Nature's Revolution
The ruling class of any biosphere is the group most able to exploit the "lower" forms for increasing and maintaining their power.
Beasts of Burden have been enslaved by humans since prehistory, and although we currently don't much need their brawn at the moment for labor, we at least need animals for our food.
Human slavery is perhaps equally a prehistoric origin, even if forms vary and heights didn't occur until large city-state empires like the Egyptians.
Human slavery helped build early America, and may or may not have changed greatly after the Civil war. Human labor becomes valuable more for complexity of behavior more than muscle power.
The Industrial Revolution invented a new slave - automated labor by machines, powered by water, by steam, and eventually by hydrocarbons - coal, oil, and natural gas.
E.F. Schumacher, author of "Small is Beautiful", wrote about his beliefs that modern methods of production have not been mastered as long as we've not mastered the source of energy that powers the production.
I sort of feel like modern life as a master/slave relationship, where we're riding a wave of cheap slaves as long as oil is available to power us. Each of us OWNS or aspires to own an automobile, most weighing over 2000 lb, and capable of traveling 80 mph on good roads.
Thus comes the old saying about "Power corrupts", and we all build our lives as if the power available will always increase. Meanwhile as a country (and even as a continent) we've peaked in our oil production, and just hoping other lands will continue providing us with our energy, ignoring the possibility that others will also aspire to "catch up" to our consumption.
The U.S. has about 5% of the world's population and consumes about 25% of the world's oil each year. The world used about 84Mbbl/day currently and even the most optimistic projections say the world will never be capable of producing more than 100-120 mb/day, and those hopeful limits will (by definition) come at the end of production increases when rates will decrease and the world will have to make due with less oil each year than the last.
Estimates of remaining recoverable convention oil vary from 900 billion barrels to as high as 4000 billion if you're a super-optimist and expand the definitions of oil sources.
Taking current world production, these reserves divide out to be 30 to 130 years of reserves. (at 84mb/year)
If the world used oil at the same rate as the U.S, the oil would run 5 times quicker or 6 to 26 years. (Not that the infrastructure or geological limits could support such rates)
What gives the right for the U.S. to consume oil at such a rate? I imagine the same question could be asked about human slavery. What gave early Americans the right to enslave kidnapped Africans for slave labor?
You may not consider these questions comparable, and I'm not going to argue on moral grounds. My point is actually simple - We took the right because opportunity knocked and we answered the door first.
I don't know about the sustainability of human slavery. I've heard that some populations had slaves outnumbering nonslaves, which makes control a hard issue.
Our current slaves are not the sort that rebel directly. We "kidnap" our oil slaves from the ground, process them into plastics and fuels, powering our processing and transporting with the slaves themselves. We're in a "positive loop" as long as we keep increasing our ability to extract more slaves.
If there's going to be a rebellion from our current slave trade, it'll have to be from Mother Nature herself.
Global Warming is one way Nature's responding to our CO2 productions. Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by 50% since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and higher than any estimated levels over the last 20 million years. The effects of CO2 increases are complex since there's many feedback loops. The balance of nature is being upset by more than just burning hydrocarbons, but by changing landscapes as well - clearing forests, causing desertification in many areas. The global warming appears to have the largest effect in the higher latitudes, and this new warmth appears to be having the affect of melting glaciers, melting permafrost landscapes. The permafrost may be an even more dangerous climate change than any other since it contains large amounts of methane gas frozen in the ice, which if released can increase global warming even faster.
The success of humanity may have already passed a point of no return - of using more resources than can be sustainably developed from the environment. So we're left with two directions for collapse - we may keep growing until natural catastrophe knocks us down, with the source being our stressing natural systems, or energy or material resources will dry up and we'll find ourselves unable to continue our growth.
Perhaps they are two sides of the same direction - left or right - system failure on the left or source failure on the right.
Some say this expansive "growth" as a cancer. Some may say humanity is just "growing up", coming into our own.
We've tricked ourselves into a lifestyle of wealth and promise, and yet we can't promise our children the same benefits.
President Bush says he wants to protect the solvency of Social Security in the year 2040, while holding 600 trillion dollar budget deficits that will tank the economy within a decade.
http://www.concordcoalition.org/facing_facts/alert_v10_n1.html
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-1_27_05_MK.html
President Bush wants to send Humans to Mars after 2030, while we can't even guarantee we'll have fuel for our economy by then.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/14/tech/main593184.shtml
Heck apparently we can't even afford to save the Hubble Space Telescope, but we're going to get a flag and footprint in the Sands of Mars. What a sense of priorities!
http://www.savethehubble.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sands_of_Mars
Anyway, I don't want to blame Bush. He's just a reflection of American expectations. We're all to blame for his election whether we voted for him or not. How much can a president really do?
Would a Democrat President be much better? He or she'd be just as beholden to economic interests that is sending us into unending debt and ever increasing risks of a crash.
No, politics is all well and good. But it will take grass root to change our direction.
SURE, you can believe that "cold fusion" or "free energy from the vacuum of space" will soon propel humanity into the next great adventure and conquering of space and other worlds. It's not a bad vision on the surface, and as much as I fear "free energy" might destroy us as well as anything else, I'll keep open a door that something new might be discovered in the next 1000 years that changes everything.
On the other hand, I expect in the short term, savior-in-the-sky or not, we're riding a small boat on a large wave that will soon be crashing onto a rocky shore. Human ingenuity be praised, and we'll need every bit.
It is interesting that idealism and morality point towards a perfection that can never be achieved in reality. Jesus apparently talked about the Lion laying down with the Lamb, a dream that natural needs for hunger and competition will end in heaven.
The late Pope John Paul was a strong defender of Life, human life at least, and the whole "prolife" movement itself is noble ideal to follow in a pure form.
I must wonder how morality and desire for perfection will ride out in times of hardship. I suppose modern Africa might be a good place to look, where AIDS had cut deep into communities and populations.
I guess I expect under times of great death, resources won't be available to meet the wider needs, and in the place of knowledge and science will come superstition and mythical explanations of why things happen.
I have my own myths - of Mother Nature (MN) as a dual goddess - life-giving AND like-taking. I think she's a better myth than GodMan-In-The-Sky (GMITS). GMITS purports to be all powerful and is above the laws of nature. MN in contrast is a dependent sort of Goddess. She'll make do - make stone soup when that's all there is, and hope the natives are kind enough to add their share. She NEEDS us for Her survival as much as we need Her. She doesn't need our "worship". She needs our patience and wisdom to see her needs and cooperate - to become a part of a larger system rather than above it.
Ah, nice words, but I know I'm of the GMITS culture, and she's just a slave girl, available to meet our needs.
So The Revolution may be close at hand, or yet decades away. Whichever, I'm convinced she'll come back and assert herself, and the revolution, whatever form it takes, won't be pretty like our Lions and Lambs sleeping together.
It seems all we can do at present is surrender our hope for security and for mercy.
Beasts of Burden have been enslaved by humans since prehistory, and although we currently don't much need their brawn at the moment for labor, we at least need animals for our food.
Human slavery is perhaps equally a prehistoric origin, even if forms vary and heights didn't occur until large city-state empires like the Egyptians.
Human slavery helped build early America, and may or may not have changed greatly after the Civil war. Human labor becomes valuable more for complexity of behavior more than muscle power.
The Industrial Revolution invented a new slave - automated labor by machines, powered by water, by steam, and eventually by hydrocarbons - coal, oil, and natural gas.
E.F. Schumacher, author of "Small is Beautiful", wrote about his beliefs that modern methods of production have not been mastered as long as we've not mastered the source of energy that powers the production.
I sort of feel like modern life as a master/slave relationship, where we're riding a wave of cheap slaves as long as oil is available to power us. Each of us OWNS or aspires to own an automobile, most weighing over 2000 lb, and capable of traveling 80 mph on good roads.
Thus comes the old saying about "Power corrupts", and we all build our lives as if the power available will always increase. Meanwhile as a country (and even as a continent) we've peaked in our oil production, and just hoping other lands will continue providing us with our energy, ignoring the possibility that others will also aspire to "catch up" to our consumption.
The U.S. has about 5% of the world's population and consumes about 25% of the world's oil each year. The world used about 84Mbbl/day currently and even the most optimistic projections say the world will never be capable of producing more than 100-120 mb/day, and those hopeful limits will (by definition) come at the end of production increases when rates will decrease and the world will have to make due with less oil each year than the last.
Estimates of remaining recoverable convention oil vary from 900 billion barrels to as high as 4000 billion if you're a super-optimist and expand the definitions of oil sources.
Taking current world production, these reserves divide out to be 30 to 130 years of reserves. (at 84mb/year)
If the world used oil at the same rate as the U.S, the oil would run 5 times quicker or 6 to 26 years. (Not that the infrastructure or geological limits could support such rates)
What gives the right for the U.S. to consume oil at such a rate? I imagine the same question could be asked about human slavery. What gave early Americans the right to enslave kidnapped Africans for slave labor?
You may not consider these questions comparable, and I'm not going to argue on moral grounds. My point is actually simple - We took the right because opportunity knocked and we answered the door first.
I don't know about the sustainability of human slavery. I've heard that some populations had slaves outnumbering nonslaves, which makes control a hard issue.
Our current slaves are not the sort that rebel directly. We "kidnap" our oil slaves from the ground, process them into plastics and fuels, powering our processing and transporting with the slaves themselves. We're in a "positive loop" as long as we keep increasing our ability to extract more slaves.
If there's going to be a rebellion from our current slave trade, it'll have to be from Mother Nature herself.
Global Warming is one way Nature's responding to our CO2 productions. Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by 50% since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and higher than any estimated levels over the last 20 million years. The effects of CO2 increases are complex since there's many feedback loops. The balance of nature is being upset by more than just burning hydrocarbons, but by changing landscapes as well - clearing forests, causing desertification in many areas. The global warming appears to have the largest effect in the higher latitudes, and this new warmth appears to be having the affect of melting glaciers, melting permafrost landscapes. The permafrost may be an even more dangerous climate change than any other since it contains large amounts of methane gas frozen in the ice, which if released can increase global warming even faster.
The success of humanity may have already passed a point of no return - of using more resources than can be sustainably developed from the environment. So we're left with two directions for collapse - we may keep growing until natural catastrophe knocks us down, with the source being our stressing natural systems, or energy or material resources will dry up and we'll find ourselves unable to continue our growth.
Perhaps they are two sides of the same direction - left or right - system failure on the left or source failure on the right.
Some say this expansive "growth" as a cancer. Some may say humanity is just "growing up", coming into our own.
We've tricked ourselves into a lifestyle of wealth and promise, and yet we can't promise our children the same benefits.
President Bush says he wants to protect the solvency of Social Security in the year 2040, while holding 600 trillion dollar budget deficits that will tank the economy within a decade.
http://www.concordcoalition.org/facing_facts/alert_v10_n1.html
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-1_27_05_MK.html
President Bush wants to send Humans to Mars after 2030, while we can't even guarantee we'll have fuel for our economy by then.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/14/tech/main593184.shtml
Heck apparently we can't even afford to save the Hubble Space Telescope, but we're going to get a flag and footprint in the Sands of Mars. What a sense of priorities!
http://www.savethehubble.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sands_of_Mars
Anyway, I don't want to blame Bush. He's just a reflection of American expectations. We're all to blame for his election whether we voted for him or not. How much can a president really do?
Would a Democrat President be much better? He or she'd be just as beholden to economic interests that is sending us into unending debt and ever increasing risks of a crash.
No, politics is all well and good. But it will take grass root to change our direction.
SURE, you can believe that "cold fusion" or "free energy from the vacuum of space" will soon propel humanity into the next great adventure and conquering of space and other worlds. It's not a bad vision on the surface, and as much as I fear "free energy" might destroy us as well as anything else, I'll keep open a door that something new might be discovered in the next 1000 years that changes everything.
On the other hand, I expect in the short term, savior-in-the-sky or not, we're riding a small boat on a large wave that will soon be crashing onto a rocky shore. Human ingenuity be praised, and we'll need every bit.
It is interesting that idealism and morality point towards a perfection that can never be achieved in reality. Jesus apparently talked about the Lion laying down with the Lamb, a dream that natural needs for hunger and competition will end in heaven.
The late Pope John Paul was a strong defender of Life, human life at least, and the whole "prolife" movement itself is noble ideal to follow in a pure form.
I must wonder how morality and desire for perfection will ride out in times of hardship. I suppose modern Africa might be a good place to look, where AIDS had cut deep into communities and populations.
I guess I expect under times of great death, resources won't be available to meet the wider needs, and in the place of knowledge and science will come superstition and mythical explanations of why things happen.
I have my own myths - of Mother Nature (MN) as a dual goddess - life-giving AND like-taking. I think she's a better myth than GodMan-In-The-Sky (GMITS). GMITS purports to be all powerful and is above the laws of nature. MN in contrast is a dependent sort of Goddess. She'll make do - make stone soup when that's all there is, and hope the natives are kind enough to add their share. She NEEDS us for Her survival as much as we need Her. She doesn't need our "worship". She needs our patience and wisdom to see her needs and cooperate - to become a part of a larger system rather than above it.
Ah, nice words, but I know I'm of the GMITS culture, and she's just a slave girl, available to meet our needs.
So The Revolution may be close at hand, or yet decades away. Whichever, I'm convinced she'll come back and assert herself, and the revolution, whatever form it takes, won't be pretty like our Lions and Lambs sleeping together.
It seems all we can do at present is surrender our hope for security and for mercy.
posted by Ares Olympus at 5:13 PM
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