The ghosts of the Carboniferous. Again via EnergyBulletin.net, I find that Bill Totten is blogging excerpts from Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, a book by human ecologist William R. Catton, an emeritus professor of sociology at Washington State. The chapter on offer at EnergyBulletin is an extraordinary discussion of resource limits, based on the notion of human carrying capacity (roughly, the population capable of being sustained by exploiting the resources immediately available in a given social/ecological system) and phantom carrying capacity, what Catton explains in terms of "ghost acreage":

Georg Borgstrom, a food scientist at Michigan State University, devoted a whole chapter of his 1965 book, The Hungry Planet, to [the subject of ghost acreage]. A number of nations have seemed to get away with exceeding the human carrying capacity of their own land, but Borgstrom pointed out that they had only been able to do so by drawing upon carrying capacity that was "invisible" - that is, located elsewhere on the planet. The food required by such a nation's population comes only partly from the harvest of "visible acreage" - farm and pasture land within the nation's borders. A very substantial fraction comes from net imports of food. Not all the imports come from other countries; some are obtained from the sea. Borgstrom therefore subdivided "ghost acreage" into two components, "trade acreage" and "fish acreage". By each phrase he simply expressed, in terms of land area, the additional farming that would have been needed to provide from internal sources the net portion of a nation's sustenance actually derived from sources outside its boundaries and in excess of its own carrying capacity.

Tellingly, Catton extends the concept to the question of fossil fuels: he calls the world supply of these fuels, rather elegantly, "a global energy bank," an accumulation "in the transformed remains of organisms that lived millions of years ago" of the "energy captured in prehistoric photosynthesis." We can thus think of our use of oil and natural gas as a another phantom carrying capacity, an importation not from outside some political or land-mass boundary, but from the past:

The energy we obtain from coal, petroleum, and natural gas can be expressed as "fossil acreage" - the number of additional acres of farmland that would have been needed to grow organic fuels with equivalent energy content. Mankind originally did rely on organic fuels, chiefly wood. Wood was a renewable resource, though even in the world's once vast forests it grew in limited quantity. Access to vast but non-renewable deposits of coal and petroleum came to be mistaken by peoples and nations as an opportunity for permanently transcending limits set by the finite supplies of organic fuel. ...

Ghost acreage of the Carboniferous period was the resource base for "modern" living. In Asia, Japan was the nation most dependent upon such prehistoric photosynthesis. In Europe, Britain has been dependent on it longer than other nations. Americans were heavily dependent upon it, in spite of their huge expanse of visible acreage and their conspicuous agricultural surpluses. The more "modern" a nation had become, the more its way of life was based on importing energy from hundreds of millions of years ago.

There's far more to the chapter than this (including a brief discussion of the role of mechnical energy in destroying the economic logic of human slavery), and I highly recommend reading it. I'm going to have to seek the book out.

And the kicker? The humbling (and, given Catton's "historian from the future tone," spooky) thing about the book is that it looks far-sighted even in today's context—and yet it was published fully twenty-five years ago. Think of it, and realize the enormous lost opportunity that quarter-century represents in the history of our civilization.

posted by michael  1:35:27 PM  
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The end of empire. Worth reading: this from Michael Ventura, published a couple of weeks ago in the Austin Chronicle, today via EnergyBulletin.net, on the question of just how American empire ends in the face of the oil decline:

America is like Wile E. Coyote after he's run out a few paces past the edge of the cliff – he'll take a few more steps in midair before he looks down. Then, when he sees that there's nothing under him, he'll fall. Many Americans suspect that they're running on thin air, but they haven't looked down yet. ...

One key to America's future will be: How quickly can we build or rebuild heavy and light rail? And where will we get the money to do it? Railroads are the cheapest transport, the easiest to sustain, and the only solution to a post-automobile America. ... There's only one section of our economy that has that kind of money: the military budget. The U.S. now spends more on its military than all other nations combined. A sane transit to a post-automobile America will require a massive shift from military to infrastructure spending. That shift would be supported by our bankers in China and Europe (that is, they would continue to finance our debt) because it's in their interests that we regain economic viability. What's not in their interests is that we remain a military superpower.

And that's where things get really interesting. The question becomes:

Can America face reality? If the government responds to the coming changes by attempting to remain a superpower no matter what, there is no way to underestimate the harm. The numbers speak for themselves. Soon we'll no longer have the resources to remain a military superpower and sustain a livable society that is anything like what we know today. It happened to England; it happened to Russia; it's about to happen to us. England sustained the transformation more or less gracefully; it lost its dominance while retaining its essential character. Russia is still in a period of transformation, but has remained a player thanks to its oil reserves. Europe in general – France, Germany, Italy, and Spain (all world powers in the fairly recent past) – is creating a post-national society, the most experimental form of governance since America's revolution. We have no appreciable oil, and we no longer have a manufacturing base. So what will the United States do? Sanely recognize its declining status and act accordingly, or make one last ignoble stab to retain its position by force?

Half a century ago James Baldwin wrote: "Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses." Americans believe they're "No. 1," destined to lead the world. That is the America that's over. If we insist on that illusion, then this world is in for tough times.

The fact that the country is in the grip of its worst elements, a clique of utter political fantasists (and totalitarians of the spirit if not in fact) who believe will is the only necessary precondition for world-historical success, who have been working for the last fifty years to lever themselves into the kind of power they now enjoy, and who act, at least, as if they're convinced they'll never lose another election—that fact bodes very ill for any sanity in the process of our extricating ourselves from the imperial mire.

posted by michael  10:45:42 AM  
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