth mass-extinction, biogeochemical flow disruption, land degradation, fresh-water depletion, emerging & exponential tech, energy & material descent, climate change), there’s also some big orcs like deforestation, overfishing, geopolitical chaos, 9-nuclear weapon states engaged in a Mexican standoff, while Sauron is perhaps ecological overshoot. I’m not sure exactly which sword is going to enter Frodo’s (modernity’s) belly first, but ultimately, all of them will, and the poor little guy isn’t going to make it…
Another great article. However, ideas along the lines of "a stable community of life" keep cropping up in your writings, as though there were some configuration of ecosystem that would last for ever (and be a wonderful place).
Ecosystems eventually reach an apparently stable configuration, a climax state. But this is inevitably temporary (or else, the first ever ecosystem that reached a climax state, would still be around today, and we wouldn't be).
I'm not sure what a normal way of life would be. All organisms (grouped by the vague term "species") are behaving in exactly the way that they evolved to. And evolution cares nothing about what that is, though it may have something to say about how long some behaviours must last.
Don't put timescales in my mouth. Of course stasis is not in the cards. I consider what has happened on Earth in the last few centuries and millennia to be off-scale-anomalous compared to how life went for timescales many thousands of times longer. Stable is thus a relative term, and not a rigid concept of timeless, changeless fantasy.
Sorry about that. It seems we agree.
Once modernity ends, I think all remaining humans will figure out that life is a struggle. Undoubtedly, there will be moments of joy and satisfaction but it will be a tough slog for much of the time. This is why I'm not too anxious for modernity to end though part of me wants it to. I suspect I won't have to deal with it, but you never know.
Dr. Murphy, are you familiar with this? Is this about right?
https://xkcd.com/1732/