The View From the Cabin

I’ve been holed up in the cabin out on the north coast since I got back to the States, catching up on my ecological disaster reading. While I was sailing to Australia I was necessarily out of touch quite a bit of the time. You can’t use the satellite phone to amuse yourself with the doom news, it’s too expensive. Now I’m all caught up. Good grief, I thought the ocean was bad enough, I mean look at this:

The beach at the entrance of the Panama Canal.

That stuff’s never going away. It’s amazing: in the future there’s going to be an entire geological layer on earth made of plastic. Up to the present era all the strata have been rock colored, more or less shades of brown. Now there’s going to be a layer of pink, blue and red plastic bits. We’re even going to look ridiculous after being crushed by tectonic forces for a 100 million years. What’s worse is some of it at least is going to be the fault of all those eco activists in fleeces. Oh, no! Yep, it turns out washing all those fleeces is putting plastic fibers on beaches on 6 continents. It’s so bad that Patagonia is running an anti-consume ad:

That was bad, but while I was out on the ocean the first stages of serious collapse began. On February 17th, the day I left on the Australia sailing trip, I wrote, “The corporate pathology has impoverished 99% of the world’s population, squandered the majority of its resources on private luxury, and spoiled or poisoned most of the land and ocean”. I thought at the time people would be in the streets by the end of the year. I should have put a bet on at Ladbrokes, but it’s the sort of thing any self respecting peak oil eco catastrophist blogger could have seen coming a mile off. Little did I know that they’d pick 99% as a name. The question was whether the Arab Spring, Occupy/99%, and the protests in Russia, China and everywhere else are related. Richard Heinberg thinks so, and since I met him in 2003 he’s been more right than damn near anyone else.

I talked to Richard at the launch of his new book, The End of Growth, out at RCA Field in West Marin County. It was good to see him again after a few years. RCA Field was commissioned by Marconi in 1913 to be the radio transmission station for the Pacific. It’s lovely out there on the edge of the continent with the fog blowing in over the Douglas firs. Richard is a man of impeccable scholarship and manners. He is still trying to talk to people in a polite, rational tone of voice about understanding industrial civilization ecologically.  Richard’s idea in The End of Growth is pretty straightforward: None of the economic ideas from the 20th century are going to work now. Because all of them rely on constant growth to work, and we appear to have reached the limits of our ability to expand energy and resource production. Oil production has been on a plateau for 6 years. It’s sad but true: infinite exponential growth on a finite planet is a fairy story. We have a choice. We either expand our habitat by colonizing other planets (Richard doesn’t think so, I’m on the fence), or we adjust to available resources.

Someone asked Richard to think of a growth industry in a post growth world. He said, “ civil disobedience and the suppression of civil disobedience.”  Right after that the Occupy Wall Street/99% movement took off.  Are we really looking at the first of the “End of Growth” riots as he told me? It looks like that to me. I happened to have just re-read the 1972 Limits to Growth. I found a copy when we were doing boat repairs in Gibraltar. I hadn’t read it in years, so as I sailed across the Atlantic I went over it carefully. Given the primitive computers even MIT had at its disposal in 1972 they did an incredible job of producing what’s become known as the world3 model. World3 predicted the collapse of industrial civilization sometime in the early 21st century. I couldn’t find a thing that was in any way extravagant in their calculations. On the contrary, they went out of their way to test the robustness of the model by doubling earth’s resources and so forth. No matter what they did the model collapsed more or less at the same time: about now. Richard’s argument in The End of Growth makes sense in terms of  world3. When the states and social organizations of a given culture, in this case global, run into insurmountable resource or environmental exhaustion they collapse.

I thought all that looked bad, but this week was the cherry on the cake. The one thing, the one thing that absolutely must not happen is the methane clathrate in the arctic melts and releases 50 Gigatons of methane into the atmosphere. That would effectively double the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. All our models give us catastrophic temperature rises at those concentrations.

In the Independent on Tuesday Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, gave an exclusive interview regarding his shocking findings on a recent field trip. He said, “Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing.” Well done everyone. We’ve actually pushed the system into positive feedback. It’s just as well I’ve been getting up to speed on those little household skills people have to have in times of severe disruption: Cooking, gardening, tool mending, that sort of thing.

I’m the first to admit that the general bias of my writing is towards the immanent collapse of Industrial civilization due to stupidity. I’ve tried blaming oil, environmental exploitation by corporate planet assassins, and the inability of anyone to resist sex.  After all, 7 billion people don’t just come in a box from Amazon, that’s a lot of hanky panky. But when you get down to it, unlike any previous civilization, we have good sensing and predictive ability. Which means that the only excuse we have for not re-designing our infrastructure in time is stupidity. Up till now that is. As I’ve been reading and settling into my redoubt on the edge of the lost coast, I’ve re-evaluated the situation. I’m not saying for a moment that this transition will be anything but godawful hellacious, but the kids might get it done. 99% of us no longer have any incentive to continue supporting a system which has failed so spectacularly. They are going to make something new. Is it possible that what comes after Industrial civilization isn’t collapse, but Intelligent civilization?

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