The Upside of Down

One of the more illuminating observations in Thomas Homer-Dixon’s recent book “The Upside of Down” was his reference to the ecological theories of complex adaptive systems and resilience, and his application of those insights to the progress of modern industrial civilization.

In a nutshell, the idea is that all complex adaptive systems (of which human civilization is one) go through looping cycles of growth, decline, reorganization and re-growth.  On the way up the front of the cycle as the system grows it gains integration, efficiency, productivity and brittleness.  The increasing brittleness makes the system vulnerable to external shocks which eventually push it over the top of the loop and into decline.  During decline the system regains modularity and resilience by losing integration, efficiency and  productivity.  Once the system has regained enough resilience during the decline it can loop around the bottom of the cycle, reorganize (within the limits of the remaining resources) and start a new cycle of growth.  The degree of resilience a system retains as it nears the peak of its growth determines how gentle or steep the inevitable subsequent decline will be.

 It's very encouraging to envision a non-catastrophic decline to the beginning of another round of human civilization's adaptive cycle.  It's also good to contemplate what sorts of changes we might make now to promote such an outcome.  When we do this, however, we must remember to consider all the factors arrayed against us right now.  Not the least of these is the burgeoning human population, or more accurately its burgeoning consumption and waste production.

There is no question that modern industrial civilization is the largest, most complex, most interconnected, most productive system yet seen on the planet.  If resilience theory is correct, it is therefore axiomatically the least resilient system ever to exist.

Per capita energy consumption is a good proxy for overall consumption, and its change over time will, if anything, understate the level of overall consumption as the energy intensity of the global economy declines.  Unfortunately (and contrary to the expectations of Dr. Richard Duncan in his “Olduvai Gorge” hypothesis), per capita primary energy consumption is again rising following its plateau during the 1980s and 1990s.  When you combine that fact with a population growth rate of 75 million people per year, it's obvious that we are continuing to increase our pressure on the global ecosystem.  That means that all the social and ecological stresses that we are currently experiencing continue to climb.  So too does the risk that some perturbation may eventually prove too great for the system to absorb.

When people speculate what might cause such a perturbation, the usual suspects include nuclear wars, pandemics and climate change.  I maintain that the likeliest suspect is none of these.   Climate change is too slow and gradual (though its local effects may not be), and while wars or pandemics could be candidates, there is one other factor that is both strong enough cause a problem, and absolutely inevitable.  The clue is in the first phrase in the previous paragraph.  The more I have learned about it, the more it seems obvious to me that the energy disruptions produced by declining global oil production have a high probability of triggering a precipitous release of system organization in the near future.

"Oh no, not another peak oil doomer!" I hear you cry.  Well, actually yes.  Let me explain why.

We know that oil is a finite resource.  We know that global oil production has been on a plateau for two years.  We know that oil is intrinsic to the transportation networks that bind the web of ultra-efficient (and correspondingly low resilience) world industry and trade.  We know that production is declining in almost three quarters of the world's oil producing nations.  We know that production in some oil provinces and fields is declining at near double-digit percentage rates.  We know that all but one of the 14 oil fields that have ever produced over one million barrels per day is in decline, and there is significant evidence that the last one - Ghawar - is now entering decline.

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The Hirsch Report

The Hirsch Report, prepared for the US Department of Energy in 2005, is one of the most important energy-related documents of the last few years.  In it Dr. Robert Hirsch makes a convincing case that intensive mitigation efforts need to start ten to twenty years before the decline begins in order to avoid significant social and economic disruptions.

On page 59 he writes:

• Waiting until world oil production peaks before taking crash program action
  leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades.
• Initiating a mitigation crash program 10 years before world oil peaking helps considerably but still leaves a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.
• Initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking appears to offer the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall for the forecast period.

On the same page he gives the following warnings::

• On the other hand, if peaking is imminent, failure to initiate mitigation quickly will have significant economic and social costs to the U.S. and the world
• Late initiation of mitigation may result in severe consequences.

My investigations have revealed mounting evidence that the beginning of the decline is now five years or less away.  Not everyone agrees with this time line, of course, but several serious analyses of planned oil projects (known as bottom up analyses) have pointed to this possibility.

 I base my expectations of imminent trouble on the following foundations:

1. We don't have 10 years left; the oil peak is here NOW.
   
2. Hirsch works from the assumption of a crash program of mitigation being undertaken in advance of the peak.  I see no evidence of such a crash program being undertaken anywhere, let alone world-wide.
3. The concept of system resilience doesn't figure into Hirsch’s analysis, which I feel is its fundamental weakness.  As a result, though he correctly assesses the inputs to the crisis and the time-lines involved, I think he significantly underestimates the potential for disruption.
4. I believe that we are now living in Hirsch's first scenario, and that the brittle social system we have created will not be able to fully withstand "a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades."

If the oil decline begins in 5 years as I expect, we will have by then added over a third of a billion people to the world's population.  At our present energy consumption rate that hints at a rise of over 5% in demand just at a time when our crucial energy resource is going into decline.  And this situation will continue to worsen as the world's population continues to grow.

If the effects of such resource depletion were uniform, we might not have to worry too much.  After all, a demand growth of 1% per year could easily be dealt with through conservation measures.  Unfortunately the growing disparities between rich and poor nations guarantee that the effects will not be uniform - some regions will face calamitous effects, while others will fare much better.  Here is where the problem of resilience (or rather the lack of it) rears its ugly head.  The highly interconnected nature of our civilization guarantee that local failures from system shocks like the sudden disruption of national oil supplies will have repercussions far beyond their origins, and in sectors of the civilization not obviously related to the original cause.

I claim that such failures are inevitable precisely because a growing population with rising material expectations will collide with a declining oil supply within such a short time frame that mitigation efforts will not have a chance to work.  Population and time scale are the confounding factors for any foreseeable avoidance strategy.  Combine that with the natural tendency of nations to try and ensure their own advantage and the reluctance of people to voluntarily impoverish themselves, and you have a sure-fire recipe for a stew of hard times.

And of course all this is playing out against the backdrop of the all the other environmental stresses that we are becoming aware of.  Soil fertility depletion, fresh water depletion,  the death of the oceans, deforestation, desertification, pervasive chemical pollution, accelerating rates of species extinctions, global economic instability and accelerating climate change merge to generate a rising drumbeat of ecological stress.  We have set ourselves up for a Tragedy of the Commons of truly epic proportions.

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Still, There Is Hope

While we may not be able to avoid the fate that appears to be looming over us, I maintain that there is in fact hope - though coming from an unexpected direction and not without cost.  Here's what I see, excerpted from my article Population Decline - Red Herrings and Hope:

These three facts mean that although we are heading for a bottleneck, some portion of humanity will survive to regroup and rebuild in a massively damaged, resource-poor world. On our way through the bottleneck we will lose much of our physical and social capital. The one and only good thing about this, from a species, biosphere and planetary perspective, is that the existing socioeconomic structures will be forcibly and involuntarily stripped away, leaving room for new structures to take their place.

The change in perspective involves not looking forward from our current situation into the decline.  Rather, step forward a couple of hundred years and look back.  What I believe you will see is the rebirth of the next cycle of civilization.

The question for me has become, "How do we ensure that the seeds are in place for a value set that will survive through and bloom after the bottleneck, a value set that will ensure that the next cycle of civilization has a chance at sustainability even in such a badly damaged, resource-poor world?"  How will we ensure that our descendants will  eventually inherit a sustainable world, even though our current situation is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination?

I've become convinced over the last couple of months that the seeds for such a transformation have already been planted. They are even resilient enough to make it through the bottleneck, and they carry the correct values for the rebirth I suggest.

American activist Paul Hawken has just written a tremendously important book called "Blessed Unrest" in which he describes a set of one to two million local, independent, citizen-run environmental and social justice groups. These groups exist world-wide, and each is acting on local problems of its own choosing. There is no overarching ideology beyond "making the world a better place", there is no unifying organization, no white male vertebrate leader setting the agenda. As a result the movement is extremely resilient - no government action anywhere can shut it down, even though individual groups may be suppressed. These groups make up the largest (though unrecognized) social movement the world has ever seen.  For a glimpse of some of these organizations, take a look at the web site WiserEarth.org.

Hawken sees this movement as part of humanity's immune system. While I like the metaphor and think it is exactly correct, I believe the importance of these groups is much greater than just their efforts to mitigate an unavoidable collapse. These groups have been called into existence by the world's dis-ease, and do two things: they work to fix local problems now (which will mitigate some local effects of the collapse), but more importantly they act as carriers for the values of cooperation, consensus, nurturing, recognition of interdependence, acceptance of limits, universal justice and the respect for other life. Those are precisely the values that a civilization will need to achieve stability and sustainability. To top it all off, many of these groups are led by women or espouse specifically matriarchal values, one attribute I see as essential for any sustainable civilization.

At the risk of sounding sentimental, I call these groups "the antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream".

I am convinced we will not save this civilization, and will lose a large fraction of humanity in the process.  But I'm equally convinced that thanks to the seeds that have already been planted in these groups we have a shot at a much better one in a couple of hundred years. The crucial change in perspective required to see the hope in this is to stop looking from here forward into the decline, and instead look backward from a position out two hundred years and imagine what it will take to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization from the ashes of this one. The values required are already embodied in a resilient organization, enough of whose elements will survive to transmit a sustainable value set into the ecologically damaged, resource-depleted world we will bequeath to the future.