Collide-a-scape

I’ve become increasingly fascinated with the “collapse” meme in environmental and energy circles. It’s really become the secular equivalent of End-Times. I don’t say that to denigrate the peak oil crowd or climate change advocates, because I happen to think the energy/climate intersection is quite serious and may well lead to widespread socio-political turmoil.

Still, I can’t help but be amused by how the debate sometimes plays out on intellectual and pop culture levels. For example, here’s a recent post over at the Oil drum, in which the writer shares a common refrain of her friends, who work in environmental NGO’s:

In brief, many now admit openly that human overshoot has gone way too far and that the programs they run are like band aids when the wound calls for a tourniquet. They lament the rise of expectations for a narrowly defined version of progress that will only deepen our predicament.

Evidently, the writer’s friends are starting to “turn inward” and get in touch with their inner survivalist. Hey, might as well make provisions for that collapse, right? Sounds like a good idea if you think it’s just around the corner and nobody else sees it coming.

So the Oil Drum writer wonders if anyone else is getting the same vibe in their doomer circles and asks six questions to ponder, of which this is tops:

Are you noticing similar conversations, where well-educated and generally well off people are worried about the security of very basic needs, such as food and water.

I gotta admit, that one hasn’t come up yet in my own privileged circle. But I do love this comment in the SF Chronicle, which is in response to a review of a new movie called,  “Collapse: A documentary about our scary fate”:

Our whole house of cards is falling, and I believe this version of civilization is about to collapse. That said, I don’t waste any time or energy complaining about it – how would that change anything?

Have a cocktail, smoke a big fatty. Sit back and relax. Keep your shotgun handy and loaded, and maybe you’ll sneak through to see what rises from the ashes. And then again, maybe you won’t. It’s out of our hands.

Hot damn, if that isn’t Northern California fatalism at its finest!

The Oil Drum is the only site I know of that makes you think seriously about the end of the world. But even Nate Hagens, my favorite commentator there,  feels compelled to offer a disclaimer of sorts for this guest post by George Mobus.  Hagens writes:

As an editor here, I continually struggle to find a balance of discourse that presents scientific reality in ways that don’t come across as apocalyptic or frightening. In my opinion, the larger the lens with which we view our situation, the more informed choices will be made towards more sustainable trajectories.

Well, Nate, this Oil Drum review of William Catton’s new book, Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse, is enough to  make even Richard Dawkins embrace the Rapture.

Black holes and Mayan prophecies do the trick. Global warming not so much.

Few seem to be getting worked up over peak oil, either, which has the resource depletion crowd wringing their hands.

Still, these are boom times for the apocalypse, as this piece in the Chicago Tribune reports.

This story in Nature News about societal collapse in ancient Peru is worth noting, especially for this quote by one of the main researchers:

Dramatic climactic events are always used to explain culture change in the Andes. But this is not satisfying based on what we know about human culture. It paints a picture of culture sitting there, not changing, hit by events over which they have no control. But Native Americans did not always live in harmony with their environment.

That last line provided some fodder for an interesting exchange in the comments thread of the story. I really wish Savage Minds would take up this meme some day. By happenstance, the death of this giant in anthropology is relevant to a wider discussion, which Rex duly notes over at Savage Minds:

First, Lévi-Strauss taught us that culture is a force in its own right.

The question many scholars struggle with is how much of a “force” culture plays in a society’s own demise–be it the Anasazi, the Angkor, or even in the widely cited case of a certain island people.

How is this possible:

One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the surprise is not how much has changed in the financial industry, but how little.

So now that the planetary panic has subsided, is it too late for institutional change? This is the passage from Alex  Berenson’s saturday’s NYT article that caught my eye:

Robert J. Shiller, the Yale University economics professor who predicted the dot-com crash and the housing bust, said the window for change may be closing. “People will accept change at a time of crisis, but we haven’t managed to do much, and maybe complacency is coming back,” Professor Shiller said. “We seem to be losing momentum.”

And Greens wonder why it’s hard to get traction on climate change.

That’s probably the best we can do, says Joseph Tainter, in a forthcoming paper. Here’s the passage that will make environmentalists bark at their computer screens:

Contrary to what is typically advocated as the route to sustainability, it is usually not possible for a society to reduce its consumption of resources voluntarily over the long term. To the contrary, as problems great and small inevitably arise, addressing these problems requires complexity and resource consumption to increase.

Anyone seriously engaged in sustainability can’t ignore Tainter’s scholarship on collapse.

There’s a fascinating, informative discussion thread on the dynamics of societal collapse over at The Oil Drum, prompted by a very readable 10,000 word essay on the fall of the Roman empire, cleverly entitled, “Peak Civilization.”

This is really complicated stuff that the news media utterly fails to convey, preferring instead to focus on single-cause “forcings,” be it drought, climate change, overpopulation, or overexploitation of natural resources. I’m susceptible to this myself with respect to drought.

Of course, the media takes its cue from scholars such as Jared Diamond, whose one-size-fits all thesis is pretty well deconstructed by Joseph Tainter. Fans of Tainter will be heartened to know that his work is intelligently discussed (as far as I can tell) at the aforementioned essay and comment thread on The Oil Drum.

I don’t agree with some of the classic examples cited, which I’ve previously discussed here, but nevertheless, this is an interesting thought experiment posed by Nate Hagens over at The Oil Drum:

By definition, all previous ecosystem and non-human collapses were not ‘understood as collapse’ by those organisms alive during the collapse. Similarly, during historical human social collapses, (Rome, Easter Island, Anasazi, Maya, etc.), people might have known they were in the middle of some unpleasant trajectory, but they didn’t have the knowledge, historical record, technology or communication that modern society possesses in understanding/explaining what was transpiring. As such, when this civilization ‘collapses’, (which in the opinion of this writer is inevitable – the timing, direction, and severity of which remain the salient unknowns), it will be the first to have at least some portion of its inhabitants anticipate and understand its own collapse in a systems dynamics sense.

How will this odd ‘collapse trivia’ manifest in steering/pulling/resisting actual collapse, if at all?

That’s worth pondering, but unlike Hagens, I don’t see the collapse of all civilization as “inevitable.” Too End-Times-ey for my taste.

I’ve been traveling so I missed ABC’s big show last night, but if this criticism (below) is on target, then perhaps another missed opportunity…

From a columnist at the SF Examiner:

The evil that ABC did in broadcasting Earth 2100 will live on long after them. By presenting a fictional account of future global warming, they will make it far more difficult to do what we do need to do to combat global warming.

A news service of the U.N. that I find useful for its dispatches from developing countries asks, in an article, if there is a danger of “information overload” with the spate of alarming reports on the consequences of climate change, such as the most recent one released last week from the Global Humanitarian Forum.

What to do? According to the U.N. piece,

The media are supposed to turn these numbers, reports, predictions and projections into “meaningful information” for the people who will be affected by the unfolding impact of climate change.

But then the article seemingly confuses the media with think tanks when it says that

The Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum in its climate change report, “The Anatomy of Silent Crisis,” released on 29 May, attempts to do this.

First of all, as Andrew Revkin at The New York Times pointed out,

There are significant questions about the robustness of the numbers at the heart of the new report [by the Forum] estimating more than 300,000 deaths are already being caused each year by global warming, with nearly twice that number possible by 2030.

Secondly, as I noted here, apart from Revkin, the rest of the media didn’t offer “meaningful information” about this report.

On a different note, over at The New Security Beat, Geoff Dabelko cautions about hyping the collapse meme, because

fear and depression without a path or a way forward leads to tuning out or rejection as oversell. We saw it with the fantastical version of climate in the [movie] Day After Tomorrow…an oversell that is a target and easier mark for opponents.