Beginning Again

Ehrenfeld is an old fashioned sort of guy, a bit nostalgic for memories from his own youth and from what he has gleaned the world must have been like before it became what it is today. By trade he is a biologist, and you may recall I quoted him once before on his love for the giant green turtles of Costa Rica:

Ehrenfeld is a very religious man, and the purpose of his book was to be, in the tradition of Schumacher and Orwell, a prophecy for the next century. “The business of prophecy” he says, “is not foretelling the future; rather it is describing the present with exceptional truthfulness and accuracy” to the point that “broad aspects of the future have become self-evident”.

His description of the present is eccentric, steeped in his personal observations about life in the sciences and in academia, but intriguing. He loathes “pervasive overmanagement”, which he sees as ruinously wasteful and the cause of horrifically bad decisions (we need only look at Katrina to see the wisdom of this view). Bureaucracy and hierarchy, he says, has allowed an entire unproductive and massive segment of our population to bog down and interfere with real work, and the “failure of unfavorable information to move upward in any administration” is a direct cause of many modern man-made crises. He laments the illusory belief that technology will magically solve our energy or environmental problems, and the unwitting loss of deep, centuries-old skills and knowledge that he believes will be sorely needed in the future. He sees our contemporary society as “power-worshipping, dominated by the myth of total control”. He believes (after witnessing first-hand the valiant but often ignorant and inadvertently destructive actions of the Exxon Valdez clean-up team) that there is no way to prepare for disasters — our only hope is to prevent them.

He is deeply concerned about loss of biodiversity, which he believes makes the ecosystem brittle and extra vulnerable to crisis. He disdains ‘experts’ who fall victim to the propensity either to pontificate about causes and about the future in complex-system disciplines where to do so is absurd and dangerous (he cites economics, long-term weather forecasting and psychology as such disciplines) or to veil themselves in “dignified retreat” and refuse to say anything outside their narrow specialty — both methods designed to protect the cachet of expertise, and both useless at best in dealing with contemporary problems where their (modest) expertise might really be of value.

Finally, in the last three chapters, he begins to prophesy — tentatively at first, then with great energy. After lauding the pragmatism of Garrett Hardin’s essay Tragedy of the Commons, he applies it — the only viable solution to human overpopulation, he says, is “restrict the right to multiply”. Nothing else will work. By all means try voluntary measures first, but if they don’t work, “limit some human freedoms to preserve others more precious”. The solution to the Green Revolution, which, he believes, has depleted and poisoned the soil and water and “destroyed farm culture and farm communities and forced millions of knowledgeable farmers to abandon farming and leave their land, in rich and poor countries alike”, is Wes Jackson’s “dream of herbaceous perennial polyculture” —

Bold, a wedding of technology and natural wisdom, working with the land instead of against it, needing no fertilizer, no chemical weeding, no seeding, no pesticides, no irrigation. But the mix of new yet natural plants that would be planted, once, in each area would be determined by the local farmers who know this land best, so that instead of another imposed and dislocating solution, this polyculture becomes their ticket back to the land they love and know. No coward, Mr. Ehrenfeld.

The final chapter begins with a cautious rebuttal of the adequacy of both “protection” and “management” approaches to conservation, and asserts:

Then he prophesies two scenarios, one pessimistic and the other optimistic. He thinks, based on what he could see in 1993, that the optimistic scenario was the more likely. But he says that if population and industrial growth, urbanization, cultural homogenization, corporate conglomeration, consumerism, military spending and mechanism of agriculture continue to increase much beyond 2020, “it becomes a fairly easy job to predict the fate of species and habitats on Earth.” What will prevail under this ‘unlikely’ scenario, he says, is “the weeds, the pests and the vermin… the resilient species, the species of upheaval, the ones we do not like and which are not good for us”. The explosion of information and the Internet will have limited impact because most of this information, he says, is simply not useful, and because information alone is insufficient to bring about change in culture, behaviour and institutions.

Even back in 1993 he could see the future of the US: “The American empire, while nominally intact, has been taken over by its creditors as the US sinks into a bottomless pit of debt”. Barring a change in human cultural direction in the next 25 years there will have to be “disintegration of the extremely complicated and finicky economic, industrial, social and political structure…supported by resources, especially petroleum, that are waning, and by an environmental and cultural legacy we foolishly took for granted, squandered and lost”, initially evidenced by “a global economic collapse”.

“It is like a massive flywheel, spinning too fast for its size and construction, coming apart in chunks as it spins”. This is the Long Emergency, the Slow Crash, the Fourth Turning that twelve years later other writers are describing in greater and surer detail than Ehrenfeld could in 1993. What follows is an astonishing (coming from someone who makes such a fetish of brutal honesty and unemotional objectivity) heartfelt rant:

It is not hard to see 9/11 and Katrina as “chunks” of this inept, massive flywheel. It is not hard to see Chernobyl, Bhopal, Rwanda, and Darfur as chunks, either: “In the undeveloped world, many of these processes of decline are already well underway with brutal effect.”

But you want to hear about the other scenario, right? The optimistic one that Ehrenfeld believes is more likely?

Well, maybe. I take some consolation from a growing awareness that, despite protestations from all sides to the contrary, it is apparent that no one is in control, no one knows what is going on. So this is not a political battle against power, but more like a game of dodge ball, where the objective is to be one of the few with the resilience, the intelligence, the new world survival skills and the passion to evade the flying chunks of the flywheel we call civilization, and, with the benefit of knowledge of what did not work, to begin again.