Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Near the beginning of “Saturday Night Fever,” John Travolta’s Tony Manero, frustrated that his boss thinks he should save his salary instead of spending it on a new disco shirt, cries out, “fuck the future!” To which his boss replies: “No, Tony, you can’t fuck the future. The future fucks you! It catches up with you and it fucks you if you ain’t prepared for it!” Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but America has morphed into a nation of Tony Maneros.
Because the scientists are challenging fundamental assumptions of our culture, such as the basis for “progress” and the consequences of “economic growth,” many cannot agree with the scientists without losing their identity. This threat to the mental model is simply too great to accept.
Life on Earth is driven by energy. Autotrophs take it from solar radiation and heterotrophs take it from autotrophs. Energy captured slowly by photosynthesis is stored up, and as denser reservoirs of energy have come into being over the course of Earth’s history, heterotrophs that could use more energy evolved to exploit them, Homo sapiens is such a heterotroph; indeed, the ability to use energy extrasomatically (outside the body) enables human beings to use far more energy than any other heterotroph that has ever evolved.
Why did once flourishing societies collapse and disappear? Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer at UCLA, has spent much of his career wrestling with this profound question.
Increases in food production, per hectare of land, have not kept pace with increases in population, and the planet is running out … of arable land. As a result, per-capita cropland has fallen by more than half since 1960, and per-capita production of grains, the basic food, has been falling worldwide for 20 years.
The lesson of “Collapse” is that societies, as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death. (Review of Jared Diamond’s new book.)
Watching Barry Bonds connect for a homer is a thrill. We are in awe of the distance he can propel a baseball, but we know the ball will land. Why? Gravity, of course. Barry Bonds lives on Earth, not outer space. If he were in space his homers would travel practically forever. What goes up doesn’t necessarily come down, in space.
A Peak Oil Nightmare
This country and the world are in for profound change as the petroleum boom winds down. I find
that even specialists in the fields that will be most affected have not seriously considered what that
transition will be like or how they will handle it. This study is an effort to describe the transition and to
explore what lies beyond it.
With the judicious employment of the technologies we have learned – and with a bit of luck – we may be able to create a more harmonious balance with the rest of the biosphere, but only at substantially lower population levels and less consumptive habits.
Paul Ehrlich talks about his new book – One With Nineveh. He reminds us that agriculture began in a fertile land, around Nineveh, in what is now the Middle East, which is now desert.
As part of Planet Under Pressure, a BBC News series looking at some of the biggest environmental problems facing humanity, Alex Kirby explores the challenge of feeding the world without destroying the planet
