[Olaf]

The core concept that has to be grasped to make sense of the future looming up before us, it seems to me, is the concept of limits. Central to ecology, and indeed all the sciences, this concept has failed so far to find any wider place in the mindscape of industrial society. The recent real estate bubble is simply another example of our culture’s cult of limitlessness at work, as real estate investors insisted that housing prices were destined to keep on rising forever. Of course those claims proved to be dead wrong, as they always are, but the fact that they keep on being made – it’s been only a few years, after all, since the same rhetoric was disproven just as dramatically in the tech stock bubble of the late 1990s – shows just how allergic most modern people are to the idea that there’s an upper limit to anything.

It’s this same sort of thinking that drives the common belief that limits on industrial society’s access to energy can be overcome by technological innovations. This claim looks plausible at first glance, since the soaring curve of energy use that defines recent human history can be credited to technological innovations that allowed human societies to get at the huge reserves of fossil fuels stored inside the planet. The seemingly logical corollary is that we can just repeat the process, coming up with innovations that will give us ever increasing supplies of energy forever.

Most current notions about the future are based on some version of this belief. The problem, and it’s not a small one, is that the belief itself is based on a logical fallacy.

One way to see how this works – or, more precisely, doesn’t work – is to trace the same process in a setting less loaded with emotions and mythic narratives than the future of industrial society. Imagine for a moment, then, that we’re discussing an experiment involving microbes in a petri dish. The culture medium in the dish contains 5% of a simple sugar that the microbes can eat, and 95% of a more complex sugar they don’t have the right enzymes to metabolize. We put a drop of fluid containing microbes into the dish, close the lid, and watch. Over the next few days, a colony of microbes spreads through the culture medium, feeding on the simple sugar.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... html#links

I check this blog every week. Interesting stuff to chew on.

Olafr

[Tanada]

The difference between us and the microbes in the cited example is we can and do reason out ways to make use of resources that can only be extracted with technology, like Solar PV, instead of just using Solar Thermal that was always right there in our environment. By analogy we were able to spread out all over the world using indirect solar energy in the form of heat and wind and even water wheel based hydro power. Those are all very simple ways to harness Solar power with little or no technology required. Then about 200 years ago someone noticed that if certain materials were exposed to sunlight, like Phosphorus, unusual things happened. This lead to experiments where all sorts of materials were exposed to sunlight and observed to see what happened, and that in turn lead to the first primitive PV cells that were able to harness solar energy in a completely new way, as direct current electricity.

[culicomorpha]

Humans use reason to make use of resources??

From what I can tell, a very small number of people use reason, and the rest just go to the store and buy stuff without the slightest idea how that thing they "need" was made, or what the real consequences of that choice are. They're too busy doing more important things... like watching American Idol or that football game.

The problem with the linear problem solving approach suggested by reason is that once a species becomes dependent upon a given process, technique, or technology to solve problems, these patterns become - for lack of a better phrase - hard-coded. That is to say, they represent a formal dependency. Whether it's oil, or pesticides, or antibiotics - whatever - it becomes very difficult to "just say no," no less so than it is for a drug addict or an alcoholic.

Once there is a formal dependency the universe of future courses of action become constrained, resulting in a loss of flexibility to adapt.

And since the global ecosystem is really huge, this kind of thinking can go on for a very long time before it becomes painfully obvious that nature and ecosystems do not work this way. In fact, I think it could be argued that all the technical innovation throughout human history has only enabled a delay in the day of reckoning, and this delay has created a massive overshoot of population that will have dramatic consequences that could have much more easily been resolved, had we not been so successful at manipulating resources to our own advantage.

I think Olaf's central point is correct, although the oversimplified analogy is easy to pick apart. If through our own ingenuity, we don't hit the limits of energy, we absolutely will hit the limits of our pollution, which is typically the mechanism that kills yeast in a fermentation vessel.

[Olaf]

Just wanted to point out that the original post is the work of the Archdruid blogger, not mine. Should've put quotes on it.

I agree that we have probably simply delayed and worsened our own cultural collapse. For all the theorizing and proselytizing, I think it is becoming clear that there will be no grand saving of people from anything. We're just spot fixing and can't even keep up with that.

I believe, and have for awhile, that local actions (individual and community) will be where we find the best successes; in places and situations where there is much less inertia to overcome.

Olaf

[Narz]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'T')he difference between us and the microbes in the cited example is we can and do reason out ways to make use of resources that can only be extracted with technology

[culicomorpha]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Narz', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'T')he difference between us and the microbes in the cited example is we can and do reason out ways to make use of resources that can only be extracted with technology

[Narz]

I agree with you pretty much 100% culicomorpha. Except for your last sentence "We may be substantially more clever than microbes, but doubtfully more wise."

I think we can be much wiser. We can create a paradise or a disaster out of our homes. We can help topsoil regenerate dozens of times faster than usual or destroy it dozens of times faster.

Most people however, are living Socrates "unexamined life".