The decline and fall of the Human Empire

Below is my article, as it appears over four pages in the current edition of ‘Village’ magazine:

Doomsday cults are as old as human civilisation. The Bible is a rich sourcebook for ‘End Times’ enthusiasts, who pore over Iron Age manuscripts purporting to pinpoint a particular day that heralds the Apocalypse. Another such date passed on May 21st last, with the ‘Rapture’ now rescheduled to October.

But just because they’re crazy, doesn’t always guarantee they’re wrong. “An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium,” says celebrated naturalist Prof EO Wilson of Harvard. But, he adds, “it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.”

In the half a billion year history of complex life on Earth, five mega extinction events have been catalogued. The last one occurred around 65 million years ago, most likely triggered by rapid global cooling resulting from an asteroid strike. It brought the 160 million year reign of the dinosaurs to an abrupt end – along with around half of all other species. Their misfortune was to be our lucky break, as this calamity opened the evolutionary window for the rise of our ancestors, the early mammals.

Today, what scientists have designated as the ‘Sixth Extinction’ is already in full swing, with an astonishing 50,000 species disappearing every year and the very face of the planet being re-shaped. For the first time in Earth history, the actions of a single species are threatening to overwhelm the entire biosphere.

Homo sapiens is a young species, barely 200,000 years old. In the 10,000 years of human history for which some records exist, there has never been an age like the modern industrial era, and there has never been a century remotely like the amazing 20th century.

My grandmother was born in 1901. Over the brief three-generation span from her life to mine, global population quadrupled, the world economy grew 14-fold, and industrial output shot up 40-fold. All this astonishing growth was fuelled by a 13-fold increase in energy usage, compared to the already industrialised 19th century.

Along the way, we chopped down a quarter of the world’s forests, exterminating tens of thousands of species in a frenzied scramble to convert the natural word into saleable goods and lebensraum for people, our agriculture and our livestock. Two fifths of the world’s land surface has already been sequestered for the exclusive benefit of just one species. This human tsunami also unleashed a five-fold increase in air pollution, and a 17-fold increase in emissions of the critical trace ‘greenhouse’ gas, Carbon dioxide (CO2).

This ongoing orgy of extraction, consumption and population growth was predicated on one key ingredient: cheap, plentiful energy. In the 20th century, humans employed more energy than in all the previous 1,900 centuries of recorded history – combined. All these trends have accelerated through the tumultuous first decade of the 21st century, as China and India in particular have clambered enthusiastically aboard the ‘globalisation express’.

The energy involved in reshaping the planet is almost unimaginable. Since 1970, the rate of energy building up within the biosphere is on a par with exploding 2.5 of the bombs that levelled Hiroshima every second, or 216,000 atomic bombs a day, every day, for the last four decades. Minus the radiation, of course.

Another example that vividly illustrates the might and scale of human planetary reengineering is the Syncrude mine in Canada’s Athabasca tar sands. This one project involves displacing some 30 billion tonnes of earth – that’s twice the total tonnage of sediment carried down all the world’s rivers in a year. For better or for worse, man is now the dominant force of nature on this planet. As Brian Cowen reminded us, being in power should not be confused with being in control.

“The human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the Earth”, is how environmental historian Prof John McNeill put it. The bubble of spectacular affluence and comfort enjoyed by many of us in the Western world has been sustained by spending down the Earth’s finite natural capital and exhausting its ability to absorb wastes at an ever-increasing rate.

The WWF’s Living Planet Index (which measures trends in biological diversity) found that between 1970 and 2007, global biodiversity had declined by an astonishing 30 per cent. “This global trend suggests we are degrading natural ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history,” says the WWF. The UN Environment Programme concurs, adding: “The world is currently undergoing a very rapid loss of biodiversity comparable with the great mass extinction events that have previously occurred only five times in the Earth’s history.”

The mass die-off of the Sixth Extinction that has already spelled the end for vast swathes of the natural world has not – yet – impacted directly on human numbers. But since we are perched precariously at the apex of a global food chain that itself is a subset of a biosphere in freefall, this is no longer a matter of if, but when, and just how severe it will be.

Not everyone is alarmed. “I think human beings are a failed species – we’re on the way out,” is the blunt assessment of Prof Michael Boulter of London’s Natural History Museum. “Our lives are so artificial they can’t possibly be sustained within the limits of our planet.” Looking down the road, he adds: “The planet would of course be delighted for humans to become extinct, and the sooner it happens, the better.” The Professor’s prognosis may be accurate, but that hardly makes it any less unpalatable to us humans.

The scientific warning bells have been tolling ever more urgently recently. In May 2011 an expert group that included 17 Nobel laureates issued the ‘Stockholm Memorandum’ urging emergency action to reduce human pressures on the global environment. The language is plain: “Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years. Evidence is growing that human pressures are starting to overwhelm the Earth’s buffering capacity. Humans have propelled the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene – the Age of Man”.

Its conclusions are unambiguous: “We cannot continue on our current path. The time for procrastination is over. We cannot afford the luxury of denial”.

The Stockholm Memorandum was widely ignored, both here in Ireland and elsewhere. After all, with a banking fiasco, unemployment and a debt mountain to worry about, who could possibly be exercised by such seeming abstractions as our unravelling ecological web, or that, in less than the time it takes to read this article, another entire species has been driven into extinction?

While the scale of the existential threat to human and wider ecosystem well-being is extremely well documented across the spectrum of the physical sciences, what is perhaps most astonishing is the degree to which human societies and the wider global community have failed – or simply proved unable – to respond. The problems, while vast, are potentially fixable. But as the clock ticks towards midnight, we’ve given up even the meaningful pretence of trying. Why?

Tempting though it is to lay the blame at the door of energy industry propaganda, the cynical and corporatised media and marketers or the malign influence of right wing economists on careerist politicians, the true answer appears to lie deep within human psychology.

As a species, we have rarely faced a collective crisis of this magnitude, and our ancient so-called reptilian brains, have proven ill-equipped to respond to a slow-moving disaster. We are hard-wired only to react to immediate threats via the ‘fight-or-flight’ endocrinal reflex. Evolution also makes us prone to heavily ‘discount’ future costs against even modest present gains. It is extremely difficult for most humans (or our media) to stay focused for long periods on threats that appear abstract, distant or are complex and multi-dimensional.

Not understanding or choosing to ignore a threat rarely makes it less real. False optimism can in fact be positively hazardous. In the 1930s, as fascists seized power in Europe, the British public wilfully ignored the gathering storm. Winston Churchill chose instead to “prick the bloated bladder of soggy hopes” that peace would last. For his efforts, Churchill was – literally until the bombs began to fall – maligned by politicians and the press as a war-mongering alarmist.

“Awakening to the prospect of climate disruption compels us to abandon most of the comfortable beliefs that have sustained our sense of the world as a stable place”, argues public ethicist, Clive Hamilton. The foundation beliefs of modernity are on the line. “When we recognise that our dreams of the future are built on sand, the natural human response is to despair”.

In the current circumstances, Prof Hamilton argues that clinging to hopefulness is just another form of denial. “We must allow ourselves to enter a phase of desolation and hopelessness; in short, to grieve”. That grief is for the loss of the future. The destruction of what is known as our ontological security – the mental stability derived from our belief that there is order and continuity in our lives – is deeply traumatic.

“At present, the early mourners feel lonely and isolated, sometimes keeping their thoughts to themselves for fear of alienating those around them with their anxieties and pessimism”. It is, he suggests, like having just learned from the doctors that there is no hope for recovery of a sick child, while your relatives crowd around reassuring you the child will be just fine.

The three stages he suggests we as individuals must pass through are: i) Despair; ii) Accept; iii) Act. Sugar-coating the scale and sheer intractability of the climate and ecological crisis to anything other than radical measures (a route favoured by many environmentalists) has manifestly failed. The roots of denialism run too deep, the crisis is too pressing, the vested interests too powerful and the time remaining in which our actions can have effect too short.

Changing lightbulbs won’t matter unless we can somehow also change a system that is bent on self-immolation. The current growth-economics model, based on globalised smash-and-grab of natural resources while ‘externalising’ the cost of emissions from the polluters to civilisation as a whole and our children’s generation in particular is a highway to climate hell. If globalisation is allowed to steam ahead at full speed until it spontaneously collapses, this will simply mean deeper immiseration for billions.

Meanwhile, as transnational corporations privatise the profits of resource plunder, they socialise the risks. Every year, the felling of forests is depriving the world of some $2.5 trillion (yes, trillion) of critical environmental services. The UN environment programme estimates that some 60% of the Earth’s natural resources have been “severely degraded” in just the last quarter century.

A formidable array of crises is now converging to challenge humanity’s dream of planetary hegemony. These include biodiversity loss, global warming, ocean acidification, peak food, peak water, runaway population growth and peak oil.

Oil is the black blood of modern industrial civilisation. Transportation and food production are just two of our critical systems completely dependent on converting cheap oil into energy and calories.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global ‘peak oil’ actually occurred in 2006. Humanity is now perched precariously at the apex of a bell-shaped production curve. It’s time to buckle up, as it’s all downhill from here.

The collapse in oil supply has been spectacular: “The existing fields are declining so sharply that in order to stay where we are in terms of production levels in the next 25 years, we have to find and develop four new Saudi Arabias”, according to the IEA. Of course, there never will be another oil field found as enormous as Saudi Arabia, let alone four.

A spike in oil prices in mid-2008 was the trigger event for the financial crisis that came within a heartbeat of obliterating globalisation itself that September, as well as crashing Ireland’s property pyramid scheme. The next spike, apart from ratcheting up global food prices to incendiary levels, will most likely induce another potentially lethal arrhythmia of panic.

A 2010 report from Feasta, the Irish-based Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability argues that, as energy flows begin to falter: “there is a high probability that our integrated and globalised civilisation is on the cusp of a rapid and near-term collapse”. What this means for countries like Ireland is that “starvation and social breakdown could evolve rapidly”, according to report author, David Korowicz.

Debt can only be repaid via constant economic growth. Once societies finally accept that resource constraints make sustained economic growth impossible, he argues that credit will evaporate, and with it, globalised trade and finance. The US, ostensibly the world’s richest nation, sits atop a national debt mountain of $14,000 billion – and rising. Before this bubble blows up in our faces, “what we now require is rapid emergency planning coupled with a plan for longer term adaptation,” adds Korowicz.

Techno-optimists will argue that shale oil and gas, plus ever greater usage of coal, along with a sprinkling of renewable and nuclear, will fill the void left by dwindling oil supplies. Let’s say they’re right, and, against the odds, the globalised economy continues to run full-throttle for the next 20 years.

Today, atmospheric CO2 levels are the highest they’ve been in at least three million years. Ocean system inertia means we haven’t yet felt the recoil of the colossal energy imbalance building up within the biosphere and threatening to jolt Earth into a new, much hotter, equilibrium.

And abrupt is the word. Sudden and unimaginably violent climate shifts have taken place in the ancient past. Some 251 million years ago, a rapid 6C temperature spike caused the Permian era to end in a cataclysm that wiped out over 95% of all life on the planet, and which took 100 million years to recover diversity.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected average temperature rise scenarios this century ranging from 1.8C to 6.4C. This spectrum runs from dangerous to deadly. The higher figures, unfortunately, reflect the business-as-usual path we have chosen to follow.

Expert consensus is that, to avoid the most severe impacts, temperature increases must be kept below the 2C mark. Beyond that awaits a Pandora’s Box of ‘positive feedbacks’ that, once unleashed, render all human attempts at intervention futile. Indeed, the IEA’s chief economist Fatih Birol recently described current efforts to keep the dial below 2C as “just a nice Utopia”. The Agency’s own forecasts see a hellish 6C average rise this century, in line with the IPCC’s worst-case scenario.

This level of temperature rise in a short period will push all life on Earth to the edge. Soaring temperatures will trigger droughts, famines, coastal inundation and warfare over shrinking water supplies. In a heavily armed, overpopulated world riven by energy, climate and resource crises we seem determined not to even try resolving, the likely scale of the coming die-off approaches the very edge of our ability to contemplate.

I am not alone in finding the lack of response to the impending events puzzling, indeed heartbreaking. Nobel laureate economist, Paul Krugman recently confessed to profound personal feelings of despair. “If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it. Dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers.”

Almost half a century has passed since President, John F. Kennedy stated baldly: “The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet”. To borrow another motif of that era: we did not listen; we’re not listening still. Perhaps we never will.

John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator and blogs at ThinkorSwim.ie

ThinkOrSwim is a blog by journalist John Gibbons focusing on the inter-related crises involving climate change, sustainability, resource depletion, energy and biodiversity loss
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13 Responses to The decline and fall of the Human Empire

  1. That’s a great article, John. You hit all the salient points.

    I am sure this same scenario has occurred, is occurring and will occur, in countless other planets in other civilisations scattered throughout the Universe. A few make it – most don’t. Perhaps will be one of the lucky few.

  2. Liamer says:

    Cracking stuff. Read it and weep. Not sure I’ve ever seen it put together quite as lucidly or forcefully as the above article. Doubly astonishing when you consider that not a line of this type of argument can be found anywhere in the ‘mainstream’ Irish media. Then again, this is the same mainstream media that cheered on the bankers and developers all the way, so no reason to seem surprised at their missing yet another bubble…

  3. Eric Conroy says:

    Very good article, John. I feel like Paul Krugman. Its clear that we are facing a very serious situation (to put it mildly), but the world doesn’t care – all political discussion is about recession, banking bailouts, unemployment and above all economic growth. Whats your view on peak oil and the prospect of oil drilling in the Arctic caused by global warming? Could you argue perversely that we will not have peak oil if oil companies can tap the large tracts in the warming Arctic?

  4. John Gibbons says:

    Thanks Eric,

    I seem to somehow always find myself the bearer of bad news! To me, Clive Hamilton’s logic is compelling when he says that optimism is the enemy of action, and is proving to be yet another form of denialism. I have felt the fear, over and over, of the likely future that awaits us and our kids. Going through that desperately unpleasant grieving process is probably the essential first step towards seeing the world as it is, not as we’ve dreamed it.

    Regarding Arctic drilling, first, there is no submarine Saudi Arabia up there, the deposits are quite new, from the PETM period c.55 million years ago, if memory serves, and modest. To see the loss of Arctic ice cover as anything other than the global catastrophe that it is shows once again how otherwise intelligent folk can become slaves to the ideology of their beloved marketplace. As alluded to in the piece, the need to NOT understand is powerful when understanding means changing from a favoured or lucrative course.

  5. John Gibbons says:

    Joseph,

    Appreciate the feedback. You may be right, but here we are, in a backwater somewhere among the tens of billions of solar systems in the Milky Way, itself a proton-sized speck among the 100 billion and more galaxies out there – yet we’re all we’ve got, and we ain’t going to find another hospitable planet to evacuate to in the next 10,000 years, let alone 50, so we’re just going to have to look after this one (or more to the point, stop preventing it looking after itself) or take our place in the lengthening queue of failed species.

  6. Barry Reilly says:

    If that’s the future, small wonder nobody wants anything to do with it. Who wouldn’t rather stay here in this best of all possible worlds where we live right now? Yea, think I’ll stay right here, thanks very much 🙂

  7. seafoid says:

    An excellent article that deserves a wider readership. I’m reading “Down to the Wire” by David Orr at the moment which covers similar ground and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

    He quotes Galbraith

    “The conventional wisdom” gives way not so much to new ideas as to “the massive onslaught of circumstances with which it cannot contend”.

    and describes “a system haphazardly created in the dim light of an incomplete understanding of reality”.

    Two elephants in the room that have to be discussed are the economic system of permagrowth and the consumer brain .

    In many ways Ireland is at the stage where the old failed system is broken and there is a chance to build something more durable from the wreckage . There are so many lessons that could be learnt now for the ultimate breakdown that is to follow. Resilience is the key. How resilient is Ireland? there was no resilence in 2008. How can such resilience be built?

    John Trudell is a Sioux writer and activist who has written extensively on picking up the pieces after everything falls apart. There are very few public figures I admire but he is one of them . I think the writings of people like him have a lot to offer.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw7V98FeXq8&feature=related

    In this one he says there’s no difference between the winners and losers of WW2. It was all about the same economic system

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG7TLCh-lKM&feature=related

    Thing is

    Nihilistic desires
    Civil lies gone insane
    Didn’t imagine it turning like this
    Some things start good and go bad
    Some things get bad and stay bad
    Are we caught in between
    Living a lie or not living at all

  8. Simon Van says:

    Cracking stuff, John. Read it in Village over the weekend and was left gasping, have since made everyone I can think of read it too. The Dept of Ed. Should put it on the Leaving Cert syllabus.

  9. John Gibbons says:

    @Seafoid
    Thanks for interesting posting. Have added “Down to the Wire” to the ever-expanding reading list. I like that Galbraith quote, hadn’t come across it before. Not so sure we’re ever going to have a chance to develop resilience to any meaningful extent; inertia and wishful thinking is too powerful a combination to overcome.

    @Simon
    Funny you should mention the school syllabus, I read yesterday about efforts in the UK to have climate change removed from the national curriculum! Apparently, they need to concentrate on REAL science – sweet jaysus preserve and keep us from these folk.

  10. seafóid says:

    This is also from “Down to the Wire”

    “the most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one’s interest. It is a suicide machine.”
    — Ronald Wright (A Short History of Progress)

    another quote from John Trudell

    “We are people with no connection to our descendants “

  11. seafóid says:

    The US :

    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/22245532-9961-11e0-acd2-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1Po0TzT6q

    In contrast, Ms Bachmann has three advantages. First, she can explain what she stands for without resorting to train metaphors. She opposes US participation in Nato’s Libya mission. She thinks the Environmental Protection Agency should be called the “Job-killing Organisation of America”. She has questioned the science behind global warming. She claims to read the works of Austrian-school economist Ludwig von Mises on the beach. As the journalist Ron Brownstein has gently put it, she has a “tendency to jumble her facts.” But her views are not necessarily further from those of the political establishment than Ronald Reagan’s seemed in 1980. ..

    ..Her second advantage is that the election schedule favours a candidate who believes the things she does. …

    And that is because of her third advantage. She excels in the two key areas of US politics: fundraising and television.

  12. Fraser Brown says:

    Its a great article. Problems that are coming are:
    1) No food
    2) No water
    3) No energy
    4) Breakdown of society and infrastructure.
    Solutions: Grow food; create own energy from wind, solar and tide; desalinize water from sea (using generated energy); build some walls/borders and own security companies such that those who did not prepare cannot get break in and steal.

    I would be interested in feedback to this. This is possible. Stopping the collapse is not possible because government is needed (and if you think the bankers are bad just wait till the fall out from the mess consecutive governments have got us into).

    Don’t get me wrong, everyone will get on board with this but only when its too late. As for me, enjoying silly money while it is here but it will soon be worthless. I’m working towards the above model and looking for like-minded people and preferably those with millions to put sustainable structures in place and make ready.

  13. John Gibbons says:

    Fraser,
    Feedback appreciated. Am with you on items 1-4 in your list above. As for “everyone will get on board with this but only when its too late”, you’re reading my mind. The determination to not understand our current and pending predicament is both widespread and dogged. Accepting all of the above leaves little choice for all but the terminally deluded but to be making plans for coping with, indeed, surviving, the coming Long Emergency. Sadly, I don’t have millions stashed away to build an eco friendly super-bunker complete with 50-calibre ‘trespasser deterrents’. There’s work to be done, and as the old Irish saying goes: you don’t try thatching your roof when the storm’s already upon you…

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