Lee Arnold has invented an intriguing symbolic 'language' that can be employed in animations
to show how complicated systems work. The elements in the language are
shown above, and were inspired by a concept for symbolic representation
of energy flows developed by Howard T. Odum.
Lee has added some rigour to the symbol set and extended it to show
economic and information flows as well as physical ones, and further
extended it to make animations based on the set more intuitive. Click
on the first link above and watch the animation of the Bush tax cuts to
get an idea of just how powerful this language is.
One
interesting quality of this language is that symbols in a pentagon
instead of a hexagon indicate the portion of the population that must
deal with systemic problems in their environment: So 'people' in a
pentagon is 'prisoners or slaves' (it could also represent physically
or mentally ill people), while 'cities & nations' in a pentagon
represents 'police or authorities', including armies.
As much
as I admire the elegance and intuitiveness of this language, I was
skeptical that its 'alphabet' was complete enough to demonstrate more
sophisticated systems. Specifically, I wondered how to represent
technology. Going through Lee's animations, I noted that he takes the
liberty of expanding the symbol set whenever necessary, trying to make
the additions as intuitive as possible, and explaining them during his
narration when they are not. So, for example, a deep purple hexagon
(the same colour as the nuclear source, a wry statement by Lee?) with a
flag on it represents the government of that country. By analogy, we
might consider technology (and information databases) as 'storage' of
information, and use the silo symbol with contents coloured black to
represent it.
The proof of the robustness of any language is
found in its use, so I decided to try to map how I would represent the
problem of modern human overpopulation using ecolanguage. I drew this
problem using systems thinking symbols last year, and it looked like
this:
Using ecolanguage, I would start with the 'prehistoric' population balance model, as follows:
The
animation would start with just the brown animal hexagon and the green
plant symbol. Then humanity would evolve from other animals (the purple
hexagon might 'emerge' from the brown hexagon), and the initially
vegetarian homo sapiens would be depicted (everything in the picture
above except the brown hexagon on the right). Then the right brown
hexagon would appear to represent humanity's transition to omnivore,
and the picture above would be complete. The human hexagon would be
shown growing as it ate (absorbed energy from) prey, and shrinking as
predators ate them in turn, keeping the system in equilibrium.
Next we would add the impact of disease and intertribal conflict, as follows:
As
humanity developed new technologies, including weapons and agriculture,
predators were gradually eliminated, and in their place disease and
warfare rose. But while these new elements killed many humans, they
were not quite enough to offset the increasing amount of food that was
available not only from gathering and hunting, but now from farming as
well. The human population is growing; the purple hexagon gets larger.
Soon,
predators disappear from the picture entirely. And, as the population
grows, so does the demand for food, which in turn drives demand for new
agricultural technologies. In the picture below, these new variables
grow the size of the available food supply, and that in turn causes the
purple hexagon to swell even further (you may have noticed that I
changed the brown hexagon to a pentagon, to represent the prison-like
conditions many farmed animals live with):
Notice
we now have what in systems thinking is called a vicious (or virtuous,
depending on your point of view) circle. The more agricultural
technology (in the broadest sense of the word -- hoes, fences and traps
at first, biotech more recently), the more food available. The more
food available, the more human population grows. The more population
grows, the more demand for even more productive agricultural
technology. The system is no longer in equilibrium, and all three
components grow without constraint.
As human population begins
to grow out of control, despite the increase in the number and
intensity of wars and epidemic diseases, new ways must be found to
increase the efficiency and scale of human activity to feed all the new
mouths. The industrial revolution ratchets up human production another
order of magnitude, bringing with it the demand for, and expectation
of, growth without limit. Unnoticed by most, the exponential growth of
agricultural production, industrialization and land use for human
habitats is beginning to tax the ecosystem that man had always assumed
to be boundlessly resilient:
The
ecosystem is shrinking and weakening as all of the other elements in
the picture above swell without limit. All, that is, except disease,
which, for a while at least, is controlled by new medical technology.
That medical technology is also enabling people to live longer, which
also contributes to the population explosion. But medical technology
also introduces birth control, so the net effect of such technology on
population is insignificant.
For the first time, information
is beginning to have an impact on human population. Awareness of the
unsustainability of exponential growth in human numbers is causing some
people to engage in family planning. And as land becomes scarce and new
frontiers hard to find, competition for land is driving up prices and
causing most women to enter the work force and delay having children,
and as a consequence have an average of 0.5-1.0 fewer children than
would ideally like. And new endemic diseases like AIDS are beginning to
push death rates back up in some countries.
On the other side of
the scale, mainstream religions pressure parents not to use birth
control or abortion services, and the sheer struggle for survival
forces many children into the labour force, depriving them of an
education that could teach them about family planning. So on balance,
information has almost no net effect on population:
The
'green revolution' has produced a glut of human food, so much that
population continues to increase for that simple reason alone.
Populations of every creature on the planet since the first appearance
of life have always varied in lockstep with the available food supply.
(The opposite is also true: when famine suddenly reduces food
supply, population falls accordingly). And swings in disease and (in
extreme cases) conflict usually occur to bring stressed populations
that increase too much back into balance.
But in the case of
our species, it is unlikely that wars, even nuclear ones, or diseases,
which are once again on the upswing, will be enough to bring human
population down far enough or fast enough to prevent the
extinction-level devastation to our ecosystem that is already in
progress, or even to significantly reduce human numbers. There is, of
course, always the possibility that some group will choose to
precipitate Armageddon -- the information and resources to do so are
readily available to anyone with reasonable intelligence and
perseverance, and access to the Internet and to some corruptible public
servants. The growing popularity of suicide bombs, perhaps the ultimate
expression of stress-related conflict, is certainly cause for concern.
But we can't put that genie back in the bottle -- the information is
out there, the means, motive and opportunity, and if that's the way the
world ends, there's no stopping it now. If either of the two icons in
the lower left explodes, the model tells us that humanity could come
close to disappearing (not with a bang, but with a whimper).
Ironically,
a shortage of food is actually a more likely brake on unsustainable
growth. Today there is more food than humankind can eat -- such a
surplus that we can afford to feed most of it to farmed animals.
Worldwatch tells us that more people today die from obesity-related
diseases than from malnutrition. There are six problems, however:
- The distribution systems of our 'market' economy are incapable of delivering that food to those who desperately need it,
- There
are so few distinct species of plants and animals being farmed that the
entire system is terribly fragile (much as it was when the Irish potato
famine hit -- most of Ireland was planted with the same few potato
variants, so there was almost no resistance to the disease that
devastated the plant),
- We are running out of fresh water for
agriculture (just as an example, the water table in Northern China, the
country's breadbasket, is dropping at a rate of eight feet per year),
- Almost all the changes to land arability predicted by climate change scientists will reduce growing areas and yields,
- Much
of the food produced today is of low nutritional value (pandering to
consumer addiction to salt, sugar and carbohydrates and a consumer
preference for prepackaged, overprocessed, chemical-laden foods), and,
here's the killer,
- Much of the land farmed today depends on
oil-based chemicals to replace the nutrient-depleted soil that can no
longer grow anything in their absence, and on low oil prices to move it
to market.
Terrorists might find it easier to tamper with our
vulnerable food supply than to attack us directly. Or a small set of
natural plant diseases might quickly eradicate much of the world's food
supply.
But it's more likely that the end of (cheap) oil will
bring about the end of population growth, or even reverse it. Here's
the scenario: Oil quadruples in cost as demand (rising by double digits
every year in much of Asia) outstrips available supply. That more
than quadruples the cost of food, since oil is needed both to grow it
and to move it. Inflation and interest rates soar to double digits, the
housing market collapses, followed by the stock market, the US forfeits
on its debt repayments, consumers stop buying anything other than food
and a depression deeper than that in the 1930s ensues. Meat becomes
unaffordable for almost everyone, so cattle, pig and poultry farming
virtually cease, and land is replanted with crops, especially
high-protein crops. Agriculture shifts back to community-based farming
because long-distance transportation is unaffordable.
Let's
suppose this depression occurs in the 2010s and only impacts
birth-rates as much as the depression in the 1930s did (35%). A global
drop of birth rates of this amount from current levels, combined with,
say, a ten year long spike in death rates in third world countries with
exhausted soils or dependent on imported foods, would essentially bring
us to global ZPG immediately. And if a combination of depression-style
conservation, population movement (from cool temperate and tropical to
warm temperate and from suburbs in to where transportation costs are
less, or out closer to food markets), and shift to virtual work (so
that, say, half the population works from home) were to occur, combined
with a switch to a vegetarian and more nutritious diet, the aggregate
global footprint could suddenly fall by, say, 50% (mostly in the
'developed' world, where footprint/person today is seven times what it
is in the 'developing' world). That would take our global ecological
impact back to 1980s levels. This still isn't sustainable, but it would
be sufficient to buy us some breathing room.
But that would
only work if it occurred soon enough -- if it took until the 2030s, the
extra 2 billion people (9 billion instead of 7) and the extra 25
billion acres of global footprint (75 billion instead of 50) would
probably put us past the point of no return ecologically, not to
mention greatly increasing the likelihood that the
nuclear/epidemic/terrorist scenario mentioned earlier would come into
play, and that extreme and disruptive weather changes would exacerbate
the crisis.
The
problem is that if this depression occurs in the next decade, we may
construe it as having been caused simply by incompetent and
irresponsible fiscal and monetary policy, rather than as a warning of
the consequences of unsustainable growth, consumption and
overpopulation. If we squander that opportunity to reduce our footprint
to a sustainable 15 billion acres from today's 40 billion, and keep it
there, it may well be an unsurmountable challenge to reduce it from the
100 billion plus acre level it will be at in the latter half of this
century.
Well, that's it for my first experiment with Lee Arnold's
ecolanguage. What do you think -- can you see using this tool to
explain how physical, financial and information systems work? I'm not
tech-savvy enough to be able to make an animation to show this
properly, but I wonder: Could you do the animation using successive
Powerpoint slides?
(Thanks
to Arnold Lee for answering my questions to him by e-mail so promptly,
and for encouraging me to play with his invention. My next app will be
a toughie: showing how organizations convert capital from physical to
financial to intellectual and vice versa -- information doesn't follow
the laws of thermodynamics.) |
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