Evidence abounds: the world is rife with dilemmas, crises, and predicaments. Prevalent are both claims of the immense severity and immediacy of our global situation, and claims of the unprecedented great achievements, and innovations. Still, many more claims warrant that the future is set to be much better or much worse, depending on the set of memes one occupies their mindspace with or the company with which one is immersed. It may seem confusing that a world so old, faced with hard realities in physics, geology, and ecology since forever, could instead be overwhelmed by collective and individual mental realities – created, propagated, and shared exclusively amongst humans. Under greater scrutiny, this phenomenon is far from curious or out of the norm for Homo sapiens, let alone the universe. Polarity is a principal existing since time immemorial – the great law of opposites. The untrained mind is like a spinning magnet, zooming from one end of the polarity spectrum to the other, in lesser and greater magnifications and degrees; love/hate, good/evil, happy/sad, and so forth. Nothing out of the ordinary. Human nature 101. The human experience that goes on inside shapes to a large extent what goes on outside. But what makes our current snippet of history and time unique? And exactly how do our collective and individual mental states affect our experience and action during this period, and at this moment?
A key reason I’ve set forth on this project – the main focus of which will be this blog – is to explore the acute effects that the landscape of the human mind has on the necessity of biological and ecological adaptation – the physical landscape of the earth. For roughly 200,000 years our species, Homo sapiens, has existed as a peculiarly adapted and intelligent species. Our presence has spread as far as that of the rat or the cockroach – to every imaginable corner of the globe. Even before our current forms of our species were known to exist, we have been on a constant course of adaption to the hard physical limits of our environs. Let us take quick look into the basis of human ecology, to roughly frame how and why we adapted to and continue to adapt to such limits.
Every organism exists under the constant pressures exerted from its surroundings. Each organism has basic sets of needs and its biology and physiology evolve in infinite ways to ensure the meeting of such goals. A primary need is food and shelter, both of which come from external sources and are intrinsically connected. Shelter does not just mean home in the sense we are likely to imagine – a house or some structure. For most organisms, shelter comes in the form of its environment; varied depths of the ocean, levels of altitude, the varied bioregions and climates, or even on your skin. In its suitable shelter, or environment, an organism, with any luck, secures its food. The plankton and marine alga feast on carbon dioxide and solar rays in the upper layers of the ocean, the great pine and spruce feast on the sun, atmospheric gases and nutrients from the cooled soils of higher altitudes and latitudes, or the Bald Eagle, which lives across north America, feasting on fish and living and breeding in the safety of trees. These are basic examples – but each has a deeper story of its synergies with its environment and how each shape each other – explore them if you have a moment. Key to all life is solar energy – whether the energy from it is obtained & utilized directly, like in a blade of grass or by some other means, like the ruminant that eats grass, you can always trace the source of all life back to the brightness of the sun. It is the plankton’s key life source, it warms the dark foliage of the evergreen conifers in seemingly inhospitable ranges, and grows the necessary food of fish, the Bald Eagles most likely meal. Each organism fills its niche, which is quite narrow for most, and lives, literally, by the whims of nature. A shortage of any crucial input increases or secures the likelihood of prolonged suffering, if not certain death, and in extreme cases, extinction.
And so we adapt as well: our key advantage being generalization. We need not only one source of energy from food nor one ecosystem for shelter. And we don’t only harvest our solar ration (our food, heat, etc.) from one source either or even in current form i.e. the yearly budget of sunshine. We use our unique physiological and mental capacities to make the best of our worlds. Let’s imagine back to what has shaped us up to this point. Imagine the first time human’s encountered fire – a stage a bit before our arrival as Homo sapiens. Fire is essentially a release of stored sunlight – the accumulation of carbon in the cells of trees and other woody plants by action of photosynthesis. Our first access to this carbon source was probably revolutionary – it afforded us heat and light at night, cooked food, and landscape management previously beyond our reach. Centuries progressed and so did our control of fire. It shaped our settlement patterns, our cultures, and our artifacts. It also facilitated the "Three age's" of human development; the stone, bronze, and iron respectively – times when humans acquired greater and greater influence over land and each other through deforestation, mining, and the use of metals. All of this on the back of the tool of fire.
Somewhere along the line humans learned that we could also “control” our access to sunlight in other ways as well: specifically in the form of intentional plant propagation, or what we now know as agriculture. Many have touched on the profundity of this discovery, probably as many as have explored our access to controlled fire. What we know for sure is that it altered human settlement immensely and probably forever. I’ll spare the drawn out details, as there are a fair number of very good overviews of the topic of agriculture & civilization. What I do wish to mention, is that agriculture is the double-edged sword of solar exploitation. This is for two main reasons really: one being that it allows the relatively easy and efficient access and guarantee of calories and nutrients, especially compared to hunting and gathering. But, it is entirely dependent on the stores of carbon and fertility of the soil, as well as the whims of the climate and nature. Any good overview of humans and agriculture is sure to expound on the dramatic and often-lethal effects agriculture can have on land and humans when taken to the extremes of soil erosion, land exhaustion, drought, and eventually famine (bearing that a lot of famine is political, but that’s an entirely separate discourse). There are countless historical and current precedents showing this, some of which I will explore in greater detail in future posts. Many attribute the development of hierarchical settlement patterns and even the concept of money (as in usury, debt bearing currency) to the historically unprecedented surplus of storable calories brought about through agriculture. Nonetheless, this phase of solar mastery, combined with the mastery of fire, continued to shape the way humans lived on the land and in its' minds. Accumulating on the tail of the discoveries and developments of fire and agriculture was the exploitation of fossil carbon reserves. Here again, human existence met another breakthrough in physical limitation.
Fossil carbon access fueled the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the early 18th century, with the first widespread exploitation of coal as an energy source in the burgeoning industrial centers of Europe. Much is attributed to human ingenuity during this era – the steam engine, mass production, the factory, and so forth. In all reality, this is a stretch of the truth. Human ingenuity was the by-product of humanities newly found access and ability to exploit the most historically dense form of energy. If agriculture is the double-edge sword of solar exploitation, then ancient carbon exploitation is the metaphorical triple-edge sword; It is dense in energy, easy to transport, but polluting in its extraction, burning, and disposal, and ultimately, non-renewable. As our ability to access, and subsequently manipulate and burn, these fossil fuels carried on over time, it fueled the rise and fall of civilizations and empires, including our own. At this present time in history, for all intents and purposes, humans in western industrial or post-industrial nations exist almost entirely on the energy derived from ancient fuel sources such as coal, which provides around 57% of the electricity in the US, liquid fuels like diesel and gasoline, which power virtually all transport, and also the majority of our food system, and natural gas, which is used to heat a good majority of homes and cook a lot of folks food. Fossil carbons went from novel artifacts of geological processes to the lifeblood of our very existence in a very short stint. And this is exactly the place where I’d like to diverge from the historical exploration into the heart of my essay.
The pressures of the environment, as you will recall, shape to a large extent, many aspects of an organisms ascent or descent in the world. This is true for every undomesticated creature alive. There are no safety nets when the pressures of the environment overrule the effort exerted by each organism. And in many cases, for many species, it is not so much effort, but the luck of the draw, that determines success or failure. Charles Darwin is oft paraphrased by the statement, "Survival of the fittest". But this is not what I mean by the success of an organisms effort or its sheer luck, that it is somehow outsmarting or out muscling other organisms. To quote Darwin more accurately, I mean to convey, "In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment." What makes humans ability to extract and burn up fossil carbon, or fossil sunlight, so amazing is that it creates a noticeable padding or distance from ecological limits – the environmental pressures that we explored earlier. Humans now have access to amenities unfathomable to even the most wealthy and powerful of lords of any empire of the pre-industrial past, let alone any other creature. We are afforded barriers from ecological vagaries very few species have the luxury to enjoy, except maybe our domesticated pets and animals. We do this thanks to the equivalent of millions of figurative carbon slaves, those immense stores of energy contained in dense, non-renewable, fossil fuels. Our horse power resides largely in diesel engines, not oat fed muscles. If we're setting out for survival, we're surely off course on adapting ourselves best to our environment.
Our wealth is so pervasive that many live in complete unawareness of it altogether. This is acutely so in America and other such countries, with cultures breast fed on the tits of consumerism, SUVs, television, hand-held computers and internet, on-demand shipment of food and other commodities. It’s as if ecological limits are a thing of the past, relegated to the less fortunate of the bunch. The amounts of physical effort or mental exercise that go into daily calorie consumption are virtually nill – the flip of a switch, swipe of a card, pressing of the pedal. Zoom, we’re off. So it seems, and especially with a glimpse in the rearview mirror of historical day-to-day life. A species so well attended to that its primary worry is something along the lines of whats on television tonight, not whats for dinner – dinner's in the microwave. A majority are more entertained by the next new toy than an impending bottleneck to their adaptation in a quickly changing world. We now live in a world of duel precedence, one where our concerns are as they've never been evolutionarily, but also a world where those adaptations are the byproducts of a fading era.
A glance over history will reveal that precedence is actually quite common. The historical patterns of breakthrough and downfall have gone nowhere. That humanity is in the midst of one of the most profound, long-lasting, potentially painful precedence’s since the first few rumblings of the coal cart out of the mineshaft is no exception. This is a shift as yet unaddressed, and perhaps unimaginable, by the mass majority of the fossil feeding inhabitants of the carbon hungry western world. This precedence is the issue of Peak Oil – that time, approximately sometime around the year 2006 – when the global production of oil reached its all-time high, plateaued, and has since been making an unpredictable, but certain, decline. There are countless studies, government reports, books, and hundreds of websites on the topic, outlining the consequences that peak oil will, and is, having on our world. Even still, it’s a reality few have faced, and even fewer have begun to act in earnest to adapt to. And who is to blame such responses? We've never been here before. We have no idea what actions will surely set us on the right course. It's likely only hindsight will tell. The only thing that's certain is: this is what life after peak oil looks like and that as our carbon padding slips, ecological realities will once again become daily reminders of our mortality.
Equivalent to the number of books and studies are theories, responses, strategies, and supposed “solutions” to this predicament of depleting fossil carbon. The problem with a predicament is that it has no solution. It's a "difficult, unpleasant, or embarrassing situation". In the case of fossil fuels, no energy source is so sweetly dense in carbon, so there is no anti-peak-oil solution. There's, when it's all said and done, only make-the-best-of-it. Regardless of this fact, there are two common themes in this response of human thought. Very common is an idea that some as of yet uncovered, un-thought of (or previously squashed or destroyed) technological breakthrough will pave the way for alternative energy sources, greater fossil fuel extraction, or zero-point, perpetual motion energy, affording business as usual no interruptions. On the other end of the polarity exists equally common ideas or claims that the world is or will soon go to hell in a hand basket – sudden catastrophic collapse, rapture, Armageddon, apocalypse – take your pick. The ecological, geological, and physical limits of earth are either of no immediate concern or a blank canvas on which to paint apocalypse theory du-jour. Several years ago I read an illuminating text, The Long Descent by John Michael Greer, which inspired me to seek a third way through the mess of apathy and fear, from which I’ve been slowly preparing a useful and bearable niche, if not one filled with much joy, hope, and satisfaction, ever since. Let us explore why that is.
In The Long Descent, Greer describes these two common world views as The Myth of Progress and The Myth of Apocalypse, respectively. It’s keen to remind yourself that the true meaning of myth is not a story that is not true, but a story that is important – a guiding narrative. He explores and explains how these two predominant myths are, under greater scrutiny, simply two opposite ends of the same story; opposing polarities. Under these two stories, the heroine (or hero) gets the future they want instead of the future breathing down their neck, as some sort of convoluted consolation for totally ignoring the responsibility for the mess they’ve participated in and helped create. It’s sort of like eating an entire carton of ice cream in hopes that it will soften the guilt of not hitting the gym or spending your last dollar on a lotto ticket after losing it all in the stock market. Both myths deliver neither what you truly want nor make the situation any less painful that it need imaginably be. For these reasons, our guiding narratives matter, in all senses of the word. They affect not only our outlook but also our thought process, which ultimately shapes the way we make decisions and act in the physical. If we act on the belief that fossil fuels can and will soon be replaced by some undeveloped or untapped renewable resources, we won't interest ourselves in conservation measures, growing some of our food, or creating new habits. Similarly, if we tell ourselves that the growing problems created from fossil fuel scarcity are too immense to keep anything short of total doom from occurring, we will act in very similar ways, adjusting to a perceived reality, perhaps by stocking up on canned foods, fire arms, or slumping into despair. Neither action meets a reality, and neither belief system reinforces critical thinking, critical action, and ultimately, responsibility, our ability to respond, the basis for successful adaptation.
Central to the purpose of this project is the exploration of alternatives to the two dominant myths of our current time, a third way, if you will, of how to live intelligently in the face of the predicament of a carbon starved future. I hope to illuminate the building blocks for the formation of a new myth, or preferably many new myths, that make the most of our achievements as a species while facilitating viable, resilient pathways of adaptation to the chaos brought about by the precedential predicament of our time, and foster a greater understanding of how the way we live in our mind, manifests in our reality, and matters.
