are we bacteria or primates?

Note: I do intend to continue the series on Charles Siegel’s work (he has a new book out) and reflect some more on what Paul Chefurka is doing, but I keep letting other things bubble up. Most recently the discussion that began here and continued with my last post has captured my attention. This essay is an attempt to contribute to that discussion.

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The pattern of human population growth in the 20th century was more bacterial than primate. — E. O. Wilson

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Last November in myriad views on overpopulation I cataloged a set of differing attitudes on population pressure. The general categories I found useful were:

• it’s not a problem
• it’s only a problem in developing countries
• we can’t/shouldn’t talk about it
• we can’t do anything about it anyway
• it’s a problem, here are solutions

Here I look at the last category, the one in which the problem is acknowledged and solutions offered.

Another name for Earth’s human population pressure problem is population bottleneck.

The term bottleneck is taken from the ‘assets are water’ metaphor. As water is poured out of a bottle, the rate of outflow is limited by the width of the conduit of exit — that is, bottleneck. Increase the width of the bottleneck, and you can increase the rate of which the water flows out. Pertaining to a business, a firm will address the ‘bottleneck’ that is limiting production. (source)

Traffic bottlenecks are familiar.

Carrying capacity for a stretch of road is determined by its number of lanes, posted speed limit, and some heuristics regarding spacing between cars at various speeds and driving conditions. When an accident or breakdown blocks one or more lanes, it forms a bottleneck which lowers carrying capacity. Given the perceived importance of car travel, it should come as no surprise that modeling traffic around and through cities is a highly evolved art, and that in some cities traffic is a main topic of conversation.

Population modeling with respect to Earth’s human carrying capacity is not highly evolved. It is in its infancy, not especially well-funded, and practiced by relatively few. Like most interesting and important problems, population and carrying capacity dynamics are hellishly complex.

Here’s a very abstract model, oversimplified for ease of discussion:

[update: As George Mobus notes in the comments, the label "bottleneck" on the red line is not accurate; "bottleneck event" or "bottleneck entry point" would be better. See addendum below.]

The blue population line creeps up until it hits the bottleneck, then a die-off occurs which might play out as a recovery or extinction.

The green carrying capacity line is interesting too. Earth’s carrying capacity is not fixed but rather a function of how it’s being used. As long as human population is in overshoot, carrying capacity is being reduced; that’s part of what overshoot means.

Even with this simple model there’s a lot to talk about. Just a few points:

• Following the recovery path is no guarantee that we don’t repeat the whole cycle again and again.
• Degradation of carrying capacity increases as the degree of overshoot increases.
• It’s possible that the social circumstances surrounding the die-off are so dramatic that extinction occurs even though the population is less than carrying capacity.

Let’s generalize a bit. Rather than population size we should use human impact on the blue line’s vertical axis. Human impact is population size times environmental impact (or, more simply, consumption) per person. For clarity and emphasis, the green line’s vertical axis is renamed human carrying capacity. Also, now that we’re talking about human impact, “die-off” is no longer an appropriate term; collapse is better.

One way to reduce human impact is to reduce the number of humans (die-off), another is to reduce the impact per person. So in a recovery scenario it may be that many people die, then the population starts to rebound. Or perhaps the population remains large but everyone is quite poor by today’s Western standards with shorter lifespans, high infant mortality, and a high fertility rate — the world as Niger. “Collapse” encompasses both ideas or a mix of the two.

Here’s the same graph with the new names.

One possibility is that we degrade carrying capacity so severly humanity is doomed to extinction. The collective response to passing through the bottleneck might be to do all the wrong things, that is, all the things that decrease Earth’s human carrying capacity.

That’s a sad picture indeed. A close cousin to extinction might occur if the human carrying capacity stabilizes at a very low number, a common idea in dystopian novels, just enough room left for some scattered communities to survive indefinitely in a harsh and unfriendly world. Who knows? Given isolation between them and an awful lot of time, they might even give rise to several species better suited to the new conditions.

Another possibility is we learn from our mistakes and make a recovery.

This diagram adds a new label, Undershoot. Recovery requires humanity finds (or stumbles into) a way of living with an impact below Earth’s carrying capacity. Continued recovery requires staying below that limit.

Still, these graphs show no units of measure on either axis. Ignoring the extinction scenario, what time frame makes sense for the x-axis? Here’s one idea (note the addition of dates at the bottom):

Some people think the collapse will be extreme and happen quickly. Others see it as a more lengthy process:

Don’t make too much of dates, which are purely illustrative and offered only to emphasize the time dimension.

We can imagine all sorts of scenarios playing out. Here are just a few more of an infinite number of possibilities:

• figure A: carrying capacity isn’t too damaged but human social structures are, thus society is unable to organize effectively to exploit Earth’s remaining bounty; or, after going through the bottleneck tragedy, people want a large cushion, a carrying capacity safety net, going forward; or a future McKibben convinces everyone there’s much to be gained from simply appreciating wild areas, just for the sheer enjoyment of it.
• figure B: carrying capacity is so degraded human impact is forced to remain low for people to survive.
• figure C: somehow people figure out to speed the recovery of carrying capacity and it and human impact both increase in parallel. (Not all scenarios are plausible.)
• figure D: the collapse happens over a longer period of time but is not as severe, a “smooth landing” scenario.

Again, these are just some of many possibilities. We haven’t yet place a metric on the y-axis. Will the 21st century see billions die of a combination of famine, war, and disease? Or in the next generation or two will our modern economies regress to something like those of 18th century? A third and rosy possibility is a neo-renaissance in which the population drops due to informed, compassionate choice and the economy evolves into a new ecologically enlightened state allowing humanity to live well and rest lightly on the planet. (One can dream.)

where are we now?

We’re not yet in the bottleneck, but there is more than enough data to see that it’s nearby. Lester Brown does as good a job as anyone of detailing the indicators, see “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (W. W. Norton, 2008, online as a single PDF file or PDF by chapter).

E. O. Wilson, as always, has a vivid description:

The 20th century was a time of exponential scientific and technical advance, the freeing of the arts by an exuberant modernism, and the spread of democracy and human rights throughout the world. It was also a dark and savage age of world wars, genocide, and totalitarian ideologies that came dangerously close to global domination. While preoccupied with all this tumult, humanity managed collaterally to decimate the natural environment and draw down the nonrenewable resources of the planet with cheerful abandon. We thereby accelerated the erasure of entire ecosystems and the extinction of thousands of million-year-old species. If Earth’s ability to support our growth is finite — and it is — we were mostly too busy to notice.

As a new century begins, we have begun to awaken from this delirium. Now, increasingly postideological in temper, we may be ready to settle down before we wreck the planet. It is time to sort out Earth and calculate what it will take to provide a satisfying and sustainable life for everyone into the indefinite future. The question of the century is: How best can we shift to a culture of permanence, both for ourselves and for the biosphere that sustains us?

The bottom line is different from that generally assumed by our leading economists and public philosophers. … Homo sapiens has become a geophysical force, the first species in the history of the planet to attain that dubious distinction. …

For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths.

In short, we have entered the Century of the Environment, in which the immediate future is usefully conceived as a bottleneck. …

so what do we do?

Recall at the beginning I said I’m writing here with respect to people who say, “it’s a problem, here are solutions,” not those who think “we can’t do anything about it anyway.” (The only way to reach the latter group is, I think, to show them a viable solution or how they might contribute to finding one.) Proposed solutions reflect how their authors model the bottleneck and think about the nature of human society.

doomsday: severe, quick collapse, happening soon, brittle society

Solutions in this category emphasize working now for a better post-collapse recovery by creating vaults to preserve human knowledge and genetic material (e.g. seeds of valuable plants) and/or by establishing remote communities that might survive the collapse intact to become leaders of the recovery. Their authors support efforts to postpone when the bottleneck occurs but don’t believe they will will do much good. There is a strong current of “the rich and powerful who are responsible for the current state of affairs can not be swayed. The small changes they’ll allow won’t amount to much.” [I see Ken Whitehead's essay which started this discussion being a solution of this type.]

radical change: some kind of collapse, not sure when, flexible society

All the other solutions end up in this bucket. Their authors are certain a collapse is coming but not much more. [I think that's an admirable and honest position considering the current state of our knowledge.] They believe society is flexible enough to change in ways which can have a large effect on when the bottleneck occurs, the severity of the collapse, and the post-collapse recovery. Yet they are by no means optimists; any collapse is a tragedy for those who die early, suffer needlessly, or see their hopes for a better life vanish. The optimists are those who think the collapse can be avoided.

The solutions in this category inevitably involve vast changes to the world economy and how we think about economics. I think some who find some initial solace in the contents of this category move on to the doomsday group when they discover the radical nature of the changes these solutions require.

a case study in radical change

Even though Lester Brown presents his Plan B 3.0 as a way to avoid collapse (and thus not formally a radical change solution), many of the elements of Plan B 3.0 are sufficiently extreme to serve as an example of a radical change solution. (I sincerely doubt Brown thinks his plan can be implemented quickly or completely enough to avoid a collapse of some sort.)

Plan B 3.0 is online for free in its entirity as a PDF file. Here’s an outline of it’s action items, some quite general, some specific (read the book for details and context):

• Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population
  • Ensure universal education
  • Target the low world population projection of a peak of 8 billion in 2041; all women who want to plan their families should have access to the family planning services they need
  • Fund basic health care and vaccinations for all
  • Reform of farm subsidies in aid-giving countries and provide debt relief to aid-receiving ones
• Restoring the Earth
  • Plant trees to reduce flooding, conserve soil, and sequester carbon
  • Protect topsoil on cropland
  • Restore rangelands and fisheries
  • Protect biological diversity
  • Stabilize water tables
• Feeding Eight Billion Well
  • Extensive changes in agricultural practices
  • Raise water productivity
  • Produce protein more efficiently
  • Eat less meat
• Designing Cities for People
  • Redesign urban transport away from cars
  • Reduce urban water use
  • Promote urban gardening
  • Improve conditions in the countryside to mitigate urban squatting in developing countries
• Raising Energy Efficiency
  • Cut net CO2 emissions 80 percent by 2020 stabilizing CO2 concentration below 400 parts per million (ppm)
  • Reduce electrical demand enough to avoid constructing any new coal-fired power plants
  • Open only enough new nuclear power plants to compensate for those that close
  • Ban incandescent light bulbs
  • Institute a worldwide set of appliance efficiency standards keyed to the most efficient models on the market
  • Push Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for new buildings, retrofit old buildings
  • In the United States, phase in a gasoline tax of 40 cents per gallon per year for the next 12 years (for a total rise of $4.80 a gallon) and offset it with a reduction in income taxes
  • Raise fuel-efficiency of new cars to 45 miles per gallon by 2020
  • Institute a worldwide carbon tax of $240 per ton to be phased in at the rate of $20 per year between 2008 and 2020
  • In the United States, construct a high-speed electrified rail system, for both passenger and freight traffic
  • New materials strategy to increase reuse, recycle everything and tax waste
• Turning to Renewable Energy
  • In the United States, create a crash program to develop 3 million megawatts of wind generating capacity by 2020 and commit to plug-in hybrid cars
  • Build, world-wide, 200,000 megawatts of solar thermal power plants
  • Encourage solar water and space heating
  • Keep supporting solar cell development and use
  • Establish for 200,000 megawatts of geothermally generated electricity world-wide by 2020
  • Reduce fossil fuel-generated electricity in the US by 90 percent by 2020
• The Great Mobilization
  • Reduce taxes on work and raise them on various environmentally destructive activities to incorporate indirect costs into the market price
  • Eliminate the estimated $700 billion of subsidies for environmentally destructive activities (such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing) currently paid each year by the world’s taxpayers
  • Bring deforestation to a halt by 2020
  • Create a new cabinet-level agency in the United States government — a Department of Global Security — that would fashion a coherent policy toward each weak and failing nation

The items in bold text are ones I think especially extreme. That is, given the political reality as we know it today, they can’t happen as soon as Plan B 3.0 requires. That doesn’t mean Plan B is a failure, just that it is not a means to avoid collapse. Following it is still a meaningful way to approach mitigation by lowering per capita consumption while avoiding both die-off and a large reduction in Earth’s carrying capacity.

Here’s some more from Lester Brown, then I’ll wrap up. He says,

There are many things we do not know about the future. But one thing we do know is that business as usual will not continue for much longer. Massive change is inevitable. Will the change come because we move quickly to restructure the economy or because we fail to act and civilization begins to unravel?

Saving civilization will take a massive mobilization, and at wartime speed. The closest analogy is the belated U.S. mobilization during World War II. But unlike that chapter in history, in which one country totally restructured its economy, the Plan B mobilization requires decisive action on a global scale.

Obviously the world as we know today it is not amenable to coordinated decisive action on a global scale. Brown continues,

On the climate front, official attention has now shifted to negotiating a post-Kyoto protocol to reduce carbon emissions. But that will take years. We need to act now. There is simply not time for years of negotiations and then more years for ratification of another international agreement.

It is time for individual countries to take initiatives on their own.

One country that should lead the way is the United States:

The world needs a major success story in reducing carbon emissions and dependence on oil to bolster hope in the future. If the United States, for instance, were to launch a crash program to shift to plug-in hybrid cars while simultaneously investing in thousands of wind farms, Americans could do most of their short-distance driving with wind energy, dramatically reducing pressure on the world’s oil supplies.

With many U.S. automobile assembly lines idled, it would be a relatively simple matter to retool some of them to produce wind turbines, enabling the country to quickly harness its vast wind energy potential. This would be a rather modest initiative compared with the restructuring during World War II, but it would help the world to see that restructuring an economy is entirely doable and that it can be done quickly, profitably, and in a way that enhances national security both by reducing dependence on vulnerable oil supplies and by avoiding disruptive climate change.

Given the political will and popular support, Plan B 3.0 could get the job done:

No one can argue today that we do not have the resources to eradicate poverty, stabilize population, and protect the earth’s natural resource base. We can get rid of hunger, illiteracy, disease, and poverty, and we can restore the earth’s soils, forests, and fisheries. Shifting one sixth of the world military budget to the Plan B budget would be more than adequate to move the world onto a path that would sustain progress. We can build a global community where the basic needs of all the earth’s people are satisfied — a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized.

This economic restructuring depends on tax restructuring, on getting the market to be ecologically honest. The benchmark of political leadership will be whether leaders succeed in restructuring the tax system. Restructuring the tax system, not additional appropriations, is the key to restructuring the energy economy.

Like all books and articles on this subject, Brown ends his like this:

In short, we need to persuade our elected representatives and leaders to support the changes outlined in Plan B. We need to lobby them for these changes as though our future and that of our children depended on it — because it does.

Even though sensible and necessary advice, I find it woefully unsatisfying. It’s like a surgeon explaining in great detail all the steps necessary to remove your brain tumor and what a great success the operation will be — then saying, after placing the scalpel in your hand, “Here, do it yourself.”

I wish we had a Plan B-prime to facilitate the political change required to implement Plan B 3.0.

summary

While a bottleneck is coming, modeling the future is complex and the state-of-the-art in its infancy. No one has a bottleneck model to which we can assign a high degree of certainty. In light of that, I find the doomsday-lifeboat-builders response shocking, a complete abrogation of responsibility to self and other, and indistinguishable from a cult. If you were riding on a train and someone said, “I have a deep intuition that the train is going to crash,” would you jump off?

Those in the radical change group, who see the bottleneck coming but admit the models are at best fuzzy, offer a mix of things we can do now to mitigate at least the worse effects — postpone the bottleneck, make the collapse less dire, and the recovery quicker. The most optimistic outcome is we collectively see the light, change our ways, go through the bottleneck with a minimum (although still tragic amount) of suffering, and establish a truly civilized society that respects the diversity of life, universal human rights, the need to live under Earth’s human carry capacity, and the value of large tracts of unmanaged wilderness.

Would you rather be a doomsday-lifeboat builder or an agent of radical change?

Nothing would be more satisfying to me than being part of a radical, positive change in the politics and economics of our planet. Even if Plan B 3.0 or some equivalent is not implemented quickly and completely, any progress on any of its elements mitigates future harm. (And I’m guessing that would be more appreciated by a post-collapse person than a lifeboat.)

And finally,

• It’s going to be a bumpy ride, and each of those bumps will change minds about the seriousness of our quandary. The pace of positive social, political, and economic change can increase dramatically. (We’re experiencing an economic bump right now.)
• High quality of life is not dependent on high-consumption, which makes it possible to get people to stop clinging to high-consumption lifestyles. Each individual who lives well and consumes little is making a strong statement to everyone else.
• We are not a small force: millions of organizations and individuals are actively working towards ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights, and political accountability address issues that are systemically interconnected and intertwined. (source)

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credits & miscellany

Elements of this image and this one where used in the creation of the diagrams.

If you really want to experience the dark side, read Jay Hanson’s odyssey — then read Caryl Johnston’s reply.

Edward O. Wilson’s The Bottleneck (quoted above) is chapter two of the book The Future of Life (Knopf, 2002). In the last chapter he says:

At the risk of seeming politically correct, I will now close with a tribute to protest groups. They gather like angry bees at meetings of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum. The boycott insufficiently green restaurant franchises. They mass on logging roads. … They have a point. … The protesters say: Include us, and while you’re at it, the rest of life.

The protest groups are the early warning system for the natural economy. They are the living world’s immunological response. …

Granted, some of the protest groups are tainted by the violent actions of a few. … But the vast majority of the protesters, those honest, loud-shouting picketers dressed in turtle costumes and homeless-shelter couture, gather to demand equal time for the poor and for nature. I say bless them all. Their wisdom is deeper than their chants and tramping feet suggest, deeper than that of many of the power brokers they oppose. … Their youthful energies therapeutically disturb and counter the cynicism endemic to the conservative temperament.

addendum

In his comment George rightly points to a labeling error in the graphs above. What should be “bottleneck event” or “bottleneck entry” is labled simply “bottleneck.”

Here’s a new graph followed by a few more words:

• Don’t make much of the scale used.
• At A, the collapse begins, human impact begins to decrease and the decrease in carrying capacity lessens.
• At B, the end of overshoot, carrying capacity stops decreasing.
• At C, human impact begins to increase again.
• The shaded area from A to C is what’s usually considered the bottleneck.
• A case could be made for the bottleneck being A to B but that’s beyond the scope of this post, perhaps contrary to established thinking, and of not much consequence one way or the other.