Frantic adaptation in any species or group, when their local carrying capacity has been exceeded, can temporarily stave off population collapse (many species, gerbils and some other rodents being prime examples, will resort to cannibalism in the face of severe overshoot). It ultimately deepens the catastrophe, however, when the inevitable can no longer be avoided. Of all the living species on this planet man has consistently proven, through our brief history, to be arguably the most adaptable species on earth. We have achieved this by adopting a strategy very different from that forced on other species by instinct. Where other species are instinctively compelled to adapt to their environment we intellectually adapt that environment to fit our needs.
Despite our ingenuity, however, we, like all other species, are ultimately subject to and constrained by the same finitude of the resources upon which we rely and which support our existence. Unlike other species, though, we have cleverly manipulated the game so that we are not individually constrained by the availability of resources in our local environment. We have taken survival of the species to a whole new level. The survival of our entire species, unlike any other, is limited not by the local environment in which we individually live but upon the collective resources of the entire planet. We are the first and, thus far, the only truly global species, not forgetting, of course, the other species we have domesticated and taken along with us on our march to dominate the globe.
We move things from one place to another depending on the abundance or scarcity of those things in different places. If an area is short of water we build a pipeline to bring in water from another area. Our individual food consumption is not limited to what can be grown in our local area. Millions of tons of food are moved around the planet on a daily basis, moving from areas where we can produce a surplus to those areas in need or want of that surplus. Where other carnivores rely on the availability of game in their territory we have domesticated and bred our game to ensure we always have it close at hand. If one nation has a surplus of population and another can or will absorb some of that surplus people leave and immigrate into other nations. Areas that can produce cotton or wool or silk supply the raw materials to clothe people throughout the world.
Unlike other species, we can and do ignore local shortages because we know that those shortages can be made up from surpluses elsewhere, anywhere in the world. And when we move through or into areas that are deficient in the resources we need or want we, unlike any other species, take those resources with us to compensate for those deficiencies.
All of this has, especially over these past two or three centuries, given us the false impression that we humans have no limits, that the resources that sustain us are infinite and the ability of the human population to grow is equally infinite. Yet we, of all species, know with absolute certainty that this is not true. We know we live on a finite world. And we know what happens to a species when it is in overshoot and is exceeding the carrying capacity of its environment.
Man is the only species with the vision to foresee its own possible extinction, the intellect to bring it about, the intelligence to avoid it, and the stupidity to let it happen anyway. The epitaph on our species tombstone may read: We knew we could destroy ourselves and now, by God, we've proven it. That's the problem with disasters. They're never quite as believable when avoided as when they happen.
We have a cultural aversion to individual murder and suicide and moreso mass murder, like that in the WWII holocaust or in the Rwanda genocide, or group suicide such as that in Jonestown. Odd that we seem not to have the same aversion to species murder and suicide. Like the hopeless addict, we adamantly cling to the very practices that we do or should know are destined to destroy us. Like the terminal addict, we may well go to our collective grave looking for that next fix believing it to be the salvation that came too late.
Our human population is in serious overshoot. There is not enough carrying capacity to sustain us all naturally. The appearance that our population is sustainable is a hologram maintained by massive amounts of fossil fuels. We have, for at least the last couple of centuries, been living in a virtual world. We consume virtual food each calorie of which requires 10 calories of fossil fuel energy. We wear virtual clothing made from a variety of fibers derived from oil. We sustain ourselves with virtual work, ride to work on virtual horses, live in virtual tribes in virtual communities. Everything about, in and from our human world is virtual. We have, we mistakenly believe, cut ourselves off from the natural world, see it only as a resource to be turned into virtual stuff in our virtual world.
It takes countless trillions of calories of fossil fuel energy every day to maintain the illusion of our virtual world. We consume, globally, over eighty-four million barrels of oil every day to maintain the illusion that our population is sustainable. And we are destroying the real, natural world, like a black hole devouring stars, to support our illusion.
Our virtual world, our illusion of reality, our illusion of sustainability, is totally dependent on the natural world against which we do constant, destructive battle. While the population of our virtual world continues to grow the resources of that natural world on which our existence is critically dependent are rapidly racing toward depletion. We have not just temporarily avoided the consequences of overshoot by adapting, which occurred when our global human population surpassed 1-2 billion. We have continued to breed like rabbits, growing our numbers to 4-7 times the real carrying capacity of the planet.
At the same time we have been rapidly destroying and reducing that real carrying capacity. We are destroying and polluting our sources of water, destroying millions of tons of life-supporting topsoil annually, narrowing the genetic diversity and the global gene pool that supports evolution, destroying the atmosphere we breath with air-borne toxins, destroying the natural cycles, rhythms, and systems that maintain the delicate planetary life-support system.
Very soon, in natural terms, the energy that drives and supports our virtual world and our ceaseless growth, is going to go into terminal decline. Oil, natural gas, coal, the uranium for nuclear power, new rivers for more hydro-electric production, the metals from which we produce stuff like cars, planes, ships and more, are all at, past or nearing peak. The quantity of these available to support our virtual world can no longer keep pace with our insatiable demands. Our virtual world is about to go into terminal contraction. There will soon be no pockets of surplus food that can be moved around the planet, insufficient energy to continue to move that food around our globalized model of community, no nations with the surplus virtual carrying capacity to allow them to absorb immigrants, no surplus natural resources to support the continued or existing population of our virtual world.
The sustainable carrying capacity of the real world is estimated to be 1-2 billion. The population of our virtual human world is 6.7 billion and still growing. That virtual world is about to be shut down due to a terminal power failure. We are soon going to have to scramble, fight, claw, cheat and steal for an existence within the 1-2 billion carrying capacity of the real world.
I don't have any answers as to how that will happen. I don't believe there are answers. I don't imagine it can possibly be pretty. It's going to be very nasty. Ultimately we will not be in control of how that unfolds. Nature, that natural world from which we have tried to divorce ourselves, only has so much carrying capacity with which to absorb those humans seeking to come back to her embrace. Those who make it are going to have to live by her very strict rules. My suspicion is she will be a harsh mistress.
Showing posts with label carrying capacity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carrying capacity. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The Solution to World Hunger Cannot be left in the Hands of Western Governments Again
Warning: This piece is long. It attempts to connect many dots on the way to making the point of the title. Hopefully you will bear with me.
The last "saviour" for the world hunger crisis
The Green Revolution (the brainchild of Dr. Norman Borlaug who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts) which dominated the efforts over the last half century to solve the world food crisis was literally manufactured by the burgeoning bioengineering industry of the U.S. and other western nations. It was built on the use of toxic petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, on massive, mechanized irrigation systems, too often using irreplaceable fossil water from deep underground aquifers, and on the new genetically modified food crops being turned out by agrifood giants like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Monsanto and Dupont.
While it bought us a few more decades of relative global food security it was also very much responsible for the virtual destruction of the natural fertility and food production capability of the world's commercial agricultural soils. It was an aspirin, offering short-term relief but still ending with severe long-term pain. But there was much more.
The strings attached to food and agricultural aid to poor nations and poor peoples by the corporate weapons of western capitalism (The World Bank, IMF, OECD, WHO, FAO and others) contributed to the unmanageable indebtedness of third world nations and ultimately diminished the ability of those nations to feed their undernourished populations. In most cases these strings included a demand for privatization and corporatization of the nation's water supply as well. The power-hungry multinational agrifood companies actually campaigned vigorously and successfully for decades to get control of world food production, making illegal, in many countries, the saving of seeds by indigenous farmers (as a condition of financial aid). The concentration of ever more limited, bioengineered crop varieties has contributed hugely to the destruction of a diverse plant gene pool, including native source crops.
This destruction has been released into the environment through cross pollination of native plants with genetically modified crops. Too often that cross-polination is transferring to native plants a terminator gene which prevents the plant from reproducing, having the potential to cause the extinction of some of those native species. How the introduction of those engineered genes into native species will affect future evolution of native plant species is totally unknown because such uncontrolled evolution of genetically modified species was never studied in the lab or in the field. We have, as a result, now turned the entire biosphere of our planet into an uncontrolled genetic evolution laboratory.
Most importantly for our near-term future, however, because of the move to large-scale, broad-acre farms to achieve efficient crop production, small farmers and indigenous farmers have been driven off the land that had sustained them and the communities around them for generations. Their small holdings of agricultural land are being consolidated into massive, managed, industrialized tracts. As a result, much of the knowledge and practice (including the facility to develop and maintain tools suited to that small-scale production) of small scale farming is rapidly being lost throughout the world. Long before the middle of this century those old ways (so critical as we slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak) may be lost forever, having to be reinvented by a desperate and hapless population having, for the first time, to learn the art of survival.
Western Capitalism is a delusional destroyer of the environment
If western capitalist society has proven one thing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it is that it has chosen to be an enemy and destroyer of the environment which, it has forgotten, sustains it. And in that role it is functioning very successfully. We have also proven that we can easily convince ourselves that what we are doing is good, even when all of the evidence says otherwise. We have industrialized and systematized our propaganda machine and our tools of self-delusion just as effectively as we have the assembly-line production of widgets. We see what we want to see and are blind to that which we do not. In our virtual world perception has become reality. We see wealth in debt. We see nutrition and sustenance in empty calories. We see agricultural fertility in a bag of chemicals. We see reality in staged farces presented on our television sets. And we recoil in fear and loathing at all that is natural, reject the only true source of reality and beauty; nature. And we vilify and criminalize those who would dare to protect what little is left of nature from man's abuse and destruction.
Human population is unsustainable
Man's greatest threat to nature, however, is not our machines, nor our technology, nor our concrete and asphalt cities and roadways. Our greatest threat is our huge numbers, period. There are over 6.6 billion of us and our numbers continue to increase year after year. The rate of population increase has slowed but our numbers could, all other things being equal, double again well before the end of this century. Being the world's most successful omnivore, however, puts us unquestionably at the top of the global food chain. But natural food chains are a pyramid with micro-organisms at the bottom, then herbivores, then carnivores, then omnivores. But each level up the pyramid has to be smaller in number for the levels below to support it. Yet we, through our unnatural use of stored energy, have turned that pyramid upside down, temporarily at least. We are 6.6 billion fairies on the head of the pin stuck in the top of that pyramid.
THAT......... is unsustainable!
Feeding Ourselves
Whether it be natural or artificial, the most common and critical need of all 6.6 billion of us is food. But that food derives from and is critically dependent on the wide diversity of other living organisms with which we reluctantly share this planet. There may be many who do not recognize that reality, who think that food naturally comes in a manufactured plastic container complete with a printed best-before date. There may be billions on this planet who have never seen a cow being milked, never seen a potato growing in the ground, never actually seen a chicken lay an egg. They only recognize these things by their packaging and their location on the grocer's shelves.
But feeding our 6.6 billion population is an ongoing and increasingly serious problem as we monopolize, and destroy, more and more of the planet's life-support system to the exclusion of other species. More and more, however, that monopolization of the food producing capacity at the expense of others is now happening within our own species. With more and more people and less and less food, and less and less capability to produce it, larger and larger numbers of people are being left out in our game of musical-food (like musical chairs but with the reward when the music stops being enough food to keep you alive rather than just a chair to sit on). To paraphrase the old expression, you can't have an ever-expanding population and enough food for all too. (I think if Marie Antoinette had lived now and witnessed recent events in Haiti her new slogan would be "Let them eat mudpies!")
Economic system disconnect between ever-increasing needs and ever-declining resources
Western nations are bound to an unforgiving economic paradigm that is critically dependent on perpetual growth with a money supply grown on the ever-increasing issuance of new debt. This cannot be the source of solutions for a world that already has too many people, already scarce and constantly diminishing resources. It is just not possible to maintain a business-as-usual system where the demand side keeps growing and the supply side keeps declining. When the money that is the representation of the economy no longer has a tangible value within the economy then the economy survives only through the momentum of faith and confidence. It can no longer survive an eventual but inevitable loss of that confidence. Even today the Capitalist Church has a rapidly declining membership and may soon face an empty collection plate.
There may have been a time when we could have redressed the economic and cultural supply-demand imbalance by either increasing the supply or decreasing the demand. That option is no longer open to us. The supply can no longer be increased, except of course on the graphs and charts of economists. The resources with which to do so are rapidly disappearing. The only option left open to us is to decrease the demand.
There is some small latitude within the system to reduce the demand without serious impact on population. But even that option is seriously limited and very short-term. The simple and painful reality is that sooner rather than later our massive population is going to have to be reduced because there simply aren't enough resources to maintain us all, no matter what level of resource consumption and lifestyle we consider acceptable. As those resources are finite sooner or later that excess population will deplete them to a level below the minimum sustainable.
Is the Human species too big to fail?
As we have proven over the past couple of centuries, species go extinct. Some 99.9999% of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. Extinction, it is now recognized by science, is a natural phase in the evolution of species. That suggests, therefore, that extinction at some point in the future is inevitable for the human species. From an evolutionary and biological point of view there is nothing particularly unique about our species that suggests any likelihood of our avoiding that eventuality. We may, before that extinction, evolve into a new species. We may, on the other hand, prove to be an evolutionary dead-end, as is the case with the majority of species that have existed. Evolution, despite our beliefs and best efforts to make it otherwise, is a crap shoot. Welcome to the real world.
With that evolutionary perspective I would like to suggest that the period we are entering into (probably covering at least this and next century) is, in fact, going to be a struggle for the survival of our species. Never in the history of our species has such a large population had to deal with such a massive shift in lifestyle and survivability as we will be facing as global energy declines over the coming decades. We have already approached extinction several times since we first evolved into being on this planet. We managed to claw back from the edge of the extinction abyss on each of those occasions. We may still do so several more times before our eventual demise. But we cannot take our continued existence as a species for granted.
Human species is in severe overshoot
We, as a species, have severely overshot the carrying capacity of the environment that sustains us, in our case, unlike most other species, being the entire planet. The resources upon which we critically depend for our survival are rapidly diminishing while our numbers continue to increase. This is a classic pattern of the transition into overshoot. Science tells us resource insufficiency due to overshoot is the most common cause of all extinctions throughout the history of life on earth.
But human overshoot in reality happened some time early in the Industrial Revolution. Many scientists believe that, without the support of the massive amounts of energy we have derived from fossil fuels, the global carrying capacity for the human species is, at best, between 1 and 2 billion. The massive added population that fossil fuels have allowed simply cannot be sustained without them. Whether we like it or not, as the global supply of fossil fuels diminish our human population will go into decline. The only question remaining, to which no one realistically has an answer, is how.
Overshoot ultimately local
Overshoot of carrying capacity, though it has species wide implications, is very much a local, regional phenomenon. Even today there are many regions and nations that can, within the resources available in their region, support their current population. This reality is masked not just by our use of fossil fuels but by the current efficiency of a global food distribution system. At the moment, and as long as there are fossil fuels (or other means) to maintain the distribution system, our carrying capacity has largely been averaged out to a global basis. Poor countries do not have higher levels of starvation and nutrition-related diseases because they do not have the agricultural carrying capacity to produce enough food. They simply cannot compete for that food in a global food distribution system that clearly favours wealthy nations and peoples. This is complicated by the unfortunate capitalist reality that much of the agricultural land of poor nations is currently being used, by large agricultural companies, to produce luxury crops like cotton, coffee, chocolate, and sugar cane for western markets.
As the global food distribution declines and ultimately fails, which it will, carrying capacity and food security will again become very clearly a local problem. Regions and nations will survive or fail based on their ability to produce the food needed to support the population within their region, and to control the level of population within their region. This local food security issue, of course, is clearly recognized by an increasing number of groups and grass-roots organizations around the world who are today fostering "eat local", "food miles" and bio-regionalism efforts.
Western Capitalism and the current global food crisis
Food self-sufficiency and food security has different components in different regions around the world. In North America and Europe the prime underpinning of our food security is wheat. In Latin America it is corn. Much of the poor diet of Africa is based on Casava and Taro (taro is also a key food in the Pacific islands, as well as fish). Asian food security is dominated by rice.
When nations supply food aid they tend to think in terms of offering that with which they are familiar. America offers wheat. Japan and China offer rice. The benefits from such aid are immediate and short term. But they create and reinforce a dependence on a foreign food source. It does not have long-term viability. It does not allow or facilitate the people or nation being helped to achieve long-term sustainability.
The real need is to help those nations and peoples strengthen and secure local self-sufficiency. In many cases, because of the consolidation effort during the Green Revolution, that may require extensive land redistribution, putting the small farmer back on the land. It needs a strengthening of development of that food resource (such as Casava in Africa) that naturally underpins the region's food security. It probably also needs a disconnect from the global debt economy, which may also need debt forgiveness to get those poor nations out from under the burden of unmanageable indebtedness. In a global economy and money supply grown by debt-issuance, the debt of not just poor nations but all nations can never be discharged. It takes new debt to pay existing debt.
Food crisis is not a technological problem, it is a population problem
Western capitalist nations approach every offer of aid and assistance as a profit-making venture and a technological challenge. Neither of these have long-term viability as solutions to the current global food crisis. This food crisis is not a technological problem. It is a population problem. Global population MUST be reduced.
This, above all else, is the reason that the global food crisis cannot be left to western capitalist nations. Every nation and region is going to have to determine what its local long-term carrying capacity is. Perhaps western nations can offer some assistance in this effort. Once that carrying capacity is determined, however, each nation and region is going to have to determine how to get their population below the level of the carrying capacity. Under no circumstances should western capitalist nations have a role in determining how this is achieved outside of their own borders. We have far different criteria than is needed. We value life very differently than most peoples and nations can afford. Whether we like it or not, life is brutal and tough, especially when the world is in overshoot and people are having to struggle for their survival. We cannot impose upon such a world our current unrealistic view of worth and value. We have spent far too long (since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution) living within the bubble of a virtual world. Our perceived reality does not an can not match the hard realities of the bulk of the 6.6 billion people and 200+ nations on this planet.
I don't know how the people of Botswana (just an example) will achieve equilibrium within their carrying capacity. I know, however, that they must figure it out, that it is not my problem to deal with. Yes, many countries and peoples will sort it out in brutal civil and inter-tribal wars, in revolutions. But if 3-5 people out of every six globally are going to be casualties it is unrealistic to expect this to be done nobly, humanely. As the money supply increases the value of that money diminishes. As the population increases, especially in overshoot, the value of each life diminishes. This is a reality we have thus far been able to avoid.
We have an unfortunate tendency to shoot the messenger, especially when the news he brings is bad. Believe me, I am not sitting back counting my piles of money and rubbing my hands in glee at the prospect of a global die-off. The next century or two are going to be a brutal struggle for survival. How quickly that struggle deepens into a battle I do not know. I don't think it is that far away. We can see the signs of an escalation in those struggles already. I am of an age and a state of health where I am content to know that I will not be around to face the worst of it. But our children and grandchildren will. And I fear for them.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Peak Oil IS About Peak Food
There is something that is very important for people to get their heads around. Peak oil is not about the oil, not about gasoline and diesel and heating oil and jet fuel. It's not about cars, SUVs, vans, trucks, buses, trains, planes or ships.
Peak oil is about food and our progressive inability, especially in the couple of decades after we pass the oil peak, to produce enough of it to feed our 6.5+ billion global population. Even now, every day over 40,000 people worldwide die of starvation, malnutrition and other nutrition related diseases. Each 1% gap between global demand and global supply will increase those deaths by 10-25%.
Food production in today's world is critically dependent on oil (for pesticides, herbicides, agrochemicals, agricultural irrigation and distribution fuels) and natural gas (for artificial fertilizers) and clean water from ever-scarcer and shrinking lakes and rivers and ever-shrinking underground aquifers. A shrinking global food supply is not just a problem for the third world. Everybody has to eat and we in the developed world tend to like to do that far more than those in the third world have the luxury of doing. Reversion to organic farming methods not dependent on artificial fertilizers and pesticides will not be as easy as the casual observer may think. Our commercial agricultural land is essentially toxic and sterile through our overuse of petrochemicals and limited-nutrient artificial fertilizers. Fertilizers are essentially Nitrogen, Potassium and Phosphorus. Plants, like people, need a full spectrum of dozens of different minerals and soil nutrients.
Commercial agriculture is essentially an export business, exporting the nutrients from the soil on which we grow the crops and never re-importing those nutrients. If the agrochemicals on which commercial agriculture relies were to disappear tomorrow, it is reliably estimated that those same commercial soils will produce only between 5-20% of the crops they do today, assuming even then that there is sufficient fresh water to irrigate them. It is estimated that it would take 10-20 years or more to rebuild the natural fertility of those commercial soils. Without those agrochemicals that means a drop of 80-95% in the productivity of those soils until their natural fertility is restored.
The other key factor, of course, is crop pests. Without oil-derived pesticides crops will be susceptible to invasion by those pests in numbers possibly never seen before. We have, through our use of pesticides, helped those pests evolve unprecedented resistance. Commercial farmers today use 33 times as much pesticides as just three decades ago and yet lose 25% more of their crop to pests than they did then. We are already losing the battle against crop pests. When the pesticides are gone we will lose the war.
That same use of pesticides has also prevented our crops from evolving their own natural defences against pests. Our current crops generally have very low survival potential without those pesticides. All of this, of course, parallels our own weakened immune systems because of the overuse of antibiotics, vaccines and other modern medicines, all of which take over the immune response rather than strengthen the immune system.
People will not really get it about peak oil and its serious implications for their own and their children's survivability until they get their heads away from worrying about transportation fuels and understand the implications for food in our world of 6.5+ billion people. We cannot simply wait until we are well past peak oil and on the decline downslope to start adapting to our changed circumstances.
Our current ability to feed most of our 6.5+ billion population has become dependent on a virtual carrying capacity. Modern, industrial agriculture has become increasingly and critically dependent on the production and application annually of millions of tons of herbicides, pesticides and artificial fertilizers, all derived from oil and natural gas. In the process we have destroyed the natural fertility of those soils. It will require decades of effort to rebuild that fertility to allow those soils to produce significant crops of food without those petrochemicals. If we wait until the feedstocks (oil and natural gas) for those agrochemicals are already in decline the tremendous loss of life while we rebuild the world's soil fertility will be unavoidable.
Peak oil is about food and our progressive inability, especially in the couple of decades after we pass the oil peak, to produce enough of it to feed our 6.5+ billion global population. Even now, every day over 40,000 people worldwide die of starvation, malnutrition and other nutrition related diseases. Each 1% gap between global demand and global supply will increase those deaths by 10-25%.
Food production in today's world is critically dependent on oil (for pesticides, herbicides, agrochemicals, agricultural irrigation and distribution fuels) and natural gas (for artificial fertilizers) and clean water from ever-scarcer and shrinking lakes and rivers and ever-shrinking underground aquifers. A shrinking global food supply is not just a problem for the third world. Everybody has to eat and we in the developed world tend to like to do that far more than those in the third world have the luxury of doing. Reversion to organic farming methods not dependent on artificial fertilizers and pesticides will not be as easy as the casual observer may think. Our commercial agricultural land is essentially toxic and sterile through our overuse of petrochemicals and limited-nutrient artificial fertilizers. Fertilizers are essentially Nitrogen, Potassium and Phosphorus. Plants, like people, need a full spectrum of dozens of different minerals and soil nutrients.
Commercial agriculture is essentially an export business, exporting the nutrients from the soil on which we grow the crops and never re-importing those nutrients. If the agrochemicals on which commercial agriculture relies were to disappear tomorrow, it is reliably estimated that those same commercial soils will produce only between 5-20% of the crops they do today, assuming even then that there is sufficient fresh water to irrigate them. It is estimated that it would take 10-20 years or more to rebuild the natural fertility of those commercial soils. Without those agrochemicals that means a drop of 80-95% in the productivity of those soils until their natural fertility is restored.
The other key factor, of course, is crop pests. Without oil-derived pesticides crops will be susceptible to invasion by those pests in numbers possibly never seen before. We have, through our use of pesticides, helped those pests evolve unprecedented resistance. Commercial farmers today use 33 times as much pesticides as just three decades ago and yet lose 25% more of their crop to pests than they did then. We are already losing the battle against crop pests. When the pesticides are gone we will lose the war.
That same use of pesticides has also prevented our crops from evolving their own natural defences against pests. Our current crops generally have very low survival potential without those pesticides. All of this, of course, parallels our own weakened immune systems because of the overuse of antibiotics, vaccines and other modern medicines, all of which take over the immune response rather than strengthen the immune system.
People will not really get it about peak oil and its serious implications for their own and their children's survivability until they get their heads away from worrying about transportation fuels and understand the implications for food in our world of 6.5+ billion people. We cannot simply wait until we are well past peak oil and on the decline downslope to start adapting to our changed circumstances.
Our current ability to feed most of our 6.5+ billion population has become dependent on a virtual carrying capacity. Modern, industrial agriculture has become increasingly and critically dependent on the production and application annually of millions of tons of herbicides, pesticides and artificial fertilizers, all derived from oil and natural gas. In the process we have destroyed the natural fertility of those soils. It will require decades of effort to rebuild that fertility to allow those soils to produce significant crops of food without those petrochemicals. If we wait until the feedstocks (oil and natural gas) for those agrochemicals are already in decline the tremendous loss of life while we rebuild the world's soil fertility will be unavoidable.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Soil Fertility and Carrying Capacity
Earth, the living planet
Earth's life-supporting environment was created by the very life dependent upon it. It is a symbiotic relationship with both halves of that partnership critically dependent upon the other. Without earth's benign and supportive environment there would be no life. Had plant life never arisen the oxygen atmosphere upon which all animal life is dependent would not exist.
As we near the end of our fossil-fuel age, the heartbreaking truth we must endure is that our dream of reaching out to the stars is likely never to be realized. We evolved as an earthbound species and will, I believe, be forever constrained to that reality. We, myself included, desperately want to believe there are other planets teeming with life. The reality is that, despite an incessant search, the only planet in all the universe that we know contains life is our own earth.
Like so many others I desperately wish SETI would receive that elusive signal from other intelligent life. Perhaps that would convince us all of what we have in common, that we are one us in a universe of them. But there are so many more reasons that we will never receive that signal than reasons that we might. Regardless, the reality is that we will continue to be dependent upon this planet for our existence.
Our solar system is a closed system. Our earth is a semi-closed system, receiving input from only our sun as it, like all stars, slowly consumes itself. The resources this planet contained before life arose are finite. Most of the resources since created by earth's living processes are renewable, not infinite but perpetually recreated by living organisms. Most of those renewable resources are themselves created from earth's finite resources. Life constantly recycles those elements through one living organism after another.
Converting inorganic matter to organic
Some of those organisms convert raw minerals and other elements into a form that they themselves and other organisms can utilize. They are made available to the roots of plants which make them available to animal species who eventually return them to the soil when they die. Then the microorganisms start the process all over again. Nature wastes nothing.
Life is still critically dependent on these organisms for extending and maintaining the carrying capacity of the planet. Every ounce of raw planetary resources converted by them to a bio-available form extends and maintains the amount of life this planet can support. In these first few billion years of terrestrial life the most readily available and easily obtained of these finite resources have continuously been drawn upon by earth's life forms.
All finite, non-renewable resources being consumed will eventually be used up, at least in their native form. Consumption will generally be at it's maximum at the point where about half of that resource has been used. This is the peak, just like Hubbert's Peak which describes the point of maximum consumption of the world's crude oil supply. Oil, though created from living organisms, is a finite resource. It is renewable only in that the same processes that created the oil we now use can recreate it. But the timescales involved are so long, on the scale of millions of years, that in human terms we must consider oil finite. I am, of course, discounting the abiotic oil theory which argues that oil is continuously created in the earth's mantle.
Resource dependence
The agent using a finite resource builds a dependence on it consistent with the rate at which that resource is being consumed. That dependence is at maximum when consumption is at maximum, when that resource has reached peak and is half used up. As that resource passes peak and its availability declines so too will the agent responsible for its consumption. That is not limited to finite resources. Dependence can also be built around a renewable resource. The number of Koala an area can support is dependent on the rate at which the Eucalyptus trees on which they feed reproduce. Pandas are dependent on the reproductive rate of bamboo. Cheetah's rely on the breeding rate of Thompson's Gazelles. Oil can be reproduced but the rate of regeneration is far exceeded by the rate at which we humans consume it.
We consume and destroy earth's resources at a rate far exceeding that of all other life forms on the planet. Our activities, unlike those of any other species, are systematically destroying the life-support capability of the planet. Vigorously carried on long enough we will destroy the planet's ability to support any life at all, ourselves included.
Life's critical dependence on top soil
Earth's life-support system consists of various components and sub-systems like the water cycle and the carbon cycle. The one component, however, most critical to land-based life, the engine of their life-support system, is top soil. That is the thin layer of dark, organically rich soil in which plants spread out their roots and upon which animals walk, urinate, defecate, give birth and die. It is in this thin, vital layer of soil that microorganisms convert raw resources and make them available to the myriad forms of life around and above them.
The human body contains trace amounts of almost every mineral on earth; carbon, calcium, sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, gold, silver, zinc, copper, iron, aluminium, molybdenum, chromium, platinum, boron, silicon and more. These are derived from the soil through our food. The amino acids that our body's proteins are made from contain only carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur. Our bones are constructed mostly of calcium, silicon, and boron. What are all of those other minerals used for?
Enzymes and Hormones in living organisms
All living organisms are vitally dependent on two particular types of proteins that control metabolism, conversion of food to cellular material, functioning of the nervous system, cell regeneration and more. Hormones are the body's internal messaging system. They control, for example, your body's rate of cell reproduction that controls your growth, your nervous reactions, cell division, immune responses and the contraction of muscles. Enzymes are responsible for the conversion of material from one form to another, the physical construction, maintenance and division of cells, the conversion of glucose to energy, and much, much more. There are literally tens of thousands of different types of enzymes responsible for virtually everything that happens in your body.
Enzymes and hormones are built to exacting specifications contained in your DNA. An enzyme may be responsible for combining together a carbon atom and an oxygen atom or splitting apart two joined sulfur atoms united by a disulfide bond. Each does only one very specific function. Most enzymes require a catalyst that acts as an agent in speeding up a chemical reaction (getting the carbon atom and oxygen atom to link or getting the two sulfur atoms to separate). These reactions would otherwise take place at such a slow rate that life could not function. Movement would not be possible. Your body would be unable to build replacements for your damaged or worn out cells. Food could never be transformed into usable material in your body or converted to energy to drive your muscles and nervous system. Enzymes quite literally are the key to life.
You may be aware of the handful of your body's digestive enzymes. But most of the tens of thousands of enzymes in your body are contained within your cells. They are generated there, do their function there, are broken down and recycled there, never exiting the cell in which they are created. Your food may be acted upon by hundreds, even thousands of different enzymes (like workers on an assembly line) from the time it enters your mouth until it is used in various bodily processes or built into a cell.
How catalytic enzymes function
The key to the enzyme's ability to do it's job, like the assembly line worker, is the tools it has to work with, the catalysts. That catalyst may be a particular vitamin, an atom of oxygen, or more likely an atom of a particular mineral like iron, gold or silver. The minerals in your body not used in the structure of your bones, cells, nerves and muscles are used by hormones or by enzymes as catalysts in completing the chemical reaction they are responsible for. Without it's required catalyst, like the assembly line worker without his tools, the enzyme cannot do its job. If one enzyme in a series of reactions doesn't work the whole series of events shuts down. The enzymes after that can't get their materials. If the body, for example, does not have functioning amylase enzymes which break down starches, all of the bodily functions dependent on the nutrients in starches will not be able to function because their materials are, in a sense, held up at the receiving dock.
It is through our food that we get all of the minerals and other substances that our enzymes and hormones need as building materials and, most importantly, as tools to do their work. The body may still be able to generate the enzymes from instructions contained in the DNA but without their catalysts they are as productively useless as the workers sitting in the cafeteria.
Destruction of critical soil micro-organisms
Plants get those minerals from the soil through the help of an army of microorganisms that convert them into a form, very often an oxide, that the plant can use and making them available to the roots of the plant. We are systematically destroying the microorganisms upon which all life is dependent and the overall fertility of our soil. We are doing so;
* through our use of agricultural pesticides which kill soil organisms as well as the insects and other pests that we intend to destroy,
* through intensive deforestation resulting in millions of tons of critical top soil (and the microorganisms and minerals in that soil) being eroded away,
* by exposing forest soil microorganisms that break down dead and fallen material on the forest floor to construct new soil,
* through intensive irrigation which leaches vital mineral content of the soil down to levels where it is no longer accessible,
* with air pollution which results in toxic chemicals being absorbed into the soil where it kills those microorganisms,
* with industrial scale plowing and tilling of the soil resulting in millions of tons of top soil being dried up and blown away every year,
* by creating an impermeable layer of hardpan just below the top layer of soil which prevents both plant roots and soil microorganisms reaching the mineral nutrients in the subsoil,
* in turning over the soil with the plow which brings deep topsoil organisms to the surface where they are killed by exposure and driving aerobic microorganisms from the top layer of soil deeper underground where they are killed for lack of air, water and heat from sunlight,
* with our systematic destruction of the balance of soil nutrients through continued application of artificial fertilizers containing only nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus,
* by systematically changing soil ph levels which makes it an inhospitable environment for many of these critical soil organisms,
* by systematically changing the symbiotic relationships of soil organisms and plants by destroying the native variety of plants and replacing it with massive tracts of monoculture.
Clearly we cannot continue the destruction of this life-support capability upon which we and all other terrestrial life depend. We must begin making drastic changes now, before it is too late. Sooner or later we will push that system to a tipping point beyond which recovery is not possible. We do not know where or when that tipping point will be. We can only hope that we have not already passed it but we must still proceed with the assumption we have not.
Focusing on food security
The focus of our effort must be food security. The most critical aspect of our ability to feed our massive population is soil fertility. We must ensure that the balance of the mineral and other elemental content of our soils is rebuilt and maintained and that the soils are repopulated and maintained with the critical microorganisms that convert those elements and make them available to the other living organisms, including ourselves.
We cannot use those processes that allow us to feed over six billion people but destroy earth's life-support capability and at the same time help the planet regain it's optimum carrying capacity. The two are mutually exclusive. The longer we use those destructive processes the greater the risk we will push the life-support system beyond the tipping point leading to its eventual and inevitable collapse.
If we pass that tipping point the worst-case scenarios of population collapse become increasingly probable. The global population will inevitably contract, with or without peak oil, with or without global warming or any of the other global crises looming on the horizon. When and how badly depends upon how soon and how seriously we begin to rectify the problems we have created and move toward a sustainable modality of interfacing with this planet's natural systems. Continuing to push the limits of that life-support system while continuing to live in denial of that reality almost guarantees the worst possible outcome, eventually.
Earth's life-supporting environment was created by the very life dependent upon it. It is a symbiotic relationship with both halves of that partnership critically dependent upon the other. Without earth's benign and supportive environment there would be no life. Had plant life never arisen the oxygen atmosphere upon which all animal life is dependent would not exist.
As we near the end of our fossil-fuel age, the heartbreaking truth we must endure is that our dream of reaching out to the stars is likely never to be realized. We evolved as an earthbound species and will, I believe, be forever constrained to that reality. We, myself included, desperately want to believe there are other planets teeming with life. The reality is that, despite an incessant search, the only planet in all the universe that we know contains life is our own earth.
Like so many others I desperately wish SETI would receive that elusive signal from other intelligent life. Perhaps that would convince us all of what we have in common, that we are one us in a universe of them. But there are so many more reasons that we will never receive that signal than reasons that we might. Regardless, the reality is that we will continue to be dependent upon this planet for our existence.
Our solar system is a closed system. Our earth is a semi-closed system, receiving input from only our sun as it, like all stars, slowly consumes itself. The resources this planet contained before life arose are finite. Most of the resources since created by earth's living processes are renewable, not infinite but perpetually recreated by living organisms. Most of those renewable resources are themselves created from earth's finite resources. Life constantly recycles those elements through one living organism after another.
Converting inorganic matter to organic
Some of those organisms convert raw minerals and other elements into a form that they themselves and other organisms can utilize. They are made available to the roots of plants which make them available to animal species who eventually return them to the soil when they die. Then the microorganisms start the process all over again. Nature wastes nothing.
Life is still critically dependent on these organisms for extending and maintaining the carrying capacity of the planet. Every ounce of raw planetary resources converted by them to a bio-available form extends and maintains the amount of life this planet can support. In these first few billion years of terrestrial life the most readily available and easily obtained of these finite resources have continuously been drawn upon by earth's life forms.
All finite, non-renewable resources being consumed will eventually be used up, at least in their native form. Consumption will generally be at it's maximum at the point where about half of that resource has been used. This is the peak, just like Hubbert's Peak which describes the point of maximum consumption of the world's crude oil supply. Oil, though created from living organisms, is a finite resource. It is renewable only in that the same processes that created the oil we now use can recreate it. But the timescales involved are so long, on the scale of millions of years, that in human terms we must consider oil finite. I am, of course, discounting the abiotic oil theory which argues that oil is continuously created in the earth's mantle.
Resource dependence
The agent using a finite resource builds a dependence on it consistent with the rate at which that resource is being consumed. That dependence is at maximum when consumption is at maximum, when that resource has reached peak and is half used up. As that resource passes peak and its availability declines so too will the agent responsible for its consumption. That is not limited to finite resources. Dependence can also be built around a renewable resource. The number of Koala an area can support is dependent on the rate at which the Eucalyptus trees on which they feed reproduce. Pandas are dependent on the reproductive rate of bamboo. Cheetah's rely on the breeding rate of Thompson's Gazelles. Oil can be reproduced but the rate of regeneration is far exceeded by the rate at which we humans consume it.
We consume and destroy earth's resources at a rate far exceeding that of all other life forms on the planet. Our activities, unlike those of any other species, are systematically destroying the life-support capability of the planet. Vigorously carried on long enough we will destroy the planet's ability to support any life at all, ourselves included.
Life's critical dependence on top soil
Earth's life-support system consists of various components and sub-systems like the water cycle and the carbon cycle. The one component, however, most critical to land-based life, the engine of their life-support system, is top soil. That is the thin layer of dark, organically rich soil in which plants spread out their roots and upon which animals walk, urinate, defecate, give birth and die. It is in this thin, vital layer of soil that microorganisms convert raw resources and make them available to the myriad forms of life around and above them.
The human body contains trace amounts of almost every mineral on earth; carbon, calcium, sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, gold, silver, zinc, copper, iron, aluminium, molybdenum, chromium, platinum, boron, silicon and more. These are derived from the soil through our food. The amino acids that our body's proteins are made from contain only carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur. Our bones are constructed mostly of calcium, silicon, and boron. What are all of those other minerals used for?
Enzymes and Hormones in living organisms
All living organisms are vitally dependent on two particular types of proteins that control metabolism, conversion of food to cellular material, functioning of the nervous system, cell regeneration and more. Hormones are the body's internal messaging system. They control, for example, your body's rate of cell reproduction that controls your growth, your nervous reactions, cell division, immune responses and the contraction of muscles. Enzymes are responsible for the conversion of material from one form to another, the physical construction, maintenance and division of cells, the conversion of glucose to energy, and much, much more. There are literally tens of thousands of different types of enzymes responsible for virtually everything that happens in your body.
Enzymes and hormones are built to exacting specifications contained in your DNA. An enzyme may be responsible for combining together a carbon atom and an oxygen atom or splitting apart two joined sulfur atoms united by a disulfide bond. Each does only one very specific function. Most enzymes require a catalyst that acts as an agent in speeding up a chemical reaction (getting the carbon atom and oxygen atom to link or getting the two sulfur atoms to separate). These reactions would otherwise take place at such a slow rate that life could not function. Movement would not be possible. Your body would be unable to build replacements for your damaged or worn out cells. Food could never be transformed into usable material in your body or converted to energy to drive your muscles and nervous system. Enzymes quite literally are the key to life.
You may be aware of the handful of your body's digestive enzymes. But most of the tens of thousands of enzymes in your body are contained within your cells. They are generated there, do their function there, are broken down and recycled there, never exiting the cell in which they are created. Your food may be acted upon by hundreds, even thousands of different enzymes (like workers on an assembly line) from the time it enters your mouth until it is used in various bodily processes or built into a cell.
How catalytic enzymes function
The key to the enzyme's ability to do it's job, like the assembly line worker, is the tools it has to work with, the catalysts. That catalyst may be a particular vitamin, an atom of oxygen, or more likely an atom of a particular mineral like iron, gold or silver. The minerals in your body not used in the structure of your bones, cells, nerves and muscles are used by hormones or by enzymes as catalysts in completing the chemical reaction they are responsible for. Without it's required catalyst, like the assembly line worker without his tools, the enzyme cannot do its job. If one enzyme in a series of reactions doesn't work the whole series of events shuts down. The enzymes after that can't get their materials. If the body, for example, does not have functioning amylase enzymes which break down starches, all of the bodily functions dependent on the nutrients in starches will not be able to function because their materials are, in a sense, held up at the receiving dock.
It is through our food that we get all of the minerals and other substances that our enzymes and hormones need as building materials and, most importantly, as tools to do their work. The body may still be able to generate the enzymes from instructions contained in the DNA but without their catalysts they are as productively useless as the workers sitting in the cafeteria.
Destruction of critical soil micro-organisms
Plants get those minerals from the soil through the help of an army of microorganisms that convert them into a form, very often an oxide, that the plant can use and making them available to the roots of the plant. We are systematically destroying the microorganisms upon which all life is dependent and the overall fertility of our soil. We are doing so;
* through our use of agricultural pesticides which kill soil organisms as well as the insects and other pests that we intend to destroy,
* through intensive deforestation resulting in millions of tons of critical top soil (and the microorganisms and minerals in that soil) being eroded away,
* by exposing forest soil microorganisms that break down dead and fallen material on the forest floor to construct new soil,
* through intensive irrigation which leaches vital mineral content of the soil down to levels where it is no longer accessible,
* with air pollution which results in toxic chemicals being absorbed into the soil where it kills those microorganisms,
* with industrial scale plowing and tilling of the soil resulting in millions of tons of top soil being dried up and blown away every year,
* by creating an impermeable layer of hardpan just below the top layer of soil which prevents both plant roots and soil microorganisms reaching the mineral nutrients in the subsoil,
* in turning over the soil with the plow which brings deep topsoil organisms to the surface where they are killed by exposure and driving aerobic microorganisms from the top layer of soil deeper underground where they are killed for lack of air, water and heat from sunlight,
* with our systematic destruction of the balance of soil nutrients through continued application of artificial fertilizers containing only nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus,
* by systematically changing soil ph levels which makes it an inhospitable environment for many of these critical soil organisms,
* by systematically changing the symbiotic relationships of soil organisms and plants by destroying the native variety of plants and replacing it with massive tracts of monoculture.
Clearly we cannot continue the destruction of this life-support capability upon which we and all other terrestrial life depend. We must begin making drastic changes now, before it is too late. Sooner or later we will push that system to a tipping point beyond which recovery is not possible. We do not know where or when that tipping point will be. We can only hope that we have not already passed it but we must still proceed with the assumption we have not.
Focusing on food security
The focus of our effort must be food security. The most critical aspect of our ability to feed our massive population is soil fertility. We must ensure that the balance of the mineral and other elemental content of our soils is rebuilt and maintained and that the soils are repopulated and maintained with the critical microorganisms that convert those elements and make them available to the other living organisms, including ourselves.
We cannot use those processes that allow us to feed over six billion people but destroy earth's life-support capability and at the same time help the planet regain it's optimum carrying capacity. The two are mutually exclusive. The longer we use those destructive processes the greater the risk we will push the life-support system beyond the tipping point leading to its eventual and inevitable collapse.
If we pass that tipping point the worst-case scenarios of population collapse become increasingly probable. The global population will inevitably contract, with or without peak oil, with or without global warming or any of the other global crises looming on the horizon. When and how badly depends upon how soon and how seriously we begin to rectify the problems we have created and move toward a sustainable modality of interfacing with this planet's natural systems. Continuing to push the limits of that life-support system while continuing to live in denial of that reality almost guarantees the worst possible outcome, eventually.
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