Will the Meek Inherit the Earth?

Excellent summary of current thinking and theories of societal collapse from the New Scientist.  For my own take on the subject go here(How to Avoid) and here(Laws of Collapse).

A Storyline of Global Collapse

In referring in my title here to “A Failed System” I do not of course mean that capitalism as a system is in any sense at an end. Rather I mean by “failed system” a global economic and social order that increasingly exhibits a fatal contradiction between reality and reason—to the point, in our time, where it threatens not only human welfare but also the continuation of most sentient forms of life on the planet. Three critical contradictions make up the contemporary world crisis emanating from capitalist development: (1) the current Great Financial Crisis and stagnation/depression; (2) the growing threat of planetary ecological collapse; and (3) the emergence of global imperial instability associated with shifting world hegemony and the struggle for resources

If you’re looking for the deep underlying narratives that can help bring clarity to the current unsettled state of our world, then this essay by John Foster is an excellent starting point.  Be forewarned that this is not an easy read and somewhat technical in it’s historical summary of economic theory, however if deeper understanding is your goal, reading this essay is well worth the effort.

The Laws of Societal, Economic, and Ecological Collapse

Once you’ve followed the intellectual trail of resource limits in a closed ecosystem, potential Liebig minimums, phantom carrying capacity, and the concept of ecological overshoot you eventually come to accept the inevitability of a global economic, societal, and ecological collapse.  At that point thoughts of sustainability are trumped by the ecological need for resilience in the face of industrial decline, and the mind turns to questions of how soon and how severe.

No one attempts to answer these questions with more rigor and insight than John Michael Greer.  In his most recent book, The Ecotechnic Future, Greer draws on both historical precedent and the science of ecology to sketch a possible post collapse future.  He predicts that the modern industrial age of abundance based on 500-million years of photosynthesis (i.e. fossil fuels) will end in a matter of years. From there the next human ecological sere will likely be a decades long age of industrial scarcity in which we attempt to maintain the myth of infinite growth and technical progress in a age of declining non-renewable resources.  As those myths die a natural death humanity will enter the next sere, a century or more of a salvage society whose economy will be based on mining the artifacts of the   industrial age.  An age in which we recycle and capture the embodied energy of an age of abundance and massive waste.  Based on the ecological principle of succession and the second law of thermodynamics, all of these sere’s will be R-selected and ultimately unsustainable.  If we are fortunate, the climax sere following the salvage society will be a K-selected Ecotechnic sere, an ecologically balanced and fully sustainable society.

According to Greer these sere’s are merely generalized stages and the actual reality is likely to be “complex, messy, and idiosyncratic”, and seasoned with the chaos  of depopulation, mass migration, political and cultural disintegration, and disruptive ecological change.

Although I tend to agree with Greer’s vision of ecological succession as a general path towards a more sustainable future, I’m not convinced that the drama will play out over a period of several centuries.  The parallels with the decline of the Roman Empire (and other collapsed societies) are compelling, however the differences in the level of complexity, interconnectedness, reliance on non-renewable resources, and ecological devastation between then and today are vast.  I do not envision an apocalyptic future nor do I envision the long stair step decline described so eloquently by Greer.  I suspect the  actual future will be somewhere firmly in the middle and far more messy than a long slow descent would imply.

In the spirit of prediction is which everyone is bound to be at least a little wrong, I propose the following laws of collapse as additional fodder for discussion.

THE PRIMARY LAW OF SOCIETAL, ECONOMIC, AND ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE

The severity of collapse will be equal and opposite to the level of complexity and environmental degradation that preceded it.

COROLLARIES TO THE PRIMARY LAW OF COLLAPSE

1. The level of reliance on non-renewable resources or phantom carrying capacity further increases the severity of collapse in proportion to the level of reliance on those resources
2. The velocity of collapse is a function of the number of single points of failure and potential Liebig minima embedded into the levels of complexity achieved prior to collapse
3. Catastrophic collapse is possible only when the number of cascading points of failure reach a critical mass far exceeding a society’s ability to cope on even a temporary basis.

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Avoiding Societal, Economic, and Ecological Collapse

“A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.” – The Collapse of Complex Societies – Joseph Tainter

“Any society that displays broad increases in most measures of capital production coupled with signs of serious depletion of key resources is a potential candidate for catabolic collapse.” – The Long Descent – John Michael Greer

“By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.” – Collapse- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed – Jared Diamond

“When irrupting populations surpass … available carrying capacity, the ensuing crash [collapse] may occur by different means among humans, animals, or plants …these differences do not affect the basic principle:  die-off is the sequel to overshoot [of carrying capacity].” – Overshoot – The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change – William Catton

“Collapse is not an attractive future.  The rapid decline of population and economy to levels that can be supported by the natural systems of the globe will no doubt be accompanied by failing health, conflict, ecological devastation, and gross inequalities.” – Limits to Growth – The 30 Year Update – Meadows, et al

Peak Oil, near economic meltdown, species loss, growing food insecurity, rising sea levels, jobless recoveries, decades long stagnant wages – is the United States and the industrialized world heading toward collapse? — has it already begun?  Can we avoid our own ecological suicide and and abandon the folly of infinite growth on a finite planet?  This post attempts to catalog different theories of collapse and various solutions proffered for it’s avoidance.

Theories of Collapse – Anthropological, Ecological, and Sociological

That civilizations rise and fall is historically (Rome, the Mayan, Easter Island, the Anasazi, etc.) evident.  The question for today’s global industrialized society is why.   Can we collectively see our own collapse on the horizon, and can it be avoided?

Joseph Tainter gives us a view of societal collapse based on a theory of diminishing marginal returns in complexity.  According to Tainter societies invest in complexity (agriculture, government bureaucracy, militarism, monetary and market systems, infrastructure, etc.) as a solution to problems.  Initially those investments have a high return and the society flourishes, but as that society grows and it and it’s problems (most of which are self induced) becomes more complex, the marginal returns on those investments fall and eventually turn negative.  As returns turn negative, and problems and stresses (resource limits, environmental degradation, competing societies, etc.) continue or emerge, the society is no longer able to cope and eventually succumbs to collapse.  The resulting collapse leads to a decline in complexity and after much turmoil and suffering, the eventual return of positive marginal returns.  In effect, Tainter’s theory of “peak complexity” leaves us in a kind of catch 22 in which we are hard wired to seek solutions which doom us to endless cycles of success and failure.

Tainter's Model of Complexity and the Law of Marginal Returns

In his book the The Long Descent, John Michael Greer builds on Tainter’s work with a model based on perspectives from human ecology. His theory of catabolic collapse is based on the interplay of the core elements of resources, capital, waste, and production.  In a human society where new capital derived from production C(p) is equal to or greater than the sum of the waste from production W(p) and the  waste from capital W(c) [called maintenance production M(p)] and the replenishment rate of resources r(R) is greater than the depletion rate of resources d(R) is sustainable.  However, a human society whose new capital from production is less than maintenance production [W(p) + W(c)] and whose depletion rate of resources d(R) is greater than it’s replenishment rate r(R) of resources, is subject to catabolic collapse.  According to Greer, catabolic collapse is a self-reinforcing process in which C(p) approaches zero and the lion’s share of a societies capital is converted to waste.

Jared Diamond (Collapse) sees societal collapse as the result of an unintentional ecological suicide (eco-cide) in which  growing consumption and population eventually push up against natural ecological limits.  As a society strains the limits of it’s natural resources, it either causes a decline (deforestation, top soil erosion, etc.) in the carrying capacity of the those resources, or by operating on the edge without any margin of safety succumbs to a drought or other stress the societies organic carrying capacity.

William Catton (Overshoot) takes a global, ecological and very contemporary view based on human carrying capacity.  Catton see’s humanity much like the yeast in a vat of crushed grapes, wildly consuming the sugar content of the mash until the sugar is depleted or the yeast succumbs to by-products of that consumption (alcohol).  In our case, the “sugar” is millions of years of solar energy converted by photosynthesis and geology into apparently vast stores of fossil fuel.  Catton asserts that fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal) combined with technology, amounts to nothing more than a “phantom” carrying capacity, and when these nonrenewable and energy dense natural resources reach their peak extraction rates and begin to decline, today’s industrial and global society will suffer a catastrophic collapse.  The following chart overlays global population with my estimate of the Earth’s organic (relying only on renewable resources) carrying capacity. The difference between the global population and the organic carrying capacity is Catton’s Phantom Carrying Capacity (labeled as Trust Fund Carrying Capacity).  If Catton’s theory is correct, some 5-billion lives hang by the thread of these depleting fossil fuel resources.

Phantom (Trust Fund) Carrying Capacity

Avoiding Collapse – Possible Solutions

“A framing premise of this paper is that the sustainability dilemma is not merely an ecological or technical or economic crisis as is usually assumed, but rather it is a crisis rooted in fundamental human nature. More specifically, it is a crisis of human evolutionary success – indeed, we have reached the point where our success is killing us!” – Is Humanity Fatally Successful? – William Rees

Limits to Growth, The Thirty Year Update – A Systems Theory Approach

In The Limits to Growth – The 30-Year Update, the authors describe the results of a systems theory model [World3] that was used to generate “broad sweep” future scenarios using the following key global metrics:

• natural resources
• food
• population
• pollution
• industrial output
• life expectancy
• consumer goods per person
• food per person
• services per person
• human welfare index
• human ecological footprint

Nearly every scenario modeled by the authors lead to an overshoot of the earth’s carrying capacity resulting in a collapse in population and human welfare.  Only one scenario’s underlying assumptions were successful in avoiding collapse and only if the assumptions used for the basis of the model were implemented in time.  The three critical assumptions in that scenario included:

1. All couples limit their family size to 2 children and have access to effective birth control technologies
2. A fixed goal of industrial output per capita (i.e. a steady-state economy)
3. The development  and investment in powerful technologies for pollution abatement, land yield enhancement, land protection and nonrenewable resources (assuming 20 years for full implementation)

When this model was run with a start date of 2002:

“The population leveled off at less than 8 billion people, who remained at their desired standard of living throughout the century.  Their life expectancy is high…per capita services grow to 50% above year 2000 levels.  By the end of the century there is sufficient food for everyone.  Pollution peaks and falls before it causes irreversible damage.  Nonrenewable resources deplete so slowly that nearly 50% of the original endowment is still present in 2100.”

To see the effect of start date on the scenario the author’s ran the same model with start dates of 1982 and 2022.  As you would expect the 1982 model results in a lower ultimate population, improved life expectancy, and a higher standard of living.  However, if action is delayed until 2022, resource and pollution problems reach an unmanageable level and it is too late to avoid decline and collapse.

However grim the outlook, at it’s writing, the authors held out hope that collapse could be averted.  Factoring in a margin for error in the model and the passing of eight years, one might conclude that we now have anywhere from zero to less than two decades before we pass a point of no return.

Post Carbon Institute – The New Real Deal
In the New Real Deal, the Post Carbon Institute outlines a plan to transition the industrial world to a post fossil fuel economy.  To be fair this is not a prescription to avoid collapse but more of a plan to minimize the impact of the inevitable industrial decline due to the depletion of fossil fuels.  The key elements of the plan include:

1. Make a massive and immediate shift to renewable energy
2. Electrify the transportation system
3. Rebuild the electricity grid
4. De-carbonize and relocalize the food system
5. Retrofit the building stock for energy efficiency and energy production

The focus of this comprehensive post carbon plan is consistent with the third assumption of The Limits to Growth scenario discussed above.

From a Failed Growth Economy to a Steady-State Economy — Herman Daly – An Economic Policy Approach to Avoiding Collapse
At the bi-annual conference of The United States Society for Ecological Economics in June of 2009, Herman Daly was honored for his many contributions to the field of ecological economics.  During his acceptance speech, in which he vilified the religion of growth hardwired into mainstream economic thought, he offered ten policy proposals directed at transitioning us to a sustainable steady-state economy and by implication, saving us from our own “ecological suicide”.

1. Use a Cap-Auction-Trade system for basic resources – Caps would limit biophysical scale by quotas on depletion or pollution, whichever is more limiting. Auctioning the quotas would capture scarcity rents for equitable redistribution. Trade would allow efficient allocation to highest uses. This policy has the advantage of transparency. It would limit  the amount and rate of depletion and pollution that the economy can be allowed to impose on the ecosystem. Caps are quotas or limits to the throughput of basic resources, especially fossil fuels. The quota would typically be applied at the input end because depletion is more spatially concentrated than pollution and hence easier to monitor. The resulting higher price of basic resources would promote more economical use at each upstream stage of production.
2. Institute Ecological Tax Reform (as an alternative or supplement to cap-auction-trade)
   Shift the tax base from a tax on value added (labor and capital)  to a tax on “that to which value is added”, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), and returned to nature (pollution). This internalizes external costs as well as raises revenue more equitably. It prices the scarce but previously un-priced contribution of nature. The value added by labor and capital is something we want to encourage, so stop taxing it. Depletion and pollution are things we want to discourage, so tax them.
3. Limit the Range of Inequality in Income (establish a minimum income and a maximum income)
   Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to the range of inequality. The civil service, the military, and the university manage with a range of inequality of a factor of 15 or 20. Corporate America has a range of 500 or more. Many industrial nations are below 25. Could we not limit the range to, say, 100, and see how it works? People who have reached the limit could either work for nothing at the margin if they enjoy their work, or devote their extra time to hobbies or public service. The demand left unmet by those at the top will be filled by those who are below the maximum. A sense of community necessary for democracy is hard to maintain across the vast income differences current in the US. Rich and poor separated by a factor of 500 become almost different species. The main justification for such differences has been that they stimulate growth, which will one day make everyone rich. This may have had superficial plausibility in an empty (resource abundant) world, but in our full world (resource limited) it is a fairy tale.
4. Free up the Length of the Working Day, Week, and Year
   Allow greater freedom for part-time or personal work. Full-time external employment for all is hard (impossible) to provide without growth. Other industrial countries have much longer vacations and maternity leaves than the US.  For the Classical Economists (versus today’s neo-classical economists) the length of the working day was a key variable by which the worker balanced the marginal disutility of labor with the marginal utility of income and of leisure so as to maximize enjoyment of life. Under industrialism the length of the working day became a parameter rather than a variable. We need to make it more of a variable subject to choice by the worker. And we should stop biasing the labor–leisure choice by advertising to stimulate more consumption and more labor to pay for it. Advertising should no longer be treated as a tax deductible ordinary expense of production.
5. Re-regulate International Commerce
   Move away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, and adopt compensating tariffs not to protect inefficient firms, but to protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition. We cannot integrate with the global economy and at the same time have higher wages, environmental standards, and social safety nets greater than the rest of the world. Trade and capital mobility must be balanced and fair, not deregulated or “free”.
6. Reduce and amend the authority of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization
   Transition to something like Keynes’ original plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances. This arrangement would seek balance on current account, and avoid large foreign debts and capital account transfers. For example, under Keynes’ plan the US would pay a penalty charge to the clearing union for its large deficit with the rest of the world, and China would also pay a similar penalty for its surplus. Both sides of the imbalance would be pressured to balance their current accounts by financial penalties, and if need be by exchange rate adjustments relative to the clearing account unit, called the bancor by Keynes. The bancor would serve as world reserve currency, a privilege that should not be enjoyed by any national currency. The IMF preaches free trade based on comparative advantage, and has done so for a long time. More recently the IMF-WB-WTO have started preaching the gospel of globalization, which, in addition to free trade, means free capital mobility internationally. The classical comparative advantage argument, however, explicitly assumes international capital immobility! When confronted with this contradiction the IMF waves its hands, suggests that you might be a xenophobe, and changes the subject. The IMF-WB-WTO contradict themselves in service to the interests of transnational corporations. International capital mobility, coupled with free trade, allows corporations to escape from national regulation in the public interest, playing one nation off against another. Since there is no global government they are in effect uncontrolled. The nearest thing we have to a global government (IMF-WB-WTO) has shown no interest in regulating transnational capital for the common good.
7. Move to 100% Reserve Requirements instead of Fractional Reserve Banking.
   This would put control of the money supply in hands of the government rather than private banks, which would no longer be able to create money out of nothing and lend it at interest. All quasi-bank financial institutions should be brought under this rule, regulated as commercial banks subject to 100% reserve requirements. Banks would earn their profit by financial intermediation only, lending savers’ money for them (charging a loan rate higher than the rate paid to savings account depositors) and providing checking, safekeeping, and other services. With 100% reserves every dollar loaned would be a dollar previously saved, re-establishing the classical balance between abstinence and investment. The government can pay its expenses by issuing more non interest-bearing fiat money to make up for the eliminated bank-created, interest-bearing money. However, it can only do this up to a strict limit imposed by inflation. If the government issues more money than the public wants to hold, the public will trade it for goods, driving the price level up. As soon as the price index begins to rise the government must print less and/or tax more. Thus a policy of maintaining a constant price index would govern the internal value of the dollar.
8. Stop treating the Scarce as if it were Non-scarce, but also stop treating the Non-scarce as if it were Scarce.
   Enclose the remaining commons of rival natural capital (e.g. atmosphere, electromagnetic spectrum, public lands) in public trusts, and price it by a cap-auction–trade system, or by taxes, while freeing from private enclosure and prices the non-rival commonwealth of knowledge and information. Knowledge, unlike throughput, is not divided in the sharing, but multiplied. Once knowledge exists, the opportunity cost of sharing it is zero and its allocative price should be zero. International development aid should more and more take the form of freely and actively shared knowledge, along with small grants, and less and less the form of large interest-bearing loans. Sharing knowledge costs little, does not create un-repayable debts, and it increases the productivity of the truly rival and scarce factors of production. Existing knowledge is the most important input to the production of new knowledge, and keeping it artificially scarce and expensive is perverse. Patent monopolies (aka “intellectual property rights”) should be given for fewer “inventions”, and for fewer years. Costs of production of new knowledge should, more and more, be publicly financed and then the knowledge freely shared.
9. Stabilize Population
   Work toward a balance in which births plus in- migrants equals deaths plus out-migrants. This is controversial and difficult, but as a start contraception should be made available for voluntary use everywhere.  Support voluntary family planning, and enforcement of reasonable immigration laws, democratically enacted in spite of the cheap labor lobby.
10. Reform how we measure and manage national well-being
    Separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account. Compare them at the margin, stop throughput growth when marginal costs equal or exceed marginal benefits. In addition to this objective approach, recognize the importance of the subjective studies that show that, beyond a threshold, further GDP growth does not increase self-evaluated happiness. Beyond a level already reached in many countries GDP growth delivers no more happiness, but continues to generate resource depletion and pollution. At a minimum we must not just assume that GDP growth is “economic growth”, but prove it. And start by trying to refute the mountain of contrary evidence.

Daly concedes that these policy prescriptions are radical, but also offers that they are amenable to gradual application.  The question is whether we have the luxury of time.  If the Limits to Growth model is anywhere near correct we have no more than about twenty years and that assumes that we start a coordinated and global effort immediately.  If we take climate change as a example of our ability to take action on a global scale, it has been more than 20 years since we first recognized the problem and we have yet to forge and began to implement an integrated global plan of action.

Given that the prescriptions to avoid or mitigate collapse offered by the authors of the Limits to Growth, the Post Carbon Institute’s New Real Deal, and Daly’s Steady State Economy are orders of magnitude more disruptive and contentious as those proposed to combat climate change, the prospects for any meaningful and timely action are near zero.

In all likelihood, change will only come in the face of crisis as we begin  to stair step down the uncertain and painful face of collapse.  By then we will have crossed the threshold from the possibility of averting collapse over to the unstable ground of mitigating the effects of the fall.  The signs that growth is no longer economic and that we have entered Tainter’s zone of negative marginal returns are all around us.  Couple that with resource depletion rates that exceed replenishment rates and we have met Greer’s criteria for Catabolic Collapse.  Add Peak Oil to the mix and we are in the early stages of the collapse of Catton’s “Phantom Carrying Capacity”.

Even in the context of crisis and decline, all the “solutions” discussed in this post are still  valid, however their value will diminish with the passing of time as resources and capital become increasing dear, our choices begin to narrow, and vested interests continue the fight to retain advantages that are destined to slip away.

Whether our future turns in the direction of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the more hopeful but still difficult direction of Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand, or a more sustainable future anchored in renewable energy, re-localized agriculture, with higher levels of satisfaction, and with much lower levels of consumption will depend on the choices that we make.

Truth Telling

“All of humanity is in peril, if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth and all the truth, and do so promptly – right now.” – Buckminster Fuller

How many times have I been told, “Keep it positive! Emphasize solutions!” Yet I can’t tell you how often I’ve sat down with an activist whose latest policy paper is all about solutions, and in heart-to-heart conversation they reveal that they don’t really think our species has much of a chance of avoiding major catastrophe, maybe even extinction.  It’s a tough balance. If you tell the truth to a fault, you don’t get invited to policy seminars, and politicians avoid you like the plague. If you sugar coat the message, you have to live with the knowledge that the vast majority of people on our planet have almost no awareness of what is about to happen to them, and you aren’t telling them. – Trying to Save the World – Richard Heinberg

I started posting to this blog in March of 2007.  It’s been as much a journey as a journal and my posts have been the cairns left on the trail of my search for meaning and truth.  The direction of my search has been open-ended, non-directional, and often both troubling and unexpected.  I changed the name of the blog from “The Sustainable Home” to “Sustainable Dwelling” as my vision expanded and my subject matter broadened in scope and reach.

As a result of one my posts, I was asked to make a presentation this summer to the International Association of Public Participation about making sustainable decisions in the context of the four pillars of sustainability.  In preparation, I was compelled to look back on my journey and ask if I really “knew” anything.  Would I be able to humbly “tell the truth” or fail and spew forth some grossly ego-contaminated version of pseudo truth?  As a result,  this blog has been mostly silent as I struggled to  resolve and make peace with what I’ve written and what I’ve learned, including my readings of others who have walked a similar path.

Much like the journey of this blog, the process of preparing the presentation became it’s own journey and I began to question the mythical foundations of humanity and how they shape our actions and beliefs.  How simple things like canvas shopping bags, electric cars, buying local, and recycling give us a false and comforting sense of “going green” that masks the imminent peril of our ecological overshoot.

In the end, my presentation – my humble attempt at the truth, would attempt to ask and answer two questions:

1. Can humanity achieve a sustainable balance within our closed ecosystem, or have we reached the point where that vision is just another example of the hubris of human exceptionalism?
2. Is it time to switch our focus from sustainability to one of resilience in the face of societal collapse and industrial decline?

I’ve posted a copy of the presentation including the speaker notes on SlideShare.net.  You can find it here.

Is a warning about the future a prediction of doom or a call to follow a different path?

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Hubris and Ecological Retribution

I’ve spent the last month painting and re-roofing the house and enjoying the slow emergence of spring in the rockies as the aspen grove turned a vibrant green.  I’ve also been watching the bear market rally in stocks as less bad news leads investors to believe that the fed can induce another debt bubble of false prosperity and growth.  So as the rain falls and temperatures hover in the low 40’s, I’m inspired to comment on the symbolism of the GM bankruptcy.  Amid all the chatter about “Government Motors” I was struck by Dan Neil’s (the L.A. Times) view of the larger lesson within our nation’s largest bankruptcy.

“This is the lesson of GM’s bankruptcy, and it has little to do with market share and miles per gallon.  It’s a rebuff of the notion of exceptionalism.

Any organization that fails to sufficiently safeguard its means of self-correction and reform, that forsakes long-term investment for short-term gain, that piles up debt year after year, will eventually fail, no matter how grand its history, or noble its purpose.  If you don’t feel a tingle of national mortality in all of this, you’re not paying attention.”

Neil doesn’t go beyond the “tingle of national mortality”, but it is no secret that the U.S. is technically bankrupt and avoids default only because of our reserve currency status and foreign purchases of our growing debt.  But the inevitable decline of the American empire only begins to describe Neil’s “rebuff of exceptionalism”.

American hubris, our excessive pride in our specialness or “exceptionalism” was born in ernest as we exited victorious from WWII.  With the rest of the  world’s industrial capacity lying in ruin,  GM and corporate america dominated the world industrial stage and American quickly transformed its vast war economy and productive capacity into a consumer economy that would eventually lead us onto a treadmill of crushing debt.  Post war retail analyst Victor Le Beau best describes the reasoning that would lead to America’s 5% of the world population consuming 30% of the world’s resources.

“Our enormously productive [war] economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Such reasoning rested on the post war belief that American ingenuity and the miracle of science and technology would overcome any limits and endless growth would lead us to a utopian future.  In his forward to William Catton’s “Overshoot”,  Stewart Udall posits the exact date that America’s post war euphoria jumped the Happy Day’s shark.

“It is easy to fix the exact date when our euphoria reached a zenith.  It was the July week in 1969 when the astronauts walked on the moon.  We celebrated this triumph with a mixture of awe and self-congratulation.  President Nixon proclaimed that it was “the greatest week since the creation of the earth.”  A NASA official opined that the feat demonstrated we were “masters of the universe.”  This proves that we can do what ever we decide to do,  Americans concluded from this climax event.”

However the 70’s would mark the first cracks in our shinning edifice of hubris.  Domestic oil production would peak in 1970 and OPEC would give us the first taste of our dangerous dependency on oil.  Honda and Toyota quality and fuel efficiency would begin to threaten the supremacy of GM.  Reacting to the costs of our failed adventure in Vietnam, Nixon would take us off the gold standard and set the stage for massive deficit spending.  Real incomes would begin to decline, saving and thrift would lose favor and combine with debt and two income families in an attempt to keep the consumer economy  alive and growing.  Our post war euphoria would be replaced with the lament, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we ….”

President Carter attempted to raise the issue of limits and lead us in direction of conservation and renewable energy, but Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s war on Nixon’s policy induced inflation set the stage for Reagan’s promise of a return to post war euphoria.  Reagan delivered with a “deficits don’t matter” war on the evil empire and launched a 20-year bull market built on a phantom foundation of deregulation, easy credit, and a mountain of government and private debt.  As W added more to the national debt than all previous presidents combined, our national house of cards collapsed in a pool of financial sector greed and overreach.

As GM attempts to pull itself from the ashes of bankruptcy and politicians around the world promise the oxymoron of “sustainable” growth, nearly 7-billion humans are still mostly blind to the reality of ecological limits and harsh retribution of overshoot and collapse.  This is the ultimate hubris—the hubris of human exceptionalism.

“The whole human enterprise is a machine without brakes, for there are no indications that the world’s political leaders will deal with the realities until catastrophes occur.  The rich countries are using resources with extravagant disregard for the next generation; and poor countries appear to incapable of acting to curb the population increases that are erasing their hope for a better future.  In such a world, declarations and manifestos which ignore the imperatives of the limits of growth are empty exercises.  All the available evidence says we have already passed a point of no return, and tragic human convulsions are at hand.” – Stewart Udall, Charles Conconi, and David Osterhout,  The Energy Balloon

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A “Crash Course” in Reality

I recently took the time to wade through Chris Martenson’s (free) online Crash Course and found it to be a brilliant and accessible summary of the economic, energy, and environment forces shaping our very unsustainable future.  If you have that uneasy feeling that the current financial meltdown is much more than just another business cycle, then this course is a must.  Martenson makes the case that a financial system that must grow to survive married to energy and environmental systems that cannot grow is a ticking time bomb that will make next 20 years VERY different from the last.

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Footprints, Limits, and Human Carrying Capacity

Lately, I’ve been thinking about footprints.  I live in the Rocky Mountains near the Pike National Forest and often hike or ride my horse in the forest.  Counting my wife and neighbors about a dozen of us tramp through the woods on a regular basis.  We mostly followed faint game trails that over the years have become miles of well established two foot wide tracks through the Ponderosa, Lodgepole and Aspen environments of the adjacent public lands.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively small footprint.  A slight loss of carbon sink and still too faint to cause any erosion damage.  Judging by the animal prints and scat, it’s safe to say that that the local fauna also make frequent use of our primitive highway system.  Still, however faint, our impact is still visible, clear evidence of our small tribes foot and hoof fall on the local flora.

Out of the forest, back in the neighborhood, our footprint grows ever larger.  Our homes cast their own footprint on the land.  The roads that serve those homes cast an exponentially larger footprint.  In Colorado, the electricity that serves those homes casts a carbon footprint of 1.8 lbs per kwhr and most of us contribute addition carbon with propane furnaces and supplemental wood heating.  We do a bit better with water.  We draw water from shallow wells that tap into the first water flowing out of the eastern slope of the continental divide and we return 85% of the that water to the local aquifer through our septic systems.   When you factor in some of our 100 mile round trip commutes to Denver and the vast global supply chain that delivers pineapples to our households in mid winter, you begin to just get a glimmer of the immense footprint that our small mountain tribe casts upon the world.

The concept of “footprint” used as a way to measure humanity’s impact on the earth first gained traction in the 1990’s when Rees and Wackernagel introduced the idea of “ecological footprint”.  The ecological footprint was and is an attempt to quantify the amount of land required to supply the world’s population with what they consume.  Recently we have added “carbon footprint” and “water footprint” to our lexicon ecological metrics.

Footprints are a very helpful way to visualize environmental impacts. In essence they are direct or indirect references to limits or to the concept of limits.  They help me to frame my mountain tribe and it’s forest tracks within the context of the 6.7 billion human inhabitants of earth hell-bent for growth and the pursuit of happiness in a closed and limited eco-system.

One way to think about limits is through the concept of carrying capacity.  For example, the carrying capacity of a biological species in a closed environment like an island is the population size of the species the environment can be sustained indefinitely, given the food, water and other natural resources available.  The concept of human carrying capacity is a bit more complex since one has to factor in the possibility of leveraging technology to increase the earth’s carrying capacity.  You also have to consider the equal possibility of unintentionally leveraging technology to decrease the earth’s carrying capacity.  Since the free market does not see any “carrying capacity price signals”, technological impacts on organic or natural carrying capacity tend to be skewed toward the negative.  William Catton, author of “Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change”, defines human carrying capacity not just in terms of population but also in terms of humanity’s “load” on the environment.

[Human] Carrying capacity needs to be understood as the maximum load an environment can permanently support (i.e., without reduction of its ability to support future generations), with load referring not just to the number of users of an environment but to the total demands they make upon it. For human societies, as for populations of other species, the relation of load to carrying capacity is crucial in shaping our future. Public comprehension of the concepts of carrying capacity and load is both vague and inadequate, and the need to correct these deficiencies is urgent.

When load comes to exceed carrying capacity, the overload inexorably causes environmental damage; then the reduced carrying capacity leads to load reduction (i.e., a crash). – William Catton

In the world of flora and fauna, a species will sometimes stumble upon an environment rich in nutrients creating a large and temporary surplus in carrying capacity.  The usual result is a sharp increase in population leading to an overshoot and a deficit in carrying capacity.  Tragically, this causes both a sharp degradation of carrying capacity and a total population collapse.

Whether humanity will suffer the same fate is subject to debate.  Some predict extinction while others believe that technology will continue to keep us safely in a state of carrying capacity surplus.  While either extreme is possible, I think the truth will end up somewhere north of extinction.

Our greatest danger today is that we rely too little on natural or organic carrying capacity and too much on borrowed or specious carrying capacity.  To use a quasi-mathematical formula:

Human Carrying Capacity = Organic Carrying Capacity + Specious Carrying Capacity

where (in simplest of terms),

Organic Carrying Capacity is a function of:

• the biosphere
• surface water and hydrologic cycle
• the atmosphere
• solar irradiation
• top soil

and, the Specious or Borrowed (from the past) Carrying Capacity is a function of non-renewable resources such as:

• fossil fuels
• minerals
• groundwater from slow recharge aquifers

In the case of human carrying capacity, both categories are acted on by technology and our economic systems of finance and trade.  The population explosion starting with the industrial revolution was made possible by the massive technological leveraging of non-renewable resources to create a temporary and specious carrying capacity surplus. The same technological advances caused and continue to cause a concurrent and accelerating degradation of our organic carrying capacity.  As a result, human carrying capacity now rests on an unsustainable house of cards.

As our total population and standard of consumption(load) have taken us back into a condition of carrying capacity deficit and we are now on the brink of collapse.  The tipping point will depend on Liebig’s Law which states that “whatever necessity is least abundantly available in an environment sets the environment’s carrying capacity”.

In our case, the Liebig trigger could be the peaking of oil production, food or water limitations, or a myriad of environmental ills that continue to further degrade organic carrying capacity.  It may even be systemic breakdown in our economy – call it “peak debt”.

Whatever the initial trigger, the question is how we will react.  Will we recognize it for what it is and navigate our way to a new state of equilibrium and balance, or frantically cling to “growth” as we compete for resources in a race to extinction?

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Housing Prices Still Unsustainable?

In a February 23rd interview on Yahoo Finance Dr. Robert Shiller makes the case that we are only half way to a bottom in home prices and that we may  experience another 25% in price declines as we approach the post WWII trendline. He also explodes the real estate industry myth of homes as investments.

However, since real estate is all about location-location-location, the impact of any further decline in values will probably depend on where you live.  See this report from the University of Virginia.

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Beyond GDP – Measuring American Well-being after the Economic Collapse of 2008

“The Gross National Product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. GNP includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior…And if GNP includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike…It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”  — Bobby Kennedy

When FDR was elected president in the midst of the Great Depression, the economic data  available to help him engineer a recovery was limited to stock price indices, freight car loadings, and a few incomplete indices of industrial production.  As a result, in order to get a handle on whether the New Deal programs were having the intended stimulus effects, economist Simon Kuznets of the National Bureau of Economic Research was tasked to develop a new set of national economic metrics.

Kuznets would win the Nobel prize in economics for his efforts and the invention of Gross Domestic Product [GDP] would become the primary measure of economic health for the U.S. and the developed world for decades to come.  As a macro-economic indicator GDP would receive universal praise as an essential tool to help manage the economy and moderate the effects of the “business cycle”.  Although merely quantitative in nature, it would take on a qualitative veneer in hands of economists and politicians who would paint GDP growth as “good” and any contraction as “bad”.

In a presentation to congress explaining his invention, Kuznets would warn that, “the welfare of a nation can … scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income …”, and yet GDP wrapped around a universally accepted “value of growth as progress”, would evolve to become our de-facto measurement of national well-being.

There have been many comparisons of the economic situation faced by president-elect Obama to the one that FDR faced in the Great Depression.  Although the specifics may differ, the gravity and systemic nature of the economic failures of these two era’s cannot be disputed.  It could also be argued that much like FDR, the Obama administration needs a new set of metrics to engineer a sustainable and equitable recovery.  A set of metrics that measures improvements in our collective well-being as accurately as GDP measures the churn of money through our economy.

GDP is no longer sufficient to measure our nation or any nations progress.  The U.S. economy leads the world in the measure of GDP and yet in many ways our economy and nation acutely lags in the provision of our collective well-being.

• One in six Americans goes without health insurance (around 47 million people).

• The U.S. ranks 24th among the 30 most affluent countries in life expectancy – yet spends more on health care than any other nation.

• The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland; if the U.S. infant mortality rate were the same as that of top-ranked Sweden, every year 21,000 additional American babies would live to celebrate their first birthdays.

• One American dies every 90 seconds from obesity-related health problems.

• One in seventeen Americans (about 6 percent of the population) suffers from severe mental illness.

• Fourteen percent of the population – some 30 million Americans – lack the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.

• More than one in five Americans – 22 percent of the population – have “below basic” math skills, making it impossible to balance a checkbook, calculate a tip, or figure out from an advertisement the amount of interest on a loan.

• Nearly one in five American children lives in poverty, with more than one in thirteen living in extreme poverty.

• The real value of the minimum wage has decreased by 40% in the past forty years and wages have been essentially stagnant since the 1970’s

• More families with children are homeless today than at any time since the Great Depression.

• The U.S. has 5% of the world’s people – but holds 24% of the world’s prisoners.

• The U.S. ranks 42nd in global life expectancy and leads the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty.

“To be a leading democracy in the information age means producing objective, independent, scientifically grounded, and widely shared quality information on where we are and where we are going, on both an absolute and relative basis, including comparisons to other nations.” — David Walker, Former Comptroller General of the United States

“Happiness is very serious business … the dogma of limitless productivity and growth in a finite world is unsustainable and unfair for future generations.” — Bhutan Prime Minister Jigme Thinley

If GDP is not a meaningful measure of a nation’s well-being then what is?  What metrics are needed to gauge the actions and deeds of our elected officials so that we can objectively measure whether government policies add to or subtract from our well-being?  Where would the U.S. stand when compared objectively with the rest of the world?

As it turns out, there is growing interest in providing indexes that transcend economic output and measure the ultimate objective of a nations economy — the well-being of it’s citizens.

The Human Development Index
One of the first metrics to challenge the supremacy of GDP was the Human Development Index [HDI].  The HDI was developed in 1990 by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and was immediately adopted by the United Nations Development Program [UNDP] in its annual Human Development Report.

The HDI index combines the normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is a standardized means of measuring human development – a concept that, according to the UNDP, “refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc.”

The HDI combines three basic dimensions:

1. Life expectancy at birth, as a proxy measure of a population’s health and longevity
2. Knowledge and education, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratio (with one-third weighting).
3. Standard of living, as measured by the natural logarithm of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) in United States dollars.

The basic use of HDI is to rank countries by level of “human development”.  This has evolved into a way of classifying whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped.

According to the 2007/2008 U.N. Human Development Report the U.S. ranked 12th based on the HDI among the “developed” nations.  More troubling is that the U.S. ranking has steadily declined since 1980 when we were ranked 2nd.  This decline happened during a period in which U.S. annual GDP grew from about $5.2-trillion to over $14-trillion dollars.

The Happy Planet Index
In 2006, the U.K’s New Economics Foundation [NEF] published the Happy Planet Index [HPI].  One should not be put off by the somewhat tongue-in-cheek title of this index.  This is a very serious and well researched metric with a serious objective.  In the words of the NEF:

“This report takes a very different look at the wealth and poverty of nations.  It measures the ecological efficiency with which, county by country, people achieve long and happy lives.  In doing so, it strips our view of the economy back to its absolute basics: what goes in (natural resources), and what comes out (human lives of differing length and happiness).”

The HPI combines three indicators to achieve a measure of how well a given country converts the earth’s finite resources into the well-being experienced by their citizens.  As an equation the index can be expressed as:

HPI = (Life Satisfaction x Life Expectancy) / Ecological Footprint

where,

• Life Satisfaction is derived primarily from the World Values Survey
• Life Expectance data is taken from the U.N. Development Report
• and, Ecological Footprint is based on data from the Global Footprint Network

The NEF did not intend the index to be a happiness scorecard.  They stress that:

“It is important to recognize from the outset that the HPI is not an indicator of the happiest country on the planet, or the best place to live.  Nor does it indicate the most developed country in the traditional sense, or the most environmentally friendly,  Instead, the HPI combines these notions, providing a method of comparing countries progress towards the goal of providing long-term well-being for all without exceeding the limits of equitable resource consumption.”

Since the U.S. casts such a huge ecological footprint relative to it’s population, it is not surprising that based on HPI, the U.S. ranks 150th in the world just behind Lithuania.  America’s HPI ranking underscores just how out of sync our nation’s outsized GDP is with our actual well-being and our inefficient stewardship of natural resources.

What Metrics are Needed for a New American Century – A New New Deal?

“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.” — Barack Obama

The U.N.’s HDI index and the New Economic Foundation’s HPI index provide excellent alternatives to GDP.  These indexes can easily be used in comparison with other countries and help to underscore some of our nation’s weaknesses, but they do not provide the kind of detail needed for policy makers at the local, state, and national levels to make decisions and for citizens to hold those policy makers accountable.

There are two privately funded American initiatives that are aimed at meeting those local, state, and national goals and to forging a more meaningful way of measuring our nation’s progress.

The American Human Development Project
The American Human Development Project  [AHDP] was founded in 2006 and is modeled on the U.N.’s global Human Development Report.  The AHDP’s American Human Development Index [AHDI] combines indicators for the three domains of a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living.

With their 2008-2009 Measuring America Report we get a first look at the AHDI index in application and can begin to compare various regions of the country.  At the state level, we find that Connecticut ranks first and Mississippi ranks last.  Among the nation’s 436 congressional districts, New York’s Fourteenth District, in New York City, ranks first, and California’s Twentieth District, around Fresno, ranks last. The average resident of New York’s Fourteenth District earns over three times as much as the average resident of California’s Twentieth District, lives four and a half years longer, and is ten times as likely to have a college degree.

The report’s rich volume of data provides a baseline to measure future progress and a new set of benchmarks for state-to-state and region-to-region comparisons.

The State of the USA
The State of the USA, Inc. [SUSA] is a non-profit founded in 2007 dedicated to providing easy access to anyone interested in finding relevant data about the true state of the nation.  SUSA’s new website will launch in 2009 and include data on an array of topics including:

• Animals, Plants, and Ecosystems
• Business
• Civic Involvement
• Crime and Safety
• Ecosystem Goods, Services
• Education
• Employment, Labor Markets
• Families & Children
• Health
• Housing
• Immigration
• Income & Wealth
• National Security
• Population
• Prices & Inflation
• Production & Output
• Research & Development
• Soil, Water, & Air
• Values & Culture

SUSA does not provide a new index but rather a high quality public data hub intended to promote informed citizen involvement in government.

A Model Metric for a New American Beginning
If I were going to choose a model for our new government to use as a benchmark for a new American metric of citizen well-being, it would be the Canadian Index on Well-Being [CIW].  Conceived in 1999, the CIW is a partnership of Canadian national leaders, organizations, and grass root efforts across Canada in consultation with international experts.  the CIW’s visions is:

“…to enable Canadians to share in the highest well-being status by identifying, developing and publicizing measures that offer clear, valid and regular reporting on progress toward that goal and well-being outcomes Canadians seek as a nation.”

The CIW challenges us to imagine an index that:

• Distinguishes between good things like health and clean air, and bad things, like sickness and pollution;

• Promotes volunteer work and unpaid care-giving as social goods, and overwork and stress as social deficits;

• Places a value on educational achievement, early childhood learning, economic and personal security, a clean environment, and social and health equity;

• Values a better balance between investment in health promotion and spending on illness treatment.

After nearly ten years in the making, the CIW index is scheduled to launch in the spring of 2009 and will combine eight indicator domains into a composite index to provide a quick snapshot of whether overall Canadian well-being is improving or declining.  Detailed reports will flush out the composite index and provide trend data and additional information about each of the individual domains.  The eight domains will provide a comprehensive view of Canadian well-being.

• Living Standards are defined as the quality and quantity of goods and services, both public and private, available to the population, and the distribution of these goods and services within the population.

• Community Vitality is characterized by strong, active and inclusive relationships between residents, private sector, public sector and voluntary organizations that work to foster individual and collective well-being. Vital communities are those that are able to cultivate these relationships in order to create, adapt and thrive in the changing world and thus improve well-being of citizens.

• Healthy Populations measures the health of a population in its fullest expression – being alive and well, experiencing disease, disability and delaying death, lifestyles we lead, and care we receive.

• Educated Populace measures the literacy skills required to function effectively in society, and is aware of contextual situations and systems, social and economic interconnections, current world events, the processes of the natural world, and the influence of current lifestyles on population health and on the choices and quality of life of future generations

• Time Use measures the use of time, how people experience time, what controls its use, and how it affects well-being.

• Ecosystem Health measures the state of well-being and integrity of our natural environment.  This includes the sustainability of Canada’s natural resources and the capacity of our ecosystems and watersheds to provide a sustained level of ecological goods and services for the well-being of Canadians and other species in nature. This domain examines both the current state of Canada’s ecosystems and changes over time.

• Civic Engagement measures the health of our democracy. It addresses three aspects of our public lives and the governance of our society: How engaged are citizens in public life and governance?; Do our governments function in an open, transparent, effective, fair, equitable, and accessible manner?: and Are Canadians, our governments and our corporations good global citizens? Civic engagement includes our electoral processes, and the policy and decision-making processes at all levels of government.

• Arts, Culture, and Recreation measures culture as a general term covering all forms of human expression. People’s culture is uniquely expressed in their language, and the contours of our multicultural society can be sketched with measures of linguistic usage. What matters to Canadians sometimes matters in different ways to those observing events from different cultural perspectives. Art is a particular type of culture. Art includes performing arts; visual arts; media arts; and facilities like galleries and all kinds of museums, historical and heritage sites.

As we face the greatest economic challenge since the Great Depression, the citizens of America will be poorly served if as a nation, we continue to rely solely on GDP as a measure of our progress.  Obama has promised change, he has promised to “promote our common welfare”, he will need more than GDP to point the way.

“The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them.” — Barack Obama, Jun. 4, 2005

See Remodelling GDP, Financial Times March 2009

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