THE REAL WAR AHEAD

The thesis for much of this blog since it began sixteen months ago has been: Our world is headed for ecological collapse, due to the relentless and catastrophic rate of increase in both human population and per-capita resource consumption (‘footprint’). We are already consuming resources at over twice the rate at which our planet can sustain such consumption, and by the end of this century, at forecast growth rates, twice as many people will each be consuming twice as much again, so we will need eight Earths’ worth of land and resources just to meet immediate demand. This consumption will, at current rates of sprawl, use up every square inch of livable, arable land on the planet just for residential housing. It will require five times the energy that we can reasonably expect to find, extract and push out to the planet’s insatiable humans by the end of the century, even if we abandon all environmental constraints and burn every ounce of coal and wood, fire up hundreds of new nuclear plants, and exhume every gallon of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbon that has taken millions of years to accumulate under the earth, the seabeds and the permafrost. As by-products of this activity, we will also generate five times as much pollution and waste as in all previous centuries combined, befouling the water and air, poisoning our food, raising the atmospheric temperature enough to bring about massive and catastrophic climate change, and eliminating all wilderness areas, every plant and animal species not used for human food, the forests that provide us with vital oxygen and medicine, and lowering the water table around the globe enough to desertify much of it and create a massive fresh water shortage.

On one point, the scientists, informed humanists and head-in-the-sand eco-holocaust denyers can agree: This cataclysmic future will never happen. As man shows himself incapable of reining in his own rapaciousness and greed, nature will intervene with increasingly potent and dreadful surprises to prevent this human cancer from destroying her body. If it weren’t for civilization, this would have already happened, quickly, simply and painlessly as it did for three million years before man invented a system he thought was better. But civilization has now raised the ante, introducing a whole new series of political, social, religious, technological, moral and economic systems, illustrated in the above chart (from last week’s post), designed to counteract and overcome natural forces. Let’s follow this chart through and see what we’re likely to face by the end of this century.

Overpopulation — more people per square mile than the Earth can reasonably support — naturally produces mental stress, which manifests itself in war, physical and psychological violence, neglect, repression, mental illness, and a lowered immunity to disease. In a natural system, this disequilibrium, combined with the scarcity of food and other critical resources in an overcrowded population, is sufficient to reduce fertility, increase mortality, and bring increasing numbers of natural predators to the table, and hence restore the population to natural levels.

But man has too much invested in relentless growth in population and consumption to give up that easily. He has invented the following ingenious methods to sustain growth and civilization even as nature is trying to limit them:

• Monoculture agriculture: Intensive cultivation of land with larger and larger quantities of fewer and fewer varieties of food plants and food animals. This is sustained by: genetically engineering plants for higher yields; soaking fields in chemicals, herbicides and pesticides to kill everything else that interferes with these selected plants; soaking fields in increasing quantities of fertilizers to compensate for the degradation of the soil caused by the chemicals, herbicides and pesticides (and exacerbated by overuse, and the runoff from clearing land not designed for agricultural use); poisoning and shooting wildlife that tries to eat human agricultural products; stuffing animals full of growth hormones and antibiotics to increase meat yield and ward off the natural diseases that come from overcrowding and monoculture; cramming these animals into tiny quarters to increase yield, and then debeaking, confining and drugging them so the stress of this horrendous overcrowding doesn’t cause them to kill themselves and each other. This agriculture is dependent on cheap supplies of foreign oil for the petrochemicals needed to sustain it, massive government subsidies, huge, inexpensive tracts of land to grow corn and grain for cheap animal feed, and concealment of the incredible cost and damage of monoculture agriculture to the taxpayers and the Earth’s ecosystems. But in the meantime it results in huge quantities of deceptively cheap food, which in turn keeps human population growing.
• Salvationist religions: As overcrowding produces stress and epidemic disease, the people could get disheartened about the benefits of civilization and rebel against the power elite. So we need religions to say that nature is evil, war and suffering are honourable and ‘natural’, and we must conform to a strict moral code — and have large families. And if as a result we’re miserable all our lives, we’ll get our reward in the next one. These religions teach us we’re not responsible, we need not act responsibly, that if we destroy the planet it’s not our fault, and someone else will fix it.
• Corporatism and its political and economic propaganda: The myth machine must ensure that the teeming billions don’t realize just how bad and unsustainable the situation is, and start taking things into their own hands — with revolutions, civil wars, terrorism, and other behaviours that disrupt the population growth and consumption necessary for civilization to continue. So the corporatist elite must control the education system, preserving the myth that pre-civilization man lived a “brutish” life, the myth that wars are caused by megalomania and ‘evil’, rather than as a response to desperation and suffering and deprivation, the myth that with hard work anyone can be rich and happy, the myth that we all have a fair say in our political, legal and economic systems, the myth that our ‘leaders’ are working for democracy, rather than hoarding their wealth and power. And the corporatist elite must control the media, to perpetuate these myths, to ‘dumb down’ the citizens into mere consumers, and to keep the majority ignorant of political, economic and ecological reality. And of course the corporatist elite must continue to control the political and economic centres of power — governments and corporations — so they control the means of production, the law, and the judiciary, to keep wealth and power for themselves, and to lock up and silence those who pose a threat to it.

These man-made systems — the skewed, destructive, elitist, subjugating economic, political, legal, social, health, educational, agricultural, corporate and criminal justice systems, and religions and the media — produce some poisonous by-products as well. The bankrupt and propagandizing education system crushes human initiative, creativity and imagination, so that many of the people who could get us out of this mess give up or drop out. Without imagination or conscience or knowledge of ecology, we get strip mining, clearcut forestry, massive flooding for hydro dams, and the deadly threat and toxic radioactive poisons of nuclear power and nuclear bombs — technologies that needlessly accelerate the destruction of the environment and the loss of biodiversity. With a little better education, we might have solar and wind and geothermal energy, erasable paper, hydroponics and advanced ceramics instead.

This same lack of education and imagination has given us a health system that treats the rich and neglects the poor, instead of a health system that prevents disease for all.

And the massive inequality created by corporatism aggravates the stress that destabilizes the third world, ruins third world economies and makes them into desperate, violent welfare states, whose destitute majorities produce the only thing they can that has marketable value — more babies.

And so the circle goes round and round, producing more and more people and more and more mindless, wasteful consumption.

What will it take to break the cycle? If we acknowledge that the cycle is unsustainable, what is its weak link? I believe there are three weak links: disease, instinct, and technology.

• Disease: If you’ve read Demon in the Freezer, you know that every species has its own unique poxviruses. They are nature’s choice of disease for dealing with massive overpopulation, and mosquitos, for example, have a host of selective poxviruses that keep their numbers in check without unbalancing the rest of the ecosystem. Poxviruses need a certain concentrations of numbers within a certain travelling distance of each other to thrive. With our record numbers and mobility, we are the perfect target for a new poxvirus, and nature’s ability to evolve new viruses when there is a prolific host is extraordinary. And we are just starting to learn about prions, another mechanism for spreading epidemic disease, and one that is probably unstoppable. And our monoculture agriculture has greatly increased the vulnerability of our foods to epidemic disease as well (as BSE and Avian Flu have demonstrated recently).
• Instinct: For three million years man survived, and thrived, by trusting and following his instincts. We have forgotten how to listen to them, and been brainwashed to distrust them, but they’re still in our DNA and they’re still telling us what to do. I believe the drop in fertility in many countries with high population density is due more to instinct than to education or birth control technology. I believe the worldwide rejection of globalization, ‘free’ trade, ‘preemptive’ war, cultural homogenization and consumerism is an instinctive revulsion, not a spiritual or parochial one — we intuitively know that there is something very wrong with the way we live and the way we are headed, and that economic, political and social imperialism — and the destruction of cultural diversity — are part of the problem, not part of the solution. We know violence, abuse, rampant crime, pollution, global warming, extreme poverty and hopelessness are symptoms of the fact that something is very wrong, and we know something must be done. We don’t need someone to show us or teach us this. We just know it.
• Technology: Technology is the innovative application of knowledge. It can do an end-run around the most entrenched and change-resistant political, economic or legal system. The corporatists recognize that the Internet has produced a knowledge and communication explosion, and have tried to squelch and corner every possible disruptive technology by patenting every single conceivable process. They even tried to create an alternative Internet under their own control. But they can’t put the lid back on Pandora’s box. Margaret Mead said it only takes a few people to change the world, and never has there been greater motivation, or opportunity, for that to happen.

You’ll notice that my three civilization ‘weak links’ have nothing to do with politics, economics, or law. These are lousy levers of change, and tend to entrench power, wealth, and the status quo. These systems, and the corporatism that depends on them, will collapse, but they will last longer than most of the other elements of civilization on the chart above. If we depend on the politicians, the economists, the lawyers or the business leaders to get us out of this mess, we’re in for a big disappointment. Not that these systems aren’t going to be faced with convulsive change in this century: Watch for massive immigration embargoes and blockades, fire-bombing of plague areas, dozens of coups, wars, suspensions of civil liberties, many new forms of hyphenated-terrorism, and revolutions. But none of these will change much. Have they ever, really?

On one side, monoculture agriculture, salvationist religions and corporatism. On the other, epidemic disease, instinct and technology. An epic battle, a fight to the finish, that will start in this century but could last hundreds of years — It’s not as if there’s a shortage of pawns. Some have called it “humanity’s final exam“. It is that, and more. Since we are a part of nature, this battle is in fact a civil war. Which side we each take, or support by our ignorance, our apathy, our indifference, will determine how we are assessed by our descendents, and how we are judged by history.

We won’t be around to see the end, but we are already witnessing the first skirmishes. We owe it to our children and grand-children to, at least, not make the situation worse. In tomorrow’s post, entitled What You Can Do to Save the World, I’ll suggest some ways I think each of us can help ‘not make the situation worse’. That may not sound like much, but if enough of us refuse to make the situation worse, it could make a huge difference.

Perhaps all the difference in the world.