Energy and Sustainability in Late Modern Society

By Karl North | July 9, 2020

Near the end of the modern age, sustainability assessment of the economic activities of modern society has encountered two problems, one physical, the other cultural. The discovery of a dense, high quality energy source had led to an explosion of human use of the planet’s raw materials and facilitated invention of new technologies, which in turn permitted even greater consumption, in a positive feedback loop. We know this phenomenon as the industrial revolution. Exponential growth in the use of raw materials, including fossil energy, eventually has caused their depletion. In the case of finite materials, this has no solution. In the case of renewables such as topsoil or fossil water, it has led to long-term and sometimes permanent erosion of carrying capacity. This whole dynamic now threatens the existence of modern society.

Also, two centuries of cheap energy have created a global cultural mindset that inhibits a clear understanding of the physical problem. As the low hanging fruit of natural resource consumption essential to sustain the industrial economy has been harvested, we simply throw cheap energy at the problem and consider it solved. Copper ore, for example, now contains only a fraction of the copper it held a century ago. But the result – increasing scarcity of this essential raw material – is palliated by enormously increasing the energy devoted to the mining and processing, so we entertain the illusion that the resource is infinite. Hence, commonly we see no need to evaluate current and future economic activities or technologies in terms of energy or raw materials costs. Only a tiny minority have understood the necessity for such cost accounting and developed the tools to do it properly. This paper will review those tools and discuss their implications for the future of industrial civilization.

As we will see, proper cost accounting requires a systemic perspective that is rare in the modern age. The reductive methods that dominate scientific inquiry deliberately ignore the systemic context of any invention or discovery and promote the illusion that what happens in the laboratory is what will happen in the real world. As a result, systems thinking is uncommon, and further inhibits honest evaluation of the sustainability of human activities.

A review of essential energy concepts

Ecosystem science teaches that human society is a subsystem of a larger ecological whole, and is subject to the same laws. In the language of economics, one could say that human society is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature. This is the premise of everything that follows. Because our schooling includes almost no ecosystem science, whatever lip service exists to this premise is mostly ignored in practice, in how we live our lives.

Nothing happens without energy. Howard T. Odum provided ecosystem science with a rigorous disciplinary basis built around a framework of energy flow, conversion, storages and feedback. By showing that all complex systems follow this energy pattern he developed systems ecology into a general theory that applies to all systems. Odum and his intellectual progeny saw that understanding how energy makes everything happen is so important, not only for the design of durable, healthy ecosystems but for the future of our species and for the future of civilization, that it needed a new term – emergy (that’s with an M): the energy involved in the chain of production of anything.

Emergy is just the full accounting of the energy cost of everything we produce, from the morning cornflakes to fighter bombers to energy itself. Emergy accounting starts with the extraction of raw materials and continues up the production and supply chain to the end product.  In an age of dirt-cheap energy, few took an interest in counting up the energy costs of everything. Now, when the energy cost of the fossil energy itself, essential to modern civilization, is permanently rising, it causes energy production, followed by economic activity, to peak and go into permanent decline. That brings to an end the industrial era. Oil geologists, natural resource scientists and systems ecologists have been trying to make the public aware of this for decades, and hit a brick wall of denial.

Here is a key reason emergy accounting is so important. As defined above, emergy is the energy invested in anything produced. The energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is an all-important calculation. It is a critical determinant and constraint on the level of our material standard of living. EROEI is a ratio: energy return/emergy. One can also think of it as net energy: gross energy produced minus emergy. It is simple to understand – it’s like business accounting. If your farm grosses $1 million, that is not profit. If your expense is $1 million, your profit is zero, right?

Now let’s apply EROEI accounting to our situation. Industrial civilization as we know it cannot run without oil. Only oil can power the transportation that is essential to today’s global economy, as Alice Friedemann dramatized in When the Trucks Stop Running and Why You Should Love Trucks.  At the height of the oil age in the US 1930s, oil EROEI was 100/1: an energy cost of one barrel of oil for a net energy return of 99 produced and processed. Cheap as water – stick in a pipe and get a gusher. Now it has declined to 11/1 for US conventional oil production and steadily dropping, and less than 4/1 in unconventional oil like hydrofracking. Corn ethanol EROEI is 1/1. That means it adds NO net energy to the economy. The only reason it is produced is subsidies. That is where the global economy is headed as EROEI of all fossil energy sources continues to drop. No more net energy – no more industrial economy.

A group of Odum’s intellectual progeny led by Charles Hall has studied the EROEI of various energy sources, with an emphasis on those claimed to be able to replace fossil fuels. They are finding that the net energy of “renewables” in nations which have devoted serious investment like Germany and Spain is nearly zero, far from the EROEI needed to replace oil’s EROEI of 100/1 in the heyday of the oil consumption that built the industrial economy. In sum, humanity has harvested the low hanging fruit – of fossil energy and most other raw materials necessary to industrial civilization.

Hall’s group has calculated society’s energy needs as a pyramid of increasing EROI requirements of oil:

Not long into this century, even global oil EROEI will be so low that oil can no longer power any industrial economy, including conventional and most organic agriculture. The energy cost (emergy) of food is huge in our oil age society. Over 90% of that energy cost is fossil fuel, mostly oil. We are eating oil, as it were. For those who pay attention, visible signs have existed since at least 1970 that because of dropping EROEI, the wheels are coming off the US industrial economy. First it began to slow down; now it is shrinking or propped artificially in places (e.g., weapons industry, hydrofracked energy) by cheap credit and enormous debt.

Fully Burdened life cycle accounting

Hall’s group has focused on the fact that every economic activity carries a long tail of energy and material costs. In accounting the costs, systems ecologists find it useful to view our universe as largely composed of open systems, whose inputs and outputs, termed sources and sinks, are governed in part by the laws of thermodynamics. How sustainable the systems are is dependent on how well the inputs and outputs are managed. Natural ecosystems have evolved to cope with source and sink problems (the first law) regarding finite materials on a finite planet, by cycling water and minerals. System survival, even without growth, requires a regular input of energy, just to keep the system from falling apart (entropy, the second law), and approximate a dynamic equilibrium. Natural ecosystems achieve it mainly by harvesting current sunlight, passing it through a food chain. Open systems are heat engines: they use energy inputs to do work, including the work of creating and maintaining organisms, but it must be continually replenished, for in the process the energy is ultimately dissipated as heat, and lost to outer space. As stated earlier, the first lesson of ecosystem science for humanity is that human society is a subsystem of nature, not apart from it, and is therefore subject to the same laws, including the laws of thermodynamics. We need to ask: What are the implications of our subjection to nature’s laws?

Anything a society does requires energy, raw materials and technology (I am defining technology broadly as knowledge to do anything rather than its limited common meaning as some physical manifestation of the knowledge, such as a machine). Lacking any one of these elements, nothing happens. The following thought experiment might help to dramatize this claim.

Suppose that in the year 1800 an angel endowed Benjamin Franklin with all the knowledge he needed to produce a smart phone and its necessary communications infrastructure at the scale of its use in the world today. Nothing would come of this gift of technology because the industrial economy and its energy and raw materials capabilities necessary to the project did not exist.

As with the above thought experiment, most of the problems of sustainability of human activities lie not with the capability of technologies used or proposed, but with the attendant energy and materials costs of applying the technologies in an era of depleting fossil energy caused by the activities themselves.  Hence, a full life cycle accounting of environmental costs of any human activity and its technologies is necessary to evaluate the sustainability of an activity. There are two reasons for this necessity.

First, all known alternatives to fossil fuels are diffuse sources that entail enormous energy costs to reconcentrate the energy to approximate the density and quality of fossil fuels, if they are intended to replace them at a significant scale. These energy costs also include sink management problems resulting from outputs that natural systems cannot handle. Negative effects are often long term, such as radiation problems from nuclear power production and silting of reservoirs serving hydropower production.

Second, most arguments ignore that replacements themselves depend on a fully functioning industrial economy which itself is inevitably shrinking due to rising energy costs of energy. As a result, a full energy accounting may reveal many existing or proposed activities or technologies to be unsustainable going forward, or of only limited transitional viability. After two centuries of industrial development based on cheap energy, few proponents of existing or proposed economic activities see the need for such an accounting, or understand what it entails. Hence, at this point, an explanation is in order.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) tracks costs from source activities like mining through a chain of processes to a final product and its disposal. LCA is not new, but the cultural mindset evoked earlier often obstructs a full accounting. Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff provides a good start on a fuller appreciation of what is missing from the picture and why.

A fully burdened accounting of energy costs of an energy source (EROI), a product or service tracks the LCA of all activities and materials needed to arrive at an end use result. Here are examples of the best such analysis to date, applied to the European projects that are the leading attempts to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar electricity.

In sunny Spain:

Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 1

Followed by an update:

Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 2

and a slide show of the graphics in this study:

http://science-and-energy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/20160307-Des-Houches-Case-Study-for-Solar-PV.pdf

In less sunny northern Europe:

Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation

These studies reveal that net energy obtained is close to zero.

Conclusion

Large scale attempts to replace fossil fuel production with alternatives face many challenges, the leading one being the energy costs described in this essay. But fully burdened environmental accounting may be able to identify transitional strategies that incorporate alternative energy at much lower scale.

Apart from the energy costs, the foremost challenges of large scale alternatives are cultural and political. Large scale conversions of the present industrial societies to a different energy source like electricity impose changes of a systemic nature – a multitude of changes that ripple through the system, multiplying costs, which require a period of sacrifice of material standards of living. Historically, societies have accepted such forfeitures only under threat of war. Moreover, the short run profit that motivates economies under private, capitalist control is a major obstacle to such systemic changes. Societies would have to adopt a ‘command economy’ where public policy dictates economic goals, which for generations has been demonized as “communism”.

Also, efficiencies in energy or raw materials consumption that a technology is capable of are real but are subject to the Jeavons effect, whereby savings achieved by efficiencies are spent in increased consumption. This is a normal social response that the growth imperative of the capitalist system and its cultural conditioning to maximize consumption intensifies.

At the other end of the scale, societies have successfully operated on direct solar gain for long historical periods, sometimes with minimal ecological footprint. As an example of a low technology, a water wheel mill that temporarily diverts a short section of a stream multiplies the power of human and animal labor at little environmental cost, compared, say, to a hydropower mega-dam, which comes with a full panoply of inconvenient consequences for society and the rest of nature. As fully burdened environmental accounting becomes more common, it may be able to identify technologies, situated somewhere between these two extremes, that can facilitate the transition to a post-oil age.

One ironic characteristic, but a potential advantage to capitalist systems faced with a transition to a lower energy consumption is its inherent capacity to foster waste, described half a century ago by critics like Vance Packard in his The Waste Makers, and more recently by students of consumerist manufacture of desire like Robert McChesney and Noam Chomsky. Also, the practice inherent in capitalist economies of extracting rent for investment of capital necessitates a growth imperative. And capitalists have found that the best way to maximize profit is to turn natural resources into garbage at the fastest possible rate. Capitalist economies thus create unusual amounts of wasteful and other ‘discretionary’ production that in theory could be eliminated and the liberated energy and raw materials devoted to production that facilitates the transition. For example, conversion of most of the land transportation sector to rail is arguably the single most energy saving transitional policy, usable even after the energy available to move goods by rail is reduced to animal power.

However, in practice even conversions that are more sustainable from an energy accounting perspective face the same political and cultural obstacles as large scale unsustainable ones.

One of the characteristics of complex systems is their resistance to change. In healthy natural ecosystems this can be desirable, and is called resilience. If the resistance is undesirable, we call it inertia. In the present predicament of fossil fueled economies facing loss of their energy source, transitional efforts require such major changes in life styles and skill sets that undesirable inertia is inevitable. Over a decade ago, energy descent writer Richard Heinberg dramatized the problem in his essay, “Fifty Million Farmers”. Where will they be found when most of our urbanized society has neither the skills or the desire?

Topics: Core Ideas, Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

Human designs for ecosystem management and survival after the oil era

By Karl North | January 18, 2020

All societies in history have relied on the land and its plant and animal resources. The superstructure of high technologies and complex forms of social organization like cities that fossil energy has made possible only conceal our essential reliance on the land. As access to the dense, high quality forms of energy in fossil fuels declines, it will force human society to return to modes of land management that use current solar gain and the low energy technologies that it provides[1].

Natural ecosystems offer an excellent guide to the kind of land management that will be necessary, because they run on current solar gain and rely heavily on their internal resource base for inputs. Long before the advent of our species, life self-organized into complexes of species that we now call ecosystems, whose interaction achieved two important synergies:

  1. They often maximized the carrying capacity of the system – the maximum biomass that the land could support.
  2. They also achieved a degree of self-regulation via food webs – a matrix of predator-prey and cooperative relationships – that enhanced the sustainability of the whole.

Pre-industrial societies, whether hunter/gatherer, horticultural, pastoral or a combination, learned to benefit from these interactions. Ecosystem science can build on and improve these pre-industrial schemes of land management. Modern knowledge of how ecosystems work can be used to enhance ecosystem processes that are essential to the health and long-term productivity of farms, when they are managed as agroecosystems. This essay will draw on current ecological knowledge to present general design elements and principles of land management to maximize long-term productivity for two types of environments: wet, temperate and relatively dry, seasonal rainfall locations.

These are not the environments that offer the highest potential carrying capacity. Locations where constant irrigation is possible are potentially the most productive, all other things being equal. Early agricultural societies built high “hydraulic” civilizations on rivers like the Nile or the Mekong, on reconfigured wetlands[2], on seasonal floodplains[3], and where high rainfall allowed water capture for wet rice systems[4]. However, they are less common than wet temperate locations such as Eastern North America or Northern Europe, or seasonal rainfall areas like African savannas, dry Asian steppes or the high prairies of Western North America. Hence the focus here; it is these latter two types, lands that most human populations will need to learn to manage sustainably if they are to survive as the industrial era melts away.

Modern systems ecology affords an understanding of how ecosystems function as complex, integrated wholes which, applied to agroecosystem management, shifts the goal from managing to maximize short run outputs to managing for the health of the system. The health of the ecosystem rests in turn on the health of the ecosystem processes: the energy flow, the mineral cycles, the water cycle and the interaction and interdependence of species. Ecosystem science has demonstrated that this holistic approach, while it may involve short run investments that sacrifice output, can improve outputs in the long run and at the same time sustain the system over the long term[5]. The strategy of management for short term outputs instead of the health of the ecosystem bears much of the responsibility for land degradation and the collapse of most civilizations since the advent of agriculture[6]. Systems ecology thus represents a revolution in thinking, a worldview that will inform the agroecosystem designs in this essay.

An essential principle of agroecosystem design in most environments is the integration of animals in relation to other species in the system, especially the plant base. Ecologists call the plant base the primary producers because photosynthesis in plants is the point of entry of solar energy into the ecosystem. That base becomes the source of energy flow in the system throughout the web of its predator-prey and sharing/trading relationships. Hence, strategies that enhance primary producer production raise the production potential and the health of the whole agroecosystem. Grazing animals have many uses, but a central function in design is to use them in a way that maximizes primary producer growth.

An example developed centuries ago is the loose cooperation between nomadic pastoralists and sedentary farmers on the West African savanna and sahel, despite being of different ethnic groups. Fula herders followed the seasonal rains north into the sahel and Sahara. Farmers like Bambara or Malinke allowed the pastoralists to return south in the dry season and settle their livestock on the cultivated fields and fallows of the farmers, gleaning and manuring them, and trading grain for milk.

Grazers in wet temperate environments

In many parts of the world, traditional models of agriculture that integrated crops and livestock to various degrees have endured for many centuries in a range of climates. For our purposes, a most interesting improvement on these models developed in areas of Europe that have a cool, wet climate comparable to our situation in the Northeastern US. In their last agricultural revolution before the industrial age, lowland European farmers created a model of animal/crop integrated farming that supported new levels of human population density (see figure)[7]. Previously, a fallow rotation had been necessary to renew fertility, and it supported a few livestock. The revolution consisted of intensive production of perennial and annual forage species for ruminants on the fallow rotation, which in turn allowed higher stocking rates, more barnyard manure, better utilization of pasture manure, and higher fertility and production on the whole farm. Pursued to its limit, this positive feedback loop allows the farmer to maximize the carrying capacity potential of the land.

Enduring examples in other parts of the world of this increasingly tight integration between cultivation and animal husbandry, using different configurations of plants and animals, underscore its advantages, which in the best cases use animals as multi-purpose tools to produce labor, fertility and food.

As early as 1650, colonists in New England had adapted animal integrated systems developed in lowland England (Donahue 2004). In colonial Concord, community land use policy supported the needs of an integrated system (see diagram). Riverine flood plain areas were managed as a swamp commons mostly reserved for pasture and hay as they dried out during the growing season. Adjacent fertile land was allocated for cropping, but became a grazing commons after harvest. Upland was multi-purpose, with the higher land maintained in forest. As in parts of Europe, well-watered riverine meadows fed with water-born silt produced enough livestock feed, livestock, and manure to sustain the fertility of land in tillage.

The next major revolution for our purposes was first documented in detail by the French farmer/scientist, André Voisin[8]. High organic matter soils are central to achieving healthy water and mineral cycles, and soils in humid temperate regions are exceptional in their ability to store organic matter and accumulate it over a period of years. Voisin’s book Grass Productivity demonstrated fifty years ago that pulsed grazing on permanent pasture is the fastest soil organic matter building tool that farmers have, at least in temperate climates. Pulsed Grazing is a method of repeated grazing of paddocks in a pasture that controls stock density and timing of stock movement in and out of paddocks to maximize forage production over the growing season. This in turn maximizes manure production to build soil organic matter. Forage plants experience repeated pulses of growth and removal of biomass, both above and below ground, over the growing season. The increase in primary production enhances the carrying capacity of the whole agroecosystem. Its key points:

Based on Voisin’s methods, so called ‘rotational grazing’ methods have spread among farmers in the US organic farming movement, but few have grasped the holistic nature and importance of Voisin’s work – to make intensively managed grazing the driving core of a crop/livestock agroecosystem that is highly productive with minimal external inputs. A notable exception is the group of Cuban agroecologists who came to the rescue of Cuban agriculture in 1989 when it lost access to the imports that its essentially high-input agriculture required. Building on Voisin’s thesis, their research showed that a system with roughly 3 acres of intensively managed forage land will both sustain itself in fertility and provide a surplus of fertility via vermicomposted manure to sustain roughly 1 acre of cultivated crops (Figure 2).

The following diagram shows a conceptual model that we developed with Cuban scientists to improve their original cow-based system by including multi-species grazing. The idea was to create a self-sufficient core system that would support a variety of subsidiary crop and animal production.

Like the Cubans, we operated Northland Sheep Dairy in upstate New York using insights from Voisin’s research; we designed our farm agroecosystem to adapt and improve on the natural grass-ruminant ecosystems that helped create the deep topsoils of Midwestern North America. Details of our design appear in earlier publications, but in summary the design focus is on three areas that are crucial to manage to maximize tight nutrient cycling. Key points of the farm nutrient cycle:

This design is working well on our farm and confirms Voisin’s thesis: in a few years forage production tripled on land previously abused and worn out from industrial methods of agriculture, and soil organic matter is slowly improving.

The weakest link in the mineral cycle at this point is the losses to leaching in our wet climate. Our solution was to design a sylvo-pastoral model for the Northeast: forage fields that will incorporate enough trees and other deep rooted plants to partially patch the leaching leak in the mineral cycle, still serve the other functions of the field (high quality hay and intensively managed pasture), and even capture synergies (shade, nitrogen fixing, forage diversification) to make the system more productive and healthy than forest and pasture separately[9]. We have seen such systems working well in Cuba, for orchard or timber production in pastures surrounded as well by live legume fence posts coppiced for forage.

Our overall design goal for the farm is to maximize productivity while respecting ecological imperatives by making the biological and physical resources of the farm serve multiple functions, as they often do in unmanaged ecosystems that self-organized in the course of natural history. In this effort we look for opportunities for symbiosis, to capture synergies. The goal is to avoid external inputs and find inputs in the agroecosystem itself. Like the historical models already evoked, we make significant use of draft animal power, which presents new opportunities to use animals as tools to provide ecological services. Our horses and mules add to the fertilizer production of the sheep flock, and used in multi-species grazing they allow more efficient use of pasture and better parasite control: they complement the sheep with different grazing habits, and their different internal parasites diminish the effective pasture parasite load for the sheep.

Grazers in seasonal rainfall environments

Large areas of the planet are relatively dry environments with seasonal rainfall. Range ecologist Alan Savory, while managing wild and domestic livestock on these lands in Southern Africa, observed that the land was degrading despite reductions in the stocking rate, and removing the grazers completely made the situation worse. His research from studying the dynamics of natural, unmanaged grassland ecosystems showed that predation on large herbivore species shapes their grazing  movement and is essential to the health of these types of ecosystems[10]. Not only is timing of herd movement critical, as Voisin had shown for wet, temperate environments, but frequent bunching of herds in response to predator pressure is critical to maintain seasonal rainfall ecosystems. If predator populations are insufficient or absent, human grazing management must simulate the natural impact of predators on the herd.

In these dry environments, ungrazed grasses remain on the stalk for long periods and oxidize, breaking the mineral cycle back to the earth, inhibiting grass regrowth and shading other plants. Lacking litter, bare ground remains unprotected from the sun’s drying effect, and capping of the soil surface reduces rain absorption, both of which weaken the water cycle.   The deterioration of these essential ecosystem processes degrades the grassland ecosystem as a whole, grass production declines and bare ground between plants increases.

High density grazing with frequent herd movements solves these problems. The bunched herd tramples uneaten forage and undesirable woody plants, creates litter, and its hooves break the capping of the soil surface. The bunched herd grinds litter and concentrated manure into the earth where it can begin to decompose back to soil organic matter. The soil begins to hold more water, repairing the water cycle. The trampling sacrifices of some of the forage in the short run, but sustains and rebuilds the health of the grassland ecosystem overall, increasing grass productivity and stocking rate (carrying capacity) in the long run. This human management strategy mimics the historically evolved dynamics of natural grassland ecosystems, which include a sufficient population of predators on large herbivores.

In sum, as Savory has demonstrated in the US West, South Africa and elsewhere, seasonal rainfall grassland ecosystems degrade with the wrong kind of management of large herbivores, often either by overgrazing or too much rest. He showed that they revive as patches grazed at high stock density spring back to life. Using this holistic approach to management, ranchers and farmers have brought large tracts of rangeland back to normal productivity. As productivity builds, the land can carry a higher stocking rate, which in turn presents opportunities for more beneficial herd effect from high density grazing, setting up a positive feedback loop.

Conclusion

Resource depletion and attendant damage to essential ecological services like clean water and fertile soil are sending industrial civilization into catabolic collapse. This process will eventually force human society, if it is to survive, into a subsistence economy that manages for ecosystem health, not short run output. Agroecosystems will need to be highly input self-sufficient. Hopefully the insights from agroecology described in this paper will facilitate the transition to a future without fossil fuels.


[1] The Industrial Economy is Ending Forever: an Energy Explanation for Agriculturists and Everyone

Kunstler, James Howard. 2005. The Long Emergency

[2] http://www.chinampas.info/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa, Ancient Mayan Water Control Systems

[3] Donahue, Brian. 2004. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord.

[4] King, F. H.(Franklin Hiram), Book Farmers of forty centuries; or, Permanent agriculture in China, Korea and Japan.

[5] Allen, T.F.H., Joseph A. Tainter, Thomas W. Hockstra. 2003. Supply-side sustainability

[6] ibid

[7] Mazoyer, Marcel, and Lawrence Roudart. 2006. A History of World Agriculture: from the Neolithic age to the current crisis. Monthly Review Press, New York.

[8] Voisin, André. 1959. Grass Productivity. Philosophical Library, New York. Island Press Edtition, 1988.

[9] North, Karl. 2008. Optimizing Nutrient Cycles with Trees in Pasture Fields. LEISA Magazine, 24 (2), March 2008.

[10] Savory, Alan. 1999. Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making.

Topics: Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy, Core Ideas, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

A systems view of Western policy today

By Karl North | July 12, 2019

Complex systems are resilient, or resistant to change from another viewpoint. Human societies are complex systems. Historically they have exhibited this inertia – a tendency to repeatedly snap back to business as usual or some facsimile of it when faced with a long period of inevitable change. Modern industrial society confronts just this situation – a long period of deindustrialization due to declining access to essential raw materials and damage to indispensable ecosystem processes.[1] Inertia in human society has multiple sources: political-economic, social and cultural. In this essay I will explore the political economy or general structure of power that shapes the policies of Western nations as a basis for better understanding how it will react to the long emergency. To better tackle the subject, a summary of the systems worldview will be useful.

A holistic or systems view of the universe holds that there are behaviors of wholes that are not predictable from the behaviors of the parts. That is, one cannot simply add up the behaviors of the parts and achieve an understanding of the whole. Missing from that analysis are emergent behaviors, so-called because they can be explained only by a study of the whole. Emergent behaviors are the result of what we call synergies, themselves the product of the web of interaction of multiple variables in the whole. A corollary of the core systems principle is that that the causes of the behavior of wholes are often multiple. A crowning lesson from systems science is that many behaviors of wholes are not predictable at all, while some are predictable in their rough shape over time only because they are driven by ecological imperatives, themselves obedient to the laws of energy and matter.

This worldview is still relatively rare, even actively resisted (more inertia), so that when we try to understand a complex whole such as foreign policy behavior patterns of the Western world in recent decades, we miss the synergies. What is worse, after several centuries of technological achievements, few denizens of the modern age are willing to accept the limits of scientific understanding described above. Instead of considering the whole social system and its power structure, we fix on parts.  In the example that is the subject of this essay, many attempts to explain foreign and even some domestic policies of Western governments fix attention on a single source of the power that shapes policy, whereas I propose that policy is shaped by a synergistic alliance of three power sources. I will first summarize each of these most common explanations.

A systems view reveals that single causes are rare in complex systems. My thesis is that by themselves no one of the forces outlined above fully explains Western policy trends in the last half century. A critical view free of influence from establishment narratives (themselves often a CIA product) easily shows that most of these policy patterns fail to serve the welfare of the citizens of Western nations; while protecting and promoting the interests of private capital they actually impair the security and welfare of Western societies. Most countries invaded or at risk for invasion from Western “coalitions of the willing” posed no risk to the national security of the peoples of Western nations. Western “wars on terror” are actually state-sponsored terrorism that cause suffering numbering in the hundreds of thousands in foreign places – all out of proportion to the suffering and security risk of “terror” to domestic society – and worse, actually generate counter-terrorism. Taxation to support expensive “defense” establishments is contributing to the decline of standards of living in Western nations. Full bore global imperial pressure necessitates demonization of nuclear powers like China and Russia, which strains relationships and brings the risk of nuclear war closer. The penetration of Western-based transnational capital destroys Third World economies and often requires destabilization and overthrow of governments, all of which sends waves of unwanted immigrants into Western societies. Policies so contrary to true interests of citizens of Western nations necessitate the domestic manufacture of fear, justifying and enabling the creation of surveillance states and the suppression of dissent.

So, who does benefit from all this? In my view, what best explains Western policy patterns is that the tail wagging the policy dog is not one of the sources of power and influence listed above but an alliance, sometimes close, sometimes loose, between all three, based on a strong overlap of interests and goals. As with any successful alliance, the whole is more powerful than the sum of the parts because each partner is willing to serve the interests of the others as long as its own goals are respected.

The coincidence of goals is most obvious in the foreign policies of Western governments regarding the societies in the Middle East. The MICs are on board for wars anywhere, so they are happy to support the Zionists in their quest to provoke the West into wars against their enemies in the Muslim world. These wars also fit well with the long-term project of global hegemonists – to fully control Russia and China for the penetration of international capital. They have been using Islamic extremists as proxies to stir up Muslim populations and destabilize the soft underbellies of these nations ever since they armed Osama bin Laden against Russia’s erstwhile ally Afghanistan during the Carter administration. So the use of these militants as proxies in the wars in the Middle East have provided opportunities to breed, train and develop the potential of extremist militias for deployment anywhere in the Muslim world, Muslim populations in the Russian Federation and China in particular.

Because the three power bases act in alliance rather than merely singly, they can draw on all sorts of resources and support in both the public and private sectors. The weapons industry spread itself strategically over the US states to guarantee congressional support for military budgets. The Zionists use their electoral campaign wealth to control governments, regularly test their readiness to act as agents of a foreign power (Israel) with legislative acts that gain near total approval, count on a tradition of support from both liberals and Christian fundamentalists, and, when all else fails, hold the accusation of antisemitism over everyone. The hegemonists have cultivated a long tradition of support for imperial policies that functions as misguided patriotism. Because these power bases have developed over at least the last half century to embed themselves in the collective consciousness, the public rarely questions this tragic state of affairs.

The brains and the operational hub of the alliance lie in the intelligence agencies, for several reasons. I will use the CIA as an example, because of its most extensive development in that agency.

First, the agency holds a monopoly on information gained secretly in its espionage role. Moreover, the veracity of its intelligence cannot be easily verified without blowing the cover of the source.

Second, the secrecy creates a mystique that makes its input more influential to the policy formation process in other institutions like the State Department and the branches of the military. The mystique is part of a cult developed around the agency as an elite club with exceptional skills and a special mission to spread the American form of society around the world. This not only fosters internal loyalty at whatever cost, but helps recruit people in other branches of government and the private sector who become loyal “assets” of use to the agency.

Third, and most important, the CIA is much larger in its real power structure, funding sources and logistic capacity than most people, even within government, realize. As Prouty and other former employees have described it, loyalists are embedded both officially and covertly in all branches of the military, the Pentagon and the State Department and its foreign service branches: the diplomatic corps, USIA and USAID. The CIA has several sources of funding in addition to the official “black budget”.  Via joint projects with other branches of the defense establishment it sponges on their budgets. It has a long-standing practice of participation in organized crime, the illicit drug industry in particular, to fund expensive clandestine military operations, either by creating its own enterprise (as in Laos during the Indochina wars) or in association with criminal drug cartels. It stockpiles material around the world and moves it with airlines and shipping companies owned by itself or by loyal agency assets. This systematic expansion of the agency started when the CIA was created in 1947. By now, the CIA and other “intelligence” agencies exert immense covert influence on government policy and serve to coordinate the activity of the tri-part alliance.

In my view it is the tri-part alliance that I have described which best corresponds to references to a ‘deep state’ that have begun to appear in alternative media. Lacking however, in most discussions of a deep state is awareness that the structure of power in capitalist society goes deeper still. Behind the deep state is the real source of power, the global capitalist class. Government, mass media, the market economy and the knowledge institutions are all largely servile agents of private capital. This is not to suggest that the global capitalist oligarchy is always unified or that the main institutions of society always succeed in their assigned roles. Unlike simple dictatorships, power relations under capitalism are complex and abound in contradictions, which is why they are often described as ‘inverse totalitarian’ systems. In this way the ultimate bases of power remain in the background protected from popular rebellion, and few among the masses manage to draw aside the veil to view the full extent of the structure of power (or the faction fights within the capitalist oligarchy).

In sum, this troika, a deep state alliance centered in the US and its vassals has paved the way for private transnational capitalist interests to free-range the planet in recent decades, even to penetrate emerging industrial economies like China, Russia, India and Brazil to various degrees, and ultimately to consume more of the planet’s finite quantity of raw materials in the last half century than in than the rest of history. Meanwhile however, as this massive consumption has progressed, the Age of Modernity, with its worldview of endless resources and growth began to give way to the Age of Limits, unnoticeably to most proponents of growth and “progress”. Now, as the limits are beginning to bite, the world economy decelerates, will soon reverse itself permanently, and the relative tolerance of its social and ecological ravages the world’s people have shown is wearing thin. It will be interesting to observe how the alliance I have described confronts this great turning point.


[1] Many accounts exist that explain the end of the industrial age. Some notable examples:

The Long Emergency by James Kunstler

The Long Descent by John M. Greer

Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg

Many papers on my website: karlnorth.com

[2] James Petras, 2006. The Power of Israel in the United States.

[3] A complete version is available free online as a pdf – The Secret Team: the CIA and its allies in control of the United States and the world

Topics: Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Systems Thinking Tools, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

The Industrial Economy is Ending Forever: an Energy Explanation for Agriculturists and Everyone

By Karl North | March 30, 2019

Nothing happens without energy. Howard T. Odum created a framework of energy flow, conversion, storages and feedback that built systems ecology into a general systems theory. That provided ecosystem science with a rigorous disciplinary basis. Odum and his intellectual progeny see that understanding how energy makes everything happen is so important, not only for the design of durable, healthy agroecosystems but for the future of our species and for the future of civilization, that Odum created a new term – emergy (that’s with an M).

Emergy is simply the full accounting of the energy cost of everything we produce from the morning conflakes to fighter bombers to energy itself. Emergy accounting starts with the extraction of raw materials and continues up the production and supply chain to the end product.  In an age of dirt-cheap energy, few took an interest in counting up the energy costs of everything. Now, when the energy cost of the fossil energy itself, essential to modern civilization, is permanently rising, it causes production to peak and go into permanent decline. That brings to an end the industrial era. Oil Geologists, natural resource scientists and systems ecologists have been trying to make the public aware for decades, and hit a brick wall of denial.

Here is a key reason emergy accounting is so important. As defined above, emergy is the energy invested in anything produced. The energy return on energy invested (emergy) known by the acronym  EROEI is all important. It is a critical determinant and constraint on the level of our material standard of living. EROEI is a ratio: energy return/emergy. You can also think of it as net energy: gross energy produced minus emergy. It is simple to understand – it’s like business accounting. If your farm grosses $1 million, that is not profit. If your expense is $1 million, your profit is zero, right?

Now let’s apply EROEI accounting to our situation. Industrial civilization as we know it cannot run without oil. At the height of the oil age in the US 1930s, oil EROEI was 100/1: an energy cost of one barrel of oil for a net energy return of 99 produced and processed. Cheap as water – stick in a pipe and get a gusher. Now it has declined to 11/1 for US conventional oil production and steadily dropping, and less than 4/1 in unconventional oil like fracking. Corn ethanol EROEI is 1/1. That means it adds NO net energy to the economy. The only reason it is produced is subsidies. That is where the global economy is headed as EROEI of all fossil energy sources continues to drop. No more net energy – no more industrial economy.

A group of Odum’s intellectual progeny led by Charles Hall has studied the EROEI of various energy sources, with an emphasis on those claimed to be able to replace fossil fuels. They are finding that EROEI of “renewables” in nations which have devoted serious investment like Germany and Spain is nearly zero, far from the EROEI needed to replace oil’s EROEI of 100/1 in the heyday of the oil consumption that built the industrial economy. In sum, humanity has harvested the low hanging fruit – of fossil energy and most other raw materials necessary to industrial civilization.

Not long into this century, even global oil EROEI will be so low that oil can no longer power any industrial economy, including conventional and most organic agriculture. The energy cost (emergy) of food is huge in our oil age society. Over 90% of that energy cost is fossil fuel, mostly oil. We are eating oil, as it were. For those who pay attention, visible signs have existed since at least 1970 that the wheels are coming off the US industrial economy. First it began to slow down; now it is shrinking or propped artificially in places (e.g., weapons industry) by enormous debt. So much for “Saudi America”. So much for what most (well-intentioned) people call ’sustainable agriculture’.

What has this to do with sustainable agriculture? For longevity, natural ecosystems historically have far outperformed human managed ones in the modern age and every other age in the last 5000 years. All two dozen major civilizations since the advent of agriculture have crashed and burned from overshoot of carrying capacity and depletion of their resource base, or were overrun by peoples who still had resources to spare. Despite lip service to learning from nature, only academic renegades and outliers like the Odum brothers, Holling, Wes Jackson, John Todd, Peter Rosset, Alan Savory, Miguel Altieri and Steven Gliessman learned enough ecosystem science to make serious contributions to improving agricultural sustainability to where food production might outlast the industrial, fossil fuel age. At least Altieri and Gliessman made the effort to write the first agroecology texts. These people are all outliers because almost no attempt has been made in academia to put agricultural science on a rigorous disciiplinary basis, which is ecosystem science/systems ecology. Howard Odum has led the way in systems ecology by creating a general framework for the study of the complex systems in our planetary universe, based on the laws of energy and matter known as the laws of thermodynamics.

As the industrial era comes to a close, those who survive the energy descent will do so because they have designed food production the way natural systems operate: almost no inputs of finite resources including energy, near 100% mineral cycling inside the system, efficient capture and recapture of sun and water flow through ecosystems, biomimicry to maximize symbiosis within an intelligently designed species diversity, understanding and respect for nature’s laws of carrying capacity and thermodynamics.

Regarding design for the right kind of diversity, as Albert Howard said, Nature never farms without animals. As French sheep dairyman José Bové says, No manure, no food. It’s a question of scale. Feedlot agriculture puts the civilization into overshoot. Some of the best biomimicry use of animals is described in Franklin King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries, agroecosystems that supported one of the highest human carrying capacities ever with almost no external inputs but sun and rain.

Topics: Core Ideas, Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | 1 Comment » |

Wind and solar – societal and residential

By Karl North | March 15, 2019

I hasten to preface these brief results of my experiments with a residential solar electric system by stating that in accord with what I think is a rising consensus, in my view these energy sources will never significantly replace fossil energy consumption at a societal level. Hence, as fossil energy depletion continues, becoming ever scarcer, the industrial society that depends on it will disappear. My supporting arguments made in 2013 are still mostly valid.  To summarize: societal solar and wind build-out will continue but eventually stall out due to increasing headwinds, two of which are inevitable and a third most likely. The first two are driven by declining net energy: 1) a shrinking industrial economy, further compromised by the diversion of resources that any serious attempt at ‘renewables’ will cause. 2) rising scarcity of raw materials compounded by depletion of the best quality sources. The third headwind is declining political will to make the economic sacrifice to pay for a large scale conversion, and to drastically reduce energy consumption in an economy where the standard of living is already dropping for most people.

Hence my solar system is designed simply to replace the grid whenever it fails, not to model a future societal energy source. It is sized to run essential appliances (water pump, two freezers, fridge, sparing use of  lights and electronics) for a time whenever the grid fails. But Even sized for emergencies the $12k kit and installation it is too costly for most people. So yes, we are seeing a lot of this among those who can afford it, but less as the economy shrinks. Most of those who can afford residential solar electricity make the mistake of claiming that because they can afford it, society can afford to convert everyone to it.

Unlike grid-tied systems, off-grid systems do not save owners any money unless they can benefit from heavy subsidies. The up-front investment, maintenance and replacement of parts (battery banks have a ten year life at best) eats up all the savings. And grid tied systems cheat other rate payers by not paying their share of transmission costs. Promoters of a solar electric future for all of society are cherry-picking the data and ignoring full cost accounting.

My system is 8 standard panels facing south, angled at 60 degrees, in downeast Maine at 45N latitude; solar charger; inverter/charger; 48V bank of 24 6V batteries; propane generator. It is set up to run the house off the battery bank inverted to normal line voltage, and to charge the bank mostly from the panels whenever possible, and to shift to charging from the grid as needed to maintain battery voltage. In case of grid failure it allows manual shift to generator charging. Unlike most generator uses in case of grid failure, in this system it does not run all the time. Once a day it recharges the battery bank in less than an hour.

Results: It provides for as much as 90% of house consumption in summer, as little as 50% in winter. Part of that is due to seasonal variation in house consumption, part of it to seasonal variation in solar gain. Actual peaks in solar power production occur in spring and fall in this system, producing as much as 11kwh per day. The house is passive solar (Three Farmhouses: A Study in Passive Solar Design): 100% of residential heat and hot water come from sun and wood. We use no high consumption  appliances. So our total electric power consumption is relatively low: 10-15 kwh/day depending on the season.

The sheep barn and shop run directly off the grid. The 1500W electric heater to keep the sheep water trough from freezing consumes a big chunk of  our total power consumption in winter.

Topics: Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

The Age of Modernity and its Discontents

By Karl North | January 27, 2019

When the whole world is globalized [read modernized], you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.
—Rene Girard

In human history, every cultural age is more than a collection of disparate elements. It is an interdependent, interactive whole some of whose elements need others to survive, as do species in an ecosystem. Some elements are ideas that justify others to us, forming an ideology. Living in the midst of an age like modernity, like fish unaware of the sea around them, we tend to take for granted many of its characteristics as permanent, whereas some are distinctive of this age and no other. Often, we focus on a few elements and fail to see how the cluster fits together as a whole.

Much has been written about the modern age (as in the early attempt by Freud, stolen for my title), but rarely from the viewpoint of its endgame due to the end of cheap energy and other raw materials[i]. In this essay I will look critically at modernity as a web of interconnections to offer a basis for exploring scenarios as to how it may come to an end.

The dominant narrative of the age of modernity describes it as the age of reason, science, mechanization, industrialization and urbanization, an age in which secular beliefs and values such as individualism, freedom and equality replace previous religions. A central belief is the quasi-religious faith in unlimited growth and progress using technology to control nature. Another is the belief that the rise of capitalism and democracy together represent the ultimate in social development, so that where they have been achieved, they constitute the end point of the development of human society, and “end of history” as it were. A dominant establishment-serving narrative depicts all these attainments as positive.

To deconstruct this narrative, I will consider prominent characteristics of the modern age separately, at the same time pointing out the interdependencies. A central focus will be on the two primary themes that characterize the modern age: the individualist/reductionist worldview and capitalism as a total way of life. I will show how their values fit hand-in-glove, reinforce each other to form an interlocking set of values and beliefs. That worldview has become the norm, one that we rarely question, and thus a kind of hologram in which we are imprisoned.  The imprisonment offers a cozy faith that will influence the endgame of the modern age. Morris Berman, a prolific chronicler of America’s cultural decline, reminds us that according to Auden, “we would rather be ruined than changed”. The challenge, therefore, is to understand the modern age well enough to see what makes us cling to it.

A piecemeal way of making sense of the world

The world functions in wholes – complexes of interacting, interdependent parts. How those wholes work and how they might be altered by our attempts to navigate them are what we most need to know to manage our lives in them. Unfortunately, most of what we have come to call science in the modern age ignores those questions.

How did this happen? It occurred for several reasons. First, the complex systemic wholes that comprise our world are not amenable to the laboratory level of prediction scientists were seeking, where experiments are reliably reproducible. Hence, in the quest for predictive power the scientific community ignored the holistic nature of the world and reduced its focus to small pieces of those wholes: causal relations between two or three variables. How does iron react in the presence of oxygen, for example? Or, when a uranium atom is split, what happens to nearby atoms?

Also, this so-called reductive method divulged knowledge about immediate consequences of specific interactions that, when applied to managing our lives, yielded technologies of such power that they appeared miraculous by comparison to anything known in the past. From at least the 17th century the material impact of what might be called the Enlightenment Model on our lives was so great that constant technological advancement eventually replaced previously reigning monotheisms to become the secular religion of the age.

Steam engine worship

Moreover, because this way of advancing knowledge deliberately ignored inevitable, often negative ripple effects of technologies in larger wholes over time, it was extremely congenial to capitalism, a way of organizing society where competitive success depends on the ability to maximize short-run profit. Because they fit hand-in-glove, the two forces of the modern age, reductive science and capitalism, which reached take-off point together roughly in the 17th century, reinforced each other in a spiraling positive feedback loop. The results do much to define the modern age, its beliefs, values and the predicament that portends its downfall.

The worldview of reductionist science.

Evolutionary biologists tell us that for most of our species’ 150-thousand-year history, survival depended on acute awareness of immediate situations, a trait eventually embedded in our genetic faculties as the so-called fight-or-flight tendency. As our knowledge slowly increased of how things change over longer time spans and in larger wholes, our intuitive understanding of the connectedness of much of our environment increased, and encouraged more holistic worldviews, such as beliefs in a single, unifying creator. Unfortunately, when the Enlightenment Model of inquiry became the secular religion, it reversed past holistic trends, reinforced the genetically evolved tendency to see the world in small, immediate pieces, and created a kind of tunnel vision worldview that makes the modern age unlike any other. I say ‘unfortunately’ because this worldview has enabled humanity to expand, and so doing erode its own resource base to the point where it undermines industrial civilization and even threatens the survival of the species. If survival is a worthwhile goal, we must try to understand the modern worldview in all its impacts and fallouts in modern life, in order to counter it with a better thinking and navigating paradigm.

As the way we do science is a main source of the modern worldview, a first question is how it has shaped the advancement of knowledge. As the reductive method in different areas of inquiry expanded knowledge and required more skill, its development spawned specialization and compartmentalization in disciplines and isolated them from each other. A slow process, even as late as the 19th century great scientists like Darwin, Liebig and Marx assumed that their quest for understanding the way the world works required the mastery of numerous disciplines.

However, the result today is a knowledge culture characterized by specialization and a scientific community of idiot-savants: people savvy in their area of training but idiots in their inability to understand how a connected world works. Another result is that today we have fields of knowledge whose underlying assumptions sometimes contradict each other. For example, it is well known in the physical sciences how little importance in their calculations most economists, including Marxian political economists, allow to basic laws of energy and matter that apply to the use of natural resources for economic or any other purpose. Physical scientists on the other hand tend to belittle social and cultural causes and explain everything humans do exclusively in terms of genetic determinism or laws of matter and energy; and social scientists tend to disregard the effects of our genetic heritage and see humanity as a blank slate on which an almost unlimited variety of social and cultural forms can be built. The bounded rationality of the resulting disciplines – that their conclusions make sense as long as criticism remains within disciplinary boundaries – perpetuates their flaws.

Because research that was acceptable in the reductionist paradigm was incapable of accounting for the interconnected, systemic nature of the universe, technologies built exclusively on the products of reductionist science succeeded as predicted in the short run, but with more distance in time and space destructive consequences appeared and multiplied, exhibiting nonlinear behavior over time that the reductive method was not designed to capture or explain. Hence the modern age produced a long pattern of technological ‘miracles’ that are fundamentally flawed because derived from reductionist science. In the end the vaunted predictive power of purely reductionist science increasingly stood revealed as a short run affair, almost inevitably altered through time as the impacts of a single technological intervention ripple through the interconnected universe, generating multiple consequences.

A striking example of the tunnel vision is the unrestrained application of fertilizers born of the Haber–Bosch technology for the synthetic fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. Once celebrated for its narrowly conceived ability to vastly improve agricultural productivity, the unrestrained use of synthetic nitrogen is now revealed to have a constellation of negative ripple effects on agricultural systems: soil compaction, deadly destruction of soil food webs, adverse effects on plant health, diminished nutritional qualities of food, massive pollution of waterways and dependency on finite resources. Today it seems incredible that generations of agricultural scientists have promoted the practice, but the dominant reductionist paradigm conferred legitimacy on such narrowly researched technologies, and agribusiness capitalists loved how it could magnify their profits.

The dumbing down of problem solving as a cultural disease

The disproportionate focus on parts instead of wholes, and individual causes rather that systemic ones has spread from the scientific community to influence the way most people think of how the world works. It is worth exploring how different areas of life have been contaminated by this way of thinking.

In medicine. The dominant approach since the advent of the germ theory of disease has been to look for single causes. The increasing failure of this approach is giving way to a more holistic view – the systems perspective that causality arises from a structure of causally related variables, which makes better sense of the data, and is delivering more effective treatments. Evolution of thinking is forced, for example, by the growing category of so-called auto-immune diseases and others – cancer, HIV, lyme disease – that cannot be adequately understood in terms of a single invasive pathogen.

In law. The narrowly based culpability typical in Western law – where blame is often assumed to fall entirely on the individual – derives from a reductionist worldview that in this case ignores the social context of individual behavior. This is not to imply that individual culpability should be ignored, or that individual behavior that is a proven danger to society should not be controlled. But to ignore systemic causes, including the very structure of different social systems, is a distortion of causality and culpability. It is well documented in social science that different social structures give rise to different behavior patterns. We typically blame poverty, inequality, drug use, or school shootings, for example on individual failure – the ‘bad apple’ theory. But the pathological behavior of individuals cannot explain society-wide trends – in this case the rise of widespread undesirable patterns in modern society. For example, the guiding assumption of the US war on drugs put blame on the addicted, the drug economy or the producers, never on socio-economic system itself as cause.

In psychotherapy. Faced with the steady rise in mental illness over decades in modern society, scientists, reflecting their reductionist training, looked for biological causes in individuals although those could not possibly explain the trend in the whole society. This focus on the individual rather than society serves the interest of ruling strata in diverting criticism away from the social system itself. In the same way, the mainstream media serve capitalist interests in their reports of increasing shootings in schools and other public places by typically explaining them in terms of the psychopathology of the shooter, which fails to account for their emergence as a pattern in society that previously did not exist. Contextualization leads to identification of root causes in the larger system. As an example, family therapy succeeds by viewing deviant individual behavior as symptomatic of illness in the social environment – in the dynamics of family interaction.

In economics. The belief that behavior of the capitalist economy is entirely due to individuals pursuing their self-interest has gained wide acceptance despite the obvious effects of monopoly power and concentrated wealth, which are systemic in origin.

The cult of progress. Another belief in the modern worldview that derives from its scientific paradigm is endless growth. We believe that nothing can stop the ability of science to increase our knowledge of the world. In society, this manifests as a belief in a linear history of endless economic growth, technological progress and the perfectibility of society itself. In this belief the modern age is distinct from all past ages, in which change was seen as cyclic or at least encountered some limit. As will be seen when we discuss the erosion of the modern worldview, progress in science itself is revealing the shortcomings of the notion of endless growth.

The technosphere. The power and convenience of inventions born of scientific progress generate a cult of technology where material innovations shape decision-making in government, business, social and personal life – most of human existence in the modern age – in ways that override and suppress traditional values that are essential to quality of life. Technological progress in communication and transportation facilitates a distance economy where people at the consumer end of the supply chain cannot see, and therefore ignore, potential ecological and social harm caused farther up the line. Also, instead of the economy serving the people, people are moved around to serve the interests of those who control the economy. The resulting break-up of community and family, dispersing members over large distances, generates feelings of alienation and disenchantment, but is rationalized by the needs of a capitalist economy that gives priority to technological progress and the subsequent maximization of profit. The latest expression of the power of the technosphere is the smartphonization of human relations that replaces direct human contact with a device.

An age of cheap energy, the technosphere presents the individual with dozens of energy slaves who facilitate the cult of individual independence from society. The original ideal of the ‘rugged individual’ becomes a soft individual floating in a fairyland of appliances. The illusion of freedom from dependence on others encourages loss of empathy. The modern age is thus a harsh departure from millennia of traditional culture where the value of face-to-face human relations and local knowledge of geographical place prevailed. Freud was more right than he knew: civilization as we know it today breeds deep discontent.

Nature strikes back. The heart of the problem of backfiring technologies and in fact the end of the modern age is the habit of the reductive approach to knowledge to ignore and therefore violate basic laws of energy and matter, the so-called Laws of Thermodynamics. These are very settled science, not legislation that can be repealed by governments or anyone else. They state that stuff cannot be created or disappeared, but can be dissipated so that it’s no longer usable. Use it up, it’s gone, but only into a garbage dump or the air or water where it comes back to haunt us. Raw materials fashioned into man-made structures require constant inputs of energy to maintain them or they fall apart. Energy use can be recaptured for reuse but eventually escapes to outer space. When energy and raw materials are no longer cheap, the structures built with cheap energy will fall apart. So, the depletion of resources is not a problem with a solution, but a predicament, a situation to which we can only adapt. Hence a guiding conviction of the modern age – that Nature’s purpose is to serve us – is revealed to be Nature’s joke on us.

The capitalist element and its narrative

Previously I pointed to a convenient convergence of the ideologies of reductionist science and capitalism. I will try to explain elements of that convergence as I explore the influence of capitalism on the modern age and its worldview.

The term capitalism as used here refers to a total social system that includes not only a distinctive political economy that concentrates wealth and power via a positive feedback loop, but also distinctive institutions of government, media, knowledge acquisition and ultimately, indoctrinated cultural beliefs and values. It has been best described as an inverse totalitarianism, where a plutocratic class remains in the background and rules indirectly through major institutions. The plutocracy obscures this process by cloaking the institutions with an incessant mythical narrative that fosters the belief that the major institutions are serving the public interest. The result is a society in which the main decisions that shape our lives are in the hands of a private elite and give priority to its interests. A vast critical literature explains the workings of the capitalist system, so here I will focus mainly on its effects on life in the modern age.

Modernity as carte blanche. Starting at least as far back as the Western Renaissance in the 16th century, capitalism developed at an exponential rate to dominate worldwide in modern times. A key distinction of capitalism that makes the modern age different from previous ones is its ability to severely check attempts to apply rules of restraint in the quest to maximize capitalist profit. At least some previous social systems embodied a social contract that, however unfair or poorly enforced, limited the exploitation of labor. Feudal peasants had certain rights to natural resources, for example, and earlier societies imposed limits on debt peonage. As for management of the resources of the land, while social strictures were few – occasional sacred forests and mountains, for example – the low levels of technology and access to energy slowed the pace of abuse.

The lack of restraint under capitalism, promoted as ‘free enterprise’ and a number of other ‘freedoms’, had several consequences. First, it affected the use of human labor. A rare limit on labor exploitation occurred when starvation or poor living conditions weakened the labor supply enough to cut into profits. All the same, the unprecedented fortunes to be made in the industrial revolution led the investor class to sacrifice a generation of wage slaves to child labor and other afflictions. Thanks to the plunder of less industrialized nations, mature industrial societies enjoy a relatively high material standard of living, but most workers are still imprisoned in an alienating rat race of economic insecurity and unfulfilling lives palliated with induced consumerism. In some industrialized nations organized labor and the threat of revolt has curbed exploitation somewhat, bringing about a so-called welfare state. Even in these countries, the welfare state is fading as US hegemony since World War II has imposed an extreme model of capitalism world-wide.

Second, powered by concentrated fossil energy, extraction of raw materials including top soil and water has grown exponentially, constrained only by what an economy can use at a given time. The irony is that depletion and other damage to the resource base has reached a tipping point where it undermines the industrial civilization that defines the modern age. The capitalist system appears unable to reverse the exploitation, so catabolic collapse seems inevitable, bringing modernity to an end.

A third liberalization in capitalism that sets the modern age off from previous ones is a highly evolved form of what used to be called usury, as part of a general evolution of capitalism through stages of evolution that are more or less predictable from its structure. Just as ecosystems develop more complexity over time in roughly predictable phases called succession, capitalism evolves more sophisticated forms, such as imperial expansion, the increase of monopoly power and the so-called financialization of the economy where an ever-larger financial class increasingly usurps control over investment from the industrial elites. In the present stage of financialization, usury – the renting of capital at interest to acquire unearned income – instead of investment to produce real wealth, takes on increasingly risky speculative forms such as junk bonds, derivatives, currency speculation and unpayable mortgage loans. The outcome of unfettered usury increases debt peonage at all levels – individual, corporate and government – to the point where an economy can no longer function.

Ancient civilizations learned that unrestrained credit eventually imprisons a society in debt peonage, and devised checks such as write-off events that erased debt, and laws that imposed limits on lending, culminating in a total ban on usury by the medieval Christian church. Anthropologist David Graeber and political economist Michael Hudson have chronicled the fascinating 5000 year history of debt and the development of constraints on usury, and underlined their importance for global society today, which is in a late stage of debt peonage imposed by a powerful transnational financial class. Global debt is at an all-time high of $184,000,000,000,000.

Capitalist economies run on interest-bearing debt. In periods of economic health, growth normally produces a surplus sufficient to cover interest costs. Now as permanently rising resource scarcity slows growth, economies are increasing debt-based investment to artificially sustain growth. But in consequence, rising interest costs are dragging economies down in a vicious circle. Always prone to bouts of economic depression due to over production, major capitalist economies now face deeper crashes as they struggle under current debt levels. This is the economic end game of the modern age. The end game does not threaten the capitalist class because it can adjust to take advantage of investment opportunities opened by the chaotic aspects of industrial shrinkage.

The Waste Makers. Paradoxically, one of the fortunate products of capitalism is wastefulness. Capitalists discovered that the best way to maximize short term profit is to turn raw materials into garbage as fast as possible. Cheap energy convergent with sophisticated forms of mind control in the 20th century spawned enormous waste, from planned obsolescence to products that are useful conveniences but not necessary to live the good life – everything from microwave ovens to airplanes. Cheap oil also allowed the luxury of inefficiencies in production and consumption. At the end of the modern age, much of the production of waste and inefficiency might be properly viewed as a godsend: slack or wiggle room because nations could theoretically stop the waste and invest the otherwise wasted resources in adapting industrial society to its demise. Whether they will or not is another question.

Ideological hegemony. To maintain peace, a social system that allows a rich minority relatively unlimited freedom to exploit the majority must have an effective ideology of pacification. Under ruling class control, common sources of information – formal schooling, mass media, government public relations –are used to colonize and imprison the collective consciousness with an establishment narrative of reality that serves a steady diet of simplistic propaganda. Capitalist ideology benefits in several respects from the way reductionist science reduces inquiry to the smallest parts because it promotes the primacy of individual rights over communal ones.

First, the establishment narrative succeeded in disguising its control of major institutions behind a mythology of individual freedoms: free enterprise, free press, free trade, academic freedom and freedom to consume in a free market. The ideology of individualism also worked to diminish a sense of collective responsibility, and instead encouraged fundamentalist credos like born again Christianity in the commoners and extreme post-modernist relativism in the educated classes. The “Land of the Free” illusion has been highly successful. As John Steinbeck allegedly remarked, the working class sees itself not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Secondly, the accentuation on the individual helped divert critical attention away from how the system works as a whole. It marginalized dialectical macro-systems model builders like the Limits to Growth authors, William Ophuls, Lewis Mumford, Morris Berman, Michael Hudson, Noam Chomsky and a long list of Marxian social scientists, whose analysis of the existing system and its patterns of change has exposed the illusions of the indoctrinated conventional wisdom. In addition, much of the scientific community denigrated these efforts and indeed all of the behavioral sciences as ‘soft science’, as not amenable to prediction. The joke is on the reductionists, for as we shall see in my concluding section, a revolution in how science is done is demonstrating ability to gain some understanding of the complexities of the real world, which the reductive method has never been able to achieve.

Thirdly, the ideology promotes a collapsed sense of history, particularly in the US – a kind of organized forgetting: history is what happened last week. Instead of teaching the importance of seeing present as history, that is, as the culmination of significant historical patterns, it encourages disinterest in history, replacing it with a cultural apparatus that focuses attention on the exciting present where kitsch and the next novelty in the marketplace replaces attention to fundamental issues like class and power. Consumerism becomes the dominant value and is normalized: if you don’t shop you aren’t a good contributor to the society. Comparisons with Europe where the public still has some sense of historical context have called the US ‘the Republic of Amnesia’.

Finally, the storyline paints the modern age as the pinnacle of perfection – “the end of history”, in the words of one academic ideological zealot. The accession of the major competing social systems, China and the Soviet Union, to capitalist penetration gave ideologues the opportunity to reinforce belief that modern Western capitalism is the most advanced form of civilization possible. “There is no alternative”, announced Margaret Thatcher.

The modern age as cityscape

Civilization, a way of life characterized by the growth of cities, matured over 5000 years to become the dominant way of life in the modern age. Urban populations as high as 80% in many countries epitomize late stage modernity.  Cities are urban concentrations of wealth and population large enough to require the importation of resources by exploitation of peripheries. Thus the city is empire on a small scale.  Its mode of exploitation requires violence. Geographer Christophe Guilluy, explains the result today:

Employment and wealth have become more and more concentrated in the big cities. The deindustrialised regions, rural areas, small and medium-size towns are less and less dynamic. But it is in these places – in “peripheral France” (one could also talk of peripheral America or peripheral Britain) – that many working-class people live. Thus, for the first time, “workers” no longer live in areas where employment is created, giving rise to a social and cultural shock. … The globalized metropolises are the new citadels of the 21st century – rich and unequal, where even the former lower-middle class no longer has a place. Instead, large global cities work on a dual dynamic: gentrification and immigration. This is the paradox: the open society results in a world increasingly closed to the majority of working people.

Guilluy sees the rising ‘populist’ revolts in industrial economies, such as the 2018-19 Gilet Jaune uprising in France, as an inevitable consequence of this latest stage of urbanization.

Now globalized and nearing the end of its resource frontier, the highly centralized system of late-stage modernity into urban clusters is increasingly fragile according to systems-thinking risk analyst Nassim Taleb. Electronic communication and cheap transportation along with urban concentration have facilitated the growth of a global economy whose precariously long supply chains and dependence on far-reaching webs of electric grid and financial homogeneity make it highly sensitive to disorders like trade wars and resource wars. Compounded with the incessant undertow of a gradual end to cheap energy, it is a system that is vulnerable to deep shocks, even collapse.

Crumbling modernity and revolutionary potential

The modern age spans five centuries in which the behavior of modern society evolves under the combined influence of key themes that I have tried to describe. The age of modernity will come to an end due to exhaustion of its unique energy supply and resource base. This will come as a shock to most people because we have been led to believe that modernity is permanent. We will begin to understand the modern age as a discrete era with a beginning and ending, as we have understood previous ages such as the bronze age, the age of city-states, the age of monotheisms or the many empires since the advent of agriculture, the lifetime of each one delineated by its period of rise and fall. Maybe this will put the age of modernity into a different, more detached perspective and help us navigate its decline.

The end game of modernity is characterized by an accumulation of discontents, widening cracks in the dominant scientific paradigm and cannibalization of its resource base. Social commentary films like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, coming near the end of the age, capture a number of social patterns that express the accumulation of discontents. This film displays a disparate but somehow connected web: two top corporations, one immersed in global crime networks and the other infested with a virulent fascist ideology; cases of pathological family disfunction in both top and bottom social strata including a serial killer, child abusers and violence against women; the influence of digital media on individual identity; investigative cowardice and incompetence in journalism and criminal bureaucratic indifference in social services in a supposedly ‘welfare state’. An abiding issue in both the film and the wildly popular book on which the film is based is the degree of complicity of social institutions in the crimes of individuals.

To confront the accumulation of discontents engendered in the modern age by the Enlightenment Model, a gentler, a humbler approach to the advancement of knowledge is needed than provided by that model. As it happens, as early as the 1960s Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions opened the door to that possibility by proposing that the advancement of knowledge proceeds as one scientific paradigm or way of doing science, plagued by accumulating anomalies it cannot address, yields to another. As Kuhn defined it, a scientific paradigm is a shared vocabulary, a shared methodology, and a shared view of what matters. The results of the reductive method have revealed limited application outside the laboratory. So “what matters” extends beyond prediction under controlled conditions to how things change in the messy, systemic connectedness of real life. Hence, a revolutionary paradigm shift is occurring, at least in certain fields of study, as we develop methods of understanding the complexity that typifies how the real-world works, which the Enlightenment Model was never designed to do.

In an earlier example I described the limits of the reductive paradigm in the effects of synthetic nitrogen on agroecosystems. Here is an example from social systems. The conventional view of the global situation sees the world through a narrow reductionist lens: the elements of the crisis – the contradictions of late stage capitalism, the many types of ecological damage to the planetary resource base, global resource depletion, the rise of the authoritarian state and the decline of the US geopolitical hegemony – as isolated problems. This makes them appear more manageable than they really are; seeing their interdependence reveals that their mutual interaction and influence amplifies the crisis.

The complexity science revolution is driven and shaped by breakthroughs in epistemology (how we know) that accumulated in the modern age:

Some of us are old enough to have been participants in a period of intense questioning of all sorts of conventional wisdom known as the Sixties Counterculture. The current revolutionary shift to a new scientific paradigm is part of a similar ferment that one participant has dubbed the Systems Counterculture.

A timely example of the new paradigm of inquiry might be to ask how we should study the next decades of global human existence as the modern age ends. Because we are dealing with a complex problem, claims to prediction are often impossible and reveal ignorance of the nature of complexity. We can sometimes predict what will happen if such change is driven by well-tested principles like the Laws of Thermodynamics. But in complex systems, when and how things will change is not predictable. The best we can hope for is to explore different scenarios and try to estimate their levels of probability. Barring early human extinction events like nuclear armageddon, runaway climate change or planetary pandemics, multiple scenarios are possible. Declining energy will limit possible scenarios as carrying capacity erodes to support only much lower human population levels.


[i] See Invisible Ships and Boiling Frogs: The End of Industrial AffluenceHumans Have Energetically Overpowered the Earth and The Industrial Economy is Ending Forever: an Energy Explanation for Agriculturists and Everyone

[i] Morris Berman books and reviews.

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The prospect of a new Gothic Age in the US during the decline of the industrial era

By Karl North | November 18, 2018

Human society faces an unprecedented, irreparable shift away from industrial civilization that ultimately will prove catastrophic for most people. A large part of the global population has a cultural heritage that derives from the age of monotheisms that began about two millennia ago. This heritage persists despite strong secularization trends that began in recent centuries with the age of science, industrialization, rationality and progress. This cultural heritage in all three major monotheisms – Judaism, Islam and Christianity – shapes how people react to times of great change, insecurity and extended crisis such as the one humanity faces today.

This pattern of response to long emergencies consists of a constellation of elements that first appeared in the formative period of these religions because the very emergence of monotheism was a reaction to extremely unsettled conditions of those times. The rise of the monotheisms served a need for new social and belief structures to address the inability of the ageing Roman empire and the existing pantheistic religious cultures to cope with the chaotic warring city state polities of the late classical age.

The characteristic response of the monotheisms is to create a community of the faithful that closes ranks in a totalitarian social order that depicts human life as threatened on all sides with damnation but open to salvation. This form of society pursues violent crusades against external infidels and internal heretics, carries out harsh punishments for sinners, and holds out an apocalyptic vision of salvation as a last resort.

My goal here is to explore the potential for this type of response to deindustrialization to occur in the USA, given our distinctive cultural heritage that has been heavily influenced by the Protestant Reformation of Christianity. I will first describe the Gothic age and the Reformation as the last major incarnation in Christian culture of the characteristic response in monotheisms to long periods of social insecurity and crisis. Then I will draw attention to historical and current developments in US society that suggest the likelihood of a new Gothic age in this country. Awareness of this probable future will hopefully help us think of ways to navigate it.

The Gothic Age

Spengler’s The Decline of the West is an extremely detailed history of the evolution of society through three great ages of religious culture. His treatment is giving me a new appreciation of the violent and scary periods in the age of monotheisms that replaced the age of classical pantheism of gods in most parts of the Western world. Recognized as Gothic Christianity in Europe, this early development in the age of monotheisms had counterparts with similar characteristics in early Islam and Judaism as well. Its manifestation in Islam for instance is the violent crusading zeal of its early period, preserved today by the Saudi medieval monarchy as Wahhabism, whose jihadi militants are used by the Western powers as proxies in the attempt to destabilize and destroy regimes that show resistance to imperial control in the Middle East. In Judaism the best parallel today to Gothic Christianity is the militantly expansionist, openly racist theocratic state of Israel and its Zionist supporters, both Jewish and Christian fundamentalist, in the US and Europe. In both Judaism and Islam, I would identify these responses as current reactions to crisis that are typical of all societies that have the monotheistic heritage described above. When not in periods of crisis or instability, religious practices in these societies take more moderate forms.

Gothic Christianity grew out of the difficult period following the collapse of the Roman Empire in Europe. The age was punctuated with repeated invasions, marauding warlords, and recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague that appeared in the unsanitary town life that revived toward the end of the period. The Church became the main creator of social order. As a result, in Gothic times humans perceived life as a frightful slippery slope with handholds upward toward the light and salvation offered by the church, but also filled with satanic beings that constantly tormented and tempted them down toward damnation. It was a time of crusades against the infidel and the extermination of presumed heretics. Inside the community of the faithful the grip of the church was totalitarian; in theory no aspect of life escaped its demand of total obedience. Outside that community was the void, which offered nothing of value. In Gothic culture, history would eventually end with the violent triage of the apocalypse, which would save only those who had remained within the community of the faithful.

The tumult of the Protestant Reformation provoked Gothic society to further extremes, the 17th century seeing a million witches burned at the stake. Here is Spengler on the effect of the Reformation:

The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of the Gothic myth – the cult of Mary, the venerations of the saints, the relics, the pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and witchcraft remained, for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner torture, and now that torture at last rose to its supreme horror. Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exorcism, the veritable sacrament of devil-banning. There grew up a large, purely Protestant literature about the Devil. Out of the Gothic wealth of colour, there remained black.      … it is a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house-sprites and sweeping clouds of the disembodied and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjurings that are still practiced with a pious awe.

Here is an illustration typical of the plight of a politically incorrect Puritan in Reformation Europe and early colonial North America as well:

The Europeans eventually exiled many of the most extremist sects of the Reformation Goths to the colonies across the Atlantic that became the USA, where many elements of Protestant Gothic culture have survived in the puritanism that spread out of New England and in the apocalyptic rapturism of the born-again Christians who today are alleged to number nearly half of the US population. In secularized Europe where magnificent cathedrals stand empty except for summer tourists, people shook their heads in amusement at the election of our first born-again Christian president, Jimmy Carter. How quaint, they thought! When the second one appeared (like a burning Bush?), Europeans began to wonder if Yankee society and culture ever was going to emerge from infancy. In Europe All Saints Day is now mainly an occasion to visit the cemetery and remember the dead. Only in America has it become full-blooded Gothic, a scary day of satanically grinning jack-o-lanterns, witches riding on broomsticks and ghosts of the dead who arise to torment the living. Despite the tongue-in-cheek children’s entertainment aspect, the event is only a step away from the real thing.

Gothic Christianity was a gradual response to the long period of unstable conditions in Europe that replaced the relative calm of the Pax Romana: economic insecurity in shifting, poorly reconstituted medieval polities, recurrent plagues that invaded the growing but unsanitary cities of the High Middle Age, weather related famines like the Little Ice Age, all took their toll. The long emergency humanity faces today of increasing energy and resource scarcity and the ensuing deindustrialization is likely to bring about similar conditions.

Indicators of a New Gothic Age in the USA

As Gothic culture in its Protestant form survives better in the US than in most Western societies, here I will point to some signs I see today that surviving Gothic remnants in this country may become the basis of a cultural response to the experiences of the age of degrowth that we are entering. Early warnings of a possible new age of Goths in the US include the following:

1. The increasing penetration of US federal and state governments by proponents of a totalitarian Christian state. The current president, while showing little evidence of Christian faith, has nevertheless populated top levels of his administration with militant Gothic Christians to retain the loyalty of groups of similar faith that populate his electoral base. The number of militant Christians in Congress continues to increase. The vice president in the Trump administration exemplifies fanatical Gothic Christianity.

2. Not to be outdone, the liberal identity politics movement, wielding a hysterical and increasingly rigid notion of political correctness (PC), is fielding its own militant totalitarians in a crackdown on all speech that invades “safe spaces”, starting in academia where speakers have been chased off campus and faculty careers have been destroyed for saying the wrong word. The government and its media and internet servants are using these liberal betrayals of free speech as an opportunity to increasingly curtail and ban speech that dissents from any part of the ruling class narrative. Laws dating from the Bush and Obama administrations permit prosecution of ‘treasonous’ dissenters as terrorist suspects. Official lists of suspects exist. A new version of the McCarthyite witch hunt culture of the hysterically anti-communist 1950s is forming, itself patterned on the witch hunt culture of colonial New England, Gothic to the core of its joyless purity.

3. For now, the ruling oligarchy is happy to encourage both the above trends, but they could easily get out of control, as has happened with its use of Islamic jihadi militias as proxies in its Middle East wars. Both increasingly totalitarian movements are displaying the propensity to indulge in crusades against heretics.  Ruling elites may be losing the ability to use the crusader element in US Gothic culture to retain support for foreign wars, so they are turning it inward to energize internecine conflicts that divert attention from more fundamental problems of society. The no holds barred politics of the so-called alt-right supremacists, the militant Gothic Christians, the identity politics PC liberals and the anti-fa alt-left are all taking on rudiments of Gothic crusader culture, branding their opponents as infidels or even the Anti-Christ (the modern favored equivalent being Hitler) and labeling internal dissent as heresy.

Late European Gothic culture included the Romantic reaction against the age of hell-bent progress, science and the machine – a reaction embodied in North American sects like the Amish and Hutterites. In contrast, a prospective Gothic revival today would occur in a society generally addicted to a religion of progress, so it would likely take novel forms to incorporate this difference. One such twist is the growing habit of hostile groups in the US to accuse each other of failing to save the American Way of Life, with each entertaining radically different interpretations of what that means. For Spengler, the age of progress that has progressively replaced the age of monotheisms is a Faustian deal with the devil that therefore contains its own abundant share of bogies, hobgoblins, gremlins and inconvenient consequences, more than enough to cause the modern system to self-destruct.

Spengler says it’s important to see the history of Gothic culture in its full intensity, because moderns have tried to forget or suppress its exotic horrors as too impossibly primitive to ever have happened to our ‘enlightened’ species. But its vestiges, at least in US culture, suggest a more enduring element that can reappear in some guise under historical conditions of sufficient stress.

A good summary of Spengler’s account of the great ages of culture in the West is J. M. Greer’s three-part series, in which he applies Spengler’s insights to sketch one likely scenario of adaptation to our present predicament:

https://www.ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-part-one-stirrings-in-the-borderlands/


https://www.ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-part-two-the-far-side-of-progress/


https://www.ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-tamanous-and-sobornost/

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An ecology of social systems

By Karl North | September 19, 2018

This essay consists of a condensation of insights from Heinberg’s three-part article, “Human Predators, Human Prey”, and a partial reinterpretation.

Two types of hierarchical relations are evident in ecosystemic predator/prey relations :

These two types of hierarchy appear in social systems. Social hierarchies arise to efficiently serve different social functions. For example, ruler control of surpluses via taxation serves as ‘antibody formation’ against external raiders and failed harvests. Similarly, the inherent criminality in social systems is a low degree of predatory parasitism that stimulates immune functions – antibody formation like law and police.

Domestication of animals, with both functional and exploitative aspects, has served to justify ‘domestication’ of some human groups by others – slavery, wage slavery, debt peonage – which usually becomes justified by ideologies of bigotry.  As hierarchies become less functional and increasingly exploitative, conflict occurs and the social system evolves in an adaptive cycle.

As subsystems of ecosystems, social systems follow the same dynamics of the adaptive cycle, as demonstrated in the rise and fall of civilizations:

Industrial society evolved in an ‘r’ phase of accelerated growth due to the one-time bonanza of fossil energy:

This civilization is now at the end of its K or conservation phase and is showing signs of decomposition – the Ω phase of collapse and reorganization.

The K or conservation phase in the imperial core is being prolonged by several props: debt, military superiority, economic advantage of the dollar reserve currency and the inertia inherent in generations of a culture of mass deception. Interest-bearing debt has become a primary prop and means of enslavement whereby a financial class exploits everyone and ultimately plunders younger generations to benefit core populations at least for a time.

In the Ω phase of collapse and release that industrial civilization is entering, the functional role of elites – maintaining social order – gives way to increased parasitism as elites become more criminal than ever, thus eventually breaking down the social order. In response, collapse is accelerated as rebels multiply – like parasitic disease organisms. As the social order breaks down, release from it restores liberty to experiment with other social forms: relocalization, partial or pure gift economies, interest-free credit/investment, participatory democracy, policies of resource use limited to refresh rate. This corresponds to the α or reorganization phase of the adaptive cycle.

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The Peasants Shall Inherit the Earth

By Karl North | August 30, 2018

It is said that prediction is difficult, especially about the future. Nonetheless, a few Romans saw the inevitable fall of the Roman Empire more than a hundred years before it completely disappeared. Their prediction was possible because they saw that the system was depleting resources essential to its survival, so had trapped itself into a cannibalistic situation where it was gradually cutting its own throat. No policy to voluntarily reduce consumption to within carrying capacity was politically viable, because that would end the empire as well. And neither the patricians or the plebs wanted that!

Again today the world is in a similar situation: the end of the industrial era is predictable because the end of cheap fossil energy and other cheap raw materials that currently sustain it is in sight, at least to a few. I have summarized this situation from different angles elsewhere[1], and it forms the premise of what follows.

Eric Wolf’s pioneering anthropology of the peasantry begins with the observation that “they are important historically, because industrial society is built on the ruins of peasant society”[2]. And yet today populations who are still in some sense peasants are still the global majority, however besieged and compromised by the global industrial economy. The thesis I will present here is that the peasant way of life offers the best opportunity to survive the demise of the petroleum era. I will describe peasant traditions in various areas of life – farming and other uses of the natural resource base, redistributive social structures and relatively communal political arrangements – a heritage still existent or retrievable that makes peasant society most likely to weather the constraints of a declining industrial civilization.

Resilient ecosystem management

As the energy descent deepens, it will raise costs and send into decline all energy intensive activities. These include not only industry but industrial agriculture and forestry on which society relies for its most basic needs: food and shelter. The best of historical peasant systems to serve these needs at low energy cost have mirrored the resilience of natural ecosystems in their diversity of species use, their small scale serving a local economy and above all in their reliance on input self-sufficiency – reliance on inputs like seed, fertility, and power that are found or created within the system, not synthesized using fossil energy. Some examples are the Aztec wetland chinampa gardens[3], agrarian communities based on the floodable great meadow in lowland Europe that spread to early colonial New England[4], the azolla/duck/rice[5] and other paddy systems in Pacific Rim countries[6] and traditional Mayan milpa agriculture. A general model of this ideal type and some examples are described in my Visioning County Food Production – Part Two.

Resilient Social Organization

Two conditions provide the bedrock of peasant resilience: control of at least some of the surplus above subsistence needs that became available with the advent of agriculture, and relatively permanent rights, however limited, in the land that creates the surplus. They usually retained these rights despite the growth of parasitical higher powers like feudal aristocracies who expropriate some of the agricultural surplus. Inheritance rights maintained the resilience over time.

Peasant communities everywhere typically created rules to conserve some of the surplus as stocks of grain or other conservable staples or livestock as a savings bank for redistribution to the community in times of need. They created ceremonials and rituals that sustained belief in these rules, first at the level of the nuclear family, then the extended kin group, and then the village.


[1] Humans Have Energetically Overpowered the Earth, Locked In: The Paradox of Capitalism,

The Future of Industrial Society: “Progress”, A Microscopic Scientific Paradigm, and Blowback

[2] Wolf, Eric, Peasants, 1966.

[3] http://www.chinampas.info/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa

[4] Donahue, Brian. 2004. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord.

[5] Furuno, Takao. The Power of Duck. Tasmania: Takari Publications, 2001

[6] King, F. H.(Franklin Hiram), Book Farmers of forty centuries; or, Permanent agriculture in China, Korea and Japan.

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Mass deception and the quest for a more sustainable agriculture

By Karl North | February 16, 2018

Most of our society has fallen victim to a spectacularly successful, century-long effort of mass deception. The idea that organically certified farming is making a significant difference is just one of the many myths. To explain how that happens, I will first sketch a more general, historical picture that provides the necessary context.

The advent of mass communications and the arrival in the US of Freud’s kinsman Edward Bernays, both at the beginning of the 20th century, was a fortuitous convergence for our rulers. Bernays showed industrialists how to manufacture desire using psychology, and spread it via the growing media of mass communication. Thus the first industry of mass deception was born, known as advertising.

It was so successful at accelerating consumption, burning through resources at the fastest rate possible, and thereby maximizing capitalist profits, that our ruling strata engaged Bernays to apply his methods of mass deception more generally to allow them to achieve near total control over us with little need for force. Bernays taught ruling strata how to use propaganda to, in Chomsky’s words, manufacture consent to a social system where most of the power lies in the hands of the few, by using a psychologically sophisticated narrative to sell the myths of democracy, free enterprise, free market, free trade, and free speech.

The result is that today most people are badly misled as to how our society works and who its most powerful institutions serve. A ruling elite has achieved immense power and bends government, media, markets and the knowledge business itself to serve primarily its own interests, while sustaining the illusion that these institutions serve the public interest. Because the powerful remain in the background, critical analysts have accurately described this system as inverse totalitarianism. Hence government agencies serve the economic sectors that they are supposed to regulate: the USDA serves those who exert monopoly control over industrial agriculture. The historical record shows that it always has. The first Secretary of Agriculture created the Pioneer seed company, which used hybridization to take control of seeds away from farmers.

Under these conditions, what is the reality regarding the present food system and the quest for a more ecologically sustainable agriculture? Ten percent of US farms produce most of the food. These are the biggest, foulest farms in the food economy. The same is true for organic – the biggest, least sustainable certified organic farms produce the lion’s share of the organic food economy, thanks in large part to the USDA’s National Organic Program that nationalized organic food miles. Worse, organic is a drop in the bucket: US acres in farming is 844 million, certified organic acres is 5.4 million – 0.64% of the total farm economy (click to enlarge).


Certified organic is a joke, just another brand that agribusiness uses to more fully exploit the discretionary consumption capacity of the gentrified slice of the food market. Make oats into the letter O, call them Cheerios (because they start your day with cheer), then call them Honey Nut Organic O’s to sell even more oats – at twice the price. Moreover, this branding hardly makes a difference in the quality of the US food system. After decades of the organic movement, certified organic food is a tiny fraction of the US food economy, less than 1%. And incessantly corrupted, at that, gradually eroding trust even in the miniscule gentrified market that it serves. Not that agribusiness cares that much for such a small market fraction. We need to think about that reality and ask what kind of social system under what set of power relations achieves such an outcome.

None of the above is meant to lay blame on farmers, conventional or organic, or on anyone who works for a more sustainable agriculture. But when we falsely believe we are making much of a difference, or expect any help in that effort from the government or any of its agencies, or any of the other major institutions in our society, we are deluded, duped, in a word, and the system will not change for the better as long as that mass deception reigns supreme.

We have been taught to dismiss any attempt to lift the veil as ‘conspiracy theory’, but knowledge about how things really work is available, not secret, if one is willing to look beyond the sources the oligarchy daily puts before our eyes and ears. Education must start with an understanding of the concentration of power that makes possible the control of institutions and the success of indoctrination. The public is even misled about that, although the information is readily available if one looks for it. The public is aware that there is inequality, but the concentration of wealth and power is orders of magnitude above what the average person thinks.

Those who try to lift the veil will be called names, suggesting they are promoting some impossible future, and diverting attention from the real question: how much of our conception of the present is illusion.

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