Our Panarchic Future  

WorldWatch has an article by Thomas Homer-Dixon arguing that civilisation is approaching a critical phase, brought on by declining EROI of energy sources and brittle systems caused by capitalism's tendency towards increased efficiency - Our Panarchic Future.

Buzz Holling, one of the world's great ecologists, is a kind and gracious man, with a shock of white hair and a warm smile. Born in Toronto and educated at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, he worked for many years as a research scientist for the government of Canada, where he pioneered the study of budworm infestations in the great spruce forests of New Brunswick. Later, as an academic researcher and eventually as director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, he created powerful mathematical models to explain the ecological phenomena he saw in the field. Using these models, he achieved major breakthroughs in understanding what makes complex systems of all kinds-from ecosystems to economic markets-adaptive and resilient.

Since the early 1970s, Holling's research has attracted attention in disciplines ranging from anthropology to economics. His papers have been distributed like samizdat through the Internet, and Holling himself has become something of a guru for an astonishing number of very smart people studying complex adaptive systems. Some of these researchers have coalesced into an international scientific community called the Resilience Alliance, with over a dozen participating institutions around the world. Although Holling is now retired from his last academic position at the University of Florida, he's still terrifically vigorous and focused on furthering the Resilience Alliance's work.

Holling and his colleagues call their ideas "panarchy theory"-after Pan, the ancient Greek god of nature. Together with anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter's ideas on complexity and social collapse, this theory helps us see our world's tectonic stresses as part of a long-term global process of change and adaptation. It also illustrates the way catastrophe caused by such stresses could produce a surge of creativity leading to the renewal of our global civilization. ...

Today's Holland gives us a hint of what this future might be like. One of the world's most crowded countries, Holland has a heavily industrialized, energy-intensive, high-consumption economy, and its people must constantly fight back the sea to survive on their small patch of territory-much of it indeed reclaimed from the sea. Over the centuries, the Dutch have responded by putting in place astonishingly complex systems of technology and social regulation. These have included block-by-block urban residential committees to prevent flooding, detailed laws to maximize efficient use of land, and of course an intricate system of dikes, canals, and pumping stations. As Holland has become progressively wealthier, more crowded, and more hemmed in by resource and environmental pressures, the regulations and technologies have become steadily more intricate and costly.

But if we end up with a global society and economy like Holland's, would that really be so bad? After all, the Dutch live very well. Sadly, even the enormous complexity of today's Holland won't be remotely adequate for the host of planetary challenges we're going to have to address soon, like climate change and worsening shortages of high-quality energy. We'll have to create a global society that I've come to call "Holland times 10," with vastly more sophisticated, pervasive, and expensive rules and regulatory institutions than anything the Dutch live with today. Do we really want such a future for ourselves and our children?

And even if we do, can we really create it? First of all, Holland is in some ways an inadequate example. It's a small, ethnically homogeneous society with relatively low economic inequality, a deeply rooted culture of collaboration, and a citizenry that's receptive to social policies intended to change people's behaviors. These are hardly features of our world as a whole. Also, today's Holland maintains its comfortable lifestyle by importing energy, food, and natural resources from far beyond its boundaries, and by expelling much of its wastes, such as its carbon dioxide, outside its boundaries too-Holland's carbon dioxide ends up traveling in the atmosphere around the planet. Humanity as a whole, though, can't get its resources or expel its pollution beyond Earth's boundaries.

More important, as our global social-ecological system moves through the growth phase of its adaptive cycle-toward a Holland-times-10 future-it's losing resilience. Capitalism's constant pressure on companies to maximize efficiency tightens links between producers and suppliers; reduces slack, buffering, and redundancy; and so makes cascading failures more likely and damaging. As well, capitalism's pressure on people to be more productive and efficient drives them to acquire hyperspecialized skills and knowledge, which means they become less autonomous, more dependent on other specialized people and technologies, and ultimately more vulnerable to shocks (remember how most Americans were so ill equipped to deal with the 2003 blackout). Meanwhile, worsening damage to the local and regional natural environment in many poor countries is fraying ecological networks and undermining economies and political stability. And finally pressure is increasing within both rich and poor societies too-from tectonic stresses like demographic imbalance, growth of megacities, and widening income gaps.

All these factors are creating an overload condition just at the moment when we're entering an epochal shift from high-EROI to low-EROI sources of energy. Because it takes energy to create and maintain complexity and order, and because energy will become steadily more expensive, we'll find it steadily harder to implement complex solutions to our complex problems.

Indeed, in a world of far higher energy costs, a Holland-times-10 global system is likely impossible. Even today's globalized economy won't be viable, because it takes too much energy to keep it running. As energy prices rise, we'll first see cutbacks on long-distance travel and trade. Instead of becoming increasingly "flat" as barriers to commerce and economic integration disappear-as some commentators, such as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, suggest-the world will become more regionalized and even hierarchical because manufacturing, commerce, and political power will shift to countries with relatively good access to energy. Eventually those of us in rich countries will have to change many things in our societies and daily lives-not just the machines we use to produce and consume energy but also the work we do, our entertainment and leisure activities, how much we travel in cars and airplanes, our financial systems, the design of our cities, and the ways we produce our food (because our current agricultural practices consume a huge amount of energy).

The growth phase we're in may seem like a natural and permanent state of affairs-and our world's rising complexity, connectedness, efficiency, and regulation may seem relentless and unstoppable-but ultimately it isn't sustainable. Still, we find it impossible to get off this upward escalator because our chronic state of denial about the seriousness of our situation-aided and abetted by powerful special interests that benefit from the status quo-keeps us from really seeing what's happening or really considering other paths our world might follow. Radically different futures are beyond imagining. So we stay trapped on a path that takes us toward major breakdown.

The longer a system is "locked in" to its growth phase, says Buzz Holling, "the greater its vulnerability and the bigger and more dramatic its collapse will be." If the growth phase goes on for too long, "deep collapse"-something like synchronous failure-eventually occurs. Collapse in this case is so catastrophic and cascades across so many physical and social boundaries that the system's ability to regenerate itself is lost. [A] forest-fire shows how this happens: if too much tinder-dry debris has accumulated, the fire becomes too hot, which destroys the seeds that could be the source of the forest's rebirth.

Holling thinks the world is reaching "a stage of vulnerability that could trigger a rare and major ‘pulse' of social transformation." Humankind has experienced only three or four such pulses during its entire evolution, including the transition from hunter-gatherer communities to agricultural settlement, the industrial revolution, and the recent global communications revolution. Today another pulse is about to begin. "The immense destruction that a new pulse signals is both frightening and creative," he writes. "The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living."

I remain puzzled why so many peak oil observers refuse to believe or acknowledge that we can't transition to other energy sources (ones which certainly don't require a 10 fold or more price increase, as claimed in this article.

Some form of global political and/or economic transformation may well take place in the next decade (there certainly seem to be plenty of groups who want it to happen), but this idea that lack of energy will be the trigger seems to be founded on the likely mistaken belief that we'll refuse to adopt alternatives.