Back in July, I worte an article for the Scientists for Global Responsibility newsletter, which was published recently. It was yet another attempt to put into words why the focus on reducing carbon (not that we’re actually doing that!) is not the right one. Since then, I’ve read volume 1 of Derrick Jensen’s Endgame. You may remember I mentioned Derrick in a post back in September 2010. I got so much more from the book than from the clips on the internet.
Given that the book runs to 451 pages (and that’s just volume 1!), I have neither the time nor the mental resources to summarise it but suffice to say, industrial civilisation cannot, and has never been, sustainable. I think I’ve known that for some time but had never put it as such. Like most other environmentalists, I hoped that there was a way to have one’s cake and eat it too. Granted, I never really understood the term ‘sustainable development’ (‘sustainable growth’ is just bollocks!) but I really did believe that if only people understood energy better, then we’d all wake up and get ourselves on the right track. Wrong!
Now I know there will be some of you who just stop reading there. That’s cool, you’re not alone. But Derrick asks this, “Do you believe that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?” Note the word ‘voluntary’. We’re not talking about people choosing a different car or to reuse carrier bags here. We’re talking about western culture choosing to stop exploiting natural resources at an unsustainable rate. We’re talking about oil and mining company executives saying, “OK guys, we’ve had it good but the party’s over. We’re going to stop wasting money exploring for more oil because it’s time to wake up to its finite nature and the falling energy returns. We’re going to leave it in the ground and look at how to feed 7 billion people without fossil fuels”. And the corporate bankers are going to choose to hang up their Armani suits, donate their obscene bonuses to the Transition Towns movement, put on a pair of overalls and start planting allotments on all their private grounds. You get my point. This will not happen.
Note also the words ‘our culture’. I’ve also been reading indigenous writings and a bit of anthropology. The problems we are creating are not a function of humans. Homo sapiens is quite able to live sustainably – indeed we did for hundreds of thousands of years but then something happened. Not settling down and planting a few crops to supplement the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but owning land. Owning land for the first time usually involves killing, enslaving or ousting those who lived there before you arrived. If no people lived there, then you’re free to do what you want with all the other species who lived there – eat them, burn them, build houses out of them, or just get rid of them because you can’t eat, burn or build houses out of them. Western culture dominates the world and while it sounds paradoxical, western culture is global. It’s the culture which dominates industry and trade. No longer does it matter whether you are in Asia, America, Europe or Africa, the chances are you are dominated by western culture. You might be one of the few who does not live by it, but if you are living on resources required by western culture you’ll soon know all about it.
If you’ve got this far, well done. I’m not asking you to agree with me, just to think about these issues. Some might be saying, “well, I knew Meikle would lose the plot eventually”. Maybe I have. Maybe I’ve gone insane. But if sanity is to accept the culture imposed on me without question, to believe that the global industrial complex will choose to stop destroying the environment, that technology will save the day then all I can say is ‘wibble‘.
PS The Transition Initiative website has a series called ‘Stories from our social reporters’ and a good friend of mine wrote an excellent article there recently on this very topic of sanity.
Hi Mandy!
I’d like to think you’re off the mark on this one if only because to believe that we can never affect the changes we need is to give up hope and I don’t want to do that (even if it sometimes seems to fly in the face of all the evidence!).
One of the key problems with western civilisation is that our culture disengages people from their communities. I have felt for years that TV rather religion is “the opium the masses” which encourages people to drowse on assuming everything will be OK, although perhaps more recently this has been replaced by the internet (being as more people use it to discuss celebs’n'sex than to post this sort of stuff!). Historically communities have been much smaller than most physical or virtual communities currently are. This made people less shy about taking part in discussions and also made cause and effect relationships more immediately obvious. So to be able to stand up to corporate culture we need to get out there and somehow encourage people to engage with communities and communities to engage with wider society. (Psychology needed again and I still can’t spell it!) This empowerment needs civilisation in terms of groups of people (civic society) who are close enough to discuss things although this doesn’t mean that all the material trapping of “civilisation” are a good thing! Without empowered communities the biggest interests are even more able to push their agenda. I’m not sure what the optimum community size is for this – I suspect a few thousand at most, but that’s still more than most hunter gatherer communities.
Another benefit of having some sort of organised community is that it allows people to specialise. If all we are after is food then very small groups can work OK provided that they only want a limited variety. However once specialised tools need to be made and maintained then there is an advantage in civilisation. For example having a specialised blacksmith who stays in one place saves every family/farm etc from having to have the skills and facilities to repair metal tools. So less resources are used (only need one forge, one anvil etc) and a spades get repaired better jobs and quicker. People often end up buying gadgets (e.g decorating or car repair tools) they only need for one small job (even though they suspect someone nearby already has one they aren’t using at that moment) because their community is not communicating effectively within itself.
I’m not saving everything about civilisation is good – there’s lots of scope for improvement, but I think it has some merits which it would be dangerous to ignore completely. Whether or if we can build effective communities in the timescale required is a very debatable matter though!
Thanks for that Janet – believe me, I’d also like to think I’m off the mark but it’s the evidence that makes me wonder. Maybe that’s all lies. Maybe there aren’t massive islands of minute plastic particles in the 5 major oceans, maybe species aren’t going extinct because we are destroying habitat and ecosystems at an insatiable rate, maybe replacing forests with monocrops is OK, maybe hoovering up every damn thing in the ocean and spitting out what we don’t want can be done sustainably, maybe climate change really does have nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and destroying carbon sinks at the same time. Actually, as I write this I realise that these things wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t the CHEAP option. So maybe we’ll start paying for all the environmental external costs we’ve had for free up til now. Oops, no, there’s a global recession on – no one could afford that. We need growth. Aaargh! See how hard it is to remain hopeful that industrial civilisation will choose to change at all, let alone quickly?
As you can see, I’m feeling the need to write more provocative and controversial posts, just to see if it gets anyone replying (or even reading!). I’m sick of not saying what I really think. But I’m surprisingly chipper! If I have lost hope, it’s really not so bad! That said, I have no idea how I’d feel about all this if I had kids…but I’m sure I’d be teaching them how to make and grow stuff, which I’m sure you are.
It’s worth pointing out that Jensen does define ‘civilisation’ as living in cities and ‘cities’ as collections of people so large that resources, such as food, have to be brought in from outside as there are too many people per unit of available land not to. I’m paraphrasing as I’m doing this via webmail (got away from work early – it’s just not the same now we’re a one-car family!). The definition is crucial. It’s not being polite or having specialist skills we’re talking about here. It’s the endless need to expand land use and consume resources, which you have to admit, is a mindset prevalent amongst our culture. How is it that more species are going extinct now than ever before (barring extinction-event asteroids!) and atmospheric CO2 is still rising, yet we’re all being told we need an iPad, iPhone, Play Station, electric car and so on? I don’t know if you read the article I referred to at the start of the post? It looks at the energy side of things.
No, don’t worry, I won’t bang on about resource wars but suffice to say, I’m as sceptical as Rob Newman (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DCwafIntj0) about American plans to bring democracy to the Middle East! Jensen also argues that hope itself can be part of the problem because we only hope for things over which we have no control (e.g. hoping that the weather is nice or that a job application is successful. We don’t tend to hope we eat food today – unless we’re homeless or live far, far away!) Anyway, what I found so interesting was that Jensen’s logic seemed to answer so many of my own questions.
OK, you’ll be delighted to hear that it’s nearly 5.30pm – knocking off time for the other half! So I’ll bend your ear no more. But changing our culture begins by not being a willing part of it – we’re doing that already by not being mindless consumers of everything we’re told we need. There lots to do and building community is certainly one of them!
I’m sorry to say that arithmetic was never my strong point and therefore I beg permission to ask for some help: This morning I read your article in the SGR Newsletter and got stuck over the calculation of percentages with regard to EROEIs, where 1: 100 makes 99%, 1:50 makes 98% and 1:20 makes 95%. You will think to yourself: this guy is nit-picking. But I assure you I would not have spent a good half hour pondering these figures, then looking at your website, then spending the whole afternoon – after my nap, that is – reading in your Blog and following your links to U-Tube etc, if I had not so thoroughly agreed and felt empathy with your sentiments and thoughts in your article. Goodness knows what we do about it all!?
But this has been your day in my life and empathy is an invigorating feeling.
I have put similar sentiments “on paper” – as we used to say, but perhaps we should say “into the ether” now – myself and you could check out whether I could return the complement by looking at our website at http://reverenceforlife.org.uk/projects/nest-the-next-evolutionary-step/ (sorry, I don’t seem to be able to turn this into a live link – its probably easier to just go to our Website click on Projects, then NESt and go to Appendix I where you will find what I call my “12 Dichotomies”) I’d be glad to know what you think?
Anyway, I think you are right about putting the emphasis on “energy” rather than the CO2, where the horse has bolted anyway by now.
As a Cheery Pessimist, which speaks to me of one who has reached a point of resignation from where, as E M Forster says, you can know how to “care, and not to care”, you may be ambivalent about whether homo-sapiens will manage to evolve sufficiently to spare itself pain by doing voluntarily, what it will otherwise be forced to suffer under duress.
Be that as it may…….. thank you for an inspiring and stimulating day!
Hi Percy and thanks so much for your comment. Like you, I am not confident with maths/numbers but I think I can quickly address your EROEI question. EROEI is equivalent to net energy + 1. Or, vice versa, net energy is EROEI – 1. So if you put 1 unit of energy in for every 100 units of energy out, the EROEI is 100:1 (or 100) and the net energy is 99 out of 100 units (99%). Similarly, if EROEI is 50:1 (1 unit in for 50 out) then that’s the same as 2 units in for 100 out or 98%. 20:1 means 5 in for 100 out = 95% and so on. The sharp decline is because this is an exponential function – a concept I understand as I used to be a microbiologist but I’m not up on the maths of such things. Someone who is is a guy called Albert Bartlett and there’s an excellent talk here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY) on exponentials and their relevance.
It’s so good to hear that you found my ramblings of interest. I will look at your link (and don’t worry, WordPress automatically makes it a link in your reply) but in haste I just want to say that it’s western industrial culture (or whatever it’s called) that I have a problem with, not Homo sapiens. We are a wonderful species, capable of love, language, art, music, compassion and so on, but thanks to some quirk of nature, those running the show call those who actually understand sustainability uncivilised and force them off their land. Told you I was in a hurry – that’s quite a sweeping statement but we mustn’t confuse all people with some people!
I’ll write more when I’ve had a look at your link. Cheers!