While reading the ramblings of a thirty-something from the Torres Strait, Australia, I found a link to this article which talks about some things near and dear to my heart. Several things actually: efficiency, resiliency, and redundancy. Commenting on the article, Verdurous managed to put all of them together in this single compelling sentence,
Nature offers plenty of examples of resiliency and redundancy but we humans choose often to follow a narrow path of efficiency and wonder why things sometimes go horribly wrong.
When we are focused on capital formation — the traditional essence of capitalism — resiliency and redundancy only get their just due when seen from a system perspective, where the “system” is the whole world. Anything less allows investors and product developers to concentrate on efficiency of production and delivery to the exclusion of all else.
The markets for safety systems and security systems are two exceptions to general rule that efficiency creates wealth. In these two areas redundancy is seen as a positive selling point rather than an inefficiency to be removed. There are, for example, a host of defenses built into the system that lets you use a debit card with confidence — similarly for air transportation and elevators.
In the 1960’s when a barrel of oil sold for less than $2 and a young Ralph Nader was a lone voice making noise about automobile safety, the idea of putting seatbelts, air bags, catalytic converters, and small engines in cars was economically absurd. In that same decade Rachel Carson was called a propagandist for suggesting DDT was not a good way to fight fire ants. She was looking at a system which included more than just the fire ants; her detractors could only see how effective DDT was at killing off harmful things. In the 60’s the idea of looking at wider systems, ecosystems, and the Earth as a whole was radical.
Today system-wide thinking is commonplace in both business management and environmental science, but we still live with an economic system that is only beginning to acknowledge this view and only in small ways — which should come as no surprise. Until recently (the last 100 years) we have had enough excess space and resources to allow the economy and the population to expand without regard to anything more than the occasional national or regional concern. It’s quite normal that our economists and political thinkers have the views they do.
To state the obvious, things have changed vastly in the last century but the way we do business has not. In 1907 the world population was 1.7 billion, China 350 million, the US under 90 million. Today those figures are 6.6 billion, 1.3 billion, and 300 million. In 1907 the Colorado River ran unimpeded to the sea, today its last drops evaporate in the desert. 100 years ago 2 million people lived in California, today there are 36 million most of whom live in the dry southern part of the state in a giant metro area.
We’ve used up the safety margins we once had and then some. Desert cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas have little resiliency. The megalopolises of Chicago, New York, and Washington-Baltimore are hardly better off. Extreme size is an Achilles heel when the only sustainable substitute for the fossil fuels that keep these cities livable is relatively small distributed systems.
Imagine how safe and secure our world could be with a population level like that of the early 20th century but with the knowledge of the 21st. Yet under ideal circumstances it will take centuries to reduce our population significantly, in the meantime we are faced with multiple stresses to our brittle, global economics. Thomas Homer-Dixon lists these:
- Population stresses arising from rapidly growing numbers in developing countries, and the creation of sprawling megacities.
- Energy stress, primarily as we shift from cheap, “high-quality” energy sources like oil and gas to expensive, low-quality sources.
- Environmental stress from our rapacious waste.
- Climate stress from anthropogenic climate change.
- Economic stress from global economic chaos, combined with widening inequality between rich and poor nations.
[See John's comment here.]
In the United States, we have had conservative administrations for all but 12 of the last 40 years and no progressive political action since the civil rights movement of Johnson years. By their very nature conservatives resist change, but they do respond to issues of safety and security. If we can get them to see that safety is now a bigger issue than being safe from crime, that security is more than saving for retirement, that the concerns of climate change and poverty are really about the safety and security of our children and grandchildren, then we might find some common ground on which conservatives and progressives can come together. We need a broad base of support to enable politicians to make the hard choices necessary to change our course before we exhaust the planet’s remaining safety margins.
footnote
In the wake of the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis, MN, I’ve seen a number references to this:
A University of Minnesota Civil Engineer in a report to MN-DOT recently noted that this bridge is considered to be a non-redundant structure. That is, if any one member fails, the entire bridge can collapse. … The textbook example of a non-redundant bridge is the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River. It failed shortly before Christmas in 1967 resulting in 46 deaths. A single piece of hardware failed due to a tiny manufacturing defect. But that piece was non-redundant, and the entire bridge collapsed into the icy river.
Humanity had occupied all reasonably decent living space and much of the marginal space on Earth by 1900, then with the help of fossil fuels we multiplied our numbers three-fold and are on our way to four-fold. That’s creating a non-redundant world. All our “wonderful” economic efficiency can not give us back resiliency and safety margins. Only a smaller population can do that.
credits
Top photo based on this one by Todd Murray.
“All our “wonderful” economic efficiency can not give us back resiliency and safety margins. Only a smaller population can do that.”
This is something I’ve been thinking about in mulling over how best to counter the arguments of those who insist that if we reduced per capita consumption to the bare minimum the earth might support 8 or 9 billion of us.Though I think there are multiple problems with that notion, one is we’d then have no safety margin, no ability to absorb new stresses. That leads, as well, to the question, “Why do some see it as desirable or important that we reach the absolute maximum number of people the earth can sustain?”
(Again, though, I think there are ways in which we might be past the maximum carrying capacity even if we did reduce resource consumption absolutely as much as possible. [assuming some kind of reasonable caloric intake, etc.] That’s something I want to research further.)
Good point. Perhaps we can achieve a carrying capacity of 9 billion by lowering our ecological footprint and thus our average lifestyle. The classic case being Bangladesh. As you say, we then have little safety margin — just like Bangladesh. One of the advantages a smaller population with a larger footprint has is the ability to shrink the footprint in times of scarcity or stress without killing large numbers of people. Instead of dying they just live less richly for a time.
There’s also the heighten risk of disease in more densely populated areas and, I think, psychological stress.
I don’t know the quality of the information at this link but it says in China today with half its population in urban areas:
“Average green land/per person in urban area: 7.4 square meters.” That’s square less than 9 feet on a side.
“Average residential space/per person in urban area: 24.9 square meters.” About 16 feet x 16 feet.
“One of the advantages a smaller population with a larger footprint has is the ability to shrink the footprint in times of scarcity or stress without killing large numbers of people. Instead of dying they just live less richly for a time.”
Hmmm, yes, I’d never thought of it quite that way.
They also have less reason to fight over resources. So they are safer in terms of handling what nature might dish up and they are safer from each other.
[...] as large as ours, even after energy is “solved.” There are also some key observations, such as those Trinifar made recently, to the effect that a population closer to carrying capacity, perhaps especially one which has [...]