In conversation: Dave Murphy and Tom Murphy – can modernity survive planetary limits?

This interview brings together Dave Murphy, an energy transition scholar, and physicist Tom Murphy, both founders of the Planetary Limits Academic Network (PLAN).

Across this series of discussions conducted by fellow founder Ben McCall, they explore a range of themes on the converging crises reshaping our world, including the polycrisis, ecological overshoot and the strengths and limits of modernity.

Read the whole series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

Ben McCall: Dave, you’ve often expressed optimism about humanity’s future despite the planetary limits we face. What makes you optimistic?

Dave Murphy: First, I would frame the issue differently. As written, it posits an optimistic outlook for the future vs. some “scientific” issue of planetary limits. These two should not be viewed in this way. There are indeed planetary limits. The second issue is the outlook I choose to take for the future, which is based on nothing scientific at all. I guess my point is that these two things are not mutually exclusive; one can understand planetary limits and be optimistic. 

Second, why am I optimistic? I would say that a tremendous amount can be accomplished in the middle ground between techno-utopian and doomer. This middle space can simultaneously acknowledge planetary limits and the dangers associated with deforestation, species decline, climate change, etc., and advocate for positive change in our energy systems. It has also been my experience that despair and doomerism are ineffective change-agents. No politician is elected on a slogan “It’s all over.”  But the real reason I am optimistic is probably pretty simple: I have kids, and I can’t tell them the world is over before they even grow up.  

Ben: Tom, what degree of optimism do you have about humanity’s future? How does your perspective contrast with the one Dave has expressed here?

Tom Murphy:I make a distinction here between humanity’s future and modernity’s future.  Many people conflate the two.  As I see it, the brief flash of modernity is incompatible with planetary limits and will necessarily terminate one way or another. For this reason, I no longer focus on energy systems, since keeping modernity powered does not seem to be an appropriate goal—essentially kicking the can down the road. Access to a large amount of exosomatic energyis exactly what has enabled modernity to carry out its atrocities against the more-than-human world via deforestation, habitat fragmentation, extermination, and extinction—and to swell human populations to precarious heights via industrial agriculture.  Technological innovations, such as renewable energy, tend to enhance—or at least sustain—our destructive practices, irrespective of CO₂ levels. Unless we change something deeper, we can expect more of the same behaviors and outcomes.

So, where is the optimism in all that? It’s simply that humans do not have to operate this way on the planet, as many amazing people have demonstrated over almost the entire duration of human habitation on Earth. Our biological hardware is fine, and indeed rather remarkable. However, the operating system we currently run in our brains, called modernity, has fundamental flaws that will self-terminate the enterprise via disregard for ecological and planetary limits. Humans are incredibly plastic and adaptable. A newborn does not yet have this operating system installed, meaning that enormous changes are possible under different material and cultural conditions. 

I am not saying that a reversion to hunter-gatherer lifestyles comes next, even though we know that mode is well tested. We can try something new that might have elements of hunter-gatherer ways and modernity, while perhaps being unrecognizable to either. In any case, I am “doomerish” about modernity as a misguided enterprise and think we will need to face letting go of it. Recovering from overshoot is unlikely to be fun. My optimism lies in knowing that—after the dust settles—humans are capable of forming meaningful, respectful, and sustainable relationships within the community of life—founded on humility rather than hubris—as a part of nature, not apart from it.

Ben: Dave, I’m curious to what extent you agree with Tom’s assessment of modernity’s future, as a distinctive concept from humanity’s future?  

Dave: What is modernity? We need to define further what we are discussing. Is insulin production part of modernity? Cancer medication? Vaccinations? Food production systems? Probably not the high-powered fossil-fuel variety of food systems, but what about agro-ecological food production systems that are organic but probably use some fuel in tractors, etc.? Are all technology and energy applications, aside from primitive tools, etc., out in this vision of the future? 

If we are saying that all the advances of modern medicine and society that require, for example, plastic or energy must be abandoned after the “dust settles,” well then, I am not sure what to say. I feel as though it goes against human nature—not to mention unethical—to advocate for a future society that knowingly rejects the basic medicines and technology that are required for the survival of so many people. 

Assuming we are not discussing that type of future, the question then becomes one of line-drawing. What is considered part of the “modernity” that must be rejected, and what is part of “modernity” that we will keep? Insulin production is a great example. Millions of people around the world require insulin to stay alive, and that insulin is (I assume, because I have not researched this) produced in fairly advanced facilities using a lot of new technology and energy resources. If we want to maintain insulin production in the future, we must maintain the supply systems for producing that insulin, which will also entail the requisite extraction of materials from Earth and energy consumption. 

The production of insulin becomes one of minimizing impacts rather than eliminating them. The energy transition is the best way to minimize the impacts associated with energy production systems, so I advocate for it, acknowledging that there will still be impacts. The energy transition doesn’t “save the world,” but it has the potential to provide essential and non-essential goods and services with much lower impact. Why spurn that opportunity if we know we will need to continue to produce goods and services in the future?  

Conspicuous consumption and much of our fossil-fuel-powered growth must change if we are going to have some sort of harmony with Mother Earth, but I think collapse is neither the best nor the only way to get there. Recent research shows that electrification alone, as part of the energy transition, will lead to a 40% decrease in global final energy demand due to more efficient end-use. That is a massive decrease in final energy demand, which translates to an even larger decrease in primary energy demand. And, as Amory Lovins wrote about this topic 40 years ago, people often overestimate the impact of the Jevons Paradox. People don’t do more laundry because they have purchased a more efficient washing machine. For sure, they may drive a bit more if their fuel costs go down due to a more efficient engine, but people who buy electric vehicles are not driving so much more that it actually increases energy consumption. I think it is a mistake to assume that the trends we see at the very beginning of the energy transition—i.e. that renewable energy has largely added to, rather than substituted for, other energy consumption—will continue in the future.

Ben: Tom, I wonder if you could offer a definition of modernity and say a little bit about what elements of modernity we might expect to retain in the long run?

Tom: Modernity is the dazzling and manifestly temporary fireworks show that we find ourselves living within, and to which we are wholly inured, so that we lack perspective on what might possibly be viable in the long term. Modernity, via rapid and grossly unsustainable expenditure of a one-time inheritance, puts humans so completely out of context as to render meaningless any artificial attempts to draw lines regarding what may or may not be part of the future. We only fool ourselves into thinking that we can play such a game, or that our ethical preferences have a say over what’s possible. We have far less agency than the recent windfall has led us to believe.  The menu is not for us to decide, as we are embedded passengers within—rather than creators or masters of—the natural world, upon which we are utterly dependent. We have some agency, in that we could—in principle—decide to prioritize ecological concerns over modern expectations and live conservatively within the perceived limits.  

Pursuing this further, we don’t arbitrate what is or is not sustainable, any more than we decide how strong gravity ought to be today.  Since our true context is as an evolved biological species operating within a larger and exceedingly interdependent community of life, we must assume that the health of that broader community is vital to our long-term success—including the vitality of unknown species with which we share co-dependencies we will likely never understand. The present cocktail of ecological ignorance and destruction is akin to sawing off the branch on which we stand, enamoured of our power and technology to carry out such an operation.

Since 1970, the average decline in vertebrate species is about 70%. Wild land mammals—now comprising 2% of total terrestrial mammal mass compared to 96% in the form of humans and domesticated animals—have been eliminated to the point that only 2.5 kg of wild land mammal mass remains for each human on the planet. This was 80 kg per person in 1800, and 50,000 kg before civilization sprang up. They’re almost gone. A major disruption in global food supply—perhaps instigated by fossil fuel shortages—could essentially finish the job. 

To reinforce an earlier point, these declines—similar in birds, amphibians, and insects—are not primarily due to CO₂, but trace to the much longer pattern of modernity’s expansion and heavy use of energy and nature’s provisions.

In light of this, the prospect of maintaining insulin for human health is in doubt, as doing so requires some threshold in technology, mining, resource extraction, energy, pollution/waste, etc., that may be well over the line of what the community of life can accommodate in the fullness of time. Can we justify prioritizing insulin over ecological health, and is it even a valid choice in the end?  If one nation had a long history of expansion, overrunning and displacing technologically inferior and peaceful nations to the point that complete elimination/dominance was in sight, is it justifiable to prioritize the healthcare of that nation’s citizens before trying to end the war against innocents? The question is even more poignant when the expanding race cannot itself survive if indeed managing to eliminate the “competition,” although few seem to be aware of this built-in peril of “success.”

So, I don’t think it’s within our power to decide how many of modernity’s perks we can keep.  Ecological context comes first, which we ignore to our ultimate peril. We have zero evidence demonstrating long-term sustainability while enjoying modern conveniences like insulin, but ample evidence that the current system is woefully far over the line, by perhaps orders of magnitude. Any number of tweaks to a grossly unsustainable system—changing the energy source that drives the machine, for instance—are unlikely to alter its fundamental character or aims. It seems like too much to ask that modernity’s forward march will inexplicably, luckily, reverse course on ecological harm without its becoming the overriding, non-negotiable priority, based on the track record thus far.  

Therefore, I would again guess that modernity, in its fundamental structure, is incompatible with planetary limits, and thus has no path to unsustainable continuance (an oxymoron, in any event). How much we must abandon is very hard to say, but I would be prepared to believe: most of it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length. This interview is part of a series that features conversations between Dave Murphy and Tom Murphy on the polycrisis and planetary limits. 

Read the whole series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five