What is this ‘Crisis’ of Modernity?
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Workmen next to the screws of the RMS Titanic at Belfast shipyard, 1911 The people at Conflicts Forum, which is directed by former British dipl
[See the full post at: What is this ‘Crisis’ of Modernity?]As far as my limited competences extend, I agree fully with this analysis (and most everything I have read on this site).
What I fear is seeing so much work being forgotten and not turned into something practical.
Maybe the best – or only – thing we can do with such information is to see how to relate it to our immediate experience, where we can really do something, however small. And of course each of us has different, equally worthy, experiences.
My experience is a very small but significant area – Florence’s Oltrarno district, which has been holding out in a way for 2000 years, and where we have managed to set up a network of resistance to the countless destructive forces that rain upon the area, simply by defending and self-managing a garden area behind the Carmine church where the Renaissance was born.
This garden allows us to bring generations together and to unite new and “traditional” residents of the area and slowly build back a community, thanks for example to a self-managed football school which has ignited enthusiasm among children and parents, or by creating a free violin school, or monitoring pollution in the district.
Websites like yours give us an enormous opportunity for understanding what the underlying problems of our times are; and many other websites provide fascinating insights into possible alternatives (I am thinking of the interesting output of some New Urbanists or of those who are involved in permaculture or other extra-urban choices).
But the big question for us is, what kind of alternative, in times of global collapse, can we build in a highly urban context, in densely populated “historic centres” of European cities, with a very mixed population and very little nature? Survivalists can tell us beautiful things about remote mountains, architects can design new districts, but how can we build communities that can survive here?
Future Growth is possible for only a fraction of the population.
1. Give less to many and so that a few will get more.
2. Reduce the number of people so that there will be more for the remainder.Generational wealth transfer is not growth.
Do you believe that 500,000 women can organize and that the news media did not know about it.
Nobody told me that there was going to be a world wide demonstration.I think the best we can hope for is a descent long enough to make the inevitable decline in population manageable. By manageable I mean allowing for the preservation in society of a humane culture.
I no longer make the effort to warn people of what is ahead. I reason, “Why unsettle their proud enjoyment of their remaining time on their Titanic deck chair?” Politicians are unwilling to be Cassandras as well.
The masses still fanatically believe our over-arching societal myth: that human progress will always continue unabated. Perhaps politicians intrinsically know that to abruptly shatter such a myth is to invite unmanageable population decline and loss of humane culture.
The overarching paradigm in Crooke’s analysis of our predicament is correct, but I am dubious about the Hills group computation of the energy loss side of their EROI computation. It is certainly true that the EROI of the marginal barrel produced has been dropping, but much of the oil used by the global economy comes from legacy fields for which the EROI is virtually unchanged since decades ago when they were first tapped.
However, like rust, depletion never sleeps. Non-renewable fossil fuels underpin the global market economy, particularly in the transportation sector, where oil powers virtually all freight transport. As the EROI of oil declines, so will the ability to extract resources and transport finished products. Energy from oil will eventually decline faster than we can extract it. If we are not at that point now, we will be soon.
So, growth is stalling and will soon turn to de-growth. If politics is in turmoil now, just think what it will be like when economic recession/depression becomes a continuous fact of economic life. Eventually people will realize that growth will never come back, the last vestiges of confidence in the economy will vaporize and we will experience the mother of all financial crises, followed shortly thereafter by economic collapse.
Crooke is aware of this impending disaster, but then segues into a bizarre conclusion that populism offers the “hope” of “regime change”. The status quo may be clueless and hidebound, but its real problem is that it is suffocating under the implacable force of thermodynamic limits. No amount of populism or regime change can alter that constraint. Populism, whether from Sanders, Trump, or anyone else, is therefore a false hope, if only for the simple reason that when it comes to avoiding the limits to growth, there is no hope.
Genuine human progress would be to recognize our wrong headed behavior; and to then proceed to change that behavior.
Instead, we think re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is actionable change.
We are stubborn to our own detriment…Is there a country that one can immigrate to so as to not witness the collapse and that the country’s policies are resilient enough to have contingency plans should things go sideways and keep modern society going?
@ sinabl10
S.E. Asia might fit the bill. Still largely agrarian, very inexpensive (outside tourist areas), and access to excellent medical facilities. The cuisine is exquisite.
Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Lao, and Vietnam have fairly high numbers of English speakers. Thailand, having never been colonized, not so much.
The downside is culture; 180° from the west; culture shock is almost guaranteed. I was largely unaffected; I think because I found the culture and language fascinating, along with the ancient ruins and history.
Good luck…This is how it was all set up before any of the present players were born. Field A: depleting access to easy oil fields. Field B: compounding interest in a debt-system.
Will there be any place to go? No, but each area has their own advantages. America still has enormous, almost indescribable open land. But Europe has the old patterns carved into the infrastructure of Florence, with centralized, walkable cities, railways, enduring architecture, and much of the surrounding open land preserved. If that seems too slender a thread, read on French market gardening in the 1890s. A truly enormous, unimaginable amount of food was grown within the city limits and horse-reach around. It had to be. That technology was set aside, but it still exists in pockets and on paper. We don’t have to go back, but we certainly will have to go forward in a different way. Strip mining the capital assets to paper over the EROI losses will only work so long.
And the worst is the lying, which makes people disoriented and unprepared for what could be just a deep cultural change to a pattern that gives us meaning and we all like better.
For Dr Diablo
” If that seems too slender a thread, read on French market gardening in the 1890s. ”
Thanks, I shall be looking into that!
Thank you Raul for posting Alistair’s piece and there are some fine comments here, particularly Joe Clarkson’s views. I am well familiar with the Hills group work and have been posting on my energy blog my own exegesis and analysis as I struggle to understand if their work is valid. I continue to parse out their graphs and equations and assumptions behind their Etp model laid out in their 65 page monograph and I have been mystified how little coverage that monograph has received in the media and the net besides an excellent report from Ugo Bardi on his casandraleagacy blog and the recent lectures by Dr Alister Hamilton in Edinburgh. No doubt most of the reason is the engineering and math complexity of their work and the interested reader needs sound grounding in thermodynamics and more than passing fluency in college math. I would urge everyone to read it particular the jarring conclusion that oil extraction, processing and distribution may be consuming all of the oil’s energy by as early as 2030, in effect consuming its tail. This surplus of exergy, not energy has made industrial civilization possible and as oil depletes so will wealth and obviously growth. The legacy fields are depleting at 5-8%/yr and the smaller fields twice that and new annual discoveries are less that 10% of world consumption and have been for decades. The average new field was 24 mbbl in 2015(source:HSBC sept 2016). It is definitely time to tend our gardens.
I would like to direct readers to Gwynne Dyer’s recent article about the Davos meeting. Particularly his suggestion that automation/AI have been the greater cause behind the decline in employment in western countries not global trade. Instead of giving a long winded account of why I say the following I will just say it. Human culture more so in western countries is being replaced by machines. The natural world is being replaced by machines and humans. The implications of this go far beyond what I consider to be this simplistic article which is mainly talking about the end of growth one of the many stories humans have agreed on to use as a world view of who humans are, what the meaning is for human life and where we are going as a species. I feel anger when I read articles such as this which goes on about growth. My God don’t we get it human beings can’t keep taking from the natural world and treat it as a sewer indefinitely. Our positivistic humanism, our hubris, our Faith in technology is so divorced from what is actually happening to the biosphere as to be a form of insanity. The stories we live by are dying. The planet our home, is dying The elite don’t quite get that , given how immersed they are in maintaining power and control, but they do understand that the masses are dangerous to them, to their power and wealth. They are building a sanctuary in the alps and in other places in the world. I saw an Earthship on an island off the coast of Vancouver Island owned by a very wealthy family. The wealthy and powerful whether globalist or nationalist are preparing. THEY WANT TO SURVIVE. THEY WANT US TO SERVE THEM AS LONG AS POSSIBLE AND THEN GOOD RIDDANCE. THEY SEE THEMSELVES AS THE ELITE, THE FORERUNNERS OF A NEW WORLD ORDER. They are scared but we should be even more. Because we are going to be hammered by so many things which they can ameliorate or control and we can’t. Humanity and especially the masses need new stories to live by. Where do they come from? We can’t solve these problems with the old stories. So where does humanity find them?
danielm said,
The wealthy and powerful whether globalist or nationalist are preparing.
If only! The wealthy could prepare more properly than more ordinary folk because they have the money to buy land. But true preparation means far more than a lavish bunker, it requires creating a complete, virtually stand alone system of food production and allocation.
Dr Diablo mentioned the market gardens around Paris, but they were found around all cities all over the world. They were the last vestige of pre-industrial agriculture, which supported people in various forms for millennia.
If rich folk wanted to get serious about prepping, they could purchase large tracts of agricultural land, populate it with peasant farmers and craft-center villages and then live off the income of dues from their tenants, paid entirely in the form of food, firewood and labor.
Rich people could reestablish pre-industrial agriculture in conjuction with one of the social structures that system requires. They could, for example, once again become feudal lords. That is certainly one logical option for surviving the end of fossil fuels, far better than most people could manage without support from government (as if that would ever happen).
I seriously hope to see reports in the press of billionaires purchasing whole counties, removing all modern infrastructure except roads and a few village structures and then populating the land with large numbers of agrarian peasants on small-holdings of a few hectares each. That kind of realistic response would be wonderful and keep many alive who would otherwise perish, but I’m not holding my breath.
Joe Clarkson
Yep, always get a chuckle when I see pictures of the luxurious bunkers of the stupid rich.
When they come out, as is inevitable, they’ll be killed by things they could never imagine.
Fools planning and greedy minds incapable of thinking…Garden in place, y’all.
https://www.johndayblog.com/2016/07/liberty-garden-central-texas-climate.html
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