(Author: G.
Creative Commons: attribution and share-alike.)

In part one I said that we could begin to address overshoot by voluntary measures such as universally available birth control. In part three I went on to say that we are facing a three-hundred Hitler holocaust nonetheless, unless, in part four, we went into Draconian Overdrive. Contradictions? Not quite, or at least not yet.

Of battle zones and gray zones.

Consider military field medics, whose job is to save lives on the battlefield. There are numerous accounts of soldiers bringing in the wounded from the opposing force (OPFOR, “enemy”), and medics saving their lives without hesitation. As a soldier your job is to destroy the OPFOR’s capacity to fight, which usually translates to “killing them before they can kill you.” Yet even in the midst of warfare, compassion does not become a casualty.

Consider our strategic nuclear arsenal in the Cold War era. The effective use of these weapons would have caused death and destruction on a scale we can barely imagine. Yet their very existence, in the context of mutual deterrence, kept the peace between superpowers for over half a century, until finally the Cold War was resolved without these weapons being used again.

Contradictions? Not quite. Paradoxes, yes. Dear readers, on this site you will often be called upon to exercise something known as “Keatsian negative capability.” This is the ability to doubt your preferred hypotheses, live with paradox and cognitive dissonance, deal with apparent contradictions, and, as I often put it, “walk in the gray,” the uncertain zone between the certainties of black and white. A number of Asian philosophers speak of something similar, referring to “non-duality”: the oneness that is beyond the appearance of difference. Coming to terms with this, learning how to think in this way, is a necessary element in the social evolution of our species. At this point in history it is essential to our survival on this planet.

The globalization of overshoot and collapse.

Throughout human history we have always been confronted with plague, famine, pestilence, and war (sound familiar?). By and large these signs and symptoms have not been recognized as pointing to the underlying disease. They are seen as exceptions and set apart from the mundane course of life as-usual.

The disease that produces each of these symptoms is overshoot of carrying capacity, by overpopulation and overconsumption. In the past it has occurred primarily on a local scale, with exceptions such as the Spanish Flu pandemic and the World Wars, that should have been taken as warnings.

In this new world of ours, the disease has gone global. The next pandemic will move at the speed of jet air travel. Hunger even now is spreading through the escalating prices of staple crops in world commodity markets. Invasive species spread into new territories as a function of climate change, destroying crops and damaging ecosystems as they go. Low-intensity conflict simmers in urban and rural areas worldwide, like the early stages of a bacterial infection. The sheer numbers and needs of humanity are causing the Earth a fever, measured in the increase in greenhouse gases and the rise of global temperatures.

In the past, help in a disaster could always come from “somewhere else” outside of the scope of the disaster. In a globalized world in the era of climate crisis, there is no outside help because there is no “somewhere else.” We are on our own together.

Life in wartime.

On the battlefield you save those you can save with limited resources. Those who can recover on their own are given a safe place to rest and heal. Those who can be saved by immediate intervention are treated first and most intensively. There are also those who will die no matter what is done for them, and the best you can do is to give them enough morphine to make painless their final moments on this Earth. This is called triage: the three-way sorting of casualties.

Field medics are trained to do it with professional objectivity in the heat of battle. At the end of the day come the prayers and the tears, and the tasteless jokes that lessen the pain of harsh decisions that had to be made. The tasteless jokes are not a contradiction to the prayers and tears.

In the future we are facing, we are going to have to make similar choices at the level of individuals, countries, and perhaps whole regions. Some can’t be saved: their condition is too dire; we will have to learn to let them go. Some will make it with minimal intervention. Many will require heroic medicine immediately. And lest the latter sound vaguely romantic, it comes down to this: everything you do, the mundane choices as well as the big decisions, will have to be measured by the standard of how it helps or harms the future of humanity on this planet.

For each person there will come a time when they step over the proverbial line and commit their lives to the future of the whole. Some will volunteer, most will be drafted and go along more or less willingly. Some will instead go AWOL and some will evade, and some of those will face judgement by their fellow humans, or by the harsher hand of nature, or by the hands of time in the words of history.

Again, should this seem vaguely romantic, please disabuse yourself of such notions, and recognize that reality will be far more prosaic: giving up the thought of having another child, giving up the desire for more consumer goods, giving up ease and comfort and convenience. In the past it was easy to go along. In the future it will not be so easy; instead it will be hard. Hard work, hard lives, hard decisions, and hard realities.

We will adjust as we have always done. Our attitudes will adjust as a simple matter of neurophysiological homeostasis, a subject I’ll cover in a future article. Our cultures will adjust accordingly. For now take it as similar to the way your eyes adjust to bright sunlight and then to the darkness of night.

A question of balance.

In part four, “Draconian Overdrive,” I closed with a call to “transcend.” This was not a hint at some kind of transhumanist or other millenarian religious route to a pleasant hereafter or its secular equivalent in silicon. Rather, it implies an attitude toward living in this world, and in particular, living in this new world of ours: letting go of what is transient and superficial, and focusing your life on what is truly lasting and significant.

For everything you sacrifice, there is the chance to replace it with something else of greater value. Worldly goods are transient; good will is lasting. The freedom to consume is superficial; freedom of the spirit is eternal. Consider the trust, gained by necessity and retained by choice, for those with whom you share your goals. Consider unconditional love. Consider learning for its own sake and for the sake of gaining essential skills.

Amidst pervasive discomforts and hardships there will still be happiness, merriment, and profound joy. There will still be the pleasures of the senses and the intellect, the delights of the body and the light of the soul. There will be time for solitude and time for socializing. And despite the fact of hard work and plenty of it, there may very well be more free time than there is in the present days of waning empire.

Life on the new frontier will also have its hazards, some of them fatal; but life in the present rat race (contemplate that phrase for a moment: rat race) can kill you slowly and painfully. In the end you will be able to say that you have truly lived, in a way that would not otherwise have been possible.

One way or another, nature will restore its own balance.

One way or another, each of us will have to seek balance in our own lives.

When you arrive at that point, you will know that you are home.

(Author: G.
Creative Commons: attribution and share-alike.)

(If you haven’t read Parts 1 - 3 yet, please do so first; the series will make more sense in chronological order.)

If you think that China’s one-child-per-family policy is severe, have I got a surprise for you. Each new smaller generation coexists with the preceding larger generations until the latter have passed on. One child per family would bring world population down to sustainable levels in about 30 years. We don’t have 30 years.

To avoid the three-hundred-Hitler holocaust would require a policy of one child per two to four families. You can call that “baby rationing.” It would also require a 60% economic contraction in the wealthy nations: slamming the global economy into reverse on a scale that would make the 1930s depression look like a dress rehearsal. And it would require a degree of redistribution of essential resources that would not just “look like” global communism, it would be global communism. Taken together, these measures can be called “draconian overdrive.”

Let’s say we wanted to save as many human lives as possible, and decided to take these steps.

Start with baby rationing. The simplest way to enforce it is to sterilize 1/2 to 3/4 of the humans of reproductive age. (In fact the numbers will vary, but for the point of this essay, the heuristic works well enough.) Those who weren’t sterilized would logically seek to hook up with each other to reproduce. After their first baby, “snip-snip,” sterilize them as well. If their baby doesn’t make it to adulthood, that’s a bonus for population reduction, helping to offset the occasional case where someone manages to sneak around the rules.

How are you going to get 1/2 to 3/4 of the people into clinics to get snipped? Most of them won’t go willingly. You have to use main force and drag them in, kicking and screaming as they go. Envision for a moment, armed officials of government knocking on doors and dragging people to the clinics, or into mobile “snip wagons” parked conveniently nearby. Imagine the degree of totalitarianism it would take to enforce that against the certainty of revolt and armed uprising.

I could go on about the “economic depression” part (think of the mass unemployment and unwilling mass migrations) and the “global communism” part (think of the mass corruption), but you get the idea. Each of these elements would also generate the necessity for further totalitarian measures.

Envision enormous numbers of dispossessed people milling around waiting for the next delivery of food to the store shelves, and in an uproar over mandatory snip-snip. Envision what it would take to maintain “control,” or even a semblance of a functional government and economy. In order to make it “work” we would have to descend into a collective hell.

Now the fact is that we are about to descend into a collective hell anyway, with starvation, pandemics, and resource wars, all caused by overshoot of carrying capacity. But there is a difference. If someone falls off a cliff, it’s a tragedy. If they jump, it’s suicide. If they’re pushed, it’s murder.

The hell foisted upon us by our collective stupidity is the penalty for acts that in and of themselves are not as obviously culpable as the acts required to put the world on draconian overdrive. Either way, intention does not excuse outcome.

We can save the humans at the expense of our humanity. Or we can save our humanity at the expense of billions of humans. This is what’s known as a Hobson’s choice, for which a classic example is, “would you rather die by shooting or by hanging?”

When is a choice not a choice? When it’s a Hobson’s choice.

And yet, there is another option.

I say this with provocative intent in mind:

Transcend.

(Author: G.
Creative Commons: attribution and share-alike.)

(If you haven’t read Parts 1 - 2 yet, please do so first; the series will make more sense in chronological order.)

Today humanity numbers at about 6.6 billion, with an overall “ecological footprint” of 1.2, meaning that we are using the resource output equivalent to that of 1.2 Earths, a 20% “budget deficit” that cannot and will not continue. The nature of cumulative deficits is that they must be repaid with drastic cutbacks later. Overspend a little over a long while, and when the day of reckoning comes, the bottom line is a real shocker.

The sustainable population level with the present distribution of standards of living is about 5.5 billion humans, and at a more acceptable standard of living for all, is 4 billion humans or fewer. According to United Nations figures we are headed toward 9 billion. As I said before, we aren’t going to make it to nine billion. One way or another the numbers will come back into balance during the course of this century and the next.

We could do it voluntarily: with legal and educational equality for women worldwide, with family planning education, with unlimited access to all means of contraception, with R&D into new and better methods of contraception, and with economic incentives such as tax policies and market measures.

Otherwise nature will do it for us, with a few billion deaths beyond the natural death rate: deaths due to disease, starvation, and resource wars. That would be a defining case of dieoff: population collapse due to overshoot of carrying capacity.

If you find the numbers difficult to visualize, here is a useful comparison. Hitler killed approximately ten million: six to seven million Jews, the rest because they were gay, Slavic, Roma, disabled, or because they dared to speak out. Overshoot of carrying capacity, and the resulting dieoff, can be expected to kill about three billion of us: three hundred times as many as Hitler.

That is to say, we are likely facing a three-hundred-Hitler holocaust over the next century or at most two. During many of these years the death rate will far exceed that of the worst years of either of the World Wars. And all of that for the sake of what, exactly?

When our descendants look back, how will they view our present choices and attitudes?

After World War 2 ended, the people of Germany looked back, and wondered how they had been led down the path to the atrocities committed in their name.

I’ll tell you the answer: It was easy. It is still all about easy.

It was easy for the people of Germany to believe that the Nazis would revive the nation, rebuild the economy, restore military strength and national pride. It was easy to go along when the regime was ascendant. It was easy to go along when the standard of living was on the upswing. It was as easy as a mouse finding a bit of cheese attached to an odd contraption on the kitchen floor. Once caught, it was not so easy to get out.

Then there came a time when acts that seemed to be the excesses of thugs were recognized as the instruments of policy. There came a time when innocent objects such as a lampshade or a book cover began to take on sinister overtones. There came a time when that persistent odd smell and plume of smoke from the “prison” nearby were recognized for what they were, and thereafter elicited the urge to vomit.

By then it was too late: once caught, it was not so easy to get out, and the price of dissent was known by the feel of that sinister book cover and the smell that wafted from the suspicious chimney. One might have looked at one’s fellow citizens and wondered if their silence was insanity, denial, or fear similar to one’s own. One would not have had a way to ask without condemning oneself to unspeakable horrors. The full realization came only in the aftermath.

We could, by some odd quirk of human psychology, console ourselves with the thought that the potential holocaust in our future, the three-hundred-Hitler holocaust, is an act of the impersonal hand of nature rather than the cruel hand of depraved fellow humans. We would be mistaken.

There is something called the banality of evil. Paradoxical though it may be, evil can become routine; so much so that it passes as normal.

How would you react if you were to discover that your favorite restaurant was serving food made from dead humans? How would you react if you were to discover that you had eaten the cannibal dishes more than once, and even recommended them to friends? While you were partaking of such fare you might have thought it unremarkable, and you would have been mistaken. Hiding under the special sauce would be an atrocity waiting to be discovered.

Just as ignorance of the law provides no excuse before a judge, denial of facts provides no escape from their consequences.

Those who promote increases in population and/or consumption levels are contributing to the prospect of the three-hundred-Hitler holocaust. They are as guilty today of creating the preconditions for the slaughter that may occur tomorrow, as those who funded and supported the Nazis in their early days were ultimately guilty of bringing about the preconditions to the slaughter that followed.

Those who condemn contraception or act to reduce its availability, those who withhold technologies that would reduce our carbon footprint, those who stake their personal gain upon the growth of what can euphemistically be called the entropy of the Earth’s means of life support: all of those are as guilty as anyone who ever cheered knowingly at the Nuremberg Rallies. Yes, some of them are nice people, just as we hear that some of those who turned the valves on the gas chambers at Auschwitz had families and treated their own children well.

Whether or not one behaves with good manners has no relationship to the destruction wrought by one’s own hand. That the consequences are probabilistic and displaced into the future is not an excuse.

Those who may think these comparisons overblown would do well to read up on what happens when population overshoots carrying capacity. Recklessness or routine selfishness or deliberate ill will, all take us to the same destination whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not.

Pack your bags, folks, the cattle cars are soon departing the station.

Pack a crowbar while you’re at it, for you may yet have the chance to derail the train.

(Author: G.
Creative Commons: attribution and share-alike.)

(If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, please do so first; this is a series that will make more sense if read in chronological order.)

The finite carrying capacity of the Earth presents us with a tradeoff between population and consumption. A smaller population can sustain a higher per-capita level of consumption; or a larger population can sustain a lower per-capita level of consumption. Think of food at a dinner party: if unexpected guests show up, everyone eats less. If fewer people show up than expected, everyone eats more. (If needed, I may write a backstory to this series, to explain issues of population and carrying capacity.)

Here are the tradeoffs:

At North American standards of living, the sustainable population is 1 - 2 billion humans.

At Western European standards of living, sustainable population is 2 - 3 billion.

At Eastern European standards, approximately 4 - 5 billion.

With 6 billion humans, the sustainable standard of living is approximately that of Cuba: a life where private automobiles are rare, and rural electricity systems provide each household with a 1-amp circuit: just enough for a couple of lights and a radio. No one starves and everyone knows how to read and write, but the hand of the writer is held and constrained by the hand of the state.

Whether or not we in the Western democracies could preserve the liberty we value more than life itself, under such stringent economic conditions, remains to be seen. In the 1930s Depression there were calls for communism and calls for fascism. We ducked the bullet that time.

Presumably there is another choice, of 7 - 9 billion humans living for the most part in conditions like those of Somalia or Iraq, and you really don’t want to go there.

One can, of course, redistribute the wealth. The more-powerful can loot, rob, and pillage the less powerful, and claim that this is the natural order of things, as if humans hadn’t evolved past the stage of cannibalism. I make this point deliberately: we normally think of “redistributing the wealth” as the forcible leveling-downward of communism; however it is no less so to use coercive means to shift wealth upward. Stealing is stealing. Getting someone else to steal for you is also stealing, just as surely as if you had done it with your own hands.

We could attempt to continue to live in a stratified world, reinforced by walls and wracked by warfare. That course of action will fail. It will fail, as respected military theorist John Robb has pointed out numerous times, due to the proliferation of biological technologies to all corners of the globe. Desperate people plus DNA splicing kits equal the potential for a small group of fanatics to unleash a plague that our walls and our warriors cannot stop. This outcome is inevitable so long as biotechnology continues to advance, the level of desperation continues to grow, and fanatical ideologies remain unchecked by reason.

Beyond that, we cannot wall ourselves off from the ecological and resource impacts of what others do. To the extent that any of us think ourselves exempt from nature’s limits, we encourage others to do likewise. To the extent that we as a species fail to muster the will to reduce global population and consumption levels, climate instability will crash the systems upon which we depend for our lives and our existence as a species. When a lifeboat is so crowded that it barely bobs above the waterline, it only takes one strong wave or one person recklessly jumping up and down to cause it to sink.

The blunt fact is that we really are all in this together. We must size up the cold equations and make our choices. We must make those choices knowing full well that any choice we make will also require us to make our own sacrifices. If we don’t make those sacrifices voluntarily, they will be imposed upon us by nature, or by the desperation of others.

There is no escaping this.

(Author: G.
Creative Commons: attribution and share-alike.)

Occasionally each person gets sick, and in due course each person will die. How you face these eventualities is a measure of your character.

Facing illness, do you shriek and thrash about? Whine and make demands? Facing death, do you squander your savings? Burn down your house? Probably not, and one of the things that prevents you doing so is simple consideration for your family, friends, and neighbors. If you have children, you are also thinking of their future.

Far better to face illness with calm resolve, face death with equanimity and dignity, and provide what you can for those who come after you. For the healthy and the living, far better to provide the sick and the dying with compassionate care.

These are the kinds of values that we refer to when we speak of what makes us human.

They are about to be put to the test of all time.

According to the best available estimates, we have less than a decade to reverse our impact on the Earth’s climate. Otherwise we will cross one or more tipping points into positive feedback cycles that will result in a radical decline of the Earth’s carrying capacity. If you talk to climate scientists behind the scenes, for example after hours at professional conferences, many if not most of them will tell you, in their unguarded moments: We don’t have anything like ten years. We’ve already blown it. Game over. Reboot.

To the best of our knowledge, we are facing a rise of two to three degrees Celsius during the course of this century, probably more if we don’t reverse course immediately. The consequences of even a two to three degree rise will include a radical decrease in global food production capacity, spread of emerging diseases from tropical areas into what are now temperate zones, the decline of available fresh water supplies in a number of highly populated areas, and resource wars both large and small. At plus five to six degrees Celsius, most of the Earth will become uninhabitable by humans.

As of this writing, world population has passed the 6.6 billion mark, and “all other factors equal,” is projected to climb to about 9 billion by the middle of this century. We’re not going to make it to nine billion. Scenarios vary, but all have this in common: we are headed for a dieoff of large magnitude. This is the inescapable outcome of overpopulation and overconsumption. The fact that overshoot must be followed by collapse is as inexorable as the law of gravity.

This is about learning acceptance while at the same time fighting with all we’ve got.

The test of our character as a species will be how we face these eventualities: the global sickness of climate instability, the deaths too many to count, the enormous scale of human suffering that could have been prevented if only we had acted in time.

If we use our brains, our muscles, and our sheer will, we can reverse our misdeeds and reduce their consequences to some degree. Our ancestors have survived worse since the time when they first swung down from the trees and figured out what their opposable thumbs were for. We are the product of their success. That track record will serve us well.

However this is about more than our survival as a species. It is about our potential. It is about continuing to build upon that which makes us truly worthy of our existence. The test of our character is about whether we can, in the hour of most dire circumstances, muster the calm resolve, the compassion, and the equanimity that will be needed. The test of our character is whether we can recognize that altruism is truly in our self interest.

We are faced with what might be called an evolutionary challenge. Meeting that challenge will require not only strength of will but good will.

The only way out is up.